Foreword: I am so busy with the events in the Ukraine that I barely had the time to follow the events in Ferguson so I will readily admit that I have no opinion about it. I do have quite a few opinions about race-relations in the USA, including some rather politically incorrect ones (I don't consider US Blacks either as either Africans or Americans, for example). While I lived in Washington DC (from 1986-1991) at the time of Marion Barry and I often found myself on the receiving end of Black racism and yet I consider Malcolm X the greatest "American" (in quotation because he never considered himself "American" and neither do I) in the history of the USA and one of my personal heroes. I now live in the South (though one could argue that Florida is culturally north of the Carolinas) where I have African and local Black friends tell me very interesting stories about how it feels to be Black and have your car pulled over by a cop. I find the issue of race relations in the USA absolutely fascinating if tragic, but right now is not the time for me to deal with this issue. But one day, if somebody is interested, I might. Right now, the Russian Team has requested articles about the events in Ferguson and one of the best ones was written up by Nora. Now, full disclosure and warning: I consider Nora as a personal friend and a wise and kind lady, don't you even think of posting something ugly if you disagree with her. You are more than welcome to criticize and disagree, but make darn sure it is substantive and respectful towards Nora. Second, while race is most definitely an issue in the USA, any racist post will immediately go to the trash. Criticize Blacks or Whites as a social group if you want, or White or Black organizations, but do not use any argument which implies that a member of race X has his/her free will restricted by his ethnicity or which lumps all the individual people into one. Deal?
The Saker
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What Happened in Ferguson
Setting The Stage
To
set the stage for what happened in Ferguson, it would probably be
helpful to understand a bit about how the deck has been stacked against
people of color in the United States. Although slavery officially ended
in 1863, it was ultimately replaced in the South by not only the
state-sponsored terrorism of Jim Crow but unofficial re-enslavement via
both the sharecropping system and arrest on trumped-up charges leading
to unpaid labor on prison chain gangs. The Civil Rights Era brought an
end to the worst of this but the War on Drugs ensured that African
Americans continue to be arrested and imprisoned at more than twice the
rate of whites for similar offenses even though drug usage is about the
same for both groups. And outrageously underpaid prison labor in
for-profit private prisons is now replacing what little remains of
American manufacturing.
Richard Nixon augmented white
resentment in the way he "resolved" the implementation of Brown vs. The
Board, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision on school
desegregation, because he shrewdly realized that working-class white
Democrats, North and South, would happily become Republicans if the
Republican Party "took their side" on the issue. The end result of that
was that re-segregation occurred and black schools are now once again
under-funded, with poorer facilities, out-of-date and sometimes even
*no* books (!), and generally much worse teachers. I.e., not much has
really changed at all in terms of education either.
Worse
yet, although blacks once lived in all areas of this country, beginning
in the third quarter of the 19th century, they were herded into the
cities and literally forbidden to be in many towns after dark. And the
parts of the cities they live in generally have far worse services --
less frequent garbage pick-up or snow-removal, streets and street lights
not well-maintained -- but still very high rents, especially
considering the quality of the housing. Ostensibly these problems were
to have ended with the passage of various Civil Rights laws but again,
not really. Redlining is an ongoing process by which blacks are
prevented from buying homes in certain areas by making it far more
difficult to obtain mortgages and setting higher interest rates for them
than whites with similar qualifications. Given that home ownership is
generally the primary source of wealth for most American families, this
arena too has been closed off to most African Americans. And finally,
jobs: given two candidates equally qualified for a position, the African
American is significantly less likely to be hired.
White
attitudes meanwhile have not shown much improvement either. This is in
part due to Nixon's Southern Strategy for re-empowering the Republican
Party, and in part due to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush's
deliberate race-baiting (and vote-getting) strategies, including
deliberately trumping up white fears of black violence and lying about
the extent of welfare fraud by blacks. But the Democrats, frightened at
their loss of white voters, weren't much better: Bill Clinton's
Welfare Reform hurt a lot of innocent people, white and black, because
he too wanted to look tough on black crime -- which had actually been
declining -- while ignoring the serious and far more expensive
crimes of wealthy whites. Another factor here is due to the relative
isolation of whites from blacks: it's far easier to remain afraid of
people you never get to know, especially if the media commentators you
trust keep filling you with stereotypes instead of telling the truth.
