The War on Wokeness ~~ KENN ORPHAN

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/12/the-war-on-wokeness/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Photograph Source: Rob Larsen – CC BY 2.0

“I am human, and I think nothing of which is human is alien to me.”

~ Publius Terentius Afer, Roman playwright  (195/185 – c. 159 BC)

Anyone who has been paying attention to politics and culture, particularly in the US, has most certainly encountered the term “woke.” It refers broadly to being “alert to injustice in society.” But it has become a vague umbrella covering anything from transgender bathroom access, to the mental health of athletes, to the #MeToo movement, to BLM protests against police state violence, to Meghan Markle, to the stunt by Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, kneeling and wearing Kente cloth. And it has become a weaponized term by several factions on the political right, center and left. At its core, it has to do with identity politics, the culture wars, and late capitalism trying desperately to save itself. But there is a nuanced approach to the topic which has largely been ignored.

The Democratic Party has long used identity politics to mobilize certain sections of its base, whether they are women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ, etc. By speaking directly to and promising to address the unique challenges and injustices that each group faces, the Democrats have been able to ignore other, more unifying issues such as economic class disparity, the lack of universal healthcare, corporate crimes, the lack of affordable housing, increased surveillance and policing, never ending war and rampant environmental degradation.

It is a cynical, but rather effective, method. And many liberals, as well as Democratic Party officials, have used it to tar the reputation of anyone who dissents from their neoliberal policies. For example, many leftists who opposed Barrack Obama’s drone wars, record deportations, or attacks on whistleblowers were labeled racists. Progressives and leftists who refused to support Hillary Clinton were often labeled misogynists. The Republican Party, too, has used identity as a way of uniting their traditional base. Evangelical Christians, the white middle class and white men, to be exact. But lately, there has been a growing backlash against “wokeness culture.” On the right, the paranoid hysteria being peddled is about the ludicrous threat of censorship and “cultural Marxism.”

All of this was to be expected. American society has never fully grappled with its oppressive and murderous history or its enduring legacy. And with the spotlight being put more and more on police killing of unarmed Black people, the entrenched discrimination against women, or longstanding anti-gay policies, this denial was bound to come to a head. But there is also pushback from the left. Much of this is due to the almost complete absence of capitalism and class in any mainstream discourse about societal injustices or “wokeness.” Now even corporations and the military/surveillance state can be “woke” sans irony regarding their egregious and abusive histories. Even an agency like the CIA, whose history is littered with crimes against humanity, can make risible claims about their “commitment to intersectional feminism” and inclusivity.

That Goldman Sachs uses Critical Race Theory or that there are rainbow flags flying at the US State Department does not mean that those entities are suddenly “woke.” Powerful corporations and state agencies have always made symbolic gestures to appeal to the public. But just because they employ certain inclusive practices does not automatically negate or discredit those practices or the theories behind them.

Indeed, there is a danger in downplaying or completely erasing the issue of identity from the discourse on the left. People are targeted everyday for their identity alone.  Certainly, the wealthier you are the better access to resources you will have. But to some leftists, capitalism is the only true evil in this world, and if were to be dismantled all other forms of injustice or inequality would magically disappear over night. I am exaggerating, of course, but I have read many commentaries that appear to imply this.

As ahistorical as this is, to even talk about the existence of different forms of injustice, or to use terms like intersectionality or systemic racism in some leftist circles is to be cast as a “liberal social justice warrior,” a “reformer,” or worse, a “grifter.” Some suggest that the “woke” crowd aren’t “real leftists,” which is basically the old logical fallacy of “No True Scotsman.” They insist that every opposition to an injustice, if it is not fundamentally anti-capitalist, is merely performative or a “grand display of liberal virtue signaling.” They claim they don’t want gatekeepers, yet seem to be happy to take up that occupation for their own flock.

These accusations have, in fact, become a rather de rigueur pejorative in some online circles. What’s more is that many of the people who make this jump in logic often become very defensive when criticized for it. Thus, the false assumption that they are being “canceled” when someone merely disagrees with them, as well as ridiculous histrionics about the supposed dangers of “woke culture.” Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Bill Maher and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek come to mind.

Certainly, canceling does occur. And it is usually nasty when it does. But this has to do with a combination of factors, including the noxious culture of social media, doxing, trolls, and the rapid, mob “justice” campaigns that all of this often encourages, more than any “woke” movement for social justice. And there is something rather humorous to the notion of “cancelling” when it mostly comes from people who have enormous platforms, which they continue to maintain, with scores of followers.

On a personal note, I know what it feels like to be “canceled.” In fact, anyone who has been involved in Palestinian solidarity knows what it is like to be silenced or censored. To be excluded from certain forums. To be unfairly labeled a bigot. Yet, most people in this movement continue nonetheless, and do so without continually complaining about this kind of suppression. Censorship has always been used against those who dissent. But the way it is being framed now makes it seem like it is some new, liberal, authoritarian menace that will wipe out freedom of expression once and for all.

