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Malooga On Ferguson - The Bigger Picture

by Malooga
lifted from a comment
@154 luca kasks: "Why don't you people wait for all the facts to come in?"
Facts are not like beloved relatives coming in to visit on cherished holidays; f
acts are like murdered ex-collaborators, to be secretly disappeared and buried d
eep in some dank forgotten hole in the ground.
Facts, for the ruling class, are dangerous beasts. Myths and stories are far saf
er fare.
Facts may escape unexpectedly at the very beginning of an event, before proper c
ontrol systems are in place, after that all one is likely to get is the official
story, or if that fails, the official fall-back position.
How could one get what is going on geopolitically by following this blog, and no
t get that the same conditions and principles of domination, control and brutali
zation operate similarly on a local scale?
Perhaps it might be helpful to detail those conditions and principles in order t
o remind ourselves what the theater in which these events take place is truly li
ke, both for the residents of places like Ferguson, and for the police who manag
e those residents.
The war on drugs was not a war against drugs. It was a war for the ultra-rich ru
lers to control and profit from the cash streams of illegal drug profits, to fin
ance un-sellable illegal wars, a method of destabilizing other countries through
drug addiction, and a method of criminalizing the intentional poverty and hopel
essness of the bottom 30%, or more, of the domestic population. (See: US protect
ion of heroin in southeast Asia and Afghanistan, CIA crack distribution in US ci
ties, Gary Webb, etc.)
The "War on Terror" is virtually the same thing: An outright war on the poor, an
d a destabilization of territories the empire does not control outright. Additio
nally, like drugs, the war is largely synthetic, that is to say, fake and victimle
ss, where the perpetrators have to be secretly sponsored to create an artificial
enemy, with what Rowan Berkeley accurately termed pseudo-gangs.
These wars are not real, in the sense that the problems as described are not rea
l; and, such problems as may exist, are intentionally handled so as to exacerbat
e them, and reinforce the problem-reaction-solution dynamic.
Drugs are not a problem to be eradicated, rather, they are a medium to be employ
ed, a means to an end. Terror, as we know, is not even a thing, it is just a tac
tic. You cant criminalize a tactic, but you can employ it as a means to an end.
I dont need to remind you that the US, the land of the free, has the largest -- in
absolute and relative terms -- prison population on the planet. And the vast, va
st, vast majority of those who are imprisoned are there for victimless crimes.
But thats not all. Because if you grow up in the projects, and you raise your kid
right, and miraculously manage to keep him away from guns and gangs, you still
face two more daunting hurdles: poverty and police violence.
Lets start with poverty. Official unemployment rates are lied over, real rates ca
n be many times higher, and many in the projects can find no work at all, or onl
y part-time work, without benefits, in a fast food joint. Lack of work equals la
ck of money, which equals lack of education, which equals lack of opportunity an
d work, and so on, in an endless vicious cycle.
Domestically, a new war is underway: an outright war on the poor, where those wh
o cant -- because of unemployment or other reasons -- keep up with their financia
l obligations are threatened with imprisonment for non-payment of bills, taxes,
child support, court fees, parking tickets, etc. Indeed, we as a society have re
gressed to the days of Oliver Twist and workhouses. Prisoners must work for thei
r keep these days as low cost producers for corporations, and quaint notions lik
e labor laws or minimum wages do not apply to them.
Prisons have been privatized, and prisoners are just another commodity to be pro
fited from in the capitalist system, like pork bellies, or wheat futures. Judges
, like police, have been proved to have quotas: they are expected to meet a prod
uction goal where, like a factory worker, a certain number of people must be imp
risoned each month or year. After all, the owners of these prisons are top campa
ign contributors, and they provide jobs to the local economy, so they must be kept
happy. Cops, like judges, are under pressure to do their part in maintaining pr
ison occupancy rates.
Any fool can see that this is not a description of a society, as anthropologists
might have studied 100 years ago, but of a catabolic process, whereby a sick or
diseased body (politic) greedily consumes itself on the way to the grave. And,
as they quietly lament around my way, it is what it is.
And yet, it is worse: for those that escape these first three evils -- drugs, th
e war on terror and poverty -- which I have briefly detailed, there is a fourth ev
il to be circumvented: what the sociologists call structural violence. And this ta
kes two forms. The first comes in the form of what psychiatrists term frustration
aggression. Watch industrially raised chickens, confined to 2/3 of a square foot
of cage space, artificial lighting, and a diet of drugs and GMO feedstock engag
e in vicious acts of cannibalism, and you will get a sense of what that is. The
ghetto is a similarly sociologically confined space, and frustration and the ina
bility to cope or escape can lead to misplaced violence or acting out against ot
hers.
The second type of violence is institutionalized violence, where, in an intentio
nal process of social engineering, one group or class of people is taught to hat
e and fear another group or class. This is the process that I, employing Gregory
Batesons insights, term schismogenesis. It is divide and rule at its most base l
evel: Civil wars, genocide, pogroms, mob violence, etc.
And yes, the police are deeply inculcated in perpetuating institutional violence
. They are trained to both hate and fear the public they lord over. And the syst
em is not accidental, by any means. The police on the beat, the SWAT teams, the
civic snipers, etc. -- these are people of rather limited intellectual abilities
in understanding how the entire geopolitical system works. They are, by nature,
not curious in that way -- rather, they are ordinary people who value fitting i
n, convention, tradition, and law and order in society. In other words, they buy
into the myths of our society, its freedom," and liberty," and goodness of purpose
," and rightness of heart," and exceptionalism," lock, stock, and barrel. And they
expect others to buy in as well in order to be good" patriotic Americans. After
all, if you are not with us, you are against us," as George Bush Jr. explained in
one of his few elegantly articulate formulations. Therefore, the police are vul
nerable to being easily propagandized.
