{"id":358,"date":"2012-12-05T13:39:18","date_gmt":"2012-12-05T13:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=358"},"modified":"2013-06-30T00:50:46","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T00:50:46","slug":"the-rising-tide-of-hate-in-amerika-a-sign-of-the-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/?p=358","title":{"rendered":"The Rising Tide of Hate in Amerika: A Sign of the Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kevin \u201cRashid\u201d Johnson<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s definitely true as Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky observed, that one can determine the level of civilization of a society by looking inside its prisons.\u00a0This is because prisons are but a reflection in miniature of the contradictions in the society that produces them, and with much of the pretense stripped away.<\/p>\n

Take Oregon for example.\u00a0I was transferred into its prison system from Virginia’s in February 2012.\u00a0The experience has allowed me a sobering opportunity to learn from a new angle a bit about the\u00a0level of civilization in Oregon, and by extension Amerika.\u00a0And the inside and outside definitely correspond.<\/p>\n

The Outside Hate<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shortly after reaching Oregon I developed correspondence with several local politically active people.\u00a0One of them being a working class white trade unionist, who’s lived in Oregon’s capital, Salem, for 15 years.\u00a0One of the first observations he made to me \u2013 a New Afrikan\/Black persyn myself \u2013 in a letter was:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think you will find fitting into Oregon pretty difficult.\u00a0I’ve lived here 15 years and I barely fit in, which is a real problem for political work.\u00a0There are very few African-Americans (sic) here and my impression is that Oregonians can be very passive-aggressive.\u00a0The now-existing means of production here gives rise to particular petty bourgeois [middle class] prejudices and cultural formations.\u201d<\/p>\n

I’ve found much truth in his words, and quite a bit more.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I’m able to get a hold of and read Oregon’s daily paper, The Oregonian<\/em>.\u00a0In the August 12, 2012 issue, a small front page article caught my eye and put a few things into perspective.\u00a0The article was entitled, \u201cNeighborhood Should See This,\u201d with a sub-caption, \u201cAs a lesson, racist graffiti is left intact for awhile on a black-owned Masonic lodge in North Portland.\u201d\u00a0The story was about John Bryant, a New Afrikan\/Black owner of the Portland, Oregon based Sons of Haiti Masonic Lodge, described in the article as \u201cone of the last black-owned buildings on Portland’s gentrified North Mississippi Avenue.\u201d<\/p>\n

What struck me was not so much that the lodge had been vandalized with spray-painted swastikas, images of lynchings, and such words as \u201cDie Nigger,\u201d which white neighbors and passersby found shameful and abhorrent, but the nonchalance in admitting the very neighborhood in which this occurred was one gentrified by the very people<\/em> who acted appalled by the vandalism.<\/p>\n

Everyone rushed to console Bryant \u2013 who obviously needed no such consolation, not from them<\/em> anyway \u2013 and volunteered to quickly<\/em> paint over the scurrilous words and images, even at their own expense and with their own labor.\u00a0Bryant declined their offers, however, wanting<\/em> people to see the words and images.\u00a0In doing this, he compelled his apologetic white neighbors to face a reality they obviously desired to keep hidden in the most recessed areas of their unconscious, namely that racism is alive and well in Amerika, and thriving right in their midst.\u00a0A fact that oppressed nationalities and folks of color know\u00a0all too well because we live it every day.\u00a0Which Bryant too was obviously conscious of.\u00a0Particularly where the article observed:<\/p>\n

\u201cBryant was raised just a few blocks away from the vandalized building, which [has] been home to the Sons of Haiti for 30 years.\u00a0He watched as white businesses, shoppers and residents replaced black ones during the past decade.\u00a0He said he’s one of the two black property owners on the thoroughfare that runs through historic Mississippi District.\u00a0The other is his elderly mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

