by DGR News Service | Dec 27, 2020 | Repression at Home
In the second part of this series we are offered systemic analysis regarding the methods employed to diminish resistance movements and the impact this had on working and middle classes.
By Russell “Maroon” Shoatz/4StruggleMag
“When you grow up in situations like me and Cliff…there is a lot of respect for brothers like [drug lord] Alpo and Nicky Barnes, those major hustler-player cats. Cause they made it. They made it against society’s laws. They were the Kings of their own domain“. (Cliff Evans, “The Ivy League Counterfeiter”, Rolling Stone, 2000; in Toure, Never Drank the Kool-Aid, Picador, New York, 2006)
The “Original” Black Mafia (BM)
Albeit a touchy matter to many, it’s an irrefutable fact that the original Black Mafia (BM) was first established in Philadelphia, Pa, in the late 1960’s, and has seen its cancerous ideas duplicated, imitated and lionized by Black youth ever since. Moreover, although it’s unclear how much the national Nation of Islam (NOI) leadership knew or learned about the BM, there’s no question of the local NOI’s eventual absorption of the BM-under Minister Jeremiah X. Pugh. In fact, although the BM was originally just local “stick-up kids” culled from neighborhood gangs, their being swallowed by the NOI would eventually turn them into a truly powerful and terrifying criminal enterprise-completely divorced from everything that the NOI had stood for since its founding in 1930.
Sadly, most of the high level tricks which the government employed against the BPP were also used against the BM/NOI; namely, Co-option, Glamorization of Gangsterism, Separation from the Most Advenced Elements and Raw Fear. Thus, it must be understood that although the NOI and BPP had different ideologies and styles, to most Black youth, both held out the promise of helping them to obtain what they most desired: self-respect, dignity and freedom. Interestingly, the puritanical NOI’s dealings with the founders of the BM were similar to that of the Catholic Church’s historical relationship with the Italian Mafia. That is, the BM members who attended NOI religious services did so strictly on that basiswhile still coming to the attention of the local NOI leadership as unusually good financial contributors. And within the lower
class Black community being served, everybody knew that meant that they were hustlers, stick-up kids, or both. So the same way that the Italian Mafia would contribute huge sums to the Catholic Church, the BM would do with Philly’s Temple No. 12.
The national NOI, however, had been under close scrutiny and surveillance by intelligence agencies for decades.
In fact, by the time of this death, the NOI’s founder, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, had in excess of one million pages of files in the archives of the FBI alone! (Anyone who still believes that the assassination of Malcolm X did not have a hidden U.S. government hand behind it, has no clear idea of the threat that the NOI was perceived to be at that time). As a result of their surveillance, the intelligence agencies knew who were the BM’s financial contributors to the NOI. Overshadowing this, of course, were the bloody assaults that the FBI and local police were levelling against other Black radical and revolutionary groups, like the local and national BPP branches, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and scores of smaller formations.
The FBI first tried to recruit Minister Pugh as a snitch against the local BPP by telling him that the BPP was out to get him and supplant the local NOI for Black youth’s loyalties. Pugh, to his credit, didn’t take the bait and also avoided getting his Temple No. 12 involved in a war with the BPP, although he had to suspect that his taking of blood money from the BM had also come to the attention of the FBI, thus making him vulnerable. Yet miraculously about the same time Pugh’s name was removed from the FBI’s Security Index, which contained all of what that agency considered to be the country’s top-level threats. After Pugh’s having been on the list for years, and right after its agents filed a report of his refusal to be a snitch, why would the Bureau nevertheless relax the pressure?
How did J. Edgar Hoover & Co. think things would unfold?
By giving Pugh and his Temple, and their BM followers, enough rope to hang themselves, or to become addicted to a game that was ultimately controlled by their professed enemies-the U.S. government and its underlings. Thus, this would turn the tables on Pugh and force him to become less radical, more compliant, and no longer a threat on the level of the BPP, RAM and other revolutionaries. For the BM members, the glamorization of gangsterism fit right in. After all, why would a group of Black stick-up kids and gang members call themselves The Black Mafia?
This was in the era of Black is beautiful, when millions of Blacks began wearing Afros/Bushes and African clothing and adopting African names-completely at odds with aping Italians! Why not name themselves the zulus, Watusis or the Mau Mau-like even younger street gangs were doing? No, Hollywood’s projection of gangsterism was getting through. Consequently, within a couple of years the BM would uniformly be recognized as expensively dressed, big hat-wearing, Cadillac-driving imitations of the Italian Mafia. And sadly, they turned countless numbers of street gang members, former RAM cadre and militants from dozens of other Philly groups, who were fighting oppression, into pawns who were used to further destroy their own communities.
The third trick:
that is, of separating the youth from the more advanced elements, operated under cover of Pugh and other insiders continuing to preach Black Nationalist doctrines amongst the youth in the street gangs and within the prisons, never missing an opportunity to hold out the illusion that they could gain pride and respect. As a result, many youth believed they were joining a rebel group that was only awaiting the right time to throw their lot in with the masses of Blacks who were waging battles from coast to coast and on the African continent.
In reality Pugh & Co. were tricking the youth into diverting their energies into gangsterism, thereby separating them from the more advanced elements. Many, if not most, bought into the rationale that their extortion and drug dealing were a tax that would be used to build The Nation. A few years later that would be dubbed drinking the Kool-Aid, after Jim Jones and his CIA handlers tricked and forced hundreds of other Blacks to “drink” their death. And undoubtedly, Huey had also tricked his people with a similar game, which decades later was shown to be completely false! Yes, that ill-gotten money did build and/or buy some expensive homes, cars, clothing, women and drugs as well as a few schools and businesses. But to fight oppression? Please!
Finally, the raw fear being levelled on the entire society had a devastating effect on the BM, also.
Otherwise how can one account for the hundreds, if not thousands, of BM street soldiers, who were fearless enough to cow Philly’s long-established Italian Mafia and most of its warring street gangs; or the BM headhunters, who terrorized the city with decapitations, nevertheless producing a distinctly lackluster showing when confronting anyone in uniform? I’ll tell you how: their leadership had completely disarmed their members’ fighting spirits by alsways telling them not to resist the police until the leadership gave the order-which never came. Comically, after the police and FBI had succeeded in suppressing, jailing, exiling and co-opting most of the BPP, BLA, RAM and others, they then discovered the BM and attacked it with a vengeance.
