The false narrative of cop victimization

D.P. GREANVILLE

A photo-op hugging phoney and supreme opportunist, Giuliani typifies the politics of the rightwing, and the establishment, for that matter. “America’s Mayor” a guy whose ethics are not much above those of an ambulance chaser, gained his title by showing up on the ruins of the Twin Towers barely after the dust had settled (CC/Wikipedia)

[dropcap]How do you[/dropcap] distinguish liberals from radicals?  There are many tests, but one of the most reliable is that liberals will by default preach that peaceful protest will get the system changed, that nonviolence is the golden path, and that, in consequence, no strikes, no public mobilizations, confrontations, let alone violence, is or will be necessary to change an institutionalized evil.

The establishment mouthpieces—a sector of the official state that also goes normally under the label “liberal” (vide Obama, and the rest of the Democrats and a few Republicans) is insistent on that point, as one of their self-assigned missions is to defang and deflect real challenges to the sacred and most profitable order. Thus safely delineated—who’s “respectable” in his right to protest and who’s not, the latter being again by definition the “crazies” of the left and the right, or people belonging to the “wrong” race—the guardians of the ship of state can pick policies to neutralize the challengers.

U.S. Marines from 1st Battalion, 5th Marines fire at insurgent positions during the First Battle of Fallujah.

That nonviolence and rigorous pacifism rarely gets a well-entrenched system of iniquity to change its spots, not to mention disappear, is an inconvenient but easily ascertained historical fact that liberals and conservatives would rather not dwell upon. Thus it is never mentioned that, yes, while Gandhi may have been instrumental in formally throwing the Brits out of India, filthy, barbaric evil in the Western-suported oligarchies and dictatorships of the Third World, in the European fascist nations, and so on, could not be dislodged without a monumental war that cost in excess of 70 million people, and protracted class struggles, and the evil was not really completely and definitely expunged, as the struggle against a resurgent fascism in Europe has become a reality once again, this time with the epicenter of the infection not in Berlin but in Washington.

It’s a fair assumption that Gandhi would not have lasted a minute if he had been preaching his gospel of peaceful activism in nations festering with brutal militaries, US-sponsored and trained death squads, and rightwing militias ready to do the plutocracy’s bidding. The shameful record is there for all to see, even if the mainstream media, the professional politicos and establishment historians and punditocracy keep looking the other way.

By not recognizing elementary facts, hotheads like Patrick Lynch raise the temperature of the social dialog, making it impossible, and actually endangering those in the police who discharge their duties according to fair and professional standards. 

The relative silence in the United states about such criminal policies is of course deliberate, for in the modern world such situations are part of the engineered social space, the democratic illusion and consequent thick hypocrisy in the capitalist democracies being the price that systemic vice pays virtue to legitimate its rule.

THE YOUNG TURKS: Mayor De Blasio Blamed For Horrific Killing Of NYPD Officers

Be that as it may,  the pervasive myth of America’s intrinsic goodness, as Salvador de Madariaga called it, “the myth of the immaculate conception of US foreign policy”—continues to be an insult to the victims of such organized suppressive terror in a rosary of countries that easily encircle the globe, from El Salvador,  Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina (just to name some examples in the Western hemisphere) to Indonesia, Vietnam, most of Africa, and, of course, more recently, the long tormented Middle East and central Asia, with Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya, the glaring, blood-soaked monuments to a tradition of perfidious, self-righteous meddling that goes back to the dawn of modern Western imperialism in the 15th century.

At this point, the irrefutable fact is that the victims of horrific violence at the hands of the defenders of an unjust status quo—unequivocally supported by the United States and its accomplices in Western Europe, old hands at the game of brutal domination—have suffered unspeakable terrors and died by the tens of millions, for the most part in virtual anonymity.

Again, contrary to the chorus of system apologists, the rise of the “indispensable nation” has provided no relief, but precisely the opposite. Given the simply monstrous superpower capabilities of the United States, the roster of nations now involved in this sordid business of imperial-instigated, directed, and financed large-scale repression is far longer, in effect near universal, leaving few states with their reputations untainted.

The post-communist regime in Poland, to name just one case, a much celebrated “free Western-style democracy”, but one, by cultural tradition, fiercely “anti-Russian” and anti-Communist, wasted little time before dirtying its petticoats by hosting CIA black sites. (See The hidden history of the CIA’s prison in Poland, as reported of all places in the Washington Post, normally an instrument of imperialist propaganda.)⁽¹⁾

The purpose of such international maneuvers has never changed. There is no nation where “American aid” —open or surreptitious—has not been used primarily to keep their populations at bay, while advancing the interests of the capitalist hegemon, lest the downtrodden unwashed masses, so cynically praised in Christian liturgy, assume their rightful and sovereign place under the sun. As preached by the Church and the Empire, this- wordliness is wrong, wrong, but other-wordliness is fine, indeed encouraged.

The precedent for the fact that institutionalized evil may require huge armies to uproot, equipped with the massive weaponry enabled by modern industrialism, was already seen in the US “war between the states” more than 150 years ago, a colossal clash that consumed the lives of more than 650,000 Americans, and which laid waste to significant swaths of the young nation’s territory. As is now well known (at least among politically aware publics), contrary to myth the war was not originally fought for noble reasons, to emancipate slaves or discombobulate the Southern plantocracy, but it ended up packaging that goal, which it filled formally by 1865, although in practice the old system continued to oppress African Americans for another 100 years. It took massive and brave mobilizations to dislodge the more blatant aspects of such tyranny, but the second-class, oppressed status of Black America remained in place, and is obvious today to any impartial observer, despite the sprinkling of affluent, “non-threatening” Blacks such as Obama, Oprah Winfrey, the celebrity preacher-politicians, and that ubiquitous nincompoop bunch, the Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Repressing the “crazies” and “those who choose violence” over peaceful protest

The state as the pinnacle of organized power defending the ruling, privileged minority does not and will never operate even-handedlly in its administration of justice and state-sanctioned violence. Thus it’s delusional to believe that when push comes to shove the rightwing militias and similar crypto-fascist formations—no matter what outrages they commit— will be repressed by the police with the same all-out vigor and viciousness reserved for the left. In fact, you can bank on the idea that in a situation of widespread public mobilization against the plutocratic order the rightwing crazies will be armed or indirectly mobilized to act as judicially above the law shock troops, death squads, etc., on behalf of the establishment. The precedent has been seen in a number of nations, the most notable example being Germany’s Weimar Republic, where the social democratic regime, by betraying the workers and colluding with the aristocratic and military sectors, midwifed the ascent to power of the Nazis.

Both the police and military understand their assigned role. While not exactly populated with geniuses, by temperament and acculturation, they are averse to disorder, whose systematic causes they do not understand.

Now that the militarized police are almost in open rebellion against its nominal civilian command, having seen their favorite m.o. questioned by a wider sector of the population, including some public figures, and at a moment when opportunistic rightwing politicians, typical filth like George Pataki or Rudy Giuliani, quickly rush before the cameras to add petrol to the fire, it’s useful to keep a few things in mind. Forgive me if some of these things seem obvious to you.

FIRST

As pointed out by Rob Urie and Glen Ford in their excellent pieces on the topic, the police feel betrayed by the very layers of society it sees as loyally and selflessly protecting. Glen Ford notes that,

The cops threaten mutiny if the State does not stick up for the men and women who do its dirty work. PBA honcho Patrick Lynch denounced “those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did everyday. We tried to warn, ‘It must not go on. It cannot be tolerated.’”

To which the protesters answer: the police killings and the criminalization of a whole people must not go on and cannot be tolerated.

For his part, evoking the indignation of the top US military brass and politicians to the audacity of Fallujah resisting and fighting back against a brutal army of occupation, Rob Urie reminded us that,

“Left unsaid at the time was that most Americans subjected to an illegal war, invasion and occupation would respond largely as the citizens of Fallujah had done. Self-defense against invading hordes is as close to a natural right as the term could convey…”

Is that so difficult to understand? Urie continues:

When Ismaaiyl Brinsley murdered NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in self-proclaimed revenge killings for the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner spokespersons for the NYPD and the PBA (Police Benevolent Association) were quick to personalize the victims while using the language of belligerent militarism to politicize the broader context of growing public resistance to police violence. What wasn’t expressed by NYPD spokespersons was any regret for the unjustifiable murder of Eric Garner or any number of other black and brown youth, for participation in systematic racial repression like stop-question-and-frisk or for the acting as an occupying army in poor neighborhoods of color. What was affirmed through the words of spokespersons for the police was that black lives don’t matter but that cop lives do.  

So the cops are up in arms, almost literally, and the insurrection, their bitterness, while going underground, may not extinguish itself as long as public criticism continues.

SECOND

All violence is not equal. The nature of violence and its moral content varies according to the social matrix in which it originates. This is not Marxist but Jesuist logic. As a rule “retail violence,” as opposed to massive, organized, direct and indirect, violence, as the system practices it daily, begins to occur when the conditions of life become unbearable for a sector of the population in which all hope has vanished.

Minimal and sporadic as the instances of violence against the police may be, this is usually enough to spark a disproportionate retaliation by the forces of order. Thus, in almost all cases studied, from Rome on down, violence in a society defined by enormous inequity starts with the state.

It’s a lie that it is the left, the revolutionists, the people yearning for true social change, who fire the first shots. History shows that, except for those instances in which a small, adventurist nucleus, way ahead of the masses’ consciousness, attempts to spark a rebellion by using armed force, it is the praetorian guard of the established order—whether Czardom, military tyranny, or capitalist democracy—that moves to “decapitate” and intimidate the nascent democratic movement via the liberal administration of state violence. Eventually, a self-defense force is organized and the outcome of that struggle is either liberation, a worse form of tyranny or a new, highly imperfect but perhaps more tolerable status quo. The cases of South Africa and El Salvador testify to that. History guarantees nothing except that ignoring its lessons perpetuates its tragedies.

Final comment
While rightwing politicians like Giuliani (as is customary) hardly help the situation by providing respectability to the fascistic utterances of narrow-minded zealots like Patrick Lynch, the card-carrying “liberals” are equally toxic.

Their language is characteristically more convoluted (see sidebar below), but the message is clear: the United States is NOT a nation in which African Americans might feel justified in resisting the police or believe that their lives are endangered by their presence. Instead such thinking should be classified as a form of insanity. As usual it’s easy to see the world in conciliatory tones when comfortably perched on the rungs of the upper middle class in the underbelly of the ruling class.

Indeed, what we witness here is a massive failure of the empathetic imagination, which should surprise no one given the natural predisposition to selfish behavior that characterizes American society. Considering how extreme and vitriolic guys like Lynch can get when their peripheral self-interest is threatened, one may justifiably ask if they would be as peaceable and law-abiding as the vast majority of Black people still are if they had to endure the ministrations of a constantly intrusive and brutal police force. Does Lynch and his ilk ever think (or heard) of the Black & Tan? It might be salutary if they did. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen.

Patrice Greanville is editor in chief of The Greanville Post.

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