Again this is all openly stated in a front-page article in Oregon’s major daily.\u00a0To its writers and readers, the only thing they find shameful about the story is the racist graffiti.\u00a0No one found anything wrong in the admitted gentrification.\u00a0That this occurred in a neighborhood from which New Afrikan\/Blacks had been \u2013 to use a more accurate<\/em> term — \u201cethnically cleansed\u201d for the economic benefit of encroaching whites.<\/p>\n

Everyone seems oblivious to the fact that such \u201cremoval\u201d and displacement of \u201cother\u201d races and nationalities, to the economic benefit of another dominant race and nationality, is what the entire German Nazi project was all about.\u00a0It was the very reason Gypsies, Slavs, Jews, Poles and other \u201cnon-Aryans\u201d were herded off to concentration camps by the SS.\u00a0The Nazis claimed that the Aryans \u201cdestiny as a people\u201d and superior culture, economy, etc. entitled them to displace and take over the land and resources of others who weren’t \u201cproperly\u201d using them. [1] These were the exact pronouncements of Nazi leaders including Hitler himself. [2]<\/p>\n

Today in Amerika such encroachments are made by way of banks instead of Brown shirts, blitzkriegs and bombs; domination via investment.\u00a0This way US ethnic cleansing is sanitized of the stigma of being no different in purpose and effect than the Nazi program (what one might call \u201cthe cleansing of ethnic cleansing\u201d).\u00a0And why would the ongoing<\/em> aims of the Amerikan project be any different than the Nazis?\u00a0Especially when Hitler himself learned from and was inspired by Amerika’s own history of stealing land and wealth. [3] Lest we forget, every inch<\/em> of claimed US territory was stolen<\/em> by use of concentration camps, mass murder, genocide and deliberate deceptions \u2013 i.e.<\/em>, ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people.<\/p>\n

So Bryant can be seen as one of the last standing \u201cnatives\u201d whose entire\u00a0community has been swept away by a clearly racialist program of domination and ethnic removal in the name of white \u201cprogress.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is no wonder he wanted the graffiti left where it was, while the neighboring whites wanted it cleaned away quickly.\u00a0Since it served to expose real the real ugly face hidden beneath a smiling mask.\u00a0The real face of thoser who’d displaced and pushed his people out of their community in pursuit of a continuing jingoist and racist agenda as old as Amerika itself, only disguised to fit with changing times.<\/p>\n

In fact the cruder displays of\u00a0Amerikan racism (e.g. Ritual festive lynchings, racist verbal insults, Jim Crow segregation, etc.) were phased out and rendered politically incorrect after World War II, in large part because overt racism became identified with the German Nazis, not<\/em> because Amerika’s values had changed at all.<\/p>\n

The vandalism exposed that the very presence of Bryant’s white neighbors was the result of a racist agenda no different from that of the Nazis.\u00a0They bthus had much to feel guilt over, prompting them to rush forward with apologies and efforts to erase and distance themselves from the crude work of one of their own less sophisticated members that exposed and indicted them all.<\/p>\n

The Inside Hate<\/strong><\/p>\n

And while the mainstream postures to project racism as a thing of te past, its rabid forms persist.\u00a0Which I found upon my imprisonment in Oregon, where in contrast to most everywhere else in Amerika, the prison population is overwhelmingly white and thus feels no compulsion to conceal its bigotry.\u00a0Security in numbers.<\/p>\n

Coming from Virginia I’m accustomed to seeing whites as no larger than 15% and Blacks at about 80% of the prison population.\u00a0So Virginia’s racial demographics weren’t conducive to open and proud displays of \u201cwhite power.\u201d\u00a0The Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) by contrast basically reverses these demographics with whites at about 80% of its prison population.\u00a0So here, they are seen to openly flaunt neo-Nazi, skinhead and similar affiliations, brazenly exhibiting white supremacist tattoos, etc.\u00a0There are over a dozen such cliques operating openly in the ODOC, with at least half of the ODOC’s prisoner population being members.<\/p>\n

