Introduction
Most people are easily deceived by and accept the capitalist system,
because they don’t understand its nature, or its methods of mass manipulation,
trickery and brainwashing.
Take, for example, that Amerika is a fascist police state, far more
advanced than Nazi Germany in sophistication and oppressive power. We, on the
dark side of the color line, live this reality all day every day, from the city
block to the cellblock, yet don’t see the big picture because our minds are
molded to fit inside a very tiny box. While there are a few who do see outside
the box, they have no idea what to do about it.
The
‘Good Cop’ Brainwash
In Amerika, government-empowered forces (military,
police, spy agencies,
jailers and their proxies) have been the key forces of persecution and violence
against people of color: Native American, New Afrikan, Latino, Mexican, Asian.
Whether the military, slave patrols, slave drivers and overseers, or lynch mobs
and racist paramilitary groups; whether COINTELPROS and urban police or the
Prison Industrial Complex; whether the Wars on Drugs, Crime and Gangs in
pretended response to the U.S. government itself flooding the ghettos and
barrios with narcotics, military grade firearms, and inciting gang wars, or the
blatant multi-agency declaration of war (Martial Law) against Louisiana’s
desperate, stranded and officially abandoned Black Hurricane Katrina victims and
subsequent policy of ethnic cleansing in New Orleans, etc. Executive forces have
been anything but our servants and protectors.
Yet the entertainment media (the real CBS: Central Brainwash System) is
infested with fantasy images of romanticized vermin (pigs, moles and rats): hero
cops, and military action figures, spy agent intrigue and shifty informants. But
nowhere do they show the actual violence, oppression and terror these vermin
inflict on poor people of color every day across Amerika. And what’s worse is
the conscious effort to cast these good cop images in Blackface.
From Ice Cube (of “Fuck the Police” rap fame) as a cop in All About the
Benjamins, to Ice T (who back in the day also spit anti-police rhymes like “Cop
Killer”) starring in Law and Order as a cop and as a snitch in Boyz in the Hood;
even activist actor Mel Gibson as a cop in the Lethal Weapon series; Will Smith
as an urban cop alongside Martin Lawrence in the Bad Boys series, as an Air
Force pilot in Independence Day (commemorating July 4th, a holiday celebrating a
war fought in large part to keep Black folks in slavery and exterminate
Natives), and as a futuristic cop in I-Robot; Samuel L. Jackson, in The
Negotiator, who only as a cop could rise above the law and resort to ‘crime’
(taking hostages and multiple shoot-outs with other cops) to clear himself of
being framed by cops with killing another cop [!?]; Martin Lawrence, again as a
cop (impersonator) in Blue Streaks. Then there’s Chris Tucker alongside Jackie
Chan in the Rush Hour series, and Jamie Foxx in Miami Vice and Stealth, Denzel
Washington in Training Day and as a rogue spy in Safe House, DMX in Exit Wounds,
Morgan Freeman in Kiss the Girls, Along Came a Spider and so on ad nauseam. In
most all other roles Blacks are cast as criminals and villains.
It’s ‘Good Cop Brainwash’ and criminal stereotyping projected in modern
minstrel shows, which the system finds necessary to gloss over the continued
growth in size and violence of Pigs in the Hood, and to perpetuate a
criminalized image of the poor urban people of color that they occupy.
Indeed, in the era of the War on Drugs (on government-supplied drugs that
is), heavily armored paramilitary SWAT teams have become everyday parts of
oppressive urban policing, while TV gives a totally distorted portrayal of their
role. As one critical race writer, Steve Martinot, observed:
“Swat team operations are presented on TV cop shows as well-choreographed
high-tech raids in dangerous situations. But 80% of their “raids” are to serve
warrants on people of color for non-violent crimes.”[i]
Preeminent critical intellectual Noam Chomsky revealed:
“Recently there’ve been some very interesting studies of urban police
behavior done at George Washington University, by a rather well-known
criminologist named William Chambliss. For the last couple of years he’s been
running projects in cooperation with the Washington, D.C. police, in which he
has law students and sociology students ride with the police in their patrol
cars to take transcripts of what happens.