Without a doubt, real censorship is something that should be fought. And freedom of speech and expression are under threat. But that threat comes more from far right lawmakers who are criminalizing protests and the corporatocracy we are all living under, rather than some fictitious “woke” mob. And there are certainly more pressing issues than any individual group’s rights or concerns. Global capitalism, ecological collapse, climate change, the pandemic, war, all of these are existential issues that affect all of us, regardless of our identities. We have more in common with each other than we do with the ruling, uberwealth class. This should unite us.

But human beings are not a mono-crop. We have personal and shared identities based on how we look, speak, act, whom we love, how we worship (if we choose to worship) and from our experiences of being different from the dominant group in our society. To deny that people are, indeed, persecuted, discriminated against, or even killed for their identity alone, is the height of disconnection from the lived reality of billions of people around the world. Yes, capitalism makes all of that exponentially worse. Yes, it must be dismantled if we are to have any future. But the ironclad law of the left is solidarity. So if that is what some consider “woke,” I will gladly adopt that moniker.

SOCIAL BANDITRY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

https://popularresistance.org/social-banditry-for-the-21st-century/

 ~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Funding The Resistance.

To finance our movements at this critical moment in history, expropriating money from certain targets is an ethical option. There are many ways it can be done.

At least as early as the first century A.D., shiftas of the Horn of Africa renounced their allegiance to emperors, government and law, and took to the wild where — through their disruptions of the usual business and trade — they would manage to survive as outlaws. For centuries, the Balkan haiduks roamed their lands, stealing from their Ottoman occupiers. Yi brigands and others from across the Chinese frontier sustained their economies in large part through raiding during the early 20th century. From 1917-1937, Peruvian women led bands of sharpshooters by horseback to rob the rich and give to the poor.

Despite limited research and the folkloric fictionalization of the Robin Hoods of our past, social banditry seems to be present wherever even the most primordial forms of civilization have offered class inequalities. The phenomenon of social banditry — theft for the good of the poor — transcends history, geography and culture.

Industrial capitalism and neoliberal economics have necessitated changes in methods for bandits. No longer do the rich travel highways by road, vigilant for wilderness hijackers. Only approximately 8 percent of the world’s money is circulated today in the form of cash. Information about the wealthy is protected by obscure tax havens. The brigand’s task today is a fundamentally creative one, and the historical shrouds of machismo and bush-fame do not offer quite the same leverage of terror they once did.

The narrative of the bandit is not dead; it has merely transformed, and may be making a comeback. Recent iterations of once-timeless rebel tales, like Otto Bathurst’s 2018 film Robin Hood, are now dwarfed by the popularity of TV series like Good Girls and Money Heist that speculate how “ethical crime” might look today. We crave a good shakedown of state financial institutions. Even those who do not condone banditry cannot help but hold a certain reverence and awe for its spirited incipient mythology.

More importantly, while these may be works of fiction, groups on the radical left all around the world have been finding ways to commandeer money and assets and redistribute them to their allies and oppressed communities. A recent noteworthy example is the requisition of a Minneapolis Sheraton hotel during the George Floyd protests, when activists transformed it into the Share-a-Ton. Historical social banditry may offer inspiration, but today’s radical left are yoinking their way into a future where popular struggle will have the resources needed to sustain itself beyond sporadic revolutionary moments.

Why Banditry Now?

Never before has our species faced an existential crisis like that of global climate chaos. The scale and pace at which we have to make concrete change must far supersede the historical scale and pace of industrialization and colonization. For perspective, we have six years and five months to put a complete end to fossil fuel use and shift 100 percent of our planet’s energy consumption to renewables, or we warm the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius and cause catastrophic damage at unfathomable scales.

Obviously the main emergency shortcut we can take is people power. Popular struggle has proven that drastic change can in fact be expedited. The climate justice movement is arguably the largest and most diverse movement in world history, and its members — a substantial mass of whom are far too young to have to carry this colossal burden — are raising the stakes with everything from brave direct action to high-level lobbying. “Indigenous communities have been telling us for centuries that nature has to be respected the same way we respect humans,” said Raul de Lima of the Climate Clock communications team. “There is still a brief window of time to protect the most important thing: life.”

To take advantage of this brief window of opportunity, we need to engender more drastic change more urgently. Money can help make this happen. With the global economy in the hands of a fraction of one percent of the world’s population, we need more creative strategies to hasten the redistribution of funds to the coffers of our most powerful movements and their syndicates.

Those with the most money have often been defeated by those with the most people power. Ultra-wealthy dictators have on many occasions fallen where people have risen in defiance, a recent example being the downfall of billionaire Omar al-Bashir, part of whose wealth is now recovered. But those at the center of resistance movements need resources to sustain their lives and work, and to build and strengthen infrastructure for their struggles. Modern people-powered movements often resource themselves through in-kind contributions, volunteerism, solicitations or dues from members and allies, partnerships with nonprofits and businesses, and philanthropic institutions and similar donors (who often hold center-liberal values and may attach strings to their support).

These are not the only options for movement financing. There is another option: stealing.

Activist purism gets in the way of us choosing this option, but at this historical moment, it may be less ethical not to expropriate money from certain targets than to continue scraping by piecemeal. There are many ways it can be done.

Robbery

The most intuitive way to steal money is to rob, and the most obvious place to rob is a bank. But that does not mean bandits must enter through the front door, guns blazing.

