01 September 2014

Making Sense of Ferguson: an Anthology

IF ONE TAKES the long view of what's happening in Ferguson, Missouri, United States of America, it is but the newest atrocity in a seemingly endless sequence of events that began with the advent of patriarchy maybe 6,000 years ago.

That's when the voice of some self-proclaimed god spoke from a burning bush and also from a fiery wheel to intimidate our species into accepting his toxic mandates: god as heavenly Führer, war against Nature and war against women and the war of God's Chosen against the Damned until all the planet is “one nation under God.”

An estimated four-and-one-half millennia later, a microcosm of the vectoring of these possibly interstellar malignancies would be re-enacted when Europeans who believed themselves divine nemissaries* acting “in the image of God” maliciously distributed smallpox-infested blankets amongst First Nations peoples to begin the “ethnic cleansing” of North America.

Now, today, after centuries of übermenschen vs. üntermenschen (whether patricians versus plebeians, Ruling Class versus Working Class, white versus people of color or however else defined), we witness in Ferguson the direct consequences of an idea that once, eons ago, was so alien to our species it had to be seared into our brains by fire – first by the biblical bush and wheel, ultimately by the flames of the burning-stake and the lynching-tree and the voices of victims whose final agonies are so monstrously horrific they cannot stop shrieking until their vocal cords are charred to silence.

But the shorter-term and therefore more easily provable sequence of events that made Ferguson the new international symbol of “American exceptionalism” and what it really means to reside in “one nation under God” began with the advent of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany and the clandestine meetings of German and Italian officials with the secret cabal of U.S. plutocrats who correctly recognized fascism and Nazism as the mature and therefore inevitable forms of capitalism.
 
The immediate result of these meetings was the Bankers Plot (scroll down for my addition of historical facts to the comment thread). Thanks largely to Soviet intelligence operatives, the U.S. Communist Party and the heroism of Gen. Smedley Butler U.S.M.C. (retired), the plotters failed in their effort to turn the United States fascist and make it the fourth (and economically dominant) partner in the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis. But they were never prosecuted – they were too rich to be jailed – and it now seems obvious they succeeded in securely implanting in the minds of their children and grandchildren the lingering notion of a fascist United States in which We the People are reduced to zero-tolerance slavery. 

Now – because the U.S. (pseudo) Left in its arrogant stupidity constantly underestimates the diabolical cunning of the Bankers Plot descendents – one Ruling Class party of two names tyrannizes the entire nation. The One Percenters, the masters of the pretend-to-be-not-so-fascist Democrats and the unabashedly fascist Republicans, have bribed themselves into total control of all government at every U.S. level whether local, state or federal. The result is capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – what earlier generations knew as fascism or Nazism, albeit without the authority of an obvious dictator. 

That's why despite Roe v. Wade there are no abortion providers in 87 percent of all U.S. counties; why there is a war on women; why the U.S. Supreme Court has nullified voter rights  and eliminated the separation of church and state; why the risk of biblical-law theocracy replacing what little remains of constitutional governance is at an all-time high;  why hate crimes are soaring  (see also here  and here); why there's no end to joblessnessforeclosure  and eviction; why homelessness is now a crime;  why U.S. press freedom is but a memory;  why U.S. citizens are denied health care by prices so prohibitive they literally condemn us to death;  why the infant mortality rate is skyrocketing  even as our educational level is flushed down the societal toilet

It's also why there's a new war against racial minorities – not coincidentally, the very minorities a Soviet intelligence study** leaked during the early 1990s said were notable for their legitimate (and therefore potentially revolutionary) anger at the racism inherent in capitalism. 

Because the Ruling Class long ago recognized the U.S. military might not be reliable in homeland search-and-destroy missions against U.S. citizens – remember the real reason the draft was abolished was to deny potential revolutionaries access to military training – the U.S. local police are now being federalized and militarized and trained as an army of occupation. That's why they behave as they did in Ferguson on 9 August 2014 when Officer Darren Wilson gunned down Michael Brown and similarly trained officers fired military-grade pepper gas and riot-control projectiles at people who had peacefully assembled to protest the killing. These same federally trained officers targeted the journalists who were trying to cover what soon became notorious as police brutality of a magnitude unseen since the era of the Jim Crow South.

