The Second Amendment As A Leading Cause of Childhood Death

I've been busy tending to urgent family matters, and as a result, I had to fly back to So. Cal. last week.  When I arrived, all the American flags I saw were flying at half mast.  Because nowadays I'm allergic to the news except in extremely small doses, I had no idea why.  Today I finally found out the reason.

Learning the reason prompted me to do a quick Internet search for the incidence of firearms as a cause of death in the United States.  I learned today that firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S.  (See this and this also.)  This inconvenient truth will no doubt be vigorously denied by the same patriotic right-wing Republican evangelical/Protestant white supremacist types who denied that the COVID-19 virus actually existed and that it could kill people.  These types will insist that the right to keep and bear arms is part of America's "Christian" heritage.  In saying this, they will conveniently elide the fact that Christ told Simon Peter to put away his sword, since "all who take up the sword shall die by the sword".  (Matthew 26).  In considering those who rabidly cling to their guns I am reminded of analyses I read about how the Vikings eventually had to abandon their ancient Greenland settlements even though the Inuit were able to remain and thrive.  The reason is that the Vikings tried to import a culture and way of life that could not survive the reality of their new environment.  Yet the Vikings stubbornly clung to this culture and way of life, even as some of their spiritual and cultural descendants are now clinging to a culture and way of life that has no future.  This can only end badly.

One other thing - I'm still working on the next installments of my series on precarity.  We will shortly start learning more about artificial intelligence.  Beware - some of the discussion will turn rather geeky...

The Tactical and Strategic Failures of Summer 2020

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D.)  Those who have read previous posts on this subject know that the most recent posts discussed Chapters 6 and 7 of the book.  Those chapters deal with the important subject of the strategy of a nonviolent liberation struggle.  Strategic nonviolent resistance does not rely on the weapons and resources of the holders of oppressive power, and one big reason why is that those who are oppressed do not have access to the weapons and resources of the powerful.  This is why strategy and strategic thinking is so important.  If the strategy of a struggle group is solid, the struggle group can achieve great shifts in the balance of power between the powerful and those without power.  If the strategy of a struggle group is weak, foolish or nonexistent, then that group will lose.

So we come to the events of the late spring and summer of 2020, those events connected with the police murder of George Floyd.  As an African-American, I stand with my brothers and sisters who are involved in the Black Lives Matter organizations, yet I feel the duty to point out some of the serious ways in which they dropped the ball last summer, as well as pointing out some of the political consequences of their failure.  (One consequence of that failure: their mistakes helped re-elect a certain two-faced gentrifying mayor of a supposedly progressive city on the West Coast.)  So here goes.  And I'm going to tell the story from the point of view of an observer who was only rarely near the center of any action.  If any readers have more expert knowledge or analysis, feel free to chime in with corrections as appropriate.

First, let's begin with the immediate consequences of the murder.  The first response seen by myself and most observers was the almost immediate arising of a wave of spontaneous mass protest, both in Minnesota (where George Floyd used to live) and elsewhere.  I would like to suggest that much of that protest originated outside of the Black community and outside any other communities of color in the United States.  I would also like to suggest, based on what I saw in the Pacific Northwest, that much of that protest originated outside of any Black Lives Matter (abbreviated in this post to BLM) organization.  However, the emergence of this protest thrust BLM movement organizations into the limelight, as many protestors who were not officially part of BLM chose to identify their actions as taken in support of BLM.  Thus BLM was offered a unique moment in which to take a leadership role, and BLM organizers initiated their own protests as a result.

But at almost the same time as the emergence of spontaneous mass protest came the almost immediate emergence of "spontaneous" violence.  I know of one white blogger who characterized it as "the emergence of the worst race riots this country has seen in decades."  However, he is exaggerating greatly what actually happened, and his reasons are dishonest.  For he does not want to face the fact that the incidents of violence were perpetrated almost entirely by white people.  (See this  and this also.)  An early case in point is the "Umbrella Man."  There is also Matthew Lee Rupert, as well as members of the Boogaloo Boys and other white groups who vandalized and looted minority businesses and attacked CNN journalism crews.  Moreover, this violence spread in ways that seemed designed to provoke outrage and strengthen the societal "pillars of support" of the police and of the regime of Donald Trump.  For the vandals and the violent targeted iconic statues and other monuments to the cultural heritage of the United States.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  And in attacking minority businesses, the vandals sought to send a clear message that this is what happens whenever there is mass protest against established authority.

Other ways in which violent infiltrators sought to convey images of dis-order included the setting up of so-called "temporary autonomous zones" in city capitals by people who did not own property or have jobs in these so-called zones.  In essence, the people who set up these zones became squatters of the same sort that emerged in city parks throughout the United States during the "Occupy" protests.  And those who occupied these zones in 2020 were mostly white, just as those who "occupied" various public spaces in 2011.  The 2020 occupations ended just as badly as those in 2011 had, for the occupiers were rightfully seen as squatters.  But these squatters, along with the looters and the vandals of businesses and statues, served a useful purpose for the right-wing fascists running the Federal Government during Trump's last year - namely, that they gave him a convenient platform to portray himself as the sole upholder and defender of "law and order" against a crazed opposition movement who simply wanted to plunge American society into "chaos" and "anarchy."  In other words, they were the convenient foil in the continued re-telling of the myth of redemptive violence - the favorite myth of fascists and oppressors, by the way, and a myth that became part of Donald Trump's re-election campaign strategy.

I would like to suggest that in the violence, vandalism and squatting that took place, people who had no sympathy for the Black struggle in America managed to hijack the protests over the murder of George Floyd and to twist the message of these protests in a direction which has nothing at all to do with the Black struggle.  (As Marshall Ganz has repeatedly said, if you don't intentionally tell your own story, someone else will tell it for you - in ways that you won't like.)  That this could happen is due to the following failures of many in the Black community:

• A failure by the Black community to appropriately define our collective identity and the strategy of our struggle.  For at least four decades, we have been unconsciously following a rather limited "strategy" of the sort first articulated by Martin Luther King, namely, the strategy of trying to build a supposedly colorblind society in which our individual or historical identities are all dissolved in a "melting pot" to produce a so-called all-American alloy.  Thus we have tried to build "beloved communities" with people who ought not to be trusted because they have no good intentions, people who refuse to give up their dreams of total domination.  It is way past time for us to come together as Black people (NOT as part of some "rainbow coalition" alloy!) to decide who we are as a people and how we will struggle as a people.  In other words, it is way past time for us to self-consciously organize ourselves.  When white people who supposedly stand for "diversity" try to bring us as individuals into their "coalition", we need to say, "Not so fast.  We will decide as a group what we choose to support.  We will NOT allow ourselves to be turned into the foot soldiers of someone else's agenda!  Maybe we're not better together!"  Of course, to say such things might provoke the sort of reaction from certain white supposed "allies" that would show their true colors.

• A failure by the Black community to understand the methods by which unarmed people shift the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless.  In short, this is a failure to understand the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance, which has also become known as people power.  We have for too long allowed ourselves stupidly to believe that strategic nonviolent resistance consists of trying to love your enemy or to "rise above" the oppression dealt to you by your enemy (that is, to smile when your enemy serves you a sandwich made of excrement!), or to show how "spiritual" you are in the face of oppression.  Therefore, too many of us have understandably written off strategic nonviolent resistance.  It's time for some of us to start reading some books.

