BY ED FELIEN
Are you concerned that the number of hillbilly militias, racist rednecks with assault rifles, has grown from a little over a hundred groups to more than a thousand groups in the last few years?
Are you concerned that the FBI warned in 2006 that white supremacists have infiltrated local police departments?
From The Holocaust Museum, Encyclopedia:
“The Nazi state in fact alleviated many of the frustrations the police experienced in the Weimar Republic. The Nazis shielded the police from public criticism by censoring the press. They ended street fighting by eliminating the Communist threat. Police manpower was even extended by the incorporation of Nazi paramilitary organizations as auxiliary policemen. The Nazis centralized and fully funded the police to better combat criminal gangs and promote state security. The Nazi state increased staff and training, and modernized police equipment. The Nazis offered the police the broadest latitude in arrests, incarceration, and the treatment of prisoners. The police moved to take ‘preventive action,’ that is, to make arrests without the evidence required for a conviction in court and indeed without court supervision at all.
“Conservative policemen were initially satisfied with the results of their cooperation with the Nazi state. Crime did indeed go down and the operation of criminal gangs ended. Order was restored. But there was a price. The Nazi state was not a restoration of the imperial tradition. It was at its core thoroughly racist. The Nazis took control and transformed the traditional police forces of the Weimar Republic into an instrument of state repression and, eventually, of genocide.
“The Nazi state fused the police with the SS and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst; SD), two of the most radical and ideologically committed Nazi organizations. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, also became the chief of all German police forces. His associate, Reinhard Heydrich of the SD, became at the same time the head of the Security Police, charged with safeguarding the Nazi regime. Nazi ideology became part of all police activities. The police were central figures not just in maintaining public order, but in combating the so-called racial enemies designated by the Nazi state. It was in this context that ‘preventive police action’ took on such terrible consequences. The SS, SD, and police were the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust.”
The Know Nothings are the oldest racist and anti-immigrant organization in America. Before the Civil War they fought against the immigration of German and Irish Catholics. If members were asked about their involvement in the often violent actions of the group, the members responded, “I know nothing,” which could also mean, “I, Know Nothing” (or, I am a Know Nothing). After the Civil War the organization evolved into the Ku Klux Klan, the Invisible Empire, and continued their tradition of secrecy.
Donald Trump, when asked about Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s enthusiastic endorsement of him, said, “I don’t know, did he endorse me or what’s going on, because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists. And so you’re asking me a question that I’m supposed to be talking about people that I know nothing about. …”
Donald Trump’s father and mentor, Fred Trump, was arrested in 1927 for fighting with police and refusing to take off his white robe at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens, New York. In 1973 Fred Trump was sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to African Americans. Woody Guthrie wrote: “I suppose Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate he stirred up in the bloodpot of human hearts when he drawed that color line here at his eighteen hundred family project.”
Are you concerned about the Minneapolis Police Department’s execution of Terrance Franklin and Jamar Clark?
Are you concerned about the two white suburban men who harassed Black Lives Matter demonstrators in North Minneapolis and shot and injured five of them last November?
Does any of this seem to fit into a pattern of an evolving right-wing terrorist state?
Is this something we should be worried about?
Of course, we don’t have to rely on the FBI, assassin of various pacifist civil rights activists and of even more Black Panthers, for information about racism among police forces. Police involvement in white supremacist activities (and white supremacist involvement in police forces) certain pre-dates 2006. Of course the police covered up (and, I believe, participated directly in) white supremacist attacks against the encampment outside the 4th precinct in Minneapolis. Police are accused of involvement in Klan killings of native people in Rapid City, SD. And so it goes, all over the country. We need to talk about abolishing the police.