The
People's Coalition For Justice
&
Humanity
***
From The Ramparts
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
Tookie Williams Microcosm of What Ails
AmeriKKKa
“Anyone
who knows anything about the U.S. criminal justice system knows that we
have been murdering African Americans for some centuries now. First it
was rebel and runaway slaves. Then is was the lynchable --
entertainment in which the unappreciated Americans could win fame by
being pictured with their kids mugging at a lynching on a picture postcard available at your corner
pharmacy. More recently we have been executing African Americans who
are indicted, prosecuted, convicted, and executed in numbers obviously
massively distorted by prejudices. The Supreme Court even has
acknowledged such” Ed Kent
After a valiant fight by foes of capital punishment, they sighed and accepted the inevitable; Stanley ‘Tookie” Williams an African-American male convicted of four murders would be executed by the state of California. The Capital punishment beat goes on as usual in AmeriKKKa. In my view the murder by the state of California of Stanley Williams was another indictment on the moral depravity of this society. There were letter writing campaigns to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger asking he spare the life of Tookie Williams. As noble and well intended as these letter writing, faxing and E-mail pleas were, given the current climate of fascism in AmeriKKKa, it was unlikely anyone would persuade Schwarzenegger or the Supreme Courts of California nor the United States to rethink the idea of state sanctioned murder. After all, we are witnessing the US government engaged in the illegal and immoral occupation and devastation of Iraq, a nation that posed no threat or peril to our health safety or welfare.
The US has become the world’s bully. It has demonstrated over and over again it will invade, murder and occupy whomever and wherever it pleases. And anyone who doesn’t go along with it is a wimp, a traitor or a supporter of terrorists. This is the Bu$h administration and rabid right wing’s mantra the corporate media beats incessantly day in and day out. Letters asking Schwarzenegger for clemency on behalf of Tookie Williams proved a waste of time. Not because Williams was unworthy or mercy, I would like to believe all human beings are worthy of at least serious consideration of leniency, mercy or clemency. Tookie Williams’ supporters weren’t asking for him to be pardoned and let out of jail. They were pleading for his life to be spared. Arnold Schwarzenegger a foreign born naturalized US citizen who gained fame as a body builder and actor, whose family allegedly supported the Nazis during WW II has cultivated an image of himself as a manly man a cold blooded killing machine in his films.
The execution of Tookie Williams is merely a symptom of the moral malaise permeating AmeriKKKan culture today. The history of AmeriKKKa is one of continuous violence, genocide and inhumanity by whites against non-whites. The Europeans who settled these shores instituted their culture of violence and bloodlust here and wove it into the very fabric of the national psyche. George Washington waged war against the Native Americans as well as the British. Thomas Jefferson in addition to being a pedophile and slave holder like Washington, also plotted the extermination of the Native Americans in the name of AmeriKKKa’s expansion. We see this same scenario being played out as AmeriKKKa has morphed into the latest in a long series of European imperialist nations bent on global domination and empire. From giving blankets infested with smallpox to the Native Americans, to stealing the Mexicans’ land via war, to invading Hawaii and toppling their indigenous government, to dropping atomic bombs on Japanese civilians to dropping napalm on Vietnamese villages to the “shock and awe” of the Iraq invasion; these are all examples of the psychopathy of the ruling elites and a testament to their ability to manipulate their people to go along with their predatory policies.
As black people, we should not be shocked at this by now! We have a long and sordid tradition of experiencing the virulent and subtle evils of white AmeriKKKa. We have lived through it. The mind control apparatus conditions us daily in the media via the wholesale promotion of gratuitous violence and death to believe one of the functions of the state is to met out murder and capital punishment. We see the government’s callousness and apathy to catastrophes, to the rampant homelessness in AmeriKKKa, the rising poverty and calcifying class stratification as the leaders gleefully go about their business of killing large numbers of human beings around the world based on lies and imperial overreach. This is why I was not shocked Arnold Schwarzenegger turned a deaf ear to the pleas to spare Tookie Williams’ life. In a very real sense California’s murder of Tookie Williams is merely a microcosm of the moral turpitude devouring the soul of AmeriKKKa.
After a valiant fight by foes of capital punishment, they sighed and accepted the inevitable; Stanley ‘Tookie” Williams an African-American male convicted of four murders would be executed by the state of California. The Capital punishment beat goes on as usual in AmeriKKKa. In my view the murder by the state of California of Stanley Williams was another indictment on the moral depravity of this society. There were letter writing campaigns to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger asking he spare the life of Tookie Williams. As noble and well intended as these letter writing, faxing and E-mail pleas were, given the current climate of fascism in AmeriKKKa, it was unlikely anyone would persuade Schwarzenegger or the Supreme Courts of California nor the United States to rethink the idea of state sanctioned murder. After all, we are witnessing the US government engaged in the illegal and immoral occupation and devastation of Iraq, a nation that posed no threat or peril to our health safety or welfare.
The US has become the world’s bully. It has demonstrated over and over again it will invade, murder and occupy whomever and wherever it pleases. And anyone who doesn’t go along with it is a wimp, a traitor or a supporter of terrorists. This is the Bu$h administration and rabid right wing’s mantra the corporate media beats incessantly day in and day out. Letters asking Schwarzenegger for clemency on behalf of Tookie Williams proved a waste of time. Not because Williams was unworthy or mercy, I would like to believe all human beings are worthy of at least serious consideration of leniency, mercy or clemency. Tookie Williams’ supporters weren’t asking for him to be pardoned and let out of jail. They were pleading for his life to be spared. Arnold Schwarzenegger a foreign born naturalized US citizen who gained fame as a body builder and actor, whose family allegedly supported the Nazis during WW II has cultivated an image of himself as a manly man a cold blooded killing machine in his films.
The execution of Tookie Williams is merely a symptom of the moral malaise permeating AmeriKKKan culture today. The history of AmeriKKKa is one of continuous violence, genocide and inhumanity by whites against non-whites. The Europeans who settled these shores instituted their culture of violence and bloodlust here and wove it into the very fabric of the national psyche. George Washington waged war against the Native Americans as well as the British. Thomas Jefferson in addition to being a pedophile and slave holder like Washington, also plotted the extermination of the Native Americans in the name of AmeriKKKa’s expansion. We see this same scenario being played out as AmeriKKKa has morphed into the latest in a long series of European imperialist nations bent on global domination and empire. From giving blankets infested with smallpox to the Native Americans, to stealing the Mexicans’ land via war, to invading Hawaii and toppling their indigenous government, to dropping atomic bombs on Japanese civilians to dropping napalm on Vietnamese villages to the “shock and awe” of the Iraq invasion; these are all examples of the psychopathy of the ruling elites and a testament to their ability to manipulate their people to go along with their predatory policies.
As black people, we should not be shocked at this by now! We have a long and sordid tradition of experiencing the virulent and subtle evils of white AmeriKKKa. We have lived through it. The mind control apparatus conditions us daily in the media via the wholesale promotion of gratuitous violence and death to believe one of the functions of the state is to met out murder and capital punishment. We see the government’s callousness and apathy to catastrophes, to the rampant homelessness in AmeriKKKa, the rising poverty and calcifying class stratification as the leaders gleefully go about their business of killing large numbers of human beings around the world based on lies and imperial overreach. This is why I was not shocked Arnold Schwarzenegger turned a deaf ear to the pleas to spare Tookie Williams’ life. In a very real sense California’s murder of Tookie Williams is merely a microcosm of the moral turpitude devouring the soul of AmeriKKKa.