"A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the ever increasing flood of intolerable police and state violence."
​

America’s New Brutalism: the Death of Sandra Bland On July 9, soon after Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, moved to Texas from Naperville, Illinois to take a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, she was pulled over by the police for failing to signal while making a lane change. What followed has become all too common and illustrates the ever increasing rise in domestic terrorism in the United States. She was pulled out of the car by a police officer for allegedly becoming combative and pinned to the ground by two officers. A video obtained by ABC 7 of Bland’s arrest “doesn’t appear to show Bland being combative with officers but does show two officers on top of Bland.”[1] In a second video released by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas state trooper Brian Encinia becomes increasingly hostile toward Bland and very shortly the interaction escalates into a shouting match and becomes confrontational.[2] During the interaction, Bland is asked by the officer to put out her cigarette she refuses stating “I am in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette?” Encinia then opens the driver’s door, attempting to physically remove her. He then states “I’m going to drag you out of here.” Bland says “don’t touch me, I’m not under arrest.” Encinia then pulls out his Taser, points it at Bland, and says “I will light you up.” Spokespersons for the State troopers later admitted that “Encinia did not follow proper procedure; …. Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said after viewing the video that Encinia was “not compliant” with the officer’s orders.”[3] Encinia claims that after Bland was handcuffed, she swung her elbows at him and kicked him in the chin, though this does not appear on the video. Bland was then charged with resisting arrest. Neither the dashcam video nor the video taken by a bystander show any indication the officer was kicked. Even more troubling is the fact that the video had a number of glitches suggesting it had been tampered with, though the Department of Public Safety indicated the glitches were the result of posting it and later released another version of the video.[4] A witness reported that “he saw the arresting officer pull Bland out of the car, throw her to the ground and put his knee on her neck while he arrested her.”[5] In the video, Bland can be heard questioning the officers’ methods of restraint. She says: “You just slammed my head to the ground. Do you not even care about that that? I can’t even hear.”[6] At one point, Bland indicates she has been hurt. She says “You’re about to break my wrist and “You knocked my head in the ground; I got epilepsy, MF!” to which Encinia responds “Good.”[7] She was then arrested for assaulting an officer, a third-degree felony, and interned at the Waller County, Texas jail. On July 13, she was found dead in her cell. Quite unbelievably, the police reported that she took her own life.  The Waller County Jail has ruled her death a suicide. It appears inconceivable that a young woman starting a new job, an outspoken civil rights activist, critical of police brutality, went to church, and was close to her family would have taken her own life. Often posting videos in which she talked about important civil rights issues, she once stated: “I’m here to change history. If we want a change we can really truly make it happen.”[8] Her family and friends believe that foul play was involved, and rightly so.[9] Adding to such disbelief is the fact that the head sheriff of Waller County “ Glenn Smith, who made the first public comments about Bland’s in-custody death, was suspended for documented cases of racism when he was chief of police in Hempstead, Texas, in 2007. After serving his suspension, more complaints of racism came in, and Smith was actually fired as chief of police in Hempstead.”[10] Bland’s death over a routine traffic stop is beyond monstrous. It is indicative of a country in which lawlessness is now integral to the police state, and extreme violence is the new norm for a society fed by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the incarceration state, the drug wars, and the increasing militarization of everything, including the war on black youth. Routine traffic stops for black drivers contain the real possibility for turning deadly. There is more at stake here than the fact that, as Federal statistics indicate, the police are “31 percent more likely to pull over a black driver than a white driver.”[11] There is the violence that propels a deeply racist and militarized society, a violence that turns on young people and adults alike who are considered disposable and a threat to society.[12] This type of harassment is integral to a form of domestic terrorism in which blacks are beaten, arrested, incarcerated, and too often killed. This is the new totalitarianism of the boot in your face racism, one in which the punishing state is the central institution for both controlling poor minorities of race and class and enforcing the rules of the financial elite. How much longer can this war on youth go on? As Karen Garcia points out, “When police officers can stalk, threaten, harass, assault, arrest, injure and kill black people for the crime of merely existing, I think it’s high time that the USA declares itself a state sponsor of terrorism.”[13] The United States has become a country in which it is proud of what is should be ashamed of. How else to explain the popularity of the racist and bigot, Donald Trump, among among the Republican Party’s right-wing base? We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system. Markets and power are immune to justice and despise it. All that matters is that control, financial and political, serves soulless markets and the Darwinian culture of cruelty. How many more young people are going to be killed for waking in the street, failing to signal a lane shift, looking a police person in the eye, or playing with a toy gun? How many more names of black men, women, and young people will join the list of those whose deaths have sparked widespread protests: Trayvon martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones, and Sakia Gunn, and now Sandra Bland. Is it any wonder that one funeral director in Chicago stated that “young people in the city do not expect to live late into their adult life.”[14] Police violence in the United States not only offers a window into the structural nature of state violence, but also serves as a gateway to prison, especially for minorities of race and class. Police violence against people of color, especially Blacks is not an aberration, it is policy, another way of dealing with those considered disposable. Sandra Bland’s tragic death that began with a routine traffic stop has become a high profile case. What is missing from most of the accounts of her death is that the data that is emerging around how often police officers kill civilians suggests that the number of such killings is astronomical. The Progress Report recently noted that two new projects are now keeping count in real time and that “According to The Guardian, 637 people have been killed by the police” since the beginning of the year to July 22, 2015. In addition, “The Washington Post…is tracking police shootings and counts 535 of those. That’s almost three people shot and killed by the police every day this year.”[15] Yet, the mainstream media is more infatuated with mindless celebrities, game shows, and the financial brutishness and idiocy of Donald Trump than they are about endless violence waged against poor minority children in the United States. What is clear is that this violence speaks clearly to a society that no longer wants to invest in its youth. And if one measure of a democratic society is how it treats young people, the United States has failed miserably. The war on terror has come home and it has taken the form of a war on poor minorities, especially black men and youth. Racism and police militarization have created a new kind of terrorism, one in which extreme violence is being used against black people for the most trivial of infractions. The killing of black youth by the police is no longer a routine affair, a norm that stretches back to slaver. On the contrary, it now appears to have become both a spectacle and a sport in America. Of course, there has been an unbroken line of terror and violence waged against black people since slavery. What is different is that such acts of domestic terrorism now often take place increasingly in full view of the American public who more and more are witnessing such lawlessness after it is recorded and uploaded onto the Internet by bystanders.[16] New technologies and an every present screen culture now enable individuals to record such violence in real time and make it a matter of public record. While this public display of the deployment domestic terrorism makes visible the depravity of state violence, these images are sometimes co-opted by the mass media, commodified, and disseminated in ways that exploit and erase black lives, as William C. Anderson argues.[17] But it does more. It also sends a clear message to the American public, one that is as dangerous as it is violent. The message is that the police can kill African-Americans, young and old, and do it with impunity, with just a few exceptions–as in the clear cut killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the indictment of the police officers responsible for his death. Americans now live in an empire of images that not only serve to reveal the dynamics of oppressive power but also empty words of any meaning, often driven by a disimagination machine that denudes images of any substantive meaning by turning them into spectacles of violence. The police appear to recognize that images no longer provide the ultimate referent for revealing oppressive violence as much as they function to massage the machinery of aesthetic depravity. Racial violence has become so commonplace that when it is perpetrated by the police against innocent people, justice is not measured by holding those who commit the violence accountable. On the contrary, all that matters is that its presence be noted by the authorities and the mainstream media as if that is the only measure of justice. Few people seem distraught by the ongoing shootings, beatings, and killings of African-Americans in a society in which a black person killed every 28 hours in the U.S.[18] In a society engulfed in fear, racism, and violence, a culture of compassion, trust, and justice has been transformed into a culture of war and violence. In a country in which militarism is viewed as an ideal and the police and soldiers are treated like heroes, violence has morphed into the primary modality for solving problems. One consequence is that state violence is either ignored, rendered trivial, or is shamelessly legitimated in the name of the law, security, or self-defence. State violence fuelled by the merging of the war on terror, the militarization of all aspects of society, and a deep-seated and increasingly ruthless and unapologetic racism is now ubiquitous and should be labelled as a form of domestic terrorism.[19] Terrorism, torture, and state violence are no longer simply part of our history; they have become the nervous system of an increasingly authoritarian state. Eric Garner told the police as he was being choked to death that he could not breathe. His words now apply to democracy itself, which has lost the civic oxygen that gives it life and is on its death bed. America has become a place where democracy cannot breathe. The mainstream press seems especially interested in such stories when the victims can be viewed as assailants, as in the case of Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown, but are less interested when the old stereotypes about crime and black culture cannot be invoked. When the victims of police violence cannot be tarred with labels such as super-predators or thugs[20] as in the case of Tamir Rice, who was only 12-years old when shot to death by a policeman– who in his previous police assignment in another city was labeled as unstable–demonizing discourse becomes useless and such acts of state terrorism simply fade out of view. Why is it that there was almost no public outcry over the case of Kalief Browder, a young black man, who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island and spent more than a one thousand days, two years of that time in solitary confinement, waiting for a trial that never happened. Shortly after being released he committed suicide.[21] Would this have happened if he were white, middle class, and had access to a lawyer? How is what happened to him different than the egregious torture inflicted on innocent children at Abu Ghraib prison? What has the United States become in the age of domestic terrorism. Not surprisingly, the discourse of terrorism once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to commit violence against the government but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own citizens. What needs to be recognized as Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out is that the killing of unarmed Afro-Americans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance against a war against black youth that is being waged on U.S. soil.[22] The call for police “reform,” echoed throughout the dominant media, is meaningless. We need to change a system steeped in violence, racism, economic corruption and institutional rot. We don’t need revenge, we need justice – and that means structural change. Ending police misconduct is certainly acceptable as short-term goal to save lives, but if we are going to prevent the United States from becoming a full-fledged police state serving the interests of the rich who ensconce themselves in their gated and guarded communities, the vicious neoliberal financial and police state has to be dismantled. Such resistance is beginning with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with youth movements such as the Black Youth Project, Millennial Activists United, We Charge Genocide, and other groups.[23] A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the ever increasing flood of intolerable police and state violence.[24] More and more people are being locked up, jailed, beaten, harassed, and violated by the police and other security forces because they are poor, vulnerable, viewed as disposable, or simply are marginalized by being black, brown, young, and poor.[25] Black youth are safe neither in their own neighborhoods nor on public streets, highways, schools, or any other areas in which the police can be found.

