Those Who Protect Bad Cops Have Blood On Their Hands, Perpetuate Criminal Cop Culture

PBA-PatrickLynchCelebratesJuryVerdict-GarnerCase

PBA’s Patrick Lynch denounces NYC Mayor de Blasio for “throwing cops under the bus,” while celebrating the grand jury verdicts, especially in the Eric Garner case. (YouTube screen grab)

By Rob Kall, Editor, OpEd News

[dropcap]For the culture[/dropcap] Pat Lynch, the head of the largest NY Police union– PBA– has blamed Mayor Bill de Blasio and US Attorney General Eric Holder for the killings of two police officers, saying their blood is on de Blasio’s hands. It ends up that Lynch has attacked every one of the past six mayors of NYC.

Lynch is an attack dog. Lynch is the one who has the blood of two police officers on his hands. Lynch has the blood of Eric Garner on his hands.

The negative reaction to the recalcitrant cops who continue to circle the wagons professing sanctimony and innocence in the face of undeniable evidence to the contrary has been noted in many social media, including YouTube.

Lynch is a huge part of the problem with police who kill. As leader of a large union, that makes the union a major part of the problem.

The union is unquestioning in its support of bad cops. It protects and fights for bad cops– criminal, murdering cops.

Published on Dec 4, 2014

In a press conference at PBA headquarters, PBA president Pat Lynch slammed Mayor de Blasio for “throwing New York City police officers under the bus” following a Staten Island grand jury’s decision not to indict P.O. Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner.

For the culture that supports and defends criminality among police to change, the elements that maintain the culture must change. That means that the head of the “snake”– Pat Lynch has to go. Unions with mentalities that back up criminal police officers have to go.

The right wingers (figures like Rudi Giuliani) who run cover for bad cops need to be called out again and again. That should be the job of the mainstream media. They could at least offer an equal voice to people protesting against police killings. [Of course, they rarely do.—Eds)

Until the police and their unions and supporters make it clear that they acknowledge that there ARE bad cops and they have to be held accountable, ALL police are going to get a bad rap that they don’t deserve.

As Rabbi Michael Lerner has said, until grand jury prosecutors start doing their jobs, THEY are putting good cops at risk. THEY are giving all cops a bad reputation. This should be an idea that gets more attention.

I hope there are some police officers who get it that Police union head Pat Lynch really does have blood on his hands, that every police union leader, ever prosecutor, every mayor, every pundit and politician who makes excuses for bad cops who kill is contributing to the murders of cops.

So speak out. Tell the police you see on the street that if they are honest that they have to police their own, that the old ways are bad for police, bad for America. And since the USA sets a very bad example that will be cited by police all over the world. A bad cop in NYC or Ferguson can lead to victims in every continent on the planet.

But if you do speak to police, do it nicely, from your heart, not from anger. This is a very touchy issue that has police feeling very defensive. So, don’t do it if you’re stopped by a cop. Do it when you see a cop in a place where you are not at risk of being mistreated or abused.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rob Kall is the founding editor of Opednews.com–– which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from a predominantly authoritarian matrix to a bottom-up one (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots).

Source: http://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=186225

PBA Blasts “Anti-Police Rhetoric” After Eric Garner Death

Published on Aug 5, 2014

By: NY1 News Updated 8/5/2014 – 6:01 PM

Leaders of two police unions had some strong words Tuesday over what they are calling anti-police rhetoric in the wake of the death of Eric Garner last month.

APPENDIX I
Surprisingly, the mainstream media, including the NYC metro tabloids that pretend to care for the working class have been divided by Lynch’s deranged accusations. The New York Post, a filthy tabloid controlled by Rupert Murdoch, the master of Fox News, an unmatched massmind polluter, has not surprisingly sided with Lynch, but the equally influential Daily News actually came out speaking in critical tones of the PBA’s chief.

BELOW, SEE EXCERPTS FROM THE DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL AND OTHER MEDIA ON LYNCH’S RHETORIC, INCLUDING THE VOCALLY CRITICAL, AND SPOT ON, GAWKER.COM ANALYSIS.
[learn_more caption=”Cop leader Pat Lynch recklessly targets enemies, including Mayor de Blasio“]

Police union chief Pat Lynch recklessly targets “enemies,” including Mayor de Blasio

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Friday, December 19, 2014, 4:05 AM

“Apparently believing his own angry, divisive rhetoric hasn’t done the trick, Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch has moved into calling on cops to split New York into their friends and their enemies. A recording of Lynch addressing PBA delegates reveals that he is also pointing his members toward an unlawful rule-book slowdown as a tactic in warring with Mayor de Blasio.

“If we won’t get support when we do our jobs, if we’re going to get hurt for doing what’s right, then we’re going to do it the way they want it. Let me be perfectly clear. We will use extreme discretion in every encounter,” Lynch said, adding: “Our friends, we’re courteous to them. Our enemies, extreme discretion. The rules are made by them to hurt you. Well, now we’ll use those rules to protect us.” He went on: “There’s a book they make for us where, if you carried it with you, you won’t need to go to the gym. Every time there’s a problem, they tell us what we can’t do. They tell us what we shouldn’t do. They never tell us what we can do. “We’re going to take that book, their rules, and we’re going to protect ourselves, because they won’t. We will do it the way they want us to do it. We will do it with their stupid rules, even the ones that don’t work.”

READ THE REST

For its part, Newsweek, struck a more conciliatory tone, posting a more polished essay on Lynch, suggesting some explanations of why he sees the world through such a thuggish fascistic prism:

It takes Patrick Lynch a very long time to get around New York: Merely walking to his SUV, parked around the corner from his office at the tip of lower Manhattan, can take 15 minutes. That’s because Lynch makes a point of shaking hands with every police officer within about a 20-foot range. A more distant officer will get a wave and a shouted greeting. The flesh-pressing is mostly just saluting the troops, but it is also good politics, since Lynch is up for reelection next year (his fifth term). With his graying hair perfectly slicked back and a pinstripe suit outlining solid features, Lynch has neatly transitioned from policing to politics.

The PBA’s communications director, Al O’Leary, believes Lynch is the most powerful police union chief in the world: His union has twice as many members as Chicago does police officers. Lynch’s loudest critics—for example, a city councilman who had once been a Black Panther and deemed the PBA the “Police Brutality Association” after the Stansbury shooting—would be dismayed to know how little impact they have on his ironclad convictions. He is not reflective, nor is he paid to be. His job is to be the strident, unflagging voice of his beat cops in contract talks and grievance hearings.

