"The fact that this was an attack on journalists, attack on our free press, also underscores the degree to which these terrorists fear freedom — of speech and freedom of the press."
President Barrack Obama, January 7th, 2015.
We live in a free and liberal society where the proper response to another incident of senseless violence committed by Islamic radicals is to blame Muslims and Arabs for hating our freedoms and bomb individuals hundreds of miles away in retaliation.
We live in a free and liberal society where the proper response to another incident of senseless violence committed by non-Muslim domestic radicals is to blame politically moderate elected officials for being honest about institutionalized racism and gun violence.
We live in a free and liberal society where the proper response to a few dozen Sunni fundamentalists killing 3,000 people in one morning is a decades-long war against largely unaffiliated governments and people that kills hundreds of thousands and injures and displaces millions of Arabic and Islamic people.
We live in a free and liberal society where the proper response to thousands of state agents extrajudicially killing a minimum of 3,000 unarmed Americans of color per decade while unjustly incarcerating millions more through a systematic war of oppression explicitly designed to disenfranchise and disempower minorities and political undesirables, is nothing. Nothing except for beating and arresting those who dare speak in favor of retaliation or serious reformation.
We live in a free and liberal society where white people regularly wear loaded pistols and semi-automatic weapons in public as a form of political expression. We live in a free and liberal society where hundreds of self-described domestic enemies of the government rally behind a white rancher stealing public services, point guns at federal agents, and are celebrated as heroes by self-described conservatives and partisan national media for forcing the corrupt government to back down.
We live in a free and liberal society where people of color are often and with little warning executed by police for touching or holding toys, bottles, cell phones, wallets, and other mistaken possible weapons. We live in a free and liberal society that charges less than 1% of the police involved in these homicides and convicts less than a tenth of that one percent. We live in a free and liberal society where officials publicly boast of their unethical and illegal actions in these miscarriages of justice, comfortable in the knowledge that these admissions are unlikely to bring official sanction and very likely to bring political favor.
We live in a free and liberal society primed for massive race riots and domestic terrorism and we are doing nothing to address this besides suppressing dissent and hey, look over there! More crazy Muslims shot people! Bomb ISIS! More drone strikes! Expand the War on Terror!
We live in a free and liberal society that, as part of a larger campaign of bombings and assassinations in the 1960s and 1970s, recruited Orlando Bosch and others to bomb a Cuban civilian airliner, killing 73. We live in a free and liberal society that in 1992 pardoned Bosch, helped resettle him in Miami, and protected an alleged accomplice from extradition on grounds that he may be tortured in Venezuelan custody.
We live in a free and liberal society that routinely ‘renders’ suspects to dictatorships far worse than Venezuela for torture at the hands of foreign agents. We live in a free and liberal society that within ten years of Bosch’s unconditional pardon, embarked on a global war against terrorism wherein we engaged in wars of aggression on false pretenses and killed hundreds of thousands of non-combatants. We live in a free and liberal society that bombs media outlets and kills unsympathetic journalists in Iraq and Palestine and Cuba and Nicaragua and Philadelphia and Birmingham and elsewhere in the name of nationalism, tradition, economic stability and realpolitik efficiency.
We live in a free and liberal society that disappears thousands of prisoners of war and political ‘detainees’ into a worldwide network of secret gulags where they are tortured and worse. We live in a free and liberal society where none of the leaders who order or encourage this torture will ever be prosecuted. We live in a free and liberal society where the bureaucrats overseeing the torture escape even the mildest censure for surveilling and intimidating the elected officials tasked with overseeing said bureaucrats. We live in a free and liberal society currently prosecuting and imprisoning journalists and whistleblowers for publicly disclosing torture and illegal surveillance.
We live in a free and liberal society that has, in the last month, arrested, jailed, and charged with making terroristic threats at minimum dozens of young men who have, in effect, done nothing other than post hip hop lyrics and paraphrased Malcom X quotes on Facebook. That is to say that they engaged in public speech using language which has, since at least 1969’s Brandenburg v. Ohio, been explicitly protected by the First Amendment.
While even leftist American political commentators engage in a pointless national pants-pissing match over whether we should assess Islamic fundamentalists murdering journalists as more or less important than Adam Lanza murdering schoolchildren because he is a raving lunatic or Anders Breivik murdering schoolchildren because he is a raving fanatic, the United States of America is busy turning popular and formerly protected political sentiment into terroristic thoughtcrime.
We are to fear the chilling effect that these latest terrorist attacks may have on journalistic and editorial critiques of radical Islam. We are to ignore, as our media and NGOs largely are, that the Department of Justice is assisting local police and prosecutors in portraying vague violent sentiments and political speech as illegal threats.
Formerly protected speech against the state and state agents is redefined as terroristic threats with the argument that said speech makes state agents fearful, anxious, and uncomfortable. It is highly troubling that decades of fundamental civil liberties jurisprudence is being disregarded and challenged in the midst of an ongoing capitulation of the judiciary to the will of the executive security state. Combine that with excessive police militarization, suspension of habeas corpus, martial law terrorism manhunts, unprecedented use of the Espionage Act to imprison whistleblowers, a state apparatus capable of recording virtually all modern communication and ignoring even token civilian oversight, and a horrifying trend becomes starkly evident.
This is no longer unfounded conspiracy theory and slippery slope conjecture. This is well-documented international news. Both of our superficially different political parties support and profit from these policies at the billion-dollar national level. One party panders to suburban and rural whites and proudly proclaims that the growing security state will be brutally wielded to protect them from urban and foreign people of color. One party panders to people of color and their progressive allies and cynically pretends that oppression and injustice are shrinking and can be overcome with polite words. We no longer need debate if it could happen here because it is already happening here and represents a far more chilling threat to free expression than does a thousand stateless religious radicals violently attacking television stations and press offices.
The war raging isn’t one of Western Secular Freedom versus Islamic Theocratic Tyranny, but rather one of the Neoliberal Globalization and Technocratic Totalitarianism of the Elite versus Everyone Else. I can understand how spending decades immersed in attitudes of American Exceptionalism, arguments for Western Colonization, and agitation against external others can make people not see the the forest for the brilliantly lit trees of faux “liberty” and “freedom.” I desperately urge us all to start squinting and try to look past the glare.