The Left's attitude to Reactionary Racism and Police Violence

Today I was reading some official documents and firsthand testimony of the atrocities against the Left in the Spanish Civil War.  Among some of the excerpts and papers was the transcription of part of a radio broadcast by Republican sympathizer and de facto Prime Minister of the Republican zone, Indalecio Pietro.  His exhortations to the Republicans of the Popular Front should serve as a model for our own response to the recent waves of racist police violent and betrayal by the legal system of its most recent victims in the ongoing epidemic of white cops shooting and murderering unarmed young black men with impunity:

Even if the terrible and tragic reports about what has happened and is happening in areas dominated by our enemies are true, even if day after day we receive lists of the names of comrades, of beloved friends, whose attacfhment to an ideal was enough to ensure them a treacherous death, do not, I beg you, I entreat you, do not imitate their behavior.  Meet their cruelty with your pity, meet their savagery with your mercy, meet the excesses of the enemy with your generous benevolence.  Do not imitate them!  Do not imitate them!  Be better than them in your moral conduct!  Be better than them in your generosity.  I am not asking you, let it be clear, to lose strength in the struggle, ardor in the battle.  I call for toughness in combat, breasts of steel, as some of our brave militias call themselves, breasts of steel, but responsive hearts, capable of shuddering in the face of human suffering, capable of pity and tender feeling, without which is lost the very essence of human greatness.