The vile compound of Cop City has been the subject of numerous articles at the Red Clarion in the past, and the state of Georgia’s lawfare against the Stop Cop City activists is on the record. They began by arresting protestors and spread to bail organizers over the course of the summer. This September, the state of Georgia has crossed the final Rubicon and declared itself in open war against all socialists of every stripe. An indictment under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, otherwise known as RICO, was filed in the state’s court naming not one, not ten, not thirty, but sixty RICO defendants in the Stop Cop City movement.
The indictment runs to 109 pages and alleges a secret conspiracy born on the date of George Floyd’s murder. Georgia’s Republican Attorney General and sweaty thumb Chris Carr (pictured left) is framing this openly as a crusade against “anarchist, anti-police, and anti-business extremist[s]”. In typical bourgeois fashion, he equates property damage with violence against living human beings.
If you come to our state and shoot a police officer, throw Molotov cocktails at law enforcement, set fire to police vehicles, damage construction equipment, vandalize private homes and businesses, and terrorize their occupants, you will be held accountable,
he complained. Of course, not one police officer has been killed defending the multi-million dollar stormtrooper training ground. Yet the Atlanta police murdered a Stop Cop City activist — Tortuguita, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán — by shooting them 57 times while their hands were raised. Despite calls for investigation by an Atlanta city councilwoman and the community, Chris Carr and the Georgia Department of Justice have declined to prosecute or even investigate this murder. Nor have the traditional channels for community protest been of any avail.
The city council ignored days of protests and the clear will of the people of Atlanta when they voted to fund Cop City on June 6 of this year. 116,000 signatures graced the desks of the legislators in the form of a ballot referendum to stop the construction; they refused to certify it. 17 hours of public comment bombarded the council on the day of their vote. They pointedly ignored it.
The curtain is finally being lowered on the state’s pretense of impartiality. It doesn’t mediate class conflicts — the state is, itself, the most powerful weapon in the corner of the wealthy capitalists. It’s in the deep fascist strongholds of Georgia and the South, where the neoliberal project was long ago rejected for a return to the naked rule of the bullet and the baton, that the most depraved exhibition of power is now being displayed. It won’t remain in the South — it will crawl across the U.S. Empire, county by county and city by city, one by one letting the local pigs off their leashes, turning them free on the people, calling us out as enemies by name. If the police succeed in building Cop City in Atlanta, it won’t be long until similar facilities are built across the United States.
The facts are simple: the hateful politicians and the enormous corporations that pay for their campaigns will never bend to public pressure in Atlanta. Worse, as one of the bastions of fascist reaction in the South, the state apparatus of Georgia has made it clear that the police will treat anyone with a dissenting voice as though they personally opened fire on a cop. Property damage, raising money, and even something as innocuous as posting ACAB on social media — these are all one and the same crime to the Atlanta police and Attorney General Chris Carr, and they all carry the death penalty.
There can be no more half-measures. The state of Georgia isn’t fooling around, and there’s no one overseeing them who will step in and put a stop to these abuses.
Any fight in Atlanta must now be a fight to win.
Defend the Atlanta Forest is a loose circle that is organizing the fight against Cop City. They need fighters to join them, but they need more than this: they need organization. They need plans. The state has shown that there is no line they won’t cross, no escalation too gruesome to undertake in the pursuit of their interests. Activists must now treat the state of Georgia as a hostile belligerent; Cop City is not a political statement or even a promise of future repression, but a war zone. Their actions must be coordinated, organized, and focused.
This isn’t a game; this is the first live-fire front a war a long time coming.
