Modern Nat Turner insures Dallas cops cannot assail Black lives with impunity

Chris DornerWas ANYBODY going to stop the unfettered lynching of people of color in America? Did President Obama ever deliver anything more than a eulogy? Few police officers are being convicted or even indicted. Videotaped killings of black men by lawmen have become so common, those disseminating the videos are being accused of harboring fetishes. People expressing offense online are being shamed for being clicktivists, though clearly the only fuels firing public outrage are the videos. Meanwhile Black Lives Matter spokespeople have become so jaded they ridicule the efficacy of street protests. And now everyone is condemning the lone direct action taker.

The killing of any human being is terrible, but the retaliatory killings of police in Dallas could have been prevented. Not by expecting minority communities to stomach further and unending extrajudicial assassinations, but by having police curb their racism and use of lethal force. Or of course by disbanding militarized police departments. Public officials can’t even broach that conversation. Do we expect the police state to dismantle itself?

Self-styled black revolutionary Micah Xavier Johnson, a typical PTSD-hardened Afghan vet, put “suicide by cop” to the service of his embattled community and avenged the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. He didn’t shoot their actual killers, but he didn’t hit innocents either. Johnson targeted America’s systemic enforcers of inequity, hitting twelve police officers, five of whom have now died.

Let’s note those cops weren’t “protecting the first amendment rights” of a spontaneous protest of the Sterling and Castile murders, but were harassing and detering demonstrations. The officers could have chosen not to, and hopefully, their comrades in other cities, molesting other legal assemblies, may now choose to stand down, because now authoritarian bullying has come in the line of fire.

There is poetic justice for those who would decry “Blue Lives Matter”. If they’re going to pretend it, let them feel the oppressive threat of violence which black lives bear. For one evening, in a small corner of Dallas, Texas, police brutality faced a comeuppance.

For now Johnson’s act is being condemned as an atrocity, as a massacre even, though obviously his victims 1) met every standard of belligerent adversary, 2) were armed, and 3) outnumbered him. Let’s concede that Johnson is a credit to his military training. He confirms how our soldiers could so murderously rapage through our war zones against lesser equipped combatants. Johnson’s motive echoes that which provoked US atrocities overseas, seeking revenge against civilians, exacting collective punishment for deadly IEDs.

If we acknowledge the violence with which African Americans are oppressed, and the mendacity of its apologists and enablers, can we condemn violent resistance? International law accords oppressed peoples the human right to resist.

Slave rebellion leader Nat Turner is recognized today as a hero, but was exhaustively vilified in his day because he killed slave owners, indescriminate of old or young. Whites retaliated and killed many more blacks. More violence follwed from abolitionsists and Jayhawkers, all of it lamentable. But slavery didn’t end because we willed it.

Because this era’s history is written with erasers, our victors’ primary tool, Micah Johnson will probably never be praised for heroism.

Johnson will join fellow effaced cop-killer Christopher Dorner. A previous African American reservist vet who was immolated alive, killed instead of being apprehended, lest an investigation benefit from his testimony about why he could no longer bear LAPD corruption in 2013.

From Dorner’s “manifesto”, before Michael Brown, Ferguson and Baltimore:

“Those Caucasian officers who join South Bureau divisions (77th,SW,SE, an Harbor) with the sole intent to victimize minorities who are uneducated, and unaware of criminal law, civil law, and civil rights. You prefer the South bureau because a use of force/deadly force is likely and the individual you use UOF on will likely not report it. You are a high value target.

“Those Black officers in supervisory ranks and pay grades who stay in south bureau (even though you live in the valley or OC) for the sole intent of getting retribution toward subordinate caucasian officers for the pain and hostile work environment their elders inflicted on you as probationers (P-1?s) and novice P-2’s. You are a high value target.

You perpetuated the cycle of racism in the department as well. You breed a new generation of bigoted caucasian officer when you belittle them and treat them unfairly.

Mikah Johnson’s last words we only know through the spin of Dallas police, the same people who decided not to wait him out, nor to smoke him or gas him out from hiding in a public parking garage, but instead to send a robot with a bomb and M.O.V.E. his ass like every other black nationalist revolutionary.

No, you murdurous assholes, Johnson didn’t “want to kill all white people.” He wanted to kill white cops. Just like Dorner, he wasn’t a threat to the public, he was a threat to the police state. You cops ensured Mikah Johnson didn’t live to dictate “confessions” and you even obliterated his body like Osama bin Laden. Drawn and quartered essentially, to preclude memorializers being able to center on an idol to build a resistance.

You and I may grapple with what to think of Johnson’s personal rampage, but the state knew immediately his was the selfless heroism they fear most. As with bin Laden, they knew his apprehension must be terminal.

Lest I be misunderstood, I do not promote armed insurrection, sedition or murder. I cannot. But I will not condemn Micah Johnson.

I need not agrandize him either. Taken without his revolutionary ideology, Johnson was an ordinary mentally wounded veteran like many others. Homicidal vets with PTSD are at the core of our epidemic of police brutality. Our law enforcement teams are full of OIF and OEF soldiers who got their start shooting up cars at checkpoints and acting out racist genocide to their heart’s content.

It’s not a new problem, the US has always had active warzones feeding veterans into homelessness for those who couldn’t cope and filling government jobs for those who thrived. Beside policemanship, a very common job for discharged soldiers has always been the post office. Rembember the rampaging gunman problem we used to call “going postal?”

America’s racism problem may be transcended by a succession of church services, but class struggle is not a hearts and minds operation. Fascist rule and its army of the rich are not going to be wished away by militant nonviolence. That’s as likely as counting on the tooth fairy.

Worrying that acts like Johnson’s will provoke increased authoritarian repression is an expression of privilege provided by someone aclimated to a tolerable status quo, clearly a white perspective for whom black lives matter not enough.

Until all of us share the plight of the average Syrian refugee, trapped in our capitalist frontier war zones, none of us are shouldering an equitable burden of the police state.

That’s why it is more than black lives that matter. The middle class greivances of Occupy Wall Street are only a class removed from Black America’s suffering. We’re still talking about privileged Americans who support a grander racism that drives our global exploitation of all peoples.

I don’t have any faith that an arc of history bends toward justice in this corporate dark age. For my own sense of what’s right, it’s important to recognize Micah Johnson and Christopher Dorner for who they were, flawed, maybe very minor, aspiring Nat Turners, who wanted to strike against today’s slave masters and their brutal blue foremen.

Bomb a Hiroshima plus a Nagasaki if you want the world to fear your nukes

APPARENTLY, nuclear club initiates have to demonstrate their bombs on real victims to convince other nations that their WMDs are real. How unfortunate for North Korea that its hydrogen bomb detonation was only a test. Naturally a bully like the US can taunt its pipsqueak adversary, asserting it doesn’t believe Piongyang’s claims of a successful nuclear blast. The US can find credibility in hoaxes like yellowcake, WMDs, or centrifuges, but a real hydrogen bomb, they have to see to believe. In WWII, Japan’s Kamikazi pilots and suicide Banzai charges were the pretext for immolating the civilian city of Hiroshima with an Atom Bomb. Americans are told it was to teach Japan the futility of resistance. The real reason we dropped the bomb of course was to show our Communist rivals that the United States of Capitalism had innovated a weapon of unimaginable power and look what it can do! Americans like Show & Tell, not just tell. We bombed Nagazaki because we had made two bombs.

Honeybees were dying because?

Lollipop by MikaNon-Bing-ers know the net is about the journey, not the destination. My search yesterday became the acquisition: from a Posterous tweet, to revisiting OK Go’s 2006 treadmill video, to their backyard dance gone-viral, to choreographer sister Trish Sie in LOLLIPOP (new tab: Mika’s highschool anthem WE ARE GOLDEN), to Sie’s PSA for Saatchie & Saatchie: HELP THE HONEY BEES. When the worry was climate change or pesticides: poor bees. Then the suspect was GMOs.

Insurgents, prairie dogs and Laser Tag

I remember discovering the difference between target shooting and Laser Tag. At a firing range you could look calmly down your gun sight and concentrate without distraction. Same with hunting. But Laser Tag, Paintball, or the doubtlessly misnomered Airsoft, let you experience what it’s like to be shot at. Who would believe aiming a gun is so different under fire?

In Laser Tag, you had to wear an infrared sensor to make yourself a target to your opponent’s fire. We used to wrap the sensor belt around our heads because it seemed the most fair vulnerability. Otherwise it was too easy to obscure your sensor between you and the ground or against whatever you were hiding behind. On your forehead, the sensor would become visible whenever you yourself attempted to poke up your head to take a shot.

