Episode 1225
Prosecuting protesters / Carolijn Terwindt
Sep 9 2020
[Cop City] was built on this forest land, critical green space in the middle of a majority black working class neighborhood. It's referred to as the lungs of Atlanta. It's part of this broader stretch of forest land in Atlanta that the city itself committed to preserving…Over the course of the movement as the environmentalists who came to it initially from the angle of, “I don't really care where if you build this thing somewhere else, just don't build it on the forest.” A lot of them came to see that if you try to protect a forest, the police, the storm troopers show up to bulldoze you and to bulldoze the forest. I think a lot of people who actually originally really only saw the environmental side of things have come to also have a broader critique of policing because they've seen how the police have been deployed to crush this movement.
Micah Herskind returns to This Is Hell! to discuss his contribution to the new edited volume, No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement from Haymarket Books. After the interview, Jeff Dorchen delivers a live, in-studio "Moment of Truth."
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Aug 27 2020
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is also, paradoxically, the drink.
There’s a funny thing that happens when tyrannical rulers train their populations to accept untimely and unnecessary death as an everyday occurrence: the populace becomes ever more likely to rise up en masse and put their lives on the line battling those hired to police them and, eventually, making their way to the throats of the rulers. The same mistake the French and then the US military and its civilian chess-masters made throughout their colonial misadventures in Indochina are being made on the streets of every major and minor city in the world.
The people will win. Even against the other people, because the other people are worshipful tools of the tyrants. Against the cops, because we vastly outnumber the cops, and they seem to be nothing more than a subset of the worshipful tool people anyway. Against the military because, in the last analysis, even the military is divided between worshipful tools and real people. And once we get past all these tools, we’ll win against the rulers, because the only thing protecting them will be their technology, and they need people to make that technology work. And, being the people, we have those people on our side.
In short, the more they take from us, the less we have to lose. And when the people have nothing to lose, the people can’t lose.
The evil idiots who presume to be in charge of everything crossed the line ages ago. This week in Milwaukee they shot another unarmed, entirely innocent black man in front of his children, partially paralyzing him. In Glasgow, Scotland, a Ugandan refugee starved to death. The Greeks have been dumping refugees alive into the sea. Oh, and the death count from Covid-19 under Donald Dump’s distracted negligence is over 175,000. They’re coercing people to choose to work during the plague or be forced out onto the street. They’re dumping refugees in the desert to die. They’re putting as many poor people as they can into prisons and jails. They’re cutting down the few forests that aren’t on fire, depriving indigenous peoples of homes and livelihoods. They’re letting the food supply decay in the ruins of Iowa, as farmers go without aid, a policy of massacre-by-negligence which seems to have begun with the Dick Cheney administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
Crops are failing, empires are... read more