"Detroit like Johannesburg," Gil Scott-Heron sang, and a movement echoed, a generation or so ago. But the Empire responded to Detroit, where the U.S. Army had to be called in to suppress a Black-led uprising and urban insurgency, and to Johannesburg — with COINTELPRO and gentrification in the case of U.S. inner cities, and with neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism in Johannesburg.
Today, Ferguson, Missouri is like Soweto — a Black township, virtually a concentration camp, like many around the U.S. where Black people and Mexicano/indigeneous Raza people have been moved. This has occurred through decades of programs and policies aimed at transforming US cities along the lines of cities throughout the global South, where the wealthy, powerful and privileged have the city center, and the poor and oppressed are relegated to shanty-towns, favelas and colonias on the outskirts.
Suburban Counterinsurgency from Gaza to Ferguson
by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror
http://ara-la.tumblr.com/...
"Detroit like Johannesburg," Gil Scott-Heron sang, and a movement echoed, a generation or so ago. But the Empire responded to Detroit, where the U.S. Army had to be called in to suppress a Black-led uprising and urban insurgency, and to Johannesburg — with COINTELPRO and gentrification in the case of U.S. inner cities, and with neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism in Johannesburg.
Today, Ferguson, Missouri is like Soweto — a Black township, virtually a concentration camp, like many around the U.S. where Black people and Mexicano/indigeneous Raza people have been moved. This has occurred through decades of programs and policies aimed at transforming US cities along the lines of cities throughout the global South, where the wealthy, powerful and privileged have the city center, and the poor and oppressed are relegated to shanty-towns, favelas and colonias on the outskirts.
Detroit itself, where the efforts at gentrification and ethnic cleansing since the ’60s didn’t work as desired to drive Black people out and reclaim the city for whites, has become a case study of a city in extremis, near death. The state has now turned to turning off the water as a way to drive people out so that their land and homes can be taken. In Benton Harbor Michigan, the state has taken over politically to prevent the local Black population from running its own city in its own interests. In Ferguson, the governor of Missouri ordered the replacement of local law enforcement with state and potentially federal National Guard forces. What this all drives home is the essentially colonial nature of the relationship of the white-supremacist settler-colonial state with Black/African people (and other colonized and oppressed people) inside the U.S.
For example, a no-fly zone has been declared over Ferguson. This is not because anyone thinks the outraged and rebellious people of Ferguson have access to an air force or even rockets (as the Palestinians in Gaza do) but because the powers-that-be want to prevent media helicopters from covering what is happening on the ground and spreading the contagion of rebellion through spreading the images, or possibly exposing some of the para-military operations of the police.
The recurring nightmare of white supremacy, settler colonialism and empire — particularly in the U.S., built on stolen land and dependent on internally colonized or imported peoples — is of slave rebellion and authentic democratic and anti-colonial revolution. The response to the rebellions of the 1960s-70s, which began even to break through the allegiance to empire within the European-descent population, was two-pronged. COINTELPRO was a domestic war strategy against the leading revolutionary forces, such as the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican independentistas, the Chicano/Mexicano movement and other sectors, featuring killings, frame-up arrests and long-term isolation incarceration, infiltration and disruption of organizations. But simultaneously, there was a mass strategy of large-scale militarization of the police and “ethnic cleansing” through gentrification, spelled out by Samuel Huntington of the Trilateral Commission in a book about the “excess of democracy”. Poor people of color, and particularly Black people in the inner-city, were seen as too close and too threatening to the seats of power.
Gentrification = Genocide
That’s why Harlem, NY now has a white majority population, why Black people were driven from San Francisco’s Fillmore district, why L.A. County pushes people who need housing vouchers out to Lancaster and Palmdale, why the large public housing projects of Chicago have been demolished.
Militarized police forces have continued to expand and harden their armaments since Nixon’s “Law Enforcement Assistance Administration” was created as a response to the rebellions that overwhelmed local police forces and required use of the National Guard and the US Army. Such policing is tied to the system of mass incarceration that in addition to containing potential threats and rebels, serves to depopulate and destabilize inner-city communities, making them more susceptible to gentrification, relocation and ethnic cleansing (AKA genocide).
The police have always served as an occupying army in communities of color and an internal border patrol around more privileged communities. But as the real army has adopted increased “policing” responsibilities in colonial interventions abroad, and the US border with Mexico has become increasingly militarized, the seamless nature of the Empire inside and outside the borders has manifested itself as an extreme militarization of local police forces. It must be understood that such “reforms” as “community-oriented policing” are part and parcel of this militarization. In their own publications, police theorists refer to community oriented policing as “the domestic equivalent of PSYOPS (psychological operations) in the military — to control the thinking of the population or the enemy.”
The police are simply the leading edge of the wedge of colonialism and domination, enforcers of a genocidal economic, social and political order. The rulers understand that the long decades of exploitation, oppression and immiseration to which poor Black, Brown, indigenous, Asian and increasingly even poor white working people have been subjected to have created an enormous tinderbox waiting for a spark to set off a conflagration or explosion. The rulers are more aware of their own vulnerabilities than we the people tend to be. The contradiction they are facing, as police killings take on epidemic proportions, is that the very weapon they seek to wield to suppress or disrupt insurgency inevitably tends to provoke it.
Exerting the Power of the People
What we need in these times is a counter-force, an organization of the people for self-defense and people’s power. We need a countervailing capacity to fight back that can give people heart and hope that we can overcome the defeats imposed by COINTELPRO, that exploited the internal weaknesses of the people’s forces in the 1960s-70s. We need to nurture and rapidly build up and unite the kernels of such leading forces that exist today, particularly in the Black liberation struggle, which has always played a pivotal and leading role in opposition to the Empire and to the capacity to build a new society based on self-determination and intercommunalism instead of colonialism and exploitation.
That’s why the Black Riders Liberation Party has been galvanizing so much support around the country. People are hungry for an uncompromising, militant, self-determined effort to take the initiative and to set the terms of the struggle going forward instead of just reacting, critiquing, condemning or pleading for fairness or justice from a system incapable of meeting human needs or respecting human dignity. Check out the Black Riders, new generation Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/..., on GoFundMe at http://www.gofundme.com/... or on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/...
People of European descent in the U.S. need to understand that we live in and must oppose and help bring down an EMPIRE — the same empire responsible for the massacres in Gaza, the every-28-hours killings of Black people by law enforcement in the US, the occupation of northern Mexico and the military imposition of a border with mass deportations, the forced removal of people of Japanese descent into camps during World War II, the invasion of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya; the same Empire that is destroying the planetary ecosystem in the name of profit. Our opposition to exploitation and oppression must express itself as a commitment to justice and solidarity, a willingness to fight this death system by every means at our disposal until it is destroyed and replaced.
Check out Anti-Racist Action-L.A. and our paper, Turning the Tide, at www.antiracist.org.
You can contact the Black Riders Liberation Party at blackriders1996@gmail.com or 323-289-4457.