“Just remember, you are not a participant here,” the Fox News anchor reminded us. “At the end of the debate, you can applaud all you want, but in the meantime, silence, please—blessed silence.”

A cursory reading of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is enough to decipher this scene. Trump is the harbinger of the apocalypse, yes, but the apocalypse is not on the horizon. It’s here.

“Armageddon has been in effect,” as Public Enemy put it in 1988. “Go get a late pass.”

The Trump threat serves to distract us from what is already happening. “I don’t want to rip families apart,” Clinton insists, in reference to immigration policy, when the administration she serves under Obama has deported over 2.5 million people—as many as all the US presidents of the 20th century put together. Mothers of the Movement promote Clinton as the candidate to curb racist policing—when police murders of black and brown people have only escalated since she got into office, and the most liberal politicians and prosecutors have failed to challenge the impunity of the police. Trump is dubbed the first demagogue of the Anthropocene—but does any candidate in the election have a realistic proposal to halt catastrophic climate change?

The same good cop/bad cop routine is playing out all around the globe. Explicitly leftist parties like Syriza and Brazil’s Workers Party have implemented the same policies they accused their right-wing counterparts of pursuing. Today, the only remaining justification for continuing to support Syriza, the Workers Party, or Clinton goes something like this: “If the left doesn’t screw us, the right will!” If the left doesn’t privatize water—if the left doesn’t militarize the police—if the left doesn’t expand the prison-industrial complex—if the left doesn’t silence dissent…

This strategy has served to cover a steady bipartisan drift to the right for at least half a century. If Clinton now has a shot of winning even Texas, that just shows how Republican her platform is.

There’s a flip side to this, too: if the left doesn’t rise in revolt, the right will. Outraged at the prevailing political class, Donald Trump’s constituency seems primed to reject the legitimacy of the electoral process. Mind you, they’re not calling for a black bloc at the inauguration or marching around with a banner reading “WHOEVER THEY VOTE FOR, WE ARE UNGOVERNABLE” yet, but if things continue in this direction, renegade Republicans will be understood as the chief adversaries of the ruling order.

The Price of Defeat

When revolutionary movements fail, reactionaries adapt their tactical and rhetorical innovations. This should come as no surprise: practically every aspect of our lives, from the buildings we live in to the music we listen to, represents the appropriation of ordinary people’s efforts and innovations.

The social movements of 2011—the Arab Spring, the movement of the squares in Spain and Greece, Occupy, and subsequent uprisings from the Balkans to Hong Kong—ran aground as a consequence of violent state repression and their own built-in limits before they could pose a significant threat to globalized capitalism and the governments that oversee it. Since the end of 2013, we’ve seen right-wing efforts seizing the initiative where these movements failed, reframing the causes of popular suffering and the objectives of revolt in their own terms.

First, nationalists and fascists used the Occupy model to topple the Ukrainian government. Then, in Brazil, some of the momentum of an autonomist movement against a neoliberal leftist government carried over into reactionary unrest that brought millions to the streets. Rather than a left social movement like Occupy, Germany produced Pegida. Meanwhile, racists around Europe attempted to appropriate feminist themes to smear migrants and Muslims. Others are doing the same thing with gay rights, while atheist discourse has become a breeding ground for Islamophobia. Nationalists are hailing the Brexit vote as a triumph of direct democracy, with the German and Dutch far-right parties Alternative für Deutschland and Partij voor de Vrijheid promising regular referendums as a plank in their platforms.

This trend reached the United States with the runaway candidacy of Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign appropriated the language of the anti-globalization movement, right down to the rhetoric of “fair trade” rather than “free trade” and the allegation that a global financial elite is benefitting at the expense of working people.

It is instructive that the narratives of a movement founded by radicals and anarchists could serve a nationalist billionaire in his Presidential bid: at the least, it reveals the ways that those narratives were vulnerable to cooptation all along. Indeed, there has long been a far-right opposition to globalized capitalism, which Trump embraced more and more openly as his campaign proceeded. Fascism was originally modeled on left-wing movements: it was a way to channel rightful indignation about class inequalities into violence directed down the social hierarchy, rather than revolt that could threaten it. As in the 1920s, so today: the price of revolutionary failure is reactionary momentum.

photo: The neoliberal state versus populist nationalism at a Pegida rally.

