Thread on RED ALERT: Paramilitary men like these anonymous federal officers in #Portland tried to pick me up years ago, in wartime El Salvador. Those men were paramilitary death squads operating out of US-trained & funded elite battalions. I see this& remember my 2008 prediction:
That the U.S. government would use immigrants to introduce dangerous new military and paramilitary forces within the borders of the country, as a way to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting deployment of military personnel within the country's borders.
Th men kidnapping protesters & forcing thm in2 anonymous vans were fr FEDERAL agencies, including Homeland Security &,probably,ICE & others.
Aftr researching articles lke this 1 in @NACLA,where I
show how th "war on immigrants" was also re controlling citizens in times of crisis
Aftr researching articles lke this 1 in @NACLA,where I
show how th "war on immigrants" was also re controlling citizens in times of crisis
As I said in the @NACLA piece, folks didn't & still ston't understand how immigrants have historically provided the state with the excuse to militarize society & do other things the citizenry would never accept. bit.ly/2RhD82F
I detail the historical manipulation of the "immigrant threat" 2 create massive policing & military bureaucracies like Dept. of Navy ,which was created in response to Shay's & other rebellions w help of John Adams & Alexander #Hamilton. bit.ly/2WvkO6v
Fearing for their interests, U.S. elites have historically hedged their bets by creating these policing and military bureaucracies during economic crises, as when they used the Red Scare of 1919, during the Great Depression.
As I wrote in the Political Research Associates piece, "millions of mostly-immigrant-led strikers provided the political impetus leading to the creation of the domestic policing bureaucracy known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)," during the Red Scare.
The Bush Administration's contribution to building what I call the "Homeland Security State" was the creation of the agency coordinating the attacks, the warrantless arrests & kidnapping: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) following the 9-11 attacks.
Trying to analyze this as an example of "Trump fascism" is of limited use,at best,when we consider that the most immediate, large scale example of the militarization of policing and the surveillance & inter-agency coordination of these kinds of attacks came during the Obama Admin
The coordinated federal surveillance & attacks on activists protesting the Dakota pipeline were preceded by the federal response to Occupy: dismantle and destroy it: huffpost.com/entry/homeland…
In a word, the surveillance, warrantless arrests and kidnapping of Trump's DHS come atop a long history of elite domestic deployment of Fed policing & military resources in times of crisis. Important to remember this has been and remains a bipartisan project. So, WATCH BIDEN too.
(IMPORTANT ADDENDUM) Also central to the policing of the citizenry has been and remains the policing of black bodies that is the historic foundation for contemporary policing of non-black poor, protesting and other bodies.
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