#4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist trolls

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Fri Oct 21, 2016 1:05 pm

BLUE SUPREMACY IS THE NEW WHITE SUPREMACY

JULY 10, 2016

Image


“It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.
A US Major on the bombing of
Ben Tré in South Vietnam
2/8/1968


We seem to be in the midst of a huge paradigm shift here in the US… It feels as though some kind of critical mass has been reached in regard to the whole country catching up to the hell that mostly Black, Brown, Yellow and Red men, women and children and even some poor white people are catching when it comes to police brutality and police murders. The root of all this of course is that the US has never ever dealt with its racist history.

The sins of the past that have been ignored, in part, to not have to feel the collective pain and shame that would tarnish the well marketed image of the US as the land of the free and home of the brave. It also doesn’t want to revisit the transgressions of the past because america is built upon the genocide of Native Peoples and the enslavement of Africans and to admit that the wealth and power of the US is built upon genocide and enslavement is to make it no better than any other colonial european power.

The strategy of US domination hasn’t changed since it’s founding. The very same bully tactics that built the country into a world power are the same bully tactics used to maintain it’s place as a world power. When you reach deep into the reasons of why the US has a race problem that it doesn’t want to deal with, you can easily see that its because the US doesn’t know how to be any other way.

The problem of the US – is the problem of race. If the US were to reaches back and own up to its past it would then be forced to own up to its present. Honestly reassessing the present would lead to real changes in the future and not the kinds of changes that result in voting acts or civil rights bills but real change that would threaten american hegemony as a world power. For the US to honestly deal with its race problem is to threaten the US as a world power. The global domination of this country is a house of cards built on a foundation of genocide and enslavement and the ongoing police killings of unarmed Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and even White bodies could quite possibly be the crack in that foundation.

Image

The microcosm of Mike Brown, John Crawford, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Philandro Castile and countless others becomes a reflection of the macrocosm of Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanemo Bay, CIA enhanced interrogation methods, the Cuban blockade and the unconditional support of Israel in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, just to name a few parallels. In this new age of social media that allows the oppressed to bypass state and corporate media you can see the connections being made between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip sending messages via twitter to protesters in Ferguson on how to deal with the tear gas enveloping them. The irony isn’t lost that the very same tear gas used by US military forces against protesters in Ferguson is the very same tear gas used by Israeli military against the Palestinians. That tear gas is made in the US and paid for by the Pentagon which distributed it to both military forces for the exact same reasons. The microcosm of Ferguson is the macrocosm of the Gaza Strip and the common denominator in all this is US domestic and foreign policy that’s has its root in the racism.

Image

The police state in Ferguson and New York and Oakland is the police state in Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel. Just look at the terminology that’s thrown around. Protesters and protest labeled as domestic “terrorists” and “terrorism”. The harassment and humiliation of “check points” in Gaza and Iraq has it’s equivalent in “stop and frisk” in New York. The police in the SU are an occupying force who see themselves in “hostile territory” and “surrounded” by a populace that they must “profile” in order to “survive” their “tour of duty”.

Image

The post 9/11 heroic reverence for law enforcement in the US that elevated them from civil servants to saints allowed these agencies sworn to uphold the law to boldly become the very terrorists they were lauded for fighting. The politics of xenophobia and jingoism post 9/11 only inflated the problem and emboldened law enforcement with the idea that it would not need to be held to account for its brutality. From the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques “that went to far” to the NYPD choking of Eric Garner by one police officer using a choke hold banned by the NYPD in 1994 as three other officers held him down, law enforcement has taken that post 9/11 reverence (which was falsely placed to begin with) and used it to insulate themselves from ever having to answer for any of the brutality it imposes. Whether it’s CIA contractors who cannot legally be held responsible for illegally detaining and torturing “terrorists” or grand juries in Ferguson and New York unwilling to prosecute police for killing “suspects” – accountability is not something law enforcement agencies in the US ever have to concern themselves with.

If you think that the connections between CIA tactics like black sites being used to torture “terrorists” and police wanton abuse in the form of frivolous arrests, beatings and even killings is going too far just look at the Chicago police department’s Homan Square. If Chicago police wanted you to “disappear” for a few hours before processing you or wanted to beat you without having to process you at all or even leave you dead in an interview room, they took you to Homan Square. If you’re political beliefs were something the Chicago police didn’t agree with then they brought you there as well. From Guantanamo to Homan Square the politic is the same and the tactics are the similar.

Image
Treyvon Martin In Post Racial America by vagabond ©


Continues at: https://nothingtobegainedhere.wordpress ... supremacy/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 19, 2016 8:49 pm

Seeing Through Police

By Mark Greif / 02 December 2016

Police are different things to different people.

Image

A surprise of being around police is how much they touch you. They touch you without consent and in both seemingly friendly and unfriendly ways. The friendly touch is the first surprise. A policeman allowing protesters to cross the street touches you on the arm or back as you cross. Face-to-face, police will put a hand on your shoulder, from the front, intimate as a dog putting his paw up. It is unnerving. Women say male police know very well how to touch, even in public sight, in ways that are professional and neutral, and also in ways that are humiliating and sexual, with no demonstrable distinction dividing the two. The police know, and you know. Like a reversal of electric polarity from protective to hostile, this conversion of mood does not only follow the policeman’s individual initiative. It traces something like an atmospheric charge among police in groups, their silent experience of a phenomenon, their habitual tactics in response.

In confrontations on a curb (when you stay on your sidewalk, because the public street is forbidden except to police), they may press lightly on your collarbone, “holding you back,” just measuring out the distance with their arms. You can even be held up in this way, if you relax. Shoving you requires a separate, additional level of their energy. Batons and gloves extend the police field of touch, insulating them from the brutality that their arms and hands will do. A gray- haired professor of history I know put his hand on the top rail of a metal police barrier, at a protest, as one will do when standing still. An officer forbade him to touch it. All macho, the historian refused to move his hand. The policeman smashed it with his baton, splitting the flesh but not breaking the bone. That was a conflict over the reciprocation of touch: the rail and the baton were proxies. The unspoken rule is that the citizen must never return touch.

Singling out an individual for arrest, the next escalation is to grab the citizen body at the neck or shoulders— attacking from the front, blackgloved fingers grip the face, while from behind, the palm shocks the base of the skull— pushing at the fulcrum of the neck to hurl the person down. Sometimes the cop’s left hand pulls up or tears at the arrestee’s shirt or outermost garment while pushing with the right hand. A poet in his forties I know was thrown to the ground like this because he stepped outside a crosswalk at the beginning of a march. Other officers swarm the downed man or woman and pull at arms and legs, and kneel on the back or the neck or head, or mash the face into the pavement under their palm while cuffs go on. The final escalation is punching, beating, or kicking. Sometimes this is reserved for the arrestee on the ground who is already restrained, as a form of punctuation. Sometimes it is done in the van or on the way to it. Police are more likely to do this only when they believe they cannot easily be recorded with cameras.

