Serf Rampage of Death in Chicago As Black Emperor Rains Death on Yemen

Apt Pupils: Chicago Violence Reflects the Lessons of the Elite

by Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque

I wrote here Monday of an Easter weekend full of death in Yemen, ordered up hot and steaming by the progressive American president and his assassins. But death was feasting elsewhere too -- in the president's hometown of Chicago, as the Guardian reports:

A senior Chicago police officer said that parts of the city are being overwhelmed by gun violence, after a weekend in which nine people were shot dead and at least 36 – including six children – were wounded.

Ronald Holt, the commander of the Chicago police department’s special activities division, said that the city was witnessing “fratricide” among young men who had come to believe “that the only way to resolve a conflict is to get a gun and go shoot to kill”.

“To tackle gun violence where it is overwhelming communities with the extraordinary loss of lives at an alarming pace, we must deal with it as a social disease and health issue,” Holt, whose 17-year-old son Blair was shot dead on a bus in 2007, told the Guardian in an email.

His remarks came as Chicago suffered its bloodiest weekend of the year. Dozens of residents were shot in a series of separate incidents. On the city’s south side, five children aged between 11 and 15 were shot while walking home from a park on Sunday evening.

This outburst of violence and hopelessness is the "strange fruit" of the implacable, relentless hatred that American society has always felt toward its black citizens. Since the end of slavery -- which was only achieved by a Civil War that killed more than 600,000 people (in contrast to the peaceful end of serfdom, in the same period, achieved by the 'barbaric' Russians) -- African-Americans have been subjected to an unforgiving barrage of legal blockades and economic terrorism to keep them broken down, broken apart, struggling for crumbs of survival in the midst of affluence and opportunity for others.

For a few years, in the 1960s, a few very mild measures were adopted with the aim of beginning to address the ingrained injustice and inequality imposed on black people during a whole century of supposed "freedom." And even these few measures would almost certainly not have passed except for the national trauma of John Kennedy's assassination, which produced a powerful Democratic majority for his successor, Lyndon Johnson, and -- temporarily -- a national mood that major changes needed to be made in an obviously sick society.

But let us be clear: as momentous as they were in context, the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s were, again, very mild, preliminary measures in relation to the vast injustice and institutionalized hatred they were meant to address. I mean, think of it: how a nation celebrated the fact that after arduous political warfare, civil unrest, many deaths and much suffering, it managed to strike down some of the laws that prevented or hindered black citizens from voting. And this in the seventh decade of the 20th century. Any civilized nation would have been ashamed that it took so long to accomplish even this barest minimum of democratic rights for a substantial part of its population; but America has never stopped congratulating itself for its magnificent benevlolence in letting the darkies cast a ballot in the "world's greatest democracy."

This back-patting still goes on today, even among political factions -- such as those bankrolled by the Pulitzer-lauded friends of humanity, the Koch Brothers -- who are spending millions of dollars to turn blacks away from the voting booth ... by any means neccessary. Yet just five years after these mild measures were introduced, the government -- and its corporate allies -- were already working assiduously to undermine them. Who can forget the sage counsel of Patrick Moynihan, who urged his boss, Richard Nixon, to practice "benign neglect" toward "issues of race," letting "the Negroes" stew in their own "social pathologies." (Moynihan, of course, went on to become a famously "progressive" Democratic senator from New York, then handed off his seat to Hillary Clinton.)

No matter; most white Americans believe, firmly but vaguely, that "all that Civil Rights stuff" in the Sixties settled America's racial issues once and for all. So if "the Negroes" have any trouble these days, it's their own damn fault. It's their "social pathologies," as Moynihan said 45 years ago; or a problem of "inner city culture," as Paul Ryan put it this year. Hey, after all, there's a black president, right? What else do these damn people want?

This is all unspeakable, evil tripe. The American system has never, for a single instant, treated African-Americans as equal citizens, of equal worth to those with white skin. It has always practiced not benign but malign, malevolent neglect toward its black citizens. Prejudice and fear toward black people is deeply ingrained in white Americans, and not just in the South. It is there, it is part of white Americans' cultural heritage and psychology; it is a stain, a presence that for most white Americans must be consciously, effortfully overcome. And of course, in many, many cases, it is not overcome. It is surrendered to; it is simply accepted, without reflection, as the natural order of things. It is expressed in almost 150 years of organized economic deprviation and denial of opportunity, in social, economic and political policies aimed at destroying black families, black communities, leaving them at the mercy of gangs, hoods and criminal -- those perfect replicators of the ruling class ethos of unjust domination backed by violence.

Look at Detroit: a major city fallen into unprecedented ruin and abandonment, now in the hands of appointed managers, with all pretense of democracy stripped away. It is inconceivable that this would happen to any city with a white majority -- or any city in a genuinely civilized, democratic country. Detroit's fate is one of the scandals of the century -- yet is is completely ignored ... even by the "first black American president," who has joined with the rest of the power structure in letting "the Negroes" in Detroit stew in "their social pathologies." Trillions of dollars are spent to bail out financial criminals who wrecked the entire global economy; billions of dollars are being sent to aid the ailing economy of Ukraine. But bailing out Detroit, all those shiftless darkies? No chance, man.

Proportionally, more blacks are imprisoned than any other Americans; more blacks are executed than any other Americans. More blacks are denied loans and jobs, more blacks are relegated to substandard, underfunded schools. Subsequently, more blacks begin life several rungs down the ladder from their white compatriots. And on every rung of that ladder, there are powerful forces waiting to beat them down, repress them, belittle them -- then blame them for not rising higher, faster, for daring to complain about the hammers pounding down on their fingers as they try to grasp the rung above.

The election of the first black president (actually, a half-white president) has done little to alter this state of affairs -- except, as Glenn Ford at Black Agenda Report has pointed out, to disarm the resistance of African-American leaders to America's still horrific, still deeply racist system. The violence in Chicago -- and the nihilistic dearth of hope and opportunity and common human feeling it represents -- is just more evidence of a terrible reality that no one will acknowledge. Brutalized, abandoned, bludgeoned, hated and scorned, the gangs of black America are reflecting the lessons taught by our elites, from the gilded corporate boardrooms and the heights of geopolitics: Money is god; power is king; violence is the way; there is no such thing as the common good.