"A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the ever increasing flood of intolerable police and state violence."
​

America’s New Brutalism: the Death of Sandra Bland On July 9, soon after Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, moved to Texas from Naperville, Illinois to take a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, she was pulled over by the police for failing to signal while making a lane change. What followed has become all too common and illustrates the ever increasing rise in domestic terrorism in the United States. She was pulled out of the car by a police officer for allegedly becoming combative and pinned to the ground by two officers. A video obtained by ABC 7 of Bland’s arrest “doesn’t appear to show Bland being combative with officers but does show two officers on top of Bland.”[1] In a second video released by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas state trooper Brian Encinia becomes increasingly hostile toward Bland and very shortly the interaction escalates into a shouting match and becomes confrontational.[2] During the interaction, Bland is asked by the officer to put out her cigarette she refuses stating “I am in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette?” Encinia then opens the driver’s door, attempting to physically remove her. He then states “I’m going to drag you out of here.” Bland says “don’t touch me, I’m not under arrest.” Encinia then pulls out his Taser, points it at Bland, and says “I will light you up.” Spokespersons for the State troopers later admitted that “Encinia did not follow proper procedure; …. Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said after viewing the video that Encinia was “not compliant” with the officer’s orders.”[3] Encinia claims that after Bland was handcuffed, she swung her elbows at him and kicked him in the chin, though this does not appear on the video. Bland was then charged with resisting arrest. Neither the dashcam video nor the video taken by a bystander show any indication the officer was kicked. Even more troubling is the fact that the video had a number of glitches suggesting it had been tampered with, though the Department of Public Safety indicated the glitches were the result of posting it and later released another version of the video.[4] A witness reported that “he saw the arresting officer pull Bland out of the car, throw her to the ground and put his knee on her neck while he arrested her.”[5] In the video, Bland can be heard questioning the officers’ methods of restraint. She says: “You just slammed my head to the ground. Do you not even care about that that? I can’t even hear.”[6] At one point, Bland indicates she has been hurt. She says “You’re about to break my wrist and “You knocked my head in the ground; I got epilepsy, MF!” to which Encinia responds “Good.”[7] She was then arrested for assaulting an officer, a third-degree felony, and interned at the Waller County, Texas jail. On July 13, she was found dead in her cell. Quite unbelievably, the police reported that she took her own life.  The Waller County Jail has ruled her death a suicide. It appears inconceivable that a young woman starting a new job, an outspoken civil rights activist, critical of police brutality, went to church, and was close to her family would have taken her own life. Often posting videos in which she talked about important civil rights issues, she once stated: “I’m here to change history. If we want a change we can really truly make it happen.”[8] Her family and friends believe that foul play was involved, and rightly so.[9] Adding to such disbelief is the fact that the head sheriff of Waller County “ Glenn Smith, who made the first public comments about Bland’s in-custody death, was suspended for documented cases of racism when he was chief of police in Hempstead, Texas, in 2007. After serving his suspension, more complaints of racism came in, and Smith was actually fired as chief of police in Hempstead.”[10] Bland’s death over a routine traffic stop is beyond monstrous. It is indicative of a country in which lawlessness is now integral to the police state, and extreme violence is the new norm for a society fed by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the incarceration state, the drug wars, and the increasing militarization of everything, including the war on black youth. Routine traffic stops for black drivers contain the real possibility for turning deadly. There is more at stake here than the fact that, as Federal statistics indicate, the police are “31 percent more likely to pull over a black driver than a white driver.”[11] There is the violence that propels a deeply racist and militarized society, a violence that turns on young people and adults alike who are considered disposable and a threat to society.[12] This type of harassment is integral to a form of domestic terrorism in which blacks are beaten, arrested, incarcerated, and too often killed. This is the new totalitarianism of the boot in your face racism, one in which the punishing state is the central institution for both controlling poor minorities of race and class and enforcing the rules of the financial elite. How much longer can this war on youth go on? As Karen Garcia points out, “When police officers can stalk, threaten, harass, assault, arrest, injure and kill black people for the crime of merely existing, I think it’s high time that the USA declares itself a state sponsor of terrorism.”[13] The United States has become a country in which it is proud of what is should be ashamed of. How else to explain the popularity of the racist and bigot, Donald Trump, among among the Republican Party’s right-wing base? We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system. Markets and power are immune to justice and despise it. All that matters is that control, financial and political, serves soulless markets and the Darwinian culture of cruelty. How many more young people are going to be killed for waking in the street, failing to signal a lane shift, looking a police person in the eye, or playing with a toy gun? How many more names of black men, women, and young people will join the list of those whose deaths have sparked widespread protests: Trayvon martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones, and Sakia Gunn, and now Sandra Bland. Is it any wonder that one funeral director in Chicago stated that “young people in the city do not expect to live late into their adult life.”[14] Police violence in the United States not only offers a window into the structural nature of state violence, but also serves as a gateway to prison, especially for minorities of race and class. Police violence against people of color, especially Blacks is not an aberration, it is policy, another way of dealing with those considered disposable. Sandra Bland’s tragic death that began with a routine traffic stop has become a high profile case. What is missing from most of the accounts of her death is that the data that is emerging around how often police officers kill civilians suggests that the number of such killings is astronomical. The Progress Report recently noted that two new projects are now keeping count in real time and that “According to The Guardian, 637 people have been killed by the police” since the beginning of the year to July 22, 2015. In addition, “The Washington Post…is tracking police shootings and counts 535 of those. That’s almost three people shot and killed by the police every day this year.”[15] Yet, the mainstream media is more infatuated with mindless celebrities, game shows, and the financial brutishness and idiocy of Donald Trump than they are about endless violence waged against poor minority children in the United States. What is clear is that this violence speaks clearly to a society that no longer wants to invest in its youth. And if one measure of a democratic society is how it treats young people, the United States has failed miserably. The war on terror has come home and it has taken the form of a war on poor minorities, especially black men and youth. Racism and police militarization have created a new kind of terrorism, one in which extreme violence is being used against black people for the most trivial of infractions. The killing of black youth by the police is no longer a routine affair, a norm that stretches back to slaver. On the contrary, it now appears to have become both a spectacle and a sport in America. Of course, there has been an unbroken line of terror and violence waged against black people since slavery. What is different is that such acts of domestic terrorism now often take place increasingly in full view of the American public who more and more are witnessing such lawlessness after it is recorded and uploaded onto the Internet by bystanders.[16] New technologies and an every present screen culture now enable individuals to record such violence in real time and make it a matter of public record. While this public display of the deployment domestic terrorism makes visible the depravity of state violence, these images are sometimes co-opted by the mass media, commodified, and disseminated in ways that exploit and erase black lives, as William C. Anderson argues.[17] But it does more. It also sends a clear message to the American public, one that is as dangerous as it is violent. The message is that the police can kill African-Americans, young and old, and do it with impunity, with just a few exceptions–as in the clear cut killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the indictment of the police officers responsible for his death. Americans now live in an empire of images that not only serve to reveal the dynamics of oppressive power but also empty words of any meaning, often driven by a disimagination machine that denudes images of any substantive meaning by turning them into spectacles of violence. The police appear to recognize that images no longer provide the ultimate referent for revealing oppressive violence as much as they function to massage the machinery of aesthetic depravity. Racial violence has become so commonplace that when it is perpetrated by the police against innocent people, justice is not measured by holding those who commit the violence accountable. On the contrary, all that matters is that its presence be noted by the authorities and the mainstream media as if that is the only measure of justice. Few people seem distraught by the ongoing shootings, beatings, and killings of African-Americans in a society in which a black person killed every 28 hours in the U.S.[18] In a society engulfed in fear, racism, and violence, a culture of compassion, trust, and justice has been transformed into a culture of war and violence. In a country in which militarism is viewed as an ideal and the police and soldiers are treated like heroes, violence has morphed into the primary modality for solving problems. One consequence is that state violence is either ignored, rendered trivial, or is shamelessly legitimated in the name of the law, security, or self-defence. State violence fuelled by the merging of the war on terror, the militarization of all aspects of society, and a deep-seated and increasingly ruthless and unapologetic racism is now ubiquitous and should be labelled as a form of domestic terrorism.[19] Terrorism, torture, and state violence are no longer simply part of our history; they have become the nervous system of an increasingly authoritarian state. Eric Garner told the police as he was being choked to death that he could not breathe. His words now apply to democracy itself, which has lost the civic oxygen that gives it life and is on its death bed. America has become a place where democracy cannot breathe. The mainstream press seems especially interested in such stories when the victims can be viewed as assailants, as in the case of Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown, but are less interested when the old stereotypes about crime and black culture cannot be invoked. When the victims of police violence cannot be tarred with labels such as super-predators or thugs[20] as in the case of Tamir Rice, who was only 12-years old when shot to death by a policeman– who in his previous police assignment in another city was labeled as unstable–demonizing discourse becomes useless and such acts of state terrorism simply fade out of view. Why is it that there was almost no public outcry over the case of Kalief Browder, a young black man, who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island and spent more than a one thousand days, two years of that time in solitary confinement, waiting for a trial that never happened. Shortly after being released he committed suicide.[21] Would this have happened if he were white, middle class, and had access to a lawyer? How is what happened to him different than the egregious torture inflicted on innocent children at Abu Ghraib prison? What has the United States become in the age of domestic terrorism. Not surprisingly, the discourse of terrorism once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to commit violence against the government but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own citizens. What needs to be recognized as Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out is that the killing of unarmed Afro-Americans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance against a war against black youth that is being waged on U.S. soil.[22] The call for police “reform,” echoed throughout the dominant media, is meaningless. We need to change a system steeped in violence, racism, economic corruption and institutional rot. We don’t need revenge, we need justice – and that means structural change. Ending police misconduct is certainly acceptable as short-term goal to save lives, but if we are going to prevent the United States from becoming a full-fledged police state serving the interests of the rich who ensconce themselves in their gated and guarded communities, the vicious neoliberal financial and police state has to be dismantled. Such resistance is beginning with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with youth movements such as the Black Youth Project, Millennial Activists United, We Charge Genocide, and other groups.[23] A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the ever increasing flood of intolerable police and state violence.[24] More and more people are being locked up, jailed, beaten, harassed, and violated by the police and other security forces because they are poor, vulnerable, viewed as disposable, or simply are marginalized by being black, brown, young, and poor.[25] Black youth are safe neither in their own neighborhoods nor on public streets, highways, schools, or any other areas in which the police can be found.