But as crack dens become condominiums, memories fade. In recent years, police officers have frequently found themselves vilified both by poor minorities pushed by gentrification into ever-more-distant neighborhoods and by the upper-middle-class whites who have replaced them in “up-and-coming” areas.

Perhaps that’s because cops serve as an uncomfortable reminder of what it takes to make Brooklyn a playground for the Lena Dunhams of this world. Like teenagers, we chafe at them, doubly so because we badly need them. Not that those who enforce the law always abide by it. To an unabashed cop defender like Lynch, what he says are rare instances of police misbehavior have received an inordinate response that points to a deeper antipathy, a growing ingratitude. “Maybe we’re forgetting what it felt like to be afraid,” he says with something approaching bitterness.

‘A Bunch of Thugs… ’

Patrick Lynch, now 51, was reared in Bayside, Queens, the last of seven children in an Irish-Catholic family. He went to Monsignor Scanlon High School, in the Bronx. There, he met Kathleen Casey, who became his wife. They have two sons. One is a police cadet. The other is a police officer. Lynch still lives in Bayside, close to where he was raised.

Nevertheless, recent events have provided a vexing challenge to Lynch: New York has never been safer, and the police have never been less popular. Last spring, the NYPD’s social media team encouraged city residents to use the #MyNYPD hashtag to tweet selfies with police officers. Within hours, Twitter exploded with photographs, coded with the hashtag, of NYPD officers looking like brutal foot soldiers of the 1 percent, swinging fists and crushing windpipes. Many were outraged by the social-media subversion, with the Daily News suggesting, in an editorial titled #ourNYPD, that the image of the NYPD as “a bunch of thugs haphazardly wielding force is gross, sloppy and plain wrong.” Yet a point had been made, in the plain sight of millions.

Lynch thinks that maybe it got too “good on the streets,” and that people have forgotten that they need the police. He thinks they will soon remember. He says he has seen an uptick in graffiti while driving around Brooklyn and Queens, a sure sign that the bad old days are returning.

A Slap in the Face

BY ALEXANDER NAZARYAN / OCTOBER 22, 2014)

Finally, for this roundup, we repost here some passages from a fraternal site, gawker.com. In a piece signed by J. K. Trotter, gawker.com stated,

“Patrick Lynch is the 51-year-old president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest and most influential union of the New York City Police Department. You might recognize his name: Over the weekend, Lynch blamed Bill de Blasio for the Saturday deaths of two Brooklyn cops who were murdered by a lone gunman from Georgia. “That blood on the hands,” he said at a press conference, “starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.”

To understand why he would say something so wrong and inflammatory, you need to delve into Lynch’s long, checkered history of issuing similarly insane statements. His public declarations over the past 15 years are essentially pro-police agitprop: Cops can do no wrong, while victims of their state-sanctioned violence always had it coming. They are also a deep well of masculine anxiety, hurt feelings, and barely disguised racism…”

Trotter proceeded to provide a list of Lynch’s big mouth “hits” over the years. He advised, “Please consult them whenever he opens his mouth in the future.”

[/learn_more]

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FILM: ‘Selma’ Portrays the True Martin Luther King Jr: A Radical Despised by the Political Establishment

CIVIL LIBERTIES
AlterNet / By Zaid Jilani
SELMA (2014), Screengrab/YouTube

[dropcap]As “Selma” opens[/dropcap] in a number of cities this week and expands to nationwide release in a couple of weeks, the country is given a chance to assess the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. Doing so is particularly relevant right now, in light of boisterous protests against police brutality that have been going on since the summer.

Selma has won nearly unanimous praise from film critics – it is currently perched at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes with dozens of reviews in – partly for its unflinching look at King as a true radical who upset not just a fringe of racists in the South, but the entire political establishment. Writing in Time Magazine, nonprofit leader Salamishah Tillet praises the film for reclaiming “Hollywood’s sanitized versions” of Dr. King as simply part of a “simple story of American racial progress.”

In the conventional wisdom, King was a beloved figure who worked with national politicians to defeat a fringe group of Southern racists; Selma upends this narrative by showing King facing off not only with Alabama governor George Wallace but also the Democratic president Lyndon Banes Johnson (LBJ) and his FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. King, and all those who stood alongside him in the demonstrations in the South, are shown not as conciliators looking to simply make racial harmony through dialogue, but as both agitators and lawbreakers – in the most righteous ways.

Selma’s portrayal has irked some, like Marke Updegrove, the director of the LBJ presidential library. He writes that the film engages in a “mischaracterization” of the King-LBJ relationship, and that “LBJ and MLK were close partners in reform.”

The truth is that MLK’s movement created even greater hostility among the political class than the film portrays.

MLK Vs. The FBI

One of the film’s themes is the conflicts between organized law enforcement and King. In the trailer, King jokes while sitting in jail, “This cell is probably bugged.”

Below, the official movie trailer. It should be noted that we will publish other reviews of this film. We simply don’t trust a film produced and managed by Oprah Winfrey, and with good reason.

The FBI aggressively monitored King and other civil rights leaders, fearing their radicalism. “We loved the FBI,” joked Andrew Young at an event at the University of Georgia I once attended. “Because we never kept notes and they recorded everything.” Between the years 1963 and 1965, the FBI bugged at least 14 hotel rooms King stayed in, looking for “information concerning King’s personal activities” in an attempt to “discredit him.”

Hoover called King the “most notorious liar in the country”; simultaneously, the FBI sent the civil rights leader a letter threatening to expose extramarital affairs – the letter closed with the words, “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is…You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” This has widely been interpreted as an FBI attempt to inculcate suicidal tendencies in King.

Why did the FBI wage such a campaign against King? Because the political leaders it worked for viewed him as politically polarizing at best and dangerous to the political order at worst.

JFK Worried King Was His “Marx”

John and Robert Kennedy are today viewed as standard bearers of Democrat liberalism, but in King’s day their support for civil rights was mixed at best. They belonged to a Democratic Party that valued its Southern power structure – a source of solid votes and organizers. In May 1963 JFK held a meeting on the civil rights movement, and he aired his complaints about King openly, worrying that he looked like a Marxist radical:

I think we ought to have some of these other meetings before we have it in the King group; otherwise, the meetings will look like they got me to do it. … The trouble with King is, everybody thinks he’s our boy anyway. So everything he does, everybody says we stuck him in there. So we ought to have him well surrounded. … I think we ought to have a good many others. King is so hot these days that it looks like Marx coming to the White House, I should have—I’d like to have at least some Southern governors or mayors or businessmen in first. And my program should have gone up to the Hill first.