In 2008, Catalan activist Enric Duran published a statement concerning half a million Euros he had stolen through obtaining 68 bank loans to finance popular struggles. Duran sought hiding after renouncing the authority of the judicial system. He urged comrades not to waste a moment campaigning for his amnesty, but rather learn from his false loan tactics and pull off similar heists at greater scales.

Duran’s defrauding strategy expanded the Catalan modern legacy of activist banditry. In 2002, The Barcelona-born movement Yomango (“I swipe”) harnessed the talents of shoplifters to publicly and unashamedly fight austerity and the corporate powers behind it. Their movement of open thieving quickly spread across Europe and Latin America, such as in Argentina where dancers openly shoplifted hundreds of champagne bottles from a Carrefour store.

In Denmark, the crew that came to be known as the Blekingegade Gang had pulled off a large number of heists in the 70s and 80s to fund allied Leninist activity at the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. One of their famous jams involved posing as police driving a Ford Escort.

Shortly before the Blekingegade Gang’s rise, the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican outfit, stole what they deemed an underutilized truck, equipped with a tuberculosis-detecting X-ray unit. They brought it to East Harlem where they ran tests for residents while flying a Puerto Rican flag above the vehicle.

Although these overtly left groups — and many others — undertook calculated acts of “ethical crime,” social banditry as it is historically understood relies less directly on ideological politics. It is class warfare inasmuch as it enables the brigand or band — marginal even in societies where they have popular support — to preserve itself over the long-term. The poor and the peasantry are taxed with a “pie in the window” — or similar minor concessions offered to the local outlaws. The bandits are in turn expected to protect the peasantry from those in power, and should they pillage a good loot, share a portion of their plunder.

For instance, John Kepe hid in the Boschberg caves of the Eastern Cape in the 1950s, ransacking the homes and farms of Afrikaners. Although the loot offered him his own survival, he redistributed useful household goods and items to fellow black South Africans. This helped keep his whereabouts mum. One might say his passive alliances with mainstream society offered him more favorable “working conditions.” Kepe’s story was recently adapted for the screen in Sew the Winter to My Skin.

The late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm — perhaps the most authoritative writer on social banditry — observes a similar pragmatic economics and politics in the historical bandits. They support the revolution, but are rarely themselves the revolution. Their niche contribution toward the struggle of the underclass rarely offers scalable infrastructure for, say, nationwide peasant revolt. They are generous in their economic sentiments toward any movement of the poor, though. It was said that Brazil’s famous bandit Lampião bought supplies at thrice the usual price from traders. Such “bandit generosity” expresses sympathies for mass rebellion and for the freedom of life outside the immediate throngs of the empire and its landlords, if not mere pomp and pride for the bandit.

Money Laundering

Straightforward robbery — that is, transferring money or assets from party X to party Y through theft — is not the only means of liberating funds. Money laundering — practiced daily by billionaires with impunity — can also be used for good.

One group interviewed for this article applies for grants from large institutions. The funds they are awarded are accounted for through receipts collected from trash bins at bus stations, or wherever else they can be found. The amount accounted for through false receipts is then distributed to allied grassroots activists or direct action groups whose activities cannot comfortably fall under the grant agreements without raising eyebrows. “NGOs do dirty things all of the time to advance their self-interests,” said a member of this group. “Why shouldn’t we use similar approaches for more radical ends?”

The modern bandit is not limited to small-scale laundering like this. In some cases, a nonprofit “shell company” like an NGO can be established to solicit for large — and usually politically moderate — donor funding. When grants are awarded, funds can be distributed to a more radical group — i.e. a “partner” — that invoices for the sum shared. In this way, the official grant recipient, in this case the “NGO shell company,” can avail financial accountability, satisfy auditors, and still report on their seemingly moderate activities while creating a buffer between the donor and radical group, thus availing greater autonomy to the radical group.

One youth organization cleans their grant monies by hosting large events — activities meant, in the donor’s perspective, to promote cultural diversity and inclusion. The community activities they organize are exactly the activities they claim to do in their applications and reports. They charge a fee for attendance, though, and in this way make back more money than they spent. Accountability for the funds has already been made through spending the capital received. The proceeds from their “suggested donations” are then distributed to antifascist groups.

Sometimes requisitioning funding from the right need not be so convoluted. “Usually, we don’t need to do stuff like this,” explained my informant. “It’s really quite easy to get a large amount of money from a right-wing donor, especially if you have a formally registered organization with a board and membership that is ‘in on it’ while maintaining a nice-looking front.”

NGO Expropriation

Most bandits have historically targeted victims in their proximity. What was once the geographic terrain of highwaymen is now the economic terrain of the movement “industry.” In other words, bandits do not run where they do not need to run; NGOs are our closest targets. Many are adjacent to but not synonymous with our movements.

The good news is that shaking down NGOs through criminality may not even be necessary, in many instances. Many NGO workers entered the sector with much hope for making change, only to become disillusioned with the ineffectual nature of their industry and the magnitude of complex problems they once set out to help solve. Everyone could use a little revolutionary fervor, and often it is possible to sell an opportunity to NGO workers dissatisfied with the pathetic impact their industry’s $1 trillion annual turnover has logged.

