|
Malooga On Ferguson – The Bigger Picture
by Malooga
lifted from a comment
@154 luca kasks: "Why don't you people wait for all the facts to come in?"
Facts are not like beloved relatives coming in to visit on cherished holidays; facts are like murdered ex-collaborators, to be secretly disappeared and buried deep in some dank forgotten hole in the ground.
Facts, for the ruling class, are dangerous beasts. Myths and stories are far safer fare.
Facts may escape unexpectedly at the very beginning of an event, before proper control systems are in place, after that all one is likely to get is the official story, or if that fails, the official fall-back position.
How could one get what is going on geopolitically by following this blog, and not get that the same conditions and principles of domination, control and brutalization operate similarly on a local scale?
Perhaps it might be helpful to detail those conditions and principles in order to remind ourselves what the theater in which these events take place is truly like, both for the residents of places like Ferguson, and for the police who manage those residents.
The war on drugs was not a war against drugs. It was a war for the ultra-rich rulers to control and profit from the cash streams of illegal drug profits, to finance un-sellable illegal wars, a method of destabilizing other countries through drug addiction, and a method of criminalizing the intentional poverty and hopelessness of the bottom 30%, or more, of the domestic population. (See: US protection of heroin in southeast Asia and Afghanistan, CIA crack distribution in US cities, Gary Webb, etc.)
The "War on Terror" is virtually the same thing: An outright war on the poor, and a destabilization of territories the empire does not control outright. Additionally, like drugs, the “war” is largely synthetic, that is to say, fake and victimless, where the perpetrators have to be secretly sponsored to create an artificial enemy, with what Rowan Berkeley accurately termed “pseudo-gangs.”
These wars are not real, in the sense that the problems as described are not real; and, such problems as may exist, are intentionally handled so as to exacerbate them, and reinforce the problem-reaction-solution dynamic.
Drugs are not a problem to be eradicated, rather, they are a medium to be employed, a means to an end. Terror, as we know, is not even a thing, it is just a tactic. You can’t criminalize a tactic, but you can employ it as a means to an end.
I don’t need to remind you that the US, the “land of the free,” has the largest — in absolute and relative terms — prison population on the planet. And the vast, vast, vast majority of those who are imprisoned are there for victimless crimes.
But that’s not all. Because if you grow up in the projects, and you raise your kid right, and miraculously manage to keep him away from guns and gangs, you still face two more daunting hurdles: poverty and police violence.
Let’s start with poverty. Official unemployment rates are lied over, real rates can be many times higher, and many in the projects can find no work at all, or only part-time work, without benefits, in a fast food joint. Lack of work equals lack of money, which equals lack of education, which equals lack of opportunity and work, and so on, in an endless vicious cycle.
Domestically, a new war is underway: an outright war on the poor, where those who can’t — because of unemployment or other reasons — keep up with their financial obligations are threatened with imprisonment for non-payment of bills, taxes, child support, court fees, parking tickets, etc. Indeed, we as a society have regressed to the days of Oliver Twist and workhouses. Prisoners must work for their keep these days as low cost producers for corporations, and quaint notions like labor laws or minimum wages do not apply to them.
Prisons have been privatized, and prisoners are just another commodity to be profited from in the capitalist system, like pork bellies, or wheat futures. Judges, like police, have been proved to have quotas: they are expected to meet a production goal where, like a factory worker, a certain number of people must be imprisoned each month or year. After all, the owners of these prisons are top campaign contributors, and they provide “jobs” to the local economy, so they must be kept happy. Cops, like judges, are under pressure to do their part in maintaining prison occupancy rates.
Any fool can see that this is not a description of a society, as anthropologists might have studied 100 years ago, but of a catabolic process, whereby a sick or diseased body (politic) greedily consumes itself on the way to the grave. And, as they quietly lament around my way, “it is what it is.”