The Reaction to Come

Clinton protests too much when she claims that Trump is besmirching the legacy of democracy in the United States by threatening to reject the results of the upcoming election. Didn’t the US actively orchestrate coups to overthrow democratically elected governments in Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Iran, and the Congo, to name a few? The interplay between elections and states of exception in which ordinary political processes are suspended has always been central to democratic governance. It’s the exception that proves the rule.

In any case, Trump is not going to lead an insurrection. He’s more of a weathervane than a whirlwind; his genius, such as it is, consists of giving all the other bigoted narcissists in Middle America someone to identify with. He doesn’t have what it takes to seize power.

So Clinton will be President. And then what?

This is not a good time to stand at the helm of the state. It didn’t work out for Morsi or most of the other politicians who came to power in the revolutions of 2011. Syriza was exalted throughout Europe when they won the elections of 2015, but they burned up all their credibility as soon as they took the reins. Only apathy, despair, and the threat of even worse rulers—like Trump—currently shore up the positions of unpopular leaders like Clinton.

In a nutshell, the double bind facing governments in globalized capitalism is that open markets and austerity measures accelerate the processes by which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but closed markets and state spending drive away investors and drain resources. Consequently, people tend to blame individual governments for economic woes that state structures can do precious little to solve. In this context, the election cycle will likely produce alternating waves of hope and disillusionment as long as the anarchist proposal to abolish government and property remains unthinkable.

But if this is a bad time to hold power, it is a great time to be in the opposition. For a burgeoning far right nationalist movement, a Clinton presidency is good fortune: that’s four more years of the liberal left taking the heat for whatever happens, four more years during which the far right can claim to have a political program that would work if only they could implement it. After the initial post-election disappointment dissipates, this will be an ideal context for far-right recruiting.

Clinton looks unstoppable now, but that will change once Trump is out of the picture. Who knows what other scandalshave yet to break? The next wave of right-wing momentum is bound to look rational and well mannered by comparison with Donald Trump; while he has brought opprobrium on himself, his strong personality has offered cover for others who share his agenda. The next demagogues will have no trouble proclaiming all manner of reactionary ideas, because Trump has shifted the window of legitimate political discourse so far. Right-wing strategists are doubtless discussing how to cast a slightly wider net; if they have any sense, they will shift from old-fashioned white supremacist narratives towards a nationalist discourse of law and order that could mobilize a large number of people even in a demographically diverse US. And although Trump isn’t prepared to orchestrate an uprising, he certainly has helped set the stage for autonomous nationalist movements to come.

If all these pieces fall into place, then when Clinton inevitably fails to solve the problems that originally drove people to support Trump and Sanders, the far right will be in a much stronger position to build street-level power and perhaps even make a grab for the state.

Don’t believe it? Consider what happened to Dilma Rousseff and the Workers Party in Brazil.

Rousseff rode to office in 2011 on the coattails of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, one of the most popular politicians in Brazilian history—a left icon who spent his time in office advancing a neoliberal agenda, taking advantage of an influx of investment dollars to dampen the immediate consequences on poor Brazilians. Powerful autonomous protest movements erupted against Rousseff and the Workers Party in 2013, drawing mass participation and achieving some temporary victories. At the peak of these movements, many people with no previous protest experience or radical politics poured into them; when the Brazilian government outmaneuvered the autonomists by the usual combination of state repression and cooptation, many of these new participants moved on to right-wing mobilizations.

Like countless politicians, Rousseff was vulnerable to charges of corruption. At first, the right-wing populist movement calling for her impeachment—and in some cases the return of the military dictatorship—seemed laughable enough, as reactionaries from the middle class clumsily attempted to appropriate the organizational methods and tactics of the autonomous movements. Then the movement gained momentum in the streets, plunging Brazil into massive right-on-left violence. In the end, Rousseff was impeached. Today, Brazil’s government is controlled by the right wing.