The purpose of touching by police is to make persons touchable. Touch readies more touch. It is preparatory. The restraints in civilization on attacking anyone, especially a citizen who portends no harm or threat, are fairly high. For most forms of violence that breach civilized norms, even if it is one’s art or profession, steps of habituation are needed. The “sudden” violent arrest at a protest is almost never sudden if you have been watching the officer and the longer sequence. The process of change in an officer who will then bring someone down is not oriented to the target, but seems interior, oriented to the self; by the expressions that pass over his face, usually in an instant of stepping back, withdrawal, and the cessation of interaction or negotiation or “management,” you can detect a kind of change of availability that prefaces the attack. It very often seems to surprise, even astonish or trouble, nearby officers, when the attack comes, yet they still know to capture and cuff whichever citizens wind up on the ground (sometimes the wrong ones, as the trailing officers will often also push down and even cuff bystanders who happened to get knocked into indirectly in the attack).

Police are different things to different people. Not because each person has his or her own subjective view on the constabulary, but because the meanings of the functions of police vary with a citizen’s identity, as one or another possible target or beneficiary of policing.

“Directing traffic.” This function of restricting and encouraging movement through a city may be the very oldest job of police. Police maintain a spatial order. The most manpower and work time are still devoted to it. What is traffic? Certain neighborhoods contain certain types of people and behavior. Others contain others. Various subjects must move through corridors of the city to redistribute themselves over the course of the day and night. But they must not unsettle police’s fundamental sense of who belongs where. Today, when police are accused of racial bias in their traffic stops and pedestrian searches and must justify themselves, they speak with pride of the fact that they will not just stop and question black people but also stop and question white people caught in black neighborhoods and rich people cruising in poor neighborhoods. This, to their minds, is parity. They don’t recognize their role in making up the boundaries of these neighborhoods in the first place, or why not all neighborhoods are functionally the same for the activities of life.

“Catching criminals.” This is the activity police truly like to identify with, however little of their time it occupies. Occasionally police stumble on red- handed robbers, or thugs fleeing an assault. The bulk of “catching” people lies in traversing the city, as necessary, to find some people on the word of other people. Police act as go- betweens for antagonists who may even be practically within arm’s reach— yelling outside their cars in a fender bender, or giving opposite accounts of a domestic dispute. Real “investigation” and “detection”— the glorious business of tracing an unidentified malefactor after the fact of a crime, without just finding out, from the witnesses closest at hand, who did it— is an activity that exists in police departments, but only among a tiny number of specialized personnel who don’t even have to wear uniforms.

Where the police identify a crime against the city, state, or law, rather than an affronted person— the so- called victimless crimes of illicit possession, unlicensed work, or unlicensed sale— we can best speak of another police function as distributing crime. The legislature declares certain objects and unlicensed commerce illegal. The police then go and distribute these violations. Street drugs are made illegal (prescription drugs are fine), hidden and unlicensed weapons are illegal (mostly carried by those on unsafe streets, which is to say the poor), flawed cars are illegal (unlit taillight, noisy muffler, unpaid insurance). Thus police spend a large part of their time distributing crime to the sorts of people who seem likely to be criminals— the poor and marginal— and the prediction is prophetic: these people turn out to be criminals, as soon as they are stopped and frisked and forced to turn out the contents of their pockets or glove boxes. (Leave them alone, and most would never be “criminal” at all.) The majority of violations technically listed in the tables of the law are of no interest to uniformed police. Those committed in the course of doing business, in the professions, and in government aren’t likely to be actively detected or sought by anyone. They are accidentally or competitively disclosed— leading to the awkwardness of the need of some settlement, which is then dealt with by regulatory agencies, guilds, or accrediting bodies, plus, at the far extreme, civilcourt proceedings and court- mandated money exchanges. Very rarely are police or even criminal justice ever brought in.

The most admirable and defensible of the exemplary police activities is “keeping the peace.” It is also the least discussed, the least subject to written laws and directives, and the vaguest. In a democracy of equal citizens, people will inevitably conflict, even through no fault or crime of one party or the other. Someone will take advantage, or threaten. The role of the police here is to pacify— and pacification, in a civil democracy, is no bad thing intrinsically. It is a vital, valuable thing.

Enforcing racial terror: this exemplary function, unofficial or officially denied though universally known, owns no familiar phrase. In recent decades, African- Americans have made proverbial the facetious offenses that police seem to be pursuing: “driving while black,” “shopping while black,” “walking while black.” The history of racial terrorism by whites is old. Police have gradually taken up its responsibilities in a process that goes back more than a century. Police departments’ role in racial terror has survived even where racism has waned and their forces have integrated nonwhite officers. Racial terrorism is simply a part of the job for local and metropolitan police forces in America— any policing at the level of the city, broadly construed. This may have been replicated in foreign municipalities, as in London policing of Caribbean and South Asian populations, and Paris policing of North Africans in the banlieues. Racial terror does create enormous complications for any ordinary theory of what American police do, however— just as it carves a fundamental division between the experience and expectations non- African- American citizens have of police and those held by African- Americans.


Continues at: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2984-se ... ugh-police
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 02, 2017 1:52 pm

Fascist Praises Cops: “Our People Have Remained Healthy” (1992)

Image
Raoul Roy

On July 6th 1991 several undercover police officers were assigned to arrest Kirt Haywood, a short Black man with dreadlocks. They mistook Marcellus François, a tall Black man with short hair, for Haywood and followed him around Montreal. Finally, they pulled over his car and approached him, guns drawn, without identifying themselves. As he went to unfasten his seatbelt, police officer Michel Tremblay shot him through the head. Francois went into a coma and died a few days later.

This is the background to Police Chief Alain Saint-Germain’s unprecedented statement, in late January 1992, that this had been a botched operation from beginning to end. This statement, while undeniably true, was severely condemned by the president of the police union, Yves Prudhomme, and on February 13th over two thousand cops marched in uniform through the streets of Montreal, demanding in effect that they be given absolute freedom to kill with impunity.

The following article written in 1992 and translated by an antifascist researcher, sums up the impressions of one racist, Raoul Roy (for a long time considered on the Quebec “left”) following this show of force by the police:

Our People Has Remained Healthy

Despite what many think, winter in Montreal is no less cold than elsewhere in our province. There are days when we feel so frozen it is as if we were being embraced by the great damp arms of the Saint-Lawrence.

It was on one of these cold days, last February 13th, that our police officers chose to hold a demonstration. They wanted to let the public know that they refused to face genocidal immigration as bullet-catchers, the role that had been reserved for them by certain suicidal individuals.

