Category: Sunday

Bigotry does not live unattended. It is in all instances accompanied by lies and blood.

Today, I write about the killing of a single black American teenager, Michael Brown. Given the number of wars and near-wars springing upon us, to focus on a single homicide in the small town of Ferguson, Missouri, seems an exercise in misplaced priorities. It is not. The shooting of this man-child was not merely the act of one human cruelly ending the life of another. The killing represents the lethal convergence of several misanthropic themes unique to the American neo-conservative worldview:  (1.) White American supremacist belief, (2.) Intolerance of dissent to that belief, (3) The militarization of that intolerance as belief and (4.) The glorification of quick, extreme violence as the most trustworthy protector of supremacist ideals.

The Ferguson incident should not be discounted as an isolated, localized event. The historic policy and psychological strands tracing through Ferguson also fuel the militarism of American foreign policy in far-flung places from the Middle East to Ukraine. The police officer’s actions in Ferguson were spawned in the same supremacist mire from which American warmongers spring forth to shower war on anyone opposing the expansion of American power and interests into domains where it traditionally lacked residence.

As such, the Ferguson incident serves as a heuristic platform from which we can derive insight into American actions in the momentous affairs that may well shape the global political economy and how we live in it for years to come.

The fatal encounter began last August when police officer Darren Wilson spotted Michael Brown and a friend jaywalking across a Ferguson street.  Upon seeing the teens commit this minor pedestrian infraction, Wilson stopped them pursuant to an alleged law enforcement policy of zero tolerance for any offense. Brown evidently was not as suppliant as Wilson required. The teen did not beg Wilson to overlook his small indiscretion. Instead, the boy appeared too cocky, probably questioning why Wilson would bother himself and them for such a petty and commonplace thing. Edgy remarks were exchanged.

Here is where things become clouded in the fog of conflicting versions. Wilson says Brown assaulted him, pushing him into the police car. There, Brown further accosted the officer in futile attempt to win the officer’s sidearm. Wilson said a shot was fired in the car. He managed to secure his weapon from Brown’s lunge. Fearing for his life, he started shooting at Brown.

If true, this version would go far to exonerate the officer in the slaying. But the story makes little sense. First, why would Brown escalate a minor pedestrian stop into a life-and-death encounter? Snatching an officer’s weapon is the equivalent of rape; it is a street taboo that even the most hardened criminal dare not violate. For Brown to have done so would have made him, “armed and dangerous,” in a small town with a police force notorious for being on the rough and ready when it comes to Black suspects. He would have been inviting the full weight of the police force upon himself. He knew setting such a thing in motion could only end badly for him.

Additionally, no trace of a bullet was found in the car. If the weapon discharged in the vehicle, there would be evidence. No such information has been forthcoming, most likely because no such evidence exists.  Last, Wilson said he began shooting Brown because the teen was ominously rushing toward him. This is inconsistent with the prior allegation that Brown virtually tackled him in the car.  For both to be true means Brown tackled him in the car, backed up many yards then charged at the armed policeman like a crazed bull. This scenario looms too odd to swallow as the milk of truth.

The fog clears somewhat when account is taken of the shooting’s several eyewitnesses. Their versions are striking similar. None professes to know the specifics of what was done and said around the vehicle before the shooting. All testify shots were fired at a fleeing, unarmed Brown. A dozen shots were fired. Some missed. Most hit the intended target. According to an independent autopsy, the first landed shot caught Brown in the back of his right arm.

Once hit, witnesses say, he stopped running. Brown thrust his arms in the air in the universal sign of surrender and went to his knees. This did not appease the policeman. He continued firing at the kneeling, unarmed youth until the fatal bullet pierced the teen’s skull. His face fell to the street, black skin met black asphalt as it has done so many times after an encounter with a White policeman who believed the black face had not given him due deference. Michael Brown and whatever future, family, children, aspirations, dreams and hopes he had died there under the summer sun. The police leaf his uncovered corpse in the street for several hours as a crude but poignant reminder to the rest of the predominately black township of the fatal costs of a contumacious encounter with local law enforcement.

The police miscalculated.  Their mean tactics did not quiet the populace. It aroused them. Protests ensued. Sporadic rioting took place. As news spread of the incident, the protests grew bigger. Media coverage cast a mean light on the town and its police force. Accustomed to handling their Black populace in their own special way and unnerved by the intense media coverage, the police force overreacted. They donned the heavy military kit and camouflage and deployed the armored personal carriers and machine guns purchases at bargain prices from excess military stocks. For a small fraction of the true costs towns like Ferguson had armed their police forces to the teeth with military gear and weapons inappropriate to the legitimate law enforcement.