As might be expected, none of the BM put up anything resembling real resistance except to go on the lam. Minister Jeremiah himself made a 180-degree turn by becoming a snitch after getting caught in a drug sting. Thus, the legacy of the BM is one of a ruthless group of Black thugs who have spawned similarly ruthless crews-notably Philly’s Junior Black Mafia (JBM) and the latest clone, Atlanta’s Black Mafia Family. But their most harmful effect comes from their deeds and mystiques that has returned a huge segment of Black youth to believing that the only way to gain any respect and dignity is through being the best and most heartless hustler around: that is, full circle back to 1955.
Finally, I used the BPP/BLA and NOI/BM as examples because they are the most well documented. Although both are surrounded by so much mythology, a true rawanalysis is almost never attempted except by the government and intelligence agencies. The latter use their findings to refine and revise older tricks in order to continue checking and controlling this country’s rebellious youth while simultaneously persisting in oppressing the communities they occupy-in line with the ruling classes’ agenda. As to the middle and upper class idealistic youth from all segments of the First Wave, with few exceptions they allowed themselves willy-nilly to be co-opted fully as the new managers of the system they had vowed radically to change. Moreover, they became the champions of and made a doctrine out of the necessity of always using and relying on passive and legal methods, epitomized by their new saint, Martin Luther King, Junior.
The Second Wave: circa 1980-2005
Thus, by 1980, for all practical purposes, the youth from the First Wave had been defeated. Following this they collectively descended into a debilitating, agonizing, escapist long period characterized by partying. I am not discounting the fringe elements who had been so adversely affected that they had their hands full trying to rebuild their sanity or families, or to go back to school or simply survive in prison or exile while everybody else seemed to be dancing on the ceiling. This was similar to the shell shocked vets of WWI and WWII and the post-tramatic stress syndrome sufferers of the Vietnam war.
The most misunderstood victims, however, were the First Wave’s children, who themselves became the Second Wave from 1980 to 2005. Those are the years when the latter either reached puberty or became young adults who, paradoxically, were left in the dark about most of what had occurred before. Instead they were left to the tender mercies of the reformed but still rotten-to-the-core and ruling class-dominated schools, social institutions and propaganda machinery. Thus, amongst all the lower and working class segments of the youth, Coolio’s Gangster’s Paradise fits the bill. These youth were raised by the state, either in uncaring schools, juvenile detention centers or homes; in front of TV sets, movies, video arcades, or in the streets. Within the greatly expanded middle classes-most notably amongst the people of color-the youth were back to the gospel of getting a good education and job as their highest calling.
This was mixed with an originally more conscious element which tackled politics and academia as a continuation of the First Wave’s struggle.
The upper class youth, however, were doomed to follow in the footsteps of their ruling class parents, since the radical and revolutionary changes they sought failed to alter the country much. Like a recurring nightmare, the Second Wave also fell victim to co-option, glamorization of gangsterism, separation from the most advanced elements, reliance on passive methods and raw fear of an upgraded police state. Left to their own devices, the lower class youth began a search for respect and dignity by devising their own institutions and culture, which came to be dominated by gangs and Hip Hop. These, on their own, could be either used for good or bad. But lacking any knowledge of the First Wave’s experiences, they were tricked like their parents.
The Gang and Hip Hop Culture Gangs are working and lower class phenomena which date from the early beginnings of this country, having also been in evidence overseas. In fact, many of those who joined the First Wave were themselves gang members, most notably Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, head of the notorious Slausons (the forerunners of today’s Crips), and the martyred founder of the Los Angeles Panthers. As little as it’s understood, the gangs are in fact the lower class counterparts of the middle and upper classes’ youth clubs, associations, Boy/Girl Scouts, and fraternities and sororities.
The key difference is the level of positive adult input in the middle and upper class groups.
Hip Hop is just the latest manifestation of artistic genius bursting forth from these lower class youth-seeking respect and dignity. Orthodox hip hoppers speak of a holy trinity of hip hop fathers: Herc, Afrika Bambaata, and Grandmaster Flash. But like moisture in the air before it rains, the conditions were ripe for hip hop before the holy trinity began spinning. Hip Hop’s prefathers or grandfathers are James Brown, Huey Newton, Muhammad Ali, Richard Pryor, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Bruce Lee, certain celebrity drug dealers and pimps whose names won’t be mentioned here… (Toure, Never Drank the Kool-Aid, op. cit.)
Alas, Hip Hop culture is daily being co-opted in ways so obvious that it needs no explanation. But woe be to us if we don’t come to grips with how the Second Wave’s gangs have been coopted. It is a continuing tragedy, moreover, which if not turned around will ultimately make the shortcomings of the First Wave pale in comparison! Ronald Reagan and crack were hip hop’s ’80’s anti-fathers: both helped foster the intense poverty and the teenage drug-dealing millionaires as well as the urge to rebel against the system that appeared to be moving in for the kill, to finally crush Black America. (Toure, Never Drank the Kool-Aid, op. cit.)
Certainly the gangs have comprised a subculture that has historically been a thorn in the culing class’ side.
It either had to be controlled and used, or eradicated. Usually that was accomplished by co-option and attrition, with older elements moving on, or being jailed long enough to destroy the group. Our First Wave, as noted, was able-somewhat-to outflank the ruling class by absorbing some key gang members of that time. This added to the First Wave’s prestige in the community and its acceptance of radical and revolutionary ideas. (Also, as noted, these ideas were pimped by BM-style groups). It’s fascinatingly simple to follow how the Second Wave has been tricked to destroy itself. Just about all the pillars upholding this giant con game are familiar to everyone in the form of movies, TV, street culture, cops, courts, jails, prisons, death, and our own families’ and friends’ experiences with them.