For those who consider horizontal grassroots efforts the best hope for social change, the most dismaying part of this story is that the autonomous movements that seemed so strong in Brazil in 2013 have been completely marginalized. The participants have been forced to choose between sitting on the sidelines or mobilizing behind the Workers Party they opposed three years ago.

photo: The reactionary popular movement that toppled Dilma in Brazil.

To recap: a controversial female candidate inherits the Presidency from a popular left leader amid charges of corruption, as reactionary momentum gains steam in the wake of defeated autonomous movements. Sound familiar?

In the context of a Clinton victory, the most significant danger is that the entire political spectrum will be divided up between a statist neoliberal left and an opportunistically antigovernment nationalist right. Each of these adversaries needs the other; each will seek to absorb those who fall outside this dichotomy or else push them into the opposing camp.

If we don’t want to be marginalized the way our comrades in Brazil have been, we have to debunk the idea that either nationalism or the state could solve any of our problems, and organize to take on both the authorities and their reactionary opposition. This means breaking with the narratives of the left as well as the right. Otherwise, as the Clinton administration inevitably fails to resolve the economic crises of everyday life, more and more ordinary people will run into the arms of the reactionaries—and as these reactionary movements gain steam, the people who should be our comrades will respond in ways that shore up neoliberal democracy. There has to be another way.

If it becomes impossible to talk about how the system is rigged or how the corporate media is implicated without advancing the discourse of the far-right—if NSA surveillance, drones, international finance, corporate profiteering, and the subtle control exercised by social media algorithms become understood as right-wing issues—then all prospects of real liberation will be off the table for another generation or more. Today, even Wikileaks is bolstering right-wing narratives; grassroots outrage is assuming the form of reactionary populism. Anarchists and other partisans of liberation will be sidelined by the popular appropriation of our own tactics and slogans unless we get our bearings quickly.

We have our work cut out for us.

Further Reading

Trump and the Legacy of the Anti-Globalization Movement

The post After the Election, the Reaction- Analysis about USA Presidential elections 2016 by American anarchists Crimethinc appeared first on Void Network.

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.
Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.
How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.
Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”
Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.
The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”
The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?

7. Television. In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).
Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.
These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite  (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

The post 8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance appeared first on Void Network.

The United States is a bizarre and dangerous country, a nation with “sociopathic tendencies riddled throughout its institutionally racist society.” Like a psychopath unfazed by other people’s pain, the general American (white) population appears “completely desensitized to what should be seen as a massive, one sided, blood bath” committed in their name.
“They expect the majority of us not to connect crimes like the murder of Trayvon Martin to the crimes of murdering Afghan and Iraqi children via airstrikes, drone strikes, night raids, and war in general.”
A serial killer is a person who kills multiple people within a period of time—-their motivation is often predicated on some sort of psychological gratification. And mass murderers usually murder multiple victims in the same place at the same time. This is often done by an individual, or more. These two profiles fit America and her various organs, almost perfectly. Since the inception of this white settler state (America), it has worked hard to perfect its serial killing ways, especially when murdering people of color. Whether systematically instituting genocide on the Indigenous people of Turtle Island (North America) or killing tens of millions (conservatively) of enslaved Africans – it made no difference to the European barbarians that initiated the bloodbath. And in 2012 it makes no difference whether it is a 17 year old black boy from Florida, named Trayvon Martin, who was murdered in cold blood by a neighborhood “watchman”, or 16 Afghan civilians mass slaughtered by a member (and his accomplices) of the US military – America consumes lives with a voracious appetite. America has a particular taste for non-white lives. This country devours people of color.


America has never allowed its artificially manufactured (and stolen) borders to prevent it from initiating killing sprees. A simple look at the mass carnage caused by US military campaigns of aggression, the world over, will irrefutably highlight that fact. And when America kills its victims (men, women and children), it, like most serial killers, shows little or no remorse. It is adept at justifying its crimes against humanity. However, the US rarely sees its inhumane and violent actions as crimes of any sort. America has sociopathic tendencies riddled throughout its institutionally racist society. If America had even one iota of remorse for the countless lives it has taken (most being people of color), it would have stopped its murderous ways a long time ago. Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq are merely recent examples of America’s reckless, yet calculated, killing sprees. The US government is built to uphold imperialism, among an amalgam of nefarious characteristics – this country’s military is a most powerful tool at its disposal.


