Rev. Jesse Jackson in an interview on Friday compared the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. to “a state execution.”
“[H]ow many times was he shot?” Jackson asked in a segment on MSNBC. “And where was he shot? And why was he lying in the street for several hours? That was kind of a state execution.”
It wasn’t the first time Jackson had used the phrase: During a vigil in Greenville, S.C. on Thursday night, he employed it more directly, according to a report by USA Today.
“If it’s done by an official with a badge on and a gun, it is a state execution,” he said.
The previous day, Jackson also published an op-ed in the USA Today, calling for calm from all sides in Ferguson while also ascribing much of the unrest to a broader problem of economic inequality.
h/t Politico
Damned straight it was!!
No, Reverend Jackson, it was a police execution at most, unless you imply that official collusion went all the way up to the governor.
a municipal executive execution; geez what does it matter
‘the State’ doesn’t necessarily mean the specific level of government associated with the 50 primary political subdivisions of the United States of America. It can, for example, mean any sovereign nation, a’la ‘The State of Israel’ and ‘A Two-State Solution’, ‘State-Sponsored Terrorism’, etc.
It can also mean any of the apparatus of central authority, from the highest level (‘crimes against the state’, for example, usually means the national identity version), to government-controlled (if technically not government owned) entities that are used to maintain the official ‘party line’ (‘Russian State Media’).
I’m all for being a pedantic nit-picker, but if you’re going to play the pedantry game, play to win.
Hard to put it more plainly than that.