To ask how this can be done, one may turn to the eccentric and arguably nonviolent means of French Highwayman of Restoration England, Claude Duval. Feared less for his strength and more for his charm, Duval was famed for using his gallantry to win hefty sums from his hijacking victims. The question Duval poses to us today is: can we charm those with their hands on NGO budgets into shifting their grantee portfolio leftward? We achieve this by selling the experience of revolution to nonprofit industry workers whose burning passions have been dwindling but are not altogether dead. (Do not read this as an endorsement of the sexualization of theft as practiced by Duval, and appropriated by many a playwright!)

“Usually there is no need for trickery,” explained one person who takes a Duvalian approach to traditional fundraising. “We can be forthcoming about our objectives and methods. Hesitancies from potential financiers come in the form of risk management. Most donors don’t want to be seen as protest funders, and many governments thrive on the propaganda that youth activism is fueled by financiers abroad, so you’ve got to persuasively explain how your group is set up to mitigate these challenges. Their interest is to circumvent this public scrutiny.” This correspondent’s group often invests months of time in relationships with large donors before securing a firm commitment, but in some instances has secured hundreds of thousands of dollars from a single donor to invest in radical work.

Toward A Bandit Ethic

How do we disambiguate modern bandits from selfish opportunists? How do we create systems of accountability where secrecy is necessary to advance radical work without jeopardizing those who have not consented to certain risks?

One of my informants described with painstaking detail how transparency over funds is shared between core members in a secure way. There are many ways to do this, using a consensus process between trusted members being one way.

The fundamental principle for what disambiguates social banditry from criminal opportunism lives somewhere in who the bandit accounts to. To invoke Hobsbawm’s words, one “becomes a bandit because he does something which is not regarded as criminal by his local conventions, but is so regarded by the State or the local rulers.” To answer what is regarded as criminal, one may ask “who are my people?” A spectrum of anarchist ethics offer varying answers to this question, but are united in identifying who their people are not: capitalists, governments, the state. Duran, for instance, did not recognize the right of the judiciary to judge.

The bandit is a pre-political phenomenon, in that there would be no need for the bandit were the revolution already fully realized. In many cases where social banditry has taken root, other fragments of revolutionary sentiment may be difficult to spot, and the political moment may still be ages away. Social bandits thus have a responsibility to recognize the validity of the experiences of the oppressed, and to affirm them through action.

Historically, this action takes the chief form of providing security from oppressors and redistributing loot. In the 21st century, the social bandit’s responsibility has leaned more upon the latter.

In any case, our bar should not be held so high. Hobsbawm wrote, “Bandit-heroes are not expected to make a world of equality. They can only right wrongs or prove that sometimes oppression can be turned upside down.” Whatever ethic we create for social banditry in our neoliberal era will be riddled with ambiguities, but the urgency of our moment calls us to navigate these complexities.

As the future of our species — and others — hangs in the balance, we must turn to high-risk, high-reward action. If we are going to go down, let it not be due to revolutionaries beating around the bush. As famed Mexican outlaw Pancho Villa sputtered out his dying words, bleeding open from gunwounds: “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

BLESS THE TRAITORS~~ Chris Hedges

https://popularresistance.org/bless-the-traitors/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Daniel Hale Exposed The Widespread And Indiscriminate Murder Of Noncombatants In The Global US Drone War.

For his heroism, he faces ten years in prison while those who oversee these war crimes continue their killing spree.

Daniel Hale, an active-duty Air Force intelligence analyst, stood in the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park in October 2011 in his military uniform. He held up a sign that read “Free Bradley Manning,” who had not yet announced her transition. It was a singular act of conscience few in uniform had the strength to replicate. He had taken a week off from his job to join the protestors in the park. He was present at 6:00 am on October 14 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg made his first attempt to clear the park. He stood in solidarity with thousands of protestors, including many unionized transit workers, teachers, Teamsters and communications workers, who formed a ring around the park. He watched the police back down as the crowd erupted into cheers. But this act of defiance and moral courage was only the beginning.

At the time, Hale was stationed at Fort Bragg. A few months later he deployed to Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Force Base. He would later learn that that while he was in Zuccotti Park, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike some 12,000 miles away in Yemen that killed Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of the radical cleric and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been killed by a drone strike two weeks earlier. The Obama administration claimed it was targeting the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Ibrahim al-Banna, who it believed, incorrectly, was with the boy and his cousins, all of whom were also killed in the attack. That massacre of innocents became public, but there were thousands more such attacks that wantonly killed noncombatants that only Hale and those with top-security clearances knew about.

Starting in 2013, Hale, while working as a private contractor, leaked some 17 classified documents about the drone program to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, although the reporter is not named in court documents. The leaked documents, published by The Intercept on October 15, 2015, exposed that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. For one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”

Hale was coerced by Biden’s Justice Department on March 31 to plead guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 designed to prosecute those who passed on state secrets to a hostile power, not those who expose to the public government lies and crimes. Hale admitted as part of the plea deal to “retention and transmission of national security information” and leaking 11 classified documents to a journalist. He is being held in the Alexandria Adult Detention Center in Virginia, awaiting sentencing on July 27. If he had refused the plea deal, he could have spent 50 years in prison. He now faces up to a decade in prison.