And yet, it is worse: for those that escape these first three evils — drugs, the “war on terror” and poverty — which I have briefly detailed, there is a fourth evil to be circumvented: what the sociologists call “structural violence.” And this takes two forms. The first comes in the form of what psychiatrists term “frustration aggression.” Watch industrially raised chickens, confined to 2/3 of a square foot of cage space, artificial lighting, and a diet of drugs and GMO feedstock engage in vicious acts of cannibalism, and you will get a sense of what that is. The ghetto is a similarly sociologically confined space, and frustration and the inability to cope or escape can lead to misplaced violence or acting out against others.
The second type of violence is institutionalized violence, where, in an intentional process of social engineering, one group or class of people is taught to hate and fear another group or class. This is the process that I, employing Gregory Bateson’s insights, term schismogenesis. It is divide and rule at its most base level: Civil wars, genocide, pogroms, mob violence, etc.
And yes, the police are deeply inculcated in perpetuating institutional violence. They are trained to both hate and fear the public they lord over. And the system is not accidental, by any means. The police on the beat, the SWAT teams, the civic snipers, etc. — these are people of rather limited intellectual abilities in understanding how the entire geopolitical system works. They are, by nature, not curious in that way — rather, they are ordinary people who value fitting in, convention, tradition, and law and order in society. In other words, they buy into the myths of our society, its “freedom," and “liberty," and “goodness of purpose," and “rightness of heart," and “exceptionalism," lock, stock, and barrel. And they expect others to buy in as well in order to be “good" patriotic Americans. After all, “if you are not with us, you are against us," as George Bush Jr. explained in one of his few elegantly articulate formulations. Therefore, the police are vulnerable to being easily propagandized.
They are then compartmentalized in knowledge, grouped into subgroups, and endlessly trained and drilled in hate and fear of the official "enemy" of the day, and then trained in techniques of the highest level of violence in thwarting the alleged goals of these enemies. Police no longer make use of bobby clubs, they are now given the elite weapons of war that our soldiers use in combat. They watch movies to see how these weapons are employed. And to seal the deal, they are given special classes, trainings and drills from the same “specialists" on “terror” that train our military because the American way of subversion always includes making people feel special. Now, they are not dumb cops anymore, they are well trained, and they are told that they are our elite guard protecting the “homeland” from those who hate our ways of freedom.
They are also economically privileged compared to the people of places like Ferguson. Police have unions, and theirs are probably the only labor unions in America today not under constant attack from the ruling class. So they get generous overtime, benefits, can buy houses and raise kids in safety outside of the leviathan that I am describing. They also, to a certain extent, benefit from the inequalities of society. So they look down on those they are policing and look up to their betters: The wealthy and those who are experts in the “threats facing society today.” Go to a real wealthy neighborhood, and the cops don’t have that same smug attitude. They address you as “Sir” or Ma’am.” If they have to pull you over for having a headlight out, they can be downright apologetic — after all, you may be a judge or a city councilman. They know who their betters are, and now they act like public servants, albeit a little falsely servile. This is obviously not the case in Ferguson, where the number of police stops annually is greater than the population of the town, and arrests are similarly elevated.
Finally, police on the force for any length of time must face the complete corruption of our society: They know that justice is a farce. They know who the drug dealers are, the money runners, the pimps, the bought politicians, and judges — the whole nine yards. And they know that there is no will to change any of this. Moreover, they have no power over any of this: They can either choose to be complicit in the corrupt system, or keep to themselves and hope for the best not to be set up one day as a patsy.
Thus, police in our society live in a state of total cognitive dissonance, what one might call an ethical double-bind. They are forced to see that on one hand, we are supposedly the greatest society ever; on the other hand, life is hopelessly brutal and corrupt. They must believe in, or at least publicly pay lip service, to the myths they are sworn to uphold: the wars on drugs and terror; the promise of progress and a quasi-religious kind of civic and moral redemption — that if you just keep your nose clean and work hard, you can escape the poverty of the ghetto they police; and that we live in a just society in which they are the protectors of that justice. Meanwhile, they like everyone else in America, watches as the whole system is rapidly breaking down. They know that there are no real jobs for the people of Ferguson, and that, like in the movie, “TheTruman Show,” the residents cannot escape the set.