Given the prevalent atmosphere of intellectual terrorism, we at SOS Genocide were almost certain that we would be the only ones brave enough to let the police know that our people does not blame them for resisting the foreign criminals and the immigrationist accomplices.

We were right. We didn’t see any other group show up to let our defenders know that the public does not blame them for resisting the attacks of our enemies.

It is difficult to put into words the emotions we felt on that extraordinary day. The image of thousands of police officers hurrying down Saint-Denis Street, their shouts of protest against their chief, those of loyalty towards their union president Mr Prudhomme; the power that this mass of protesters gave off was striking. There was nothing we could say, other than that was the place to be for anyone who opposes our self-genocide. Our people are not very politicized and certainly not used to spotting and resisting treasonous social classes. Having always lived among the people, we know that French Canadians share the anger of the police about the hypocrisy, the softness and the cowardice of our politicians, whose treason has been encouraged by the media. Yet even if the new class that rules us has decided to drown what is left of the nation that opened North America to civilization, the invasion of Montreal by the unassmiliable has not gone so far as to provoke a mass revolt. Unfortunately, when this time comes it will be too late!

The demonstration started at Laurier metro and went to Old Montreal. As they descended Saint-Denis, this impressive march could only make us wish that this force would line up with the national liberation movement. And why shouldn’t these men demand a truly modern military training, such as an efficient national guard requires?

Nothing should stop us, even under the British regime with the provincial government that we have, from transforming the Quebec Provincial Police into an unofficial army. In fact, what are we waiting for to create an auxiliary police force to this end?

So that the police could see our signs we stood at the corner of Saint-Denis and Sainte-Catherine, with our backs towards that horrible bomb shelter called the University of Montreal. As they marched the police chanted « We want a new chief, Long live Prudhomme! ». As they came upon Sainte-Catherine Street they were suddenly quiet, trying to figure out what was written on those signs blowing in the wind ahead of them. Whatever it was, it seemed to please the marchers ahead of them, who clapped their hands in applause.

This is what they could read : SOS Genocide – Immigrants : respecty our laws and our police – Immigration equals Unemployment – The immigrants will vote against independence – Immigration is getting bigger, the people is shriveling up – Stop letting foreigners immigate, it’s out of control! – Yes to a Natalist policy, No to Immigration – We need a moratorium on immigration – Genocidal Invasion of Quebec.

It is worth mentioning that before they reached us the police officers had to pass by the corners of de Maisonneuve and Saint-Denis streets, where twenty counter-demonstrators were yelling « The police are racist, down with repression! » Amongst these spoiled children it was easy to pick out some of University of Quebec’s students-for-life as well as a garrulous « spokesperson » for prisoners, a certain Bernheim. Not to mention the cromagnon faces of Stalinism, those that have been planted in this university since its inception, and whose harsh cries were louder than all the others.

I have to admit that we were not expecting the triumphal reception that we received. The fervent cheers that we received will remain engraved in our memory for a long while to come. We would like to have been able to thank each and every one of these brave protesters; as it is, we had to satisfy ourselves with waving at them, especially at those who seemed particularly glad to see us.

This was one of the nicest days of my life. Why? Because this demonstration, by those whom our genocidal immigrationists would use as mere sandbags in the guerilla war that is beginning to kill us as a nation, prove that our people has remained fundamentally healthy. And yet the thousand and one cults that are active here do indicate a troubling disorder.

At heart, our people do not accept the rot that is called liberalism. They are hungry for decency, order and common sense. This is why there is still hope.


-Raoul Roy




on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://ift.tt/2kTKbOp
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 02, 2017 3:52 pm

More on Raoul Roy:


A Brief History of the Far Right in Quebec, 1920s-1990s

Image



Raoul Roy’s Neo-Socialism

Between 1966 and his death in 1997 Raoul Roy wrote over a dozen books and countless articles defining his “anti-colonial socialism”. His ideas have a lot in common with the writings of Leftists from other oppressed nations. But taken as a whole what they resemble most are the neo-socialist doctrines developed in Europe in the thirties. The neo-socialists started out on the Left but, rejecting class struggle, they ended up opposing not only Communism but also egalitarianism, and advocating what they called “left-wing fascism”. Like Roy, they eventually submerged themselves in the broader, decidedly right-wing fascist movement, supporting the bourgeoisie and collaborating with the Nazis[104].

Roy’s fascist conversion did not occur overnight. Nor was he alone on this ideological journey. The ASIQ had folded in the sixties, but many of its members continued to meet. In the seventies Roy and these supporters began to publish a sporadic journal, the Revue Indépendantiste. Any insufficiently nationalist French Canadian was now a traitor, and all non-French Canadians who stood in the way of a unilingual, monocultural and “socialist” French Canada were attacked on the basis of their ethnicity. Roy berated so-called “soft nationalists”, rose to the defence of the Catholic Church and got up the courage to attack the United States – just what he had attacked the Left for doing ten years earlier! He castigated Marxists for ignoring the fact that national struggle, not class struggle, was the motor force of history.

In fact, the only area where Roy felt he could maybe agree with Marx was regarding the need to solve the “Jewish question”. Bemoaning the fact that Jews formed “a secret society devoted to self-advancement”[105], Roy could not help but note that “so many rootless Jews are leading the internationalist movement.”[106] In 1979 he devoted an entire book to this subject[107]. He wrote that there was no one Jewish race, nation, nationality, people, culture, religion, culture or lifestyle[108], the true nature of Jewishness being one of a secret society bent on advancing and protecting the interests of its members. Once again he built on the “progressive” universalism that had led certain Marxists to claim that the liberation of the Jew implied abolishing any specific Jewish identity – all the while noting that Marx’s gross materialism proved that he had failed to truly emancipate himself from the capitalistic Jewish spirit[109]. As always, Roy juggled this ethnocidal one-worldism with a fierce defence of French Canadian cultural specificity. This was to become a key element of Roy’s “socialist” racism: the division of humanity between “real nations” and “false nations”, with the latter being obliged to assimilate into the former.

In 1981 Roy founded the Carrefour de la résistance indépendantiste (CRI; trans.: Assembly for Indépendentiste Resistance), which was supposed to carry out narrow nationalist and racist agitation. Like the ASIQ before it, the CRI scapegoated immigrants for the situation in Quebec. Over the next ten years the CRI affiliated with a number of very similar groups, most notably SOS Genocide and the Rassemblement pour un Pays Canadien-Français[110] (RPCF; trans: Rally for a French Canadian Country). Through the RPCF it was tied to the Mouvement pour une immigration restreinte et francophone (MIREF; trans.: Movement for a Restricted and Francophone Immigration) and the Mouvement pour la Survie de la Nation[111] (MSN; trans.: Movement for the Survival of the Nation). All of these groups took public positions and even demonstrated against “massive and suicidal” immigration. They have specified that only newcomers from “Latin” (i.e. French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian) and Christian cultures should be allowed into Quebec.