Tragically, his case has not garnered the attention it should. When Nick Mottern, of the Ban Killer Drones campaign, accompanied artists projecting Hale’s image on downtown walls in Washington, D.C., he found that everyone he spoke to was unaware of Hale’s plight. Prominent human rights organizations, such as the ACLU and PEN, have largely remained silent and uninvolved. The group Stand with Daniel Hale has called on President Biden to pardon Hale and end the use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers, mounted a letter-writing campaign to the judge to request leniency and is collecting donations for Hale’s legal fund.

“Daniel Hale is one of the most consequential whistleblowers,” Edward Snowden said on a May Day panel held at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers.  “He sacrificed everything — an incredibly courageous person — to tell us that the drone war, that, you know, is so obviously occurring to everyone else, but the government was still officially denying in so many ways, is here, it is happening, and 90 percent of the casualties in one five-month period were innocents or bystanders or not the target of the drone strike. We could not establish that, we could not prove that, without Daniel Hale’s voice.”

Speaking on Democracy Now! with host Amy Goodman a few weeks later, Daniel Ellsberg agreed that Hale “acted very admirably, in a way that very, very few officials have ever done in showing the moral courage to separate themselves from criminal activities and wrongful activities of their own administration, and resist them, as well as exposing them.”

Because Hale was charged under the Espionage Act, he, like other whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, who spent two-and-a-half years in prison for exposing the routine torture of suspects held in black sites, was not permitted to explain his motivations and intent to the court. Nor could he provide evidence to the court that the drone assassination program killed and wounded large numbers of noncombatants, including children. He faced trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, much of whose population has links to the military or intelligence community, and whose courts have become notorious for their harsh sentences on behalf of the government.

The 2012 “Living Under Drones” report by the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic provides a detailed documentation of the human impact of US drone strikes in Pakistan. Drones often fire Hellfire missiles that are equipped with an explosive warhead of about 20 pounds. A Hellfire variant, known as the R9X, carries “an inert warhead,” The New York Times reported. Instead of exploding, it hurls about 100 pounds of metal through a vehicle. The missile’s other feature includes “six long blades tucked inside,” which deploy “seconds before impact to slice up anything in its path” — including, of course, people.

The numbers of civilian dead from US drone strikes run into the thousands, if not tens of thousands. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization, for example, reported that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, drone strikes killed between 2,562 and 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom an estimated 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children.

Drones hover 24 hours a day in the skies over Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. Without warning, the drones, operated remotely from Air Force bases as far away as Nevada, fire ordinance that obliterates homes and vehicles or kills whole groups of people in fields or attending community gatherings, funerals and weddings. The leaked banter of the young drone operators, who often treat the killings as if they are an enhanced video game, exposes the callousness of the indiscriminate killings. Drone operators refer to child victims of drone attacks as “fun-sized terrorists.”

“Ever step on ants and never give it another thought?” Michael Hass, a former drone operator for the Air Force told The Guardian.  “That’s what you are made to think of the targets — as just black blobs on a screen. You start to do these psychological gymnastics to make it easier to do what you have to do — they deserved it, they chose their side. You had to kill part of your conscience to keep doing your job every day — and ignore those voices telling you this wasn’t right.”

The ubiquitous presence of drones in the skies, and the awareness that at any moment these drones can kill you and your family, induces feelings of helplessness, anxiety and constant fear.

“Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities,” the 2012 report reads of the drone war in Pakistan. “Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school.”

Drones have become killing machines that mete out random death and usually permanently cripple those victims who survive.

“The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration, shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs,” the report reads.  “Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss.”

Hale, now 33, always had doubts about the war, but he enlisted in 2009 when Obama assumed office. He hoped that Obama would undo the excesses and lawlessness of the Bush administration. Instead, Obama, a few weeks after he took office, approved the deployment of an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan where 36,000 U.S. troops and 32,000 NATO troops were already deployed. By the end of the year, Obama increased troop levels in Afghanistan again by 30,000, doubling U.S. casualties. He also massively expanded the drone program, raising the number of drone strikes from several dozen the year before he took office to 117 by his second year in office.  By the time he left office Obama had presided over the killing of at least 3,000 suspected militants and hundreds of civilians. He authorized what are known as “signature strikes” allowing the CIA to carry out drone attacks against groups of suspected militants without getting positive identification. He spread the footprint of the drone war, establishing drone bases in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other overseas locations to expand attacks to Syria and Yemen. The Obama administration also indicted eight whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all previous administrations combined. The Biden administration, like the Trump and Obama administrations, continues to launch widespread global drone strikes.

“Before I joined the military, I was well aware that what I was about to enter was something I was against, that I disagreed with,” Hale says in the 2016 documentary film “National Bird.” “I joined anyway out of desperation. I was homeless. I was desperate. I had nowhere else to go. I was on my last leg. The Air Force was ready to accept me.”

In the film, Hale alludes to a difficult and chaotic childhood.

“It’s kind of funny, a little ironic too, because so far I’m the only adult male in my entire family, immediate and external, who had not been to prison so far,” he says. “I come from a long lineage of prisoners, actually, a very proud tradition of fuck-ups who get drunk and go driving, or sell pot, or carry a gun when they shouldn’t be carrying a gun, in the wrong place at the wrong time, a lot of that where I’m from.”