“This country devours people of color.”


The civilians they murder are deemed “collateral damage”. Over 90 percent of persons killed in US military “engagements” since Vietnam are, in fact, civilians. Those totals, in the case of Iraq, hover right around one million killed. Americans, by and large, are completely desensitized to what should be seen as a massive, one sided, blood bath. Americans, however, are easily programmed and will virtually fall for whatever propaganda is thrown their way. Most Americans are not able to see beyond the coordinated program of indoctrination they have received since childhood. They have been trained not to critically think; therefore they accept almost whatever messages that are methodically presented to them.
In March 2012 Americans, like the rest of the world, were fed a heaping helping of bullshit, otherwise known as Kony 2012. Besides they fact that Kony 2012 is a well-produced psychological operation aimed at reinforcing US military operations throughout Central and Eastern Africa, it is blatantly hypocritical. If most Americans were not so indoctrinated with “American Exceptionalism,” they would understand a few basic things regarding their own mass murdering government. The US government and its military have taken far more lives of children of color than Lord’s Resistance Army “leader”, Joseph Kony, could ever dream of.
Through deadly sanctions on countries like Zimbabwe and Iraq, the US has ripped the life away from innumerable children. Through military engagements of imperialism and brutal aggression, America has slaughtered innocent civilians in places like Panama, Iraq, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Libya – to name a few. Where are the white liberal reactionaries, like Invisible Children, when it comes to speaking out against the destruction of children from these countries? Where is the 30-minute, Hollywood production styled video detailing the role America has played in committing crimes against humanity and why it should be brought to justice? Where are their tears of sorrow and anger demanding that the selective International Criminal Court bring US government officials, from multiple presidential administrations (including the Obama administration), to the Hague?


“Over 90 percent of persons killed in US military “engagements” since Vietnam are, in fact, civilians.”


Invisible Children and organizations of their ilk are frauds and supporters of US military campaigns of murder. That is why these con-artists will say nothing about the mass murder of 16 Afghan civilians (including 9 children) carried out by Staff Sgt. Robert Bale (and his accomplices). Staff Sargent Robert Bale was trained by the most fierce and effective killing machine known to man—the US military. Actions like his were routinely carried out by US soldiers during the Vietnam War. The precedent has been established that if you are US military personnel and you do something like that, you will most likely get away with it, just as American police officers regularly get away with killing unarmed black and brown people. Even though the thuggish so-called “neighborhood watchman” that killed our young brother Trayvon Martin in cold blood was not a real police officer, his actions were not unlike that of many American police. The institutionally racist and lethal US system of policing facilitates a culture that allows cops to kill unarmed men of color. The excessively flawed and corrupt judicial system, then allows these police officers to get away with it. The American prison industrial complex feasts on black and brown people, yet detests the taste of racist corrupt cops.
George Zimmerman’s actions in killing Trayvon Martin were similar to the actions of the police officer that, in 2010, murdered Aiyana Stanley Jones, a seven year old African/black girl, in Detroit. His actions were also not unlike that of murderous police who killed the likes of Sean Bell, Timothy Stansbury, and Oscar Grant, to name a few of the countless African/black people that have been murdered within the US, by its state sponsored “law enforcement”.
Those who are surprised by the recent murder of our young brother Trayvon Martin are either delusional or disingenuous, including US president Barack Obama. When president Obama recently said, “I think all of us have to do some soul searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” he knows very well how something like the coldblooded murder of an Africa/black boy happens. It happens in America all the damn time! How quickly Obama supporters forget that it was he who refused to send a US delegation to a United Nations Conference on Racism (Durban Review Conference). Perhaps president Obama believes institutional racism had nothing to do with the death of our brother Trayvon Martin and the non-arrest of the thug (George Zimmerman) that killed him. If president Obama believes that, he is as delusional as many of his supporters who cling to the myth that he actually gives a damn about the black community.


“The institutionally racist and lethal US system of policing facilitates a culture that allows cops to kill unarmed men of color.”
It was candidate Obama in the summer of 2008 that justified the wrongful verdict that allowed the police officers who murdered Sean Bell, to be fully acquitted. Obama said, “The judge has made his ruling, and we’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down.” He made these comments as rightfully infuriated black people were peacefully protesting the unjust verdict. He made these comments as if he had the authority to speak on behalf of African/black people. Obama was concerned with his presidential campaign and making sure he did not make white liberals too uncomfortable. Those people had every right to peacefully rally and protest as they did.
Despite Obama making those callous statements about the Sean Bell murder verdict, he can now display himself as if he has been a strident opponent to the kinds of crimes that are routinely committed upon African/black people in America. He can do this because he knows very well that most of his supporters back him unconditionally, regardless of what he does. If they (many Obama supporters) gave a damn about justice, they would have been protesting his presidency long ago, especially given the fact that he has continued and expanded the war mongering ways of his dim witted predecessor, George W. Bush. Obama, like the American “justice” system, is banking on these rallies in protest of the murder of our young brother Trayvon Martin to die out after some time, even if the murderous thug (George Zimmerman) goes free.
There are protests each time a person of color is killed in cold blood by the police, and rightfully so. However, each time, after a few rallies, the chants of injustice grow fainter by the day. Some of us seem to forget that the same old system, and society, that makes these crimes possible, is still intact. Those that support and uphold this system can behave like chameleons as if they are genuinely concerned with the systematic killing of people of color, like Trayvon Martin. They do this while playing significant roles in upholding a system of human destruction. They expect the majority of us not to connect crimes like the murder of Trayvon Martin to the crimes of murdering Afghan and Iraqi children via airstrikes, drone strikes, night raids, and war in general. The same way we see Trayvon Martin as our brother, is the same way we must see children from other countries, whose lives are being lost each time the US government’s military decides to bomb their villages in to oblivion. And we must (as a collective) be much more consistent in our work, before and after, injustices that fall upon children like Trayvon Martin and Aiyana Stanley Jones.


“Each time, after a few rallies, the chants of injustice grow fainter by the day.”
If we become more consistent and organized with our work we may be able to prevent these murders from ever happening. However, if we don’t, the kind of scum that uphold and operate their state sponsored crimes, within this system, will continue to do so—unabated. We all have a role to play in confronting this unforgiving and destructive system. Raising awareness is imperative (rallies, utilizing progressive media, community forums, teach-ins, etc.). Mobilization and organizing is crucial (domestic and international legal tactics). Consistent and uncompromising political actions will be paramount. Developing and sustaining strategies is vital. Committing ourselves to put an end to institutional racism, white supremacy and imperialism must be a goal we seek. These are a few of the types of strategies that must be employed, community by community and state by state. They all must be done consistently and by a critical mass.


Remember that only one percent of the US population actively participated in the Civil rights Movement. It won’t be easy, however – freedom, justice, and equality seldom are. I can’t think of any better way to honor the lives of young people like Trayvon Martin and the countless Afghan and Iraqi children who have perished because of American military aggression and sanctions. There can be no justice without peace. Right now the US is facilitating violence and injustice throughout the globe (including within its own borders). Untold lives depend on our unrelenting commitment towards tangibly creating a society founded, not on injustice and inequality, but on peace, justice, and equality—-FOR ALL.


Solomon Comissiong is an educator, community activist, author, public speaker and the host of the Your World News media collective (www.yourworldnews.org). He can be reached at: solo@yourworldnews.org.


Source : 
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/america-global-serial-killer


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In a break with protocol, the soldiers also took photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. In the photos, Morlock grins and gives a thumbs-up sign as he poses with Mudin’s body. Note that the boy’s right pinky finger appears to have been severed. Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs reportedly used a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears to cut off the finger, which he presented to Holmes as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.

Morlock posing with an Afghan child. The photos collected by soldiers included many shots of local children, often filed alongside images of bloody casualties. At one point, soldiers in 3rd Platoon talked about throwing candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village and shooting the children who came running to pick up the sweets.

Another photo of Afghan children. According to one soldier, members of 3rd Platoon also talked about a scenario in which they “would throw candy out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run the children over.”