I quickly learned the name of each group and how to identify many of their members.\u00a0They being:\u00a0skinheads, Aryan Brotherhood, Dirty White Boys, Aryan Family, Nazi Lowriders, Irish Pride, Bootboys, European Kindred, Insane Peckerwood Society, Aryan Death Squad, Organized Aryan Criminal Syndicate, Fat Bitch Killers, etc.<\/p>\n

I still recall my near visceral reaction when on my first day in Oregon’s general population (GP), two whites walked past my cell en route to the breakfast meal, one flaunting a large swastika tattoo on the\u00a0side of his neck, the other with a series of similar smaller tattoos across his face.\u00a0Then yet another passed with a huge iron cross on his forearm.\u00a0I found that all<\/em> the whites freely associated with these sorts of racialist elements, which indicated that no one took issue with the white supremacist culture at all.\u00a0On talking to several I discovered nthis is what they grew up around.\u00a0Yet the mainstream media and politicians promote the lie that such rabid embodiments of racism are outmoded in Amerika.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the less blatant white supremacists, which are most, embody everything in their mannerisms, character, intelligence, etc. that Amerika proudly portrays as models of white suburbia. They do not<\/em> fit the vulgar, stupid, doped-out, drop-out stereotypes projected of wihte supremacists.\u00a0Most could easily slip into a suit and tie and intelligently hold forth in corporate boardrooms or are the types you’d envision toting books on a college campus.\u00a0Quite a few were actually headed in these directions, or come from these backgrounds.<\/p>\n

One such fella who wavers on the status quo was open to critically examine the racial question.\u00a0His name is Anthony Lazarides.\u00a0On reading a recent article I wrote on the Jim Crow segregationist practices at the Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP) [4], he exclaimed, \u201cI really didn’t realize how racist we actually are.\u00a0I’ve seen it all my life yet never recognized anything wrong.\u00a0It’s just how things are.\u201d\u00a0He went on to tell me how, in his own experiences, a lot of whites when around New Afrikan\/Blacks are respectful, friendly and deny racism.\u00a0But behind their backs and when with fellow whites they love to use racist epithets and show their real racist faces.\u00a0I told him I was somewhat aware of this.\u00a0That various studies have exposed this tendency. [5]<\/p>\n

The Violent Hate<\/strong><\/p>\n

So what I found in the ODOC was an open reflection of the jingoism and racism of the larger Oregon (and Amerikan) society denuded of its pretensions, which I actually prefer to the artificial smiling liberalist approach.<\/p>\n

I also found on observing white ODOC guards a prevailing lynch mob mentality, but also cloaked behind a polite, fake friendship, smiling facade.\u00a0And while I’ve witnessed and experienced many an instance of abuse by guards against prisoners in Virginia, by accounts of victims and witnesses here in Oregon, when ODOC guards get rabid it’s consistently directed at national and racial \u201cminorities,\u201d gays and the mentally disturbed (the same groups that Nazis considered \u201cdegenerates\u201d to be purged), and it’s extremely<\/em> brutal.\u00a0Systematically so.\u00a0I’ll give four of many examples; selected because in these cases the victims both consented and wanted\u00a0to have their identities publicized.\u00a0They being:<\/p>\n

Shua Tilahun, #15493938 (Black);
\nNathan Goninan, #17079611 (Native American); and
\nDaniel Loos, #13783862 (Gay)<\/p>\n

Shua’s incident occurred on August 4th, 2012 at Oregon’s Two Rivers Prison, where he was taken into an office while in GP by two sergeants and a corporal (all white) to \u201ctalk.\u201d\u00a0On entering the office they instructed him to submit to being handcuffed, whereupon he protested that he \u201cdidn’t do anything.\u201d\u00a0At that point they maced him in the face and proceeded to systematically beat him.\u00a0Several times pinning his body down and continuously kicked, punched and stomped him.\u00a0They repeatedly dug their fingers down into his eye sockets, attempting to dig out his eyes.\u00a0The beating lasted an extensive period of time.\u00a0Following which he had to be rushed to the emergency room, where he was treated for multiple lacerations to his head, contusions across his eyes, and an MRI found he had multiple fractures to both his cheekbones, his nose and the orbital lobe of his eye; also a dislocated shoulder.<\/p>\n