Gangstas, Wankstas and Wannabes
All of the above, more than anything, crave respect and dignity! Forget all of the unformed ideas about the homies wanting the families, fathers and love that they never had. That plays a part, but if you think that the homies only need some more hugs, then you’ve drunk the kool-aid! Actually, even if you did have a good father and a loving family/extended family, if everything in society is geared toward lessening your self-worth because of your youth, race, tastes in dress, music, speech, lack of material trappings, etc., they you will still hunger for some respect, which if it came, would lead you to knowing dignity within yourself. Even suburban, middle and upper-class youth confront this-to a lesser degree.
All of the beefin’, flossin’, frontin’, set-trippin’, violence and bodies piling up comes from the pursuit of respect and dignity. This is how 50 Cent put it: Niggas out there sellin’ drugs is after what I got from rappin’…When you walk into a club and the bouncers stop doin’ whatever the fuck they doing to let you in and say everybody else wait. He special. That’s the same shit they do when you start killin’ niggas in you hood. This is what we been after the whole time. Just the wrong route. (“Life of a Hunted Man”, posted on Rolling Stone website, April 3, 2003; in Never Drank the Kool-Aid, op. cit.)
Admittedly, at times that simple, but raw truth is so intertwined with so many other things that it’s hard to grasp.
Namely, nowadays, the drug game, other git-money games, and most sets do provide a sort of alternative family. They also provide a strong cohesion that is mistakenly called love. Hence, to cut through the distractions, I’ll illustrate my point as follows: When the Second Wave was left hanging by the defeated and demoralized First Wave, its members unknowingly reverted to methods of seeking dignity and respect that the First Wave had elevated themselves above during their struggle for radical and revolutionary change. This was a period during which gang wars and gang banging were anathema!
The revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth notes that the colonized and oppressed are quick to grab their knife against a neighbor or stranger, thereby in a subconscious way ducking their fear of directing their pent up rage at those responsible for their suffering: their colonial oppressors. The notable early sets-like the Bloods, Crips and Gangster Disciples-primary activity was banging, or gang warring over “turf”: neighborhoods, schools, etc., as well as over real or imagined slights. But the real underlying motivation was of all of the parties’ desires to build their reputations and earn stripes, meaning to gain prestige in the eyes of fellow bangers.
This translated into respect amongst their peers.
It also causedthese youth to bond with each other like soldiers do in combat; a bonding like a family-even more so. Not surprisingly, many outsiders decreed that this bonding was love. Some youth also thought that. However, to exchange love, you first have to love yourself, and the gang banger by definition has no love for his or her self. They in fact are desperately seeking respect, without which love is impossible. Example: If you respect your body, you can also love your body, and you would not dare destroy it with drugs or alcohol. But if you don’t respect your body and you go on to destroy it in that fashion, then it follows that you have no love for it either.
The bangin’ raged on for years, piling up as many deaths and injuries as the U.S. suffered during the Vietnam War. Each incident elevated either the attacker’s or victim’s stature in the eyes of his or her peers. As might be expected during those years, the overseers of the oppressive system bemoaned the carnage while locking up untold numbers of bangers for a few years; but overall, they did absolutely nothing to try to arrest the problem. Now here’s where it really gets interesting. Drugs, as noted, had been flooding into these same communities since the 1960’s. Back then, however, it was mainly heroin, with marijuana and meth playing relatively minor roles. Remember the movies Serpico and The French Connection exposing that? But the early gangs, to their credit, never got deeply involved in that. They saw dope fiends as weak and, although those early gangs would blow some sherm or chronic, it was just a pass-time activity for them. They were serious about bangin’!
The bangers were in fact all co-opted;
wedded as they were to their form of fratricidal gangsterism and totally separated from the remnants of the First Wave, about whom they knew next to nothing. Meanwhile, the “good kids” were being indoctrinated in passive, legal, get-a-good-education approaches. And both groups were scared to death of the police! For despite the bangers’ hate and contempt, any two cops could lay out a dozen of them on all fours-at will. Hence, Tupac’s later iconic stature amongst them, since he could walk his talk:
…”the fact that while everyone else talks about it, Tupac is the only known rapper who has actually shot a police officer; the walking away from being shot five times with no permanent damage and walking away from the hospital the next day and the rolling into court for a brief but dramatic wheelchair-bound courtroom appearance-it’s been dangerously compelling and ecstatically brilliant” . (“Tupac”, The Village Voice, 1995, in never Drank the Kool-Aid; op. cit.)
At that time this madness was contained in lower class communities since the ruling class believed that technology had made what it dubbed the underclass obsolete anyway. To do this the ruling classes’ henchmen made sure that their Gestapo-like police were heavily armed and fully supported. I urge people to see Sean Penn and Robert Duval’s movie, Colors. But something was on the horizon that was about to cause a seismic shift in this already sorry state of affairs. It was to alter things in ways that most still cannot or will not believe.
The first part of this piece was published yesterday and the final part of this series will be published on the 28th November 2010.
Original artwork was created for this piece by Siri: thank you!
by DGR News Service | May 25, 2019 | The Solution: Resistance
Appendix A of US Army FM 3-0, “Operations”, 2008 edition
The nine principles of war represent the most important nonphysical factors that affect the conduct of operations at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. The Army published its original principles of war after World War I. In the following years, the Army adjusted the original principles modestly as they stood the tests of analysis, experimentation, and practice. The principles of war are not a checklist. While they are considered in all operations, they do not apply in the same way to every situation. Rather, they summarize characteristics of successful operations. Their greatest value lies in the education of the military professional. Applied to the study of past campaigns, major operations, battles, and engagements, the principles of war are powerful analysis tools. Joint doctrine adds three principles of operations to the traditional nine principles of war.
Objective
Direct every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective.
A-1. The principle of objective drives all military activity. At the operational and tactical levels, objective ensures all actions contribute to the higher commander’s end state. When undertaking any mission, commanders should clearly understand the expected outcome and its impact. Combat power is limited; commanders never have enough to address every aspect of the situation. Objectives allow commanders to focus combat power on the most important tasks. Clearly stated objectives also promote individual initiative. These objectives clarify what subordinates need to accomplish by emphasizing the outcome rather than the method. Commanders should avoid actions that do not contribute directly to achieving the objectives.