They are then compartmentalized in knowledge, grouped into subgroups, and endles
sly trained and drilled in hate and fear of the official "enemy" of the day, and
then trained in techniques of the highest level of violence in thwarting the al
leged goals of these enemies. Police no longer make use of bobby clubs, they are
now given the elite weapons of war that our soldiers use in combat. They watch
movies to see how these weapons are employed. And to seal the deal, they are giv
en special classes, trainings and drills from the same specialists" on terror that
train our military because the American way of subversion always includes making
people feel special. Now, they are not dumb cops anymore, they are well trained
, and they are told that they are our elite guard protecting the homeland from tho
se who hate our ways of freedom.
They are also economically privileged compared to the people of places like Ferg
uson. Police have unions, and theirs are probably the only labor unions in Ameri
ca today not under constant attack from the ruling class. So they get generous o
vertime, benefits, can buy houses and raise kids in safety outside of the leviat
han that I am describing. They also, to a certain extent, benefit from the inequ
alities of society. So they look down on those they are policing and look up to
their betters: The wealthy and those who are experts in the threats facing societ
y today. Go to a real wealthy neighborhood, and the cops dont have that same smug
attitude. They address you as Sir or Maam. If they have to pull you over for having
a headlight out, they can be downright apologetic -- after all, you may be a jud
ge or a city councilman. They know who their betters are, and now they act like
public servants, albeit a little falsely servile. This is obviously not the case
in Ferguson, where the number of police stops annually is greater than the popu
lation of the town, and arrests are similarly elevated.
Finally, police on the force for any length of time must face the complete corru
ption of our society: They know that justice is a farce. They know who the drug
dealers are, the money runners, the pimps, the bought politicians, and judges --
the whole nine yards. And they know that there is no will to change any of this
. Moreover, they have no power over any of this: They can either choose to be co
mplicit in the corrupt system, or keep to themselves and hope for the best not t
o be set up one day as a patsy.
Thus, police in our society live in a state of total cognitive dissonance, what
one might call an ethical double-bind. They are forced to see that on one hand,
we are supposedly the greatest society ever; on the other hand, life is hopeless
ly brutal and corrupt. They must believe in, or at least publicly pay lip servic
e, to the myths they are sworn to uphold: the wars on drugs and terror; the prom
ise of progress and a quasi-religious kind of civic and moral redemption -- that
if you just keep your nose clean and work hard, you can escape the poverty of t
he ghetto they police; and that we live in a just society in which they are the
protectors of that justice. Meanwhile, they like everyone else in America, watch
es as the whole system is rapidly breaking down. They know that there are no rea
l jobs for the people of Ferguson, and that, like in the movie, TheTruman Show, th
e residents cannot escape the set.
This double bind is of course unresolvable. So police themselves, under tremendo
us internal strain, resort to the same frustration-aggression, and unexpected vi
olent lashing out, in order to cope.
Under these conditions, the only power police have is over the people in the com
munity they are supposed to serve. And the only way they can demonstrate that po
wer is by acting out brutally and violently.
Sociologists and criminologists know that the methods police are taught and trai
ned in dont work, just as economists know that trickle down really means flow up. Gen
tler methods involving community involvement, restorative justice, etc. have all
been worked out and proved to work. But the new methods actually do work, only
for different purposes and to different ends: they frighten and cower population
s, they allow one group to dominate another, they isolate people and pit them ag
ainst each other in fruitless zero-sum games, and they destroy human lives, valu
es, and charitableness. In sum, they control people, and allow them to be select
ively harvested for profit, like a slowly maturing cash crop in the sweltering S
t. Louis summer heat.
And, community policing, bad as it is these days, does not even compare to the v
iolence perpetrated by the new elite SWAT teams. These groups are as brutal as t
he teams used to clear houses in Iraq -- and no surprise there, for they are tau
ght the same methods: If it moves, take it out.
And that brings us back to the police. Under the conditions I have just detailed
, under the impossible constraints they forced to endure, how can they not be vi
olent, at least some of the time. And how can they, as an organized force, not b
e violent in a systematic manner. Perhaps not all the time, but more often than
not the social forces which police work under these days force violence to be pr
opagated down in a systematic and totalizing manner.
And it is the awareness of all that I have described that causes many commenters
here to reflexively assume police lies and violence to be ubiquitous. I hope th
at this is more understandable now. It is not a judgment of an individuals (the c
op who shot Michael Brown) -- who one obviously doesnt know well -- moral value,
rather it is an holistic appraisal of the social and material conditions of our
society today, in which the American underclass, and their handlers, seek to ope
rate.
Therefore, as for the police themselves, yes, perhaps out of the many hundreds o
f cases a year like this of police murder, corruption, assault, brutality, cover
-up, bribery, theft, etc., there are possibly a few that were accidental, uninte
ntional, or even false charges. If that were to be the case -- which appears pra
ctically impossible -- the facts would get out -- unless the cop were being inte
ntionally set up. But, to focus on this petty detail, and insist upon its import
ance to the bigger picture, is to miss that bigger picture altogether. I hope we
can all see this.

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