Don’t fall for it. As you might have heard — even countless times before — those in power would have plenty of interest in starting a race war in America. And if we carelessly succumb to their lurid divisive tactics — allowing racial differences to define us instead of uniting in shared humanness against those powers — they will succeed.
Fury, anger, frustration, and despair over the unjust dearth of accountability for police who perpetrate murder and violence in unprovoked or unreasonable circumstances is not only natural, it’s human.
And while statistics show police use force — as well as profiling, harassment, and more — disproportionately against minorities, the State would rather emphasize the disparity than address its underlying driver: the failed war on drugs.
In fact, the State’s drug war came to fruition specifically to criminalize hippies, seen as the radical left, and the black population — and by extension since, every non-caucasian group, as well as anyone opposing government.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” asked John Daniel Ehrlichman, President Nixon’s counsel and domestic policy chief, of Dan Baum for a 1994 article in Harper’s Magazine.
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and black people with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Obviously, the sham has enjoyed smashing success — from the government’s point of view.
This baseless criminalization, not only of drugs, but of not being white, or not accepting the State’s oppressively violent war machine — and its domestic twin, the prison-industrial complex — has created a chasm in understanding among segments of the population that seem virtually unbridgeable.
Of course, in post-declaration-of-the-drug-war America, life has been assigned value on a sliding scale. And though the government’s enforcement arm, the police, handily prove this nefarious disparity — particularly in this week’s controversial killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling — the populace similarly affirms the artificial divide in dissecting victims’ histories, rather than placing rightful blame on violence indiscriminately perpetrated by the State originating with the drug war.
Castile and Sterling suffered the same untimely deaths as thousands of others from every race — but the war on drugs has infused bias and bigotry in American policing so completely, black people are killed in alarmingly disproportionate numbers.
As has been previously pointed out, the drug war root cause of racially-biased policing isn’t even mentioned in the Black Lives Matter movement’s list of demands — a glaring omission evidencing the effectiveness with which the Nixon Administration initiated its criminalization of blackness.
America has a dirty little secret,” wrote Matt Agorist, “and that secret is that black lives do not matter; at least not to the state they don’t.”
And they won’t until we collectively end the criminalization of substances which fuels the issue and funds for-profit prisons, militarized police, and the all-out war the State actively wages against the people.
Yet, so many affirm the government’s false divide and conquer narrative.
Five randomly-targeted police officers died and seven more suffered gunshot wounds Thursday night in Dallas as a sniper — assumedly irate over police murders of civilians — took aim at their uniforms and badges as symbols of all that is wrong in the U.S. in 2016.
In fact, according to a spokesman for Black Power Political Organization, the group which confirmed it claims responsibility for the Dallas shootings in an exclusive interview with The Free Thought Project, anger over police violence was one of the primary motivators for … that act of indiscriminate violence against police.
In addition to a “number of reasons,” he said, “we want to punish them […] for punishing us.”
Violence, many have said to justify or rationalize those shootings of police, begets violence.
Funny, but that’s the exact rationale police employ in dehumanizing life for the sake of the State’s war on drugs.
Do you see the absurdity of the cycle yet?
Incentivizing locking up nonviolent drug users and sellers using quotas, mandatory minimum sentencing, and unnecessary plea deals not only lines the pockets of privatized prisons, it reduces human life to little more than statistics. Because substances that shouldn’t be are illegal, police — at the State’s implicit behest — view anyone outside the ‘brotherhood’ of law enforcement as criminals.
Rather than facing uncomfortable truths about the drug war’s racist, politicized beginnings, blaming victims and taking ‘sides’ against one another has become de facto policy of the people.
After all, it’s simpler to blame an entire race or creed or religion than it is to admit you might, in fact, have been misled by the government you’ve been indoctrinated since birth to blindly trust.
However, these not-at-all comfortable details must be examined by all of us, lest we allow unfounded vociferous prejudice to lead us straight into a second civil war — something increasingly likely as the empire doubles down on its authority amid its obvious, ultimate demise.
Since it seems readily apparent the State won’t be ‘fixing’ failed drug policy anytime soon — meaning, the police won’t be retrained to restrain use of force nor be required to carry the liability insurance which could effect the same — an obligation exists for us to resist.
Resist dividing amongst ourselves. Resist justifying State violence. Resist politicians’ constant race-baiting. Resist viewing those who break baseless, nonviolent criminal drug codes as criminals. Resist intolerance. Resist bigotry. Resist racism. Resist the blanket hate of any group — including police.
But most of all, it is imperative we resist resorting to violence — the same violence the State unhesitantly doles out — as an method to deal with frustrated outrage and desperation.
If we do, we are no better than the State. And worse, if we employ violence, we risk all-out war with each other — a veritable guarantee that criminal State will opportunistically rob us all of our few remaining rights, and potentially martial law.
No matter how abhorrent our current situation superficially appears, never forget the most crucial point — this is not about black versus white, no matter what the war on drugs has led us to believe.
This is us versus them — the people versus the State — and the shackles of governmental control will never be removed if we’re too involved in fighting our similarly-shackled neighbors.
The more we vilify each other, the more we ignore the fact we’re all under the same State thumb — and the greater risk we put ourselves for never solving that dilemma.
They — the politicians and profiteers — pant breathlessly over the prospect of a race war. Don’t be their fools. Please SHARE this information!
via tftp