This double bind is of course unresolvable. So police themselves, under tremendous internal strain, resort to the same frustration-aggression, and unexpected violent lashing out, in order to cope.
Under these conditions, the only power police have is over the people in the community they are supposed to serve. And the only way they can demonstrate that power is by acting out brutally and violently.
Sociologists and criminologists know that the methods police are taught and trained in don’t work, just as economists know that “trickle down” really means “flow up.” Gentler methods involving community involvement, restorative justice, etc. have all been worked out and proved to work. But the new methods actually do work, only for different purposes and to different ends: they frighten and cower populations, they allow one group to dominate another, they isolate people and pit them against each other in fruitless zero-sum games, and they destroy human lives, values, and charitableness. In sum, they control people, and allow them to be selectively harvested for profit, like a slowly maturing cash crop in the sweltering St. Louis summer heat.
And, community policing, bad as it is these days, does not even compare to the violence perpetrated by the new elite SWAT teams. These groups are as brutal as the teams used to clear houses in Iraq — and no surprise there, for they are taught the same methods: If it moves, take it out.
And that brings us back to the police. Under the conditions I have just detailed, under the impossible constraints they forced to endure, how can they not be violent, at least some of the time. And how can they, as an organized force, not be violent in a systematic manner. Perhaps not all the time, but more often than not the social forces which police work under these days force violence to be propagated down in a systematic and totalizing manner.
And it is the awareness of all that I have described that causes many commenters here to reflexively assume police lies and violence to be ubiquitous. I hope that this is more understandable now. It is not a judgment of an individual’s (the cop who shot Michael Brown) — who one obviously doesn’t know well — moral value, rather it is an holistic appraisal of the social and material conditions of our society today, in which the American underclass, and their handlers, seek to operate.
Therefore, as for the police themselves, yes, perhaps out of the many hundreds of cases a year like this of police murder, corruption, assault, brutality, cover-up, bribery, theft, etc., there are possibly a few that were accidental, unintentional, or even false charges. If that were to be the case — which appears practically impossible — the facts would get out — unless the cop were being intentionally set up. But, to focus on this petty detail, and insist upon its importance to the bigger picture, is to miss that bigger picture altogether. I hope we can all see this.
Malooga opens an important discourse, by carefully responding to comments calling for an explanation of the situation in Ferguson.
And J Sorrentine immediately responds by attempting to put an end to any rational discussion. That much is par for the course and increasingly tedious. I’m going to ignore Sorrentine’s posts which serve only the cause of a ruling class which hates people thinking, and reasoning honestly together, almost as much as J does.
I forget where I saw this piece about the way that Zionists disrupt discussion but it is worth posting:
” ‘The Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus’, which is distributed to campus activists by organizations like Stand With Us, explains that it is often better to score points than to engage in actual arguments, and offers an explanation for how, in its own words, ‘to score points whilst avoiding debate’. Point-scoring, the Hasbara Handbook explains, “works because most audience members fail to analyze what they hear. Rather, they register only a key few points, and form a vague ‘impression’ of whose argument was stronger.” Part of the strategy is to recycle the same claims over and again, in as many settings as possible. ‘If people hear something often enough,’ the document points out, ‘they come to believe it.
“Needless to say, this was precisely the tactic developed by the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, which he called “the big lie.” Goldberg and Makdsisi continue:
“The Hasbara Handbook offers several other propaganda devices, all of which can be seen vividly at play in the coverage of the UCLA Gaza panel and other similar events, including again, the Robinson affair. ‘Creating negative connotations by name calling is done to try to get the audience to reject a person or idea on the basis of negative associations, without allowing a real examination of that person or idea,’ the handbook states with remarkable bluntness, in advocating this tactic. It also suggests using the opposite of name-calling, to defend Israel by what it calls the deployment of ‘glittering generalities’ (words like ‘freedom’, ‘civilization’, ‘democracy’) to describe the country, manipulating the audiences’ fears, etc…”
It strikes me that J Sorrentine has made a deep study of Hasbara methods, which are, obviously, easily adapted to the purpose of non zionists and zionists alike.