During the first five months of last year, a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan went on a shooting spree, killing at least four unarmed civilians and mutilating several of the corpses. The “kill team” – members of the 5th Stryker Brigade stationed near Kandahar – took scores of photos chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan. Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos, launching a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib. The images – more than 150 of which have been obtained by Rolling Stone – portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing innocent civilians is seen as a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people,” one of the soldiers told Army investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.” Many of the photos depict explicit images of violent deaths that have yet to be identified by the Pentagon. Among the soldiers, the collection was treated like a war memento. It was passed from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, UFC fights and films such as Iron Man 2. One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who  By Mark Boal MARCH 27, 2011 10:00 PM ET http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327?print=true Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji. Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger. Bravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the company’s 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields. To provide perimeter security, the soldiers parked the Strykers at the outskirts of the settlement, which was nothing more than a warren of mud-and-straw compounds. Then they set out on foot. Local villagers were suspected of supporting the Taliban, providing a safe haven for strikes against U.S. troops. But as the soldiers of 3rd Platoon walked through the alleys of La Mohammad Kalay, they saw no armed fighters, no evidence of enemy positions. Instead, they were greeted by a frustratingly familiar sight: destitute Afghan farmers living without electricity or running water; bearded men with poor teeth in tattered traditional clothes; young kids eager for candy and money. It was impossible to tell which, if any, of the villagers were sympathetic to the Taliban. The insurgents, for their part, preferred to stay hidden from American troops, striking from a distance with IEDs. While the officers of 3rd Platoon peeled off to talk to a village elder inside a compound, two soldiers walked away from the unit until they reached the far edge of the village. There, in a nearby poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. “The general consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it,” one of the men later told Army investigators. The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution. He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. His name, they would later learn, was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. He was wearing a little cap and a Western-style green jacket. He held nothing in his hand that could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. The expression on his face was welcoming. “He was not a threat,” Morlock later confessed. Morlock and Holmes called to him in Pashto as he walked toward them, ordering him to stop. The boy did as he was told. He stood still. The soldiers knelt down behind a mud-brick wall. Then Morlock tossed a grenade toward Mudin, using the wall as cover. As the grenade exploded, he and Holmes opened fire, shooting the boy repeatedly at close range with an M4 carbine and a machine gun. Mudin buckled, went down face first onto the ground. His cap toppled off. A pool of blood congealed by his head. The loud report of the guns echoed all around the sleepy farming village. The sound of such unexpected gunfire typically triggers an emergency response in other soldiers, sending them into full battle mode. Yet when the shots rang out, some soldiers didn’t seem especially alarmed, even when the radio began to squawk. It was Morlock, agitated, screaming that he had come under attack. On a nearby hill, Spc. Adam Winfield turned to his friend, Pfc. Ashton Moore, and explained that it probably wasn’t a real combat situation. It was more likely a staged killing, he said – a plan the guys had hatched to take out an unarmed Afghan without getting caught. Back at the wall, soldiers arriving on the scene found the body and the bloodstains on the ground. Morlock and Holmes were crouched by the wall, looking excited. When a staff sergeant asked them what had happened, Morlock said the boy had been about to attack them with a grenade. “We had to shoot the guy,” he said. It was an unlikely story: a lone Taliban fighter, armed with only a grenade, attempting to ambush a platoon in broad daylight, let alone in an area that offered no cover or concealment. Even the top officer on the scene, Capt. Patrick Mitchell, thought there was something strange about Morlock’s story. “I just thought it was weird that someone would come up and throw a grenade at us,” Mitchell later told investigators. But Mitchell did not order his men to render aid to Mudin, whom he believed might still be alive, and possibly a threat. Instead, he ordered Staff Sgt. Kris Sprague to “make sure” the boy was dead. Sprague raised his rifle and fired twice. As the soldiers milled around the body, a local elder who had been working in the poppy field came forward and accused Morlock