Dear Progressive Reader,
On Tuesday June 2, Donald Trump shocked the nation’s governors, and then the rest of us, by proclaiming that he would use the U.S. military to subdue peaceful protests that were underway in hundreds of cities and towns across the country. “I am your President of law and order,” he declared from the Rose Garden. He followed those statements by illustrating his point with a tear-gas-filled clearing of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., so that he could triumphantly walk across the street in what cartoonist Mark Fiore has dubbed “Operation Photo Op.” As Ruth Conniff reports, it was a clear example of the President’s vision of America’s future. Remembering his January 2017 Inaugural address, Conniff says, “[Three and one half] years later, Trump’s description of an American hellscape reads like prophecy. Trump has presided over an unimaginably precipitous decline.”
In a moment of historical resonance, I remembered the brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters in China’s Tiananmen Square during the same week thirty-one years ago on June 4, 1989. I covered the protests and their aftermath extensively for WORT-FM community radio throughout June of that year, speaking to Chinese students, witnesses, journalists, and scholars. These protests, too, began with a group of mostly students calling for greater accountability of their government officials. Erwin Knoll, then editor of The Progressive and a fierce advocate for free speech and the right to protest, was very moved by the reports coming from Beijing. In the July 1989 issue he wrote, “Ultimately, the Chinese rulers behaved the way rulers usually do when their grip on power is threatened: They deployed the full force of the state’s military apparatus against their own subjects.”
This past week, as protests raged across the country, many were met with brutal tactics from a police force that has become more and more militarized over the past two decades. Some of our reporters covered protests in Madison and Milwaukee, while others were in Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd’s murder on May 25 sparked the current wave of outrage. Meanwhile, Reese Erlich looks at how the rest of the world is viewing the actions of police in the United States. “U.S. officials,” he writes, “whether Democrat or Republican, pretend that only other countries violate human rights.” But today, just as when an innocent teen was brutally murdered in 1955 in Mississippi (as historian Tim Tyson shows clearly in his 2017 book, The Blood of Emmett Till), the whole world is watching and sees the lie of United States' claims of moral superiority.
Finally, this week we sadly remember the life and work of Native writer Mark Anthony Rolo who passed away over the weekend. Mrill Ingram shares some memories of a brilliant writer that we will all miss.
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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