And make no mistake about it: the most prejudiced whites are also the
most frightened whites. Sadly, it is not only to the benefit of the
Republican Party to keep them that way but, because few blacks vote
Republican, the Democratic Party really doesn't have to work very hard
to get the black vote -- so they don't much bother either. So it's a
truly lose-lose situation there too.
Now for
the police. Racial profiling and police brutality have always been a
fact of life for people of color in this country. This stems in part
from the fact that traditionally the people recruited to be policemen
have been quite likely to view blacks as inherently inferior, dangerous
and more likely to be criminal. Gun use is deeply ingrained in American
culture, and those who hold such racist views are particularly
likely to see their guns as essential for personal safety and the only
real way to maintain public order. It should also be noted that fears
of a black insurrection as well as the desire to conserve one's human
property led quite early to the formation of armed paramilitary slave patrols throughout the South, a primary reason for both the inclusion and peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. http://truth-out.org/news/
However,
the over-militarization of local police -- up to and including official
instructions to consider and respond to non-violent protesters as
terrorists -- is a disturbing new trend. The Department of Homeland
Security has been a huge profit-making venture for the Military
Industrial Complex, both in terms of providing taxpayer-funded grants to
local police and fire departments ostensibly to protect us from terror
attacks but in fact to ensure that items no longer needed for the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq could be sold somewhere. So now the tiniest
rural fire departments have armoured vehicles they can hardly afford to
fuel, and local police have the latest in military equipment and Mossad
training inculcating in them a genuine terror of the population -- i.e.,
us -- they are paid with our tax dollars to protect.
A
commenter on the English version of this blog who lives in a Washington
DC suburb recently called her local police department about a possible
fraud case which ordinarily would have required simple fact-finding by a
single detective. Instead, a fully-armed five-man SWAT team arrived at
the wrong address, ready to fire. These events are increasingly common
across the board, with innocent people of every age and color and
sometimes even their pets being brutalized and/or murdered at traffic
stops, in clearly non-violent situations in their own homes when simple
medical or other assistance had been requested or again the police burst
into the wrong home, and/or the simply because the policeman did not
feel his (often quite arbitrary and illegal) orders were being
sufficiently obeyed. There is also considerable evidence to suggest
poor screening for excess violence or poor behavioral controls, previous
job infractions of this sort and/or drug and alcohol abuse among
applicants for police work.
Add in a "normal"
quantity of southern racism (also quite present in the North, of course,
reinvigorated by Sarah Palin and deliberately amplified by various
rightwing media in efforts to get Republicans out to vote), a large
group of African Americans recently moved from the inner city to one of
the few areas they were begrudgingly allowed to enter, and a town whose
second-largest source of operating revenues comes from the fines and
fees paid by African Americans disproportionately targeted for traffic
stops and other low level offenses http://www.democracynow.org/
The Event
The
evidence on which all parties agree is that Michael Brown was an
unarmed 18-year-old highly regarded by his teachers who wanted to start
his own business and had no criminal record. He was shot and killed by
Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson while walking with a friend to
visit his grandmother at approximately noon on Sunday, August 9, 2014,
just two days before he was due to start college. There is no police
video of the shooting although an audiotape of several shots appears
legitimate and many eyewitness tweets and a later video of Brown's body
are also on record; nevertheless, many details of the incident remain
unclear. What can be stated without dispute is that Wilson stopped the
two teens and ordered them with rather questionable legality to get off
the street and onto the sidewalk; accounts differ as to how hostile this
confrontation was or whether Brown remained on the street, was pulled
by Wilson towards or into the car or was at some point actually in the
car assaulting Wilson as later claimed by the police. It is fairly well
established, however, that Wilson was seated in his car when he first
shot at Brown and his friend through the open car window but missed as
they fled. He then got out of his car, fired again at Brown and
continued to shoot multiple rounds after the teen turned around with his
hands up, ultimately killing him with a shot in the head as he fell.