One aspect of Ferguson which is striking is the tameness of the community’s response to the brutality and flagrant illegality of the state’s actions. Only a few years ago, in England, the killing of Mark Duggan by cops provoked riots that spread across the country and involved tens of thousands of people. In Ferguson the response has been much more muted and deeply coloured by lamb like pacifism. Black America understands the way that the system works, that it lives on sufferance and that between the police, the courts, the politicians and the media they are caught up in a
labyrinth from which there is no escape on this earth.
As someone recently pointed out, the fists in the air have been unclenched, hands now wave above heads in surrender.
Much of this is the result of repression but the state has always repressed popular protests. What has changed is that the institutions of working class politics, from the Unions to the socialist, populist and reformist parties no longer offer alternatives in leadership to communities in which religion and crime are the only organisations left. And this is not entirely the state’s fault: suicidal sectarianism is also to blame. The sort of sectarianism which sees Malooga’s post not as an opportunity to broaden our understanding of what is to be done, but as an affront to the single source of all wisdom and the only licensed dispenser of opinions.
Posted by: bevin | Aug 20 2014 15:54 utc | 20
Thanks everyone for all the feedback.
First, when I started writing my post to respond to Luca last night, I just wrote the first line. Then I thought and wrote the second line. I kept adding thoughts as they came to me, and that’s how the piece got written. I did not plan where I was going to go with my thoughts, and to tell you the truth, I myself was rather surprised with where I ended up. But that often happens when I write. Both jsore and really had some problems with the end of my piece, and to tell you the truth, I wanted to add a few more paragraphs to bring the piece back into focus a bit more. But it was 4 AM and my eyes were closing on their own, so I left it and posted. Neither did I have any idea that I would awake to find it headlined — if I were writing a headline post I would at least put it aside for several hours and then reread it and see if it needed some editing.
An excellent companion piece to mine: The Three Tipping Points in Ferguson.
jsore calls my piece an “Ode to Fascist Murderers,” and elsewhere a “paean to criminal collaborators.” That gave me a good laugh! I can only think that it was a willful misreading of the piece, since it was certainly not my intention to justify the actions of violent police. What I felt I did do was contextualize that violence and elaborate on the nature of the forces behind it.
My last three paragraphs were:
And that brings us back to the police. Under the conditions I have just detailed, under the impossible constraints they forced to endure, how can they not be violent, at least some of the time. And how can they, as an organized force, not be violent in a systematic manner. Perhaps not all the time, but more often than not the social forces which police work under these days force violence to be propagated down in a systematic and totalizing manner.
And it is the awareness of all that I have described that causes many commenters here to reflexively assume police lies and violence to be ubiquitous. I hope that this is more understandable now. It is not a judgment of an individual’s (the cop who shot Michael Brown) — who one obviously doesn’t know well — moral value, rather it is an holistic appraisal of the social and material conditions of our society today, in which the American underclass, and their handlers, seek to operate.
Therefore, as for the police themselves, yes, perhaps out of the many hundreds of cases a year like this of police murder, corruption, assault, brutality, cover-up, bribery, theft, etc., there are possibly a few that were accidental, unintentional, or even false charges. If that were to be the case — which appears practically impossible — the facts would get out — unless the cop were being intentionally set up. But, to focus on this petty detail, and insist upon its importance to the bigger picture, is to miss that bigger picture altogether. I hope we can all see this.
Attempting to explain violence neither condones nor justifies that violence — I believe I am clear enough on this. Asking how the police can NOT be violent is clearly a rhetorical devise used in building my argument. I am supporting the commentators who implicitly assume police lies — this is clear from previous posts of mine on the same thread. And I don’t make any pronouncements on Officer Wilson because I don’t discuss any evidence in this piece — it simply wasn’t where I was going. To fault me for this is like those book reviewers who might pan a history of WWII humor because it does not discuss the reasons for the war.
