15/08/2016 — krasnayavesna

The Milwaukee Protests: Growing Resistance to Genocide

Impromptu protests began in Milwaukee on Saturday night after a man, later identified as Sylville Smith, was murdered by police in Sherman Park neighborhood in the northwestern section of the city.

According to the Milwaukee police department and the city mayor, the police shot Smith on Saturday afternoon when he was stopped inside a car and began running away from police with a gun, and did not drop the gun after being told to do so.[1] Naturally, progressive peoples ask whether it is the person running away who is a threat to the lives of armed pigs, or the pigs who are a threat to the lives of the peoples they put on the run. After all, flight is almost always a response to a perceived threat to survival. For Sylville Smith, this threat proved to be real, as the police shot him in the back as he fled.

After killing a person running away on foot, the authorities and the media immediately began a campaign of dehumanization against Smith by repeatedly mentioning that Smith had been arrested before and that the gun carried by Smith was stolen, which for the white liberal occupation forces of north amerika warrants an immediate and irreversible death sentence for colonized peoples.[2, 3]

Subsequently, the people of northern Milwaukee, outraged by the murder, the “administrative duty” wrist-slap received by the officer who carried out the killing, and vicious victim-blaming from the authorities, began protests at night, setting fire to cars and throwing rocks and bricks at pigs. A gas station and several other businesses, reviled in the community for their anti-black excess, were burnt down and one pig was hospitalized after being hit by a brick. At midnight, the mayor and other liberal city officials tried to talk soothingly to end the protests and a liberal hashtag on Twitter was initiated on early Sunday, #PrayforMKE.[4] The proliferation of social media posts discussing violence of the protests is similar to what happened in Ferguson in 2014 and in Baltimore in 2015: the white liberal majority of the u.$., cherished as the future building blocks of socialism by the First World left, ignores the initial murder of colonized peoples by pigs, but does not fail to immediately flee from and condemn the subsequent protests and cries from colonized peoples as “senseless rioting” and “wanton destruction”.

Given that the most militant demonstrations are now over, the Wisconsin National Guard has been dispatched to occupy the city of Milwaukee, and the murder victim has been successfully dehumanized for most white people as a “criminal who had it coming”, it is safe to say that there will be no justice for Sylville Smith. At the same time, the social antagonisms between the oppressor nation and the oppressed have demonstrably intensified and will continue to intensify as more and more colonized peoples are martyred and those who survive them respond with more than words.