Karapatan expresses solidarity with the American people and with various people’s movements all over the world in condemning the spate of ruthless racist attacks and police brutality on anti-racism protests in the United States following the murder of Black men and women such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.
Karapatan expresses solidarity with the American people and with various people’s movements all over the world in condemning the spate of ruthless racist attacks and police brutality on anti-racism protests in the United States following the murder of Black men and women such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.
Racist, particularly anti-Black, police violence in the US has a long and bloody history: it lies at the heart of State fascism in America as well as the continuing colonial legacy of US imperialism. Both fascism and imperialism comprise the foundations of modern and militarized policing in the US — which has targeted and continues to target Black, indigenous, queer, migrant and poor working-class communities and people’s movements that challenge the exploitative and oppressive capitalist order.
A global anti-imperialist and anti-fascist backlash is in the offing: people are rising up against racism, colonialism, and police brutality not only in America but in various parts of the world. That Donald Trump is resorting to vile and cowardly threats of shooting down protesters and declaring anti-fascist activists as “terrorists” already speaks to the burgeoning social crisis in the US in the face of mass resistance, with the US government unleashing an open rule of terror and rampant violations of people’s rights to brutally suppress widespread dissent.
Along with its own history of terroristic violence against its own people and those living in its territory, the US government also carries out brutal forms of violence against the peoples of the world in its so-called “war on terror” and other imperialist wars of aggression, or through its client States and agents, such as in the Philippines.
Resistance to police violence and brutality is also a reality in the Philippines. Thousands of poor communities have suffered violence, killings, unlawful arrests, and other human rights violations at the hands of the police under Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” where even innocent children and minors are killed mercilessly. Police and military brutality in counterinsurgency operations funded by the US have targeted poor, peasant, and indigenous communities and activists — pointing to the long colonial and imperialist history of State fascism in the Philippines — as the US continues to sell lethal weapons and provide counterinsurgency training to the Philippine National Police and the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
Police violence against the poor and dissent has worsened under the militarized lockdowns against the pandemic, with Duterte himself ordering the fatal shooting of “leftists” and “troublemakers.” The use of excessive and sometimes deadly force to enforce lockdowns and curfews has alarmed United Nations High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet that the pandemic is sparking a global “human rights disaster” particularly in the use of police violence to quell dissent and protests, under the guise of enforcing lockdown measures amid the worsening socio-economic crisis of the capitalist system exposed in full by the COVID-19 pandemic with the loss of people’s livelihoods, growing mass hunger, and further erosion of public health systems.
As we join the millions of voices in grieving for the deaths of individuals such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other Black men and women, we also raise our fists with various people’s movements in demanding justice for them and for all victims of racist police brutality, State fascism, and imperialism all over the world. Without justice, there is no peace — and we can only achieve just peace in solidarity with all the oppressed peoples of the world in resisting the global scourge of racism, fascism, and imperialism!