What
Happened in Ferguson
The Saker
Setting
The Stage
To
set the stage for what happened in Ferguson, it would probably be
helpful to understand a bit about how the deck has been stacked
against people of color in the United States. Although slavery
officially ended in 1863, it was ultimately replaced in the South by
not only the state-sponsored terrorism of Jim Crow but unofficial
re-enslavement via both the sharecropping system and arrest on
trumped-up charges leading to unpaid labor on prison chain gangs. The
Civil Rights Era brought an end to the worst of this but the War on
Drugs ensured that African Americans continue to be arrested and
imprisoned at more than twice the rate of whites for similar offenses
even though drug usage is about the same for both groups. And
outrageously underpaid prison labor in for-profit private prisons is
now replacing what little remains of American manufacturing.
Richard
Nixon augmented white resentment in the way he "resolved"
the implementation of Brown vs. The Board, the landmark 1954 Supreme
Court decision on school desegregation, because he shrewdly realized
that working-class white Democrats, North and South, would happily
become Republicans if the Republican Party "took their side"
on the issue. The end result of that was that re-segregation
occurred and black schools are now once again under-funded, with
poorer facilities, out-of-date and sometimes even *no* books (!), and
generally much worse teachers. I.e., not much has really
changed at all in terms of education either.
Worse
yet, although blacks once lived in all areas of this country,
beginning in the third quarter of the 19th century, they were herded
into the cities and literally forbidden to be in many towns after
dark. And the parts of the cities they live in generally have
far worse services -- less frequent garbage pick-up or snow-removal,
streets and street lights not well-maintained -- but still
very high rents, especially considering the quality of the housing.
Ostensibly these problems were to have ended with the passage
of various Civil Rights laws but again, not really. Redlining
is an ongoing process by which blacks are prevented from buying homes
in certain areas by making it far more difficult to obtain mortgages
and setting higher interest rates for them than whites with similar
qualifications. Given that home ownership is generally the
primary source of wealth for most American families, this arena too
has been closed off to most African Americans. And finally,
jobs: given two candidates equally qualified for a position, the
African American is significantly less likely to be hired.
White
attitudes meanwhile have not shown much improvement either. This
is in part due to Nixon's Southern Strategy for re-empowering the
Republican Party, and in part due to Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush's deliberate race-baiting (and vote-getting) strategies,
including deliberately trumping up white fears of black violence and
lying about the extent of welfare fraud by blacks. But the
Democrats, frightened at their loss of white voters, weren't much
better: Bill Clinton's Welfare Reform hurt a lot of innocent
people, white and black, because he too wanted to look tough on black
crime -- which had actually been declining -- while
ignoring the serious and far more expensive crimes of wealthy whites.
Another factor here is due to the relative isolation of whites
from blacks: it's far easier to remain afraid of people you
never get to know, especially if the media commentators you trust
keep filling you with stereotypes instead of telling the truth. And
make no mistake about it: the most prejudiced whites are also
the most frightened whites. Sadly, it is not only to the
benefit of the Republican Party to keep them that way but, because
few blacks vote Republican, the Democratic Party really doesn't have
to work very hard to get the black vote -- so they don't much
bother either. So it's a truly lose-lose situation there too.
Now
for the police. Racial profiling and police brutality have
always been a fact of life for people of color in this country. This
stems in part from the fact that traditionally the people recruited
to be policemen have been quite likely to view blacks as
inherently inferior, dangerous and more likely to be criminal. Gun
use is deeply ingrained in American culture, and those who hold
such racist views are particularly likely to see their guns as
essential for personal safety and the only real way to
maintain public order. It should also be noted that fears
of a black insurrection as well as the desire to conserve one's human
property led quite early to the formation of armed paramilitary slave
patrols throughout the South, a primary reason for both the inclusion
and peculiar wording of the Second
Amendment. http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery The
growth of the American gun lobby over the past 25 years has both fed
upon and reinforced these views but in point of fact, parents in the
black community have traditionally had to sit their pre-teen children
down for the rite of passage known as "The Talk", in which
they're given very specific instructions on how to behave with
sufficient meekness and submission to, hopefully, remain alive.
