The World Says Goodbye to George Floyd

Protests Continue - Join One Today – Read/listen to David Rovics, below

By James R Smith

A memorial was held today for George Floyd, who was tortured and murdered in broad daylight on a city street by an “officer of the law.” The auditorium at North Central University was turned into a Black church this afternoon as gospel songs shook the walls on this solemn occasion. A funeral will be held in Houston next Tuesday, where Floyd lived most of his life.

The Rev. Al Sharpton officiated at today’s service and gave a powerful speech, which was heard by the packed auditorium. Hundreds more listened outside and thousands more watched the memorial live on television. Sharpton likened the cop’s knee on Floyd’s neck to the knee of racism on the necks of people of color.

“George Floyd’s story has been the story of black folks... The reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being, is you kept your knee on our neck,” he said.

Some of Floyd’s family spoke in glowing terms about the 46-year-old George Floyd. He was the great-grandson of a slave, Thomas Stewart, and before that nearly 300 years of slaves. Stewart eventually accumulated land for a farm in North Carolina, but whites gradually moved in and took it away. Even though he was a free man, he could do nothing about it.

In spite of a family history of hundreds of years of degredation, racism and white supremacy, the 6 ft, 7 in. Floyd was a peaceful man, said family members.

Among the attendees were Martin Luther King III, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gov. Tim Walz, both Minnesota Senators, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, who immediately fired the four officers involved in Floyd’s arrest. Celebrities included actor Kevin Hart and rappers Master P and Ludacris, along with several members of the Minnesota Vikings.

Perhaps the most moving part of the ceremony was the 8 minutes, 46 seconds of silence which everyone observed. That was the length of time Officer Chauvin had his knee on George Floyd’s neck.

Floyd is still on center stage as protest marches continue throughout the country. His role in history is just beginning.

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Part 2 of David Rovics, renowned singer of songs of social significance and veteran protester • www.davidrovics.com

The "Outside Agitators" Myth

Traditionally, when there is a major protest that involves some forms of civil disobedience or other forms of direct action, so that business as usual is sufficiently interrupted to the point where the protests can't be ignored, the media will adopt one of two tropes. If it's not people "burning down their own neighborhood," then it's some kind of "outside agitators" who did it.

The "outside agitator" is generally someone like me, who cares about society, and other people in it, so much that they want to leave their own homes and even their own home towns or states or countries, to go to another place to practice what is known as solidarity or mutual aid, depending on the situation. It's easier for the media to blame "outside agitators" when there's a national or international meeting of the elite taking place, say a G8 or G20 meeting, and tens of thousands of people show up to protest against or try to shut down those meetings. This scenario has been played out many times in the US, Canada, and many other countries, and I've personally been to many such events, throughout the world, since I'm more or less an outside agitator by profession.

From my experience, even at a big international event in Washington, DC or New York City, most of the people involved with the protests will be from the local area. They may not be from the actual city the protest is taking place in, but most of them will be from a nearby state. Locals, by a broader definition than the media likes to use. So when they say that 20% of those arrested in Minneapolis were not from Minnesota, they don't mention that of those 20%, the vast majority were from the state of Wisconsin, a short drive away. (I don't know this to be true, I'm just guessing based on past experience.) Of course, if they came from further afield than Wisconsin to show solidarity with people in Minneapolis, this still does not make them bad people.

One of the wonderfully confusing things going on right now with media coverage and the reactions to events by politicians trying to spin the picture the way they want us to see it is they can't decide on which false trope to fall back on here. Is it people burning down their own neighborhoods, or are these outside agitators? Obviously, it's both -- and so much more.

The outside agitator theory also becomes very hard to maintain in this situation, because they are everywhere at the same time. Traditionally, outside agitators have to come from outside. By outside, usually they're talking about select groups of highly committed young anarchists going from supposed anarchist hubs like Seattle, San Francisco and New York City, to places where big, pre-planned events are taking place, such as the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh in 2009 or the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks in Miami in 2003, to name a couple random examples. In the face of protests happening in every major city at the same time, the "outside agitators" now must have come from a nearby suburb, which doesn't seem all that "outside" to me.