By the late eighties Roy was openly reinventing his pedigree. In a special issue of Revue Indépendantiste dealing with the 1930s, he interviewed Walter O’Leary and Paul Bouchard, fascists of another era. If he had once denounced corporatism as medieval, intolerant, anti-working class and anti-democratic, he now described in glowing terms as a halfway point between capitalism and socialism. Roy now bragged of how he had identified with Bouchard’s newspaper La Nation, of how much he had admired the O’Leary brothers’ pro-independence stand[112].

In 1990 Roy summed up his thoughts about the Left he had once been a part of. In a book that took the form of a long open letter to Pierre Bourgault, Roy scolded the former president of the RIN for making positive statements about immigration. Halting the flow of immigrants was now top priority, coming even before independence[113]. Roy also took Bourgault to task for being part of the pot-smoking, foul-mouthed, animalistic and amoral hippy crowd that had ruined the nationalist movement. According to Roy, true French Canadian patriots were at war with feminists, counter-culture types and cultural relativism. He described the Quiet Revolution as “an irreparable devastation inflicted upon our nation”[114], explaining that the rejection of traditional values constituted a form of genocide. As if to make the nature of his “socialism” perfectly clear, Roy claimed that material poverty had been abolished by capitalism, but that cultural poverty had taken its place[115].

By this point Roy’s neo-socialism resembled the third-position fascism of the European New Right[116]. Yet he continued to enjoy the respect and support of a number of people who agreed that history was made by national, not social, collectivities. “Respectable” nationalists like Gilles Rheaume and members of the Société Saint-Jean Baptiste associated with Roy, as did fascists who had never pretended to be on the Left.



http://sketchythoughts.blogspot.com/201 ... uebec.html
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 18, 2017 4:00 pm

Killing is Their Business

A World Without Police January 24, 2017

Image

An investigation into police firings shows that murder is in a cop’s job description.

What is a policeman’s job? The answer we’re taught is: “to serve and protect”, to stop crime and capture criminals. Of course, the white supremacist regime of mass incarceration has meant an incredible explosion of punishable “crimes”, so that more and more these days the criminals we’re “being protected from” do such heinous anti-social activities as wearing their pants too low, sleeping on the subway, talking back to their teachers or playing loud music in their own homes. One study projects that police spend 90% of their law-enforcement time pursuing and enforcing such non-violent code violations and rule breaking. And police spend a lot of their time not in the pursuit of these nefarious criminals, but also going to court, doing paperwork, monitoring public events, parades and demonstrations, guarding schools and other government buildings, engaging in public relations campaigns and performing a variety of other bureaucratic services for their cities.

Still, most of these services fall more or less under the description “enforcing the law”—which is a standard commonsense definition of a cop’s job description. Many people therefore oppose police violence and the police murder of unarmed people on the basis that this behavior is illegal. It is not just outside the bounds of their work, it is opposed to the very nature of the policeman’s job. It follows, this argument goes, that police need to be reformed, trained better, given public oversight, monitored (perhaps with body cameras) or otherwise reigned in in order to “properly” do their job of enforcing the law. It argues that the police can be reformed to enforce the law equally, “colorblindly”, to do their job without enforcing antiblackness and white supremacy.

But this reform will never work, because it is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of what a cop’s work actually is. Murdering people is part of the policeman’s job. Along with filling the cages of America’s vast prison empire, lynching is what they are hired to do.

A good way to understand the parameters of a job is to look at its fireable offenses. With that in mind, we at A World Without Police did a small study* of what police were fired for in 2016. One of the core discoveries was that while pigs were frequently fired for publicly making racist statements, they were almost never fired for the public, white supremacist murder of unarmed black people, or indeed for killing of any kind. This informs our claim that their job is to reenforce the white supremacist capitalist state through terror and violence, but, crucially, to not appear to be racist, misogynist or homophobic while doing so.

In 2016, US police killed an astonishing 1153 people, as tracked by the website Killed By Police. As a result of those 1153 killings, however, we only found five police who were fired. Of those five, two were fired after officer Cassie Barker killed her own three year old daughter by leaving her in the back seat of her cruiser. Only three police were fired for shooting someone down in the street. We also found one other policeman fired for a killing committed this year: officer John Slepski was fired for inducing a fatal car accident that killed teenager Rashid Abdul Bashir. Bashir did not appear on Killed By Police’s 2016 round up, however, which indicates that even their excellent work is underestimating the number of people police killed in 2016.

There were two other firings for murder of a civilian, but those deaths happened before 2016 and are thus not included in the 1,153+: in January six Cleveland police officers were fired for a 2012 high speed chase that ended with them executing the unarmed Black couple they were chasing, firing 137 bullets into their car, shooting both of them over 20 times. And a Pennsylvania cop was fired for killing another married couple in a high speed car accident in 2014.

But we found a number of other facts in our research that deepen the thesis that killing is official police work. Two cops who had previously murdered unarmed civilians (both, oddly in Milwaukee), were fired this year but for other reasons. Indeed, Dominique Heaggan-Brown, whose lynching of Sylville Smith in August sparked the rebellion there, was fired for committing sexual assault months later. Police made it clear he was not fired for Smith’s murder. Another, Lieutenant Mark Tiller, was fired a year and a half after shooting 19 year old Zachary Hammond, but the department refused to state the reason for Tiller’s firing.

And one police officer in 2016 was fired for not killing a Black man. Weirton, WV police officer Stephen Mader recognized that 23 year old Ronald D. “R.J.” Williams, despite having a gun, did not pose a real immediate threat to anyone’s safety, and so Mader subdued and arrested him. His department then fired Mader for not shooting Williams to death: the clearest instance we’ve ever seen proving that murdering people, not enforcing the law, is a policeman’s job.

But while white supremacist murder is a crucial part of the job, publicly advocating white supremacy is, apparently, beyond the pale. We found twelve cops who were fired for posting racist statements on social media, one fired for flying a confederate flag, and another for having his KKK membership publicly revealed. More than four times as many police were fired for saying or signifying racist things in 2016 than actually murdering Black people and re-enforcing racial terror.


More at: http://aworldwithoutpolice.org/2017/01/ ... -business/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 20, 2017 9:12 am

Origins of the police

by David Whitehouse

Image
The Five Points district of lower Manhattan, painted by George Catlin in 1827. New York’s first free Black settlement, Five Points was also a destination for Irish immigrants and a focal point for the stormy collective life of the new working class. Cops were invented to gain control over neighborhoods and populations like this.

