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12/15/2005:

"Angela Davis: "The State of California May Have Extinguished the Life of Stanley Tookie Williams, But They Have Not Managed to Extinguish the Hope for a Better World""

...ANGELA DAVIS: Well, it seems to me that we saw a very intentional politicization of this process, namely the equation of what Schwarzenegger would call lawlessness and criminality with radical political activism. It is revealing, it seems to me, that every single name he evoked by quoting the dedication from Tookie's autobiography, every single name is the name of a person of color, a black person or a Native person, and of course we have Nelson Mandela, who is a global hero, who represents to us the determination to dismantle racism and sexism and economic exploitation.

It is very frightening to me that Schwarzenegger would make such a statement, particularly in light of the assault on people's rights associated with the PATRIOT Act. This feels like an even more intense kind of McCarthyism that's happening here, and it was particularly ironic that he said that Williams is not reformed and he still sees violence and lawlessness as legitimate, as what he called a legitimate means to address societal problems. This is ironic, since Stanley Tookie Williams has publicly embraced nonviolence, and as I said this evening, when I spoke at the rally, this execution is the most outrageous example of using violence, of using state violence as a legitimate means of addressing social problems.
democracynow.org