Killer cops, drone wars and the crisis of democracy
I've been observing an interesting (and depressing) theme to many criticisms of the Brown and Garner protests: insistence on making the alleged infractions by the victim the central issue, and objection to the notion that racial inequality is a root cause of police brutality against black people. I have been struggling to find a way to express my interpretation of the origin of these beliefs in the people making these arguments.
Today on Salon, Andrew O'Hehir published an excellent article entitled "Killer cops, drone wars and the crisis of democracy." He confronts the issues of economic injustice, racial inequality and American military hegemony with ideas from Nietsche and the black radical philosopher Frantz Fanon. Read the entire thing, it's well-written and insightful:
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/06/killer_cops_drone_wars_and_the_crisis_of_democracy/
O'Hehir discussed Nietche's concept of the "slave morality" and applied it to the modern American experience:
. . . To borrow an explosive concept from Nietzsche and turn it to new purposes, it’s about the “slave morality” that characterizes so much of American life, meaning the desire to be dominated and ruled, to give up control over one’s own life and allow others to make the decisions.
Since the word “slave” carries special meaning in American history, let me be clear that I’m not talking here about the legacy of 19th-century human slavery (although that too is still a factor in our national life). I’m talking about the plurality or majority of contemporary Americans who have enslaved themselves – in moral and psychological terms — to the rule of a tiny economic oligarchy, and to a state that serves its interests, in exchange for the promise of order, safety and comfort. That order, safety and comfort then become the absolute values, the only values; they become coterminous with “freedom,” which must be defended by the most exaggerated means. If the leaders hint that those values are under attack from sinister forces, or might someday be, the timorous, self-enslaved majority consents to whatever is said to be necessary, whether that means NSA data sweeps, indefinite detention camps, mass murder by remote control or yet another ground war in the Middle East. Compared to all that, letting a few killer cops go free is small potatoes.
I then found this passage, which seemed to express the ideas I had difficulty putting to words:
One could argue that Mike Brown and Eric Garner died because they expressed insufficiently avid slave morality, or did not do so rapidly enough. Reasonable-sounding people on TV and the Internet have repeatedly assured us, over the last few weeks, that those who submit to authority and trust the system (despite the manifest and obvious failures of the system) need not fear being killed in the street. There is a logic here, but it is the logic of military occupation that Fanon would have recognized in the colonial context, not the logic of democracy: Capitulate entirely and without hesitation, do not insist on your so-called rights, and you will be permitted to live.
"Trust the system." That's what is at the heart of these denials of racial inequality, police brutality and war crimes. We, the collective American citizenry, have over time built this System. The System gives us order, safety and comfort, and to suggest that it employs immoral methods to do so implies that we who benefit from this order, safety and comfort are complicit in the crimes wrought by the State. That's a harsh realization for many. Therefore it's much more palatable to believe that the System is working as designed, and the design is sound, rather than to face the frightening possibility that the System is broken.
