Under Attack

BY ED FELIEN

According to a police report, Charmaine Mackbee was driving home and was driven off the road by a pickup truck with a crudely painted sign in the back that said, “NOW NIGGA.” Ms Mackbee is black. The photo of the truck, the sign and the license plate are clearly visible in the photo.
Minneapolis Police Depart-ment spokesman John Elder confirmed that a police report had been filed, and that an active case had been turned over to investigators.  “We’re in the infancy of the investigation,” Elder said. “We’ll continue to plow through it.”
Tragically, how can anyone have confidence that the Minneapolis Police Department will sincerely investigate an obvious racist attack when the MPD
treated the man who drove a pickup truck into a crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators at first as a victim; when the mayor and the chief of police have refused to release the tapes of the police murder of Jamar Clark; when the mayor and chief have refused to seriously investigate the police murder of Terrance Franklin?
Does anyone detect a pattern here?
The Brown Shirts in Germany were just a gang of racist thugs beating up Jews and leftists until they became a movement under Hitler.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump said in his campaign speech at Dordt College in
Sioux Center, Iowa.
Is Donald Trump saying his supporters should shoot black people, Muslims and Latinos? (“Who’s going to take away his license to kill?” – Bob Dylan)
Is there a race war going on and “good and decent people” are just ignoring it?
Edmund Burke said, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
It is time for good people to unite and demand that their elected officials recognize that there are racist elements in the general public and in the Minneapolis Police Department, and it is their responsibility to do something
about it. We must remind our elected officials that they swore an oath to protect the public welfare—and that means all of us—blacks, Latinos and Muslims. All of us must demand accountability from our elected officials.
What are they doing about the Charmaine Mackbee incident?
What are they doing about releasing the tapes of the Jamar Clark killing?
Have they read the police report and the medical examiner’s report on the killing of Terrance Franklin?
It is my opinion that we are in the very early stages of a race war, and unless our government acts forcefully to counter these acts of racist terrorism they must be seen as working in collusion with them—either through acquiescence or indifference.
Blacks, Latinos, Muslims and women feel that they’re under attack.  They feel a low intensity war is being waged against them.
Here are the results of recent studies: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/neuroscience-behind-why-white-cops-kill-black-men
“What scientists have found time and time again, is that on average, white individuals categorize negative words much faster when they follow black faces, and positive words faster when they follow white faces. What these studies show is that many of us, despite what we believe about ourselves, have split-second negative reactions towards members of certain other races. And unfortunately, these subconscious racist tendencies may affect behavior in the real world, especially when police officers need to make blink-of-an-eye decisions about how to respond to a perceived threat.
“Another type of experiment has provided further evidence that white individuals tend to subconsciously perceive black males as threatening.”
What does this mean in terms of young black men interacting with police? ProPublica reports that black males stand a 21 times greater chance of being killed by cops than their white counterparts.
What about Latinos?  “Attacks against the Hispanic community have more than tripled in a year according to an official report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The Hate Crime Victimizations report, a Census-driven study, shows an alarming rise in violent anti-Hispanic crime from 0.6 per 1,000 persons age 12 or older in 2011, to 2.0 per 1,000 in 2012.” http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/20/hate-crime-victimization-statistics-show-rise-in-anti-hispanic-crime.html
What about Muslims?  “Hate crimes targeting Muslims, their mosques and businesses, have tripled this year and the bulk of the attacks have occurred in recent weeks, according to a tally by California State University San Bernardino college professor Brian Levin.”  http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hate-attacks-muslims-u-s-spike-after-recent-acts-terrorism-n482456
What about women?  The World Health Organization says, “Recent global prevalence figures indicate that about 1 in 3 (35%) of women worldwide have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime.”
There are many more instances, many more studies, but the evidence seems plain that there is a war being waged by the dominant white male American culture against blacks, Latinos, Muslims and women.
White male crazies are murdering twice as many people as the jihadis:
“Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a         Washington research center.” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html
What drives this white male low intensity warfare?  Fear and loathing.  Fear that blacks will seek revenge for years of racist second class citizenship. Fear that Latinos will take their jobs.  Fear that Muslims will do strange things they can’t understand.  Fear that women will laugh at them.
And Donald Trump is the master manipulator of fear and loathing.  But he is not the first.  He follows a long tradition:
“Why of course the people don’t want war … But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship … Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” – Hermann Goering
“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” – Plato
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” – U.S. President James Madison
“A history of false flag attacks used to manipulate the minds of the people!” “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“Terrorism is the best political weapon, for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.” – Adolph Hitler
But FDR said it best, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Let’s do whatever we can to make peace.  But that means confronting the racism and hatred when we see it, especially when we see evidence of it in our police department.  Sgt. Jeffrey Rothecker of the St. Paul PD had to apologize for saying on his Facebook page that people should run over Black Lives Matter demonstrators on Martin Luther King’s holiday.  But Minneapolis police have supported drivers who ran over BLM demonstrators, have shot and killed young black men without any public inquiry.
Peace, yes.  But first, justice.
Reasonable people could have different opinions about events, and the best insurance that people will discuss a public problem rationally is a fair presentation of facts.
Some say they saw Jamar Clark in handcuffs when a police officer shot him in the head.  The police deny it.  They say Clark was resisting arrest and was struggling for the officer’s gun. There were a number of surveillance cameras that have footage of the event.  But the mayor will not release the tapes.  So we do not have access to the facts.
Myron Orfield’s study of racist redlining by US Bank and Wells Fargo could have been the basis of a class action lawsuit by the City of Minneapolis on behalf of the hundreds of black, brown, Asian and white families that lost their homes because of subprime mortgages.  Orfield estimates the metropolitan area lost $20.5 billion dollars after the 2008 crash.  The city had the opportunity to sue the banks for restitution.  They had a chance to get fair compensation for the homeowners who had been cheated out of their homes.  The mayor and the City Council passed.  A lawsuit would have meant a fair and public presentation of the facts.  But there are powerful interests that do not want a public presentation of the facts.  And those powerful interests contribute to political campaigns, so the public will never know how much the banks stole from us.
The facts are also not clear in the case of the killing of Terrance Franklin.  The police report and the medical examiner’s report contradict each other.  There needs to be a public inquiry here as well to show us what the true facts are in that homicide.
It’s our job as citizens to demand that our elected officials be honest with us and share the facts in matters of social concern.