Henry A. Giroux
Cultural Critic and Public Intellectual

The killing machine has become spectacularized, endlessly looped through the mainstream cultural apparatuses both as a way to increase ratings and as an unconscious testimony to the ruthlessness of the violence waged by a racist state. Once again, Americans and the rest of the world are witness to a brutal killing machine, a form of domestic terrorism, responsible for the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling who were shot point blank by white policemen who follow the script of a racist policy of disposability that suggests that black lives not only do not matter, but that black people can be killed with impunity since the police in the United States are rarely held accountable for such crimes.

In the Castile case, the police fired into the car with a child in the back seat–a point rarely mentioned in the mainstream press. At the same time, the power of violence as a tool for expending rage and addressing deeply felt injustices has resulted in a young black man mimicking the tools of state violence by deliberately killing five police officers and wounding seven others in Dallas, Texas. This is a horrendous and despicable act of violence but it must be understood in a system in which violence is disproportionately waged against poor blacks, immigrants, Muslims, and others who are now defined as excess and pathologized as disposable. The killings in Dallas speak to a brutal mindset and culture of mistrust and fear in which violence has become the only legitimate form of mediation

In the increasingly violent landscape of anti-politics, mediation disappears, dissent is squelched, repression operates with impunity, the ethical imagination withers, and the power of representation is on the side of spectacularized state violence. Violence both at the level of the state and in the hands of everyday citizens has become a substitute for genuine forms of agency, citizenship, and mutually informed dialogue and community interaction.

Etienne Balibar has pointed out that “as citizenship is emptied of its content,”[i] the right to be represented is ceded to the financial elite and the institutions of repression or what Althusser once called the “repressive state apparatuses.” Under such circumstances, politics is replaced by a form of “antipolitics” in which the representative and repressive machineries of the state combine to objectify, dehumanize, and humiliate through racial profiling, eliminate crucial social provisions, transform poor black neighborhoods into war zones, militarize the police, undermine the system of justice, and all too willingly use violence to both to punish blacks and to signal to them that any form of dissent can cost them their lives. But such apparatuses do more, they willfully exclude and repress the historical memories of racial violence waged by both the police and other racist institutions.[ii] They have no choice since such histories point to the deeply embedded structural nature of such violence as a reproach to the bad cops theory of racist violence.

What we are observing is not simply the overt face of a militarized police culture, the lack of community policing, deeply entrenched anti-democratic tendencies, or the toxic consequences of a culture of violence that saturates every day life. We are in a new historical era, one that is marked a culture of lawlessness, extreme violence, and disposability, fueled, in part, by a culture of fear, a war on terror, and a deeply overt racist culture that is unapologetic in its disciplinary and exclusionary practices. This deep seated racism is reinforced by a culture of cruelty that is the modus operandi of neoliberal capitalism–a cage culture, a culture of combat, a hyper masculine culture that views killing those most vulnerable as sport, entertainment, and policy.

The United States is in the midst of a crisis of of governance, author­ity, and representation and as historical narratives of injustice and resistance fade there emerges a further crisis of individual and collective agency, along with a crisis of the identity and purpose regarding the very meaning of governance. As democratic public spheres disappear and the state increasing turns to violence to address social problems, lawlessness becomes normalized and violence becomes the only form of mediation. This is fueled by a discourse of objectification, and a race-based culture of pathology, which often finds expression not only in police violence but also in scattered mass shootings and a tsunami of everyday violence in America’s major cities, such as Chicago. Politics has been emptied out, lacking any representative substance, and opens the social landscape to the dangerous forces of right-wing populism and ultra-nationalism, both of which are deeply racist in their ideological discourse and their relationship to those excluded others.

Americans are witnessing not simply the breakdown of democracy but the legitimization of a society in the grips of what might be called a politics of domestic terrorism, a kind of anti-politics that rejects the underlying values of a democracy and is unwilling to reclaim its democratic tendencies while deepening its civic principles. The U.S. is deep into the entrails of an updated authoritarianism and until that is recognized under such circumstances violence will escalate, people of color will be killed, whites will claim they are the real victims, and the discourse of racial objectification will become, as it has, a visible if not embraced signpost of an anti-politics that defines the varied landscapes of power and institutions of everyday life.

The ultimate mark of terrorism both domestic and foreign is a hatred of the other, a certainty that defines dialogue, an ignorance that embraces the power of the mob and the redemptive force of the savior. As America moves dangerously close to embracing such an authoritarian social order and the politicians who endorse it, indiscriminate and intolerable violence will assume a kind of legitimacy that allows people to look away, refuse to recognize their own powerlessness, and align them with a barbarism in the making. All of this bears the weight of a history in which such indifference is easily transformed into the worst forms of state violence. The face of white supremacy and state terrorism, with its long legacy of slavery, lynching, and brutality has become normalized, if not supported by one major political party, a large percentage of the public endorsing Donald Trump, and a corporate and financial elite wedded only to increasing their power and profits. We are in a new historical era that is widening the scope and range of violence-an expansive age of disposability that widens the net of those considered expendable if not dangerous.

Some conservatives such as David Brooks have argued that the collapse of character and the rise of a form of political narcissism are producing deeply troubling forms of authoritarianism.[iii] That analysis is too facile, and ignores the underlying social, economic, and political conditions that concentrate power in very few hands, distribute wealth largely to the upper 1 percent, eliminate social services, and destroy those institutions capable of producing a culture of critique, empathy, and engaged citizenship. The old age of the social contract and social democracy is dead; the economic foundations that once supported large segments of the working class have been destroyed by the forces of globalization; and the promise of a collective ethical imagination has given way to the tawdry self-indulgence and self-interest that drives a consumer and celebrity culture. Not only have too many Americans become prisoners of their own experience, they also  have become passive in the face of state violence, a culture of extreme violence, and a web of mainstream cultural apparatuses that trade in violence as sport and entertainment.

Racism is one register of such violence, but in the age of cell phones and video cameras it has become more visible, and its brutalizing imagery contains the possibility for mobilizing social formations such as the Black Lives Matter Movement to both expose and eliminate its underlying ideologies and structures. At the same time, such blatant acts of racism offer a false sense of community to those being organized around hate and anger, resulting in a blind devotion to false prophets, such as Donald Trump, who trade in fear and despair.

Let’s hope that the current crisis we are witnessing as it appears to unfold daily will transform cries of collective outrage into a social movement that is organized around a call for economic and social justice, one less intent on calling for reforms than for eliminating a neoliberal economic order steeped in corruption, racism, and violence.

Notes.

[i] Etienne Balibar, “Uprisings in Banlieues,” Equaliberty, [Durham: Duke University, 2014] pp. 252

[ii] See, for instance, Jerome H. Skolnick, The Politics of Protest: Task Force on Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence 2nd Revised edition (New York: NYU Press, 2010). Also see Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[iii] David Brooks, “The Governing Cancer of Our Times,” The New York Times, [February 26, 2016] Online: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/opinion/the-governing-cancer-of-our-time.html?_r=0

Cross-posted with CounterPunch.

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable

[email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”]

=By= Lamont Lilly

Lamont points out a critical reality that is impacting the Black Lives Matter movement, namely the targeting of organizers and groups by local police and the FBI. This is huge, but it is one, not new; and two, increasingly characteristic of today’s government (fed, state, and local). It is open season on those who speak out against racism, inequality, destruction of the planet, and corruption within government. Interestingly, while it is the folks on the far right are the ones carrying guns (and too often using them) they do not seem to be facing the same infiltration and targeting problems. This point is NOT what is being argued by Lilly in this article. There is an inescapable truth that there is significant differences in harsh and deadly encounters with police, and a significant difference in how those who engage in deadly violence are treated. This article discusses these problems quite cogently. -rw

During the height of the Ferguson Rebellion in late summer 2014, youth organizer, Joshua Williams quickly rose to the call of duty. In the aftermath of Officer Darren Wilson’s brutal murder of unarmed Black teenager, Mike Brown, 19-year-old Josh Williams, stepped forward in the most dedicated and courageous way possible – on the front lines.

At protests, Williams stood his ground against armed police, national guardsmen, tanks and teargas, encouraging others to do the same. In doing so, Josh not only earned the respect and admiration of his peers, he began to garner favor with longtime veteran leaders such as Cornel West and Al Sharpton. Williams became a darling of the national media, from USA Today to the New York Times. Everyone loved Josh. His humor. His courage. His charisma.

Unfortunately, just a few months after Mike Brown’s dead body dangled in the street for four hours, another Black teenager, Antonio Martin, was shot by the police in Berkeley – a small town just outside of Ferguson. In a righteous rage, youth took to the streets in rebellion. In the process, Williams was caught on camera lighting a fire at the convenience store where Martin was shot and killed. In December 2014, Josh Williams was arrested by the St. Louis County police, and a year later plead guilty to first degree arson and second degree burglary.

Were Josh’s actions of “damaging property” illegal? Yes, of course. But so was the murder of innocent human lives. Did Darren Wilson serve time in jail? No, he did not. Did George Zimmerman serve time for murdering 17-year-old Trayvon Martin? No, not at all! Josh Williams, however, was sentenced to eight years in the Eastern Reception Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Mo. Neither Wilson nor Zimmerman never served one day in prison.

Legal Repression, Trumped-up Charges

Another recent case of overt targeting of activists by the state is the case of 28-year-old Jasmine Richards (also known as Jasmine Abdullah). Founder of the Black Lives Matter  Pasadena Chapter, Richards became the first Black person in the United States convicted of “felony lynching.” Yes, lynching! She was hit with this charge for attempting to prevent the arrest of a Black woman accused of not paying her bill at a local restaurant, back in August 2015.

During the incident, Jasmine and others were nearby at a local park rally against violence in the Black community. As commotion spilled over into the street, Jasmine and nearby protesters came to serve as witnesses, demanding justice. At the time, only the suspect accused of not paying her bill was formally arrested. Three days later, however, for her valiant pursuit of justice, Jasmine was charged with delaying and obstructing officers, inciting a riot and felony lynching. On June 1, 2016, Jasmine Richards was sentenced  to 90 days in jail and 3 years of probation time.

In the state of California, lynching implies “the taking by means of a riot of another person from the lawful custody of a peace officer.” The erroneous charges against Jasmine backfired, however, when the general public finally received word of such a ridiculous interpretation, and legal application. Public outcry was heard worldwide. And though Richards was released on bail just a few days ago on June 18, an old phenomenon has become quite clear.

Learning Lessons from Past Movements

What we’re seeing in regards to targeting activists and organizers of the Black Lives Matter Movement  is nothing new – no different than the targeting of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur and Leonard Peltier. What we’re seeing is the same strategy that COINTELPRO used against the Black Panther Party (BPP), Black Liberation Army (BLA) and American Indian Movement (AIM).

What we have to do now is call this out, and critique such developments through a contemporary context. The intent of such repression is to halt the movement, to halt the surge and organization of the poor and oppressed, to “disrupt, discredit and destroy.”

For those who may not be familiar, “the state” is the police and county sheriffs – ICE , U.S. Border Patrol, the FBI and CIA – your local probation and correctional officers – even the judges and state prosecutors. Collectively, the state apparatus will do anything to protect the elite. Such statement is unfortunately true because, it is indeed, their job. And if the state cannot stop you permanently, they’ll tie up your time, energy and resources in the jails and court system. And they’ll use the media to demonize you in the process.

As current activists, radical scholars and revolutionaries, we have to learn from these lessons and pass them on. As the Movement for Black Lives continues to grow, mature and push forward, it would behoove us to only expect that there will also be other activists targeted. It could be me. It could be you. It could be any one of us: the organizer, the foot soldier, the professor.

We know what the state wants – to prevent the poor and disenfranchised from rising and seizing power. Such position has always been the state’s role. What is new, is that a new generation must be armed with the proper information to protect themselves. Those on the front line must be defended, by us, the people, the community, at all cost, by any means necessary.

As our great field general, Assata Shakur teaches us, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

---

Lamont Lilly is a contributing editor with the Triangle Free Press and organizer with Workers World Party. He has recently served as field staff in Baltimore, Ferguson, Oakland, Boston and Philadelphia. In February 2015, he traveled to both Syria and Lebanon with Ramsey Clark and Cynthia McKinney. Follow him on Twitter @LamontLilly.

---

 

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

Last night, Jesse Williams received the 2016 Humanitarian of the Year award. He took the opportunity to speak out. It was an eloquent statement against racism in the United States, and makes a direct challenge to others to not stand quietly while racist police brutality continues.

---

jesse williams – full speech from Josh Begley on Vimeo.

Transcript of Williams’ remarks (from Genius.com)

Peace peace. Thank you, Debra. Thank you, BET. Thank you Nate Parker, Harry and Debbie Allen, for doing that. Before we get into it, I just want to say — I brought my parents — thank you for being here and for teaching me to focus on comprehension over career. They made sure I learned what the schools were afraid to teach us. Also, thank you to my amazing wife for changing my life.

Now, this award – this is not for me. This is for the real organizers all over the country – the activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers, the students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do.

It’s kind of basic mathematics – the more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize.

Now, this is also in particular for the black women in particular who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.

Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people everyday. So what’s going to happen is we are going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.

