The Other Link

Media spokespeople and politicians in both parties are working overtime to paint imaginary connections between the broad movement supported by millions of Americans to strip police of their traditional immunity and impunity for violent acts committed against civilians on the one hand, and the deranged, disconnected shooters of police in Texas and Louisiana.

The real links they studiously ignore are that the Dallas and Baton Rouge shooters were both veterans of the unjust and murderous US military occupations of Afghanistan and/or Iraq, as are many of the police who commit violent acts against their fellow Americans after they return home.

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The US military is widely known to aggressively discourage soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines from admitting to or seeking help for psychological disorders and injuries. The world our military members live in is a brutal and twisted place where two out of five women are sexually assaulted. It’s a world where reporting, not committing such an assault is a career-ender, a world where seeking help for psychological problems can impair your security clearance and job prospects years later in civilian life because military medical and psychological records, unlike those of civilians are not confidential.

Indications are that the Baton Rouge and Dallas shooters both had problems which are likely results of their military experience.

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For too long Americans have hidden from the facts and the consequences of America’s brutal overseas wars, even while making motion picture heroes of white snipers like Chris Kyle who famously claimed to have been paid to shoot 30 so-called “looters” in New Orleans during the Katrina disaster. In Chicago, the famous police torturer John Burge first learned his trade in the Vietnam war’s Phoenix program. A generation later Burge’s successors in the Chicago Police Department were directly linked to the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. Rank and file US torturers at Abu Gharaib were Pennsylvania prison guards in civilian life

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It’s not fantasy but fact that US special ops troops are currently active in dozens of countries across Africa and Asia, and in Ukraine on the borders of Russia, doing bloody brutal and unspeakable things the American people don’t endorse and didn’t vote for. Their crimes go unacknowledged and unpunished and their psychological injuries untreated. Our military, stationed at the frontiers of US empire in more than a hundred countries around the world are incubating the next waves of brutal and abusive police, along with their disconnected and deranged shooters, all practicing what they never should have been taught, bringing home to us another cost of global empire.

  Bruce Dixon, managing editor Black Agenda Report

The nation is awash with mass-murderous military-style assault weapons of the kinds used by the Black military veterans Micah Xavier Johnson (an Army veteran of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and a trained sniper) in Dallas and Gavin Long (a 29-year-old former Marine who served imperial time in Iraq) in Baton Rouge. There are somewhere between 5 and 8 million assault rifles in homes in the “armed madhouse” (Greg Palast’s apt description) that is the United States.

The nation is full of military veterans [trained in the craft of killing, including the killing of armed soldiers and gendarmes] who have been badly traumatized and mentally as well as physically damaged by deployments in Washington’s miserable, criminal, and racist wars in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

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The nation’s mental and other health care services for military veterans are notoriously and maddeningly inadequate and under-funded.

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From its military actions abroad to the images on its movie screens, television shows, and video games at home, the contemporary United States -- heir to the “Gunfighter Nation” of the 19th century -- regularly promotes and glorifies murderous violence. It routinely portrays such violence as a legitimate and reasonable solution to complex social problems.

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The rugged American ethos of self-defense (hardly unique to America) has long held that men don’t simply stand by while people in their community are harassed, murdered, and maimed by bullies and oppressors from outside. They fight back.

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Black military veterans are likely to live in the nation’s still highly segregated Black communities and see up close the many forms of egregious abuse Black people still routinely face in the United States today.

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Among all the various and interrelated ways in which Black people are oppressed and incited in the U.S., none is more galling and maddening perhaps than the regular, almost routine murder of their sons, brothers, fathers, boyfriends, and husbands by mostly white and commonly racist police officers engaged (among other things) in keeping the nation racially separate and unequal -- in keeping Blacks “in their [related] place[s],” both socioeconomically and geographically.

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As we see yet again in Baltimore with the continuing exoneration of the police officers who engaged in the “depraved heart” torture and murder of Freddie Gray, U.S. prosecutors and courts continue to deny Black Americans anything remotely close to real justice through “due process of law” after police are caught torturing, maiming, and killing Black men.

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The most startling fact is that the number of police killed in the U.S. by Black American Snipers isn’t higher.

  Paul Street @ Black Agenda Report

It's early yet. ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.