In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades — roughly from 1825 to 1855.

The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it.

Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s

— strikes in England,
— riots in the Northern US,
— and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.

So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.

I will be focusing a lot on who these crowds were, how they became such a challenge. We’ll see that one difficulty for the rulers, besides the growth of social polarization in the cities, was the breakdown of old methods of personal supervision of the working population. In these decades, the state stepped in to fill the social breach.

We’ll see that, in the North, the invention of the police was just one part of a state effort to manage and shape the workforce on a day-to-day basis. Governments also expanded their systems of poor relief in order to regulate the labor market, and they developed the system of public education to regulate workers’ minds. I will connect those points to police work later on, but mostly I’ll be focusing on how the police developed in London, New York, Charleston (South Carolina), and Philadelphia.


Read at: https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014 ... he-police/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 22, 2017 1:07 pm

Fighting Cops and the Klan: The History and Future of Black Antifascism

Image


American fascism is no recent phenomenon, either. Bento notes that the US, with its foundational culture of white nationalism combined with its long tradition of scapegoating and state repression of people of color, has always been a fascist state for Black folks. Even before the Black Panthers or the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Black activists like Mabel and Robert Williams were fighting the most brutal forms of American fascism by arming Black people and teaching them how to defend themselves from the Ku Klux Klan.

This is why antifascist work "has always been important," said Gem Isaac of the Black-women-led, anti-police-brutality group Why Accountability. Her group recently organized a march in New York City against white nationalism on Inauguration Day where protesters marched from Harlem to Trump Tower, shutting down streets and chanting against Trump and the police on the way there. Isaac points out that Black people have long been at the forefront of many areas of social and political life, including antifascism.

"We talk about the Civil Rights Movement, but we can go back further than that," Isaac told me. "When you talk about Nat Turner or Sojourner Truth, to take up arms against your oppressor and push back against them, that is antifascist work. When you talk about Nanny of the Maroons in the Caribbean or the Haitian Revolution, that is antifascist work. History has shown us, time and again, African people participating in antifascist work."

Isaac, along with another member of Why Accountability, also showed up at New York University on February 2 to help shut down a speech by fascist hipster Gavin McInnes. This practice of disrupting and shutting down fascist meetings and speeches is known as "no-platforming" and is a quintessential antifa practice aimed at stopping fascists from organizing and thus preventing and defending against far-right violence.

"You had Gavin McInnes being given a platform by NYU to come in and, in my opinion, do a recruitment session," Isaac said. "Being allowed to come, under the guise of free speech, so you can eventually bring violence against other people and have it upheld by the local police department -- that is violence."

Isaac also brought up tactics like doxxing (in which people's private information, such as their full names, phone numbers or addresses, are published online in order to encourage abuse) and targeted online harassment, which are used by alt-right trolls, as more modern forms of fascist violence. Black women have been especially targeted in these kinds of online attacks, as illustrated by what happened to comedian and Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones in July 2016. Racist online trolls, angered at the idea of a Black woman starring in the Ghostbusters movie, began endlessly harassing Jones on Twitter, flooding her account with racist and sexist comments shortly after the release of Ghostbusters. About a month after this harassment began, Twitter banned Breitbart editor and fascist troll Milo Yiannopoulos for coordinating the online attacks. Jones' personal website was then hacked with photos of her driver's license and passport posted up on it. The hackers also posted alleged nude photos of Jones.

"What's happened is the actions of the KKK from yesteryear have now moved to a digital platform," Isaac said. "So instead of burning a cross at your house, which they still do depending on where you are, they'll dox you, threaten to release information about you, or they'll post unflattering photos of you on white nationalist websites. So the tactics have shifted but the outcome that they want -- for violence, harm or death to come to anyone who opposes white nationalism -- is all the same."

Colin Ashley of the racial justice group Peoples Power Assemblies has experienced this kind of violence firsthand not just for being Black but also for being queer. On the night of December 17, 2016, Ashley and a group of friends had just left an activist party in Manhattan and were chanting slogans like "Black Lives Matter," and "We're here! We're queer! We're fabulous! Don't fuck with us!" They were soon approached by a group of men chanting "Trump!" who then made racist and homophobic remarks to them. One of the Trump-supporting men pointed specifically at Ashley and yelled: "He's a fucking faggot!"

"As we chanted back at them, they were following us from the event that we were at, one of them took a swing at one of my comrades," Ashley said. "I jumped in to defend them, and we were then basically beaten and attacked by this guy and his friends that night."

Pictures of the aftermath showed Ashley with a swollen face, a bruised eye and blood on his clothes. The attack exemplified for Ashley how the most marginalized groups of people, groups like immigrants, LGBTQ folks and Muslims, are often the main targets of fascist violence. This vulnerability to fascist violence, whether it be in the form of street harassment or deportations or incarceration, is also increased for people who are part of more than one marginalized group. Black immigrants, Black queer people, Black trans folk and Black Muslims all have to be extra careful of politicized bigotry putting them in physical danger.

"We know full well from the history of this country that once fascistic nationalism takes hold, the most marginalized are the ones who become blamed, targeted and systematically oppressed," he said. "There may be this sense for some people that it's just immigrants or just Muslims, but it's not going to stop with these groups."

The case of CeCe McDonald, a Black trans woman attacked by a Nazi in June 2011, is emblematic of the constant threat to marginalized people posed by fascists. Much like Ashley, McDonald and a group of friends were confronted by another group of people spewing racist and transphobic remarks at them. One of the women in the other group smashed a glass in McDonald's face and punched her. After a fight between the two groups broke out, the woman's ex-boyfriend assaulted McDonald, whose face was already bleeding from the glass, and threw her into the street. The man, with fists clenched, began pursuing McDonald. She quickly pulled a pair of scissors from her purse and stabbed the man in the chest as he lunged towards her. The man died. He was later found to have a swastika tattooed on his chest. McDonald, now seen by many as a hero and antifascist icon, went to prison for 19 months of her 41-month sentence, despite having obviously defended herself against a racist, transphobic Nazi who was threatening her life.

But despite these cases of street violence and online harassment, all of the activists I spoke to insisted -- like the Black Panthers did before them -- that a primary perpetrator of fascist and white supremacist violence against Black people has always been the police. In her autobiography, the legendary Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur recounted how much the New Jersey State Troopers resembled and spoke like actual Nazis. Despite calling them "fascist pigs" for years, the cops "shocked me by the truth of my own rhetoric," Shakur said.

Recently, the Intercept reported on a 2006 FBI report showing that white supremacist groups have long been "infiltrating law enforcement communities or recruiting law enforcement personnel." When a Philadelphia cop was photographed last year at the Democratic National Convention with his Nazi tattoos in plain sight, Internal Affairs cleared him of any wrongdoing. And during the presidential campaign, the Fraternal Order of Police, the country's largest police union, proudly endorsed Donald Trump for president.

