Silence of the Swine: Abolish the Police and Bring Back the Panthers

One thing that has become crystal fucking clear to any sane sentient creature with a pulse who has paid attention to current events over the last month is the fact that America's cherished fascist institution known as the police is completely and totally fucking useless to working class people. By night, our self-flagellating martyrs in blue become harder to find than Waldo as they're outnumbered by the most irate of the citizenry they've wronged, who've turned their rage inward towards defenseless small business' while the true target of their anger cowers in the shadows of the flames. By sunrise however, these heavily armed cowards suddenly rediscover that old fighting side of them and prove their shriveled manhood by laying into guitar-strumming pacifists with flailing truncheons, Covid-friendly tear gas, and a torrential downpour of barely-less-than-lethal rubber rounds. Just like schoolyard bullies and neo-Nazi skinheads, the neckless jarheads of the American police state are only badass' when its ten against one and that one is a sickly old peacenik that could be bowled over by a stiff wind. 

This little ritual of jackbooted nocturnal pussyfooting is only broken up when these uber-macho alpha males take the time out of their busy ruthless schedules to cry on Tucker Carlson's shoulder about how they're the real victims in all this. Speaking as a transgender anarchist who has literally had friends murdered by my local police force, there is nothing more nauseatingly hilarious then watching a bulging clump of roided-out, military armed, poster boys for toxic masculinity throw themselves a pity-parade masquerading as a press conference so they can tell faggot snowflakes like me how oppressed they are now that they're finally being called out for their hyper-homicidal behavior. "Well, I'm proud to be a pig! My pistol goes Bang! Bang! My siren goes Woo! Woo! And mommy says I'm still a hero!" "Yeah!" "That's right!" "You tell em Sarge!" For the love of Christ, talk about crisis actors. Someone bring me the world's smallest violin so I can play a maudlin tune for these blubbering baby-killers.

Naturally, the only people more sickening than the endangered white males of the right are their sycophantic, glad-handing, partners in crime in the Democratic Party. While Joe Biden is kept a safe distance from anymore black men with microphones in his basement, Nancy Pelosi and her posse of woke Clintonian dinosaurs dawn dashikis, take a knee, and work hard to heal our nation's wounds with wheel spinning empty gestures like changing the Confederate names on our war criminal factories to something more politically correct, because god knows George Floyd will rise from the grave if we can just train Bolivians to waterboard their Indians in a building named after Harriet Tubman.

All this frivolous virtue signaling is being done while the left in this country is finally making some goddamn sense again. Once radical notions like reigning in the prison industrial complex and defunding its club-swinging lackeys have become downright mainstream as the smoke settles on the greatest American uprising since 1968. Unfortunately, this also means that they are becoming downright watered down to the point of utter pointlessness. Even the Democrats not trying to distract their off-white base with glorified political blackface are selling us a bill of goods labeled as reform. Most of the few police defunding bills to actually see the light of day are merely moving the money around and changing labels on the same damn top-down police state that lynches young black men and rapes young transwomen like it's a motherfucking competitive sport.

I'm not a reformer, I'm an abolitionist. There is no reforming a system that's very premise is inherently colonialist and undemocratic. We don't need to defund the pigs, we need to fucking abolish them. That means those crybaby psychopaths in blue are fucking fired and need to find a real job that doesn't involve looting taxpayers so they can strut through other people's neighborhoods like Vic Mackey with a hard-on. I suggest stripping. They'll have to actually work for a living, serving women and queer folk, but they can hold on to the Village People uniforms and pompous sense of vanity without murdering anybody. Cue "Working for the Weekend" and crack out the singles.

Of coarse the response to this suggestion by every naysaying statist on either side of the aisle is "How do we protect our lily-white cis-het suburban communities from the Mongol hordes waiting at the gates?" This question may sound hilarious to anyone who's ever occupied a gayborhood or a barrio where the police are that Mongol horde, but it gets a lot of play in Middle-American neighborhoods like the one I currently occupy, so I'll try to respond with something a bit more sensitive than hysterical laughter. Let me see, how do I put this politely? It's called the Second fucking Amendment, stupid! There we go. 

Now even though my commie ass is technically a part of the Libertarian Party (it's a long story), I don't share my fellow party member's somewhat childish fetish for the Founding Fathers. I'm not going to sit here and attempt to convince you, much less myself, that the original intention of that amendment had anything to do with poor people of any race. It was written by a bunch of slave-raping Indian killers for Christ's sake. I will tell you that a few of the saner pederasts who authored the Bill of Rights were very much aware  that any form of less than fascist government simply could not coexist with the menace of a standing army, whether they wore redcoats or badges. They also understood that the only thing strong enough to permanently prevent this menace was a well armed populace with a civilian militia, and you don't have to go back to the Whiskey Rebellion to find a good example of one that serves the people. You just have to go back to my childhood heroes in the Black Panthers. 

In the wake of the Watts Riots and the assassination of Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale decided to get their Second Amendment on and start an inner city militia for black people living under the jackboot of the notoriously corrupt Oakland PD. Contrary to popular mythology, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense actually worked pretty damn well until the feds started to fuck with it. Not only did they manage to protect they're streets from the gangsters in blue with bitchin leather-clad patrols armed with walky-talkies and law books as well as rifles and shotguns, but they started up a wide array of decentralized social services and "survival programs" that empowered disaffected youth and fought crime at its roots in the garden of urban despair. In Chicago, young Panthers like the late Fred Hampton even went so far as to convert well known street gangs to radical organizations that serviced their communities rather than preying upon them. I think we need to bring these kind of experiments in community self-defense back and make them even more radical.

I honestly believe that if allowed to flourish rather than being sabotaged by J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro, the Black Panthers would have likely developed into something akin to the more popular militias active now in the Middle East, who not only provide an alternative to centralized law enforcement but an alternative to the centralized state itself. The safest working class neighborhoods for minorities to live in in the Middle East are the ones governed by groups like Hezbollah and the Sadrists. I see no reason why our nation can't model their successful stateless organizational skills while "westernizing" these kinds of institutions with libertarian values like free speech, voluntarism and mutual aid.

As a Panarchist and a Syndicalist, my ideal for a democratic society is one in which every profession and social culture has a union and every union has a militia, making the notion of governments totally voluntary and non-territorial. Everyone would be free to choose what government to engage in or choose no government at all, and weigh the benefits accordingly. We need to abolish the police and bring back the Panthers, but we need to do more. We need to abolish the state by giving every individual the right to choose their own government, their own Panthers. Black Panthers, Brown Panthers, Queer Panthers, Capitalist Panthers, Communist Panthers, the possibilities are endless and we don't need any government but the ones we create in our own damn neighborhoods to make it happen.

Fuck the police and create a new underground and no force will be able to keep us down cuz we're Queer or we're Brown. Now lets get armed and organized and make some motherfucking history. It's high time we silence the swine.

Peace, Love, Empathy, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post.

*  The Fighting Side of Me by Merle Haggard

*  Across 110th Street by Bobby Womack

*  Down Rodeo by Rage Against the Machine

*  Down in the Streets by the Stooges

*  911 is a Joke by Public Enemy

*  Kick Out the Jams by the MC5

*  The Big Payback by James Brown

*  Fuck tha Police by NWA

*  Hate to Say I Told You So by the Hives

*  I Fought the Law by Dead Kennedys

*  Workin' For the Weekend by Loverboy

*  Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones