The Day of the Broom is Over: Indefinite Detention for Enemies of the U.S. Empire!
Represent Our Resistance
By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD -- BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
There is an ancient Latin saying that has come to us through England, and before that from Rome: Rex no potest peccare - ‘The King can do no wrong.’ It is an odd concept in a nation that claims its origin in a statement proclaiming quite boldly, that the King of England had wronged the people of the American colonies…
-Mumia Abu Jamal, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners defending Prisoners V. the U.S.A
As of January 1, 2012, we have all been designated enemies of the state. America is the new battleground, and your ‘right’ to due process is null and void.
-Mike Adams, “R.I.P. Bill of Rights 1789-2011,” Op-Ed News.com
Hoka hey!*
In Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, Eduardo Galeano’s vignette on “Kafka” begins:
As the drums of the first world butchery drew near, Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis. And not long after, the war under way, he wrote The Trial.They are two collective nightmares:a man awakens as an enormous cockroach and cannot fathom why, and in the end, he is swept away by a broom;another man is arrested, charged, judged, and found guilty, and cannot fathom why, and in the end, he is knifed by the executioner.
The stories in Kafka’s books, writes Galeano, continued in the “pages of the newspapers, which day after day told of the progress of the war machine.”
Do we ever learn?
The war machine continues today, and the nightmares reflecting internal and external trauma of our lives, persist no less potent than the days of “butchery” in Kafka’s time.
We live in the age of the Corporate Media. Truth equals capital: He who has enough capital has the right to disseminate truth. An instigator of fear, the Corporate media profits from the advertising of relief while its news, headlines, for the most part, shorter than the ads for relief, present mug shots of the captured or the killed “criminal” or “terrorist.” The underlying message for the viewer is that in-depth news is depressing. Nightmarish!
Maybe it was the Supreme Court’s decision that gave George W Bush the presidency in 2000. Maybe it was the following year. Four hijacked planes or 2 planes and 2 missiles, 19 Saudi hijackers dead, or maybe not all dead, maybe not all Saudi, explosives and Building 7’s mysterious collapse, NORAD’s stand down, nearly 3,000 dead citizens on U.S. soil, and George W. continuing to read to a class of children, even after he is told something has happened on his watch. Maybe it was the last straw, and shell shocked citizens watched as smoke and dust overwhelmed them miles and miles away from Ground Zero. Bush unfurled the flag of the Fatherland, declaring the world a battlefield, and urging U.S. citizens to shop, shop, shop!
While many citizens have turned to alternative and particularly progressive news sites, online news magazines such as ours, or Truthout or Op-Ed News, I encounter citizens who not only have never heard of these sites, and knowing less is better than knowing more. For many citizens in the U.S., reality became too much to endure, and the only good news is the news from the pharmaceutical industry.
“Tuned out” youths in the late 60s and early 70s are now the voluntarily medicated. Relief is a pill. All is well in the world if you are well! Feed your body supplemental vitamins and stress reducers, organic veggies and fruits, set regular appointments with therapists, wellness consultants, yoga masters, and spiritual guides. Relieve the pain of life on Earth. The body politics is the enemy of my body! Thinking is unhealthy!
Not surprisingly, African cultural nationalism came back in vogue, rounding up African American individuals seeking stress free lives, supplemental tablets, and special cleansing oils, clothing from Nigeria, Benin, Ghana - the wisdom of the Motherland - Africa! Far away in Africa, on the U.S. Empire’s sub-Sahara’s battlefield, the free market enterprise grabs land and displaces farmers, corrupts political leaders, sells military weaponry to conduct proxy wars, pollutes the water supply, and funds the murder of resisters. But on the wall of these African Cultural Nationalists’ establishments, the Fatherland is represented by a framed photo of African American Barrack Obama.
Imprisoned potential fighters for the opposition alienated in futile battles to overcome a sense of impotence, bow to the power of the nightmare: capitalist by day, “Black” by nightfall. Believers in the Bacchus doctrine: party hard and party often. The broom is a foregone conclusion.
We look over the battlefield. We do not know the total count of our “dead” here in the U.S., or in Iraqi and Afghani or anywhere else, but we can recite the names of our political prisoners in the U.S. We can identify them as the ones who have witnessed the powerful nightmare and who have nonetheless remained anchored to a vision of justice and an end to minority rule.
Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning…
Criminalized and labeled “enemies” who desire to do away with the American Way of Life, political prisoners in the U.S. are incarcerated while Reagan’s “freedom-fighters” of Nicaragua, Clinton’s anti-Lavallas protesters, and Obama’s “democracy-loving” rebels in the Middle World are armed and funded in the name of “democracy.” Mumia Abu Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Assata Shakur, Russsell Shoatz, MOVE activists, and the kidnapped prisoners at Guantanamo wronged the State!
Thanks to the go along, get along Barrack Obama (who signed the National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA) and the facilitators of corporate dictatorship, the U.S. military is to patrol the entire battlefield in search of “enemies” to kidnap and indefinitely detain. Anyone, including a U.S. citizen, would be subject not to a nightmare but to a reality in which, without having done anything wrong, finds him- or herself a political prisoner of the U.S. Empire.
Habeas Corpus and the Bill of Rights - No more!
Now, with the passage of the NDAA, the federal government has torpedoed the entire Bill of Rights, dismissing it completely and effectively promising to violate those rights at will. As of January 1, 2012, we have all been designated enemies of the state. America is the new battleground, and your ‘right’ to due process is null and void.
-Mike Adams, “R.I.P. Bill of Rights 1789-2011,” Op-Ed News.com
The U.S. foreign policy of war and repression and domestic policy of war and repression have merged! And no one is fooled: Obama’s signing statement is meaningless. Sorry, sorry. I don’t mean to do it! They are making me do it!
War and repression is codified into law because it is not enough to subdue the shell shocked when the numbers of unemployed, uninsured, foreclosed, evicted, homeless, hungry are daily rising in the U.S. And when the number of independent journalists, documentary filmmakers and global protesters with access to communications technology are also growing and becoming more and more vocal and visible, the Empire must respond because it must secure more victories. We are reaching the point now that the world has seen before - when trains, or will there be planes too now?, transport “enemies” of the State to their final destinations.
Some of us will know why the days of the broom is over and the executioners are armed beyond knives with pepper spray, high-powered rifles, drones, and with Kafkaesque interpretations of “lynching” laws. No longer can we say that Joseph K’s experience represents a literary nightmare.
The U.S. Empire is corporate rule and corporate rule lacks empathy with humanity and the planet, and we cannot afford to empower the fascist reality in which corporate control of government(s) functions to protect corporate interests while facilitating the criminalization of dissent.
Despite the Empire’s arsenal and our losses, U.S. citizens not overcome by fear are standing up on behalf of human rights and the rights of Mother Earth. The Occupy Wall Street Movement (De-Colonize Movement) is here! Globally, troops of dissenters are occupying the battlefield.
The citizenry of dissenters read beyond the headlines and in between the lines!
In response to NDAA’s indefinite detention, the OWS (De-Colonize) Movement should not ask the corporate functionaries but pursue, with the peoples’ power, the immediate release of our political prisoners who have long experienced the absurdity and cruelty of indefinite detention.
We will not let our warriors linger in the Empire’s dungeons nor will we go like sheep to the executioner…
If we must die - let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die - oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
-Claude McKay, “If We Must Die”
* In the Lakota language, this means “It is a good time to die.” Reportedly shouted by Crazy Horse when going into battle.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.
