[News] Racism and War in America and Beyond

[Anti-Imperialist News]

December 11, 2014
*http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/11/racism-and-war-in-america-and-beyond/*

*'I Can't Breath'*


  Racism and War in America and Beyond

by RAMZY BAROUD

America's ruling elites are blatant in their intentions of maintaining 
"white privilege" at home and economic dominance by military means abroad.

Their "democracy" in both of these regions is a ruse, and it is yet to 
deliver any degree of social justice and equality to the millions of 
disadvantaged Americans which are comprised mostly of black and Latino 
communities. The unequal distribution of wealth in the United States is 
simply staggering. In fact, 75.4% of all wealth in the US is owned by 
the richest 10 percent, according to the authoritative Credit Suisse 
Global Wealth Databook 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/us-is-now-the-most-unequa_b_4408647.html> 
(2013).

This influx of wealth comes at the heels of a major economic recession, 
of which rich bankers were mostly to blame, but were never held 
accountable. Instead, millions of lower-middle class and poor Americans 
became even poorer. And since America's political and economic classes 
largely overlap and feed upon the privileges of one another, millions of 
American lost their homes and savings, while the rich got richer 
<http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/the-rich-get-richer-through-the-recovery/?_r=0>.

Good branding aside, the "land of opportunity" has always been 
overrated, as has American democracy, which has been rigged for 
generations to produce more or less similar results. The media -- with 
overt and covert racial supremacy displayed by the likes of Fox News -- 
is there to ensure that consent is manufactured 
<http://www.chomsky.info/talks/19890315.htm> in such a clever way, so 
that ordinary Americans constantly feel trapped between a ruling class 
of two strands, Republicans and Democrats, all vying for votes with the 
ultimate goal of maintaining their privilege.

Considering low presidential ratings 
<http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/data_access/data/presidential_approval.html>, 
and the ever decreasing credibility of Congress 
<http://www.gallup.com/poll/175676/congress-approval-sits-two-months-elections.aspx>, 
most Americans are not impressed by the ongoing political charade. 
However, as most Americans are held in bondage to debt, constantly 
striving to pay bills, incessantly working to remain financially afloat, 
many feel disempowered -- thus politically disorganized.

After the deadly attacks of September 11, 2001, the government grew even 
bolder in manufacturing, perhaps coercing, political consent by playing 
on real or imagined fears. Under George W. Bush the "global war on 
terrorism" became a tool in which Americans found themselves losing 
fundamental rights, herded, shoes in hand, in line to strip naked at 
airport scanning rooms. All in the name of "national security".

The "see something say something" mentality, empowered by 
unconstitutional <http://rense.com/general94/patr.htm> and divisive 
PATRIOT act laws 
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/patriot-act-violate-privacy>, 
has turned communities against one another. Whatever tolerance that 
existed prior to Sep 11 has vanished thanks to the constant stream of 
hateful media propaganda, phony experts on Islam, or brown people in 
general.

Thus, it was no surprise that a month after the attacks, an ABC poll 
indicated that 47 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Islam. 13 
years after the deadly events, and despite the killing and maiming of 
millions of Muslims so that Bush could tap into greater oil wealth in 
the name of fighting terrorism, only 27 percent of Americans carry the 
same view today 
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/11/13-years-after-9-11-anti-muslim-bigotry-is-worse-than-ever.html>. 
And why should anyone be surprised when around-the-clock news networks 
continue to dish out the ever selective news of Islamic terrorism from 
Nigeria's Boko Haram to the Middle East's ISIS, and so on.

But this matter hardly concerns the media and the ruling class alone. 
The American sense of "manifest destiny", accompanied by the "white 
man's burden", never truly faded into mere historical references. They 
are real notions that continue to exist and define "white privilege" at 
home, and military crusades outside.

Indeed, "democracy", coupled by the upholding of "human rights" have 
been injected time and again to justify all sorts of undemocratic 
measures and numerous wars and military interventions 
<http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html>, which 
have mostly victimized -- let's face it -- brown nations across the globe.

