In fact, what the pundits call “black paranoia” is really what the Black Consensus looks like from inside the bubble of white American racism. Metaphors are dangerous, but bubbles are usually delicate and fragile things. An immense weight of lies and denial are already pressing down on the bubble of white racism and the load is about to get heavier. While African Americans and the rest of humanity outside the bubble are always hoping, praying and working for its collapse, we know not to count on it any time soon. And we know that even paranoiacs have some real enemies.
A superb think piece courtesy Bruce Dixon of The Black Commentator. All the links to the original story and mountain of evidence available in all its infernal glory thanks to BC. Savory seasonings to accompany and accentuate today's banquet of Alberto "Torturegate" Gonzalez having his day in the Senate.
In this particular, the (DEA/CIA/Whomver) forced US Attorneys to stop major drug cases from going to trial in order that information about heavyweight dealers would not go public.
Why did they do this?
In other words, the CIA/DEA/Whomever knew that major importers were shipping crack into the country and they did nothing to stop it.
You mean shipping cocaine into the country? But wasn't the introduction of a simple kitchen chemical reaction the key to exponentially expanded proliferation of cocaine addiction and abuse? I mean, Richard Pryor burned himself up freebasing, so rendering acidic cocaine into a smokable base form wasn't exactly new, but freebasing on an industrial scale with kitchen chemicals and microwave ovens was rather new fangled. There seems to have been a nexus of capability and intentionality that you've neglected to interrogate here.
The difference between that and a mission to send crack to the ghetto in genocidal conspiracy is the difference between skepticism and paranoia.
Please explain. Smoking freebased cocaine is more powerfully addictive than snorting cocaine because of the differing efficiency of active ingredient delivery, right? Now we've all seen the difference between a snorter and crackhead, and obviously, crackheads are destroying their limbic systems far more radically and efficiently than simple snorters, right? You got so many factors compounded in this nexus of activity that was *best case* an overt instance of executive criminality undertaken by a republican administration in order to fund a covert and congressionally unauthorized war in Central America.
None of that changed the reality of the demand for crack.
Is this a suggestion that personal responsibility should have in any event trumped the demand generated by a new and previously unexperienced chemical delivery mechanism? i.e., ghetto droogs should've known that that base hit was frying their brains in a hurry and should've known better than to get themselves hooked and converted to crack zombies and strawberries?
I'm sorely tempted here to cart out the mounds of malignant evidence from MK-Ultra and related nastiness going back deep into the cold war to cinch the case that serial malfeasance has been going on at the highest levels for a long time around the abuse of the populace with drugs. I'm not suggesting that this has always been all or exclusively about black folks, but given the history of drug propaganda in the U.S., we should always be given pause to think carefully about the intentions underlying criminality like this.
I guess I'm just a little astonished at your tolerance for official criminality and implied disdain for black retail criminality. How much compounded nastiness do you require in order to let the evidence of executive branch criminality tinged with every possible appearance of structural racism simply be what it is? What motivates such tortuous benefit of the doubt?
Seems a spade a spade and if that pisses the malignant criminal-minded somebody off, too bad. We're still at liberty to do that, right?
Temptation too great. Must post link to MK-Ultra skull-and-bones-duggery and let the evidence flow into the paranoic consensus as it may. There is a non-paranoic nexus of culpability here that can and has been demonstrated VERY effectively. Anyone interested in genuinely understanding how these abuses occur and proliferate is encouraged to read Chorover, Stephan. FROM GENESIS TO GENOCIDE:THE MEANING OF HUMAN NATURE AND THE POWER OF BEHAVIOR CONTROL
The key to understanding what Webb struggled to document can be found in the history of the misapplication of psychotechnology during the 19th and 20th centuries. After reading Chorover, you be disinclined to extend the benefit of the doubt to officials engaged in monstrous malfeasance. As with most things, it's a question of pov.