"A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the ever increasing flood of intolerable police and state violence."
​

America’s New Brutalism: the Death of Sandra Bland On July 9, soon after Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, moved to Texas from Naperville, Illinois to take a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, she was pulled over by the police for failing to signal while making a lane change. What followed has become all too common and illustrates the ever increasing rise in domestic terrorism in the United States. She was pulled out of the car by a police officer for allegedly becoming combative and pinned to the ground by two officers. A video obtained by ABC 7 of Bland’s arrest “doesn’t appear to show Bland being combative with officers but does show two officers on top of Bland.”[1] In a second video released by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas state trooper Brian Encinia becomes increasingly hostile toward Bland and very shortly the interaction escalates into a shouting match and becomes confrontational.[2] During the interaction, Bland is asked by the officer to put out her cigarette she refuses stating “I am in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette?” Encinia then opens the driver’s door, attempting to physically remove her. He then states “I’m going to drag you out of here.” Bland says “don’t touch me, I’m not under arrest.” Encinia then pulls out his Taser, points it at Bland, and says “I will light you up.” Spokespersons for the State troopers later admitted that “Encinia did not follow proper procedure; …. Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said after viewing the video that Encinia was “not compliant” with the officer’s orders.”[3] Encinia claims that after Bland was handcuffed, she swung her elbows at him and kicked him in the chin, though this does not appear on the video. Bland was then charged with resisting arrest. Neither the dashcam video nor the video taken by a bystander show any indication the officer was kicked. Even more troubling is the fact that the video had a number of glitches suggesting it had been tampered with, though the Department of Public Safety indicated the glitches were the result of posting it and later released another version of the video.[4] A witness reported that “he saw the arresting officer pull Bland out of the car, throw her to the ground and put his knee on her neck while he arrested her.”[5] In the video, Bland can be heard questioning the officers’ methods of restraint. She says: “You just slammed my head to the ground. Do you not even care about that that? I can’t even hear.”[6] At one point, Bland indicates she has been hurt. She says “You’re about to break my wrist and “You knocked my head in the ground; I got epilepsy, MF!” to which Encinia responds “Good.”[7] She was then arrested for assaulting an officer, a third-degree felony, and interned at the Waller County, Texas jail. On July 13, she was found dead in her cell. Quite unbelievably, the police reported that she took her own life.  The Waller County Jail has ruled her death a suicide. It appears inconceivable that a young woman starting a new job, an outspoken civil rights activist, critical of police brutality, went to church, and was close to her family would have taken her own life. Often posting videos in which she talked about important civil rights issues, she once stated: “I’m here to change history. If we want a change we can really truly make it happen.”[8] Her family and friends believe that foul play was involved, and rightly so.[9] Adding to such disbelief is the fact that the head sheriff of Waller County “ Glenn Smith, who made the first public comments about Bland’s in-custody death, was suspended for documented cases of racism when he was chief of police in Hempstead, Texas, in 2007. After serving his suspension, more complaints of racism came in, and Smith was actually fired as chief of police in Hempstead.”[10] Bland’s death over a routine traffic stop is beyond monstrous. It is indicative of a country in which lawlessness is now integral to the police state, and extreme violence is the new norm for a society fed by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the incarceration state, the drug wars, and the increasing militarization of everything, including the war on black youth. Routine traffic stops for black drivers contain the real possibility for turning deadly. There is more at stake here than the fact that, as Federal statistics indicate, the police are “31 percent more likely to pull over a black driver than a white driver.”[11] There is the violence that propels a deeply racist and militarized society, a violence that turns on young people and adults alike who are considered disposable and a threat to society.[12] This type of harassment is integral to a form of domestic terrorism in which blacks are beaten, arrested, incarcerated, and too often killed. This is the new totalitarianism of the boot in your face racism, one in which the punishing state is the central institution for both controlling poor minorities of race and class and enforcing the rules of the financial elite. How much longer can this war on youth go on? As Karen Garcia points out, “When police officers can stalk, threaten, harass, assault, arrest, injure and kill black people for the crime of merely existing, I think it’s high time that the USA declares itself a state sponsor of terrorism.”[13] The United States has become a country in which it is proud of what is should be ashamed of. How else to explain the popularity of the racist and bigot, Donald Trump, among among the Republican Party’s right-wing base? We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system. Markets and power are immune to justice and despise it. All that matters is that control, financial and political, serves soulless markets and the Darwinian culture of cruelty. How many more young people are going to be killed for waking in the street, failing to signal a lane shift, looking a police person in the eye, or playing with a toy gun? How many more names of black men, women, and young people will join the list of those whose deaths have sparked widespread protests: Trayvon martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones, and Sakia Gunn, and now Sandra Bland. Is it any wonder that one funeral director in Chicago stated that “young people in the city do not expect to live late into their adult life.”[14] Police violence in the United States not only offers a window into the structural nature of state violence, but also serves as a gateway to prison, especially for minorities of race and class. Police violence against people of color, especially Blacks is not an aberration, it is policy, another way of dealing with those considered disposable. Sandra Bland’s tragic death that began with a routine traffic stop has become a high profile case. What is missing from most of the accounts of her death is that the data that is emerging around how often police officers kill civilians suggests that the number of such killings is astronomical. The Progress Report recently noted that two new projects are now keeping count in real time and that “According to The Guardian, 637 people have been killed by the police” since the beginning of the year to July 22, 2015. In addition, “The Washington Post…is tracking police shootings and counts 535 of those. That’s almost three people shot and killed by the police every day this year.”