For days, America was treated to the disquieting, incongruous spectacle of camouflaged, machine gun toting, clenched-jawed policemen, with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Macdonald’s in the background, marching down Main Street of a small town to disrupt Americans exercising their right to free speech and peaceful assembly and protest. It was a reminder that the more you arm your security forces, the more authoritarian they become. Those who are supposed to protect the public use the acquired arms to suppress the people. The police evolve to safeguard the interests of those who procure their weaponry instead of safeguarding the interests of democracy and justice.

The Brown shooting was about maintaining social and racial order, to keeping certain people in their certain place. If justice were part of the officer’s calculation, he would likely not have stopped Brown and companion. Had Brown been a middle-aged White man, the stop likely would never have occurred. Brown likely stoked the policeman’s ire by raising this inconsistency of treatment. Had justice motivated the officer, he would not have fired at a fleeing, unarmed teen. Once the boy tossed his hands into the air in visible surrender, the shooting would have ceased, if justice were present.

Again, this was about the maintenance of order, not about law and certainly not justice. Mercy and leniency had no function here. Fifty years ago, Brown and companion would not have dared talk snappily to the officer. Then the officer could have called them “nigger” and “boy.”  Blacks were by law and custom inferior in all ways. The police or any White man needn’t reason to accost a black man. It was a White’s right to proffer and a Black’s obligation to accept mistreatment as his fate. A Black did not have to transgress. Being Black was transgression enough. Thus, a police officer could easily put a Black man in his lowly place and keep him there with a cold stare and a hand on his holster. Then something happened: the Civil Rights Movement.

Although blackness was no longer a legal infirmity, Blacks were still despised by the conservative, reactionaries who populate at least half of White American society. However, the White reactionaries could no longer jail and degrade Blacks based solely on skin color. They could no longer publicly spout epithets like “jigaboo,” “monkey” and “coon.” However, this group was far from defeated. They would seek to reconstruct and preserve the pre-civil rights social and racial order to the extent possible.

There would be a “counter reformist” backlash against civil rights.  Noting that Blacks could no longer be maltreated simply for being themselves,  reactionaries weaved a new inimical social mythology. No longer would Blacks be simply deemed inferior and dumb. We would become evil and criminally minded. No longer would we be ‘niggers, coons and tar babies.” We would become “thugs, hoodlums, and the criminal element.” Blacks were transformed from a dependent, inferior appendage of society into a societal pox to be contained.

This backlash started immediately after legal racial equality was won via the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-sixties. The conservative backlash would gain full momentum during the Reagan presidency. It would carry through during the Bush terms and Clinton years. A White southerner, Clinton knowingly approved law enforcement measures that would sentence disproportionately large numbers of Black men to prison terms for nonviolent crimes. He did not care. He was disinterested in justice. No matter how many Blacks he seemed to befriend, Clinton had always been a true, reliable custodian of White order. He remained true to both color and form.

Thus, what happened in Ferguson was inevitable.  The police officer did not see Brown as a fellow human being. He saw the youth as felony incarnate. His black skin made him a crime in the offing; worst, it made him a crime already committed even in the lack of evidence of wrongdoing. Thus, the man felt no remorse or reticence unloading his weapon into the boy. The officer was imbued with such animus and fear that he created a chain of events in his mind vastly different from what others saw.

In his mind, he was not merely protecting himself from inherent danger; he was protecting the social order from assault from its most egregious threat, Black criminal harm. So taken by this mindset, the officer discarded the reality of the day to create a fiction excusing him for killing the unarmed youth. The boy died because the officer superimposed his perception of social order on the factual dynamics of his encounter with Brown. As such, he not killed shot Brown, the officer shot dead the equality and justice heralded by the Civil Rights Movement. In that moment, the officer symbolically positioned himself as the successor assassin of Dr. King and all the doctor stood for.