He was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg and underwent language and intelligence training. He worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) in Afghanistan as an intelligence analyst identifying targets for the drone program. His Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) security clearance gave him access to the vast, global drone war hidden from public view and Obama’s huge secret “kill lists.”

“There are several such lists, used to target individuals for different reasons,” he wrote in an essay titled “Why I Leaked the Watchlist Documents,” originally published anonymously in the book “The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program” by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. The book is based on the leaked documents provided by Hale that first appeared as an eight-part series called “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept.

“Some lists are closely kept; others span multiple intelligence and local law enforcement agencies,” Hale writes in the essay. “There are lists used to kill or capture supposed ‘high-value targets,’ and others intended to threaten, coerce, or simply monitor a person’s activity. However, all the lists, whether to kill or silence, originate from the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, and they are maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center at the National Counterterrorism Center. The existence of TIDE is unclassified, yet details about how it functions in our government are completely unknown to the public. In August 2013 the database reached a milestone of one million entries. Today it is thousands of entries larger and is growing faster than it has since its inception in 2003.”

The Terrorist Screening Center, he writes, not only stores names, dates of birth, and other identifying information of potential targets, but also stores “medical records, transcripts, and passport data; license plate numbers, email, and cell-phone numbers (along with the phone’s International Mobile Subscriber Identity and International Mobile Station Equipment Identity numbers); your bank account numbers and purchases; and other sensitive information, including DNA and photographs capable of identifying you using facial recognition software.”

Data on suspects is collected and pooled by the intelligence agencies known as the Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance formed by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each person on the list is assigned a TIDE personal number, or TPN.

“From Osama bin Laden (TPN 1063599) to Abdulrahman Awlaki (TPN 26350617), the American son of Anwar al Awlaki, anyone who has ever been the target of a covert operation was first assigned a TPN and closely monitored by all agencies who follow that TPN long before they were eventually put on a separate list and extrajudicially sentenced to death,” Hale wrote.

He also exposed that the more than one million entries in the TIDE database includes about 21,000 United States citizens.

After leaving the Air Force in July 2013, Hale was employed by the private defense contractor National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as a political geography analyst between December 2013 and August 2014. He said he took the job, which paid $80,000 a year, because he was in desperate need of money and hoped to go to college. But by then he was disgusted with the drone program and determined to make the public aware of its abuses and lawlessness. Inspired by the peace activist David Dellinger, he, like Dellinger, had decided to become a traitor to “the American way of death.” He would make amends for his complicity in the killings, even at the cost of his own security and freedom.

“When the president gets up in front of the nation and says they are doing everything they can to ensure there is near certainty there will be no civilians killed, he is saying that because he can’t say otherwise, because anytime an action is taken to finish a target there is a certain amount of guesswork in that action,” Hale says in the film. “It’s only in the aftermath of any kind of ordinance being dropped that you know how much actual damage was done. Oftentimes, the intelligence community is reliant, the Joint Special Operations Command, the CIA included, is reliant on intelligence coming afterwards that confirms that who they were targeting was killed in the strike, or that they weren’t killed in that strike.”

“The people who defend drones, and the way they are used, say they protect American lives by not putting them in harm’s way,” he says. “What they really do is embolden decision makers, because there is no threat, there is no immediate consequence. They can do this strike. They can potentially kill this person they are so desperate to eliminate because of how potentially dangerous they could be to the US. But if it just so happens that they don’t kill that person, or some other people involved in the strike get killed as well, there are no consequences for it. When it comes to high-value targets, every mission you go after one person at a time, but anybody else killed in that strike is blanketly assumed to be an associate of the targeted individual. So as long as they can reasonably identify that all of the people in the field view of the camera are military-aged males, meaning anybody who is believed to be age 16 or older, they are a legitimate target under the rules of engagement. If that strike occurs and kills all of them, they just say they got them all.”

Drones, he warns, make remote killing “too easy, too convenient.”

On August 8, 2014, the FBI raided his home. It was his last day of work for the private contractor. A male and female FBI agent shoved their badges in his face when he opened the door.

“Immediately behind them came about 20 agents, basically all of them with pistols drawn, some wearing body armor,” he says in the film. “At this point I was extremely scared. I did not understand what was going on. Altogether, there might have been at least 30 to 50 agents in and out of the house at different points throughout the evening taking photos of every room and everything, searching for different things.”

By the time they finished his house was stripped of all electronics, including his cell phone.

For the next five years he lived with the uncertainty of his fate. He struggled to find work, fought off depression and contemplated suicide. He was barred, by law, from speaking about his plight, even with a therapist. In 2019, the Trump administration indicted Hale on four counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of theft of government property.

The thousands of targeted assassinations carried out by drones, often in countries that are not at war with the United States, are an egregious violation of international law. They are turning huge swathos of the planet against us. The secret kill lists, which include US citizens, have transformed the executive branch into judge, jury and executioner, obliterating the right to due process. Those that commit these killings are unaccountable. Hale sacrificed his career and his freedom to warn us. He is not a danger to the country. The danger we face comes from the secret drone program, which is spiraling out of control and ominously being adopted by domestic law enforcement agencies. If left unchecked, the terror we impose on others we will soon impose on ourselves.

