Whoa, whoa, whoa...
Yet you are celebrating that based on their association with some jerk who liked blowing things up.
This is an anti fascist board and you are supporting the death penalty for two people based on their associations, despite multiple confessions by mob figures suggesting they were responsible for the murders and didn't have anything to do with sacco and vanzetti's political movement.
- Celebrating what? Not their getting an unfair trial. That was bad. But honestly? They were scum. Yes, all the reasons for their being outraged are worth remembering, and yes it's all eerily similar to today. Exactly one of my points: Sacco and Vanzetti didn't ruin any American dream, they ruined American
dissent and
resistance. They were outraged, as they should have been. As we should be. But they decided to solve the outrageous problem by advocating for and helping others commit
murder. Were they guilty of shooting Berardelli and Parmenter? I said that it's possible they didn't. But it looks like they probably had a hand in it. Not only mob confessions there. Confessions and death bed testimony that, yeah, it was Sacco and Vanzetti. There was no total lack of evidence that they were guilty, too. Read the whole wiki entry. Read more about it, too, if you want. There was some exculpatory evidence, some shenanigans by the prosecutor, some bias and misconduct by the judge, for sure. But then, what do you call the defense attorney fiddling with the gun parts? The unfairness of the trial went both ways. Would I have voted to acquit? It's very possible. But if they had been charged with simply two counts of Being Murderous Assholes, then I vote guilty. I understand the importance of process. But there is a competing principle of justice. And what these guys becoming martyrs has done, is turn the face of wrongfully-convicted dissenters into a couple of loathesome douches. It spoils what ought to have been a unanimous campaign against the government persecuting dissenters, having those two be the face of it. It's as if OJ Simpson had become the face of a campaign against LAPD wrongdoing. Maybe the LAPD wronged him, sure. Process, I get it. Rights. But did that vile shit probably kill his ex-wife and a waiter? Yep. And any campaign using him as a poster boy would be ruined. Honestly, what the left ought to have done is noted the unfairness of the trial, made a few basic attempts to rectify it, and then moved on to other cases, to other dissidents who weren't bomb-making bastards. Maybe had a brief moment of silence for poor Sacco and poor Vanzetti, who might have only been standing next to his partner in robbery when Sacco shot those two, and maybe other shots came from the getaway crew assisting Sacco and Vanzetti. Wahhh. Poor guys. Don't really care. Choose better martyrs.
- If you think I would ever support the death penalty, you should do a search for my username and "death penalty", it'll probably bring up some stuff about how I rode a fucking bus from Boston to Atlanta in order to help the campaign to save Troy Davis. Troy Davis. Now there's a martyr. Almost certainly not guilty of the murder he was himself murdered for.
- Yes, they can rot in Hell all the same. No sympathy here, from me. Not for them. And I'm not alone. And that's why it's imperative to choose better poster children. Some legal injustices are not, ultimately, moral injustices. If there is such a thing as karma, Sacco and Vanzetti had the bad kind, in a bad way. If it wasn't that trial, it would've been another. They were expressly committed to creating the basis for another trial. Their friends bombed and slaughtered while they were in jail, on their behalf. They were evil. Evil people can be fueled by a good cause, if they respond in evil ways. The road to hell. They took it.
- I'm a terrorist? Ha! Oh, my government. Yeah, I am responsible for a government of strangers, thousands of unelected people, about 536 people for whom I only get to vote for three, and the only one who won is Elizabeth Warren, and I don't see her piloting any drones. What am I supposed to do? Ask my unaccountable government in the stranglehold of a ghoulish network of delusional national-security-hawks, "Please, sirs, no more bombing innocent brown children, pretty please"? Ask more firmly, more nicely? It is a kind of political nihilism, to hold every citizen equally responsible for any of the evil deeds of his or her leaders or neighbors. I mean, isn't that exactly the angle taken by, hmmm...Al Qaeda and Hamas? The government of America and Israel? "It's okay to kill some innocent civilians because...uhhh...they didn't try hard enough to stop their unaccountable leaders or unreachable neighbors from atrocities. They are all one people." Fuck that shit. Fuck essentialism. I am as responsible for what Obama does as I am for what some random kangaroo in Australia does. I can express myself, is all. If I see the kangaroo rummaging through some innocent dude's garbage, I can try to yell at it, if I were in Australia, and hopefully it hears me. If I see Obama authorize the cold-blooded slaughter of civilians in Pakistan who fit a ridiculously-vague and normal pattern, I can type an angry letter, post something clever and outraged here, and hopefully he hears it. Someday maybe I'll run for president, lol. I voted for myself last November. That's about as much as I, a nobody in America, can do. Pfff, terrorist. Are you shitting me? Uh, no.