A-2. The purpose of military operations is to accomplish the military objectives that support achieving the conflict’s overall political goals. In offensive and defensive operations, this involves destroying the enemy and his will to fight. The objective of stability or civil support operations may be more difficult to define; nonetheless, it too must be clear from the beginning. Objectives must contribute to the operation’s purpose directly, quickly, and economically. Each tactical operation must contribute to achieving operational and strategic objectives.
A-3. Military leaders cannot dissociate objective from the related joint principles of restraint and legitimacy, particularly in stability operations. The amount of force used to obtain the objective must be prudent and appropriate to strategic aims. Means used to accomplish the military objective must not undermine the local population’s willing acceptance of a lawfully constituted government. Without restraint or legitimacy, support for military action deteriorates, and the objective becomes unobtainable.
Offensive
Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative.
A-4. As a principle of war, offensive is synonymous with initiative. The surest way to achieve decisive results is to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative. Seizing the initiative dictates the nature, scope, and tempo of an operation. Seizing the initiative compels an enemy to react. Commanders use initiative to impose their will on an enemy or adversary or to control a situation. Seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative are all essential to maintain the freedom of action necessary to achieve success and exploit vulnerabilities. It helps commanders respond effectively to rapidly changing situations and unexpected developments.
A-5. In combat operations, offensive action is the most effective and decisive way to achieve a clearly defined objective. Offensive operations are the means by which a military force seizes and holds the initiative while maintaining freedom of action and achieving decisive results. The importance of offensive action is fundamentally true across all levels of war. Defensive operations shape for offensive operations by economizing forces and creating conditions suitable for counterattacks.
Mass
Concentrate the effects of combat power at the decisive place and time.
A-6. Commanders mass the effects of combat power in time and space to achieve both destructive and constructive results. Massing in time applies the elements of combat power against multiple decisive points simultaneously. Massing in space concentrates the effects of combat power against a single decisive point. Both can overwhelm opponents or dominate a situation. Commanders select the method that best fits the circumstances. Massed effects overwhelm the entire enemy or adversary force before it can react effectively.
A-7. Army forces can mass lethal and nonlethal effects quickly and across large distances. This does not imply that they accomplish their missions with massed fires alone. Swift and fluid maneuver based on situational understanding complements fires. Often, this combination in a single operation accomplishes what formerly took an entire campaign.
A-8. In combat, commanders mass the effects of combat power against a combination of elements critical to the enemy force to shatter its coherence. Some effects may be concentrated and vulnerable to operations that mass in both time and space. Other effects may be spread throughout depth of the operational area, vulnerable only to massing effects in time.
A-9. Mass applies equally in operations characterized by civil support or stability. Massing in a stability or civil support operation includes providing the proper forces at the right time and place to alleviate suffering and provide security. Commanders determine priorities among the elements of full spectrum operations and allocate the majority of their available forces to the most important tasks. They focus combat power to produce significant results quickly in specific areas, sequentially if necessary, rather than dispersing capabilities across wide areas and accomplishing less.
Economy Of Force
Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts.
A-10. Economy of force is the reciprocal of mass. Commanders allocate only the minimum combat power necessary to shaping and sustaining operations so they can mass combat power for the decisive operation. This requires accepting prudent risk. Taking calculated risks is inherent in conflict. Commanders never leave any unit without a purpose. When the time comes to execute, all units should have tasks to perform.
Maneuver
Place the enemy in a disadvantageous position through the flexible application of combat power.
A-11. Maneuver concentrates and disperses combat power to keep the enemy at a disadvantage. It achieves results that would otherwise be more costly. Effective maneuver keeps enemy forces off balance by making them confront new problems and new dangers faster than they can counter them. Army forces gain and preserve freedom of action, reduce vulnerability, and exploit success through maneuver. Maneuver is more than just fire and movement. It includes the dynamic, flexible application of all the elements of combat power. It requires flexibility in thought, plans, and operations. In operations dominated by stability or civil support, commanders use maneuver to interpose Army forces between the population and threats to security and to concentrate capabilities through movement.
Unity Of Command
For every objective, ensure unity of effort under one responsible commander.
A-12. Applying a force’s full combat power requires unity of command. Unity of command means that a single commander directs and coordinates the actions of all forces toward a common objective. Cooperation may produce coordination, but giving a single commander the required authority is the most effective way to achieve unity of effort. A-13. The joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational nature of unified action creates situations where the commander does not directly control all organizations in the operational area. In the absence of command authority, commanders cooperate, negotiate, and build consensus to achieve unity of effort.
Security
Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage.
A-14. Security protects and preserves combat power. Security results from measures a command takes to protect itself from surprise, interference, sabotage, annoyance, and threat surveillance and reconnaissance. Military deception greatly enhances security.
Surprise
Strike the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared.
A-15. Surprise is the reciprocal of security. It is a major contributor to achieving shock. It results from taking actions for which the enemy is unprepared. Surprise is a powerful but temporary combat multiplier. It is not essential to take enemy forces completely unaware; it is only necessary that they become aware too late to react effectively. Factors contributing to surprise include speed, operations security, and asymmetric capabilities.
Simplicity
Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure thorough understanding.
A-16. Plans and orders should be simple and direct. Simple plans and clear, concise orders reduce misunderstanding and confusion. The situation determines the degree of simplicity required. Simple plans executed on time are better than detailed plans executed late. Commanders at all levels weigh potential benefits of a complex concept of operations against the risk that subordinates will fail to understand or follow it. Orders use clearly defined terms and graphics. Doing this conveys specific instructions to subordinates with reduced chances for misinterpretation and confusion.
A-17. Multinational operations put a premium on simplicity. Differences in language, doctrine, and culture complicate them. Simple plans and orders minimize the confusion inherent in this complex environment. The same applies to operations involving interagency and nongovernmental organizations.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 25, 2018 | Male Violence
by Eric London / World Socialist Web Site
Lost among the wall-to-wall press coverage of allegations of Russian interference in US politics is a recent revelation that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received 1,310 reports of rape and sexual assault of immigrant detainees by ICE officials between 2013 and 2017 alone.
On July 17, Emily Kassie of the New York Times published a short documentary with interviews with two women who were sexually assaulted by guards at immigrant detention facilities in Texas and Pennsylvania.