On August 6th he was transferred to OSP and moved into a segregation unit where I was also housed and saw him enter.\u00a0His severe facial injuries were blatantly apparent.\u00a0Two large black rings around his eyes drew taunts from several white prisoners that he looked \u201clike a raccoon.\u201d\u00a0His face was so badly deformed, another prisoner who knew him well from the streets and was housed in the cell next to him didn’t recognize Shua until he heard his name.\u00a0Shua described his attack and sought eagerly for help.\u00a0He stated multiple photographs were taken of his face at Two Rivers and OSP.\u00a0I took down his name and the facts, tried to advise him on some options, and told him I’d try to generate exposure and help him find help.\u00a0Shortly afterwards we were separated.\u00a0Although not himself a very good writer, Shua reads well and is very articulate verbally.<\/p>\n

Goninan has been targeted numerous times at OSP.\u00a0Two incidents stand out because they involve the same white guard, D. Smith.\u00a0On January 15th, 2012 Smith (whom I have witnessed repeatedly drunk on the job) set Goninan up to be forcibly extracted from his cell by a mob of guards in riot armor and using a taser.\u00a0Upon being forcibly taken down and handcuffed from behind, he was held kneeling on the cell floor, abdomen against the bedframe, and bent over with his upper body and face pressed flat to the bed.\u00a0While one guard kneeled on his head to hold him immobile, another female guard pulled\u00a0down his pants and underwear, pressed the contact electrodes of the taser between his buttocks and repeatedly electrocuted his rectum.\u00a0The entire event was captured on portable audio-video camera.<\/p>\n

Subsequently Goninan filed a Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) complaint and delivered it to a lieutenant Erickson who gave him a copy and filed it.\u00a0He also called the prison’s PREA hotline and repeatedly filed complaints up to present, with no responses received and no investigations ever conducted.<\/p>\n

On July 15th, 2012 Goninan was involved in a fight with another prisoner.\u00a0In response guards sprayed O.C. gas and ordered them both to lay on the floor, which they did.\u00a0Smith and another guard, Tryon, entered the unit and handcuffed Goninan from behind and leg-shackled him.\u00a0Upon raising Goninan to his feet and \u201cescorting\u201d him toward the front of the unit, Smith, for no reason, punched him several times in the back and side of the head and slammed him face first to the floor.\u00a0Throughout this time yelling obscenities and racist names at him.\u00a0Still being verbally abused, Goninan was lifted to his feet again and upon taking a couple of steps, Smith snatched the shackle chain from behind, forcefully pulling Goninan’s feet back and upward without warning, causing him to crash, face forward, to the floor, breaking multiple upper and lower teeth and pushing one back and sideways.\u00a0Smith then began punching him continuously in the head, side and back, as Goninan protested he wasn’t doing anything and to stop hitting him.<\/p>\n

The entire unit of prisoners witnessed the attack (several of whom later wrote and gave Goninan sworn written statements of what they saw), and many began kicking and banging on their doors and protesting.\u00a0Tryon then dragged Goninan out of the unit into a holding cell, where Smith forcefully clamped the handcuffs and shackles down as tightly as they would go on his wrists and ankles.\u00a0Then tried to hang him by his wrists behind his back from the top of the holding cell door frame, using a long nylon leash connected to the handcuff chain, ripping his shoulder muscles.\u00a0Several prisoners could still see this and were protesting, so Tryon told Smith to take him to another floor for fear of inciting a riot.\u00a0They then took Goninan to a holding cell on another floor and left him tied to the door by the leash.\u00a0For over 72 hours he was denied medical care and did not see a dentist for 10 days; when seen the dentist told him he’d have to have his broken teeth capped and shaved down to repair them.<\/p>\n

Smith once escorted me to a medical appointment at OSP, during which time he boasted to another guard how he’d beaten and even killed \u201cHajjis\u201d (a racist term used by US soldiers against Arabs) while in the Army.<\/p>\n