Recall that Robert Kennedy was the acting Attorney General, and on JFK’s orders he in 1963 authorized wiretaps of King’s personal residence. The Kennedys and JFK wanted King to sever ties with Stanley Levison, a Jewish attorney who helped organize the Montgomery bus boycotts. To the FBI, Levison was simply a Communist sympathizer, and by extension, King was engaging in borderline-seditious activities by enlisting his help. King’s refusal to throw Levison was key to White House’s authorization of the wiretaps, part of a larger campaign against leftists that took place in the backdrop of the Cold War.

The cascade of propaganda from the FBI certainly won over JFK’s wife Jackie. In a series of oral interviews recently released, she is recorded as saying, “I just can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man’s terrible.”

King Loses Johnson And The Entire Political Establishment By Standing For Peace

For years, King cultivated a close relationship with LBJ, knowing he was essential to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act. Indeed, the two spent many hours meeting not only in person but frequently talked on the phone. In a phone call shortly after LBJ took power following JFK’s assassination, the president assured King of his support for his civil rights causes.

Yet even though LBJ pledged his support for the overall goal, the two often clashed over how quickly change could come about. For example, King wanted the 1964 Democratic convention to recognize only the integrated Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party; Johnson feared doing so would lose Southern votes and opposed the move. Also at the convention, one of those Mississippi activists, Fannie Lou Hammer, spoke passionately about her own mistreatment and the murders of civil rights workers. Johnson didn’t want her message to make headlines about the Democratic Party, so he called a press conference to try to divert news attention away from her. Like JFK, LBJ desperately wanted to avoid alienating racist whites whose votes the Democratic Party sought.

If King’s anti-racist campaigns in the South did much to alienate the FBI and JFK, it was his eventual turn against the Vietnam War that finally lost him the rest of the political establishment, including not only LBJ but also many within the civil rights movement itself.

In early phone calls with LBJ, King would raise the issue of Vietnam, only to be rebuffed in his warnings about the war. Eventually, MLK grew so impatient with Johnson that he gave a marquee speech at Riverside Church in New York City blasting the war (ironically Levison, whose radicalism brought about King’s FBI suspicion, told him not to give the address).

In the speech, King called the U.S. Government the “greatest purveyor of violence on earth,” and quoted a U.S. Official who said America was on the “wrong side of a world revolution.” He called for comprehensive peace talks aimed at removing American forces from Vietnam and ending the bombing campaigns. The real target of progressive campaigners, he declared, needed to be three evils: racism, materialism, and militarism.

The response to King from the political class was apoplectic. The New York Times editorial board, run by liberal northerners allied to the Democrats, blasted King for linking the war in Vietnam to the struggle for civil rights and poverty alleviation at home, saying it was “too facile a connection” and that the comparison was doing a “disservice” to both causes; it also accused him of “slander” for accusing the United States’s use of chemical weapons in Vietnam and comparing them to the “new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe.” It concluded, “There are no simple or easy answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country.”

Many of King’s fellow civil rights leaders refused to join his anti-war stance. This stance also put MLK on the opposite side of America’s labor unions, to whom the war meant good wages and job security. But it was the civil rights movement that provided the most internal fury over King’s antiwar turn. In 1965, the head of the NAACP Roy Wilkins refused to allow a resolutionon the Vietnam War to be voted on during the organization’s national convention; Whitney Young of the National Urban League told King that “Johnson needs a consensus…if we are not with him on Vietnam, then he is not going to be with us on civil rights.” When the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the youth arm of the civil rights movement, compared the death of a civil rights activist in 1966 to the U.S. violations of international law during the Vietnam War, Wilkins moved to dissociate the NAACP with SNCC – an attempt to win the Johnson administration after it reacted with fury to SNCC endorsing draft resistance.

By the summer of 1967, a third of the staff of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council “had to be laid off because of a lack of funds.” 168 major newspapers denounced King’s stance, and Johnson disinvited him from the White House permanently.

This total alienation from the political class did not stop King. He spent the last years of his life devoted to a cause few associate him with: labor activism.

The Poor People’s Campaign

In November 1967, King devised what he called the “Poor People’s Campaign,” designed to be “the beginning of a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.”

It was this campaign that brought him to Tennessee where he was tragically assassinated while campaigning for striking sanitation workers. But his radicalism lived on in the protests of the new SCLC president Ralph David Abernathy and his wife Coretta Scott King. The two set up what they called “Resurrection City,” a series of tents and shacks on the Mall in Washington, D.C. To make the reality of poverty real to the politicians there. It was an act of protest similar to what we saw during the Occupy encampments, and lasted a month before the Department of the Interior forced it to close.

A Renewed Telling Of The King Story?

While “Selma” focuses on King’s campaign in Alabama and does not tell the tales of resisting the Vietnam War or the Poor People’s Campaign, it is an important departure from the traditional narrative about King: that he was an eloquent activist who brought people together in order to overcome an extreme fringe of racists. The movie is honest in its portrayal of King as a radical and his movement as people who very much wanted to upset the status quo and risk alienating the political establishment to force progress. We can only hope the film renews discussion and debate about the necessary place of radicalism in our politics, radicalism that was so nobly represented by MLK.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zaid Jilani is an AlterNet contributing writer. Follow @zaidjilani on Twitter.

And now a word from the Editors of The Greanville Post

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Taking the Initiative Back For the Movement After the Brinsley Killings

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Mayor de Blasio has been vilified by police mouthpieces, who are darkly insinuating they won't protect the Mayor. Fascistic thuggery under the guise of the First Amendment and defense of union rights.

NYC Mayor de Blasio has been vilified by police mouthpieces, who are darkly insinuating they won’t protect the Mayor or anyone who does not condone police’s implicit call for a lack of accountability. Fascistic thuggery under the guise of the First Amendment and defense of union rights. (Flickr)

[dropcap]For brutal wannabe fascists[/dropcap] [1] like police union thugs, for liberal authoritarian politicians like President Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus and most big city mayors, for media talking heads like CNN’s Don Lemon, and for weaseling civil rights spokesleaders eager to throw shade on grassroots movements that make them irrelevant, the December 20 killings of two NYPD officers were a gift from heaven, or whatever place their gifts come from.

The killings let cop thugs across the country, usually Republicans, flip the script to massquerade as injured victims [2] living in fear for their lives, howling (or oinking) at the media for covering their crimes and citizen outrage at all. The fascist cops also single out authoritarian liberal politicians for even pretending to listen to the protests, and for not unleashing them even further.

The killings gave prevaricating politicians from the president on down to city halls across the land the excuse to double down on their authoritarian credentials, repeating once again the Big Lie that cops are in unique and daily danger, despite the fact as Johanna Fernandez points out [3], elsewhere in this week’s Black Agenda Report, that cop killings are at a 50 year low at the same time police killings of civilians are at an all time high.

The killings allowed corporate media to stop covering the nationwide protests against police crimes, and deliver us instead more cops pretending to be victims, more public officials posturing in favor of whatever cops want to do, and orchestrated demands that protesters outdo each other in mourning the slain police and again and again renounce any thought of breaking the state’s monopoly on violence, even in self-defense.

Zombie-like civil rights spokesleaders, ever attentive to their masters’ needs, directly link the killings to the protest movement in their own way by calling in some cases for suspension of protests, and bringing forth the kin of police victims to join in public mourning for the slain officers, as though some kind of tit-for-tat world exists in which cops, prosecutors and officials publicly mourn civilian deaths at the hands of police.

The post-Ferguson movement is in a kind of crisis moment. Its leaders and prominent spokespeople, some possibly influenced by Teach For America trojan horses Brittany Packnett and others [4] have been on a sort of nonstop victory tour the last couple months, flying back and forth across the country to meet with the president and his school privatizer-in-chief Arne Duncan [5], popping up on CNN, MSNBC and elsewhere. The president and doubtless other wise and influential heads have counseled them, as Dream Defenders Phillip Agnew wrote in the Guardian, to “think big but go gradual [6],” to not embarrass the president and his crew by demanding “too much too soon.”

This is not the kind of self-serving advice that you ignore. It’s the kind you listen to carefully, and do the exact opposite of.

If movement activists follow the president’s advice they’ll waste the fleeting opportunity that media coverage allows them to advance their own demands, and without taking those demands a step further in the direction opposite the one Obama and his crew want, the movement may find it difficult to continue to grow. The president, the Congressional Black Caucus [7], big city mayors and other liberal authoritarians are old players at an old game. They desperately need movement leaders to AVOID game-changing demands. They’re Democrats, utterly dependent on votes from the overpoliced and terrorized communities. So while the fascist cops work for them, and they have little intention of cracking down on police murder and brutality beyond the cosmetic and convenient, they need to appear to be “listening” to the pain of communities suffering under their police and prison state. Their remedies, as always will be community policing, more training, and more talk, to show that they are indeed listening. Their aim is to channel back whatever activism exists into the safe channels of Democratic party politics.

The increasing tensions between police and the public as created difficult problems for the politicians at all levels.

The increasing tension between police and the public has created difficult problems for professional politicians at all levels, especially those who pretend to side with the people.

Still, “authoritarian” means exactly what you think it means. These are the very same Democrats who deployed the fusion centers, the Department of Homeland Security, military intelligence resources and coordinated federal, state and local police agencies [8] to infiltrate, to disrupt, to co-opt, to discredit and crush the Occupy Movement only 2 years ago. It’s delusional to imagine they intend anything different for today’s movement. As we pointed out in these pages back in 2005 [9], mass movements don’t wait on or answer to elected officials.

“Mass movements exist outside electoral politics, and outside the law, or they don’t exist at all. Mass movements are never respecters of law and order. How can they be? A mass movement is an assertion of popular leadership by the people themselves. A mass movement aims to persuade courts, politicians and other actors to tail behind it, not the other way around. Mass movements accomplish this through appeals to shared sets of deep and widely held convictions among the people they aim to mobilize, along with acts or credible threats of sustained and popular civil disobedience…Mass movements are kindled into existence by unique combinations of outraged public opinion in the movement’s core constituency, political opportunity and aggressive leadership. The absence of any of these can prevent a mass movement from materializing. ”

Aggressive leadership means advancing demands that are both radical in the sense that the authorities must emphatically reject them as “too much too soon,” and realistic in that they must seem quite reasonable and sensible to the masses. Without such demands the movement loses the initiative and inevitably ends up trailing behind liberal authoritarian Democrats in either of two columns, either with the old school Sharptons and Morials or with a younger generation trying to replace them, but with the same ethics and table manners.

The aim of the establishment managers is to channel back whatever activism exists into the safe channels of Democratic party politics.

The movement has to get beyond the failed liberal authoritarian responses of “more black officers,” “more community policing” and “more training for cops.” Nobody spends more on training than big city departments like Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Training hasn’t stopped the killing and police terror, and neither has hiring more black and brown cops. As for community policing, the shorts-wearing Officer Friendly on a bicycle is just a radio call away from the SWAT team in the amphibious mine-resistant armored vehicle.

Here are some examples of far reaching, but sensible set capable of inspiring masses, keeping them in the street, and taking steam away from liberal authoritarian

The movement must double down on the demand to de-militarize local police, to cease the flow of military grade hardware to local cops, and ban the use of local funds to refit and refurbish military hardware for local police use.
End asset forfeiture, and ban police use of seized assets. Right now cops can grab money, vehicles, and property of all kinds without proof a crime has been committed. Lots of people outside the current movement are already angry about this, and it will give them a tie to what’s happening in the streets.

End all federal funding to local cops based on their volume of low level drug arrests.
Decriminalize drug use, homelessness, mental illness and sex work. Ending these kinds of interactions with civilians removes heavily armed police from most of the very situations which end in daily civilian deaths. Of course decriminalizing homelessness, mental illness and sex work will require far-reaching changes in laws and judicial practices. Nobody said rolling back the police and prison state was easy. But it is absolutely necessary.
End profiling and overpolicing in minority communities, whether it goes by the name “stop and frisk”, “broken windows” or the latest shibboleth, “predictive policing [10].” This too is tough to accomplish, since cops and prosecutors have taught themselves, and have taught a large number of voters as well that aggressive overpolicing of minority communities is all that holds society as they know it back from the brink of the abyss. They can learn new lessons, or get new jobs.
Force all police departments to record and report data on police violence inflicted on civilians, and make this data transparently available to the public. Since the Clinton administration federal law has required the Department of Justice to gather stats on police violence against civilians, but local departments are under no obligation to keep them, so the requirement has been meaningless. Local cop shops will fiercely resist this, and authoritarian Democrats who want our votes but don’t want change will resist it with them, calling it “unrealistic.” Screw them. It’s real, and its right, or politically speaking, left.