Now… I got more y’all – yesterday would have been young Tamir Rice‘s 14th birthday so I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on 12 year old playing alone in the park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich. Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better than it is to live in 2012 than it is to live in 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Dorian Hunt.

Now the thing is, though, all of us in here getting money – that alone isn’t gonna stop this. Alright, now dedicating our lives, dedicating our lives to getting money just to give it right back for someone’s brand on our body when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies, and now we pray to get paid for brands on our bodies.

There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done. There is no tax they haven’t leveed against us – and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here. “You’re free,” they keep telling us. But she would have been alive if she hadn’t acted so… free.

Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter, but you know what, though, the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now.

And let’s get a couple things straight, just a little sidenote – the burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, alright – stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest, if you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.

We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil – black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is though… the thing is that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.

 

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable

[email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”]

=By= Shane Burley

There is a shift across the country to arm campus security. This is intertwined with the growing militarization of police. Portland State University (Portland, Oregon) is one of those places and there is an active student push back against this shift. One of the implications of arming campus security obviously shifts more college finances out of the academic arena, and student services are one of the first things on the budget chopping block. – rw

As the student leaders of the Portland State Student Union, or PSUSU, began leading chants to “disarm” the university, hundreds of students and community leaders had already begun circling the steps of the library. The rally was the meeting point for a planned student and faculty “walkout” on May 10, where more than 400 students promised to leave class to protest the Board of Trustees’ decision to arm campus police officers — which organizers see as just a piece of the larger trend towards the militarization of police officers around the country.

“Our incarceration system is a continuation of slavery,” said Portland Jobs With Justice coalition organizer Andrea Lemoins. “It targets people of color. It targets people in the LGBTQ community. It targets people who are traditionally oppressed, and we are here fighting oppression.”

Portland Jobs With Justice, which is an action coalition of over a hundred community groups and unions, was only one of the dozens of community sponsors that endorsed PSUSU’s campaign to confront the use of lethal armaments on the urban campus for the state university.

The Disarm PSU campaign is just the most recent organizing drive in a sequence of campus movements around the country to confront the increased use of lethal arms on college campuses. According to a U.S. Department of Justice survey of the over 4,000 campus police departments in 2011-2012, around 92 percent of public universities have armed police, as opposed to 38 percent of private schools.

Walking out

One of the first high-profile incidents of campus police violence was the fatal shooting of 43-year-old African American Samuel DuBose on the University of Cincinnati campus in July 2015. While stopped for a missing license plate, DuBose started his engine and put the car in drive. Ray Tensing — a sworn police officer — opened fire, erroneously reporting that the vehicle was dragging him. Tensing was later indicted for murder and manslaughter charges by an investigating grand jury, and a $4.5 million dollar settlement was issued to the DuBose family from the university. This included free college tuition for each of DuBose’s 12 children.

The shooting also prompted the formation of Irate 8 — a University of Cincinnati campus group whose name refers to the percentage of African American students on the campus. The group has instituted a 10-point set of demands on the university, including calling for extra scrutiny on campus police officers and for the university to address the racial disparity in curriculum and staffing.

The arguments against the arming of campus security are based largely on the disproportionate use of force that organizers say has become increasingly common among police departments across the country.

“It poses a disproportionate threat to students of color, people who are houseless, people who suffer from mental illness,” said Olivia Pace, a PSUSU organizer with the Disarm PSU campaign. “They have been criminalized and talked about as people who we need to be protected against, when — in fact — they are a part of our campus community. So, really, [the arming of campus security] poses a threat of violence and fear to those students.”

Critics also argue that the types of crimes committed on campus are not ones where armed police need to intervene. According to the U.S. Department of Education Campus Safety and Security, burglary was the leading crime by a wide margin at PSU between 2011-13. Student groups like PSUSU call for campus security to find alternative solutions that do not rely on lethal force and criminalization to solve issues of safety on public university campuses.

Organizers at the University of California’s Davis campus were among the first to challenge their school’s use of fully-sworn police officers — with access to weapons and the ability to make arrests — following an infamous November 2011 incident, where police pepper sprayed Occupy UC Davis protesters. An August 2015 incident pushed the issue even further, as UC Davis campus police used force to detain a black alumni who was using campus facilities. A campus march called “Divest, Disarm: Davis for Black Lives” was held in November, linking the campaigns to disarm campus police and divest from private prisons with the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement.