Daniel Loos’s incident occurred at Oregon’s Snake river prison on December 11th, 2010.\u00a0Loos is an extremely effeminate gay prisoner with long hair.\u00a0He was being \u201cescorted,\u201d handcuffed from behind, to the disciplinary segregation unit by two guards, for being in a housing unit he wasn’t assigned to.\u00a0While in a hallway area, one of the escorting guards asked, \u201cHey fag wanna play?\u201d\u00a0At which point he was slammed face first to the floor, lacerating his brow, and was systematically beaten, being kicked, punched, stomped and having patches of hair ripped from his head.\u00a0He suffered a broken wrist and hand and a laceration requiring 10 stitches, and extreme bruising and swelling to his head, face and body.\u00a0Presently he has a federal lawsuit pending on the matter.\u00a0Snake River officials, in obvious attempts to aid the guards who beat Loos, erased and \u201clost\u201d surveillance camera footage of the beating.<\/p>\n

These are but four of numerous \u201chate\u201d motivated attacks by white ODOC guards, resulting in broken bones and teeth, in which ODOC had acted to cover up.<\/p>\n

Dark Faces in High Places \u2013 A Defense Mechanism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oregon is not my first exposure to national and racial oppression and hate.\u00a0It was particularly prevalent in Virginia’s remote supermaxes, Red Onion and Wallens Ridge State Prisons, where I spent the last 14 years before transferring to ODOC.\u00a0The guards, drawn from the local rural mountains of southwestern Virginia, were\u00a0especially bigoted.\u00a0But in Virginia racial division between prisoners is pretty much non-existent.<\/p>\n

Today, there’s a virtual kneejerk response to exposures of official racism, namely placing a token Black or Brown figurehead into a high position within the \u201cexposed\u201d institution, which changes nothing in fact, but instead actually serves as a cover that permits greater abuses, which when complained against prompts the defense, \u201cHey we can’t be racist, we’ve got a [person of color] in charge!\u201d\u00a0I’ve seen it happen over and again.<\/p>\n

It was done at both of Virginia’s supermaxes, following repeated exposures of racist brutality that earned them national notoriety as two of Amerika’s most racist and abusive prisons.\u00a0A Black warden was appointed to Red Onion during 2001 following intense outside protest of racist abuses of prisoners.\u00a0Under this warden, Daniel Braxton, things got worse.\u00a0The same occurred during 2011 at Wallens Ridge with the appointment of Gregory Holloway as warden, and the appointment of Harold Clarke as the first Black director of the notoriously racist Virginia prison system.<\/p>\n

It was also done here in Oregon, at the Snake River prison where I’m presently confined.\u00a0Snake River is by all accounts ODOC’s harshest, most remote prison, where white staff are particularly racist, which prompted widespread protests by prisoners over the years.\u00a0Consequently a Black warden, Mark Nooth, and a Black security manager, A. Hannon, were brought in, changing nothing but the curtains\u2026window dressing..<\/p>\n

At all of the aforementioned prisons Blacks are practically non-existent in the staff bodies, which are controlled by the local entrenched white supremacist status quo, which these Black tokens go out of their way to avoid making waves with.<\/p>\n

One can also see the same method employed with the nomination and election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, at just the point when New Afrikans\/Blacks were reaching peak outrage with the US government, in response to one abuse piled on another.\u00a0From our treatment during the Hurricane Katrina crisis and subsequent policy of ethnic cleansing in New Orleans, Jena 6, increased police racial profiling (especially \u201cstop and frisk\u201d practices), mass displacements and breaking up and closing down of Black communities, gentrification, rising instances of police murders and brutalizing Black youth, cuts in already inadequate social benefits to our poor and needy and the elderly, to mass imprisonment and racist selective drug laws, etc.\u00a0Mass unrest reminiscent of the 1930s and 1960s was admittedly feared.\u00a0Suddenly the Democrats \u2013 the same party that was used by the John Kennedy administration to coopt and subvert the threatened Black siege of the nation’s capital in 1963 \u2013 nominated a Black man for president.\u00a0The same<\/em> loyal Black token who was used to quell mass outrage in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, by making grand photo op appearances alongside Bill Clinton, visiting Black hurricane victims in Louisiana hospitals.<\/p>\n

