As in life so too in death – No Justice; No Peace!



By Stanley Collymore

You might be able to stitch me up with crimes I didn’t

commit; racially stereotype and accordingly, thanks

to your meticulously hand-picked and bent

jurors, routinely find me guilty, then

get your crony magistrates or elitist judges

with their entrenched Colonel Blimp and

colonialist mindset to incarcerate me

for inordinately lengthy periods

of time in your antiquated,

18^th Century-assembled

and enormously

congested

jails.

That’s, of course, if your arrogantly assumed

and disdainfully exhibited abhorrence

of me, comprehensively and

liberally laced with an

astonishing immunity you know that you

can reliably count upon doesn’t cause you to

forego all that earlier stuff and, profoundly

emboldened by the successful prospects

of your racist enterprise, lead you to

callously and sadistically, even

in broad daylight and on the

streets of our busy cities,

gratuitously deprive me

and others like me

as well of our

lives.

But then, to you I was always just another

Nigger: one of the thousands of others

of all ages and of both genders that

systematically, continually and

uncaringly on your part as well as

that of our supposedly impartial

judicial system; our country’s

venal and grossly unfit for

purpose politicians who generally and

together with the powers that be

not only wanted us dead but

also at whose hands we

consistently found ourselves subjected

to racial stereotyping and profiling

ordinances, which clearly were

themselves liberally spurred

on by untrammelled

sophistry and culpable

pernicious acts of

mindboggling

bigotry.

And although we’re now finally dead: racially

murdered or executed as you all wanted us

to be, our righteous cause will none the less

live on eternally in the hearts, minds and

actions of those close to us: the likes

of Carole Duggan or Neville and

Doreen Lawrence for instance,

who love and will always

care about us and the

justice which they know

we justly deserved

but, of course,

never got.

Honest, decent, hardworking and law-abiding

persons: although no noticeable advantage,

if any at all, has been discerned from

them being thus, who all the

same along with thousands of likeminded

people across the entire nation already know

full well that what happened to us, and

quite unrestrained is going on apace,

is criminally wrong, and in conscionable

terms too the most damnable moral travesty that

either we or those who’re currently affected

could ever face; and that without justice

to lean upon, impartially grant us

full absolution, and from this pernicious

evil we’ve all been cruelly subjected

to secure for us a warrantable

societal reprieve, then there

cannot or won’t ever be

any meaningful or

durable peace!

© Stanley V. Collymore

12 January 2014.

Comment:

This poem was written specifically with Mark Duggan in mind and is dedicated to his children, mother, other family members, friends and supporters, but most especially to Mark’s aunt Carole Duggan.

An incomparable lady, Carole whose courageous and tireless commitment, in the face of overwhelming odds against her, not only to ascertain truthful answers as to why her nephew was murdered but additionally the juxtaposition of this with her unflagging energy and indefatigable determination to see justice done by him I find highly commendable, fully empathize with, totally admire and wholeheartedly support.

God bless and sustain you in your worthy endeavours Carole, and in heeding too the compellingly powerful and pertinent voice from the grave embedded in your own spirited and honest cry: “No Justice; No Peace!”

After the most brutal, savage and summary execution of Mark Duggan on a London street and in broad daylight on the 4^th August 2011 the police spin machine went into overdrive.

A vicious crime exacerbated by the abysmally atrocious manner and indifferent treatment meted out to Mark’s family afterwards when they peacefully sought answers at Tottenham Police Station as to why their loved one was murdered and that served as the catalyst for the subsequent widespread riots across England when news of their gross mistreatment at the hands of the police, all too common in the case of Black people, became knowledgeable was, to say the least, inevitable.

However, in a desperate bid to expunge the blood-stained tracks of those who had premeditatedly planned, ordered, oversaw and ultimately carried out Mark Duggan’s extra-judicial execution, and specifically in the lead up two and a half years later to the most perverse inquest jury verdict outcome either witnessed or recorded in the UK, the police, who were the perpetrators of Mark’s killing, ably assisted by their compliant media hacks hurriedly went on the offensive to disparagingly vilify him at all costs.

Instantaneously Mark Duggan was publicly and vociferously declared as having been the 45^th most dangerous criminal, and how’s this for idiotic hyperbole, not in Britain as the many gullible and significant brain-dead in our midst would expect; oh no! But the whole of Europe.

Risible or what? This notwithstanding the deadly circumstances replete in the entire situation surrounding Mark Duggan’s controversial murder and against whose backdrop this claptrap and cynical charade were being absurdly played out.

Personally, I don’t think that that remark from our boys in blue, echoed and regurgitated by their racist chums, about Mark Duggan being the 45^th most dangerous criminal throughout Europe would have found favour with or gone down at all well with the Italian or Russian mafias for example; let alone the incorrigible, sadistic, cut-throat killers and so-called leaders of the western created, and in which Britain played a major role, hand-out, dependency satrapy of Kosovo that these western paragons of virtue, as they would have you believe, still avidly support.

Understandably, the respective European mafias and their Kosovan counterparts must be spitting rage at having been so disrespectfully and publicly humiliated by a concerted British police propaganda campaign, and a lying one at that, that sees these genuinely well-renowned and arch-criminals criminally, and mortifyingly so, supplanted by of all people a London Blackman.

Ironic coming from the British police, I must say, when all the empirical data to hand categorically show that Blacks in the UK are more likely to be the principal victims of crime here rather than the perpetrators of it; and particularly so of race crimes, that as some of Britain’s major broadsheets reported on the 13 January 2014 the police don’t even bother to investigate. And with such endemic prejudices within the police ranks reinforced by conditioned racial stereotypes why would they prefer to hesitate, given those clear-cut circumstances, rather than summarily kill a Blackman when the opportunity either presents itself or one is premeditatedly and cynically manufactured for them?

Be that as it may! But having assiduously observed and contemporaneously collated the many facts as they emerge, it all looks very much to me like the British Police and more especially their Metropolitan colleagues on finding themselves shut out of the public convenience of honesty and reason and therefore anxiously looking for somewhere else to offload their profuse urine, were forced in the Mark Duggan case, as they were with the Stephen Lawrence one and others, to piss in the air in the earnest hope that in doing so what they let off didn’t fall back and embarrassingly drench them.

However, in the immortal words of the black bobsledder in the film “Cool Runnings” similarly compromised in his emergency situation the response is: “Too late!”