Similarly, the Campaign for Equitable Policing in Chicago has united students from the University of Chicago and nearby residents, who were troubled by the apparent overreach of campus police into their neighborhoods. In October, they held a community forum to bring together people from the surrounding community to discuss what many call a systemic level of racial profiling.

A student uprising

With its growing and diverse membership of nearly 50 active student organizers — not to mention community and labor support — Disarm PSU is becoming a leader in the movement against campus militarization.

The fight went into high-gear in 2013 when a report from the university’s Presidential Task Force on Campus Safety was published, outlining public safety issues on campus, along with recommendations on how to address them. Even though the report listed violent person-to-person crimes as only a small fraction of campus crimes, the recommendations included bringing sworn police officers to campus that contract with the Oregon State Police and the Portland Police Bureau. This would mean that beyond the non-sworn security officers, PSU would bring on fully-registered police officers who carry guns and have the right to arrest. This was recommended despite the fact that PSU is in downtown Portland, where it already has direct access to both of the contracted police departments. Not surprisingly, for many of the concerned students, the task force was comprised of many PSU staff, but only two student delegates.

The Board of Trustees, which student activists say is not directly accountable to staff or students, passed the recommendations and put them into effect last July. The plan went ahead despite overwhelming opposition by two-thirds of the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers members on campus, as well as opposition from numerous college departments, such as the Chicano Latino Studies and Black Studies departments.

“The task force recommended having officers who are trained in using firearms because certain situations require them: serving search warrants and performing off-campus welfare checks, to name a few,” said the administration through an FAQ created during the implementation of the police force. It went on to say that in the previous situation, with the campus being tied to the larger cityscape without a barrier, it was unable to meet threats if they were to happen.

In opposition, PSUSU and other campus activists disrupted Board of Trustee meetings by overwhelming the discussion session, forcing trustees to leave the building rather than confront the opposition. Tying together issues like inflated administrative salaries and tuition increases to board decisions, students are calling for the long-term project of dissolving the board in favor of a decision making body that is more accountable to stakeholders.

The May 10 student eruption on campus came after the decision to use armed police was implemented. Over 500 people began a roaming march and speak-out that brought together a diverse set of voices from the campus and surrounding community.

“I support your movement,” mayoral candidate Sarah Iannarone told the crowd. “I don’t want militarized police on our campus, and I’m running for mayor right now because I don’t want them in our city.” Iannarone had been running against local Democratic politicians Ted Wheeler and Jules Bailey on a progressive platform addressing issues like the minimum wage and housing insecurity in the city, but ended up finishing third with under 10 percent of the vote.

“We need to de-criminalize poverty in this city,” Iannarone added. “We need to de-criminalize being black or brown in this city.”

PSUSU created the Disarm PSU campaign to maintain a broader look at equity and justice on campus with four key demands: disarming campus police, severing the contracts with the anti-union food service company Aramark, bringing all campus workers up to $15 per hour and lowering tuition costs by cutting the salaries of the highest paid administrative staff.

After speaking in front of the library, the campus security building, and in the Urban Plaza, the protesters moved to the Fourth Avenue Building where they staged a “die in” to confront the increased threat they say armed police present on campus, as well as the economic burden of low-wages and high tuition.

“The students, at their core, want democracy in the university, and that’s not what we have right now with the Board of Trustees model,” said PSUSU organizer Alyssa Pagan. “When we say that we want the campus to not have armed security, the Board of Trustees heard that and didn’t take any action to move in accordance with that. So there’s no system of accountability.”

With support mounting both around Portland’s progressive community to endorse the Disarm PSU campaign, as well as the growing campus movement towards alternative solutions to armed police officers, pressure is forming around the Board of Trustees to reverse its decision. While the board has said that it allowed sufficient time for student and community feedback before reaching its decision, PSUSU activists say the board represents an unelected and unaccountable decision-making body that is not representative of the constituencies comprising the bulk of Portland State University.

“The climate of activism has kind of exploded across the country,” Pace said, refering to the movement to target police violence both on and off campus. “The fight for the de-militarization of the police is something that has really come to the forefront.”

The board finally agreed to sit down with the students on May 25 to hear concerns about tuition, scholarships, diversity and campus police. While many students spoke out, the board has made no promises about changing decisions other than stating publicly that it would “discuss them.”

For the student union, this will be just a piece of a larger set of demands to reshape the college’s priorities in order to align with a more multi-racial, working-class base. This means continuing to confront the Board of Trustees, which many organizers say is the central component that is driving many of the unpopular campus decisions.