These are not random thoughts compelled by the ongoing turmoil in the 
Middle East -resulting from American interventionism and its complete 
failure to take responsibility for its own actions. Yes, they are partly 
due to that, but they are also on account of the Grand Jury verdict not 
to indict a New York police officer who choked to death an economically 
disadvantaged black man named Eric Garner 
<http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/10-ways-racism-killed-michael-brown-and-eric-garner>. 
This only days succeeding the refusal to indict the officer who shot and 
killed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and after 
12-year-old Tamir Rice 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/us/video-shows-cleveland-officer-shot-tamir-rice-2-seconds-after-pulling-up-next-to-him.html> 
faced the same fate by a police officer in Cleveland, Ohio. Both also 
happened to be of African descent.

And in case you are wondering, yes, there is a clear link between racism 
at home and war abroad.

US media insists on reducing the highly involved issue to simple 
terminology and sound bites, barely scratching the surface of a deep and 
long existing racial divide. Fox News is finally taking some 
intermittent breaks from demonizing Muslims, to demonizing blacks, as if 
they have not been victims of systematic and historic discrimination 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws> that extends centuries into 
the past.

Some liberals and progressives -- who enjoy basking in the glory of 
appearing liberal and progressive -- are quick to protest the moral 
outrage of their country's historically rigged social and economic 
system, of which many of them benefited, at the expense of others. They 
are outraged as if the news of Garner's and Brown's fate are anomalies 
in an otherwise harmonious system.

Yet, the system has always been rigged 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/25/michael-brown-witness_n_6216366.html>, 
and none of it was ever a secret. It was designed that way so that the 
privileged remain wealthy and protected by laws that were enshrined for 
that specific purpose: protecting wealth 
<http://www.alternet.org/story/152284/4_ways_government_policy_favors_the_rich_and_keeps_the_rest_of_us_poor>.

As for police violence targeting black communities, a report in 2012 
indicated that a black person is killed every 28 hours 
<http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/1-black-man-killed-every-28-hours-police-or-vigilantes-america-perpetually-war-its> 
in the United States. Rarely do such killings call for mobilization or 
any kind of collective soul searching on the part of the white majority.

While the killing of three Americans by ISIS was enough to take the 
nation to another useless war that has already killed thousands, the 
routine killing of unarmed black men and children fails to yield even 
proper trials, needless to say indictments. The moral inconsistency is 
not difficult to spot.

One recalls Bush's insistence that American soldiers, no matter how 
hideous their crimes were aboard, were never to face a trial before an 
international criminal court 
<http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/08/the-us-should-not-join-the-international-criminal-court>.

The message was simple: those who serve power will not be disowned. This 
remains the case whether the victim is an unarmed black American child, 
an Iraqi man or an Afghani woman.

The Washington elite refuse to take responsibility. The onus, instead, 
is always on the victim to do some soul searching to improve their 
chances for living better lives; blacks simply need to behave 
themselves, and Iraqis need to appreciate the perks bestowed on them by 
"American values" and democracy. The US, however, is free to carry out 
the very violent policies that yield terrorism in the first place.

But how does one quit being the color of their own skin? Black people 
didn't choose to be slaves; didn't devise the Jim Crow laws; didn't 
construct the insurmountable system of social and economic inequality 
and apartheid that has been set in place for too many generations to 
count; they didn't design the unfair tax system that keeps the poor poor 
forever; or the prison system that disproportionately incarcerates black 
men.

All of this has been the work of a well-devised system that has access 
to wealth and a monopoly on power that is protected by willing goons who 
don't hesitate to choke an ill black man to death because he was 
"caught" selling cigarettes to feed his now fatherless 6 children.

"I cannot breath," were Eric Garner's last words.

He died, but many millions from New York to Missouri, to Kabul and 
elsewhere are still gasping for air.

/*Ramzy Baroud* is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media 
consultant, an author and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His 
latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story 
(Pluto Press, London)./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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