For too long, we have let cynical politicians and
business leaders divide and rule us, funding police and
the Pentagon over real human needs, pitting us against
each other at home and leading us off to wars against
our neighbors abroad.
By Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Daviesune 09,
2020 "Information
Clearing House" - On June 1, President
Trump threatened to deploy active-duty U.S. military
forces against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters in
cities across America. Trump and state governors
eventually deployed
at least 17,000 National Guard troops across the
country. In the nation’s capital, Trump
deployed nine Blackhawk assault helicopters,
thousands of National Guard troops
from six states and at least 1,600 Military Police
and active-duty combat troops from the 82nd Airborne
Division, with written orders to
pack bayonets.
After a week of conflicting orders during which
Trump demanded
10,000 troops in the capital, the active-duty
troops were finally ordered back to their bases in
North Carolina and New York on June 5th, as the
peaceful nature of the protests made the use of
military force very obviously redundant, dangerous
and irresponsible. But Americans were left
shell-shocked by the heavily armed troops, the tear
gas, the rubber bullets and the tanks that turned
U.S. streets into war zones. They were also shocked
to realize how easy it was for President Trump,
single-handedly, to muster such a chilling array of
force.
But we shouldn’t be surprised. We have allowed our
corrupt ruling class to build the most destructive
war machine in history and to place it in the hands
of an erratic and unpredictable president. As
protests against police brutality flooded our
nation’s streets, Trump felt emboldened to turn this
war machine against us—and may well be willing to do
it again if there is a contested election in
November.
Americans are getting a small taste of the
fire and fury that the U.S. military and its
allies inflict on people overseas on a regular basis
from Iraq and Afghanistan to Yemen and Palestine,
and the intimidation felt by the people of Iran,
Venezuela, North Korea and other countries that have
long lived under
U.S. threats to bomb, attack or invade them.
|
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
|
For African-Americans, the latest round of fury
unleashed by the police and military is only an
escalation of the low-grade war that America’s rulers
have waged against them for centuries. From the horrors
of slavery to post-Civil War
convict leasing to the apartheid Jim Crow system to
today's mass criminalization, mass incarceration and
militarized policing, America has always treated
African-Americans as a permanent underclass to be
exploited and “kept in their place” with as much force
and brutality as that takes.
Today, Black Americans are at least
four times as likely to be shot by police as
white Americans and
six times as likely to be thrown in prison.
Black drivers are
three times more likely to be searched and
twice as likely to be arrested during traffic
stops, even though police have better luck finding
contraband in white people's cars. All of this adds
up to a racist policing and prison system, with
African-American men as its prime targets, even as
U.S. police forces are increasingly militarized and
armed
by the Pentagon.
Racist persecution does not end when
African-Americans walk out the prison gate. In 2010,
a third of African-American men had a
felony conviction on their record, closing doors
to jobs, housing, student aid, safety net programs
like SNAP and cash assistance, and in some states
the right to vote. From the first "stop and frisk"
or traffic stop, African-American men face a system
designed to entrap them in permanent second-class
citizenship and poverty.
Just as the people of Iran, North Korea and
Venezuela suffer from poverty, hunger, preventable
disease and death as the
intended results of brutal U.S. economic
sanctions, systemic racism has
similar effects in the U.S., keeping
African-Americans in exceptional poverty, with
double the
infant mortality rate of whites and schools that
are as
segregated and unequal as when segregation was
legal. These underlying disparities in health and
living standards appear to be the main reason why
African-Americans are dying from Covid-19 at
more than double the rate of White Americans.
Liberating a neocolonial world
While the U.S. war on the black population at home
is now exposed for all of America—and the world—to
see, the victims of U.S. wars abroad continue to be
hidden. Trump has escalated the horrific wars he
inherited from Obama, dropping
more bombs and missiles in 3 years than either
Bush II or Obama did in their first terms.
But Americans don’t see the terrifying
fireballs of the bombs. They don’t see the dead
and
maimed bodies and
rubble the bombs leave in their wake. American
public discourse about war has revolved almost
entirely around the experiences and sacrifices of
U.S. troops, who are, after all, our family members
and neighbors. Like the double standard between
white and black lives in the U.S., there is a
similar double standard between the lives of U.S.
troops and the millions of
casualties and ruined lives on the other side of
the conflicts the U.S. armed forces and U.S. weapons
unleash on other countries.
When retired generals speak out against Trump’s
desire to deploy active-duty troops on America’s
streets, we should understand that they are
defending precisely this double standard. Despite
draining the U.S. Treasury to wreak horrific
violence against people in other countries, while
failing to “win” wars even on its own confused
terms, the U.S. military has maintained a
surprisingly good reputation with the U.S. public.
This has largely exempted the armed forces from
growing public disgust with the systemic corruption
of other American institutions.
Generals
Mattis and Allen, who came out against Trump’s
deployment of U.S. troops against peaceful
protesters, understand very well that the fastest
way to squander the military’s “teflon” public
reputation would be to deploy it more widely and
openly against Americans within the United States.
Just as we are exposing the rot in U.S. police
forces and calling for defunding the police, so we must
expose the rot in U.S. foreign policy and call for
defunding the Pentagon. U.S. wars on people in other
countries are driven by the same racism and ruling class
economic interests as the war against African-Americans
in our cities. For too long, we have let cynical
politicians and business leaders divide and rule us,
funding police and the Pentagon over real human needs,
pitting us against each other at home and leading us off
to wars against our neighbors abroad.
The double standard that sanctifies the lives of
U.S. troops over those of the people whose countries
they bomb and invade is as cynical and deadly as the
one that values white lives over black ones in
America. As we chant “Black Lives Matter,” we should
include the lives of black and brown people dying
every day from U.S. sanctions in Venezuela, the
lives of black and brown people being blown up by
U.S. bombs in Yemen and Afghanistan, the lives of
people of color in Palestine who are tear-gassed,
beaten and shot with Israeli weapons funded by U.S-taxpayers.
We must be ready to show solidarity with people
defending themselves against U.S.-sponsored violence
whether in Minneapolis, New York and Los Angeles, or
Afghanistan, Gaza and Iran.
This past week, our friends
around the world have given us a magnificent
example of what this kind of international
solidarity looks like. From
London, Copenhagen and Berlin to New Zealand,
Canada and
Nigeria, people have poured into the streets to
show solidarity with African-Americans. They
understand that the U.S. lies at the heart of a
racist political and economic international order
that still dominates the world 60 years after the
formal end of Western colonialism. They understand
that our struggle is their struggle, and we should
understand that their future is also our future.
So as others stand with us, we must also stand with
them. Together we must seize this moment to move
from incremental reform to real systemic change, not
just within the U.S. but throughout the racist,
neocolonial world that is policed by the U.S.
military.