I mean, you’ve got to read this stuff: it is targeted against Black and
Hispanic populations almost entirely. And they are not treated like a criminal
population, because criminals have constitutional rights – they’re treated like
a population under military occupation. So the effective laws are: the police go
to somebody’s house, they smash in the door, they beat the people up, they grab
some kid they want, and they throw him in jail.”[ii]
Cops don’t make our communities safer, nor do they positively impact the
people’s security needs, nor reduce ‘crime,’ nor the drug plagues. Even Malcolm
X recognized, decades ago, that when the police presence increases yet community
problems only worsen, the police are obviously a big part of the problem.
Steve Martinot gave a vivid example of this in the tragic story of Adam
Hakim, a Black New York youth who was the victim of massive ‘search and kill’
police manhunt, which concluded in his being beaten and paralyzed by guards,
because he refused to sell drugs for local cops in his neighborhood.[iii]
I’ve previously written in some detail about the well-documented practice
and designs of U.S. police in persecuting, murdering, then attempting to replace
popular independent New Afrikan political leaders like prominent Black Panther
Party members, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others.[iv] Also,
their roles in facilitating crimes, violence, gang wars and the drug plagues in
our oppressed communities, then in turn expanding the police presence and
violence, and mass imprisoning us where we cannot reproduce and fathers are torn
away from our families and communities – also well documented.[v]
So, the media image projected of the pig establishment is a far cry from,
indeed the very opposite of, reality. Their role has been to make war on,
contain, criminalize and cripple our communities, which the drug plague plays a
key role in.
“The presence of drugs gets people fighting among themselves over the money
generated by trafficking. Massive drug presence in a community produces a
strung-out and desperate populous, increasing petty crime and gang warfare over
control of the trade. A tide of actual criminality emerges, feeding stereotypes
that have criminalized those communities before the fact. Ostensibly to stem
this tide, police departments demand bigger appropriations from state
legislatures. They expand to become very powerful political forces in urban
areas, which they manifest through increased militarization and aggressiveness.
That power is now nationally coordinated and centralized through the Law
Enforcement Assistance Act passed under Nixon.”[vi]
Why the ‘Good Cop’ Brainwash?
Why indeed is there the perpetual onslaught of Good Cop brainwash?
First off, glamorizing pigs and generating preoccupation with crime and
punishment are essential elements of fascism. Dr. Lawrence Britt observed this
in his comparative study of various fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany),
Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several in Latin
America. Among 14 common features of fascism, Britt listed:
“Obsession with crime and punishment – under fascist regimes, the police
are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing
to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of
patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited
power in fascist nations.
“Supremacy of the Military – Even when there are widespread domestic
problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding,
and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are
glamorized.”
Other features common to fascist systems relevant to this discussion
are:
“Controlled Mass Media – Sometimes the media is directly controlled by the
government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government
regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship,
especially in wartime, is very common.”[vii]
Second, as the U.S. economy slips further towards acute depression, the
line dividing the haves (the capitalist imperialists) and their vermin
gunslingers, and the have-nots (the working class and the poor) is being drawn
more sharply. With economic want and instability comes doubt and distrust of the
masses in those in power. In turn society becomes increasingly polarized between
those who conform and those who oppose the status quo. As resistance increases
the vermin become more extreme in repressing and villainizing it.
These are the dynamics, the dialectic, which generates mass revolutionary
struggle to overthrow oppressive and exploitative systems, like we live under.
Thus conformity versus resistance must be cast in a “law abiding” versus
“criminal” light, placing malcontents on one side and the ruling class, vermin
and their conformists on the other.
The masses are driven to choose sides. Indeed for oppressed community
youth, the only options presented to them, early on, by the system is to become
either “criminal” or “cop.”[viii] Hence the media glorification of the Black
soldier/cop role and preoccupation with ‘crime and punishment.’
Third, up to and during the 1960s –‘70s a high tide of revolutionary
struggle in Amerika, the blatant official violence against people of color here
and abroad, and open persecution and government-orchestrated murders of popular
independent New Afrikan leaders and activists, exposed the real oppressive
character of the pigs and U.S. vermin culture, driving mass resistance against
the system.
