MOVE Bombing of 1985 in West Philly

Politics, History, & 'Conspiracy'
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Masato
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MOVE Bombing of 1985 in West Philly

Postby Masato » Mon May 15, 2017 3:15 pm

Why Have So Many People Never Heard Of The MOVE Bombing?

In West Philadelphia in 1985, in which Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a residential neighborhood, leaving 11 dead — including five children

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I'm From Philly. 30 Years Later, I'm Still Trying To Make Sense Of The MOVE Bombing

What gives? It's seems incredible that so many people had never heard about the time American law enforcement bombed U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, which, on top of the deaths, left dozens of bystanders' homes destroyed in an uncontrolled fire that the police commissioner told firefighters not to put out right away. The details are so extreme, so over-the-top. How have we forgotten this?

I put the question to Robin Wagner-Pacifici, who teaches at the New School and has written books on MOVE and other fringe militant groups involved in bloody government standoffs, including the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the Weaver family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. She has noticed that while those groups identified with each other to a degree, referring to each other in their manifestos as fellow victims of the state, they don't seem to feel the same way about MOVE. "They created this kind of genealogy," she says, "but none of them mentioned MOVE."

She thinks the reason was ideological: MOVE's quasi-Rastafarian, anti-technology, pro-animal-rights worldview doesn't neatly fit on any part of the political spectrum, while other militant groups she has studied had some degree of overlap. And you can't lump MOVE in with other black power movements of the time, either; black radical groups often bristled at their tactics.

In the universe of violent fringe movements that ended in deadly mayhem, MOVE occupies a lonely branch. To some degree, maybe this helps explain why the story of MOVE isn't better known: If few people feel like your ideological kin, few people feel cause to carry your torch.

Wagner-Pacifici also traces this relative obscurity back to the players involved. Unlike other fringe groups she has studied, MOVE's final confrontation wasn't with a big federal agency like the FBI or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They clashed with local Philly cops and some state police. So while the story of Ruby Ridge has been folded into the larger national debate on gun control and the limits of federal power, the political implications of MOVE were seen as more provincial and self-contained. And unsurprisingly, local politicians were all too eager to move on and leave those implications behind.

Of course, Ferguson protesters faced off against local law enforcement, too, and Ferguson city cops would have loved if Michael Brown's death had stayed a hyperlocal affair. But technology has changed everything in the decades since May 13, 1985. If the MOVE bombing were to happen today, bystanders would be furiously uploading videos to YouTube, spawning Twitter hashtags and interconnected protests in cities around the country. CNN would be camped out in West Philly for weeks, to say nothing of the countless think-pieces.

If MOVE happened today, it might be quickly folded into the classroom, as has happened with other recent incidents of police violence. Teachers have all the materials at their fingertips: clips from livestreams, links to mainstream news articles and personal blogs, embeddable tweets, and so on. Back in the mid-80s, you'd have to wait around for the inevitable Frontline documentary or for an academic to publish a book. History gets commodified and redistributed much more quickly today.

The MOVE story faded into relative obscurity partly because no one connects with their cause today, and largely because the mechanisms to preserve the story weren't in place yet. But had it happened now, it would be much harder to forget.

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Masato
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Postby Masato » Mon May 15, 2017 3:16 pm

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Postby Masato » Mon May 15, 2017 3:18 pm

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Canuckster
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Postby Canuckster » Tue May 16, 2017 12:34 pm

Wow, good story, I've never actually heard of this
People say they all want the truth, but when they are confronted with a truth that disagrees with them, they balk at it as if it were an unwanted zombie apocalypse come to destroy civilization.

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Winnson
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Postby Winnson » Sun May 21, 2017 12:51 pm

I didn't know that either. We didn't really hear the extent of the damage of the Rodney King riots in LA either. I guess information was easier to control back then.

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Edge Guerrero
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Postby Edge Guerrero » Sun May 21, 2017 4:02 pm

Canuckster wrote:Wow, good story, I've never actually heard of this


- Same.
I never heard about that story neither.
- I rent this space for advertising

Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.

I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain

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Redneck
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Postby Redneck » Wed May 24, 2017 10:47 am

Wow.


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