American Flawed Democracy: The White Power System Sacrifices Truth and Reconciliation

The western propaganda apparatus has universally served the interests of this white power structure, ever peddling the myths of freedom and democracy, manufacturing sensational publicity or publishing fabricated stories planted by the spooks. Throughout the history of existence of the U.S. justice system the courts have been stacked in favor of white power interests and against people of color.  “Although the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and certain Supreme Court rulings banned racial discrimination in jury selection, local officials bared African Americans from serving on juries.”¹

While the U.S. court system, then as now, have operated as tools of subjugation for BIPOC, the scale and nature of the injustices promulgated by the courts extend into other sectors. The so-called U.S. ‘Family Courts’, for example, are completely overrun with corrupt officials, agencies and individuals who benefit from a system of power and private profit that is (primarily) trafficking women and children and are completely unaccountable.²

The drugs to prison pipeline was intimately and systematically tied to corrupt police vice-squads in cities like Chicago, Louisville, Boston, New York and Los Angeles, and in some communities every drug deal that went down was overseen by police and politicians in league with the Mafia, and all of it was generally linked to overseas drug lords, terrorism and war. Search warrants were unnecessary, and Blacks were easily picked up to fulfill an FBN agent’s quotas.

Inside the intelligence apparatus, Black agents were discriminated against, overlooked for promotions, and used against their own people, and they maintained a code of silence expected from them by whites, because they needed the white agents to cover their backs, which they sometimes did, and sometimes didn’t. The courts upheld and even furthered the injustices.³

For BIPOC, the COINTELPRO era (circa 1960 to 1990) ushered in a new kind of the same old story of persecution, disenfranchisement and dispossession.  This secret FBI operation focused on neutralizing the black liberation struggle and the American Indian Movement (AIM) by any means necessary, and this included targeted bombings, infiltrations, the use of agent provocateurs, and assassinations. 

For many years the CIA has funneled narcotics to the primarily black population centers in the U.S. inner cities to simultaneously destabilize black populations, facilitate greater criminalization and incarceration of blacks, and meanwhile fund their nefarious covert operations.  The CIA crack-cocaine Contra guerillas (Nicaragua) connection was exposed by investigative journalist Gary Webb in the 1990s, and the system — relying heavily on the mainstream propaganda media corporations to manufacture stories that served the cause of protecting white power interests — subsequently conspired to discredit and crush Webb, resulting in his eventual suicide.⁴

There have been no shortage of covert interventions, all over the world, involving America and its allies’ spy agencies and these have run the gambit from the illegal dirty war backing the right-wing (fascist) Chinese nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, on and off from 1928 to 1975, to the creation of the ultra-terrorist Phoenix Program in Indochina in the 1960s and 70s, to the secret wars in Angola, Congo, Central America, and on, and on, and on. These wars and terror operations against people of color abroad are mirrored by the domestic terrorism against BIPOC at home.⁵

The contemporary white supremacy movement, the new face of vigilante injustice such as the ‘Proud Boys’ and other right-wing and heavily armed militia or veteran’s gangs, did not rise up out of the ashes of some previous era’s fire, but can instead be tied to one long contiguous trail of blood, torture and tears. The current protests are infiltrated by agent-provocateurs, just as the COINTELLPRO and Civil Rights movement were infiltrated, and the western mass media —ever serving the prerogatives of the predatory white predominantly male power interests —peddles a very efficacious propaganda meant to confuse, discredit, divide and conquer.

We can see this by even loosely examining any recent story about ‘Black Lives Matter” that has been manufactured by the propaganda system.  Take for example a feature story under the title “In an Outraged Louisville, a Police Force in Crisis,” that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on Friday, September 25, 2020, a day and a half after a Grand Jury in Louisville rendered their decision exonerating the three Louisville police officers involved in the shooting death of 26 year-old Breonna Taylor. 

The NYT feature story paints a picture of a police department (Louisville PD) under siege, a police force “victimized” and “facing open hostility” by violent blacks.  This article is hardly any different than those that justified lynching in the early 1900s, while at the same time it represents a total transformation of the kind, scale and nature of propaganda that is being used in psychological warfare against the U.S. public (and the world). 

It is impossible for most white people to understand the extent of the deep psychological roots of terror suffered by BIPOC.  The historiography of violence, the narratives told and believed by the white power system, are skewed by the whiteness of power and the manufacture of consent by the predatory, corporatized, for-profit mass media.⁶ White people suffer from white fragility, and that prevents most of us from examining our biases, privilege and entitlement on anything more than superficial levels.⁷

Accountability and solidarity require a lot more than placing a sign on our lawn or a badge on our shirt that says “Black Lives Matter”.  Accountability requires that white people search their souls, educate themselves, shut-up and listen to BIPOC, show compassion, show a real interest in understanding, make tangible sacrifices and reparations, and all the while work to overturn or overthrow the system that is destroying so many people’s lives and all life on planet Earth. 

While the white power system has perpetrated more than four hundred years of terror against native Americans, Latinos and Latinx, blacks and other people of color, there has never been anything close to a fair accounting, and nothing that might reasonably count as grounds for something along the lines of ‘truth and reconciliation’. Instead we have growing divisiveness, scapegoating, fearmongering, confusion, resentment, anger and hate. 

The system is fundamentally flawed, by design.  There is a domestic war against black people, indigenous people and people of color, and there will be no justice and no peace without first confronting the true history and exposing the falsified historiography of racial terror at home and abroad. This terror occupies and informs the consciousness of people of color, the survivors.  They have much to be angry for, and their anger is appropriate, righteous and justified.

References

1. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 2015: p. 57.
2. Keith Harmon Snow, The Worst Interests of the Child: The Trafficking of Parents and Children Through U.S. Family Courts, Burning Sage Press, 2016.
3. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs, Verso, 2004: p. 62.
4. Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, Seven Stories Press, 1999; and Nick Schou, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, Nation Books, 2006.
5. William Blum: Killing Hope: U.S. Military and Cia Interventions Since WW II, Zed Books, 2014; and Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program, iUniverse, 1990, 2000.
6. Sullivan and Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, SUNY Press, 2007.
7. DiAngelo and Dyson, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Beacon Press, 2018.