Posted by: cnulan at January 7, 2005 09:59 AMI have little to no tolerance for waste, fraud and abuse, but like conservatives everywhere, it is what I expect from government on a regular basis. Government is very inefficient and bureacratic by definition. Lots of things go wrong and change comes slow. This is how government bureacracy works, and it is guaranteed to create fuckups. We are all so lucky that there are generations of military history to study so that particular government function can respond rapidly to change. Yet even so, Rumsfeld is having a bear of a time meeting the challenges of inner-city guerilla combat. It's too bad we're not all about conquest and submission.
So I don't give the operations of government the benefit of the doubt, I give the intentions of government the benefit of the doubt. And I am saying categorically that it was not the intention of the US government to introduce new forms of addictive drugs into America's ghettos. Sure it happened on their watch and their operational bungling and compromise allow it to happen anyway. At some point somebody had to look at what was going on and realize that despite their best efforts, the legal restraints on government action tipped the scales, perhaps irretrievably, in the favor of the drug underworld.
I don't believe that the US government invented crack, nor that the WHO invented HIV. Period. It does no one any good to believe it anyway because the problem isn't the invention, the problem is the distribution. Aside from all that, as regards the chemistry and knowledge itself, that's been assimilated into ghettos long ago. My personal experience was that in 1979 weed dealers wanted to be coke dealers.
As for demand, I can only echo Nancy Reagan. It's as simple as that. Guess what, it works.
As for MK Ultra. Yeah sure. Absolutely. So give me a body count. What is the number? You've got all the evidence? How many people did MKUltra's idiocy kill vs oh.. say the Clanton gang in East LA?
The only way the US government or any government can sustain a successful genocide is with the compliance of the general population. It begins with assassination and continues with midnight raids. Here in Los Angeles, Michael Zinzun, who is about as radically pro-grassroots-black as it is possible to be, lost an eye to the LAPD. Then he got a multimillion dollar settlement from the city. So which way is the tide turning? Geronimo Pratt is free. Hello?
I am not disinclined to believe that officials are poison, evil and wrong. I take it as a given. So I keep my money out of their hands when I can. This is the essence of a belief in limited government. But I do believe that the mission of the DEA is a proper one. -- Then of course we have to get into the whole business of the drug economy. Different story.
Nevertheless, I still say that the Black Consensus is poorly informed. Understand that I come from LA, and I was being radical in the middle of all that. There is a severe limit on the leadership capacity of unfunded grassroots organizers, and for the most part Americans do not have sufficient cause to doubt or dismantle their government. If they did, they would, because the long arm of history bends towards justice (and the heavy boot of militancy swings toward vulnerable asses); there is a certain inevitability of human desire expressing itself. The LA Riots were as big as it gets, and I don't see a Black Consensus emerging that wants anything more.
We are in the 70s again, where pimps were cool, OK? The 'black' consensus lies in the vision of Superfly, Ron ONeal. Hey, there's corruption out there, let's get a piece then try to take it legit. Everybody wants to be legit.
Posted by: Cobb at January 7, 2005 12:44 PMthere is a certain inevitability of human desire expressing itself
Truer words have seldom been spoken. At state of the art levels of American proprietary governance architecture design and implementation, it is precisely the convergence of predictable human desire and a systematic knowledge of the same that has resulted in the total usurpation of long-term guardian impulses by short-term commercial impulses in our collective.
To your point, legally speaking, the Webb web of connections doesn't hold up well under careful evidentiary scrutiny. However, what the Webb web suggests about the way things work in this society is sufficient at numerous levels to corroborate a multi-level framework of systemic injustices that interoperate far more insidiously to our continuing detriment. The DOJ/OIG full monty investigation of the Dark Alliance allegations does a rather more stunning job of outlining the overall modus operandi of this framework constructed of numerous building blocks disproportionately antithetical to the well-being of black folks in America.
I don't have to suspend disbelief for even a moment to understand why the popular black consensus views American governance as if it were a Rube Goldberg inequity contraption...,
Posted by: cnulan at January 7, 2005 08:46 PMYou are begging questions of evil genius as regards what it takes to systematically work antithetically to the well-being of blackfolks. Who? Marge Schott?