An ICE agent was driving one immigrant woman from T. Don Hutto detention center in Texas after she was released on bond. Kassie wrote: “After gathering her belongings, she was escorted to a loading area fenced with razor wire and placed into a cage inside a van. The driver was a male guard named Donald Dunn. Shortly after leaving Hutto, Dunn pulled off the road.
“‘He grabbed my breasts … He put his hands in my pants and he touched my private parts,’ she said. ‘He touched me again inside the van, and my hands were tied. And he started masturbating.’”
Many women who seek asylum in the US are escaping sexual assault and rape at the hands of their persecutors—in many cases the US-backed police and paramilitary forces of Central America.
Kassie interviewed another asylum seeker who was 19 years old when a detention center guard raped her. “‘I didn’t know how to refuse because he told me that I was going to be deported,’ the asylum seeker said. ‘I was at a jail and he was a migration officer. It’s like they order you to do something and you have to do it.’”
Cristina Parker, communications director for the Texas immigrant rights nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, told the World Socialist Web Site: “It’s terrible to say, but this report doesn’t shock me. Those of us who know these facilities thought, ‘That’s about right.’ It’s a common thing we hear. It’s been a problem. It’s not just at [T. Don] Hutto [detention center], it’s endemic and pervasive in the system.”
The corporate media has largely ignored the reports of widespread rape and sexual abuse by US immigration officials. The New York Times buried Kassie’s video shortly after it was published, while the Washington Post made only a passing reference to it at the conclusion of an article summarizing the day’s news. Otherwise, the story was not covered in the bourgeois press. The fascistic abuse of immigrants has been drowned out by the hysterical anti-Russia campaign dominating the airwaves.
“It’s disturbing that this doesn’t get more coverage and isn’t met with more outrage,” Parker said. “The media is more interested in the reality television show that is our current federal administration and not the impact that it’s having on individuals and human beings on the border. Even though immigration has fallen off the national radar, only a fraction of the children separated from their parents have been reunited. The detention system is operating at a mass scale.”
The bulk of the reports of rape and abuse were made from 2013 to 2017—mostly during the Obama administration. In an effort to cover up widespread abuse, ICE found roughly 60 percent of the abuse claims to be “unsubstantiated.”
“I do not believe there is a culture of abuse, for the past six years it’s been less than 1 percent of our population that has reported an incident,” Philip Miller, former deputy executive associate director of ICE, told Kassie.
Hundreds of thousands of people have passed through immigration detention centers in recent years, indicating that tens of thousands have been raped or assaulted. The legal doctrine of “qualified immunity” makes it extremely difficult for inmates—especially immigrants—to file lawsuits against guards.
The total number of assaults is much higher than the number reported, as most detainees are too fearful of retribution to step forward.
The report comes one month after the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) sent a letter to ICE demanding internal records about two immigrant women who were sexually abused by a prison supervisor at T. Don Hutto detention facility in 2017.
In addition, the letter states that four immigrant detainees saw the supervisor “on multiple occasions, masturbate in the dorm area while staring at detainees in a lewd manner.”
An ACLU report released in May exposed widespread physical and sexual abuse of detained immigrant children from 2009 to 2014. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents forced one 16-year-old girl to strip and “forcefully spread her legs, and touched her private parts so hard that she screamed.”
Employing the depraved and brutal language of fascist thugs, agents put another child in a room and said, “Right now, we close the door, we rape you and f*** you.” A male and female agent forced another child to get naked while they watched her for 15 minutes, threatening to lock her in a room with a large male inmate to force her to be “his wife.”
Kassie’s documentary, which deals with complaints brought by both adults and children, proves that the abuse did not stop in 2014. Among the exposures included in the ACLU report is the fact that the Obama administration actively covered up the abuse of immigrant children.
Responding to a complaint by one immigrant child in 2014, an Obama administration inspector wrote, “Are we sure we want to open this given the huge amount of more serious complaints we have?”
The CBP responded to the ACLU report by claiming allegations of abuse are “unfounded and baseless.” Reports of sexual assault “equate allegations with fact,” the report said.
None of the leaders of the #MeToo movement have made public statements about the US government’s rape and abuse of the most impoverished and oppressed. While figures such as actresses Rose McGowan, Asia Argento, Ashley Judd and former State Department official Ronan Farrow engage in endless acts of self-promotion on Twitter, their pages remained silent about Kassie’s report.
The #MeToo campaign has no interest in the fate of refugees who are the victims of US imperialism’s wars in Central America, Africa and the Middle East. The focus of the wealthy initiators of that anti-democratic campaign is not on halting “abuse of power,” but advancing their own careers and inflating their own bank accounts.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 10, 2018 | The Problem: Civilization
Editor’s note: Read the German version of this article here.
by Boris Forkel / Deep Green Resistance Germany
On July 10th 1985 the Rainbow Warrior, ship of the environmental organization Greenpeace, was sunk by agents of the French Service Action.
From the 1940’s til the 60’s, the US-Army had been testing atomic bombs on the Marshall Islands. What used to be a South Pacific Paradise, was now contaminated. The people suffered diseases and cancer, children were born with abnormalities. In 1985, the residents of the Island Rongelap asked Greenpeace for help. The Rainbow Warrior came and relocated 300 people to the Island of Mejato. From Mejato, the ship was supposed to move to New Zealand for a short stop and then to the Moruroa-atoll (French Polynesia), to protest against French atomic-bomb tests. While the Rainbow Warrior was anchored in the port of Aukland, New Zealand, during the night of july 10th two bombs detonated in the ship’s hull. While the ship sunk, most of the crew were able to save themselves, except for the photographer Fernando Pereira, who drowned. Tragically, he was a parent of two small children.
The investigations of the New Zealand police lead to the French secret service. Under growing pressure, the government under Francois Mitterand steadily admitted being responsible for the attack.
The people in charge of the French government were never held accountable. In 1987, the French government paid compensation of 8 million US-Dollars to Greenpeace, and more than 7 million to the New Zealand government. All of the people involved stayed in charge and kept their positions in the French government, some received the highest military honors.
In 1985, I was six years old. The pictures of the Rainbow Warrior were on the media everywhere. Since then, the Greenpeace-activists have been my heros. I would look at the Greenpeace-magazines, that shocked me deeply with pictures of baby seals slayed with clubs, burning rainforests and dead whales, swimming in a sea of blood.
©Andrija Ilic/Reuters
If you take the perspective of a six or seven year old child, you see buts all around you and you hear the voices of grown-ups from above. In my memory, most times the grown-ups spoke about work. “How was work?” “Well, ok…” “I have to work tomorrow.” “Will you go to work?” “Yes.” “I hear that you have a new job? How do you like it?” “It‘s pretty ok…” work…” “at work…” “for my work…” “in my work…” “work…” “work…” “work…”
I felt there was a huge chasm between the conversations I overheard from the adults, and the pictures that stuck in my childish mind from the Greenpeace-magazines. They always wanted to know, what I wanted to be when I grew up. The question is hard to understand for a six or seven year old. What should I become? I’m a human being already, and there is not much more I can actually become. Well, a grown-up human being, someday. But such a stressed out, worried human being, which is at the same time dependent and plagued by its daily work, like the grown-ups around me, I certainly didn’t want to become. Why is their work so important to them, when at the same time such horrible things are happening?
Later, when I understood better what they were up to with that question, I always answered that I wanted to become an environmentalist. This was very important to me. After I learned to read and write, I printed business cards, stating environmentalist as my profession.
Back then, questions evolved, that didn’t change much over all these years. Why do these people, by all costs, want to kill whales? And seals? And why do they want to destroy these rainforests everywhere? And why are the people from Greenpeace obviously the only ones who care and try to stop the killing?
I asked these questions as a child, but soon stopped, because I would never receive a satisfying answer. “You won’t understand this, you are to small…” They would avoid my questions. They didn’t like these questions. They were unpleasant to them, and they had no answers.
As a child, one tends to think, that the grown-ups are very smart and know more than children. Unfortunately, this is a fraud. Most adults are very stupid indeed, highly indoctrinated, and don’t know any answers to the really important questions.
Still, the questions stay the same. Why are the grown-ups always talking about work, while there is a horrible slaughter going on? Nowadays, I‘d boil all the questions of my childhood down to one: Why is our culture killing the planet?
When I asked my grandmother why all the Indians had to die, she answered that this had been God’s will. The Indians, soon enough, would have built big ships on their own, sailed to Europe and would have exterminated us, she said. How great that God is with us…
Thanks to answers like this, over time I learned to forget my questions and hide my feelings, which after all arose from a very normal empathy I felt for our fellow beings.
I went through the mainstream-culture with severe depressions. I held myself together with books, which helped me to survive disturbing dreams, think deeply and question everything. I will always be grateful to the authors of these books.
Finally, I found myself realising, that the decision I had made when I was six years old was still right and valid.
Within a culture that mistreats its fellow creatures like ours, resistance is a moral imperative. I understood this as a child. Actually, it isn’t very hard to understand. All we have to do is to look around us. Foolishly, we have built a whole culture based on not looking around us.
It also has to do with the form of social organization this culture is based on. Which might be the most destructive invention, that humans have ever made. Gunpowder, for example, is surely a very destructive invention, especially if you use it, like our culture does, for firearms. It is symptomatic for our culture, to use all technological inventions for destructive purposes, most times for ever more destructive weapons. Without firearms, it would have been far more difficult to drive big animals like bears, bisons or siberian tigers to the brink of extinction. Without firearms, the conquest of the Americas and the genocide of indigenous peoples worldwide would have been far more difficult. Firearms therefore, take the second place on my list of the most destructive inventions.
The plow and the combustion engine compete for the third place. While the wheel, which is often mentioned as one of the most important inventions, isn’t very destructive, the car, with all the surrounding infrastructure like roads, is one of the most destructive inventions one could think of. It is an extreme waste of energy, to move a machine of about two tonnes of weight, most times only to transport one single human being. Car culture is the most energy intensive form of transportation to ever exist. We can only afford this unbelievable decadence, because we learned to use fossil fuel for combustion engines. Apart from the waste of energy, it is also not very intelligent to poison the air that we need to breathe. This is a crime we commit to our future generations.
Martin Prechtel says:
“Technological inventions take from the earth but give nothing in return. Look at automobiles. They were, in a sense, dreamed up over a period of time, with different people adding on to each other’s dreams — or, if you prefer, adding on to each other’s studies and trials. But all along the way, very little, if anything, was given back to the hungry, invisible divinity that gave people the ability to invent those cars. Now, in a healthy culture, that’s where the shamans would come in, because with every invention comes a spiritual debt that must be paid, either ritually, or else taken out of us in warfare, grief, or depression.”
The plow stands for monocultural agriculture. I like to describe agriculture as the blueprint of colonialism. They take a piece of land, drive away or kill all indigenous living beings, animals, humans and plants, and replace them with a monoculture of one species, with individuals entirely brought into line.
The most destructive invention that humans ever made is not a technological innovation, but a form of social organization (indeed one which is very technological). It is the megamachine; a form of social organization, that makes is possible for a hundred thousand people to spend the majority of their lifetime happily working for the goals of a company like Daimler-Benz, BASF, Bayer, Deutsche Bank et cetera. Hundreds of thousands of employees, working strictly organized and brought into line within a hierarchical organization. Often, there is a very strong identification of the employees with their company. This is the modern version of what made it possible for the ancient Egyptians to build the giant symbols of their civilization. In ancient Egypt, the slaves already formed an organized caste, that used strikes as a way to fight for better food, housing or working conditions. Even back then, people had already accepted their fate as a working class, as part of the machine, and tried to ensure slightly better conditions within it. Derrick Jensen talks about dismembering, and about how suppressors bring their victims to identify with them in this video.
Ultimately, slavery is the cradle of civilization in the same way as agriculture. Both are related, because large-scale monoculture is only possible with slaves. Initially, slaves must be hold in captivity and forced to work. Nobody volunteers to be a slave. At the beginning at least. Over a few thousand years, our culture perfected the machine more and more. With a permanent combination of organized violence, lies and propaganda, alongside powerful institutions like state, church and school, the original forms of social organization were destroyed, and replaced with a breed of totally isolated human beings, who by themselves identify as workers and do not resist any more. These are the happy slaves, that serve the machine. Without them, factories are unthinkable, there would be no industrial agriculture, no machines, no industrial production. Nothing of this would be possible without the innovation of the mechanical social organization, which in the ancient civilizations began as massive slavery. About 80% of the population in ancient Greece were slaves.