However,
the over-militarization of local police -- up to and including
official instructions to consider and respond to non-violent
protesters as terrorists -- is a disturbing new trend. The Department
of Homeland Security has been a huge profit-making venture for the
Military Industrial Complex, both in terms of providing
taxpayer-funded grants to local police and fire departments
ostensibly to protect us from terror attacks but in fact to ensure
that items no longer needed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
could be sold somewhere. So now the tiniest rural fire
departments have armoured vehicles they can hardly afford to fuel,
and local police have the latest in military equipment and Mossad
training inculcating in them a genuine terror of the population --
i.e., us -- they are paid with our tax dollars to protect.
A
commenter on the English version of this blog who lives in a
Washington DC suburb recently called her local police department
about a possible fraud case which ordinarily would have required
simple fact-finding by a single detective. Instead, a
fully-armed five-man SWAT team arrived at the wrong address, ready to
fire. These events are increasingly common across the board,
with innocent people of every age and color and sometimes even their
pets being brutalized and/or murdered at traffic stops, in clearly
non-violent situations in their own homes when simple medical or
other assistance had been requested or again the police burst into
the wrong home, and/or the simply because the policeman did not feel
his (often quite arbitrary and illegal) orders were being
sufficiently obeyed. There is also considerable evidence
to suggest poor screening for excess violence or poor behavioral
controls, previous job infractions of this sort and/or drug and
alcohol abuse among applicants for police work.
Add
in a "normal" quantity of southern racism (also quite
present in the North, of course, reinvigorated by Sarah Palin and
deliberately amplified by various rightwing media in efforts to get
Republicans out to vote), a large group of African Americans recently
moved from the inner city to one of the few areas they were
begrudgingly allowed to enter, and a town whose second-largest source
of operating revenues comes from the fines and fees paid by African
Americans disproportionately targeted for traffic stops and other low
level offenses
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/8/27/is_ferguson_feeding_on_the_poor and
yes, Ferguson was a recipe for disaster. The event itself
though, while hardly atypical, is in some ways less interesting than
its aftermath, which provides almost a Rohrschach test for America's
people, media and governance at this point in time.
The
Event
The
evidence on which all parties agree is that Michael Brown was an
unarmed 18-year-old highly regarded by his teachers who wanted to
start his own business and had no criminal record. He was shot
and killed by Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson while walking
with a friend to visit his grandmother at approximately noon on
Sunday, August 9, 2014, just two days before he was due to start
college. There is no police video of the shooting although
an audiotape of several shots appears legitimate and many eyewitness
tweets and a later video of Brown's body are also on record;
nevertheless, many details of the incident remain unclear. What can
be stated without dispute is that Wilson stopped the two teens and
ordered them with rather questionable legality to get off the street
and onto the sidewalk; accounts differ as to how hostile this
confrontation was or whether Brown remained on the street, was pulled
by Wilson towards or into the car or was at some point actually in
the car assaulting Wilson as later claimed by the police. It is
fairly well established, however, that Wilson was seated in his car
when he first shot at Brown and his friend through the open car
window but missed as they fled. He then got out of his car,
fired again at Brown and continued to shoot multiple rounds after the
teen turned around with his hands up, ultimately killing him with a
shot in the head as he fell. What happened next is like plate
tectonics or watching a Greek tragedy unfold.
The
Aftermath
Not
trusting the hostile and overwhelmingly white power structure in
Ferguson, Brown's family requested a private autopsy by a former NYC
forensic pathologist; his results showed nine gunshot wounds (four on
the right arm, three on the head and two on the chest) suggesting he
had been shot at least six times though not from very close range
since there was no gunshot residue on the
body. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/us/michael-brown-autopsy-shows-he-was-shot-at-least-6-times.html?_r=0
However, the full findings from the official autopsy by the St. Louis
County medical examiner's office have not been made public, so the
presence of any residue on Brown's clothing or in Wilson's car
remains uncertain. The Justice Department was also asked to conduct
an autopsy, though it is highly doubtful that additional information
can be obtained.