How high could one get as an evil genius? If you wanted to be the Man, how would you accomplish it?
Posted by: Cobb at January 8, 2005 01:04 AMHow high could one get as an evil genius? If you wanted to be the Man, how would you accomplish it?
From what I can tell, with the right combination of smarts, luck, ruthlessness and language skills, you could get Kissinger/Brezenzki high. Now mind you, they ain't THE Man, but they've been some of his ace boon hard pipe hittin niggaz ever since.
1. There are always the basics....,
2. Crib up all the decades old, hard won, and hard to repeat (human experimentation and slaughter) Nazi homework, personnel, and rolodexes you can get your hands on.
3. Stir them shizzles up for a while, a good long while......,
5. Consistency is key to achieving the Man's full agenda.
6. Tell a helladocious just-so-story
7. So that your perspicacious kneegrows can't tell whether they're paranoid or whether somebody really IS out to get them!
Posted by: cnulan at January 8, 2005 09:05 AMP6 dropping it on Alberto "Torturegate" Gonzalez
See, here's the thing, even without the critical mass of our actual and factual history as the world's only true alien abductees here in the one true modernist democracy we call home...., I believe our consensus is oftentimes plain stunned by the sheer and unrelenting magnitude of official hypocrisy...,
official lies and the psychological strategies that construct them using tortious terms from the consensus friendly verbal logic of litigation and criminal justice do a very great deal to keep us on edge...,
with the very best of intentions, no doubt. (^;
mebbe we're paranoid because our collective unconscious detects something funky emanating from the collective unconscious of the other man...,
Posted by: cnulan at January 8, 2005 01:35 PMWebb was a skeptic, and most of his fans were cynics and paranoids.
That's nice hyperbole but it's not a statement that can be taken seriously unless given susbstance to back it up.
The fact is, Webb's piece was panned by The Washington Post and the L.A. Times, but they went after what some people said, not what Webb wrote.
Webb never wrote the U.S. intentionally introduced crack, only that U.S. policy probably aided the increased import of cocaine into the U.S.
It is also interesting that on the Saturday after the Post wrote a critical piece on Webb's writings, and attacked the Black community as paranoid with a piece titled, "Why the African-American Community is Paranoid" (or something close to that), they published an article, on the inside of the A-section, that supported much of Webb's claims concerning the U.S. government over looking drug running by people deemed helpful to U.S. interests.
The Post ombudsman at the time, raked the Post's critical piece as being shoddy and attacking Webb over something he never stated.
Lastly, the ironic thing about Webb's piece is that the government's involvement in over looking drug running came to light before, with both the Times and Post nailing the Reagan administration about it.
Posted by: EBrown at January 9, 2005 11:17 PMLastly, the U.S. may not be behind introduction of crack, but don't forget within the past few years, it has come to light that the FBI let an informant get away with 1st degree murder. Some conservative commentators wrote about it as well.
Bleahgh. 'Dark Alliance' is on my second shelf. The heart of the matter was something anybody who saw 'Deep Cover' with Larry Fishburn ought to understand. In order to get to drug kingpins, you let the underlings deal as if no law enforcement knows what's going on. In this particular, the (DEA/CIA/Whomver) forced US Attorneys to stop major drug cases from going to trial in order that information about heavyweight dealers would not go public. In other words, the CIA/DEA/Whomever knew that major importers were shipping crack into the country and they did nothing to stop it.
The difference between that and a mission to send crack to the ghetto in genocidal conspiracy is the difference between skepticism and paranoia. Webb was a skeptic, and most of his fans were cynics and paranoids.
None of that changed the reality of the demand for crack.
I have little faith in the analytical competence of the Black Consensus. The Black Consensus, whatever that is, doesn't read 548 page books.
Posted by: Cobb at January 6, 2005 10:50 PM