Hence, industrial civilization is the most extreme and by far most destructive form, because it combines this form of social organization with actual machines. Actually, these two have merged already. The humans, who are functioning as part of the machine, are themselves handling machines all the time. They identify more with their car, their computer or their smartphone than they identify with other living beings –including humans. This is why the people of our culture don’t care about the mass extinction of our fellow beings. The extinction of the insects and songbirds doesn’t lead to an uproar, unlike, say, driving restrictions due to increasing air pollution. The parts of the machine can’t imagine a life without cars and other machines; the machine belongs to them as they belong to it, and they are absolutely loyal to it.
Unfortunately, neither the machine nor its parts are intelligent or know any kind of morality. It is not intelligent to poison the air we need to breathe, the water we need to drink and the soil we need to grow food.
People who strike, fight for better working conditions or against cutbacks of jobs are already perfectly oiled gears of the machine. These people identify as working class, as parts of the machine, they have been born and raised as parts of the machine; the gainful employment, the profession, is in our culture a very important part of individual identity.
Being part of the machine is all they know. The limits of their perception are already very restricted. They don’t know real freedom. As part of a machine, you don’t need to think, but to work. This is our dominant industrial culture.
If humans exist as parts of a machine, they forget how to be responsible for their own lives and the lives of their children. This is why so few people are resisting against the slaughter of our fellow beings and the destruction of the planet. The liability for the machine is never carried by its parts, but its inventors. It is a strictly hierarchical system. Only with a system like this, it is possible to build institutions like the police force, the giant bureaucratic apparatus of state and government, or huge corporations, with people simply following orders without taking any responsibility for their actions. The responsibility is always up in the hierarchy. There is no humanity within a machine.
A machine has no empathy. It works exactly like it has been built. Some call that structural violence, or, like Samuel Huntington, organized violence. “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
This form of social organization made it possible for Europeans to conquer almost the whole world. The machine made the brutal extinction of most of the life on the American continent possible. Propaganda and rationalizations, like the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, served as instruction manuals for the machine. It is actually needless to say that the Third Reich, with the industrial mass extermination of unwanted human beings, exactly worked according to the principles of the megamachine. Of course, the IG Farben knew what their products would be used for.
For the few people, who are still able to think clearly, this culture is long since a dystopian nightmare. For the indoctrinated, this nightmare is the bare reality.
If a creature learns, to completely accept captivity and slavery, it can drive out the pain. But to be free, one must look at the pain; one must go through all the terror.
Jack D. Forbes
If people can’t get out of this nightmare, because they think this is “the way things are,” they are trapped in a life-long horror trip. It’s a horror trip to believe, that we must sell eight hours per day or more of our lifetime, to work and do things we would rather not.
Institutionalized religion works as another instruction manual for the machine. Christianity plays an important role for the indoctrination by teaching us for thousands of years that life is full of privation and a vale of tears. Later, the evangelical christians declared the morale, the work ethic, to a new religious doctrine, and therefore created the basis for capitalistic ideology.
The reward comes after death, if we behaved well and obedient during our lifetime. Thus, institutionalized religion has proven to be one of the most effective tools for suppression. Due to almighty belief systems like this, people don’t have to be suppressed by brute force; through faith, they will suppress themselves, others and their own children. Says Robert Combs: “Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of a culture. Nowadays, parents raise their children according to the religion of capitalism and the believe in an almighty market, in order that they will have a chance to be successful in this culture.”
Our culture is based on institutionalized lies, that have been erected as barriers to truth. One of the most obvious and thus most propagated lies is, that we can have industrial civilization and a living planet. The bare truth is, that we have to decide. As things stand, most people in our culture made their choice in favor of the megamachine and against a living planet.
After all, humans are animals. The wild packs of wolves, being the enemy of civilization, have been exterminated nearly everywhere; nowadays, all that is left are state-owned, domesticated dogs. Dogs can be raised to be the most loving and caring creatures, like guide-dogs who take care of blind humans with a highly developed social competence. But they can also be conditioned to become terrible monsters, like the Spanish conquistadores with their fighting dogs that were fed with butchered Indian children.
Violence has always been the most effective tool of our civilization.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 7, 2017 | Direct Action
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a training held last May 13-14 at the Shxwowhamel First Nation.
by Sakej Ward
Individual Operational Readiness
Do you have an impact on the “battlefield” or are you a liability? Do you possess a wide range of activist’s conflict skills? Are your skills up to speed? Not all activists are created equal.
The come-as-you are activist, the person who shows up at crisis events with intent to engage in obsolete, ineffectual, passive tactics that requires so very little skill and equipment (gear) is an amateur who treats the struggle for justice more as a social gathering (a crisis pow wow with endless opportunities to get selfies) than a war.
On the “Battlefield” good intentions, thoughts and prayers are not enough.
The opposition (the colonial government and its industries of destruction) are deadly serious about counter-activism operations. They see it as a war to protect their vast power and privilege. They see it and treat it like a war. They go to great lengths to plan, prepare, mobilize, equip, deploy and release their dogs of war upon the people.
The gap of capability (including skills and gear) between the activists and the government is immense but it doesn’t have to be. Activists can reduce this capability-gap by training in their particular skill sets and acquiring, modifying and training on the proper highly-specialized gear to get those tasks done in a highly efficient manner.
Skills and gear empower the strategy.
The come-as-you are activist, showing up with little to no skills to conduct critical actions and little to no mission essential gear to pull them off need to take their engagement in “battle” much more serious. They need take more responsibility for their commitment to justice if they want to be of real help.
Your commitment to justice is measured by your willingness to put in the necessary time, effort, resources and sacrifices to make yourself a better weapon of justice.
Activists need to become “Become the Weapon” by becoming Operational Ready in order to be of real help at crisis situations.
Operational Ready consist of two main factors; skills to complete your mission and the gear to fulfill it.