• This ignorance played out in 2020 in a failure to understand the impact of violence on a protest movement.  When violence began to erupt during the protests, I saw it as a clear indication of a lack of organization on our part, as well as a lack of training.  I saw it moreover as a clear sign of tactical and strategic misunderstanding and failure.  But in conversations I had with BLM organizers, both during the 2020 CANVAS Summer Academy and in 2021 with BLM organizers who were part of the Leading Change Network, whenever I pointed out these failures, the BLM organizers got really defensive.  Their response to my criticism was, "We were not the violent ones!  And you can't believe everything the media tells you!  Most of the protests were peaceful!"  In making such criticisms, they missed the point altogether.  That point being this: that if you engage in mass protests, and violent things happen during your protests, your protest movement will suffer, no matter who started the violence.  Erica Chenoweth explains this beautifully as follows: When a mass protest is peaceful, everyone who is an ally or potential ally is likely to show up.  This includes young families with small children and elderly grandmas with nothing better to do.  In such circumstances, it is very hard for the government to justify using violence to shut down your protest.  But as soon as the government is able to provoke or inject violence into the protests, the vulnerable - young families with small children and elderly grandmas - start to disappear until you are left only with athletic young men facing heavily armed cops.  In those circumstances it becomes very easy for the government to justify the use of violent oppression to shut down the protest!

• Having said that, I wonder why the BLM organizers did not shift from tactics of concentration to tactics of dispersion as soon as the violence began to appear!    (Pardon me - I shouldn't wonder.  It's because these fools did not read any books!)  For instance, why didn't one or more leaders immediately issue a statement saying, "We see that evil actors have shown up to inject violence and vandalism into our protests.  Therefore, we are switching to protest tactics that don't involve large groups of people coming together in the streets.  These new tactics will be legal, and will not be able to be hijacked by those who want to cause violence or to paint us as criminals." It shows a fatal lack of brains that not one of these leaders took such a step.  I remember reading the news reports of protest after protest in which a small group of agents provocateurs broke away from a protest march to go off and vandalize while the police "declared a riot", and I was shouting in my living room, "Please, wake up and shift tactics!"  (It felt to me very much like my experience as a kid watching Saturday Night wrestling and screaming at the TV whenever the "hero" made an obvious mistake.  Lot of good that did.)  I agree with BLM that there should have been protests.  Yet there are both smart and stupid tactics of protest, and BLM failed to understand the difference.  (Oh, look!  It's happening again.)

• A failure to see the limitations of mass protest.  Protest is not a viable single strategy of liberation.  At best, it's a single tactic.  A tactic is not a strategy.  And as we have considered strategy in the context of strategic nonviolent resistance, we have learned that the best strategy is a strategy which your opponent is not ready to meet, and for which he has no defenses.  Chapters 6 and 7 of From D to D have drawn heavily from the writings of a British man named Basil Henry Liddell-Hart, who in the aftermath of World War 1 advocated heavily that armies should adopt a strategy of indirect approach as the best means of meeting one's enemy in a place where he is not prepared to meet you.  I suggest that among the tactics of nonviolent action, mass street protest is now the tactic which most governments are most prepared to meet, and that these governments can short-circuit mass protest most effectively simply by injecting violence into the protests.  Once they do that, they can justify raising the cost which ordinary people must pay to participate in protest by using tactics of violent police repression of protest.  Mass protest is therefore not an example of the strategy of indirect approach.  And mass protest carries certain unavoidable costs even when the protestors do not have to face police repression.  I think of some of the BLM websites I saw last year in which organizers vowed to protest every day until their demands were met.  I guess they never heard of "protest fatigue"!  Moreover, as pointed out by Jamila Raqib, protest by itself does not alter the balance of power between the powerful and the powerless.

In their insistence on the same tactic of mass protest day after day, the BLM protest organizers reminded me very much of a Briton who never considered the strategy of indirect approach, namely Sir Douglas Haig.  I hope the man has no partisans, fans, or groupies who are still alive - otherwise, they might come to the USA to hunt me down and slash my tires - er, I mean, "tyres" - or threaten to give me "a bunch of fives."  But Haig is a man worthy of much criticism.  I think of his insistence on costly daily frontal assaults for three months during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, and how the Germans played rope-a-dope with him there.  I fear that here in the USA, should another outrage against African-Americans be perpetrated, and should that outrage spark mass protest, our enemies may play rope-a-dope again with us as they did in 2020.  