These tokens are always those proven<\/em> most loyal not to the oppressed peoples, but to the oppressive system, who can be trusted not<\/em> to make waves, and to do absolutely nothing<\/em> to alter the status quo, much less to even acknowledge any problems.\u00a0Just as Obama did by denouncing his own religious leader, Jeremiah Wright, because<\/em> Wright criticized US government abuse and neglect of New Afrikan\/Black people.<\/p>\n

This is in fact how<\/em> these self-interested opportunists who have no connection with the masses of Blacks rise in the ranks of the system.\u00a0And when it suits their masters they’re appointed as window-dressing \u201cto disprove the evidence of racism.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0With the predictable result that things only get worse.\u00a0In fact Obama’s presidency has seen absolutely nothing improve for the masses of struggling Blacks in Amerika.\u00a0Ask John Bryant did it allow the \u201creturn\u201d of his ethnically cleansed Black neighbors, or change the rabid white supremacist sentiments that were scribbled on his building or that I see all around me in the ODOC on both sides of the cell door (prisoners and guards), of course not!\u00a0Which is what’s to be expected, when an oppressed people allow the sources of their oppression to only throw up defense mechanisms, to distract them from throwing up real solutions.<\/p>\n

Festering Hate, a Seedbed of Reaction<\/strong><\/p>\n

What I’ve seen in Oregon has led me to reflect on pre-Nazi Germany, when the Weimar Republic was in power.\u00a0There was a lot of social disaffection and a major economic downturn caused by the mismanagement inherent in a global capitalist system, creating a large destabilized middle class and youth facing economic insecurity.\u00a0Minority groups believed themselves generally accepted and integrated into Germany society.\u00a0Including the Jews who’d for centuries been persecuted and repressed just like New Afrikan\/Blacks in the US.\u00a0Some of them had achieved prominent positions in government and business, just like Blacks today.\u00a0Then Hitler arose, challenging the republic and arousing\u00a0the masses with race-baiting and \u201cAryan\u201d nationalism, blaming the Gypsies, Slavs, Jews, and other \u201cnon-Aryans,\u201d and gays and the mentally disabled, as scapegoats for Germany’s problems.\u00a0He proved a master at mobilizing hate, appealing largely to the middle class and youth, who took up his cause with blind violence nurtured by a festering subculture of racial and rightwing nationalist sentiments, that had long been hidden under cover of racial tolerance.\u00a0Millions were slaughtered, and not<\/em> just Jews.\u00a0The \u201cHolocaust\u201d touched many national and ethnic minorities.<\/p>\n

No one believed it could happen, even as they themselves were being swept up, herded into concentration camps and exterminated.\u00a0All thought Germany \u2013 like Amerika today \u2013 was too intelligent and developed an industrial society to descend to such barbarism.\u00a0But descend it did.<\/p>\n

One cannot but see the stark parallels between pre-Nazi Germany and today’s Amerika.\u00a0And as Oregon reveals, there is a thriving culture of racial animosity already primed tot carry out the dictates of a far right agenda should one come to the fore.<\/p>\n

Steps are already in place to implement an overt fascist clampdown at anytime in the name of a national emergency or insurrection.\u00a0Post-Katrina Black New Orleans was just a trial run.<\/p>\n