Skills
To be operation-ready for a crisis situation, activists need to determine skills needed to conduct their type of actions. Most activists have no advanced thinking about what kind of assistance he/she will provide or what type of skills their assistance may require.
Developing skills sets starts with creating a training plan. Establishing a training plan begins with an analysis of doctrine, operations (campaigns), missions (actions), tasks and skills.
Activists should start by determining their doctrine (how they fight). The activist’s doctrine may be passive legal, it can be civil disobedience, or the doctrine may be direct.
Next determine the type of operations (campaigns) that are common to those doctrines. It is important to make as complete of a list of common operations (campaigns). These can be operations that are normally conducted by the activist or operations the activist feels his/her doctrine would call for. It would also be wise to realistically anticipate trends towards upcoming new types of conflicts and operations the activists may engage in the near future.
Identifying operations (campaigns) aren’t just about identifying the issue in contention. It’s about identifying the objectives used to successfully complete those operations. For example, an activist participating in Indigenous justice may engage in a Murder and Missing Indigenous Women Campaign (operation). The objective of the operation (campaign) might be to raise awareness of the issue or to bring those responsible to justice. Identifying the objective may generate some ideas on new or unused tactics for specific operations.
After all the operations (campaigns) have been identified the list needs to be broken down further by determining a full range of missions (actions) in those operations (campaigns).
So, an operation (campaign) to save a forest, for activists with a doctrine of civil disobedience, may include missions (actions) like setting up a blockade on a logging road or chaining themselves to a tree while activists with a doctrine of Direct Action may include missions (actions) like taking out a piece of heavy equipment or taking down a bridge on a logging road. The operation is the same but the doctrine creates a different set of mission profiles.
Once a full range of operations and the missions utilized in those operations are identified, then determine the tasks that are necessary to complete those missions (actions). A blockade mission (action) would require tasks like shutting down traffic on a road, barrier construction, interacting with people, interacting with police, interacting with media, guard duty, tactical observation, tactical communications, etc. Some of these skill sets are team skills (stopping a vehicle) and some are individual skills (rolling out barbed wire). Separate the two skills sets (team and individual) involved in those actions. Training plans should be a sequential development of skill sets from individual skills up to team based skills.
In addition to identifying individual skills of these skill sets, determine the standards for those skills. Standards are the level of quality expected for the skill sets. Being able to execute a skill in a poor manner like making several mistakes, taking a very long time to execute it, only can execute the skill with help from references (people, books, videos, etc), can’t do it in the dark or under pressure all ensure failure when it comes time to execute these skills in a crisis situation. Skills need to be practiced to certain level; a standard that reflects the conditions of the actions you will be in. For instance – assigning a standard to applying a first aid pressure dressing should include executing it properly (without mistake), in a designated time, possibly with improvised items, in the dark, in field conditions while under stress. Every skill needs to have a standard assigned to it as a way of establishing the level of training and as a testable condition.
Assemble all the skills and arrange them in blocks of training (like first aid, tactical communications, self defense, etc.). Determine the required sequence of instructing these skills. Some skills require knowing a prior skill first, for example – in order to send a radio message activists would first need to know how to put a specific radio into operation. Assign a timeline to instruct, practice and test each skill. This timeline influences the development of your training schedule.
Finalize the training plan by identifying instructors for each of the skill sets, training areas, training facilities, reference materials, training budgets, and training aids.
Gear
- Identify common gear needed that best fits all the tasks. This is the kind of gear that will be used in most or all crisis situation such as backpack, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, wet weather gear, warm gear, multi-tool, Individual first aid kit, survival kit, etc.
- Identify mission specific gear. This is gear that is specific to the identified missions. It can be barrier construction tools, observation tools, breaching tools, safety equipment, etc.
- Select gear for those actions. Determine the best gear for the task based on a few factors;
Selection Factors
- Cost – We would all love to have the newest, most high tech tactical gear around but cost becomes the barrier to this. Select gear based on a priority list of critical and mission-essential gear first.
- Availability – You may want it but it isn’t available, for whatever reason, to you. Determine good substitutions.
- Quality – much of the gear should be excellent quality because your life or liberty may depend on it. Some gear isn’t as crucial like a rain jacket. Does it need to be the best rain jacket from a high-end store or does it just have to get the job done? There is also good quality used gear for sale, as long as you know what to look out for. Set standards for what you need in your gear before buying.
- Durability – The gear will be used under the worst conditions so don’t expect cheap dollar store gear to hold up under field conditions. Should be simple but rugged.
- Multi-purpose – finding gear that can be used for more than one task increases its value.
- SAWC – Size And Weight Consideration. Sometimes good gear is large, bulky, and heavy and impedes mobility. Look for gear that is as compact, light but still functional for the tasks.
- Camouflage pattern – Bright shiny items attract the eye and can give you away. Determine the best camouflage pattern for the area of operation.
- Waterproof – it will rain in the field so gear needs to be water proof.
- Shockproof – it will be dropped, kicked, sat on, thrown across the room in frustration (or at a threat) but it still needs to function after its abuse.
- Simplicity – the more high tech or the more moving parts invites breakdown. Try to select gear that is simple and robust.
- Best achieves the mission – the main purpose of the gear is to assist in successful completion of missions (actions). That should stay in the forefront of the activist’s mind. When choosing between two possible pieces of gear, determine which best assist in achieving the mission.
- Ergonomic – the gear should be both efficient and comfortable. This extends the time frame for use in work. An uncomfortable or inefficient piece of gear will wear down the activist earlier, making work harder.
The best gear isn’t always the most expensive, coolest looking (tacti-cool), widest advertised or what some other person or group is using. If there are any questions on gear determination or gear selection consult an experienced freedom fighter that is a subject-matter-expert in the use of gear as well as the procurement of gear for specific kinds of operations and missions.
Once a training plan is developed and the gear is obtained the activist needs to train to standard on the skills and with the gear obtained in order to properly fit, modify, personalize and familiarize with that gear.
When all the gear procurement and initial training is complete a series of culmination exercise (based on all the different operations and likely missions for each) should be conducted. It provides an opportunity for testing to standard and evaluating all the common and mission-essential tasks to determine if the activists are operational ready.
“Welcome to my War”