These are just a few examples of sensible demands that fascist Republicans, authoritarian Democrats and civil rights zombies will all declare ‘unrealistic” but that the masses know are just and sensible. Advancing these, along with the insights provided in this week’s issue by such original thinkers as Johanna Fernandez [3], Thandisizwe Chimurenga [11], Glen Ford [12], Michelle Renee Matisons [13] and Davey D [14] all show how the movement can regain the initiative from cops, politicians and spokesleaders, reaching past all of them to inspire and move masses. Inspired masses can accomplish almost anything. Look [15] what the Cubans did in 50 years outside Yankee rule, both at home and in the service of liberating Africa [16].

In the end of course, the police are part of the coercive machinery of the state, the strong arm and tip of the spear for whichever class is governing a particular society. As long as the rich rule at the poor’s expense, as long as the gulf between them is a largely racialized one that continues to widen, racist cops will keep on doing all the wrong things to all the wrong people. Arguably, the problem of brutal, racist, corrupt and murderous police enjoying immunity and impunity simply goes with the territory of 21st century capitalism. It might be time to look for new territory.

Whipsawed between fascist Republicans and authoritarian Democrats, the US is rapidly going the way of Brazil, as recounted also in this issue of Black Agenda Report by Brian Mier [17]. Down there Mier says, murderous police not only enjoy immunity and impunity in the aggressive overpolicing of black communities, cops descending on suspect neighborhoods routinely and customarily murder a few innocents just to instill general fear and show who’s in charge. Don’t think it can’t be done here. The US military in Afghanistan and Iraq, also routinely tortures large numbers of random folks without even bothering to question them about anything, just to send the same message.

It’s time, when our fascist cop Republicans and our authoritarian liberal Democrats are denouncing and dictating to the movement, for us to stop carrying their messages. It’s time to stop reassuring people that the elected officials are finally “listening.” It might even be time to suspend the victory tour for a while and double down on work nearer the ground. It’s time for leaders to carry the movement’s own messages, to amplify the horizontal conversation that is the lifeblood of movements instead of the vertical ones that stilt and suppress it. It’s time to take the initiative back.

Bruce A.Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a state committee member of the GA Green Party. Reach him via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14591

Links:
[1] http://crooksandliars.com/2014/12/cleveland-police-union-chief-gives-most
[2] http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Chicago-FOP-on-NYPD-Killings-We-Dont-Know-When-Next-Attack-Is-Going-to-Come-286621091.html
[3] http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14582
[4] http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14566
[5] http://www.ksdk.com/story/news/local/2014/12/17/education-secretary-visits-ferguson/20519791/
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/05/obama-ferguson-movement-oval-office-meeting
[7] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/congressional-black-caucus
[8] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy
[9] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/its-time-build-mass-movement
[10] http://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/strategies/predictive-policing/Pages/welcome.aspx
[11] http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14580
[12] http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14590
[13] http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14584
[14] http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14585
[15] http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14589
[16] http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14579
[17] http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/14583
[18] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackagendareport.com%2Fnode%2F14591&linkname=Taking%20the%20Initiative%20Back%20For%20the%20Movement%20After%20the%20Brinsley%20Killings

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The Empire is Crumbling, That is Why it Needs War

A POETIC CALL TO ACTION AND TRUTH BY OUR SPECIAL ROAMING CORRESPONDENT
2015 Will See Decisive Battles
Putin in Davos, 2009, still very much enmeshed in Western claptrap. The pivot toward the East should have commenced earlier. The triumph of multipolarity depends on the Russia-China alliance, both nations in the crosshairs of the Empire. (Flickr/WEF)

[dropcap]in Beijing, I sat in a historic Szechuan restaurant with a friend who happens to be a Chinese diplomat. We exchanged some stories, ordered food, and then, suddenly, my throat felt dry and my eyes got misty.

I bowed and thanked her for the heartfelt offer China made to rescue Russia.

Just before leaving my hotel, I read the news on the RT:

“China’s foreign minister has pledged support to Russia as it faces an economic downturn due to sanctions and a drop in oil prices. Boosting trade in Yuan is a solution proposed by Beijing’s commerce minister.

‘Russia has the capability and the wisdom to overcome the existing hardship in the economic situation,’ Foreign Minister Wang Yi told journalists. China Daily reported Monday: ‘If the Russian side needs it, we will provide necessary assistance within our capacity.’”

By no means was I representing the Russian Federation here, in Beijing, nor was my friend representing China that night, at the dining table. It was an informal meeting attended by just a few friends, nothing more.

Not to mention that I am not really, ‘technically’ a Russian. Yes, I was born in Leningrad but almost my entire life I spent elsewhere… all over the world, to be precise. And in my veins, not that it really matters; it is also all confused… there circulates an explosive mixture of Russian, Chinese and European blood.

But lately, to be Russian, to me and to many others, is much more than just about blood. ‘I am a rebel; therefore I am Russian’, to paraphrase Albert Camus. Or: ‘I am Russian because I refuse to abandon the struggle.’

‘Ya Russkii!’ or ‘Cubano soy!’ It simply feels good, and makes one proud, and stronger.

***

The world is in turmoil. Like in the early 1940’s, something tremendous is gaining shape, something irreversible.

Almost all of us who have been analyzing the Empire fighting against the propaganda and nihilism it spreads, and its venomous tentacles extending to every corner of the globe, know that ‘appeasing’ Western imperialism is clearly impossible, as it is impractical, and even immoral.

Just as George W. Bush (clearly borrowing from fundamentalist Christian rhetoric), liked to say: “You are either with us or against us”. Countries are now evidently put on the spot: ‘they either accept the Western neo-colonialist doctrine’, or they get destroyed, one after another, as were Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

No logic can help, no negotiations, no international mediation from the United Nations. The willingness to compromise is mocked. Appeals for simple human compassion do not move the rulers of the Empire even an inch.

It is clear that the Empire is preparing for the final assault. It will not back down. It will attack, destroy and annihilate. No idea when, but it will. And it will happen sooner rather than later, and with tremendous force.

Some would ask, why now? Why is there suddenly such a rush to fight the final battle for the total control over the planet?

