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Here's a little portrait of the United States in June 2020, a passage from a New York Times report on the National Guard's treatment of a recent protest march of people chanting "We can't breathe!" in Washington, D.C.:
"A Black Hawk helicopter, followed by a smaller medical evacuation helicopter, dropped to rooftop level with its searchlights aimed at the crowd. Tree limbs snapped, nearly hitting several people. Signs were torn from the sides of buildings. Some protesters looked up, while others ran into doorways. The downward force of air from the rotors was deafening. The helicopters were performing a 'show of force' -- a standard tactic used by military aircraft in combat zones to scatter insurgents."
Talk about America's wars coming home! George Floyd's recent killing is both a long way, and yet not far at all, from the police shooting of the unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Many Americans felt shocked then on seeing that city's police force respond to the ensuing protests togged out in Pentagon-supplied gear of every sort, including sniper rifles and Humvees, often directly off the battlefields of this country's ongoing wars. As Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver put it then, referring to an Iraqi city largely destroyed by the U.S. military in 2004, "Ferguson resembles Fallujah."
The question is: What does the U.S. resemble six years later? You know, I'm talking about the place that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper recently referred to as a "battle space" (as in "dominate the battle space") in a contentious discussion he and President Trump had with the nation's governors. I'm talking about the country where that same president has been threatening to call out the troops as police forces. (When retired military brass screamed bloody murder, Esper began backing down.) I'm talking about the land into which Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton has the urge to send the 101st Airborne Division, or Screaming Eagles, whose assault troops have previously seen action in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. ("If local politicians will not do their most basic job to protect our citizens, let's see how these anarchists respond when the 101st Airborne is on the other side of the street.")
Could you ever doubt that America's wars would sooner or later come home in a big way? I suspect retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and historian William Astore didn't. After all, he's been writing for years at TomDispatch about how our former citizens' military has, in those very wars, become the equivalent of a foreign legion. Fully militarizing the police and bringing the legionnaires home, a subject he explores today, seems like just the next obvious step in this country's precipitous decline. Tom
"Light 'Em Up"
Warrior-Cops Are the Law -- and Above the Law -- as Violence Grips America
By William J. AstoreFrom their front porches, regular citizens watched a cordon of cops sweep down their peaceful street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rankled at being filmed, the cops exceeded their authority and demanded that people go inside their houses. When some of them didn't obey quickly enough, the order -- one heard so many times in the streets of Iraqi cities and in the villages of Afghanistan -- was issued: "Light 'em up." And so "disobedient" Americans found themselves on the receiving end of non-lethal rounds for the "crime" of watching the police from those porches.
It's taken years from Ferguson to this moment, but America's cops have now officially joined the military as "professional" warriors. In the wake of George Floyd's murder on May 25th, those warrior-cops have taken to the streets across the country wearing combat gear and with attitudes to match. They see protesters, as well as the reporters covering them, as the enemy and themselves as the "thin blue line" of law and order.
The police take to bashing heads and thrashing bodies, using weaponry so generously funded by the American taxpayer: rubber bullets, pepper spray (as Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio experienced at a protest), tear gas (as Episcopal clergy experienced at a demonstration in Washington, D.C.), paint canisters, and similar "non-lethal" munitions, together with flash-bang grenades, standard-issue batons, and Tasers, even as they drive military-surplus equipment like Humvees and MRAPs. (Note that such munitions blinded an eye of one photo-journalist.) A Predator drone even hovered over at least one protest.
Who needs a military parade, President Trump? Americans are witnessing militarized "parades" across the U.S.A. Their theme: violent force. The result: plenty of wounded and otherwise damaged Americans left in their wake. The detritus of America's foreign wars has finally well and truly found its place on Main Street, U.S.A.
Cops are to blame for much of this mayhem. Video clips show them wildly out of control, inciting violence and inflicting it, instead of defusing and preventing it. Far too often, "to serve and protect" has become "to shoot and smack down." It suggests the character of Eric Cartman from the cartoon South Park, a boy inflamed by a badge and a chance to inflict physical violence without accountability. "Respect my authoritah!" cries Cartman as he beats an innocent man for no reason.
So, let's point cameras -- and fingers -- at these bully-boy cops, let's document their crimes, but let's also state a fact with courage: it's not just their fault.
Who else is to blame? Well, so many of us. How stupid have we been to celebrate cops as heroes, just as we've been foolishly doing for so long with the U.S. military? Few people are heroes and fewer still deserve "hero" status while wearing uniforms and shooting bullets, rubber or otherwise, at citizens.
Answer me this: Who granted cops a specially-modified U.S. flag to celebrate "blue lives matter," and when exactly did that happen, and why the hell do so many people fly these as substitute U.S. flags? Has everyone forgotten American history and the use of police (as well as National Guard units) to suppress organized labor, keep blacks and other minorities in their place, intimidate ordinary citizens protesting for a cleaner environment, or whack hippies and anti-war liberals during the Vietnam War protests?
Or think of what's happening this way: America's violent overseas wars, thriving for almost two decades despite their emptiness, their lack of meaning, have finally and truly come home. An impoverished empire, in which violence and disease are endemic, is collapsing before our eyes. "When the looting starts, the shooting starts," America's self-styled wartime president promised, channeling a racist Miami police chief from 1967. It was a declaration meant to turn any American who happened to be near a protest into a potential victim.
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