[15] Yet, the mainstream media is more infatuated with mindless celebrities, game shows, and the financial brutishness and idiocy of Donald Trump than they are about endless violence waged against poor minority children in the United States. What is clear is that this violence speaks clearly to a society that no longer wants to invest in its youth. And if one measure of a democratic society is how it treats young people, the United States has failed miserably. The war on terror has come home and it has taken the form of a war on poor minorities, especially black men and youth. Racism and police militarization have created a new kind of terrorism, one in which extreme violence is being used against black people for the most trivial of infractions. The killing of black youth by the police is no longer a routine affair, a norm that stretches back to slaver. On the contrary, it now appears to have become both a spectacle and a sport in America. Of course, there has been an unbroken line of terror and violence waged against black people since slavery. What is different is that such acts of domestic terrorism now often take place increasingly in full view of the American public who more and more are witnessing such lawlessness after it is recorded and uploaded onto the Internet by bystanders.[16] New technologies and an every present screen culture now enable individuals to record such violence in real time and make it a matter of public record. While this public display of the deployment domestic terrorism makes visible the depravity of state violence, these images are sometimes co-opted by the mass media, commodified, and disseminated in ways that exploit and erase black lives, as William C. Anderson argues.[17] But it does more. It also sends a clear message to the American public, one that is as dangerous as it is violent. The message is that the police can kill African-Americans, young and old, and do it with impunity, with just a few exceptions–as in the clear cut killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the indictment of the police officers responsible for his death. Americans now live in an empire of images that not only serve to reveal the dynamics of oppressive power but also empty words of any meaning, often driven by a disimagination machine that denudes images of any substantive meaning by turning them into spectacles of violence. The police appear to recognize that images no longer provide the ultimate referent for revealing oppressive violence as much as they function to massage the machinery of aesthetic depravity. Racial violence has become so commonplace that when it is perpetrated by the police against innocent people, justice is not measured by holding those who commit the violence accountable. On the contrary, all that matters is that its presence be noted by the authorities and the mainstream media as if that is the only measure of justice. Few people seem distraught by the ongoing shootings, beatings, and killings of African-Americans in a society in which a black person killed every 28 hours in the U.S.[18] In a society engulfed in fear, racism, and violence, a culture of compassion, trust, and justice has been transformed into a culture of war and violence. In a country in which militarism is viewed as an ideal and the police and soldiers are treated like heroes, violence has morphed into the primary modality for solving problems. One consequence is that state violence is either ignored, rendered trivial, or is shamelessly legitimated in the name of the law, security, or self-defence. State violence fuelled by the merging of the war on terror, the militarization of all aspects of society, and a deep-seated and increasingly ruthless and unapologetic racism is now ubiquitous and should be labelled as a form of domestic terrorism.[19] Terrorism, torture, and state violence are no longer simply part of our history; they have become the nervous system of an increasingly authoritarian state. Eric Garner told the police as he was being choked to death that he could not breathe. His words now apply to democracy itself, which has lost the civic oxygen that gives it life and is on its death bed. America has become a place where democracy cannot breathe. The mainstream press seems especially interested in such stories when the victims can be viewed as assailants, as in the case of Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown, but are less interested when the old stereotypes about crime and black culture cannot be invoked. When the victims of police violence cannot be tarred with labels such as super-predators or thugs[20] as in the case of Tamir Rice, who was only 12-years old when shot to death by a policeman– who in his previous police assignment in another city was labeled as unstable–demonizing discourse becomes useless and such acts of state terrorism simply fade out of view. Why is it that there was almost no public outcry over the case of Kalief Browder, a young black man, who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island and spent more than a one thousand days, two years of that time in solitary confinement, waiting for a trial that never happened. Shortly after being released he committed suicide.[21] Would this have happened if he were white, middle class, and had access to a lawyer? How is what happened to him different than the egregious torture inflicted on innocent children at Abu Ghraib prison? What has the United States become in the age of domestic terrorism. Not surprisingly, the discourse of terrorism once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to commit violence against the government but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own citizens. What needs to be recognized as Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out is that the killing of unarmed Afro-Americans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance against a war against black youth that is being waged on U.S. soil.[22] The call for police “reform,” echoed throughout the dominant media, is meaningless. We need to change a system steeped in violence, racism, economic corruption and institutional rot. We don’t need revenge, we need justice – and that means structural change. Ending police misconduct is certainly acceptable as short-term goal to save lives, but if we are going to prevent the United States from becoming a full-fledged police state serving the interests of the rich who ensconce themselves in their gated and guarded communities, the vicious neoliberal financial and police state has to be dismantled. Such resistance is beginning with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with youth movements such as the Black Youth Project, Millennial Activists United, We Charge Genocide, and other groups.[23] A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the ever increasing flood of intolerable police and state violence.[24] More and more people are being locked up, jailed, beaten, harassed, and violated by the police and other security forces because they are poor, vulnerable, viewed as disposable, or simply are marginalized by being black, brown, young, and poor.[25] Black youth are safe neither in their own neighborhoods nor on public streets, highways, schools, or any other areas in which the police can be found.

 