George Floyd’s murderer convicted – But no real justice exists in a racist system! ~~ Erika Roedland AND Arman Ebrahim

https://marxiststudent.com/george-floyds-murderer-convicted-but-no-real-justice-exists-in-a-racist-system/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Last summer, tens of millions of people in the US participated in the Black Lives Matter movement sparked by the racist police murder of George Floyd. Nearly one year later, on 20 April 2021, his killer Derek Chauvin was convicted of three charges: second-degree unintentional felony murder; third-degree “depraved mind” murder; and second-degree manslaughter. Chauvin’s conviction is a far cry from justice for George Floyd and all those constantly facing police brutality.

One individual cop being ‘held accountable’ for his actions is a symbolic gesture that comes in response to the enormous energy expended by the masses during the movement last year.

But the uprising last summer was not just caused by George Floyd’s murder—it was an explosion of all the pent-up anger from the constant harassment and exploitation that millions of oppressed people experience every day. In Minneapolis alone, police killed nearly 50 black men over the past 20 years. Between 2013 and 2020, police officers in the US killed over 9,000 people—a quarter of them black. The movement last year was sustained by the killing of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and the shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin. It called for justice, not only for George Floyd, but also for all the nameless victims whose killers in blue never had a court date.

Same thing, different day

In the last eight years, just 151 of those police killings that have been documented resulted in officers being charged with a crime—let alone convicted. That amounts to just 1.6%. For example, the officer who brazenly shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha is not facing any consequences for his actions. He is also not reflected in these statistics because he is still alive, paralyzed from the waist down after being shot point-blank in the back seven times.

The officers who murdered Breonna Taylor faced no charges. Neither did the Chicago officer who shot 13-year-old Adam Toledo, despite the graphic bodycam footage that shows the kid raising his hands right before his murder.

Since the beginning of the Chauvin trial on 29 March, police have killed more than three people per day. And on 11 April, before Chauvin’s defense could even present their case, Daunte Wright was murdered by police in Brooklyn Center, a short distance away from downtown Minneapolis.

There was an immediate response to this latest killing, with hundreds pouring out in protest. The National Guard, which was poised and ready for the Chauvin verdict, was deployed ahead of schedule. Democratic Governor Tim Walz notified Minnesotans that the “largest police presence in Minnesota history” would be enforcing a curfew, conveniently to begin at 7 p.m.—the time set for a protest after Wright’s killing. But the protesters assembled anyway, and faced vicious repression, with rubber bullets and tear gas causing injuries nearly every night.

Running scared

Far from a show of strength, this police violence against protesters, alongside Chauvin’s guilty verdict, shows that the ruling class is deeply concerned about another mass movement. Last year’s Black Lives Matter protests struck fear in the hearts of the ruling class. At its height, it had President Trump hiding in an underground bunker, threatening to use the full might of the military against unarmed civilians.

Biden’s hundredth day of office is fast approaching, and after four turbulent years of Trump’s presidency, the bourgeoisie was looking to re-establish the credibility of their system. So, along with the stick, the carrot is also being used. During the trial, Biden called George Floyd’s family to say he was “praying” for the “right verdict,” and congresswoman Maxine Waters said she hoped Chauvin would be found “guilty, guilty, guilty”. Even the police chief testified saying Chauvin’s actions were out of bounds. The guilty verdict is part of a concerted ruling-class effort to prove that the justice system is “fair”—in order to prevent another nationwide, millions-strong outburst.

Given the high stakes, the government made an effort to control the information, dialogue, and “stability” during the trial. Shortly before the proceedings began, the Minneapolis government erected barricades around the downtown courthouse—the very image of a “free, fair, and confidence-inspiring” justice system. In coordination with Governor Walz, the city of Minneapolis deployed 2,000 National Guard troops for the duration of the trial as part of “Operation Safety Net.” The police placed barbed wire around government buildings in an attempt to intimidate protesters.

Nonetheless, about 1,000 people protested outside the barricaded Hennepin County Government Center on the first day of the trial, and there have been nearly daily protests since then.

No fairness under capitalism

The city also tried to “influence” public opinion of the trial through a plan to contract social media influencers to disseminate information. The hiring ads specifically targeted ethnic minorities in the area, offering $2,000 each to six people who would spread “city-generated and approved messages.” The majority-Democrat City Council tried to do what Democrats do best—co-opt the movement’s leaders to push their agenda. Facing public backlash, these “job opportunities” were eventually retracted.

Additionally, the bourgeois media attempted to provide “neutral” and “accurate” coverage during the trial, and the state accommodated a greater degree of “transparency” for the press, this being the first criminal trial in state history to be televised. Some of this “neutral” coverage by the St. Paul Pioneer Press included the opinions of University of Minnesota Law School professor Richard Frase, who defended the need to find jurors who “don’t have their minds made up on the case” in rural areas of Hennepin County—which happen to be predominantly conservative and white.