In Protect Our Leaders Defend Our People, I pointed out that a 1970 survey
found that brutal police violence against the Black Panthers led some 80% of
urban Blacks “to believe that Black people must stand together to protect
themselves” against the police, who were certainly not seen nor embraced as our
heroes or helpers. I quoted comrade Sundiata Acoli’s observation that the
increasing role of Black cops in the media was a conscious effort to repair the
pigs’ image and conceal their real function:
“ . . . a large part of the part of the programs on TV are still ‘police
stories’ and many of the roles available to Black actors are limited to police
roles. A lot of this has to do with the overall process of still trying to
rehabilitate the image of police from its devastating exposure during the
Panther era, and to prevent the true role of the police in this society from
being exposed again.”[ix]
To achieve this effect today, and counter Black opposition to pig
oppression, popular Black entertainers with independent street credibility (rap
artists, comedians, etc.) are ‘turned’ and used to popularize and glamorize pigs
and vermin culture to the very people they oppress, and to project criminal
stereotypes of their own people, culture and communities. Note too that the
vermin are always portrayed as wealthy or upper middle class, and possessing the
material trappings of Amerikan “success”: large homes, flashy cars and clothes,
beautiful women, etc. And they are literally above the law, with the power to
execute or set-up and thereby dispose of opponents and exact revenge, usually
without consequences to themselves.
Fourth, by casting vermin as the only legitimate models of social heroes
and objects of achievable power and respect to be held in awe and sympathy by
the oppressed, the system teaches aspirations toward and conformity to pig
“authority,” and counters a possible resurgent revolutionary mass culture which
would instead promote the masses of people as the real heroes, and the only
legitimate power holders who should and can take control of their own
communities’ security needs. This is also why the common people are always
portrayed in these dramas as helpless, especially in response to “corrupt”
pigs.
Vermin culture projects pigs as invulnerable and imperious to challenge by
the common people, who must suffer passively and hope some hero good cops will
rescue them. However, the oppressed communities can rid themselves of death
dealing dope peddlers and their pig supply lines, and gangsters who prey on the
people, and resist killer cops and paramilitary goons like the KKK. If the
people come to see themselves as the true heroes and agents of real change, as
capable of being organized and united to meet their own economic, political,
cultural and security needs, this would eliminate their conditioned belief that
we need to turn to the pigs and system to solve our problems, which they have
never done anyway!
Allowing such ideas to take root and spread is intolerable to any enslaver,
since it reveals to the enslaved whom he profits off and rules by force and
fraud that they don’t need him, and they can seize and exercise their own formal
independence. This would deprive the enslaver of the very source of his wealth
and power. Namely us. This is what the Black Panther Party was teaching urban
New Afrikans and other oppressed people through its “Serve the People” community
survival programs. For pigs to be able to function or even exist in our
communities requires our cooperation and communication with them. Recall the
instant media and industry backlash to suppress the popular grassroots “Stop
Snitching” movement a few years back?
Now all one sees are pig dramas where if folks aren’t joining forces with
the pigs, copping out to them or snitching on themselves, they’re informing on
everyone and his grandma. The pigs took similar measures when the FBI tried to
prevent the release of Uptight, a 1970s Blacksploitation era movie starring
Julian Mayfield with the theme that snitching has bad consequences.
How easily the system and its racist mass imprisonment practices could be
frustrated by folks simply refusing to talk to the cops, period. In fact, the
vast majority of those warehoused in these razor wire plantations
plea-bargained, were informed on, or told on themselves.[x]
Without our most basic cooperation the pigs are powerless. Our communities
must provide for their own security.
Pig-In-Chief
In several articles I’ve discussed U.S. government policy, beginning with
Assistant FBI Director William C. Sullivan in 1964, and formalized in 1978 in
National Security Council memorandum, #46, to destroy and repress popular
independent leadership, and then replace it with misleaders groomed and
“approved” by the system. As Sullivan predicted:
“When this is done, and it can and will be done, obviously much confusion
will reign, particularly among the negro people . . . .The negroes will be left
without a national leader of sufficiently compelling personality to steer them
in the proper direction . . . .”[xi]
Actually, planting U.S. trained “dark faces in high places” is how Amerika
subverted all the revolutionary socialist national liberation struggles across
Africa and Asia during the 20th century, and maintained Western imperialist
control over their natural resources and economies.
So it is no real accomplishment or surprise that a man of color was
implanted as Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. executive branch in 2008 – i.e.
Barack Obama. In fact, it can be clearly seen as a tactical move in large part
to counter and contain growing Black unrest.
Obama’s role as Amerika’s highest-ranking cop served to redeem the
legitimacy of pig authority to Black Amerika right in the midst of our growing
disaffection and outrage with the U.S. government. How many of us went from
raging against the pig machine (in response to our treatment during Hurricane
Katrina, Jena 6, the increasing scourge of cops killing and brutalizing our
youth, gentrification, mass displacements and breaking up of Black communities,
cutting already substandard and inadequate social services, massive
imprisonment, police racial profiling, etc.) to rallying in support of it,
solely because of Obama’s presidential campaign and victory? His nomination and
victory sent waves of euphoria bordering on mass hysteria through our
communities.