I learned to cheat by crawling under cars to obscure my forehead in the undercarriage while my line of sight remained unimpeded. Of course I was a sitting duck when spotted. But from no matter what covered position, I found it much harder to take aim when adversaries were directing their fire at me.

If you’d succeeded in concealing your vantage point, you were free to concentrate on your aim. But now you were challenged with a further trembling sensation in your fingers. Now there was a heightened hesitation to pull the trigger, because the moment you did, your position would be revealed and you’d attract fire.

This is the predicament we discount when we think of military snipers. Though it seems quite plainly cowardly to shoot unsuspecting opponents from a concealed position, often snipers have to operate from hiding places deep in enemy territory. When they finally take their shot, snipers become prey themselves.

I think about this immediate blowback consequence when I think of Iraqis or Afghans who contemplate taking aim at the US military machine. Insurgents face technology and firepower to obliterate the very hill from which they might be shooting. It would seem that anyone who would dare to stand armed against US forces would be a suicide bomber. It’s near certain death to fire a Kalashnikov knowing that US electronics can very quickly extrapolate your location and bring ordinance against you like a fly-swatter against a fly.

In WWII against Japan, we held a sad esteem for the suicide pilots of the last desperate Japanese efforts. The Kamikazes would pilot explosive laden aircraft which had no landing gears in case they changed their minds. It seemed like lunacy, and often they were young, and barely trained.

I wondered if our soldiers accord the Iraqi or Afghan insurgents a similar awed respect. To merely raise your head from the rubble, without Kevlar armor, requires a bravery to defy the gods. What a cost to try to defend your homeland against America’s overwhelming might. I couldn’t do it. You draw almost certain overkill coming from unforeseen points, high in the sky, laser-guided by a team of technicians in climate controlled comfort on the other side of the planet, who are not themselves under fire. We’ve rendered all our adversaries into suicide bombers. How dare our behind-the-lines officers call them cowardly?

Mentally challenged unfit for insurgency

Indignity at the barrel of a gunUS disinformation forces in Iraq pointed recently to an insurgency so in its last throes, that it was desperate enough, and dastardly, sure enough, to press mentally retarded girls into service as suicide bombers. Soon enough our military was forced to recant that report. The young Iraqi women may have been bipolar, or depressed, but they didn’t have Down Syndrome, as cranial deformities caused by the bomb blasts had led the US forensics to conjecture. But the false accusation had its desired effect and there was worldwide condemnation of the Iraqi resistance. This story has irked me in both incarnations.

Namely, why in the name of the Special Olympics is it alright to presume the mentally handicapped could not rise to the challenge faced by their fellow insurgents?

That there would need to be suicide bombers is sad for anyone to contemplate. But a people oppressed by overwhelming military dominance have little recourse. The US drove the Japanese to resort to recruiting Kamikazis. The French pushed the Algerians to the most desperate efforts. The Soviets, the US and Israel have since left Afghans, Iraqis and Palestinians no option but “terrorism.” We don’t label carpet-bombing, detainment or torture as “terrorism,” but freedom fighters and their asymmetrical warfare is enough to terrorize us.

And so, to many Iraqis, maybe especially those orphaned by our invasion and occupation, to be a suicide bomber is to be put to the only strategy which may yet prove effective. Rocks thrown against tanks do nothing. Shots fired against armor-clad troops yield naught but a hail storm of higher caliber bullets. IEDs are now up against heavier mine-resistant vehicles. Civilians without access to artillery or high-tech triggering remotes have no choice but to deliver their angry message in person, guided and detonated by their brave partisan selves prepared to pay the price with their lives.

Of course a mentally disabled person cannot reasonably be considered to have understood enough to make such a profound sacrifice. But I’m surprised the PC crowd wouldn’t allow them the dignity to aspire to contribute to the cause of their fellow Iraqis. I’d venture to ask if their lives could have served a more honorable service. It must suck to be mentally handicapped in Iraq, considering the US has destroyed every semblance of health care service, and refuses to rebuild it. The US is killing the health-needy of Iraq, even as they accuse the insurgency of the exploitation/murder.

And which side cannot deny preying upon the retarded from which to recruit its troops? With casualties on the rise, American motives unmasked, the timetable interminable, and the prospect of surviving intact virtually null, who but the mentally challenged are signing up to “defend freedom” for Uncle Sam?