What is the definition of a gang? I would generally argue that this word is a contrived label used by rich people to describe any group of poor people organized around using force to acquire wealth like rich people without a state to hide behind. However, an even better definition may ironically come from United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement who describes a gang on their website as "An association of three or more individuals whose members collectively identify themselves by adopting a group identity, which they use to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation." I say "ironically", in fact quite painfully so, because these self-righteous pig fuckers, better known as ICE, seem to have essentially described themselves to a T.
Since its inception as a part of Dubya's post-9/11 Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, ICE has grown into an association of 21,000 or more people who have adopted the group identity of a heavily armed and well-organized squad of militant kidnappers for hire. If an administration, be they Democrat or Republican, requires the decimation of a large civilian population then ICE will provide their services for a hefty sum of pilfered tax dollars and what these services essentially amount to is what can probably best be described as human trafficking on an industrial scale. Or what historians once referred to as a pogrom.
So, why are we so shocked when what is by their own definition a gang encounters gangland violence? The news has recently been teaming with a stream of breathless stories about organized and not-so-organized attacks on ICE like the poorly botched ambush on a detention center in Alvarado, Texas that left one police officer injured and ten hooligans in custody on attempted murder charges. According to Big Brother this is all part of an unprecedented spree with the Department of Homeland Security reporting that attacks on their immigration agents have risen by 700% in the last six months.
Republicans blame Democrats, claiming that their often-empty-handed rhetoric inflames such mayhem, but Democrats seem to be equally aghast over this wave of attacks on ICE, bemoaning the tragedy of radicalism gone too far and they're not totally wrong about this but they are grossly overthinking the phenomenon. ICE is a notorious gang of lecherous body-snatchers that preys on desperate people for a paycheck and some of these people are fighting back. That's it. Basically, what 2pac would call thug life. It's not wrong, it's not right, but it really shouldn't be that shocking either and neither should the fact that such acts of criminal blowback are increasing to unprecedented levels considering that the government has recently bumped up their payments to ICE under the condition that they accelerate their long raging war on human movement to an unprecedented level of barbarism and cruelty.
After another Trump regime failed miserably to deliver on another campaign promise to purge Middle America of a mythical shadow army of border hopping Hannibal Lecters, those shucksters did what they always do in such scenarios and sicked their favorite immigration gang lords on blueberry farms and Home Depot parking lots to shore up the numbers with anyone browner than Marco Rubio who fudged their paperwork, and when that failed they fudged the goddamn paperwork for them.
In order to meet his own insane quota of detaining 3,000 migrants a day, Trump has arbitrarily revoked long standing protections for federally recognized refugees and unilaterally terminated temporary protection status, essentially rendering well over a million legal immigrants illegal overnight. As if that wasn't criminal enough, the Donald is also pushing to gut the 8th Amendment by affectively outlawing bond hearings for millions of immigrants awaiting court hearings, damming these largely nonviolent offenders of invisible lines to years in glorified concentration camps.
So, if you really want to blame any politician for the rise of violence against the border gestapo then blame Donald Trump for turning thugs into goddamn terrorists. He might as well have painted "shoot me" on their backs in Spanish. But don't you dare cry for ICE. Last time I checked "just following orders" doesn't fly in any legitimate court of law and these gangsters didn't start getting cruel under Trump. If any president turned Frankenstein into Godzilla, it was Barack Obama who still holds the title belt for Deporter in Chief and ICE continued to operate the draconian detention facilities Obama gifted to Trump under his former VP Joe Biden. The worst of these cross-partisan concentration camps are without a doubt the ones that have housed tens of thousands of children and become notorious dens of child sexual abuse with thousands of allegations against ICE pedophiles still pending.
The GOP and their belching Cassandras on Fox and Friends like to go off on tearjerking tangents about child trafficking enabled by Democratic policies and, once again, they're not wrong, but they conveniently leave out the fact that the worst predators are their heroes in ICE, and every time a Republican slithers into office their budget for prowling the schoolyards for supple brown flesh goes through the fucking roof. And this is the only thing that really makes ICE exceptional among thieves; their membership in a bipartisan cartel known as the Westphalian Mafia aka the State- a colossal constellation of mercenaries, pencil pushers, kidnappers, lobbyists, thugs, and killers who have affectively maintained a monopoly on the use of criminal behavior in the west through a mix of high concept propaganda and sheer blunt force.
The only factor that makes pretty much every federal government agency any different than the Crips or the Bloods is a massive standing army and a compulsory school system that grooms all of us from childhood into believing that this criminal enterprise somehow amounts to some form of democracy. They can dress their mafia up in all the judge's robes and laughably non-binding amendments they want, what all of this really amounts to at the end of the day is "You've got a pretty nice community there. It would be a real shame if something nasty happened to it... then again, if you just kicked up a few bucks of your paycheck every week, our boys in shiny badges could keep it real nice for you."
This isn't to say that I think we should all go out and shoot up the nearest ICE hideout. Aside from the fact that we would all be stooping to their level by fighting like another state (which is the quickest way to replace it with another one), this strategy simply isn't affective. Every time some wannabe-revolutionary caps one of those glorified pimps, the news turns him into some kind of fucking martyr for law and order, and congress passes another law giving them even more power. These motherfuckers need to be taken down hard but taking down a criminal enterprise of that size and magnitude requires more brains than brawn.
The people who have been the most affective at achieving this goal in the era of Trump have actually been the undocumented communities themselves who have developed intricate networks of communication and evasion over their decades of essentially stateless existence. This has affectively afforded them the ability to collectively police the thugs who call themselves police. Chicago's sanctuary movement, which has its roots in the movement to protect the refugees of Reagan's Central American death squads during the 80s, affectively crippled Trump 2's initial inaugural kidnapping spree and LA's La Raza-radicalized immigrant communities who used an appropriately diversified array of tactics ranging from basic neighborhood outreach to flamethrowing direct action, frightened Trump badly enough to call in the heavy gangbangers in the National Guard and the Marines.
This is what we need on a much broader scale across the entire country; a highly organized but heavily decentralized coalition of communities organized around fighting the many crimes of a state on a rampage. I'm talking about establishing volunteer rapid response networks stationed outside of every courthouse, police station, and federal agency in the country and alerting their communities of the comings and goings of every gangbanger with a badge.
This means policing the DEA attempting to lock up peaceful people for trading illegal plants on the free market. This means alerting sex workers of raids attempting to govern their god given bodily autonomy by force. And this means doing what the Panthers did before Cointelpro and sending two brothers to every police showdown in a marginalized neighborhood, one with a megaphone and a stack of law books to educate the block on their rights and one with a loaded shotgun sending a simple message to the thugs that we will defend those rights by any means necessary, only this time we'll add a cameraman so the bangers know that the whole world will be watching who fires the first shot this time, live across multiple platforms.
It's time to stop crying over spilt ICE and crack down on the real criminals in this country. It's time to launch a war on the war on crime and we don't need to fight like a state to do this. We just need a thousand communities quietly roaring "Enough!"
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced This Post
* What's Fair by Blondshell
* Iron Man by Black Sabbath
* Milk by Samia
* Police Truck by Dead Kennedys
* Hit 'Em Up by 2Pac
* Wild in the Streets by Circle Jerks
* Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne
* How I Could Just Kill a Man by Cypress Hill
* Los Angeles by X
* Rise Above by Black Flag
No comments:
Post a Comment