Furthermore, while the system attempts to create automatons which it can use for its purposes, I believe very strongly that people have free will and can make choices on how they intend to relate to the system of entrenched violence. Not always clear black and white choices, but certainly better and worse choices. None of us is without sin in this world: we are all conscious that we are reading this post on hardware made with sweat labor. But none of us has recently gone out and unloaded 6 quick ones in someone who was bothering us. This element of free will would have been a nice way of summing up my argument. I did not intend to give the impression that I was making what “really” has called “a rationale that the police are not culpable due to the fact their “overlords” control them completely mind, body and soul.”
Now, to get back to jsore’s other 14 posts: Yes, I do live in the US. Yes, I am very familiar with retail theft and police and street violence. I grew up in NYC in the 60‘s and mostly lived there through the early 90‘s. I was a street peddler in midtown Manhattan for five years and owned about five retail stores over the years. I could go on for pages about my experiences and share many interesting stories — indeed it’s a miracle I am still alive — but that is not the point of this post. I will say one thing — I had many people steal many things from my businesses, and I could not imagine calling the police for two sodas and a donut, as Kajieme Powell allegedly stole. And if someone were killed because I complained about a $2 loss to me, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I only called the police once, when a theft was in the hundreds of (1980’s) dollars, and even there the police laughed at me and asked what I expected them to do. Times have changed — and not for the better.
“C-O-L-L-A-B-O-R-A-T-O-R-S” Sure, it works for me.
jsore, I do value your presence on this blog for your ability to essentialize the heart of the matter. But that hardly makes the rest of us fools for going beyond that in our thoughts. You state, “but a the end of the day society members… have to pull their heads [out] of their intellectual asses and deal with the violent murderers in their midst ” — I doubt anyone in this society would find that controversial. So why scream it? Yes, criminals should be prosecuted. And carpenters shouldn’t keep hitting nails after they are buried in the plank. No one wants to watch a poor carpenter bang away to no effect. In other words, when a power tool squeals, people plug their ears. But, do what you want, after all, you will anyway.
Elsewhere:
luca:
I believe your belief system is so far from mine and so tightly held, that there is little I can say to convince you. Having lived on an 85% black island in the West Indies for seven years, I have no fear of whites being in the minority in this country. I don’t think it will change anything. The police were corrupt down there, but no more so than here — and, it being a small island where people know each other, they were far less violent. If you are still fearful of becoming a minority, I advise you to treat others well; therefore they will have no desire to treat you ill when they hold the reins of power. The narrative that “whites are always evil and blacks always victims” is in your mind. I am addressing power relations in my piece, not race relations; it matters little the color of the cop. It might be more accurate to state that the poor are always victims of the rich. As far as black vs. white crime statistics and affirmative action money, you will have to visit other websites and read books that challenge your beliefs more and think critically about what you read. Make a few black friends and drive around with them at night.(Yes, affirmative action was a divide and conquer technique, as Michael Parenti points out. In your case it seems to have worked. Why not a society with opportunity for all, instead of fighting each other on the ground for crumbs?) Then and only then can you come to an informed opinion. Steve Sailor is not god. I spend most of my time reading things I disagree with to expand and challenge my thinking. I find little purpose in reading what I already know as inner reinforcement. Your mileage may vary. If you are still worried and believe that we might need some ethnic cleansing to remain in the majority in the US, I advise you to take one of those Ukrainian “safaris” that are so popular these days. That will either cure you of the fear, or relieve you of your mortal coil.
*6 black men have been killed by police this month so far in the US.
*for jsore’s enjoyment: “Holocaust Survivor Arrested at Non-Violent Michael Brown Assembly Downtown”
*maxcrat: war on nature, yes.
*criminal justice studies: yes, very good point, heavy propaganda. Isn’t the phrase “criminal justice” an oxymoron anyway?
*don bacon Police: Protect and Serve (seen on their cruisers): True, but who? They protect their own, not the public, so technically it is not a lie.
