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.
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.
_________
*“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.
******
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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...”
******
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.
***
“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.)
***
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.”
***
“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...”
***
“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.”
***
******
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.
***
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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