By Jock Mulligan
The tragic news of another man shot dead in the streets of Minneapolis by the ICE raiders of the department brings a cold blast of memory to anyone who knows the hard history of a people under the boot. It is the old tale of strangers sent in to police a folk they neither know nor care for. We are looking at a modern mirror of the Black and Tans, those desperate and cruel men sent across the sea to Ireland to keep a quiet and a cowed people in their place.
The Tans were a rough lot of ex-soldiers with no stake in the parish they patrolled. They saw every face as a target and every doorway as a trap. They were not there to help the public. They were there to crack them open. And now we look at Minneapolis where the men of the department descend like a raiding party on a place they do not belong to. They come with their armoured lorries and their high calibre gear looking for all the world like a foreign army in a land they have just taken. When the smoke clears and another soul is left cold on the cobbles we see the same empty eyes and the same lack of a heart that marked the auxiliaries in the old days.
There is no Geis here. No sacred bond to the people of the street. These men answer to a desk in a city a thousand miles away and they never have to look the grieving mothers in the eye at the local shop. They are wrapped in a layer of institutional silence that would make a Dublin Castle clerk green with envy. The likeness is not just in the shooting. It is in the weather of fear they create. The Tans were known for the night raid and the sudden kick at the door that meant a man might vanish into the dark. Today in the parts of Minneapolis where the immigrants bide the sight of a government badge brings that same cold shiver. It is the dread of being torn away from your life by a force that sees you as a mark on a tally sheet rather than a man with a name and a story.
The pity of it is that the state still thinks you can plant peace with the tools of a slaughterhouse. They send in the hard handed and the hollow hearted and then they act surprised when the town is in flames. The moneyed disruptors and the boardroom liquidators thrive on this scrap between the person and the state. They want a world where the law is a stick used to beat the small into line. It is a shambles and it is a crime against the life of a human being.
If we do not ask for a new moral law and an end to these raiding parties that answer to no one we are only waiting for the next death. The ghosts of the Tans are walking the streets of Minneapolis and they are wearing government badges. Trump and his billionaire backers see this as a fine result. They see the dead and they see the terror and they count it as a win for their corporate dream of total control. But for the people on the ground it is just another day of being hunted in their own homes.
My Heart goes out to the family of the as yet unnamed man. And the people of that City. A reckoning must come. The guilty must pay for their crimes. And those at the top of this criminal pile must do time.
Jock Mulligan uses ai as an aid for grammar and punctuation.
