Who will remember the downtrodden?

Today President Trump has threatened to call the National Guard to suppress the righteous civil unrest following the killing of George Floyd. On May 25 a white police officer handcuffed Floyd and crushed his windpipe with his knee while he repeatedly called out that he couldn’t breathe. This has been another sparking event in a chain of endless police murders of African-Americans under the systematic racism of its institutions. Racial prejudice has always been dominant in American society, but Nixon more than any other President cemented the role of the police not only in the defence of capital but in the oppression of blacks. The Black Panther Party actively fought against the state and provided where it didn’t, their crime represents what American politics vehemently forbids: to speak out and agitate. African-Americans are expected to remain silent and obedient in their own segregated communities, bring up their issues on a ballot. Anything more is an uncivilised and dangerous riot, a threat to the good and upstanding society. At the time this was extended to Vietnam protesters and peace movements, the treatment is the same to anyone who “proclaims loudly what is happening”. The Black Panther’s brutal suppression by Nixon alike with the Civil Rights Movement lead the FBI to destroy the party, arming young blacks Americans to organised crime and pass policies which still disproportionately affect them.

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

We’re fed the lie that racism is an issue of the past, which modern Americans only face in the occasional incident, reasonable on the part of the killers; “that cop felt threatened by his stature, that cop thought he had a gun”. Their hypocrisy has been proven in the face of the peaceful treatment of armed ‘rebels’ to the ‘authoritarian’ lock-down. The economic crisis of our times has opened a new path of racial justice against the police state and in the same manner it has opened a path of racial suppression in the interests of the fearful white liberal. A black American is dead and the community has risen again for their justice, if they fight long enough they’ll make more progress than any President since Lincoln. If they’re suppressed, who will remember the downtrodden?

In 1970 Nixon called the National Guard on Kent State, four protesters were shot dead and nine wounded. In 2014 Obama called the National Guard on Ferguson, suppressing the protests.

In 2020 Trump will call the national guards.