We instantly forgot reality.
All it took to defer our reviving dreams of struggle for real power and
change was to plant a dark skinned prostitute in a suit in the Oval Office, a
prostitute beholden to the same corporate powers as the 43 white ones that
preceded him. Mere color don’t make a brother.
And what is Obama but an entertainer – a play actor? A role-playing
politician whose business is to woo and inspire false hope in desperate people
with slick sounding rhetoric, clever sounding turns of phrases, and empty
promises totally unrelated to reality. The real litmus test for us is to
question what substantial positive changes have taken place in the oppressed
communities since his election? Absolutely none!
The dope-dealing CIA, that operates right out of the White House, still
floods our communities with narcotics and the attendant social chaos. The
government is still enlarging its militaristic posture and aggressiveness
against us while keeping us under increasingly closer surveillance. We are still
murdered, brutalized, race-profiled and railroaded en masse into prison by the
cops, then consequently disenfranchised and stripped of access to public housing
and social “benefits”!
Our third world level infant mortality and child hunger rates continue to
rise, while the availability and quality of already substandard health care and
social services for us continues to fall in the face of our steadily rising
health needs and problems and the HIV/AIDS/MCV pandemics we face. Our poverty
and depression level unemployment rates continue to grow. Our community, family
and individual security needs remain unmet.
Basic human and civil rights don’t exist for us. In fact, the court system
remains inaccessible and financially out of reach for purposes of litigating to
enforce our interests and basic rights. Indeed, our plight has deteriorated
markedly under the Obama administration. We remain victims of a system of racial
and national oppression, economic exploitation, neo-colonialism, imprisonment,
impoverishment and police impunity, and all-round insecurity and
desperation.
But, emotionally, we can tolerate it all a little better when a Black cop
is the U.S. Pig-In-Chief. The Good Cop Brainwash worked like a charm.
Who Controls the Brainwash System?
Now
let’s look at the broader picture and explore who controls the Brainwash system,
how, why, and how it works to control the People’s thinking.
The Central Brainwash System (CBS) operates on two levels. The first is the
elite media that indoctrinates the upper “educated” sector of the population.
The second is the mass media that indoctrinates and distracts the general public
so they don’t understand or interfere with the decision making power in society.
The media is a cultural weapon of mass influence and control.'
The “educated” sector who participate in society’s decision making
processes are indoctrinated through corporate controlled school curricula (of
“higher” learning), and such “high level” media as The Wall Street Journal, The
Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.
For the general masses (the other 80%-90% of the population) there’s
football (and other spectator sports) and violence and sex themes to excite and
stimulate the lower passions and inhibit critical thinking. The mass
entertainment media portrays the most sordid, animalistic and cynical characters
or emphasizes escapism and fantasy. Just like on the old slave plantations, the
common people are kept preoccupied in their leisure time with irrelevance and
“fun” to distract and discourage them from knowing how the world works, and
learning of their actual power to impact and change its conditions.
The news (info-tainment) media also works to distort and conceal reality.
In a speech given at CIA headquarters, Washington Post publisher, Katherine
Graham, stated:
“There are some things the general public does not need to know and
shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take
legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to
print what it knows.”[xii]
On this point I refer the reader back to Dr. Britt’s observation that just
such “controlled mass media” is a common feature of fascist systems. We can also
see how independent media and whistleblowers that critically expose the true
oppressive face of the pigs are persecuted, villainized and suppressed, like
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and PFC Bradley Manning today.
Also, I refer the reader to the fact, pointed out in Kill Yourself[xiii]
that the government and media jointly concealed that, beginning in the early
1980s, the CIA with the U.S. Justice Department’s “okay,” began dumping tons of
crack cocaine and guns into Black ghettos and inciting gang wars over drug turf.
Over a decade later journalist Gary Webb broke the story. The CIA then destroyed
his career, and he ultimately was found dead from gunshots to the face. His
death was dismissed as a suicide.
So the common people face, not only indoctrination and deception, but
effective depoliticization, to prevent their developing a mass culture based
upon critical popular media that acquaints them with the real world, with what’s
going on, and why and how they can change it in profound ways.
