THE ATROCITIES COMMITTED by federally militarized local police in Ferguson, Missouri and in a Wal-Mart store
near Dayton, Ohio tell us the operational truth about today's Imperial
United States. That's because – in terms of the causative factors –
there is no difference between the wanton murders of two men of color by
trigger-happy white cops and George Bush's wanton invasion of Iraq or
Barack Obama's equally wonton war-making in Ukraine.
Might now officially makes right, the charade of democracy be damned,
and woe be unto those who – even accidentally – neglect all the
demeaning protocols of submission.
In
the overseas regions of the USian Empire, in places like South Vietnam
or Pinochet's Chile or the USian conquests in the Middle East,
nonconformity or disobedience has always meant imprisonment and torture and death.
In these relatively distant realms, capitalism's credo of infinite
greed as ultimate virtue has always demanded the moral imbecility of
capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One
Percent, total subjugation for everyone else. Meanwhile we here in the
USian homeland were inadvertently protected by Soviet and Chinese
Marxism, which forced capitalism to conceal its greedy malevolence
behind the humanitarian facade of representative democracy. But now
capitalism has no rivals. It no longer bothers to hide its relentless
savagery. Even here at home, it is maturing into its inevitable final
form, which is a new and infinitely more diabolical form of fascism. And
We the People – capitalism's newest colonial victims – are becoming
ever more angry and rebellious.
In
response, the local police are ever more federalized and militarized.
In the eyes of our masters, We the People are nobodies, ΓΌntermenschen, non-persons, no different from the people of Radda' or Odessa.
Now, as it always was in the overseas USian colonies, so it is here at
home – no matter how stubbornly some of us may deny what is being done
to us and why.
Because African Americans have a proud history of rebelliousness that predates the Civil Rights Movement by 429 years, they are invariably the authorities' first targets,
the first demographic group from within which the Ruling Class extracts
its most brutal examples: Michael Brown gunned down in Ferguson and his
body obscenely displayed for the next four hours; John Crawford III
slain in the Dayton suburb of Beavercreek, Ohio merely because he was a
black man who decided to buy a BB-gun. And who knows how many others
have been unjustifiably shot
by police? A bitter truth: such statistics aren't kept because the
Ruling Class doesn't care – or doesn't want us to know. Just as, for
example, the atrocities at Baghdad were covered up until they were leaked by Chelsea Manning.
And let us not forget her fate: guilty of embarrassing the imperial
military machine, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
As
I have noted before, any one of us – especially those of us who have
darker skins – could be Michael Brown or John Crawford III. And any one
of us who dares expose the reality of capitalist governance could be
another Chelsea Manning. In which context note again the fate of Gary Webb.
******
The
connection between white Christianity and Caucasian racism has long
been evident in the southern colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan: “the
Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class.” Now a carefully researched
report by historian Randall Balmer in Politico reveals how the
rise of the so-called Religious Right was fueled not by abortion but by a
U.S. Supreme Court ruling that denied tax-exempt status to racially segregated Christian schools. As Amanda Marcotte puts it in a more recent commentary in Slate,
“Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized
conservative Christians.” And their leaders were so eager to ally
themselves with the Republicans, they “blamed the Democratic president
for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon.” Men of god perpetrating a Big Lie? You betcha; it happens all the time. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008).
******
I
cannot conclude these observations about the broader significance of
the deaths of Michael Brown and John Crawford III without pointing out
the apparent hypocrisy of the USian (pseudo) Left as demonstrated by how
it is ignoring the latter atrocity.
Thus far, only a socialist publication has covered Crawford's murder
and its aftermath in any real depth. (Another account, focused on Ohio's
post-shooting activism, is here.)
Note too how the text of a newly circulated petition to the Obama
administration, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security
and the Department of Defense makes no mention of the Ohio incident: “In
the wake of Ferguson, we must secure a positive transformation in
nationwide policing. Join us in calling on the executive branch of the
federal government to take definitive steps to protect civil and human
rights in every community by setting a higher standard of policing,
strengthening accountability mechanisms, investing in strengthening
economic infrastructure (employment, education, healthcare), and
securing critical reforms to end abusive, militarized, and biased
policing targeting Black and brown communities.”
The Nation
magazine, which is one of the petition's sponsors, emailed please-sign
requests a week ago, the point here being the timing: the document
obviously post-dates by nearly two months the clarification of the
initially distorted circumstances of the Ohio shooing. The petition's
other sponsors are: Advancement Project, Center for Popular Democracy,
ColorofChange.org, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, RH Reality Check, RootsAction and Working Families.
While I am not familiar with the views of all these groups, I know most of them are fanatical opponents of the Second Amendment
and equally fanatical supporters of forcible civilian disarmament. I
have experienced firsthand the hateful hysteria of such people. They
claim mere legal possession of a firearm is “an act of violence,” and
they damn all gun owners as “Nazis” and “wanna-be killers.” Hence it is
not difficult for me to imagine the anti-gun frenzy of a debate that
might have banished from the petition any citation of the Beavercreek
outrage – never mind its circumstances are far more egregious than those
of the Ferguson incident. Therefore I am forced to ask: is the fact
Crawford apparently wanted to buy a BB gun the reason the petition
ignores his tragic slaying? Obviously I don't know – but I think the
absence of Beavercreek from the text is significant, and if I were a
gambling man, I'd bet the BB gun is the reason.
******
Which
reminds me: apropos the claim that civilians with small arms are
powerless against modern weapons, note how tragically under-equipped
Kurdish women are said to be defeating the rabid minions of the newest caliphate. (Historical reference: the last aggressive caliphate was the creation of the Mahdi
in Khartoum. Though most of my comrades on the Left will denounce as
heresy what I am about to say next, I'll say it anyway: where is Lord
Kitchener now that we need him?)
******
The Washington Post, as reliable a propaganda outlet for the USian Ruling Class as der Voelkischer Beobachter was for the ruling elite of Nazi Germany, nevertheless sometimes publishes enlightening material. Such is “Wages should be growing faster, but they're not. Here's why.” The head is self-explanatory.
The money quote – no pun – tells the whole story. “Raising pay is
simply not part of the business model of American employers. They will
not do so until they’re absolutely forced to by a labor market that’s
much tighter than what we’ve got today.” In Marxian terms, this means
the proletariat – We the People – will be imprisoned in wretchedness by
the One Percent until we unite, rise up and cast off our chains. Two
other news reports provide variations on the same theme: “Scott Walker says $7.25 an hour is a living wage,” here, and “Amid Soaring Profits, Walmart to Cut Off 30,000 Workers From Health Insurance,” here. Lastly, since USian colleges and universities are ever more subservient to capitalism, it's no surprise they also reflect capitalism's incipient racism, as revealed in “Applying to College With a Criminal Record.”
Such is our lot in a system governed by the credo of infinite greed as
ultimate virtue – the conscious rejection of every humanitarian
principle our species ever set forth.
******
Two
of this week's reports on the USian approach to policing are unusually
informative, which is why I list them here as recommended reading. “FBI and Shattering of Students for a Democratic Society” describes how the USian secret police destroy dissent
– an important disclosure for any present-day dissident, particularly
those who chronically underestimate the cunning of the capitalist
authorities. In the Imperial United States of today as in
pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia, Leon Trotsky's dictum remains an
absolute truth: “In every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is
at least one agent of the Okhrana.” Then there's “Asset Seizures Fuel Police Spending,” a Washington Post investigative report that is probably intended to distract us
from the inconceivable sums of money by which the Defense Department
and the Department of Homeland Security are training, equipping and
federalizing the local police as a surrogate army of occupation in the
homeland colonies. But the WaPo piece contains vital
information: it tells us why the cops love the so-called war on drugs,
and another reason the fascists love municipal budget-cuts, which
guarantee local-police insistence on (obscenely profitable) drug
prohibition will intensify rather than diminish.
******
Outside Agitation Elsewhere: I posted on only three comment threads last week. “Secretly Buying Access to a Governor,” a New York Times editorial reprinted by Reader Supported News,
prompted me to hope it “is the opening volley in a no-quarter war by
the (few) humanitarian-minded members of the Ruling Class against its
now-dominant faction, the morally imbecilic disciples of Ayn Rand who
are maliciously reducing all the rest of us to slaves.” I agreed with “Obama Hates the Press,”
pointing out the president is “so shamelessly obvious in his
transformation from Obama the ('change we can believe in') Orator to
Barack the ('worse than Richard Nixon') Betrayer, even the stenographic
Ruling Class media cannot avoid reporting his lies and deceptions.” My
remark triggered a predictable flury of thumbs down
from Democratic Party operatives. They are out in force during these
last weeks before what – largely because of public anger over
presidential betrayals – looms to be their worst mid-term election loss
in years. And “Scientists Discover World's Oceans Warming Faster Than Predicted” prompted a bitter eulogy to our planet and our species:
We're doomed – and because we've been in denial so long, it's now far too late to do anything about it.
Given
the fact the inertial momentum of all matter is toward consciousness,
our failure is unequivocal proof of the lack thereof – which is
precisely why our extinction as a species is now guaranteed.
The
great irony is the source of our extinction – fossil fuel – is the
putrefied remains of other failed species. This is especially true of
petroleum, which is literally the liquid putrescence of dinosaurs.
Thus
the carrion of one age of failed species ensures the failure of another
age and species, an equation in which there is surely a lesson, though
perhaps only in karma, specifically the now obviously irremediable curse
we have inflicted on ourselves by basing an entire economy on a form of
grave-robbing.
******
Another
major element in our impending extinction is no doubt our species'
astounding propensity for hatred. It is an inclination so venomously
dominant, it suggests that instead of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, we should be renamed Homo Sapiens Odibilis – “human, thinking and hateful.”
Yes,
very rarely we seem to beat the hate mongers, as in Jacksonville,
Florida's Duval County, where a nationwide petition campaign has forced a
local board of education to rename the Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, which die-hard segregationists had defiantly named to honor the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
But
these victories over hatred are always more apparent than real. A name
change is just that – it does nothing to alter internal psychological
reality.
Meanwhile,
racism, sexism, ageism – indeed every form of hate-mongering imaginable
– is given new and unprecedented malevolence by the unfettered anonymity provided by the Internet. And given the abusive realities of global patriarchy, it is not surprising “The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women” shows a preponderance of the Internet's victims are females. (Thanks to my friend Katelyn Driskill for bringing this profoundly disturbing report to my attention.)
But
it seems to me the real issue transcends – without diminishing – the
focused victimization of any single group of people. What is evident
here is synergistic hatred of a hitherto-unimaginable magnitude, the
expression of a formerly suppressed hatefulness that seizes upon new
technology to intensify and metastasize its malice, seemingly to
infinity. But why now, when – ironically and paradoxically – we need
cooperative solidarity more desperately than at any other time in our
species' history? Is patriarchy and its ultimate expression as
capitalism that self-destructive? Could it be that hatred of our fellow
humans – especially the hatred of the life-bearing gender who mothers us
into being and without whom we would all perish – is but a subset of
our now-undeniable (and now undeniably suicidal) hatred of the
environment? Is this the real, hitherto unacknowledged barrier that
fatally obstructs all our efforts to cope with terminal climate change?
Perhaps the New Agers were right after all – that there could be no
healing of our environment until our psychological selves were healed.
But who – or what – could have accomplished such a feat? And what does
that tell us about our species' fitness for survival?
LB/6-12 October 2014
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