The fact is, the city of Minneapolis has thousands of people in it who probably identify explicitly as anarchists. There are many other cities in the US that have a high concentration of radicals. Minneapolis has been one of them, for a very long time. The radical tradition in Minneapolis is a multiracial one, like this uprising, and includes prominent people from every major ethnic background, very much including white, black, brown, Asian and indigenous resistance in many forms.

Within the ranks of all of these communities, and within the ranks of radicals within all of these communities, there are many different opinions on effective strategies. While many people understand how folks might not differentiate between burning down a locally-owned upscale restaurant and a big chain corporate store, many would be critical of burning down anything, ever. And those who think burning down buildings is a good tactic might distinguish between these two targets, intellectually. Where radicals of all backgrounds tend to unite is around the understanding that oppressed people will tend to rise up, and those uprisings will tend to be messy, especially in the absence of a radical labor tradition, and in the absence of any kind of viable third party option to the two capitalist, imperialist ruling parties who are largely responsible for the terrible disparities in society in the first place.

The "You're Just Being Paranoid" Myth

In their efforts to confuse people and manage the situation from their corporate elite vantage points, the stenographers of CNN and NPR will rarely mention that local, state and federal police forces have a long and terrible history of infiltrating, undercutting, planting evidence, sowing division and otherwise destroying social movements in any way possible, including killing activists and then blaming others for the killings. Dozens of leaders of the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement were systematically killed by the authorities at various levels of power, and no one has ever been brought to justice for these many crimes against these immensely popular organizations. If you familiarize yourself with the public record on the FBI's Counterintelligence Program or Cointelpro – which has never ended, to be sure – you will find they have committed every crime imaginable, both very overt and extremely underhanded, to cause movements to implode or explode, depending on what works best.

So, are FBI agents and undercover cops among those who are attacking the police and burning down buildings across this country? While we may not yet have any concrete proof of this, we can assume, based on massive amounts of concrete proof of past activities of these so-called law enforcement agencies, that their agents are involved with many of the most egregious cases of small or ethnically-owned businesses being burned down. This has been their modus operandi for a very long time, in order to sow division. You would have to be completely ignorant of recent history to think it's not happening now. Yet on the off-chance anyone might suggest on a mainstream media outlet that this sort of thing is probably happening, they would likely be lampooned as a conspiracy theorist.

Currently, it appears rightwing actors who may or may not also be cops are trying to start a "race war" by targeting certain buildings for arson attacks and by firing into crowds of protesters. This adds another level of complexity to the situation, obviously.

Collateral Damage

In a war, many innocent lives are lost. If you have ever known a person who participated in a war that they even thought was completely just, you will find just one more person who is traumatized by the things they have seen, and the innocents who have died in the course of the conflict they participated in. If you meet someone who participated in a war that they realized at the time, or later, was unjust, this trauma will tend to be even more intense.

In an uprising like what is currently taking place, this is no different. When you set about to burn down a police station, this is a difficult task that involves many challenges. Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that if you're burning down a building, neighboring buildings might also catch fire, whether you wanted them to or not. If the fire department was assisting the arsonists, as with a controlled burn of a forest or building, to make sure nearby trees or houses didn't catch fire, it would be different, but that's not the situation here. If it were the military accidentally bombing the wrong house, or a hospital, or a wedding party, as the US military has so often done in recent years in so many parts of the world, they'd just say oops, it was collateral damage. But if a small business gets torched by accident, or on purpose, by people in the course of an urban rebellion, then it's a different story you'll hear from the media and others that these wackos are burning down very nice nonprofit centers that no sensible person would want to harm. The collateral damage angle, though obvious from a logistical standpoint, will rarely be mentioned - as rarely as the possibility that a particularly destructive action might have been carried out by an FBI agent posing as a protester, despite the abundant evidence of this kind of systematic behavior over the course of past decades.

In Conclusion

Rebellions, uprisings, and revolutions have some things in common, regardless of the outcome: they are messy, they are dirty, they smell bad, people get hurt, people get killed, buildings get burned, and a lot of innocent people suffer. They don't happen unless conditions were completely untenable to begin with. And as they grow, for some, there are rays of hope amidst the flames.

David Rovics is a prolific song writer and singer. He lives in Portland, Oregon, but is often out touring the U.S. and Europe. Catch his music on youtube and on his website davidrovics.com. Thank you David for joining us on The Left Coast.

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