It was in this light that African revolutionary, Comrade Amilcar Cabral,
observed in the context of leading a mass movement for Guinea Bissau’s national
independence:
“When Goebbels, the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard culture being
discussed, he brought out his revolver. That shows that the Nazis – who were and
are the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination –
even if they were all degenerates like Hitler, had a clear idea of the value of
culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination.”[xiv]
It’s important to remember the U.S. government adopted Nazi methods into
its propaganda, military and intelligence systems.[xv]
Which brings us to the really important question of who controls society –
who has the real power? In the U.S., it’s not those with government authority
who are the real power holders. Those vermin are merely the servants and
protectors of those in power. So the pigs do actually serve and protect . . .
just not you and me. Instead, they serve the owners of society, the super rich
1% who hoard social wealth and are the big business interests behind Wall Street
and the multinational corporations. And it is the common people, the masses of
working class and poor, the pigs serve and protect the wealthy against.
The established media is the tool of the wealthy. It serves them and exists
by their design. The system and process breaks down very simply.
Big media exists and survives because big business pays for it through
advertisements. Without advertisements the mainstream media would collapse or
remain very small and weak. Because the wealthy keep big media in business,
these outlets air only programming and information that serves and promotes the
interests and values of big business, which is to indoctrinate the educated
elite, distract and depoliticize the poor and working class, and glorify the
wealthy to all.
An example of how a popular media is crippled without the support of big
business occurred in England with such labor newspapers as The News Chronicle
and The Daily Herald, which reported world conditions and events to working
class people from a perspective that opposed big business. Although both papers
had a very wide readership, they went out of circulation for lack of funds.
Subscription fees alone are never sufficient to maintain media.
Here in Amerika, many examples present themselves as well. For example, the
wealthy promote media that report business and investment trends, stocks, etc.
to middle and upper level investors and corporate shareholders. Therefore, they
invest and advertise extensively in media that carry such “news.” In turn, these
media outlets act as virtual mouthpieces of the business communities and appeal
especially to the elite educated sector.
Similarly, they invest and advertise in and promote “dumbed down”
entertainment media that distracts, misinforms and depoliticizes the general
masses, and indoctrinates them with pro-business values to “spend, spend, spend”
and “buy, buy, buy,” chasing sensory gratification, high-tech toys, gizmos and
trinkets, meaningless status symbols, and ever-changing fads that are advertised
for mass consumption, day in and day out, via multi-million dollar ads and
commercials. Sponsoring and promoting entertainers, music, art, etc. works the
same way. Big business creates the market then supplies it, and advertises to
“tell” the people what to believe and want, what to like, what to buy, while
using the labor power of the same working class people, entertainers, artists,
musicians, etc. to produce the goods, services and materials they advertise –
which always conforms to the values and interests of the wealthy.[xvi]
One can routinely hear rap artists explain that they rap about what the
industry promotes (which are irrelevant and degenerate themes), and not about
“conscious” issues or reality because the industry won’t promote that. This was
a major topic of discussion in recent years, debating whether “Hip hop is dead.”
Likewise, actors find themselves playing roles or in movies and TV shows that
the industry (and not them) promotes and makes available. A principled actor
just won’t have a lucrative career.
If it isn’t about sex, pimping, murder, money, cops and crime, fantasy or
escapism, the big producers, recording labels, promoters, or advertisers won’t
back it. And by being bombarded with such asinine themes, we generally can’t and
don’t think outside the box of degenerate topics, irrelevance and worshipping
materialism. It’s a process of mass brainwash, indoctrination and miseducation
imposed on us by outside forces that replace our self-defining and authentic
culture and identity. The U.S. government is now even promoting programs of
sending rap artists, sports entertainers and others abroad to influence people
in other countries with U.S. values.
And it’s not that people don’t want “conscious,” authentic music, art,
movies, etc., but that industry executives realize such music, art, etc. runs
counter to their brainwash. That it may get people thinking the wrong things.
Like how the wealthy leech off the working class and poor, or that the system is
the cause of urban poverty and crisis, or that we can collectively change things
for the better on our own, or that the pigs are our oppressors, not our heroes.
So they don’t promote it. And neither will the so-called “independent” music
labels that expect to compete in the industry for market sales.
Thus “conscious” musicians, like independent media, must operate
“underground” with very limited resources, few advertising options, and a small
“fan” base. Otherwise, they must sell their souls and “cross over” to the
mainstream and promote the values, images and messages desired by big business,
which is why the pigs now promote pig culture and lifestyles of the rich and
famous in Blackface.