What happened next is like plate tectonics or watching a Greek tragedy
unfold.
The Aftermath
Not
trusting the hostile and overwhelmingly white power structure in
Ferguson, Brown's family requested a private autopsy by a former NYC
forensic pathologist; his results showed nine gunshot wounds (four on
the right arm, three on the head and two on the chest) suggesting he had
been shot at least six times though not from very close range since
there was no gunshot residue on the body. http://www.nytimes.com/
Michael Brown's body lay in the
street for four hours afterwards at police insistence, Wilson's name was
not revealed for another week and although the Ferguson Police
Department filed an incident report on 8/15 alleging that Brown and his
friend had committed a robbery just before he was killed, it took the
department another full week to file even a highly-abbreviated report of
his murder. It was acknowledged, however, that Wilson had no knowledge
of the robbery at the time he ordered Brown off the street.
Meanwhile,
when the police finally allowed people to access the site of his death,
Brown's family and other residents placed flowers and candles over the
bloodstains on the street. At that point, in gestures of contempt quite
familiar to people who had lived through Jim Crow, one policeman let
his dog urinate on the memorial and others re-blocked the street from
cars and then deliberately drove their cars over the candles and
flowers, scattering the petals, ruining the memorial and deeply
horrifying the already shocked, grieving people. http://www.motherjones.com/
Over
the next few nights the unarmed mourners and protesters grew
increasingly restless and perhaps a dozen of them began looting and
vandalizing and set one business on fire. Accustomed to enforced
deference but at this point genuinely afraid they might have a riot on
their hands, the police refused to acknowledge any culpability,
attempted with questionable veracity to place the entire blame on Brown,
and responded to the protesters according to the Mossad training
provided their chief. This included riot gear, SWAT team tactics and
helicopters the first night, followed by tear gas, wooden pellets,
rubber bullets, smoke bombs, and flash grenades. The results were about
as predicted, the governor intervened, steps were taken to calm things
down, more people protested, the situation gained national attention,
the media took their accustomed positions along predetermined political
fault lines, the police over-reacted again, the intensity ebbed and
flowed, the National Guard were called in, many people were roughed up,
threatened and arrested, including several journalists, and statements
by the Obama administration appeared more interested in the violence
perpetrated by the protesters than against Michael Brown. Things
finally began to calm down after his funeral.
The Fault Lines
Every
single part of this tragedy, up to and including the poor training,
judgment and violent behavior by some of the police, was utterly
predictable; so too was the sensationalized and highly-slanted media
coverage, the location, content and intensity of the public outcry on
both sides of the Left-Right political divide with the typical uncaring
indifference in the middle, and the far greater amount of money
collected on behalf of Darren Wilson than Michael Brown. http://www.ksdk.com/story/
It is equally
important to recognize that what happened in Ferguson was hardly an
anomaly: not a single thing happened there that hasn't happened in many
places in this country many times before. In fact, taking a longer
view, the biggest question is why the media chose to give it so much
coverage. And the answer to that most likely has more to do with their
own increasingly precarious finances and the current state of our
foreign rather than domestic affairs and their resulting assessment once
again that the public really needs a strong diversion and the
inculcation of yet more fear.
Nevertheless,
just as people all over the world are becoming increasingly aware of
the Anglo-Zionist Empire's true role in taking over and/or destroying so
many other countries, the ugly difference between myth and reality in
American life -- essentially unchanged since our very beginning -- has
been revealed for everyone to see. The sad truth, however, is that the
vast majority of Americans remain locked in to their own
propaganda-induced preconceptions, and while efforts continue to be made
to address the underlying issues of police militarization, brutality
and unequal treatment before the law, the likelihood of genuine
improvement in any of these areas is extremely low.
A Word About Sources
Please
feel free to ask if you have any questions. For more information on
any of this, I will be happy to provide all sorts of URLS but for a deep
and nuanced view of the African American experience I cannot more
highly recommend a writer and blogger named Ta-Nehisi Coates. He sees
things clearly, thinks things through exquisitely well, and is a
genuinely superb writer. http://www.theatlantic.com/