Peek at Western machinations in Ukraine. We can see how this mindset taints global order and justice. Russia is the remnant of the Soviet Union that America had dubbed an evil empire. America became the lone superpower upon the demise of the Soviet condominium at the end of the Cold War. Hawkish Americans seek a global order where America has no peer or rival. They seek an order where America dictates everything of importance.  The same notion that makes them believe they are the sole architects of American society tends them to believe they are the masters of the entire planet. Nations that do not cohere to this belief are deemed repugnant. Putin and his resurgent Russia are blacklisted because they oppose the expansion of NATO to their doorstep. They have fought the Western-backed overthrown of an elected government in Ukraine. Supporting Ukrainian federalist rebels, Russia now thwarts Western expansionist plans. Russia has merely stood to defend its traditional sphere of influence and buffer zone against Western encroachment. Weighed against the precepts of geopolitical strategy, Russia has acted the wiser, adhering to a course of prudent, restrained endeavor to achieve a limited end that maintains the geopolitical balance. The West is the flagrant actor trying to upend the status quo by threatening Russia’s western approach.

However, the media paints Russia as the craven aggressor bent on retaking all of Eastern Europe when all it has done is protect its own backyard. Putin is now vilified as the world’s most dangerous leader. Yet, few stop to ask a simply question; If Putin harbored such grand megalomaniacal designs, wouldn’t he have unleashed them before now? The opportunity has always been there. No, something sparked the eastern Ukrainians to rebel and sparked Putin to help them. That something was the West’s insistence on the coup toppling the extant government in Kiev so that the West could supplant Russian influence in Ukraine.

If Putin wanted all of Ukraine and venture farther westward, he would not have engineered the cease-fire between Kiev and the separatists. Strange, the cease-fire has a chance to end the civil war and to create a federal system all parties in Ukraine can tolerate. However, the West fulminates against the accord, hopes it does not work and seeks to undermine it. When the Ukrainian president said Russian troops were out of Ukraine, America countered that he was lying. The Ukrainian president has the most at stake; why would he fabricate away his own security?

The truth is that America and its allies objectives are not peace and democratic stability in Ukraine. Their objective is to defeat Russia and teach it a lesson. Their objective is to impose their version of the geopolitical order in a place not traditionally within their sphere of interest. As such they are dangerous revisionists. Yet, they finance a media campaign painting Putin and Russia as stark villains in this drama. They seek to make Russia an outcast, a global pariah. As such, Putin and Russia, for simply maintaining their own, have become the “niggers of Europe.” Back to Ferguson.

Attempting to justify the officer’s initial stop of Brown, the police published footage of someone stealing handful of inexpensive cigars for a local store.  We were told the officer stopped Brown, fingering him as the perpetrator of the cigar caper. The dead victim gets turned into the villain. This tact is standard police procedure. However, there was a flaw in this approach. Further evidence revealed Officer Wilson had no idea of the cigar theft when he halted Brown. The police had blatantly lied.

This was more than a case of the ends justifying the means. It was a case of the liars believing themselves to be righteousness personified.  These people believe themselves more virtuous and of a higher calling than mere facts. Thus, they are duty bound to alter reality through fabrication to achieve their supremacist objective.

In Ferguson, they lied about Wilson’s knowledge of the cigar heist just as Wilson prevaricated about the shot fired in his vehicle. On the international stage, Americans leaders of the same conservative ilk as the men of Ferguson would lie to world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and about the use of sarin gas by Assad’s government in Syria. These lies were made in the naked attempt to provoke American military into areas where no vital American interests were at stake. Now the same type of lies are being cast that Putin and Russia threaten European peace. Also that, with the horrid beheadings of two American captives, ISIL constitutes a grave threat to the American homeland that must be answered with a massive display of American force in Iraq and Syria.

To bolster the flimsy case, American security estimates about ISIL’s troop strength escalated from 10,000 men to over 30,000 in just a few days after President Obama’s war speech. It was claimed ISIL is wealthy and thus can finance terror worldwide because it robbed banks in Iraq. However, the Iraqi government claims the large banks in Mosul were not touched. The reality is that ISIL’s bulk funding comes not from illegal withdrawals from Iraqi banks but from clandestine donations for regional governments allied to America.

No matter how repugnant the murders have been, ISIL is no grave and present threat to American soil. The talk of imminent threat is to scare Americans into panting for war when recent experience counsels against bellicosity. However, the march to war serves the designs of conservative American thinkers. They wanted to establish a permanent base in Iraq from which to topple Syria and trouble Iran. They now inflate the ISIL threat to get their wish. To establish a world order in which they order the world, these people are willing to march room to room, city to city and country to country to spread war until all opposition is muted if not broken. To make the world safe for their brand of American democracy, they are willing to become lords over everyone and everything else. This is the plight of the self appointed angel. It is the 21st century version of the White Man’s Burden. More next week.

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