Cops and the Klan have been working hand in hand for much of US history: from the KKK allying with Southern police during the Civil Rights era in order to more easily commit murder to the modern-day infiltration of law enforcement by the KKK. This has, in turn, shaped Black resistance and given Black antifas a unique perspective on fighting fascism. Daryle Jenkins of the One People's Project, a group that monitors racist and far-right groups, can tell you everything you need to know about fascists and white supremacists in the US. And though he's spent about 30 years keeping an eye on right-wing groups and even been individually targeted by them, he points to the police as a major source of white supremacist violence against Black people.

"Whenever you see a cop beating somebody down on the street or slamming people up against a wall, that's part of it. And everybody keeps forgetting that," he said. "I think that one of the biggest problems that we have is the fact that the fascists use law enforcement as a way to get at those that they hate. They basically look at law enforcement as their own personal Gestapo."

The close relationship between police and fascists is why Trevor, Bento, Isaac and Ashley are all part of groups that focus on state violence against people of color. All of them have also personally experienced or witnessed violence from police.

Trevor has been harassed and stopped and frisked simply for being Black. Bento was once racially profiled and had a gun put to his head by a cop. Isaac has seen Black activists physically assaulted by police while trying to file a complaint against police. Ashley had a cousin who was killed by police.

Though Jenkins can't imagine large numbers of Black people embracing the black bloc tactic in the struggle against cops and fascists, he does see similar tactics occurring in more broad-based Black antifascist work.

"When you see what happened in Baltimore, when you see what happened in Ferguson, that's our antifascist work," he said, referring to young people battling it out with cops in the streets of both those cities in response to high-profile cases of police brutality. "It just hasn't been called that."

In the future, Ashley hopes to see Black antifa activism being called that, and hopes to see the label "antifa" being used to describe more than just breaking windows and punching Nazis (though he's not necessarily opposed to those things).

"Yes, there's something beautiful and powerful about direct forms of resistance that are more aggressive and straightforward; but also, part of antifascist work is establishing alternative ways of being," Ashley said. "In many ways, people of color, Black people especially, have always kind of done that in this country out of necessity. But I think it needs to be expanded, and I think it needs to be named as antiracist, antifascist work. Both of those are part of our liberation struggle."


Excerpted from: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3953 ... ntifascism
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby divideandconquer » Mon Feb 27, 2017 2:14 pm

Luther Blissett » Fri Oct 07, 2016 3:04 pm wrote:Here's a lot of people still not understanding that reverse racism doesn't exist. I thought people were starting to get that.

“Luke Cage” and the racial empathy gap: “Why do they talk about being black all the time?”
If white viewers dislike the Marvel show's focus on black characters, it's because they're used to being catered to

A bulletproof black man is making White Twitter crap its pants.

Netflix dropped Marvel’s “Luke Cage” last Friday, and it’s the streaming platform’s only superhero feature to date that stars a nonwhite lead. Luke Cage (played by Mike Colter) is a man gifted with extraordinary super strength, which gives him the ability to pick up a washing machine or withstand a round of bullets.

Created by Cheo Hodari Coker (“Ray Donovan”), the show is based on the classic Marvel series, and the first of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe shows to feature a black man at the center. The comic books first hit stores in 1972 under the name “Luke Cage, Hero for Hire.” It would later be amended to “Luke Cage, Power Man,” intended to cash in on the success of blaxploitation films like “Black Caesar” and “Coffy.” In “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Melvin Van Peebles played Sweetback, another indestructible man of color.

Although the show has received mostly positive reviews from critics, there’s one demographic that’s less jazzed about Marvel’s ode to black strength and resilience: white people. On Twitter, some viewers of the Caucasian persuasion took “Luke Cage” to task for its portrayal of white people — namely because the show doesn’t portray them at all. Featuring a deep bench of talented actors — including Alfre Woodard (“12 Years a Slave”), Rosario Dawson (“Grindhouse”) and Mahershala Ali (“Moonlight”) — only two white characters recur often enough to appear in six or more episodes of the freshman season.

Angered by the show’s predominantly black cast, some white viewers took to Twitter to label it “racist.” Here’s a sample:

ᴇʟᴇᴄᴛʀɪᴄ★ʟᴏᴠᴇʟʏʟᴀɴᴅ @CommanderLovely
Lack of white people in Luke Cage makes me uncomfortable. This show is racist, how is this on Netflix???
3:18 PM - 2 Oct 2016

shrek rap @apronikas
im not racist but :/ why is luke cage so political :/ why do they talk about being black all the time :/ where are the white characters :/
9:47 PM - 2 Oct 2016

LiberalsUnited @RockerThompson
Is it me or the new Netflix. Luke Cage a little racist. Notice it's mostly black where is the diversity. @LIVE_COVERAGE


Even a “woke” white viewer had to confront her own initial discomfort with the show, which she then shared on Twitter:
Image
April Del Rario @AprilDelRario
Watching #LukeCage I was shocked to find racism in myself I didn't know was there. This is my confession & an invitation to watch @LukeCage.
11:10 AM - 4 Oct 2016


The very thing that makes “Luke Cage” distinctive is precisely what upsets these viewers: It’s unapologetically black. Coker, who previously wrote the screenplay for the Biggie Smalls biopic “Notorious,” fills nearly every inch of his frame with black faces — particularly in scenes of the crowded Harlem nightclub where Cage works. Its commitment to blackness astutely flips the script on the racial status quo in Hollywood, where people of color are forced to the margins of the screen or rendered invisible. To watch “Luke Cage” is to be reminded that a great many films, even in 2016, don’t contain a single black character, let alone one as fully fleshed out as Cage.

***

The unbearable whiteness of the industry reared its ugly head recently during an interview with Tim Burton, in which the director appeared to be having what Twitter was having. Burton, responding to the lack of diversity in his new film “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” threw up his hands at the need to cast people of color. “I remember back when I was a child watching ‘The Brady Bunch’ and they started to get all politically correct,” the goth auteur said. “Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black.”

The movie, starring Eva Green (“Penny Dreadful”) as an avian headmistress who watches over a group of children gifted with unusual abilities, finds Burton up to his usual twee, Hot Topic-styled antics. “Miss Peregrine,” however, is notable for one unfortunate piece of trivia: It’s the first film in the director’s 30-year career to feature a person of color in a lead role and the character is a cannibalistic villain. Samuel L. Jackson (“Pulp Fiction”) plays Barron, who eats the eyes of children in a quest to achieve eternal life. Jackson appeared in a similar role last year in Matthew Vaughn’s surprise hit “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” His billionaire megalomaniac in “Kingsman,” though, had a taste for McDonald’s, not Justin Bieber fans.

