Interesting Times

Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque
In a brief post yesterday, I wrote that African-Americans were treated as second-class citizens in the United States. I would now like to apologize for making such a controversial - and flagrantly incorrect - statement. Obviously, I was letting my knee-jerk liberal PC prejudices run wild. For as a new article in The Nation forcefully demonstrates, African-Americans are not treated as second-class citizens in the United States; they are treated as wild animals to be hunted down and shot in cold blood.

The article is a very detailed investigation of the white vigilante groups that formed, with police approval, in the white enclave of Algiers Point in New Orleans in the days after Hurrican Katrina. Although authorities had designated the area - which had largely escaped damage in the storm and flood - as a vital evacuation point for those trapped in the city, a group of white residents seized the opportunity to declare open season on anyone with black skin. Many African-Americans were shot and several were killed; but no one knows the exact number, because New Orleans police have refused to investigate any of the incidents, and coroner's records of the gun-blasted bodies that showed up in the area have unaccountably gone missing.

Many of the shooters have been quite open - even boastful - of their activities, and of their certainty that they will never be prosecuted. As the Nation?s A.C. Thompson reports:

 

[Militia member Wayne Janak is] equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

"Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all?white against black?that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful" - her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

"Jurassicpork" at "Welcome Back to Pottersville" sums it up well:

But this goes beyond mere race-based paranoia and becomes a massive, urgent commercial for the necessity of a functioning, efficient and community-engaged police department. Hurricane Katrina was certainly one of the greatest natural calamities to strike the United States but people like the Algiers Point militia, these little Count Zaroffs in waiting, far from acting out of any understandable concern for their property, used the total lack of law enforcement as an opportunity to murder black people simply for being black and getting caught on their turf. Far from being a siege mentality, the center of Algiers Point descended into barbarism at the first available opportunity, the minute the blue uniforms disappeared. The mere absence of law enforcement, in their minds, gave them a license to kill.

In other words, we've actually regressed several steps from the early 60's when three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi by white racists. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had flooded the area with agents, did a thorough investigation and brought several men to justice (albeit for civil rights violations).

Fast forward to 2005-2008: No FBI, no local law enforcement, no autopsies, no records, no pending litigation, no nothing.

But killers and would be killers like this aren't confined to small areas of the US like NOLA and big city streets prowled by gangs and backwoods white supremecist enclaves. They've been exported to serve US interests in other areas of the world as well. (Does the epithet "sand nigger" ring any bells?)

I was more stressed as time went on. It had much to do with hearing some soldiers boast about their kills. I thought it was insane. I wrote in my journal, ?The Army makes use of and channels what would otherwise be criminal behavior using people who would otherwise be no more than criminals.? Of course, the exception is never the rule. ~American, Interrupted

Lax enlistment standards have inadvertently allowed known members of the Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings, and various white supremacist groups to join the military. But no gang has infiltrated the armed forces as deeply as the Gangster Disciples, a 100,000-member Chicago-based syndicate that has been linked to an assortment of crimes ranging from murder to mortgage fraud. Now, with the unintended help of the U.S. Army, the gang is extending its reach worldwide. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article last year, Gangster Disciple graffiti has been spotted all over Iraq. The gang's initials and main symbol, the six-pointed star, have been tagged on concrete blast barriers, armored vehicles, and even remote firebase guard shacks. In an astonishing study of just three Army bases over the past four years, a Department of Defense detective identified more than 300 active gang members. Some experts estimate that up to 2 percent of the soldiers on active duty-perhaps as many as 20,000-have sworn allegiance to one gang or another.  ~Gangs of Iraq

Who bears responsibility for these Iraqi deaths? The young soldiers pulling the triggers? The commanders who establish rules of engagement that privilege "force protection" over any obligation to protect innocent life? The intellectually bankrupt policymakers who sent U.S. forces into Iraq in the first place and now see no choice but to press on? The culture that, to put it mildly, has sought neither to understand nor to empathize with people in the Arab or Islamic worlds? ~Andrew J. Bacevich, What?s An Iraqi Life Worth?

Maybe, both at home and abroad, it's more than just a few bad apples at the bottom of the barrel. Maybe, as has been demonstrated in regard to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the racism, the cruelty, the psychopathy, the evil blood lust, is at the top as well. God help those caught in between.

The ugliest truth is that our civilization is built on three unspeakable holocausts, each justified by a White racist ideology, causing the murder of millions, each committed with impunity: (1) acquiring free land at gunpoint while systematically brutalizing hundreds of Indigenous cultures; (2) acquiring free labor by force from ancient Indigenous cultures in Africa by violent removal of those who survived capture; and (3) acquiring cheap resources, labor and markets through thousands of overt and covert interventions at gunpoint into more than 100 countries.

...From the 1790s to the early 2000s, the U.S. military overtly intervened more than 500 times in over 100 nations to pursue its hegemonic designs (and thousands of covert interventions). One military study revealed that between 1869 and 1897, the U.S. Navy made 5,980 port calls to further U.S. commercial and political advantages. Virtually all U.S. wars and interventions have been masked under elaborate rhetorical pretexts, such that we learned an extraordinarily censored version of history. The U.S. military and various police agencies have also intervened hundreds of thousands of times domestically.

The pattern has been consistent: either people will assimilate into the White culture, or be eliminated by it. White supremacy is the cult and we have all been subjected to it - either in complicity with it, or to be crushed by it. Our origins intrinsically are possessed by shame of genocide through terror.  ~S. Brian Wilson, 9/11 & Bush are Distractions from a People?s Revolt from Below

Comment: Also read "Bad Apples" Didn't Fall Far From the Tree