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*
Alan Ginsberg wrote
It's an outstanding and harrowing documentary.
"We would like to share the extraordinary 2013 film *Let the Fire Burn*,
a document of another tragic clash between government and citizens that
occurred 35 years ago in Philadelphia. On May 13, 1985, a longtime feud
between the city and the black liberation group MOVE came to a deadly
climax when, by order of local authorities, police dropped
military-grade explosives onto a MOVE-occupied rowhouse resulting in the
tragic deaths of eleven people (including five children) and the
destruction of 61 homes. It is a story that is worth revisiting in these
current days of injustice, anger and grief.
*"Let the Fire Burn* will be available to watch for free here throughout
the month of June. Please read the accompanying statement by Mike Africa
Jr., member of the MOVE Organization about the film."
https://kinonow.com/let-the-fire-burn
Thank you, Alan, for sending this out. I finally got around to watching
it. It adds important context to what we're seeing now.
The events shown here are harrowing, savage, masterfully assembled as
documentary, searing beyond any rational conception of being human - 35
years ago and counting. None of the perpetrators charged, none
convicted, only those who spoke an irrefutable if garbled and seemingly
primitive truth paid the price once again, the victims with their
inoperable and legal display weaponry, killed or imprisoned, and these
events subsequently submerged and ignored.
Nine repeat nine Move members convicted of the killing of one police
officer back in 1978 and all but one still in prison - with inoperable
weapons, imputations of friendly fire, and subsequent police vows of
revenge.
To quote from many sources, "death by burning flesh, military-grade
explosives and more than 500 cops firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition in
less than 90 minutes. The nearly 500 police officers gathered at the
scene were ludicrously well-armed — flak jackets, tear gas, SWAT gear,
.50- and .60-caliber machine guns, and an anti-tank machine gun for good
measure. Deluge guns were pointed from firetrucks. The state police had
sent a helicopter to the scene. The city had shut off the water and
electricity for the entire block. And as the public would soon learn,
the police had explosives on hand. The police dropped an improvised bomb
made of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex, an explosive gel used in
underwater mining. This caused the house to catch fire, and ignited a
massive blaze which eventually consumed almost 4 city blocks, 61 homes,
left 240 homeless, and killed eleven Move members in all, including five
children."
The duly appointed commission of inquiry found only "gross negligence"
on the part of city officials, none of whom as said was ever charged.
Gross negligence in law: "conscious and voluntary disregard of the need
to use reasonable care, which is likely to cause foreseeable grave
injury or harm to persons, property, or both." A mild rebuke if there
ever was one under these circumstances, which also as a charge precludes
in its implementation, if any, punitive damages.
After years upon years of this, with steady drumbeat of inflammatory
rhetoric and steady build-up of police capacity to attack with impunity
and with less and less restraint, in my view now, talk of defunding,
reforming, retraining police can almost come from Trump's lips, as it
strikes me, it so drips with hubris, hypocrisy and avoidance.
How can we not see the connection between inequality, exploitation, and
what the police mandate is and which, without major systemic change,
will continue to be?
If we are not coming somehow closer and closer to kicking over this
system root and branch by now, then how long oh lord we have to ask
every time.
Buried deep in the national subconscious and still denial everywhere,
with graphic evidence such as this seen by pitifully few. And the easy
tendency to rationalize all this away- particularly among us, the broad,
buffering American middle class, since it's not us in those accounts -
after all, the propriety, the composure and the property of respectable,
middle class neighbors just like us were destroyed, though fueled by
their own ill-considered complaints and misunderstanding - the easy
tendency to just shake our heads, fold our hands and go on without any
concerted, effective, active response whatsoever.
Nothing really different. The woods were burning then but the blaze is
more fierce now by far. How many of us have even known about this 2013