While it’s easy to single out Burton, whose movies are whiter than a three-day-old corpse, he’s one of many directors who almost never casts people of color. Woody Allen hasn’t featured a black man in a consequential part since Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Melinda and Melinda,” which was released in 2004. He’s directed 12 films since then. Filmmakers ranging from the Coen brothers to Wes Anderson have been called out for the lack of black faces in their expansive ensembles. A Funny or Die video spotlighted the Coens’ “No Country for Old Men,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Fargo,” “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” and “A Serious Man” for featuring “almost no black people.”

The very thing that makes “Luke Cage” distinctive is precisely what upsets these viewers: It’s unapologetically black. Coker, who previously wrote the screenplay for the Biggie Smalls biopic “Notorious,” fills nearly every inch of his frame with black faces — particularly in scenes of the crowded Harlem nightclub where Cage works. Its commitment to blackness astutely flips the script on the racial status quo in Hollywood, where people of color are forced to the margins of the screen or rendered invisible. To watch “Luke Cage” is to be reminded that a great many films, even in 2016, don’t contain a single black character, let alone one as fully fleshed out as Cage.

***

The unbearable whiteness of the industry reared its ugly head recently during an interview with Tim Burton, in which the director appeared to be having what Twitter was having. Burton, responding to the lack of diversity in his new film “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” threw up his hands at the need to cast people of color. “I remember back when I was a child watching ‘The Brady Bunch’ and they started to get all politically correct,” the goth auteur said. “Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black.”

The movie, starring Eva Green (“Penny Dreadful”) as an avian headmistress who watches over a group of children gifted with unusual abilities, finds Burton up to his usual twee, Hot Topic-styled antics. “Miss Peregrine,” however, is notable for one unfortunate piece of trivia: It’s the first film in the director’s 30-year career to feature a person of color in a lead role and the character is a cannibalistic villain. Samuel L. Jackson (“Pulp Fiction”) plays Barron, who eats the eyes of children in a quest to achieve eternal life. Jackson appeared in a similar role last year in Matthew Vaughn’s surprise hit “Kingsman: The Secret Service.” His billionaire megalomaniac in “Kingsman,” though, had a taste for McDonald’s, not Justin Bieber fans.

While it’s easy to single out Burton, whose movies are whiter than a three-day-old corpse, he’s one of many directors who almost never casts people of color. Woody Allen hasn’t featured a black man in a consequential part since Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Melinda and Melinda,” which was released in 2004. He’s directed 12 films since then. Filmmakers ranging from the Coen brothers to Wes Anderson have been called out for the lack of black faces in their expansive ensembles. A Funny or Die video spotlighted the Coens’ “No Country for Old Men,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Fargo,” “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” and “A Serious Man” for featuring “almost no black people.”


WTF? I'm watching "Luke Cage" right now and it's pretty good.

Luke Cage’ Renewed for Season 2 on Netflix

Did they change their mind?
'I see clearly that man in this world deceives himself by admiring and esteeming things which are not, and neither sees nor esteems the things which are.' — St. Catherine of Genoa
User avatar
divideandconquer
 
Posts: 1021
Joined: Mon Dec 24, 2012 3:23 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Fri Mar 10, 2017 1:43 pm

A Reflection from Boise on Police Brutality and the Need for Abolition Work

This contribution was submitted by Valerie Baeshk, an organizer in Boise, ID. Shout out to them and the growing crew of police abolitionists in their town!

Image
Demonstrators during a Black Lives Matter protest in Boise, ID, July 2016 (Harrison Berry/Boise Weekly)

I am a genderqueer, white radical activist in the Northwest. I am inviting you to remember. I am inviting you to engage in critical imagination and radical honesty with yourself and those around you. This piece is specifically for people in the communities that I am situated in in Idaho and the northwest. It is my hope readers will critically examine why abolition work is important, necessary, and feasible, and alternatively why liberalism is an abject failure. Please note that some of the examples listed here are hypothetical anecdotes based on lived experiences and no personal identifiers are being used. This piece was originally written as a writing sample for a job role, and I intend this piece to evoke thinking and collaboration about what makes this essential work possible.

Recall all of the police brutality, intimidation, PR stunts, community picnics, whitewashing of news, and police’s defensive stance following the deaths. Recall police brutality is an issue that spans intersections of time, space, economics, ability, and identity. Recall that when you call the police on your noisy neighbors you may be playing God- you may be the match that lights the fire of death. Recall that the police use their weapons to intimidate and threaten people, especially those in the queer community and communities of color. Recall the gun that was put to the head of an unarmed, non-english speaking refugee’s head. Recall a quiet and peaceful house. Recall the police banging on the door. Recall them gun-loaded, ready to kill another black person. Recall that they apologize and pretend what they did was acceptable, and it will never become public knowledge without an arrest.

Recall the seemingly outrageous and vile murders of unarmed people of color in 2016. There were articles written about them. Remember the trauma inflicted on them, on their families, and on the larger global community. Note how many police persons were fired or faced repercussions for their deaths. At least 303 black people were killed by police in 2016 alone. Repeat their names. Mourn their deaths. Recollect the videos of their deaths. Exposure didn’t make them safer. Their deaths didn’t shake the institution of the police. Restore the fact that they were human, that they were somebody. Notice that they were murdered by the hands of the government that says it will protect them. That said it would learn them, be them, see them.

Recall your reaction to all of this. Were you moved?

Recall that all of this is happening in Idaho.

This is exactly the reason activist work is needed now more than ever. The institution of the police, since it’s inception, has valued racial profiling and been complicit in the American imagination that has created simplistic mythology about black people, black bodies, black queerness, and black existence. According to Corrine Werder, the primary role of creating the police institution was to enforce order and to prevent crime. They state, “Enforcing order and disciplining bodies that occur outside that order are the central roles of the police…the presence of police is a disciplinary, control function,” and this certainly pervades society today in terms of what enforcement looks like, how it is acted upon, and who is affected, despite or in conjunction with violent measures. Similarly, Dr. Victor E. Kappeler notes the institution of slavery and control of minorities prevailing after the abolition of formal slavery contributed deeply to the formation of policing and the rise of the formal institution of the police.


Continues at: http://aworldwithoutpolice.org/2017/03/ ... tion-work/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Mar 10, 2017 8:36 pm

Waiting for the hit on blue pensions funds, just like the one that cut the Teamsters by 31%.
Pissed off cops are not nice and not healthy to be around.
User avatar
Iamwhomiam
 
Posts: 6572
Joined: Thu Sep 27, 2007 2:47 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Wed Mar 15, 2017 3:24 pm

American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Mon Apr 03, 2017 3:37 pm

THE ANARCHISM OF BLACKNESS

Make no mistake: progress has been secured by Black people’s mobilization as opposed to a single political party. We are the ones who have achieved much of the progress that changed the nation for the better for everyone. Those gains were not a product of any illusion of American exceptionalism or melting pots, but rather through blood, sweat and community self-defense. Our organization can be as effective now as it has been in the past, serving every locality and community based on their needs and determinations. This much can be achieved through disassociating ourselves from party politics that fail to serve us as Black freedoms cannot truly be secured in any given election. Our political energy is valuable and should not all be drained by political cycles that feed into one another as well as our own detriment.