Michael
Brown's body lay in the street for four hours afterwards at police
insistence, Wilson's name was not revealed for another week and
although the Ferguson Police Department filed an incident report on
8/15 alleging that Brown and his friend had committed a robbery just
before he was killed, it took the department another full week to
file even a highly-abbreviated report of his murder. It was
acknowledged, however, that Wilson had no knowledge of the robbery at
the time he ordered Brown off the street.
Meanwhile,
when the police finally allowed people to access the site of his
death, Brown's family and other residents placed flowers and candles
over the bloodstains on the street. At that point, in gestures
of contempt quite familiar to people who had lived through Jim Crow,
one policeman let his dog urinate on the memorial and others
re-blocked the street from cars and then deliberately drove their
cars over the candles and flowers, scattering the petals, ruining the
memorial and deeply horrifying the already shocked, grieving people.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/ferguson-st-louis-police-tactics-dogs-michael-brown
Over
the next few nights the unarmed mourners and protesters grew
increasingly restless and perhaps a dozen of them began looting and
vandalizing and set one business on fire. Accustomed to enforced
deference but at this point genuinely afraid they might have a riot
on their hands, the police refused to acknowledge any culpability,
attempted with questionable veracity to place the entire blame on
Brown, and responded to the protesters according to the Mossad
training provided their chief. This included riot gear, SWAT
team tactics and helicopters the first night, followed by tear gas,
wooden pellets, rubber bullets, smoke bombs, and flash grenades. The
results were about as predicted, the governor intervened, steps were
taken to calm things down, more people protested, the situation
gained national attention, the media took their accustomed positions
along predetermined political fault lines, the police over-reacted
again, the intensity ebbed and flowed, the National Guard were called
in, many people were roughed up, threatened and arrested, including
several journalists, and statements by the Obama administration
appeared more interested in the violence perpetrated by the
protesters than against Michael Brown. Things finally began to
calm down after his funeral.
The
Fault Lines
Every
single part of this tragedy, up to and including the poor
training, judgment and violent behavior by some of the police, was
utterly predictable; so too was the sensationalized and
highly-slanted media coverage, the location, content and intensity of
the public outcry on both sides of the Left-Right political divide
with the typical uncaring indifference in the middle, and the far
greater amount of money collected on behalf of Darren Wilson than
Michael Brown.
http://www.ksdk.com/story/homepage/2014/08/23/cash-raised-for-mo-cop-surpasses-brown-donations/14506401/ The
intensity of the protesters' response is likewise hardly surprising
given the destruction of a simple memorial to a murdered teenager
whose body was not yet cold, performed deliberately by members of the
same organization as the man who had killed him under highly
questionable circumstances.
It
is equally important to recognize that what happened in Ferguson was
hardly an anomaly: not a single thing happened there that
hasn't happened in many places in this country many times before. In
fact, taking a longer view, the biggest question is why the media
chose to give it so much coverage. And the answer to that most
likely has more to do with their own increasingly precarious finances
and the current state of our foreign rather than domestic affairs and
their resulting assessment once again that the public really needs a
strong diversion and the inculcation of yet more fear.
Nevertheless,
just as people all over the world are becoming increasingly aware of
the Anglo-Zionist Empire's true role in taking over and/or destroying
so many other countries, the ugly difference between myth and reality
in American life -- essentially unchanged since our very beginning --
has been revealed for everyone to see. The sad truth, however,
is that the vast majority of Americans remain locked in to their own
propaganda-induced preconceptions, and while efforts continue to be
made to address the underlying issues of police militarization,
brutality and unequal treatment before the law, the likelihood of
genuine improvement in any of these areas is extremely low.
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