Unicorn Riot's thread also describes how even as they were listening to the testimonies and writing out these reports, "A mercenary is perched high in the parking ramp taking cell phone pics of the press conference right now." Below this description is a picture of a man with a baseball cap and shades standing next to a camera tripod in a dark room up in the nearby building, seemingly taking these pictures both with the mounted camera and with his phone. The occupier sees that a light is being shone on its recent abuses, and it's monitoring those who've spoken up so that it can retaliate in a perhaps more covert way.
About the incident of repression, a Minneapolis photojournalist elaborated this month: "A rather aggressive private company cleared the Winston Smith and Deona Marie memorials in Uptown Minneapolis this morning. The contractors, who were armed with some wearing military fatigue, declined to state their employer when I inquired. Some of them had law enforcement style zip-tie handcuffs. It's unclear to me what they planned to do with these but to the best of my knowledge the only use of them that I'm aware of is to restrain people."
Given that Erik Prince's current incarnation of Blackwater is the mercenary company which illegally sent contractors and arms to try to overthrow Libya's UN-backed government in 2019, and all we know about this unnamed company is that it's sent contractors to Iraq and Libya, perhaps Prince is behind these Minneapolis atrocities as well. This would explain the unwillingness of the company to make its name known to the public, with Prince and Blackwater holding an already sinister reputation that would be further damaged by this scandal. Even if Prince isn't the one pulling the strings, Trump's pardoning last year of the Blackwater contractors who had been convicted for wantonly massacring unarmed Iraqi bystanders has given these Minneapolis mercenaries an unprecedented sense of impunity. Impunity that's on display in the details provided by Unicorn Riot.
Their actions""total secrecy about what company they're working for, casual infliction of brain trauma on a U.S. citizen, physically grabbing protesters with no efforts to temper their own adrenaline""go beyond those of the TigerSwan mercenaries at Standing Rock, who were content with merely setting up a de facto intelligence center to intensively monitor and infiltrate the demonstrations. They also go beyond the actions of Atlas Aegis, the mercenary company that was hired last year to monitor polling places in the leadup to Trump's attempted post-election coup.
This unknown company has assumed the role of intelligence gatherer while simultaneously functioning as a direct police force, in the same vein as the South African private police who've been bringing apartheid-esque law enforcement discrimination back into the country in recent years. All while depriving the public of the knowledge about their company's name that's necessary to hold them accountable.
The ruling class has taken things this far because U.S. imperialism, beset by ongoing failures to expand into regime change target countries like Bolivia or China and faced with an imminent collapse of its currency, can only survive by turning inwards. And if the victims of internal U.S. imperialism succeed at overthrowing the colonial occupier, returning full sovereignty over the stolen lands back to the indigenous First Nations, and building socialism on this continent, capital will be broken. So the empire is turning its foreign instruments of repression and counterinsurgency upon its own people, trying to keep the colonial barriers intact.
The fact that it's doing this by introducing mercenaries as the additional go-between spokesmen for the rule of the settler state, in addition to the soldiers and policemen, shows the desperation of the empire. Mercenaries are historically harbingers of an empire in decline. And the use of these hostile and unaccountable contractors is furthering the alienation that the masses are increasingly feeling from the state, an alienation that could turn into solidarity with the anti-colonial movement.
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