[VID] Limited Emancipation, & the Ties That Bind Empire's Domestic & Foreign Policies
Connecting war to our prisons and concentration camps
I am a big believer in the obvious truism that everything is connected. Certainly the ties that bind are obvious when it comes to domestic and international policy of the U.S. empire.
As a guest on this week’s episode of Revolutionary Jargon on the Fred Hampton Leftists Network I got a chance to discuss the ways in which the concentration camps that the U.S. government currently operates for Latin people are connected not just to the “normal” carceral system that legal scholar Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow, but also to our genocidal wars of aggression like the one we continue to wage on the innocent people of Iraq. Read some transcribed excerpts from the conversation, below, and watch the entire interview, also embedded below.
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“Once you other or dehumanize people abroad, you can do it here. If we can dehumanize a million Iraqi people killed in the first five years of the latest stage of our war against Iraq - the hot war that we started in 2003, not even counting the 500,000 mostly women and children killed by sanctions in the mid-nineties up to that point - if we can justify that and other them to the point where we largely don’t think about what genocide on that scale is in modern times then you know what, it’s not going to be too difficult to do similar things and lock up generations of Black men…here in the United States in a New Jim Crow system as Michelle Alexander writes, considering how we’re long conditioned to dehumanize Black folk. It’s going to happen there, it’s going to happen here. What we do here, we take abroad. What we do abroad is brought back home. And, there’s no limit to it.”
“Not only will we lock people up, not only will we imprison people, most of whom never even faced trials for so-called non-violent offenses but we’re also going to use them for slave labor. That’s nothing new. When we abolished chattel slavery, we did it everywhere but for prisons. So it’s not a very big coincidence that the foci then became, ‘well, how do we start locking up Black people? How do we start criminalizing these newly freed men and exert the same type of control?’ They did it immediately after, they revamped efforts in the 60’s and 70’s with the war on drugs and it’s been bald and blatant the whole time.”
“We ramped up incarceration in the early 90’s at a time when crime was going down but it was done supposedly as a public health measure. People like Joe Biden and the Clintons were talking about ‘super predators,’ young Brown and Black kids who supposedly had no empathy. They created these monsters so that they could create an illusion of a public health concern that would justify incarceration. A similar thing is happening now with covid.”
“The Trump administration used a pretense that was not backed by any prevailing consensus among the public health scientific community that, actually, we needed to put Title 42 in to prevent covid-19 into the United States (from Central American migrants) which is actually a hotbed. People actually need to worry about us giving them covid-19 in other countries, for the most part. There was no real reason for that, and now they’re continuing it…They tell us every four years that this is the most important election of our lives and that everything is at stake but in reality empire rolls on regardless of who is at the helm because they all pretty much have the same masters and the same corporate bosses.”
“It’s a really sad thing that the same lies, Big Lies, that are really just pretense for racist actions - and racism itself is, I believe, a logic that is pretense to serve capital - just happens across party lines.”