Image

While bound to the laws of the land, Black America can be understood as an extra-state entity because of Black exclusion from the liberal social contract. Due to this extra-state location, Blackness is, in so many ways, anarchistic. African-Americans, as an ethno-social identity comprised of descendants from enslaved Africans, have innovated new cultures and social organizations much like anarchism would require us to do outside of state structures. Black radical formations are themselves fundamentally anti-fascist despite functioning outside of “conventional” Antifa spaces, and Black people have engaged in anarchistic resistances since our very arrival in the Americas.

From slave ship and plantation rebellions during enslavement to post-Emancipation labor and prison camps, to Harriet Tubman’s removal of enslaved peoples from the custody of their owners, to the creation of maroon societies in the American South, to combatting the historic (and present) collusion between state law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan — assertions of Black personhood, humanity and liberation have necessarily called into question both the foundations and legitimacy of the American state.

So given this history, why do we understand Black political formations as squarely entrenched within liberalism or as almost synonymous with supporting for the Democratic Party? The reality of the afterlife of slavery shows that the updated terms of Black citizenship are still inextricably linked to the original sins levied against us from the moment of this nation’s inception. We are not able to escape a cage that has never been fully removed, though liberal fantasy would have you think we will have a dream or dignifiedly protest out of harm’s way.

The simple and increasingly realized reality is that mass protests, petitions and the over-exhausted respectable methods liberals tout as sole solutions have a purpose, but do not stop bullets — that is why Dr. King and many of their favorite sanitized “non-violent” protesters of yesteryear carried weapons to defend themselves.


More at: https://roarmag.org/magazine/black-libe ... i-fascism/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Wed Apr 05, 2017 8:53 am

https://itsgoingdown.org/anti-fascist-r ... -unionism/

For an Anti-Fascist, Revolutionary Unionism!

By African People's Caucus

Image

Fascism is a concept that has grown a lot of particular interest since the election of Donald Trump and the failure of neoliberalism. While we don’t consider Trump himself to be a fascist but a right wing populist, we do recognize that he has mobilized a broad coalition of the right, which includes some fascists. However, reactionary violence is nothing new to black and African people living in the United States. Our communities have seen first-hand the terror campaigns of proto-fascist groups such as the KKK, and other kinds of organized white supremacist violence. Our oppression and exploitation have been central to the establishment of modern capitalism in the Americas. This also means we have been fighting back since we were brought here. Our stake in anti-fascism is not an academic question.

Fascism needs to be defined for our context: right now this is a smaller element participating within a popular front of the right wing. Most notable of this multi-tendency white nationalist milieu is the alt-right, who believe in atrocities such as “white” ethnic cleansing, misogyny, violence against a perceived “other” (minorities, refugees, Muslims, women, lgbtqia, Jews), and overwhelming worship of authority and class-based hierarchies. What allows this to spread is that neoliberal economic policies under capitalism cause the working class to suffer, and they are given scapegoats and offered false and authoritarian solutions. The reactionaries’ influence within the State will be strengthened, which will increase the suffering of black and African people at the hands of the police, prison, and poverty.

While fascism sometimes spreads using political opportunists like the electoral right wing, it is also an independent movement of the insurgent right wing and has an agenda separate from and opposed to the current state. Fascists also recruit through entryism into popular cultures and subcultures (music, arts, internet groups, faith-based, etc). Today’s fascists have improved the ability to hide within “legitimate” conservative political and social groups. Its spread is international and evident in the western turn away from neoliberalism towards economic nationalism, Islamophobic motives surrounding Brexit, and the State literally assassinating drug users in the Philippines. Trump is a big piece of this, but definitely not the only one. In addition to being aware of fascists attempting to turn the repressive state apparatus against us, we also have to prepare to defend ourselves against reactionaries like George Zimmerman and Dylann Roof, who have terrorized us with direct extralegal violence since we got here.

It’s important that we not let our history of struggle be claimed by the liberal narrative that the civil rights era was built on a dogmatic commitment to “nonviolence”. Black and African people have had to physically, mentally, and emotionally defend their communities from State and white supremacist terror, and it was organized. Groups like the Deacons for Defense, Black Liberation Army, and Black Panther Party understood why a self-defense approach in the face of police and reactionaries was necessary. If a person knows the bloodshed that occurred at the height of the labor movement, one must also acknowledge there has been consistent violence against black and African people for centuries.

Labor organizers and specifically the IWW have long-opposed class traitors like the Ku Klux Klan. White supremacists despise the radical left because of their commitment to solidarity with all oppressed people. The IWW will remain a target of the State and the far right, especially as our activity gains momentum and size. The General Defense Committee has been and can continue to be an excellent vehicle to grow the anti-fascist movement.

Anti-fascism needs to grow into an extremely popular movement in order to win. Communities that build their capacity for organized defense against the State and organized hate will be major contributors in the fight against capitalism.

We black and African workers face this threat in many places within and beyond our workplaces, and a fascist threat to any of the working class is a threat to the entire class. We have no choice but to confront organized white supremacists, just as we have no choice but to struggle against the bosses in our workplaces. We are calling on our comrades in the IWW and elsewhere, to join us in confronting white nationalists organizing to direct further violence against our people. We are calling on the General Administration to give our rank and file militants the support we need to organize in defense of ourselves and our class on the ground. We believe that the slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all” should also be demonstrated by our white comrades who feel as though confronting fascism is optional or of little importance.

For an anti-fascist, revolutionary unionism!

Twin Cities IWW African Peoples Caucus



African People's Caucus

https://www.facebook.com/originaliwwapc/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby American Dream » Tue Apr 18, 2017 4:36 pm

It's sad that we're not more clear on the history and its implications for now:



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... ebook-post
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: #4thPrecinctShutown in Minneapolis attacked by racist tr

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Apr 18, 2017 4:45 pm

American Dream » Tue Apr 18, 2017 3:36 pm wrote:It's sad that we're not more clear on the history and its implications for now:


[invective deleted on edit.]

Eva Rosenhaft is a primary researcher into this whole under-examined topic. Her article is a good brief introduction to it. All the more pity that it's buried in this non-related thread.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
User avatar
MacCruiskeen
 
Posts: 10558
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 6:47 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 53 guests