Over at the Intercept, a brigade of contributors have compiled an article of tremendous importance, explaining leaked documents newly published by their portal which concern a mercenary group not only working alongside state and local authorities in silencing the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, but how the bullies were sharing in violently militaristic counter-terrorism tactics against those activists peacefully practicing their freedom of speech. This was militant force wielded publicly against private citizens by tax-funded soldiers, and on the behalf of corporate interests looking to profit from land and resources it holds no earthly claim to.
I have very recently written about the dangers of nationalizing or privatizing domestic militias. Or of ever not dismantling and outlawing the more glorified hit-men such as the overgrown fratboy brats comprising Academi. And the Dakota mercenaries. Although I relapsed by necessarily paraphrasing myself in my comment following the Intercept piece, it’s worth repeating from the rafters. The bats are in the belfry:
Scahill and Hedges have both made the claim that Blackwater is the militant wing of the alt-right, but what they miss is how virtually every gun club and militia in the United States are conservative-voting Christians, so they come across as making the bold claim that a militant group has a militant wing. Some water might be wet.
Seriously, we have the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association pushing for law enforcement officers around the country to refrain from enforcing gun-control laws. We have the FBI pushing Shared Responsibility Committees, which will invariably lead to lynch mobs. I can so see this happening. Power never relinquishes itself, it only ever seeks to increase its reach.
Expanding on this, the miserable truth is that the majority of Americans today are so willing and able to blame others for their own problems that they are willing and able to sign off on brutalizing strangers. We so fear the notion of anyone disagreeing with us that subjecting those nay-sayers to police brutality or worse is fine. If it takes the unregulated arming of private citizens to serve as judges, juries and executioners just to hammer every cog into conforming to the one design, then so be it, evidently. Digesting this today, while reading of the anti-Muslim bigot who murderously slashed two people who were only trying to protect strangers from said bigot, I was bothered to see the varieties of voices online finding rationality in supporting the killer. And the same occurred after the story of the Montana Republican candidate for Congress who physically assaulted a journalist, was given a slap on the wrist by the sheriff investigating the charges as the sheriff himself had donated to the candidate’s political campaign, ending with said candidate winning his election nonetheless.
It was not that long ago when an armed militia took over a federal building, somehow magically avoiding a drone response often implored against hospitals and schools in the Middle East. Or the rival biker clans in Texas who indulged in a massive shoot-out, with local police later fetching coffee and recharging smart phones for the combatants. These are not random, freak occurrences, they are the new norm. Violent extremists, polarizing the many people who are not their family or friends to the extent of breaking laws and claiming lives, given free license by the long arm of the law to continue doing just that. Private armies are just plain wrong.
So I realized something today, coming to the conclusion that America’s foreign policy of arming and supporting the miscreants of the Middle East, the regional convicts, bikers and gang-bangers and narcotics-transporting truckers and survivalists propelled over the edge by far right media and the psychopaths already happy to kill for money, all to destabilize their own communities, has become the one and same America’s domestic policy to match. America’s body elect subject their own population to the exact same tribulations and trials as it subjects the populations of sovereign nations it maniacally, obsessive-compulsively opposes. Foreign or domestically, the bottom feeders are exploited for reasons which will never benefit themselves in the slightest, destabilizing their communities and warring upon their neighbors to keep the greater populations from ever aligning and taking note of how deeply their politicians are laughing all the way to the bank at everyone’s ultimate expense. And those self-purported patriots ironically waving around flags for the Confederate States of America, from their homes or their vehicles or on their clothing, should technically be charged with treason, rather than given their own parade floats or unforgivable safe spaces or headlining talking heads on Libertarian podcasts.
Quite a few Middle Eastern rebel groups waving their own rebel flags in the years since the Arab Spring fundamentally represent the same ambitions in life, the subjugation of all those around them. It’s fighting against freedom rather than for it.
Empowering the most dangerous among us empowers what sets them apart to begin with. And any authority that is feared but not respected, politicizing how a might makes right to carry, will always irrevocably confess how its badge conceals kinks for self-aggrandizing, guaranteed to prove a rich excuse for placating genocide.