CodePink
- Medea Benjamin and Nicolas
Davies -
The case for Black Lives Matter should be applied
globally and the push to defund police should be extended to the U.S.
military.
On June 1, President Trump threatened to deploy
active-duty U.S. military forces against peaceful Black Lives Matter
protesters in cities across America. Trump and state governors
eventually deployed at least 17,000 National Guard troops across the
country. In the nation's capital, Trump deployed nine Blackhawk assault
helicopters, thousands of National Guard troops from six states, and at
least 1,600 Military Police and active-duty combat troops from the 82nd
Airborne Division, with written orders to pack bayonets.
After a week of conflicting orders during which
Trump demanded 10,000 troops in the capital, the active-duty troops
were finally ordered back to their bases in North Carolina and New York
on June 5, as the peaceful nature of the protests made the use of
military force very obviously redundant, dangerous and irresponsible.
But Americans were left shell-shocked by the heavily armed troops, the
tear gas, the rubber bullets and the tanks that turned U.S. streets
into war zones. They were also shocked to realize how easy it was for
President Trump, single-handedly, to muster such a chilling array of
force.
But we shouldn't be surprised. We have allowed
our corrupt ruling class to build the most destructive war machine in
history and to place it in the hands of an erratic and unpredictable
president. As protests against police brutality flooded our nation's
streets, Trump felt emboldened to turn this war machine against us --
and may well be willing to do it again if there is a contested election
in November.
Americans are getting a small taste of the fire
and fury that the U.S. military and its allies inflict on people
overseas on a regular basis from Iraq and Afghanistan to Yemen and
Palestine, and the intimidation felt by the people of Iran, Venezuela,
north Korea and other countries that have long lived under U.S. threats
to bomb, attack or invade them.
For African-Americans, the latest round of fury
unleashed by the police and military is only an escalation of the
low-grade war that America's rulers have waged against them for
centuries. From the horrors of slavery to post-Civil War convict
leasing to the apartheid Jim Crow system to today's mass
criminalization, mass incarceration and militarized policing, America
has always treated African-Americans as a permanent underclass to be
exploited and "kept in their place" with as much force and brutality as
that takes.
Today, Black Americans are at least four times as
likely to be shot by police as white Americans and six times as likely
to be thrown in prison. Black drivers are three times more likely to be
searched and twice as likely to be arrested during traffic stops, even
though police have better luck finding contraband in white people's
cars. All of this adds up to a racist policing and prison system, with
African-American men as its prime targets, even as U.S. police forces
are increasingly militarized and armed by the Pentagon.
Racist persecution does not end when
African-Americans walk out of the prison gate. In 2010, a third of
African-American men had a felony conviction on their record, closing
doors to jobs, housing, student aid, safety net programs like SNAP
[Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] and cash assistance, and in
some states the right to vote. From the first "stop and frisk" or
traffic stop, African-American men face a system designed to entrap
them in permanent second-class citizenship and poverty.
Just as the people of Iran, north Korea, and
Venezuela suffer from poverty, hunger, preventable disease, and death
as the intended results of brutal U.S. economic sanctions, systemic
racism has similar effects in the U.S., keeping African-Americans in
exceptional poverty, with double the infant mortality rate of whites
and schools that are as segregated and unequal as when segregation was
legal. These underlying disparities in health and living standards
appear to be the main reason why African-Americans are dying from
COVID-19 at more than double the rate of White Americans.
Liberating a Neocolonial World
While the U.S. war on the black population at home
is now exposed for all of America -- and the world -- to see, the
victims of U.S. wars abroad continue to be hidden. Trump has escalated
the horrific wars he inherited from Obama, dropping more bombs and
missiles in 3 years than either Bush II or Obama did in their first
terms.
But Americans don't see the terrifying fireballs
of the bombs. They don't see the dead and maimed bodies and rubble the
bombs leave in their wake. American public discourse about war has
revolved almost entirely around the experiences and sacrifices of U.S.
troops, who are, after all, our family members and neighbors. Like the
double standard between white and black lives in the U.S., there is a
similar double standard between the lives of U.S. troops and the
millions of casualties and ruined lives on the other side of the
conflicts the U.S. armed forces and U.S. weapons unleash on other
countries.
When retired generals speak out against Trump's
desire to deploy active-duty troops on America's streets, we should
understand that they are defending precisely this double standard.
Despite draining the U.S. Treasury to wreak horrific violence against
people in other countries, while failing to "win" wars even on its own
confusing terms, the U.S. military has maintained a surprisingly good
reputation with the U.S. public. This has largely exempted the armed
forces from growing public disgust with the systemic corruption of
other American institutions.
Generals Mattis and Allen, who came out against
Trump's deployment of U.S. troops against peaceful protesters,
understand very well that the fastest way to squander the military's
"Teflon" public reputation would be to deploy it more widely and openly
against Americans within the United States.
Just as we are exposing the rot in U.S. police
forces and calling for defunding the police, so we must expose the rot
in U.S. foreign policy and call for defunding the Pentagon. U.S. wars
on people in other countries are driven by the same racism and ruling
class economic interests as the war against African-Americans in our
cities. For too long, we have let cynical politicians and business
leaders divide and rule us, funding police and the Pentagon over real
human needs, pitting us against each other at home and leading us off
to wars against our neighbors abroad.
The double standard that sanctifies the lives of
U.S. troops over those of the people whose countries they bomb and
invade is as cynical and deadly as the one that values white lives over
black ones in America. As we chant "Black Lives Matter," we should
include the lives of black and brown people dying every day from U.S.
sanctions in Venezuela, the lives of black and brown people being blown
up by U.S. bombs in Yemen and Afghanistan, the lives of people of color
in Palestine who are tear-gassed, beaten and shot with Israeli weapons
funded by U.S.-taxpayers. We must be ready to show solidarity with
people defending themselves against U.S.-sponsored violence whether in
Minneapolis, New York and Los Angeles, or Afghanistan, Gaza and Iran.
This past week, our friends around the world have
given us a magnificent example of what this kind of international
solidarity looks like. From London, Copenhagen and Berlin to New
Zealand, Canada and Nigeria, people have poured into the streets to
show solidarity with African-Americans. They understand that the U.S.
lies at the heart of a racist political and economic international
order that still dominates the world 60 years after the formal end of
Western colonialism. They understand that our struggle is their
struggle, and we should understand that their future is also our future.
So as others stand with us, we must also stand
with them. Together we must seize this moment to move from incremental
reform to real systemic change, not just within the U.S. but throughout
the racist, neocolonial world that is policed by the U.S. military.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK
for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside
Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent
journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood
On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
This article was published in
Volume 50 Number 21 - June 13, 2020
Article Link:
CodePink - Medea Benjamin and Nicolas
Davies
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
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