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America’s New Brutalism: the Death of Sandra Bland On July 9, soon after Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, moved to Texas from Naperville, Illinois to take a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, she was pulled over by the police for failing to signal while making a lane change. What followed has become all too common and illustrates the ever increasing rise in domestic terrorism in the United States. She was pulled out of the car by a police officer for allegedly becoming combative and pinned to the ground by two officers. A video obtained by ABC 7 of Bland’s arrest “doesn’t appear to show Bland being combative with officers but does show two officers on top of Bland.”[1] In a second video released by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas state trooper Brian Encinia becomes increasingly hostile toward Bland and very shortly the interaction escalates into a shouting match and becomes confrontational.[2] During the interaction, Bland is asked by the officer to put out her cigarette she refuses stating “I am in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette?” Encinia then opens the driver’s door, attempting to physically remove her. He then states “I’m going to drag you out of here.” Bland says “don’t touch me, I’m not under arrest.” Encinia then pulls out his Taser, points it at Bland, and says “I will light you up.” Spokespersons for the State troopers later admitted that “Encinia did not follow proper procedure; …. Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis said after viewing the video that Encinia was “not compliant” with the officer’s orders.”[3] Encinia claims that after Bland was handcuffed, she swung her elbows at him and kicked him in the chin, though this does not appear on the video. Bland was then charged with resisting arrest. Neither the dashcam video nor the video taken by a bystander show any indication the officer was kicked. Even more troubling is the fact that the video had a number of glitches suggesting it had been tampered with, though the Department of Public Safety indicated the glitches were the result of posting it and later released another version of the video.[4] A witness reported that “he saw the arresting officer pull Bland out of the car, throw her to the ground and put his knee on her neck while he arrested her.”[5] In the video, Bland can be heard questioning the officers’ methods of restraint. She says: “You just slammed my head to the ground. Do you not even care about that that? I can’t even hear.”[6] At one point, Bland indicates she has been hurt. She says “You’re about to break my wrist and “You knocked my head in the ground; I got epilepsy, MF!” to which Encinia responds “Good.”[7] She was then arrested for assaulting an officer, a third-degree felony, and interned at the Waller County, Texas jail. On July 13, she was found dead in her cell. Quite unbelievably, the police reported that she took her own life.  The Waller County Jail has ruled her death a suicide. It appears inconceivable that a young woman starting a new job, an outspoken civil rights activist, critical of police brutality, went to church, and was close to her family would have taken her own life. Often posting videos in which she talked about important civil rights issues, she once stated: “I’m here to change history. If we want a change we can really truly make it happen.”[8] Her family and friends believe that foul play was involved, and rightly so.[9] Adding to such disbelief is the fact that the head sheriff of Waller County “ Glenn Smith, who made the first public comments about Bland’s in-custody death, was suspended for documented cases of racism when he was chief of police in Hempstead, Texas, in 2007. After serving his suspension, more complaints of racism came in, and Smith was actually fired as chief of police in Hempstead.”[10] Bland’s death over a routine traffic stop is beyond monstrous. It is indicative of a country in which lawlessness is now integral to the police state, and extreme violence is the new norm for a society fed by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the incarceration state, the drug wars, and the increasing militarization of everything, including the war on black youth. Routine traffic stops for black drivers contain the real possibility for turning deadly. There is more at stake here than the fact that, as Federal statistics indicate, the police are “31 percent more likely to pull over a black driver than a white driver.”[11] There is the violence that propels a deeply racist and militarized society, a violence that turns on young people and adults alike who are considered disposable and a threat to society.[12] This type of harassment is integral to a form of domestic terrorism in which blacks are beaten, arrested, incarcerated, and too often killed. This is the new totalitarianism of the boot in your face racism, one in which the punishing state is the central institution for both controlling poor minorities of race and class and enforcing the rules of the financial elite. How much longer can this war on youth go on? As Karen Garcia points out, “When police officers can stalk, threaten, harass, assault, arrest, injure and kill black people for the crime of merely existing, I think it’s high time that the USA declares itself a state sponsor of terrorism.”[13] The United States has become a country in which it is proud of what is should be ashamed of. How else to explain the popularity of the racist and bigot, Donald Trump, among among the Republican Party’s right-wing base? We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system. Markets and power are immune to justice and despise it. All that matters is that control, financial and political, serves soulless markets and the Darwinian culture of cruelty. How many more young people are going to be killed for waking in the street, failing to signal a lane shift, looking a police person in the eye, or playing with a toy gun? How many more names of black men, women, and young people will join the list of those whose deaths have sparked widespread protests: Trayvon martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Renisha McBride, Aiyana Jones, and Sakia Gunn, and now Sandra Bland. Is it any wonder that one funeral director in Chicago stated that “young people in the city do not expect to live late into their adult life.”[14] Police violence in the United States not only offers a window into the structural nature of state violence, but also serves as a gateway to prison, especially for minorities of race and class. Police violence against people of color, especially Blacks is not an aberration, it is policy, another way of dealing with those considered disposable. Sandra Bland’s tragic death that began with a routine traffic stop has become a high profile case. What is missing from most of the accounts of her death is that the data that is emerging around how often police officers kill civilians suggests that the number of such killings is astronomical. The Progress Report recently noted that two new projects are now keeping count in real time and that “According to The Guardian, 637 people have been killed by the police” since the beginning of the year to July 22, 2015. In addition, “The Washington Post…is tracking police shootings and counts 535 of those. That’s almost three people shot and killed by the police every day this year.”