The answer is very clear: for the first time disgust with the Empire is widespread, and worldwide. Many people are getting cured from blindness.

The mask of benevolence and rationality has been torn off by powerful media outlets based in the countries of Latin America, in Russia, China, Iran, but also in North America where the independent media is playing an increasingly important role. It is not even a matter of some elaborate ‘objectivity’, anymore. To get things right, it is enough to call fascism by its real name, as it is sufficient to identify mass murder perpetrated by the Empire on all continents!

The mask has fallen and what is now exposed is horrifying: the face of a monster, with blood and pus, a greedy grin and merciless fangs. It is a monster that is still in love with itself, unable to see its dreadfulness. It remains proud of its fundamental religious dogma, which it often doesn’t even see as ‘religious’. It dwells on self-righteousness, and at the same time, on its twisted market-fundamentalist faith that everything and everybody are for sale. It is a monster full of complexes – both those of superiority and inferiority.

It is not a happy monster and the people it produces are mostly miserable, lonely and scared. But it cannot change, it cannot back-up, it cannot let go. It would rather destroy its children and the world, than to admit that it went totally wrong, for years, decades and centuries.

Now many people have had enough, and some have even forgotten how to be scared! And the monster knows it, and it is actually scared itself, of those who are not scared of it.

The voices of the voiceless are now resonating louder and louder – we make sure that they are!

Except in the countries where the intellectuals and ‘elites’ have totally sold out, like in Indonesia or Malaysia, the horrendous deeds of the colonialism and neo-colonialism of Europe and North America, are finally being discussed, analyzed, and understood.

And the monster, the Empire, knows that it is the beginning of the end.

It cannot live as an equal. Therefore, it will fight its final battle. It will try to win. Or, it will try to destroy the world. Because life is not worth living for it, if it is not in full control; if its God is not in control, if it is not perceived as the enforcer of the divine manifesto.

***

When I visit a barbershop in Beirut or Amman, and am asked ‘where are you from?’ (It used to be a painfully confusing and complex question to answer, just a few years ago), I now simply reply: “Russia,” and people come and hug me and say, “Thank you.”

“Appeals for simple human compassion do not move the rulers of the Empire even an inch.”

It is not because Russia is perfect. It is not perfect – as no country on Earth could or should be. But it is because it is standing once more against the Empire, and the Empire has brought so many horrors, so much humiliation, to so many people; to billions of people around the world… and to them, to so many of them, anyone who is standing against the Empire, is a hero. This I heard recently, first hand, from people in Eritrea, China, Russia, Palestine, Ecuador, Cuba, Venezuela, and South Africa, to name just a few places.

Alexander Nevsky: The hero refuses the mongol ambassador’s invitation to join the Golden Horde. [From Eisenstein’s classic, Alexander Nevsky (1933)]. ]The Russian nation has a long history of resistance —and triumph—against would-be conquerors.

And that is why the Empire is now ‘in such a hurry’, unwilling to wait any longer, trying to provoke Russia, to bring it, metaphorically speaking, into yet another open epic battle, like the one that was fought in ancient times, on the thick ice, by Alexander Nevski.

The Empire is in too much of a rush, it is too scared to think, to understand, to remember, what every invader had to learn the hard way: Russia can be attacked and the Russian people can be murdered by millions. There can be devastation and fire; there can be ruins, tears and graves, graves, graves… Mothers burying their sons, and sons returning back home, to only encounter ashes. But Russia cannot be defeated. When the survival of the world is at stake, Russia stands up, enormous, powerful and frightening. And it fights as no other nation can; it fights for humanity, not only for itself. And it wins.

When such a moment comes, there is only one possible way how to defeat Russia: it is to destroy the entire world.

Are you ready for that, Mr. Obama? Are you ready for it, corporate America and Europe? Are you ready for it, Pentecostal Christians, Televangelists and other morally defunct beings?

Still from Alexander Nevsky: The Teutonic knights prepare to hang a rebel. (Wikipedia)

Still from Alexander Nevsky: The Teutonic knights prepare to hang a Russian rebel. (Wikipedia)

Think twice. One more step, and you will find yourself facing two enormous nations, and dozens of smaller ones, ready to fight for the survival of mankind.

Your only strength is in your weapons of mass destruction, and therefore in spreading fear. And most of your arguments have no foundations in truth, only in deception and lies.

This year, I witnessed your deeds in Iraq, in Eritrea, China, Ukraine, all over Africa and the Middle East.

This year, somehow, it appears that you went too far, that the proverbial drop has fallen on Earth.

Stop! And stop torturing this Earth. Do not provoke, do not trigger yet another world war!

Stop, or there will be a fight. And you will lose, or we will all lose, but you will lose no matter what, because this time, Russia and China, Venezuela and Cuba, and others and many others, will not back down, anymore, while others will join.

***

Despite all of its terror, propaganda and brainwashing called ‘education’—or news, or entertainment—the Empire is well aware that it is losing its grip on global power. And it is horrified, because it does not know how else to live, except with a whip in its hand. Planet Earth realizes that the ruler is sinister, ruthless and degenerate – some people realize it clearly using logic, others just sense it, intuitively. If there was really a global democracy, the people of our planet would throw the existing power structure straight to the dogs. But there isn’t, there still isn’t! Just look at the toothless, constantly humiliated United Nations. Almost everywhere, voting has become nothing more than an act of sticking a piece of paper into a box, and not much more.

***

The year 2015 is approaching. During that year, it will become clear who is fighting for the survival of our human race, and who is on the side of oppression, of imperialism, and of the Empire.

Next year, more and more countries will get destabilized or attacked. Perhaps millions of people will get killed, as they get killed every year, but most likely, this time, many more will. The ‘opposition movements’ manufactured by the West, as well as various Christian groups and other right-wing religious factions, will continue standing firmly on the side of imperialist oppression and market fundamentalism. The conservative petite bourgeoisie in the West and in almost all ‘client states’ will be battling to uphold their privileges. Fascist family structures and cultures will continue intimidating children and young people, preventing them from thinking, from rebelling and from living.

The Empire has many allies, all over the world, but most of them are of an extremely sinister nature. But their closest allies are always ignorance, servility and fear.

While our revolutions, the true ones, as well as the resistance and battles for a better world, are always based on knowledge, and in summary are nothing else other than an act of love.

***

The fight ahead of us will be extremely tough; it will be an epic struggle, involving great nation states, as well as groups and movements.

As the grungy Russian bear is being battered and provoked into a military conflict, great Chinese dragons are determined to form a protective circle, and this time, are declaring indirectly but clearly that they will come to the rescue of weaker nations attacked by the West. As even The New York Times reported:

“Mr. Xi did not mention the United States by name but took an unmistakable jab at Washington, saying, ‘The growing trend toward a multi-polar world will not change’, a reference to the Chinese view that America’s post-Cold War role as the sole superpower is drawing to a close.”

The goal is to never allow Western imperialism and colonialism to take control over the planet again, as it mercilessly did at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, at the cost of tens of millions of human lives.

After centuries of plunder, rape and occupations, the West has no mandate to govern the world.

“Peace can only be based on justice, on social justice especially; otherwise it is not peace.”

After constantly justifying and glorifying its terrible deeds, brainwashing our planet into believing that it actually brings progress and rationality to the savages (the rest of the planet), it cannot be trusted with ‘informing’ and ‘educating’ the people.

That is why we now have independent media, as well as powerful state-controlled media outlets based in the countries that are not willing to succumb to European and North American propaganda and indoctrination.

These media and education institutions should and will redraw the entire historical and contemporary narrative.

Some examples?

Instead of glorifying the wisdom of Founding Fathers of the United States, we should recall that North America was created on the unimaginable suffering of the indigenous people, on Christian bigotry and forced conversions, on genocide, and on theft of the land. And that it was not done by some new and extraterrestrial breed or race called ‘Americans’, but by the same European puritans and religious hordes that had already murdered for centuries, all over Asia, Africa and the Middle East—not to mention each other.

‘New America’, both North and South, was predictably created on fear, violence, glorified superstition, and theft.

We should recall the slaves who were brought in shackles from Africa. Most of them died when traversing the Ocean, women raped and humiliated, children raped and marked forever, men with their dignity taken away from them.

Women and young girls were then chained in the fields, becoming sexual toys for those ‘puritan’ white farmers. Men and children, at least those who survived, were made to work days and nights, until falling dead from exhaustion.

All this done under the shadow of the cross, progress, and ‘democracy’!

This is how America was built. This is the true story, the true narrative, of those ‘great beginnings of the land of the free’!

And those theatres of Europe, cathedrals and churches, palaces and parks –far too many created from loot and genocides, colonialism and the Crusades, ‘military adventures’.

This is how the regime, how the Western establishment always functioned. Rape is love. Indoctrination is education and information. Fear is belief. Slavery is freedom!

Do we want this kind of world for several more decades, even centuries?

I am not asking Parisians, Londoners or New Yorkers. I am not asking corrupt businessmen in Jakarta or deranged preachers in Kinshasa, top military brass in Kigali or the murderous feudal lords in Guatemala.

No humanist, no compassionate human being wants this sort of shit!

And for the first time, people are not afraid to say it, or at least to hear it, or read it!

I am not afraid to write this. Are you scared to read it? I don’t think so.

***

The ‘peace’, we were told about again and again, is something that has to be achieved and upheld by all means.

But what kind of peace are we aiming at, and peace for whom?

The Empire wants a ‘peace’ arrangement, in which countries like Cuba and Russia, Venezuela and China, just back down, give up, and surrender. That is not peace!

We are asked, ordered, to live peacefully in a world ruled by European and North American masters, as some slaves crawling in filth.

Are we expected to succumb to the one and only religious dogma on which this entire racist, imperialist and capitalist system is built?

What a prospect, what a peace!

To them, to the imperialist West, peace means only one thing: unopposed rule over the planet.

If one fights for his people, he is a terrorist, a bandit. Then, it is a war!

The Nazis called resistance fighters in Ukraine or France, ‘terrorists’.

The Israeli military calls Palestinian resistance by the same name.

The West calls any legitimate rebellion, ‘terrorist’. Even MRTA in Peru was a ‘terrorist group’; MIR resistance against Pinochet was ‘terrorist’. The mainly social movement in Lebanon – Hezbollah – is defined as ‘terrorist’, and so is the entire proud Eritrean state.

Shia Muslims are ‘terrorists’, because the West is supporting Sunni monsters in the Gulf.

Che Guevara was a terrorist, and so were Fidel and sub-commandant Marcos. So was Lumumba.

To the West, to its lackey regimes and NGOs, true peace will come only if all natural resources were offered to the multi-national companies. All left-wing, Communist and socialist movements would be butchered, if Russia were to return to that humiliated and shapeless shit it was converted into, for a short time, under the sneaky and brutal alcoholic Boris Yeltsin, if China turned back to the Deng Xiaoping days of only providing cheap products, labor and almost no global fight against imperialism! If Venezuela was to supply crude and fuck its own people, as it used to, before the heroic revolution of Hugo Chavez, if Cuba sold its women and booze and cigars for a pittance, before its most dignified revolution took place!

‘Peace’ would be, if billions of miserably poor people were quietly and un-confrontationally dying in their slums, while the capitalists, preachers and landowners several neighborhoods further were enjoying their private clinics and private schools!

But such peace will never again be accepted!

To fight for a better world, and for the oppressed, is like writing a poem.

War is when you plunder and rape, when you murder in order to oppress, and to control others!

Peace can only be based on justice, on social justice especially; otherwise it is not peace.

***

Russia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fought for its survival on many occasions. Germans attacked it, then after the Revolution in 1917, the West Europeans and North Americans attacked, and then the Germans again. Tens of millions vanished defending the Motherland. Not one apology ever came from Washington or London!

China was forced open, humiliated, ransacked, including its capital city Beijing. Those who did it, the Brits and French, are now lecturing China about ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’. It is truly grotesque!

Look at the other nations that are now standing up against Western imperialism!

Iran, colonized, destroyed when it took a socialist path, and then infected by a Suharto-style maniac, the Shah, later attacked by Iraq, after the West had armed Baghdad.

Latin America – was ruined by colonial and neo-colonial expeditions, for centuries, reduced to nothing by the ‘Monroe Doctrine’, with death squads trained in the US; trained how to kidnap and torture, and how to rape children in front of their parents.

Should we go on? Korea: tens of thousands of civilians were burned alive by US troops in tunnels. It was one of the most brutal wars in the history of mankind, aptly described by the most brilliant investigative journalist of the 20th century – Wilfred Burchett.

Indochina – 7 million were killed, bombed to death, or burned alive. Will we ever know how many? Vietnam is now an ally!

South Africa, Zimbabwe, Eritrea…

Yes, this is our alliance. Some 2 billion people who are living in the countries that were terrorized, brutalized, reduced to ashes, but that stood again and decided to fight, rather to live like slaves.

These are all imperfect countries, but countries peaceful to the core, countries that exist mainly in order to improve the lives of their men, women and children… and those all over the world.

And look at the other nations that are resisting Western attacks against their sovereignty– Cuba, North Korea, Eritrea – ostracized, surviving countless terrorist attacks, subversions, propaganda, and destabilizing campaigns. And then, when they mobilize, ready to protect themselves, they are designated, and defined as ‘hermit states’ or ‘beastly dictatorships’!

Who forced them into a corner?

It is all twisted. Never again! Enough!

***

Do you hear that silence, after the US decided to ‘normalize’ its relationship with Cuba? We all know why there is such a terrible silence, don’t we? Because we realize that, based on the centuries of US involvement in Latin America, this will be part of a new destructive tactic, a new attack: that Cuba may now actually be facing the greatest danger in decades! We don’t know exactly what will happen, but we are somehow certain, that something very terrible will.

Is the West going to manufacture a ‘Cigar Opposition Movement’ in Cuba? Or is it going to be yet another color?

2015 will see many battles.

But the most important first step has just been made.

China made a great symbolic gesture: calmly, respectfully, but decisively. The message is clear: “You shall not be allowed to destroy others!” Not anymore.

The Empire is decomposing; it is sick, unsustainable.

But it is also toxic, and its illness is contagious. Its propaganda is mighty and its dogmas are violent.

Let us make sure that it goes away, crumbles, step by step, without destroying the world, without dragging it into WWIII.

Let us unite, individuals and nations, movements and parties. At least until the most dangerous period passes.

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

And now a word from the Editors of The Greanville Post

FRIENDS AND FELLOW ACTIVISTS—

AS YOU KNOW, THERE’S A COLOSSAL INFORMATION WAR GOING ON, AND THE FATE OF THE WORLD LITERALLY HANGS ON THE OUTCOME.

THEIR LIES.
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Revisiting ‘Jurassic Park’ in light of ‘Blackfish’


 By Jon Hochschartner

[dropcap]WITH[/dropcap] next summer's release of 'Jurassic World,' recently teased with a trailer starring Chris Pratt, I think it's worthwhile to revisit the original film in the paleontological franchise in light of the 2013 SeaWorld-documentary 'Blackfish,' with a focus on the inherent abuse captivity represents for wild animals and the potential dangers it creates for human handlers.

While I think it's safe to assume most readers have seen 'Jurassic Park,' for those not familiar with the other title, 'Blackfish' centers on Tilikum, an orca currently living in SeaWorld Orlando, who has been held captive for more than thirty years. During that time, he has killed three humans. The movie, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, suggests Tilikum's aggression was the result of his imprisonment. As journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell asked, "If you were in a bathtub for 25 years, don’t you think you’d get a little irritated, aggravated, maybe a little psychotic?” Since the documentary's release, SeaWorld has posted dramatic financial losses.

Interestingly, the inciting incidents for Steven Spielberg's 1993 blockbuster and 'Blackfish' are remarkably similar. 'Jurassic Park' opens on an island off the coast of Costa Rica with a captive velociraptor killing an employee of InGen, the bioengineering company responsible for the titular resort. It's this specific action that puts the entire plot of the film in motion. Paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, mathematician Ian Malcom, and paleontologist Alan Grant are invited to the island in the wake of this episode to assess the park's safety. Correspondingly, Gabriela Cowperthwaite's documentary begins with the brutal drowning of an experienced SeaWorld trainer, Dawn Brancheau, by Tilikum. From there, the remainder of the film seeks to answer the question of why this happened.

Dismissing conservative accusations of anthropomorphism, historian Jason Hribal encourages us to see such acts of violence not as random occurrences, but as intentional rebellions against speciesist confinement. "Through my research, the resistance became ever more evident. Captive animals escaped their cages," Hribal said. "They attacked their keepers. They demanded more food. They refused to perform. They refused to reproduce. The resistance itself could be organized."

Obviously there are differences between real-life orcas and fictional dinosaurs. As researcher Howard Garrett states in 'Blackfish,' there is no record of orcas attacking humans in the wild. And given the speculative nature of 'Jurassic Park,' we have no idea how various ancient species would interact with humans. Existing predators, such as tigers, generally attack humans only if they can't meet their dietary needs otherwise. But say we concede, for the sake of argument, that free-living prehistoric animals would choose to hunt and kill us, absent unique circumstances. I don't think such predation would invalidate the view that specific non-human violence in 'Jurassic Park' could be interpreted, to one degree or another, as an intentional form of resistance.

Jeffrey Ventre, a former SeaWorld trainer, says that Tilikum, an animal who should be traveling 100 miles a day, is kept in what amounts to a small, concrete swimming pool. Similarly, in 'Jurassic Park,' the resort's 'game' warden Robert Muldoon states that, like cheetahs, velociraptors can run 50-60 miles per hour, which presumably means the species would be accustomed to free access to large swaths of land. And yet the velociraptors are kept in a ludicrously small cage, about the size of a hockey rink, which they clearly do not enjoy. "She had them all attacking the [electrified] fences when the feeders came," Muldoon says, referring to the leader of the pride. "But they never attack the same place twice. They were testing the fences for weaknesses systematically. They remembered."

Indeed, the desire of these animals to escape is so great the owner of the resort, John Hammond, concedes InGen has been forced to take extreme precautions to prevent this from happening. "The viewing area below us will have eight-inch tempered glass set in reinforced steel frames," Hammond says.

One must assume that Spielberg and others involved in the creation of the box-office smash that was 'Jurassic Park' did not intend it to be a sci-fi parable of non-human revolt against captivity. The filmmakers' view appears to be expressed through the voice of Dr. Malcolm, who has nothing to say regarding animal treatment or use, and sees the threat posed by the island's dinosaurs purely as a result of scientific arrogance run amok. But I'm not sure that authorial intent matters that much. Ultimately, there's enough evidence in the film to make credible an anti-speciesist interpretation of 'Jurassic Park' as a sort of fictionalized 'Blackfish.'

The author with the woman who shares his life and two of his furry children.

The author with his fiancée and two of their furry children.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jon Hochschartner is a freelance writer.

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