But the Ferguson story's not about individual cops run amok – never mind that's the disinformation with which we're being deluged by our Josef Goebbels media. It's not even about the police per se. What it's about is the methodical transformation of the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich – a transformation of which the militarized cops with their assault rifles and their Nazi-style helmets and their armored cars are merely the most visible manifestations.
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*“nemissary” – the combination of “nemesis” and “emissary,” for which my thanks to a dear friend who prefers to remain anonymous.
**The analysis cited here was amongst the KGB papers leaked after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I read of it in major media – possibly Macleans Magazine, maybe also Newsweek – probably in 1992. The focus of the KGB study was rebelliousness within the U.S. during the 1960s. It concluded that white rebelliousness was mostly either fad or, as in the anti-war movement, motivated by fearful selfishness; therefore it had no revolutionary potential. But the rebelliousness amongst First Nations peoples, African Americans and Hispanics was motivated by legitimate grievances against capitalism and was therefore implicitly revolutionary. Unfortunately the report has since apparently been disappeared down the Orwell hole, as neither I nor far more skilled researchers have been able to find it. 


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Making Sense of Ferguson: a Veteran Agitator's Reactions

I posted these remarks, reproduced here in italic, on the comment threads of various Ferguson stories published on other websites. (Special thanks for the superb coverage by Reader Supported News.) 

On “The Body in the Street”: To understand why Michael Brown's body was left (on display) in the street for four hours it is necessary to understand the new paradigm of governance that's being imposed on the U.S. homeland.
 
This new paradigm is brazenly capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – other names for which are fascism and Nazism.
 
It has always been the paradigm of governance in the USian colonies – places like Pinochet's Chile and Diem's Vietnam. But now with the labor movement dead and the Soviet Union gone and China eternally co-opted, there is no longer any power on earth adequate to prevent the capitalists – the One Percent – from ruling domestically with exactly the same savagery they have always ruled their overseas possessions.
 
The function of the police in this new paradigm is to protect and serve the Ruling Class and to tyrannize all the rest of us. In this new paradigm, We the People are the enemy. The police are an army of occupation protecting the Ruling Class from the rage of this foreclosure-conquered nation.
 
That's why Mike Brown's body was left in the street for four hours It was a warning to the people, a standard army-of-occupation tactic. It is a 21st Century version of how the Nazis in their conquered territories hung dissidents from lampposts with signs proclaiming the new order. Disobedience Is Death, whether in Hitler's Grosse Deutschland or in the United States of America.
 
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On “The Ferguson Police Have a Card up Their Sleeve”:  Firstly, the Ferguson police are not “incompetent.” They are a latter-day Gestapo behaving with the same sneeringly competent viciousness that defined the Nazi occupation troops in Europe. In other words, the Ferguson cops are (competently) doing what the (white) Ruling Class trained and equipped them to do: terrorizing blacks.
 
Secondly, the reason blacks in Ferguson do not vote no doubt lies in the state's history, which includes long years of the most violent racism in the United States. Indeed, Civil-War-related violence in Missouri continued “until 1889.” But given the behavior of the police in Ferguson, it is now obvious Missouri's penchant for racial violence has never been suppressed. (For an introduction to the state's bloody history, see here  and here
 
Thirdly, racism is a subset of capitalism, a byproduct of its master-slave mentality. Thus if we are to win against capitalism, we must stop underestimating our oppressors. They are in fact the most malevolently competent tyrants in human history. That is why they now own and control the entire world.
 
Fourthly, the function of the police under capitalism is not to serve and protect the people. It is instead to serve and protect the Ruling Class by terrorizing real and potential dissidents – exactly as the Ferguson police are doing.
 
