Over the weekend I saw a video of some mob *justice* delivered upon a teenage girl in Guatemala. The backstory of the clip was that she was part of a gang that had robbed and killed a taxi driver. The male culprits had gotten away.
The girl was surrounded by a hundred or more people.There was no place for her to go to escape them. She is kicked and punched by various people. My Spanish is quite rusty but, she was called a whore. People come at her. One guy seems to come to her aid, perhaps appealing to the crowd for calm but, it's hard to tell if that's what his intention is. At one point she's beaten down and a guy comes by, douses her with fluid and he lights her afire. She's alive while the flames engulf her body. As they subside, the guy refuels her body, briefly setting some of the crowd and the plaza on fire. You can only hope that she loses consciousness and suffers no more but, I don't know that she got that lucky. Most people, engulfed by flames, suffocate as all of the oxygen around them is consumed by the flames. Regardless, it can't be a quick way to die.
I viewed the clip on a popular republican site. The text said it was pulled from Youtube because it was so graphic but it's still on the republican site. That's actually kind of fitting.
The whole episode is so primal. So Biblical. So 20th century American South. Just like our republicans.
According to the text, they also lynched her. From 1882 to 1968, 4743 people were lynched in the US. Of those, 3,446 were African-Americans. Wiki adds that better than 85% of those were in southern states. It was typical to set the body on fire. Sometimes black men were mutilated, their genitals cut off.
I'm sure our nation's racists are pointing out: "Hey, ya goddamned Ferrerman- white people were lynched too!"
I can always count on our nation's Topix posters to enlighten us that (essentially) "both sides have done stuff so, uh, there you go..."
Then, the more Sublime will offer historical facts about how black people actually having started lynching... They didn't of course, but the more Sublime among us can deduce that, blacks were indeed an integral part of the lynching process in the south....it couldn't have happened without them....so therefore, and the party of the first part....
I guess white people just perfected it, much like the slave trade.
If you think I digress, you should have seen the comments. As if watching a human life ending in one of the worst ways imaginable were not horrific enough, reading other humans responses to it were also horrific. The folks commenting seemed to think Obama was bringing these folks to America to vote for democrats... You know how such sites go. Some folks were against the mob action and actually stayed on topic. Others went on about it highlighting the need for immigration reform.
Obviously people haven't changed much throughout the centuries. Guatemala has cell phones and videos but they have 20th century Alabama standards of justice. Alabama has cellphones but they seem to want to get back to more simpler times.
Mob justice is rather Biblical. Jesus once asked a mob: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Today, since he died on the cross for those sins and with Christian lawyers having poured over the Bible, one only has to apologize to Jesus, ask forgiveness and then one can commence rock-chucking. They make it seem that easy.
Mob justice is easy. It's not hard to reach a consensus of guilt among dull, slow-witted people with perverse revenge on their mind. I rather doubt that the girl in question actually killed anyone herself and her participation at all is probably in question. That's why we have police and courts with evidence and testimony. I don't care if she was part of the murder. Torture is not supposed to be part of the judicial process. You can tell Dick Cheney I said so.
It made me sick to see this happen to this child, this human being. To be so alone in a crowd... To plead for justice and mercy, with no one willing to help as the flames of inhumanity feed her persecutors. We're really just not getting any better at this, anywhere, are we?
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