Remember, the pigs are the protectors of the powerful, and exist to keep
the powerless in line. And, it’s the Central Brainwash System that has us
infatuated with sex, money, murder, and now pigs.
Conclusion
In this light we can clearly see that not only does big business and government go
hand-in-hand, but that glamorizing vermin culture – especially to the most
oppressed, and therefore most potentially revolutionary, sectors of the
population – is essential to maintaining the power of the bloodsuckers who own
society and the stability of their system. It was Benito Mussolini, the man
credited as the creator and founder of fascism, who defined it very simply as
the merger of the interests of private corporations and the state. So now you
know. And knowing is half the struggle. The other half is applying this
knowledge to actively change the world in favor of the oppressed.
Dare to Struggle Dare to Win!
All
Power to the People
Endnotes:
[i] Steve Martinot, “The Question of Fascism in America,” Socialism and
Democracy, Vol. 22
[ii] Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky (The New
Press: NY, 2002) p. 373.
[iii] Op. cite note 1
[iv] Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, Protect Our Leaders Defend Our People
(2007)
[v] Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, Kill Yourself or Liberate Yourself: The Real
U.S. Imperialist Policy on Gang Violence versus the Revolutionary Alternative
(2008)
[vi] Op. cite note 1, o, 29l see also, Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim
Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Under Caste.”
Socialist Viewpoint, Vol. 12, No. 3 (May/June 2012) p. 24: “The drug war has
been brutal – complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and
sweeps of entire neighborhoods – but those who live in white communities have
little clue to the devastation wrought.
This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color,
even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell
illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact some studies indicate that
white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than
Black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans (sic) is more
severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about
three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their
African American (sic) counterparts. “That is not what you would guess, though,
when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with Black
and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans (sic) comprise 80
percent – 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.”
[vii] Dr. Lawrence Britt, ”Fascism Anyone?” Free Inquiry (Spring 2003), p.
20
[viii] See, Kenneth Saltman. Education as Enforcement: “Military generals
running schools, students in uniforms, metal detectors, police presence,
high-tech ID cards, dog tags, real-time internet-based surveillance cameras,
security consultants, chain link fences, surprise searches – are all part of the
investment the military industrial complex is embedding in U.S. public schools
as they increasingly resemble the military and prisons. Militarism and the
promotion of violence as virtue pervade foreign and domestic policy, popular
culture, educational discourse and language.
In addition to promoting recruitment, military education plays a central
role in fostering a social focus on discipline. In short, to speak of
militarized schooling in the United States context is inadequate to identify the
ways that schools increasingly resemble the military and prisons. This
phenomenon needs to be understood as part of the militarization of civil society
exemplified by the rise of militarized policing, increased police powers for
search and seizure, anti-public gathering laws, ‘zero tolerance’ policies and
the transformation of welfare into punishing workfare programs.”
[ix] Op. cite note 4
[x] 96.4% of all criminal cases (97% of all federal and 94% of all state
criminal cases) end in plea bargains. New York Times, March 20, 2012.
[xi] Quoted in Church Committee, U.S. Congressional Report: Intelligence
Activities and the Rights of Americans. 94th Congress, 2nd Session, report no.
94-755 (1976) (Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office), book III, p.
136.
[xii] Regardie’s Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 5, January 1990, pp 90f.
[xiii] Op. cite note 5
[xiv] Amilcar Cabral, National Liberation and Culture (1970).
[xv] Michael McClintock, Instruments of XStatecraft: U.S. Guerrilla
Warfare, Counterinsurgency and Counter-Terrorism 1940-1990 (NY: Pantheon,
1992).
[xvi] An outstanding analysis and expose of the mass media and how it works
is detailed in Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent, which
they elaborate as a “Propaganda Model,” summarized thusly:
“A propaganda model focuses on [the] inequality of wealth and power and its
multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by
which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize
dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their
messages across to the public. The essential ingredients of our propaganda
model, or set of news “filters,” fall under the following headings: (1) the
size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the
dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of mass
media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government
business, and “experts” funded and approved by these primary sources and agents
of power; (4) “flak” as a means of disciplining the media; and (5)
“anti-communism” [today it’s anti-terrorism] as a national religion and control
mechanism.
“These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material
of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue
fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the
definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis
and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.”
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