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Notes -
Was Floyd picked as a figurehead because he was a criminal, rather than in spite of this?
I've been wondering about this from time to time over the last couple of years. I'd like to know if there's a term for this political strategy, if indeed it exists.
Surely there were some truly "innocent", non criminal black men - or black women, as the media would spin the 'racism crisis', but I gather it is pretty rare for women of any color to be murdered by cops - who were killed by cops in dubious circumstances, and could have been picked out by the BLM movement as their martyr? I'm not American and am not very familiar with the issue, but I do vaguely remember a few cases of egregious police brutality against black men without criminal records and without meth addictions, maybe even during the same time period in the year 2020. Rather than someone with a long criminal record and two types of hard drugs in his system.
If indeed this was done on purpose; why? May it be in order to make the pill harder to swallow for political opponents? And with the movement becoming unstoppable as they hoped for, it resulting in a bigger political win? If people went along with protesting for a criminal, they'll definitively be very likely to do it for actual decent people too...?
Even most of the people in the Soviet gulags were genuine criminals.
If you mean "criminals according to the arbitrary application of USSR laws", which included criminal punishment for things like criticizing The Party, having more property then the Party things you should have, or procuring any food when The Party decided you must starve to death, let alone being late to the job or making any mistake (which is clearly terrorist sabotage) - then yes. Otherwise I don't think they were.
Can I ask why you routinely resort to such snark? What he very obviously meant to say was that the majority of GULAG prisoners were common criminals as opposed to political prisoners i.e. thiefs, murderers, bandits, rapists, average thugs and bums etc., which was indeed the case if you look at the data.
There's no snark there. By USSR laws, a lot of minor acts were criminalized - like being late to work, or any unauthorized usage of kolkhoz property (which was just forcibly taken from the farmers) - e.g. the infamous Law of Three Spikelets so a lot of people that were convicted under supposedly "criminal" articles weren't actually bandits, rapists or bums - they were average citizens trying to survive in the hellscape of total terror. "The data" (which btw you neglected to support with any evidence) can't tell you that, you need a little knowledge about what actually was going on.
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