A Parasite Protection Plan

Many reputable media sources have mentioned the prominent role that white American evangelical and Protestant churches played in the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol last week.  These sources have also noted the prominent role which these churches are playing in the threat of violent white nationalist insurgency in the United States from now on.  This is interesting, given the fact that many of these churches have been ongoing recipients of funds authorized by Congress under the Payment Protection Plan instituted by the U.S. Government in response to financial hardships experienced by American businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  It is also no secret that these churches should never have received these funds (due to the Constitutional separation of church and state as well as the Code of Federal Regulations), and that the only reason why they did is because of the influence of Donald Trump.  And a number of these churches have been guilty of misusing these funds, using them for legal fees incurred in defending the churches from sex abuse scandals, or for buying private jets.  See this, this and this also.

The question that naturally arises is this: why are American taxpayers (many of whom are people of color who are threatened by these far-right white supremacists) giving our tax dollars to organizations that want to violently take over the United States?  And why do churches continue to enjoy tax-exempt status?  At this late stage of the game, what value do these groups actually provide to the American people?  They have shown themselves to be utterly unreliable as a moral compass.  As a moral restraint, they are about as worthless as a set of burned-out brakes on a runaway semi truck.  (For those readers who care about the defense of Biblical doctrine, why are white evangelicals joining forces with Nazi New Age shamans in their pursuit of white supremacy?  See this also.  Doesn't sound very Christian to me.  Remember what I said about the syncretism of these white supremacists?)  Why should they continue to receive free money in order to threaten the rest of us?  Why are U.S. taxpayers being required to give money to religious talking heads such as the Family Research Council, Ralph Reed, or Franklin Graham?

How Do You Say "Head Fake" In Mancunian?

I almost titled this post, "How do you say 'Head Fake' in Scouse?" Many may not know this, but British actor Bernard Hill, who played King Theoden in the Lord of the Rings movies, got one of the bigger breaks of his career playing a Scouser unemployed asphalt layer named Yosser Hughes in the British 1980's series The Boys From The Blackstuff.  I have never lived in Britain, so I cannot tell the difference between a Mancunian accent and a Scouse accent.  However, I did discover that Bernard Hill is actually from Manchester - thus not a Scouser at all.  Such is the power of good acting, that a skillful actor is able to so thoroughly disguise his origins and identity in pretending to be someone else.  (I remember seeing one other instance of this several years ago, when a coworker foisted a DVD of Secondhand Lions off on me, and insisted that I watch it, which I did.  I couldn't really stand the kid in the movie, nor did I particularly like the movie itself, but Michael Caine did a very creditable job of pretending to be Texan.  Could'a fooled me...)

Such cases of pretending can be quite entertaining when part of a well-done drama, although they can't save a cheesy plot from annoying the living daylights out of those who are forced to be its audience.  As I think of Manchester, and of the recent "terror" attack which took place there, I have to confess that I am annoyed.  The trouble to me is that it has all the markings of other attacks which were perpetrated in Europe and the United States over the last several years, characteristics such as the following:

• The attacks were supposedly perpetrated by some vague, shadowy "Islamic State" bent on imposing Muslim rule throughout the world;
• The attacks did not materially degrade the military capabilities of the nations where they took place;
• The attacks had an effect exactly opposite the supposed aims of the supposed perpetrators.  The actual effect of the attacks was to provide an excuse to inflame anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant (especially anti-dark-skinned-immigrant) sentiment in the nations where they took place, and to provide a justification for the nations of the Global North to attack Muslim and Arab nations where there were large concentrations of mineral resources.
• The alleged perpetrators of the attacks all wound up conveniently very dead, and thus unable to stand trial in pubic.
• After each attack, critical thinkers began to expose holes and inconsistencies in the official narrative put forward by government authorities.  One example of this includes the fact that after a supposed Islamic jihadist supposedly drove a truck into a crowd of people in France last year, French anti-terror police asked the city in which the attack occurred to destroy all video surveillance footage of the attack.  (See this also.  And, oh, by the way, did you know that remotely driven trucks have existed for years?)  If the police were really interested in getting to the bottom of this attack, why destroy video footage that could provide valuable evidence?  Another example is the presence of faked passports among the dead in the 2015 Paris terror attack.  Now in the wake of Manchester, an analyst and critical thinker is again raising questions.  And even some of his potential enemies have begun to listen. 

There is additional evidence of plans to carry out false flag attacks over the last few months, such as the case of the German army officer who tried to pose as a Syrian refugee in order to plan an attack that would have been blamed on Syrian asylum-seekers. I think the cases I have mentioned only scratch the surface of the false-flag phenomenon as it is now being practiced by powerful interests in the Global North.  The goal of these attacks is actually to prop up these powerful interests, who have succeeded in capturing the governments of the United States and Russia, and who have succeeded in the recent reversal of freedoms in many other countries such as the Philippines.  These false-flag operations prop up such regimes by validating the myth of redemptive violence which is devotedly taught by so many oppressive regimes because each autocratic leader of such a regime can cast himself as Marduk, the Babylonian autocrat deity who alone preserves the world from...chaos!!!  Those subjects who live under autocratic rule are thus taught again and again to fear...chaos!!!..., to fear disorder, to fear any deviation from the micromanaged script dictated to them by the Marduk who rules their society, and most of all, to fear those whom Marduk deems to be enemies of the state, for those enemies are the potential seeds of...Chaos!!!  And if those enemies don't care to act like enemies, Marduk must arrange incidents which portray these enemies as agents of...CHAOS!!!

In his book, The Powers That Be, theologian Walter Wink does a good job exposing the myth of redemptive violence and the uses which dictators and autocrats make of this myth in propping up their regimes.  If you follow his logic, you can see that George W. Bush was Marduk.  Dick Cheney was Marduk.  Ronald Reagan was Marduk.  Donald Trump is Marduk.  (Indeed, Trump is a spectacular Marduk, as he is only good for protecting us from "threats" that don't exist.  Other than that, he is worthless as an agent of the common good.)  Maybe Theresa May is about to become a Marduk.  (In that case, "he" will become "she" for a while.)  And Vladimir Putin is Marduk, as he showed in March of this year when he rallied his security forces against the outbreak of...CHAAAOOOOSSSS!!!!!!

The execrable part of this program is that too often, it actually brainwashes ordinary people who are susceptible to national narcissism, as in the case of Germany at present, where in 2016 there were about ten attacks a day against asylum-seekers, or in the case of Portland, Oregon, in the United States, where last Friday, a crazed white supremacist killed two passengers with a knife and seriously injured a third while they were riding a MAX train. 

What is the actual nature of the "chaos" of which the Marduks of the Global North are afraid?  If we're going to be honest, this "chaos" is nothing more than the loss of white supremacy and global domination, and the emergence of a world in which one nation cannot bully or unilaterally impose its will on other nations.  It is a world in which you can't get anywhere without taking your turn, saying "Please," or "Thank you."  It is also a world populated by many, many really neat, decent people - even though they are not of European descent!  It is a world in which nations that formerly dominated the world must acknowledge these non-European people as people, as fellow human beings.  It is a world in which national narcissism simply won't fly, but will instead lead to a moment in which the leaders of narcissistic nations are forced to look at each other and say, "You arrogant coyote, you've killed us!"  Britain is having such a moment just now.  For narcissists always miscalculate.  And the outworkings of damnation always find those who have made themselves damnable.  "Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap."