Saturday, August 30, 2014

"Untouchable": Ferguson & the American caste system

     When I was in India several years ago, I learned a lot about its historic caste system and the role of its "untouchables".  But I never put two and two together -- that we might have "untouchables" and a caste system here in America too -- until I saw photos of what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, this August.

     When I was in the Peace Corps in South Africa, I learned all about its grim apartheid practices in the past.  But I never actually figured it out -- until Ferguson -- that America practiced apartheid too, and that the old apartheid bantustans of South Africa strongly resemble modern African-American bantustans like Ferguson; deliberately kept isolated, controlled and apart from the rest of America until there is almost no hope of ever getting out of them except by doing hard time in prison.


     In Israel/Palestine, I saw people constantly discriminated against "not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin," to paraphrase Martin Luther King.  But not until Ferguson, where whites clearly hold all the power and use it corruptly, did I realize how deeply ingrained institutional racial and economic prejudice was in America too. 

     When I was embedded in Iraq, I saw American tanks and weaponry like you wouldn't believe, used on Iraqi civilians to keep them in line.  But it wasn't until I saw videos of Ferguson that I realized that the use of tanks and military weaponry have become standard warfare procedure against civilians here in America too.

     When I was in Burma, I saw minorities being labeled as inferior, being called insulting names and constantly being accused of laziness, stupidity, immorality and violence to the point where in some cases the minorities actually started suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome and becoming all the things that they were constantly being labeled as -- but I never really brought this connection back home until Ferguson.
    When I was in Honduras, I heard tales about how Ronald Reagan funded his brutal death squads there by having the CIA fly whole plane-loads of drugs into secret airfields in Arkansas via "Air America" and then sell all those drugs in the ghettos here at home.

     I knew that, back in the 1980s, the sudden availability of cheap crack cocaine had hit America's Black communities like a ton of bricks -- but I hadn't really realized how much this crack epidemic had hurt these communities, even decades later, until I saw what the results of this evil agenda of deliberately choreographing drug sales in America's ghettos had done to the societal fabric of American cities and towns like Ferguson back in the 1980s -- and how hard, even today, that "authorities" are still fighting to keep the residents of places like Ferguson from ever putting their lives back together again.


       But I never thought to associate all of this foreign drug trafficking with the breakdown of African-American cultural norms due to the sudden availability of huge amounts of heroin in ghettos all across our own nation -- at least not until Ferguson caused me to see that the break-down of cultural norms in American ghettos had been carefully orchestrated and planned to do just that.  And while turning a profit too -- so that our own impoverished ghetto bantustans here at home are actually helping to finance the American military-industrial complex's grim slaughter-for-empire abroad.  Think about it.
     When I was an election observer in Syria last June, I soon learned not to trust anything that the American and British mainstream media claimed about election fraud there.  There was no election fraud there.  Period.  So why should I believe anything the MSM says about an American bantustan called Ferguson.  Hell, many residents of Ferguson are victims of election fraud themselves.

     Shame on me for so easily seeing all the bias, racism, apartheid, military brutality, corruption, caste systems and just down-right immoral behavior by ruling-class Brahmans that routinely happens in other countries -- but failing to see that all these grim tactics are being used right here at home too.

     And shame on America for letting all this profiling, perfidy, pilfering and prejudice go on for so long back here at home -- where we Americans are supposedly civilized and moral, and supposedly hold ourselves to the higher ideals of liberty, equality and democracy.


    Something drastic must be done immediately to rectify this grim situation if we are ever going to pull the emergency brake on America's rapid downward descent into feudalism and fascism -- starting with using the trillions of dollars that we will save when we put a stop to ruthless military adventurism, and instead use that money to open world-class schools in every ghetto (and even in every non-ghetto) in the land, and to provide decent, chemical-free non-mutated food on every table too.  And to change America's reality away from what it is now:

We now live in a nation where
doctors destroy health
lawyers destroy justice
universities destroy knowledge
governments destroy freedom
the press destroys information
religion destroys morals
and our banks
destroy the economy.
       --Chris Hedges


     The American military-industrial complex is currently spending 1.5 million dollars a day on military operations in Iraq.  Imagine if that money was being spent to send Black kids to college -- or to supply a college education to all American kids too for that matter.

     Every single patriotic American who loves his or her country needs to immediately get on the phone (and not even just go on FaceBook either) and make calls to Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court -- bluntly telling them, "I'm sick of war!"

PPS:  "But Jane," you might say, "those people in Ferguson blatantly stole stuff and looted and defied the law."  Yeah they did.  But then so did Cliven Bundy -- and nobody seemed to object to that.  Angry Ferguson-Americans obviously need to learn how to steal and loot and defy the law Bundy-style!  Fox News will probably even make them heroes.   And maybe Bundy could even give them some tips.

     Or maybe the citizens of Ferguson can get some tips from the primitive horde of neo-Nazis that the American military-industrial complex has recently hired (for five billion dollars) to shoot up and loot Ukraine -- including but not limited to that Malaysian airplane that we never read about any more after it became public knowledge that Ukrainian neo-Nazis, not Putin, shot it down.

     When I was in Ukraine several years ago, everything was peaceful -- but just look at it now.  It's a war zone.  And just another example of our tax dollars at work abroad destroying people's lives rather than fixing people's lives here at home.