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On “Police Officer Resigns, Another Is Fired After Ferguson Incidents”: As I said on the thread of an earlier story about these two cops, nearly all U.S. police departments – militarized by the federal government and federalized by the Patriot Act – are hotbeds of neo-Nazi ideology and/or Ku-Klux-Klan-type Christian fanaticism...Hence these two officers will quickly be hired by other departments. Meanwhile do not imagine the new savagery of the police is an isolated event...Open your eyes, people: see the pattern. An atrocity against one is an atrocity against us all. Stand in solidarity. Otherwise we're doomed.
 
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On “Why We're So Blase About Global Warming(and what that attitude has to do with Ferguson): Unfortunately for our entire species, at least 63 percent of the U.S. public has already been seduced by Christian idiocy (see for example here) – and the number of these malevolent morons is growing. Supplemental proofs include skyrocketing hate crimes, the war against women and minorities, the Oath Keepers tape from Ferguson, etc. ad nauseam. We are indeed fucked – raped, actually, and abandoned to die – and it is Abrahamic religion with its fanatical hatred of nature and femaleness that has murdered us.
 
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On “This One May Be Worse (than Michael Brown)”: It's not just the South.”  It's the entire country. The federalized, militarized police have obviously been deliberately equipped to wage war on us, We the People. Just as obviously – see for example here  – the targeting of minorities marks the war's first offensive. And, despite claims to the contrary, the orders to begin this war have obviously – like the plethora of equipment that has turned police departments into conquering armies – come from the federal government. Though the war's immediate victims are minorities, protesters (remember what was done to Occupy) and journalists – especially those who try to cover the escalating savagery, in truth the entire 99 percent is on the government's target list... To paraphrase Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the Blacks...”

   

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Making Sense of Ferguson: Ten Vital Background Reports

(My special thanks to Pat Fletcher, whose Internet research skills helped gather these exceptionally informative stories.)
 
A Former Marine Explains All the Weapons of War Being Used by Police in Ferguson”: Reprinted from The Nation by Truthout, Lyle Jeremy Rubin's documentation of the equipment the Ferguson cops are using against local citizens is invaluable. It is tantamount to a seasoned intelligence-analyst's report on an enemy army's order of battle. (“Order of battle” is the military term for studies of an enemy's capabilities that focus on leadership, organization and equipment.) It's relevance, which cannot be over-emphasized, is that Rubin's work is probably the first easily accessible public disclosure of the extent to which U.S. local police departments have been federalized into de facto armies of occupation.

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Suspended St. Louis Police Officer: 'I'm Into Diversity, I Kill Everybody'”:  Allen McDuffee's report for The Wire, republished by Reader Supported News, adds the dimension of police personality to our understanding of militarized-police order of battle. McDuffee's disclosures are based on the (now-censored) videotape that reveals the boastful murderousness and the violent Christianity of Dan Page, the St. Louis County cop who assaulted an African-American journalist during the ongoing Ferguson protests. Another account of the Page's bigotry is here,  (also linked in “Global Warming,” above), complete with some representative footage CNN captured from the videotape before it was censored.

(Note: I listened to the entire tape – this obviously before the unknown censors blocked public access to it – and Page's statements are indeed as murderous, and as murderously Christian, as McDuffee describes. Page was addressing a gathering of Oath Keepers, the organization of Christian fanatics, which of course responded favorably to his boasts. McDuffee's report is therefore also relevant to my ongoing coverage, previously linked in the introductory essay, of the intensifying effort to impose biblical-law theocracy  on the United States.) 

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Five reports give us a a picture of the brutal circumstances under which Michael Brown lived and died. “Why Michael Brown had the right to stand his ground” references the demographics of Ferguson, which implicitly white-supremacist USian capitalism has turned into a de facto ghetto. Routinely policed as if it were Bull Connor's Birmingham, Alabama, it is also somewhat reminiscent of Henrich Himmler's Warsaw.  A more scholarly and detailed demographic report is “Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of Growing Suburban Poverty.”  A Brookings study, it reveals at least 25 percent of the community's families live below the federal poverty line – in other words, in truly abject poverty. “In defense of black rage: Michael Brown, police and the American dream”  gives Brittney Cooper's account of the reality behind the statistics. “Violence,” she writes, “is the effect, not the cause of the concentrated poverty that locks that many poor people up together with no conceivable way out...” Another relevant report on the policing of Ferguson is “Police raid Ferguson church for third time.”  Finally there is the ultimate portrait of police attitudes in Ferguson, “Nurse on Site Was Not Allowed to Tend Mike Brown.”   

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A Movement Grows in Ferguson”: Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker does what only the very best and bravest reporters do and goes beyond the police lines to get the back story: “...it is now beginning to look like a movement. The local QuikTrip, a gas station and convenience store that was looted and burned on the second night of the protests, has now been repurposed as the epicenter for gatherings and the exchange of information. The front of the lot bears an improvised graffiti sign identifying the area as the 'QT People’s Park.' With the exception of a few stretches, such as Thursday afternoon, when it was veiled in clouds of tear gas, protesters have been a constant presence in the lot...” 

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Missouri GOP Outraged About Voter Registration Booths In Ferguson”  As noted above, voter participation in Ferguson is extremely low, reminiscent of the South in the years before the voter registration drives of the Civil Rights Movement and passage of the (now-nullified) Voting Rights Act. But as soon as a few folks tried to to make it easier for Ferguson citizens to exercise their right to vote, a top official of the Missouri Republican Party denounced the effort as a threat to “justice and peace.” 

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Four Things You Probably Don't Know About the Ferguson Protests” gives us another revealing glimpse inside the beleaguered community.


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Making Sense of Ferguson: Racism as Class Warfare

Profiling Is as USian as Apple Pie: If there are any OAN readers who still doubt the federalized, militarized police have been ordered to specifically target African Americans – perhaps even more ruthlessly now that closet-Republican Barack Obama is effectively channeling Richard Nixon in the White House – let “When You Fit the Description” relieve you of your uncertainties. It is the infuriating story of how television producer Charles Belk was busted, publicly humiliated and imprisoned in an especially egregious case of mistaken identity and false arrest inflicted by the Beverly Hills Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wrongfully accused of bank robbery, Belk was relentlessly interrogated by an agent from the FBI, the primary U.S. secret police agency.

Why? Merely because Belk is a “tall, bald head, black male,” as was the perpetrator, who of course escaped. In the mind of the Ruling Class, as in the minds of their militarized-police guardians, black – even well-dressed black – means poor which means criminal, just as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar points out in the essay linked below. And maybe – given the immediate involvement of the secret police – it's also because the Ruling Class remains terrified by that KGB study I mentioned in the opening commentary. 

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Influenced as I am by Marx, Engels and Lenin, I have long recognized U.S. racism as a particularly vicious subset of class struggle – the methodical reduction of African-Americans to the very lowest ranks of the üntermenschen. Having lived half my boyhood in the South, I bear witness to the fact the savage relentlessness of the Ruling Class is fueled not just by the usual capitalist components of moral imbecility – the infinite greed and selfishness the works of Ayn Rand and the graduate schools of business have elevated to maximum virtue – but by the karmic dread-of-revolution indigenous to any willfully sadistic aristocracy. The ideological and often genetic ancestors of these present-day One Percenters profited handsomely from slavery before the Civil War and again 70 years later when slavery was resurrected by the Nazis in their concentration camps. Now they themselves have resurrected the antebellum term “human capital,” reintroducing to our 21st Century workaday vocabulary what is no doubt an arrogant gesture of their own malevolent intent. 

But the upwelling of resistance in Ferguson suggests at least the potential of a rather more optimistic future. Hence the relevance of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's surprisingly candid Time magazine piece entitled “The Coming Race War Won't Be About Race”:  “...to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal...and that's how the status quo wants it.” Obviously the Josef-Goebbels-minded editors forced Abdul-Jabbar to write “status quo” instead of Ruling Class, (or maybe changed his original text), but the point is nevertheless made: We the People, whether we're dodging rubber bullets in Ferguson, waiting hopelessly in unemployment lines or starving under bridges, are at last awakening to the fact we're in a class war. The question is what – if anything – will we dare do with our newly raised consciousness: whether and how we will solve the problem now that we have recognized the Downpressor Man  for who and what he is. 

LB/23-31 August 2014 

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