[15] Yet, the mainstream media is more infatuated with mindless celebrities, game shows, and the financial brutishness and idiocy of Donald Trump than they are about endless violence waged against poor minority children in the United States. What is clear is that this violence speaks clearly to a society that no longer wants to invest in its youth. And if one measure of a democratic society is how it treats young people, the United States has failed miserably. The war on terror has come home and it has taken the form of a war on poor minorities, especially black men and youth. Racism and police militarization have created a new kind of terrorism, one in which extreme violence is being used against black people for the most trivial of infractions. The killing of black youth by the police is no longer a routine affair, a norm that stretches back to slaver. On the contrary, it now appears to have become both a spectacle and a sport in America. Of course, there has been an unbroken line of terror and violence waged against black people since slavery. What is different is that such acts of domestic terrorism now often take place increasingly in full view of the American public who more and more are witnessing such lawlessness after it is recorded and uploaded onto the Internet by bystanders.[16] New technologies and an every present screen culture now enable individuals to record such violence in real time and make it a matter of public record. While this public display of the deployment domestic terrorism makes visible the depravity of state violence, these images are sometimes co-opted by the mass media, commodified, and disseminated in ways that exploit and erase black lives, as William C. Anderson argues.[17] But it does more. It also sends a clear message to the American public, one that is as dangerous as it is violent. The message is that the police can kill African-Americans, young and old, and do it with impunity, with just a few exceptions–as in the clear cut killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the indictment of the police officers responsible for his death. Americans now live in an empire of images that not only serve to reveal the dynamics of oppressive power but also empty words of any meaning, often driven by a disimagination machine that denudes images of any substantive meaning by turning them into spectacles of violence. The police appear to recognize that images no longer provide the ultimate referent for revealing oppressive violence as much as they function to massage the machinery of aesthetic depravity. Racial violence has become so commonplace that when it is perpetrated by the police against innocent people, justice is not measured by holding those who commit the violence accountable. On the contrary, all that matters is that its presence be noted by the authorities and the mainstream media as if that is the only measure of justice. Few people seem distraught by the ongoing shootings, beatings, and killings of African-Americans in a society in which a black person killed every 28 hours in the U.S.[18] In a society engulfed in fear, racism, and violence, a culture of compassion, trust, and justice has been transformed into a culture of war and violence. In a country in which militarism is viewed as an ideal and the police and soldiers are treated like heroes, violence has morphed into the primary modality for solving problems. One consequence is that state violence is either ignored, rendered trivial, or is shamelessly legitimated in the name of the law, security, or self-defence. State violence fuelled by the merging of the war on terror, the militarization of all aspects of society, and a deep-seated and increasingly ruthless and unapologetic racism is now ubiquitous and should be labelled as a form of domestic terrorism.[19] Terrorism, torture, and state violence are no longer simply part of our history; they have become the nervous system of an increasingly authoritarian state. Eric Garner told the police as he was being choked to death that he could not breathe. His words now apply to democracy itself, which has lost the civic oxygen that gives it life and is on its death bed. America has become a place where democracy cannot breathe. The mainstream press seems especially interested in such stories when the victims can be viewed as assailants, as in the case of Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown, but are less interested when the old stereotypes about crime and black culture cannot be invoked. When the victims of police violence cannot be tarred with labels such as super-predators or thugs[20] as in the case of Tamir Rice, who was only 12-years old when shot to death by a policeman– who in his previous police assignment in another city was labeled as unstable–demonizing discourse becomes useless and such acts of state terrorism simply fade out of view. Why is it that there was almost no public outcry over the case of Kalief Browder, a young black man, who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and incarcerated at the notorious Rikers Island and spent more than a one thousand days, two years of that time in solitary confinement, waiting for a trial that never happened. Shortly after being released he committed suicide.[21] Would this have happened if he were white, middle class, and had access to a lawyer? How is what happened to him different than the egregious torture inflicted on innocent children at Abu Ghraib prison? What has the United States become in the age of domestic terrorism. Not surprisingly, the discourse of terrorism once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to commit violence against the government but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own citizens. What needs to be recognized as Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out is that the killing of unarmed Afro-Americans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance against a war against black youth that is being waged on U.S. soil.[22] The call for police “reform,” echoed throughout the dominant media, is meaningless. We need to change a system steeped in violence, racism, economic corruption and institutional rot. We don’t need revenge, we need justice – and that means structural change. Ending police misconduct is certainly acceptable as short-term goal to save lives, but if we are going to prevent the United States from becoming a full-fledged police state serving the interests of the rich who ensconce themselves in their gated and guarded communities, the vicious neoliberal financial and police state has to be dismantled. Such resistance is beginning with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, along with youth movements such as the Black Youth Project, Millennial Activists United, We Charge Genocide, and other groups.[23] A new brutalism haunts America, drenched in the ever increasing flood of intolerable police and state violence.[24] More and more people are being locked up, jailed, beaten, harassed, and violated by the police and other security forces because they are poor, vulnerable, viewed as disposable, or simply are marginalized by being black, brown, young, and poor.[25] Black youth are safe neither in their own neighborhoods nor on public streets, highways, schools, or any other areas in which the police can be found.

 

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As The 100th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-

As The 100^th Anniversary Of World War I Enters Its Second Year-The Anti-War Resistance Begins-Lenin, Trotsky, Liebknecht, Luxemburg    

 

 

 

The events leading up to World War I (known as the Great War before the world got clogged up with expansive wars in need of other numbers and names and reflecting too in that period before World War II a certain sense of “pride” in having participated in such an epic adventure even if it did mow down the flower of European youth from all classes) from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources had all the earmarks of a bloodbath early on once the industrial-sized carnage set in with the stalemated fronts (as foretold by the blood-letting in the American Civil War and the various “small” wars in Asia, Africa, and, uh, Europe in the mid to late 19^th century once war production on a mass scale followed in the train of other industrial production). Also trampled underfoot in the opposing trenches, or rather thrown in the nearest trash bin of the their respective parliamentary buildings were the supposedly eternal pledges against war in defense of one’s own capitalist-imperialist  nation-state against the working masses and their allies of other countries by most of the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations (Anarchists, Syndicalists and their various off-shoots)representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those imperialist capitalist powers and their hangers-on in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20^th century history. All those beautifully written statements and resolutions that clogged up the international conferences with feelings of solidarity were some much ill-fated wind once bullet one came out of gun one.

Other than isolated groups and individuals, mostly like Lenin and Trotsky in exile or jail, and mostly in the weaker lesser capitalistically developed countries of Europe the blood lust got the better of most of the working class and its allies as young men rushed to the recruiting stations to “do their duty” and prove their manhood. (When the first international conference of anti-war socialists occurred in Switzerland in 1915 one wag pointed out that they could all fit in one tram [bus].) Almost all parties assuming that the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everyone could go back to the eternal expressions of international working-class solidarity after the smoke had settled (and the simple white-crossed graves dug). You see, and the logic is beautiful on this one, that big mail-drop of a Socialist International, was built for peace-time but once the cannon roared then the “big tent” needed to be folded for the duration. Jesus.  

Decisive as well as we head down the slope to the first months of the second year of the war although shrouded in obscurity early in the war in exile was the soon to be towering figure of one Vladimir Lenin (a necessary nom de guerre in the hell broth days of the Czar’s Okhrana ready to send one and all to the Siberian frosts and that moniker business, that nom de guerre not a bad idea in today’s NSA-driven frenzy to know all, to peep at all), leader of the small Russian Bolshevik Party ( a Social-Democratic Party in name anyway adhering to the Second International under the sway of the powerful German party although not for long because “Long Live The Communist International,”  a new revolutionary international, would become the order of the day in the not distant future), architect of the theory of the “vanguard party” building off of many revolutionary experiences in Russia and Europe in the 19^th century (including forbears Marx and Engels), and author of an important, important to the future communist world perspective, study on the monopolizing tendencies of world imperialism, the ending of the age of “progressive” capitalism (in the Marxist sense of the term progressive in a historical materialist sense that capitalism was progressive against feudalism and other older economic models which turned into its opposite at this dividing point in history), and the hard fact that it was a drag on the possibilities of human progress and needed to be replaced by the establishment of the socialist order. But that is the wave of the future as 1914 turns to 1915 in the sinkhole trenches of Europe that are already a death trap for the flower of the European youth.  

Lenin also has a "peace" plan, a peace plan of sorts, a way out of the stinking trench warfare stalemate eating up the youth of the Eurasian landmass. Do what should have been done from the beginning, do what all the proclamations from all the beautifully-worded socialist manifestos called on the international working-class to do. Not a simple task by any means especially in that first year when almost everybody on all sides thought a little blood-letting would be good for the soul, the individual national soul, and in any case the damn thing would be over by Christmas and everybody could start producing those beautifully worded-manifestos against war again. (That by Christmas peace “scare” turned out to be a minute “truce” from below by English and German soldiers hungry for the old certainties banning the barbed wire and stinking trenches for a short reprieve in the trench fronts in France and played soccer before returning to drawn guns-a story made into song and which is today used as an example of what the lower ranks could do-if they would only turn the guns around. Damn those English and German soldiers never did turn the damn things around until too late and with not enough resolve and the whole world has suffered from that lack of resolve ever since.)

Lenin’s hard-headed proposition: turn the bloody world war among nations into a class war to drive out the war-mongers and bring some peace to the blood-soaked lands. But that advanced thinking is merely the wave of the future as the rat and rain-infested sinkhole trenches of Europe were already churning away in the first year as a death trap for the flower of the European youth.   

The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way as did the various German-induced wars attempting to create one nation-state out of various satraps almost could not be avoided in the early 20^th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine. The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and range and the increased rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last wars. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas.

The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began the damn thing among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.

A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht (who against the party majority bloc voting scheme finally voted against the Kaiser’s war budget, went to the streets to get rousing anti-war speeches listened to in the workers’ districts, lost his parliamentary immunity and wound up honorably in the Kaiser’s  prisons) and Rosa Luxemburg ( the rose of the revolution also honorably prison bound) in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia (both exiled at the outbreak of war and just in time as being on “the planet without a passport” was then as now, dangerous to the lives of left-wing revolutionaries), some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America “Big Bill” Haywood (who eventually would controversially flee to Russia to avoid jail for his opposition to American entry into war), many of his IWW (Industrial Workers Of the World) comrades and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs (who also went to jail, “Club Fed” for speaking the truth about American war aims in a famous Cleveland speech and, fittingly, ran for president in 1920 out of his Atlanta Penitentiary jail cell),  were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space.

Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well when the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. Even my old anti-war amigo from my hometown who after I got out of the American Army during the Vietnam War marched with me in countless rallies and parades trying to stop the madness got caught in the bogus information madness and supported Bush’s “paper war” although not paper for the benighted Iraqi masses ever since (and plenty of other “wise” heads from our generation of ’68 made that sea-change turn with him).

At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. “Be ready to fight” the operative words.

So imagine in the hot summer of 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses, including the beguiled working-classes bred on peace talk without substance, would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long or too late to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war, began four years of bloody trenches and death.                  

Over the next period as we continue the long night of the 100^th anniversary of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before the first frenzied shots were fired, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles after it in places like Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the hodge-podge colonies all over the world map, in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.     

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind

The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind 

 

 

 

Here is the drill. I started out life listening to singer like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby (and his brother Bob), Miss Patti Page, Miss Rosemary Clooney, Miss Peggy Lee, the Andrew, McGuire, Dooley sisters, and all the big swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother Jimmy who had his own band) as background music on the family radio in the 1950s which my mother had always during the day to get her workaday daytime household world and on Saturday night when my father joined in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlin on local radio station WJDA and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times of the 1930s Great Depression and then when they slogged through (either in some watery European theater or Pacific one take your pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War II. I am not saying that they should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly that stuff then (and now although less so) made me grind my teeth. But I was a captive audience then and so to this day I can sing off Rum and Coca Cola, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (the Glenn Miller version not the Andrew Sister) and Vera Lynn’s White Cliffs of Dover from memory. But that was not my music, okay. 

Then of course since we are speaking about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and roll which I “dug” seriously dug to the point of dreaming my own jailbreak dreams about rock futures (and girls) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for me to be able to unlike my older brother, Prescott, call that the music that I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through my mind and I can quote chapter and verse One Night With You (Elvis version, including the salacious One Night Of Sin original), Sweet Little Sixteen (Chuck Berry, of course), Let’s Have A Party ( the much underrated  Wanda Jackson), Be-Bop-a-Lula (Gene Vincent in the great one hit wonder night but what a hit), Bo Diddley (Bo, of course), Peggy Sue (Buddy Holly) and a whole bunch more.   

The music that I can really call my own is the stuff from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with my coming of chronological, political and social age (that last in the sense of recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred, out there beside myself filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek solidarity with which I did not connect with until later after getting out of my dinky hometown of Carver and off into the big cities and campus towns where just at that moment there were kindred by the thousands with the same maladies and same desire to turn  the world upside down). You know the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter Family coming out of Clinch Mountain, Buell Kazell (from Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music times), Jimmy Rodgers the Texas yodeler who found fame at the same time as the Carters in old Podunk Bristol, Tennessee, the old country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country collected by Child in Cambridge in the 1850s and taken up in that town again one hundred years later in some kind of act historical affinity), the blue grass music (which grabbed me by the throat when Everett Lally, a college friend and member of the famed Lally Brothers blue grass band let me in on his treasure trove of music from that genre), and the protest songs, songs against the madnesses of the times, nuclear war, brushfire war in places like Vietnam, against Mister James Crows midnight ways, against the barbaric death penalty, against a lot of what songwriter Malvina Reynolds called the ticky-tack little box existences we were slated for by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. The latter songs being what drove a lot of my interest once I connected their work with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which I have written plenty about elsewhere where I hung on poverty nights, meaning many nights).

 

A lot of the drive toward folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution that I kept hearing on my transistor radio during that early 1960s period with pretty boy singers and vapid young female-driven female singer stuff. (Of course being nothing but one of those alienated teenagers whom the high-brow sociologists were fretting about like we were what ailed the candid world I would not have characterized that trend that way it would take a few decades to see what was what then the music just gave me a a headache). Also to seek out roots music that I kept hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once I found a station (accidently) which featured such music and got intrigued by the sounds. Part of that search, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know, Chicago blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of Son House the mad man preacher-sinner man, Skip James with that falsetto voice singing out about how he would rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man, Bukka White (sweating blood and  salt on that National Steel on Aberdeen Mississippi Woman and Panama Limited of course Creole Belle candy man Mississippi John Hurt.

But those guys basically stayed in the South went about their local business and vanished from big view until they were “discovered” by folk aficionados who headed south looking for, well, looking for roots, looking for something to hang onto  and it took a younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose photograph graces this sketch, B.B. King, to move north, to follow the northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away just by playing like they too had made their own pacts with the devil. And made a lot of angst and alienation just a shade more bearable.  Praise be.