When I look at these guys around me, guards and prisoners, I can very easily see them in the roles of consolidated martial law forces on US soil, just like those cobbled together in New Orleans in 2005.\u00a0Forces held to no accountability by civilian laws, because suspended under declaration of martial law, or better yet overthrown<\/em> in a rightwing takeover (which is basically the same thing).\u00a0In fact as The Oregonian<\/em> reported on August 21st, 2012, no less than 14% of Oregon’s prisoners are veterans, with half or more of the prisoner population active white supremacists and most of the rest neutral or sympathizers, that accounts for a lot<\/em> of white supremacists \u2013 and<\/em> people inclined to lawlessness \u2013 in the military.\u00a0Or is the military breeding criminals?\u00a0Remember the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report \u201cA Few Bad Men\u201d, by David Holthouse that exposed extensive activity of white supremacist groups in all branches of the US military?<\/p>\n

And career special operations veteran Stan Goff revealed that the military’s special ops units \u2013 its most elite infantry combat forces \u2013 are composed predominantly of white racists and systematically exclude and weed out Blacks from their ranks. [6] It is no wonder he admitted that, \u201con the ground, at the infantry level, wars of domination in every instance become race wars.\u201d [7] And let’s remember that accused Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was a white supremacist and product of the US military.\u00a0As was Wade Page, who shot up the Sikh temple in August this year, killing six worshippers and himself.\u00a0Why is it all these so-called \u201cbad apples\u201d come from the same bunch?<\/p>\n

From the same forces that would occupy the ‘hood in a martial clampdown as they did in New Orleans, which brings to mind some very troubling reports of things that occurred there, like this account for example:<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring the time we were across the street from the Convention Center, these cops \u2013 I don’t know if they were police but they were all in black, they had these guns, and they were banded real close together \u2013 they came up the street, and they were screaming all kinds of obscenities, and all kinds of racial slurs.\u00a0And they were pointing guns at folk and demanding you to lay down.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt this particular time, I had really gotten tired of using the rest room on the sidewalk, and so I’m trying to get across the street into the Convention Center to use the rest room.\u00a0At this point, these cops, whoever they were, they came up the street, they got these guns with the lights on them, you know, they pointing them at people saying, ‘Sit your so-and-so so-and-so down before I blow you so-and-so head off, you black so-and-so.’<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, God.\u00a0At that point, it really felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.\u00a0They’re treating us like criminals.\u00a0But everyone had to adhere to what they said, so once they passed me, I pretty much stayed low, in just about a crawling position, trying to get across to the other street to get into the Convention Center to use the rest room.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I seen when I came out I will remember for the rest of my life…\u00a0At this time, I’m crouched trying to get back into the parking lot…\u00a0Everybody is sitting on the ground with their hands in the air.\u00a0The cops are stationed in different spots, with their guns aimed on people.\u00a0I look at my 5-year-old granddaughter, Baili McPherson, and the light from one of the guns was actually on her forehead.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy oldest daughter, Gayness, she’s like, you want to go ballistic when you see someone do something like this to your child but you can’t do nothing because, guess what, you and your child both might get killed.\u00a0Baili is sitting with her hands in the air.\u00a0And she’s just past afraid, she’s terrified.\u00a0And she’s asking her mama, Gayness, ‘Am I doing it right?’ because even babies know the police kill in New Orleans.\u00a0So she’s asking her mama, \u201cMama am I doing it right, am I doing it right?’\u201d [8]<\/p>\n

This<\/em>, despite the delusions of many, is the level of civilization in Amerika, which one sees reflected in Oregon prisons, where a rabid racist culture parades openly stripped of pretense and lying in wait for the moment it can be given free violent expression.\u00a0It reveals that oppressed nationalities have a long way\u00a0to go (as does the feeble and divided white Left, just like the Left in pre-Nazi Germany), and a lot of preparation for self sufficiency and community defense capability to develop.\u00a0Especially when we consider that free speech and protest are under attack, and a major clampdown seems in the works.\u00a0Our segregated communities are already corralled, surveilled and terrorized by militarized police, and we fill US prisons to overflow.\u00a0Homeland Security (previously FEMA), the very same department that coordinated the martial law operations in New Orleans), is hiring to staff all its detention centers (concentration camps) around the country, and they’ve ordered tons of hollow points (.40 cal), rounds which are illegal for use by the military.\u00a0Also a consortium of bankers are pulling together an army of private mercenaries around the murderous old Blackwater crew of Iraq and New Orleans ill fame.\u00a0And economists say we’re due for another big crash.<\/p>\n