“It’s so much more than just disarming campus security,” Pagan said, regarding the growing student movement on the PSU campus. “It’s about a small handful of people who are very wealthy and [who] are serving their business interests on the backs of students.”

 

---

Shane Burley is a writer, filmmaker, and organizer based in Portland, Oregon. His work as appeared in places such as In These Times, Truth-Out, Labor Notes, Waging Nonviolence, CounterPunch, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. He contributed a chapter on housing justice movements to the recent AK Press release “The End of the World As We Know It?” and has work in upcoming volumes on social movements. His most recent documentary “Expect Resistance” chronicles the intersection of the housing justice and Occupy Wallstreet movement. His work can be found at ShaneBurley.net, or reach him on Twitter at @shane_burley1.

---

 

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

WITNESSES TO HISTORY
CALEB MAUPIN

---

The US is on a march to war with Russia (and apparently China), and the ballistic missile installations are one important link in the chain. However, the preparation of the soil for war is a larger project that includes squashing the protections against state intrusions into peoples lives (as with surveillance programs) and the squashing of dissent in its various forms. In the US we have an uptick in the monitoring of the population and silencing and punishing whistleblowers. Clearly this is happening in Poland as well. If the state increases the propaganda while silencing dissent to its actions, then the likelihood of mass public dissent drops dramatically. Poland is one nation where this is happening; it certainly is not the only one. -rw

The United States and its NATO allies have recently established ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and Romania. The United States claims that these systems are set up for the purpose of protecting Romania and Poland.

However, Russian leaders interpret the systems as a threat to them because these “defense systems” are strike enabling. The new ballistic missile systems enable NATO forces in Poland and Romania to strike Russia with cruise missiles, and then deflect any response.

Russia and China raised similar objections to the missile system being established in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. In Cold War terms, these missile systems give “first strike capability” to the United States and its NATO allies in Eastern Europe.

The installation of the missiles in Poland has been quite unpopular. Naturally, the installation of the system in Poland has been accompanied by a crackdown on political forces that object to it.

Mateusz Piskorski, a Pan-Slavic activist and former member of the Polish parliament has been detained without specific charges. Authorities allege, without citing anything specific, that he has been engaged in espionage.

To anyone trained in criminology or the history of espionage, it should be highly obvious that Piskorski has not engaged in any illegal activity. Piskorski is a well-known political activist. He leads a small political party and runs a Pan-Slavic publishing house. As a well-known public figure, Piskorski is the last person that any intelligence agency would cooperate with. Piskorski has been detained because he is an outspoken critic of NATO and the European Union, and is loudly voicing his opposition to Polish cooperation with hostility to Russia.

Piskorski is not the only one who has been targeted by the pro-NATO government in Poland. On April 1st, the right-wing political party that runs the country passed a sweeping anti-Communist law. The law outlaws displays honoring adherents of the “Anti-Polish Communist Ideology.” The law specifically lists a number of Polish historical figures who cannot legally be honored. Among them are not only leaders of the post-war socialist regime, but also the Dabrowski Brigade of Polish volunteers who fought fascism in Spain, and any members of the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania, once led by Rosa Luxemburg. A number of anti-Nazi resistance groups, led by Communists, that operated during the Second World War are also outlawed.

On March 31st, four leaders of the Communist Party were convicted of “promoting totalitarianism.” Their crime was operating a website and printing a leftist newspaper. They were sentenced to nine months in prison with hard labor.

The “Law and Justice Party” which leads Poland is leading the crackdown on Communists, leftists, and Pan-Slavists while at the same time allowing Neo-Nazis and other fascists to operate openly. While Communists and Pan-Slavists are forced into the shadows, 400 Neo-Nazis paraded through the streets on April 13th in a public rally.

Imagine if Vladimir Putin were to crackdown on his pro-liberal, western opponents in such a way? In Putin’s Russia, the “Union of Right Forces” and other parties that embrace western ideologies operate openly. Groups promoting free market capitalism, falsifying Russian history and accusing great historical figures of genocide, openly operate all across Russian soil, and often receive western funding as they do so.

The “human rights” allegations against Russia pale in comparison to what is being openly done by the pro-NATO polish regime, as the missile systems are being erected, paving the way to World War Three.

The hypocrisy of western media and the “human rights” NGO noise machine should be very obvious.

Source: New Eastern Outlook

 

---

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.

---

---

=SUBSCRIBE TODAY! NOTHING TO LOSE, EVERYTHING TO GAIN.=
free • safe • invaluable

[email-subscribers namefield=”YES” desc=”” group=”Public”]