and Holmes of murder. Pointing to Morlock, he said that the soldier, not the boy, had thrown the grenade. Morlock and the other soldiers ignored him. To identify the body, the soldiers fetched the village elder who had been speaking to the officers that morning. But by tragic coincidence, the elder turned out to be the father of the slain boy. His moment of grief-stricken recognition, when he saw his son lying in a pool of blood, was later recounted in the flat prose of an official Army report. “The father was very upset,” the report noted. The father’s grief did nothing to interrupt the pumped-up mood that had broken out among the soldiers. Following the routine Army procedure required after every battlefield death, they cut off the dead boy’s clothes and stripped him naked to check for identifying tattoos. Next they scanned his iris and fingerprints, using a portable biometric scanner. Then, in a break with protocol, the soldiers began taking photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. Holding a cigarette rakishly in one hand, Holmes posed for the camera with Mudin’s bloody and half-naked corpse, grabbing the boy’s head by the hair as if it were a trophy deer. Morlock made sure to get a similar memento. No one seemed more pleased by the kill than Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the platoon’s popular and hard-charging squad leader. “It was like another day at the office for him,” one soldier recalls. Gibbs started “messing around with the kid,” moving his arms and mouth and “acting like the kid was talking.” Then, using a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears, he reportedly sliced off the dead boy’s pinky finger and gave it to Holmes, as a trophy for killing his first Afghan. According to his fellow soldiers, Holmes took to carrying the finger with him in a zip-lock bag. “He wanted to keep the finger forever and wanted to dry it out,” one of his friends would later report. “He was proud of his finger.” After the killing, the soldiers involved in Mudin’s death were not disciplined or punished in any way. Emboldened, the platoon went on a shooting spree over the next four months that claimed the lives of at least three more innocent civilians. When the killings finally became public last summer, the Army moved aggressively to frame the incidents as the work of a “rogue unit” operating completely on its own, without the knowledge of its superiors. Military prosecutors swiftly charged five low-ranking soldiers with murder, and the Pentagon clamped down on any information about the killings. Soldiers in Bravo Company were barred from giving interviews, and lawyers for the accused say their clients faced harsh treatment if they spoke to the press, including solitary confinement. No officers were charged. But a review of internal Army records and investigative files obtained by Rolling Stone, including dozens of interviews with members of Bravo Company compiled by military investigators, indicates that the dozen infantrymen being portrayed as members of a secretive “kill team” were operating out in the open, in plain view of the rest of the company. Far from being clandestine, as the Pentagon has implied, the murders of civilians were common knowledge among the unit and understood to be illegal by “pretty much the whole platoon,” according to one soldier who complained about them. Staged killings were an open topic of conversation, and at least one soldier from another battalion in the 3,800-man Stryker Brigade participated in attacks on unarmed civilians. “The platoon has a reputation,” a whistle-blower named Pfc. Justin Stoner told the Army Criminal Investigation Command. “They have had a lot of practice staging killings and getting away with it.” From the start, the questionable nature of the killings was on the radar of senior Army leadership. Within days of the first murder, Rolling Stone has learned, Mudin’s uncle descended on the gates of FOB Ramrod, along with 20 villagers from La Mohammad Kalay, to demand an investigation. “They were sitting at our front door,” recalls Lt. Col. David Abrahams, the battalion’s second in command. During a four-hour meeting with Mudin’s uncle, Abrahams was informed that several children in the village had seen Mudin killed by soldiers from 3rd Platoon. The battalion chief ordered the soldiers to be reinterviewed, but Abrahams found “no inconsistencies in their story,” and the matter was dropped. “It was cut and dry to us at the time,” Abrahams recalls. Other officers were also in a position to question the murders. Neither 3rd Platoon’s commander, Capt. Matthew Quiggle, nor 1st Lt. Roman Ligsay has been held accountable for their unit’s actions, despite their repeated failure to report killings that they had ample reason to regard as suspicious. In fact, supervising the murderous platoon, or even having knowledge of the crimes, seems to have been no impediment to career advancement. Ligsay has actually been promoted to captain, and a sergeant who joined the platoon in April became a team leader even though he “found out about the murders from the beginning,” according to a soldier who cooperated with the Army investigation.ked. Read all the article and see the photos and the videos here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327?page=1

The post “The Kill Team // How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon” a report by Rolling Stone magazine appeared first on Void Network.