Racism is used by the ruling class in America to turn working people against each other so that they do not see the larger issue of capitalist inequality and exploitation, according to author and political commentator Danny Weil.
Black Lives Matter
"Today, racism, as it always has been, is used by the ruling class in America to justify land theft, austerity and war; to distract people from attacks on their civil rights and living conditions, and, more importantly, to turn working people against each other so that they do not see the larger issue of capitalist inequality and exploitation and thus will not organize against it," he said in an interview with the Balkans Post.
BP: What are your thoughts on the U.S. government's response to the widespread protests that broke out in the U.S. over the police killing of George Floyd?
Danny Weil: The general response by the U.S. government to protests over the killing of George Floyd has been to launch 'counter-insurgency warfare'. What we are witnessing is the roll-out of a Phoenix Program in America which, non-coincidently was used in Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq, Latin America and Afghanistan as a counter-insurgency method to quell popular uprisings against imperial repression and exploitation at home.BP: What are your thoughts on the U.S. government's response to the widespread protests that broke out in the U.S. over the police killing of George Floyd?
This seems to me a very good description of the role of para-military, police departments in America today.
The police only exist as a political apparatus to "serve and protect" the ruling class, the small ownership class. Increasingly, the police, funded nationally with $100 billion every year, have been integrated into their own military, armed with the most advanced weaponry of war.
Let's be clear: the police, the men and women themselves, are not a cross section of American life. Like the military, they are recruited from the most reactionary sections of the lower-middle class and politically backward workers and trained to hate and despise the poor and oppressed while maintaining subservience to authority and 'capital'.
The police are a hostile occupying force in every working-class neighborhood in the country. Many police recruits have served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they became indoctrinated into and/or inured to violence and death of the "other". They return home, psychologically battered, where many find new roles in local police departments littered with white supremacists.
So, the response to the legitimate protests has resulted in what can be logically expected: a rampage by the police and perhaps the most violent and vicious attacks on democratic rights in the history of the United States. States of emergency have been declared and curfews implemented in cities and counties across the country (most of which are controlled by corporate Democrats), and the police militarized.
The White House itself is now the political nerve center for a fascist movement to establish a military dictatorship, overthrow the Constitution, abolish democratic rights, inject the system with austerity and violently suppress the multitude of protests against police brutality and savagery that have swept across the United States.
More disturbing, Trump and his DOJ Attorney General William Barr have also responded by decreeing that federal prosecution of demonstrators be placed under the Joint Terrorist Task Force, a multi-department military-intelligence agency in charge of prosecuting combatants captured in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.
With the new decree, FBI agents working through the JTTF now can go to people's homes, work sites and communities and question people about their political views, in gross violation of the Constitution, while seeking to criminalize their participation in peaceful protests.
Counter-insurgency begins with intelligence gathering efforts as they pertain to the politics and culture of the society/community being targeted. It is always accompanied with intense police repression. The goal is to penetrate into the all corners of a society/community -- to get agents inside civil society, organizations, families, and social networks and then figure out who's the "bad guy".
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