Terror abroad and Fascism at home
When a nation commits itself to the “tactics of terror” abroad i.e. drones, assassination, the deaths of innocent in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Palestine, and, as the plutocrats become addicted to “national security” contracts for the manufacture and purchase of weapons, so the corporate oligarchs turn on their own citizens and send out their so-called guardians, dressed now in desert fatigues to hunt down the homeless or the black and brown man, the protester and the dissenter.
The Albuquerque Police Department dare not shoot dogs, so they shoot the homeless and disenfranchised, producing body bags to send a message: don’t tread on us or our masters. We are using you as target practice. Now, we see in vivid color, the pictures from Ferguson, Missouri, cops dressed in military garb, riding armored vehicles designed for urban warfare, high-powered weapons trained on the citizenry, shooting down the All-American scapegoat i.e. the young black man——just as soldiers once shot up the Native Americans and shoved the indigenous Hispanic peasant and vaquero aside during the era of Manifest Destiny.
Oh, yes, it’s never been about black and brown but about the rich against the rest, while the elite plays off age-old prejudices in a “divide and conquer” tactic that became a permanent strategy: hence the southern strategy and the strategy of imprisoning young men of color behind bars or shooting them dead in the streets.
Karl Marx called it class warfare and what could be more obvious than the events being photographed from bloody Ferguson, where like the Mid East, the cops and soldiers arrest journalists for reporting and where the rioters, young people, like the resisters in the Mid East and Gaza, refuse to run like sheep.
What could be more obvious as the disenfranchised rise up to challenge the Plutocrat’s shock troops, the victims of the propaganda, who would do the elite’s dirty work? How long before we have individuals who will sacrifice themselves like Palestinian members of the Intifada or the Buddhists who lit themselves on fire as protest during the Vietnam era?
When hope gives way to despair life gives way to death even as suicide bombers make a last statement.
The Bush Administration destabilized Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Mid East. Obama continues to expand and prolong the unending war. His pronounced democratic successor, another Clinton, threatens to sound even more warlike. The entire Mid East along with American proxy Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Government appears to be blowing up in Biblical-like conflagration.
Despite pleas for justice and reminders to its readers by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the lessons of the past, the Israelis are engaged in the slow genocide of the Palestinians they starve and bomb, blockade and beat down. More than 400 school-age children have died and Netanyahu blames the victims.
And now we see the black-robed militants, called Isis, who seek the destruction of ancient Christian Yazidis, Yazidis, men, women, and children, who stand forlorn on rocky mountaintops waiting for Noah’s Ark. They get food drops and a few F-16s. In Ferguson the kids get killed, clubbed, gassed, threatened with urban warfare. Chaos.
All this takes place while we listen to the Tower of Babel.