Brian Holmes on Tue, 13 Apr 2021 07:36:19 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> Another killer cop video


After the five hundredth sadistic video, my outrage turns to a colder kind of rage.

What exactly is going on so that cities spend half their budget on police, in order to exert systematic racist violence that they used to successfully cover up until just a few years ago?

It is not just about good cop and bad cop. The answer is much more obvious. The way we are living 'normally' demands this 'extraordinary' expenditure. Police constantly murdering black and brown and red people is the price of the radical inequality that maintains the middle-class tech-happy lifestyle. This is not different in France or Holland or the UK or in Beijing or wherever, only the colorwheel spins a little.

It's insane, because life would be a lot better without that particular lifestyle, I mean the style of extreme inequality, which we kill for many times over.

Now it feels like a generational choice has been made against it. And although this is definitely about young people, I also mean a political generation, that can transform people whatever their age. It is damn interesting to watch the testimony in the George Floyd trial, because what you see is just like what happened during the last US elections: people of this new political generation have decided to tell the professional truth that they formerly kept to themselves, locked tight under pressure. All the key experts of the police have testified unequivocally against the killer. This is entirely new. This wants to be a system.

Only later will we know if such behavior just decorates a feverish moment in an implacably continuous reality.


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