Contrary to the Pioneer Press’s idea of “impartiality,” black defendants are convicted 1.25 times more often by an all-white jury than are white defendants. Pools of 50 or 100 potential jurors usually only have one or two potential black jurors—if any—even in the most “diverse” counties in the country. In this trial, a pool of 300 jurors was sorted through by both the defense and prosecution. The final jury of 12 and two alternates was heralded as “more diverse than Minneapolis”—which essentially meant that it was not all white.

But there can never be genuine “impartiality” and “fairness” under capitalism because it is the ruling class that sets the rules for an inherently racist system. As stated in the ABCs of Communism: “Whatever the composition of the court, its decisions are restricted in accordance with the volumes of statutes in which are incorporated all the privileges of capital and all the lack of privileges of the toiling masses.” You cannot exorcise systemic racism from society through more “diversity” in the system’s justice or law enforcement apparatus. The police enforce the racist laws passed to defend the interests of the property-owning minority, and the courts uphold and legitimize them.

The capitalist criminal justice system is particularly rigged against poor, working-class black people. It is illegal to strike jurors based on race alone, but lawyers can easily manufacture “race-neutral” reasons for disqualifying them. For example, Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson dismissed potential juror number 76, stating that the juror “had a bias against the Minneapolis Police Department”—simply because of his experience with everyday racism. The potential juror had described that police would drive through his neighborhood blasting “Another One Bites the Dust” after a shooting or arrest in the area. Still, one selected white juror, who claims to have a “neutral view of Black Lives Matter” and strongly opposes defunding the police, was not considered “biased.”

While George Floyd was extrajudicially executed for being black, the watchdogs for capitalism opened their pocketbooks to foot an enormous bill. Chauvin received over a million dollars in legal funds from the Minneapolis Police and Peace Officers’ Association, and has 11 lawyers at his disposal, in addition to a private attorney.

Hiding their crimes

The defense rested on the contrived argument that George Floyd’s death was not the direct result of the nine-minute chokehold, but rather, due to drug use and other unrelated health problems. But the evidence is clear and plainly contradicts this: Floyd was slowly choked to death as he pleaded for his life. The prosecution showed the videos from security cameras and cell phones at the beginning of the trial.

Witnesses were brought to the stand by the prosecution, including a former wrestler who explained that Chauvin was using a “blood choke.” A forensic pathologist with over 36 years of experience summarized the autopsy plainly: “The activities of the law enforcement officers resulted in Mr. Floyd’s death.”

In the minds of the millions of people who saw the viral video of George Floyd’s final moments, there was not a shadow of a doubt that he was brutally murdered in broad daylight and cold blood. But while the immediate perpetrator of this racist crime was Derek Chauvin, he was just one link in a chain of institutions designed to uphold a system with exploitation and racism in its very foundations.

Capitalism engenders the need for an armed force to defend private property and repress the working class and poor. It was capitalism that gave rise to racist ideology and violence to divide and rule against the working class. Capitalism aided and abetted the murder of George Floyd. Derek Chauvin and the other officers who stood by him are products of this system.

And yet, the police department was not on trial—nor were the three other officers present at the scene with Derek Chauvin, who will be tried in August. The city council, which voted to increase the number of police officers in the city last December after promising to dismantle the force, was not on trial. Hundreds of killer cops will continue to get away with murder as long as this system persists.

To end racism – end capitalism!

There is no such thing as blind, impartial justice in a society built on exploitation and oppression. Nothing exists in a vacuum. A racist, exploitative society will not produce an unbiased justice system, a “color-blind” police force, or humane rehabilitative prisons. The courts are not neutral arbiters of justice, but an arm of the state that serves the ruling class’s interests, and we can have no illusions that the courts will indict a system they belong to and uphold. There can be no justice as long as a police force that evolved out of slave catchers is maintained.

Last summer, many in the movement concluded that what was needed was to “defund” or “abolish the police.” But the only way to eliminate the law enforcement apparatus is to overthrow the system that dictates the laws. Ultimately, it is not as simple as just “disbanding” the Minneapolis police force—the whole system must be upended.

To achieve this aim, the BLM movement needs greater organization, coordination, and a clear program of struggle. Organized labor must throw its full weight into the movement. We saw a glimpse of the potential power of organized labor during the protests after Daunte Wright’s murder. After it became known that National Guardsmen had been using the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation building as a base, rank-and-file workers showed up to demand they vacate, and the National Guard left without a fuss. Many unions have expressed solidarity with the protesters, including the Minnesota Nurses Association, Minnesota Workers United, and the St. Paul Federation of Educators.

The neighborhood watch committees that emerged in Minneapolis last summer were a concrete example of what workers’ self-defense and self-organization could look like. As conditions demand, they should be revived, coordinated by the labor movement, cemented with democratic leadership, established in every workplace and neighborhood, and spread throughout the Twin Cities and across the country.

Along with protecting our neighborhoods from the police and far-right vigilantes, these committees, with their organic connection to the working class, would play a vital role in coordinating preparations for a general strike—which the labor leaders should call and mobilize for. This is the only serious way to challenge the dominance of the capitalists and their system!

Only a truly massive movement and the conscious power of the working class can win even an ounce of justice for George Floyd and the billions of other victims of this system. To end racism, we must end capitalism. This is what the IMT fights for, and we invite you to join us!