*NewYorker: posse comitatus, absolutely.
* Eureka Springs: list of good ideas
*”They shouldn’t have used so many bullets.” Setting the terms of the debate — how many bullets — rather than stating that no one in there right mind, especially a trained specialist, a cop, should have used any bullets at all. For decades, English police managed perfectly well without any guns. (No weapons needed is like the idea of full employment — the powers that be set what Chomsky calls the ”bounds of the permissible” — therefore, being beyond the boundaries, the idea is simply inconceivable. )
*Noirette: Interesting piece of propaganda, the clip on Watts. Everyone should watch it. I never would have picked this up before studying the color revolution techniques, but the narrator mentions the presence of sniper rifles killing people from rooftops (Syria, Egypt), followed a minute later by the image of a soldier in camos walking by with a sniper rifle in his arms. I am certain that a strategy of tension was in place then to maximize the violence and damage. I should go back and study this. We face the same thing in St. Louis today: Intentional shock and awe to escalate the stakes and push the poor back into the gutter. The question is — in these days of social media, will it work. As I said in my more interesting post yesterday: “Soft Power meets Hard Power on West Florissant Avenue.” Will the notion of inherent US goodness be irremediably damaged by the images of police violence going out around the world — or has the empire taken a page from the Israelis, and cares only about fear alone. We saw how well that worked with Hezbollah.
*juan moment: “Whats the use of a police officer who initiates a situation in which he claims the only way out alive for him was by killing an unarmed teenager? What do they teach cops these days at cop school?”
This is the whole point. In all my years on the streets of NYC, I never saw what I see now. Police were trained to approach slowly and in a non-threatening manner. Take their time, put the suspect at ease, ask a few questions. They were trained to negotiate: with people with weapons, hostages, those threatening suicide. Hold the perp’s attention, while another approaches from the rear. Use humor. Deflect. I’ve seen skillful police work so many times in my life — and really it was quite ordinary and expected. Most police shootings could be prevented if both the perp and the victim had better social skills today.
So, I believe that these changes are intentional and for a purpose, and that purpose is not good for the rest of us. The rules have been changed without our consultation or permission.
More strategy of tension: A young women, Mya Aaten-White shot in head in what police describe as a drive by shooting, except none of the witnesses saw the drive-by, and the police kept the bullet removed from her skull. Hmm…
And finally: This latest killing of Kajieme Powell is positively in tin foil territory. As I see it:
*Filmed a little too conveniently, narrated to tell us what we are seeing. Postmodern VICE (website) video techniques.
*Where is the filmer’s homey who supposedly told him to show up and film?
*No history of mental illness presented in media coverage.
*Crime is petty. Perp is not even interested in consuming what he lifted.
*Perp doesn’t leave the scene, but waits around for the police.
*Police arrive, exit with guns drawn and blazing for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Victim is dead within 18 seconds of arrival. It makes no sense at all — if one uses one’s critical thought, it is really quite impossible, like a 47 story building not hit by a plane falling at freefall speed .
*Victim asks to be killed hysterically, then looks around very calmly and steps up off the pavement so bullets will not be in line with the crowd observing. Nice!
*Victim does not have a weapon in his hands. Police lie again. Even if he did have a steak or butter knife (hah!), a simple bobby club or small shield would have harmlessly deflected it, or rendered it harmless.
* No evidence of blood.
*No one too shocked at witnessing a live shooting; no screaming, crying, etc.
*Watch the small white guy in blue jeans, red striped shirt and cardinal hat. Instantly, after the police shoot this guy he walks right up to within 10 feet or less of the cops. Who would do that and not worry of being the next victim? Cops are completely unconcerned with him. They chase others away, but he hobnails with police and walks up to one of the cruisers. Is he the “handler?” Are some of the other guys handlers too?
* Could this of been a hoax, or a mind control victim?
Time to take off my tin foil hat and go to sleep.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 21 2014 8:12 utc | 94
|
