Ed Koch, Dead Racist
February 10, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Ed Koch was the mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989. His greatest “accomplishment” was turning NYC into a northern lynch mob city, fostering and making it “acceptable” for liberals to give vent to their most base racist feelings and for reactionary mobs and gunmen to go out and murder Black youth, and backing police who murder Black and Latino youth.
His legacy and impact are captured in two incidents:
When Bernhard Goetz, a fanatical racist, pulled out a gun and opened fire on four unarmed Black youth on a subway train, Koch called it self-defense and orchestrated a near lynch-mob environment in New York.
And when five Black and Latino youth were framed for a rape they didn’t commit—the case of the Central Park Five—Koch was the head cheerleader for whipping up a racist lynch-mob mentality against these innocent men—channeling the spirit of cracker politicians in the South at the time of the lynching of Emmett Till.
Koch promoted every kind of mean-spirited bigotry, white supremacy, and pompous, self-righteous celebration of the crimes of the system—particularly U.S. backing for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. He presided over the era of the epidemic of crack cocaine flooding the inner-city neighborhoods while blaming (and unleashing police state conditions on) the victims of the epidemic. He was a dedicated union-buster. And as the AIDS virus ravaged the LGBT community and Black people, Koch was studiously uncaring and hostile to activists who fought to unleash the education, research, and medical resources needed to deal with the AIDS epidemic.
He will be sorely missed by smug self-righteous bigots, flag-waving hyper-patriotic idiots, and most of all by the powers-that-be that sit atop a system of exploitation and oppression that Koch served with such vigor.
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