Our only solution is to unite and organize those who can be united of every<\/em> nationality and \u201crace\u201d to overthrow this imperialist system, and build an all-new society based on cooperation and mutual support instead of competition, hate and barbarism in the wings.\u00a0A barbarism that history teaches we should struggle with all our collective might to ward off and without delay, before the true face of Amerikan civilization sheds its pretentious mask and consumes us all with hate, whether as victims or villains, from inside out.<\/p>\n

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win!
\nAll Power to the People!<\/p>\n

[1] See generally, Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards:\u00a0A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich<\/em> (Cambridge, UK:\u00a0Cambridge University Press, 1988).<\/p>\n

[2] See generally, Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race:\u00a0Alfred Rosenburg and Nazi Ideology<\/em> (New York:\u00a0Dodd, Mead, 1972).<\/p>\n

[3] Hitler’s genocidal programs were based on his study of US treatment of Native Americans.\u00a0See, John Toland, Adolph Hitler<\/em> (New York:\u00a0Doubleday, 1976), p. 702 (\u201cHitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history.\u00a0He admired the camps for Boor prisoners in South Africa and for Indians in the wild west, and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination by starvation and uneven combat \u2013 of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.\u201d); Joachim c. Fest, Hitler<\/em> (New York:\u00a0Harcourt Brace, 1973), p. 214 (Hitler’s \u201ccontinental war of conquest\u201d was modeled \u201cwith explicit reference to the United States.\u201d); Richard Rubenstein, \u201cAfterword:\u00a0Genocide and Civilization,\u201d Isidor Wallimann, eds., et al, Genocide and the Modern Age:\u00a0Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death<\/em> (Westport, CT:\u00a0Greenwood, 1987), p. 288 (\u201cHitler saw the settlement of the New World and the concomitant elimination of North America’s Indian population by white European settlers as a model to be followed by Germany on the European continent.\u201d)\u00a0In fact Hitler stated in his own writings his aim was to reproduce in Europe a \u201ccontinental bloc\u201d on the same model as what Amerika had created.\u00a0Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf<\/em> (New York:\u00a0Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), pp. 403, 591; also Hitler’s Secret Book<\/em> (New York:\u00a0Grove Press, 1961) pp. 46-52<\/p>\n

[4] Kevin \u201cRashid\u201d Johnson, \u201cThe South is Risen:\u00a0Old Jim Crow Thrives Inside Oregon Prisons,\u201d Socialist Viewpoint<\/em>, September\/October, 2012.<\/span><\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0In Two-Faced Racism:\u00a0Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage<\/em> sociologists Joe Feagin and Leslie Picca, revealed research on social behavior and attitudes among whites in Amerika todaay.\u00a0They had 626 college students keep record of every incident they witnessed that was race-related.\u00a0Of which 9,000 incidents were recorded and 7,500 of which were outright racist words or actions by whites when around other whites, most of whom have friends and associates of color and promote Black athletes and entertainers.<\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0Stan Goff, Full Spectrum Disorder \u2013 the Military in the New American Century<\/em> (NY:\u00a0Soft Skull, 2004).<\/p>\n

[7]\u00a0Stan Goff, \u201cTraining The White Nation,\u201d Truthdig<\/em>, 2006.<\/p>\n

[8]\u00a0Lola Vollen and Chris Ying, eds., Voices From the Storm:\u00a0the People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and its Aftermath<\/em> (San Francisco, CA:\u00a0McSweeney’s Books, 2006), pp. 128-129.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kevin \u201cRashid\u201d Johnson It’s definitely true as Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky observed, that one can determine the level of civilization of a society by looking inside its prisons.\u00a0This is because prisons are but a reflection in miniature of the contradictions in the society that produces them, and with much …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-oregon-prison-conditionsnews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":724,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions\/724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rashidmod.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}