American MRAP Battles of 2020
YOU MAY NOT HAVE NOTICED, but there has been some trouble with the police in the last few months. Yes, it seems that the post-9/11 “War on Terror” has co-habitated and procreated with the Reagan-Era “War on Drugs” to produce some distinctly unattractive offspring.
And this isn’t just in your local Shire/Duckberg/Gotham/Mega City/Ecumenopolis! SOME might say that the police department in almost every US city is dominated by a clannish, hyper-militarized culture of violence, racism, and utter contempt for the very public that they’re supposed to be protecting. They are shockingly well-armed, and this is not by accident. The police did not tumble upon ‘Fortnite’ or ‘Call of Duty’ weapon crates, as is commonly accepted. Banks, corporations, and the Kochs have been donating funds to police departments for years, as a way to shore up property protection and influence law enforcement policy.
There’s also the 1033 Program, which was started during the Clinton administration. It let American cities get a boost in their “War on Drugs” by them providing free access to surplus military equipment (provided the cities paid shipping costs). Sometimes this was as simple as office equipment. Other times, it was tear gas, flak vests, semi-automatic weapons, or the $800,000 Mine Resistance Ambush Protection Vehicle (MRAP), used in the Iraq War to protect soldiers when they ran over improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Normal and cool.
If you can sum up the crumbling American empire of 2020, it would be an image of municipal police in expensive, storm-trooper gear beating non-violent protestors; while the wounded civilians are treated by front-line medical professionals wearing garbage bags and bandanas to avoid catching COVID-19.
SOME POLICE DEPARTMENTS ARE GRRR MAD, THO! Mike O’Meara, President of the NYPD Benevolence Association released a video case study in psychological projection, saying that the people criticizing George Floyd’s murder need to stop treating cops like “thugs” and “animals” and “show them respect.” ‘Lol’, as the kids used to say, before their innocence was taken from them, in a world awash in sin.
This is, of course, all par for the course. Society’s owners want the police paranoid and hyper-militant, distrusted and resented by the public. The more alienated these groups are from each other, the less likely policemen are to drop their weapons and join the protesters. This is already strategically managed by giving benefits and privileges to the nation’s police unions that no other union could possibly imagine in 2020. Solidarity strikes between unions are a common labor tactic. There will never be a police union strike, unless it’s in the film Robocop.
Omni Consumer Products launched a very successful campaign to defund the Detroit police department.
IT CANNOT BE OVERSTATED THAT THE SOUTH WON THE CIVIL WAR, and this is the source of so many of our current social ills. The North pulled a classic “Winning the war, losing the peace”. Unless, of course, the point of the war was not to free slaves, but to ensure preserve the dominance of one economic system over another. In which case, the North did win.
It’s important to note that despite Lincoln getting killed by a confederate-sympathizing racist actor, and despite President Johnson taking over and ending Reconstruction, post-War African-Americans still enjoyed a renaissance in business, education, academics, and politics. Reconstruction was working! Communities were forming, a future was being built, and abolition’s narrative of human equality was bearing fruit.
At first, the Northern political/business interests supported this, mainly because it put the final nail in the coffin of the plantation system, the last major rival economic system to rival the dominance of northern industrial capitalism. The Southerners, from the most genteel gentlemen to the most impoverished good-old boy, began a concentrated, century-long campaign of terrorism, murder, and inconceivable cruelty against blacks; killing and plundering everything that they dared to build or dream.
Eventually, Americans grew tired of fighting and dying for black people. Besides! “Separate but Equal” sounds fair, right? And, frankly, if the redlining, white flight, and murder of black political figures of later decades were to be any indicators, lots of people in the North sympathized with the racist whites over the blacks that their ancestors fought to liberate.
despite his state of Iowa fighting for the North and losing more than 10,000 soldiers.
A few Supreme Court rulings and thousands of lynchings later, everything was different, but-you know-same as it ever was. African-Americans people made no money, had no power, and were subject to the violent whims of vicious, violent racists without the protection of law. If you were a black person who lifted their head up too high, you might find a mob of white terrorists torturing you to death in the streets, like the peasantry of some medieval city. If you were poor, then you were trash that proved the inferiority of your race. If you were too successful, maybe they’d burn your community down out of spite.
Anyway, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an evil group of wealthy southern aristocrats, used their money and influence in the early 20th century to put up the statues of the very Southern Generals who lost the war. Over 100 years later, people still angry when they’re taken down. That should tell us all something.
OBAMAGATE! Catch it! Define it! Remember it?
