by Ben Bartee
The Daily Bell
“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” – Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967
The American Empire’s violence has hit home with a fury never before experienced through a domestic lens.
When the American Empire’s stormtroopers extrajudicially executed George Floyd on camera, with onlookers present, in broad daylight, on Memorial Day 2020, outrage ensued among working-class Americans of all races who have felt the boot of unchecked government oppression on their necks for decades.
The bedlam that has boiled over in the last two weeks did not erupt in a vacuum; the escalating brutalization of the American people has simmered for years, slowly draining the lifeblood out of civil society over time. The tinder for an explosion was well-laid – George Floyd’s murder simply supplied the spark to set it off.