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Fortress America

Chapter 65

 

 

  

A society where love and mutual connection have been killed is not a beautiful sight. Even the church escapes the social ethics of Christ and betrays the poor. That many poor then betray the church is no wonder. It is not uncommon for black robbers to arrive in churches just before the collection plate is passed round and force the churchgoers at gunpoint to give to the real needy. A despairing minister in Chicago told me that they were closing his church because the congregation was plundered every Sunday.

  

  

No institution in America today is too sacred to avoid the anger of the ghetto. Teachers are attacked at gunpoint even by first grade pupils. In some cities there are armed guards or police on every floor of hotels to protect the guests.

  

  

Trains on the subways of New York and Chicago carry both uniformed and plainclothes cops, and still people are being murdered and raped before the eyes of panic-stricken passengers who dare not try and help. People are murdered on the street in front of 40 spectators, who watch from their apartments without any of them calling the police, because they "didn't know if the attackers were in collusion with the police," they told Life Magazine. Tourists return to Europe with "American neck" from continually sending anxious glances back over their shoulders.

  

  

This Nigerian student whom I lived with behind bars in Philadelphia's ghetto was so panic-stricken over conditions there that she tried to be sent home "to safety" before the end of her studies. Her statement would not have surprised me if it were not for the fact that she had just lived through the civil war in Nigeria.

  

  

People chain their bicycles to their sixth floor refrigerators.....and find both bicycle and refrigerator gone when they come home. The confinement of the ghetto is dehumanizing for all. In five of the homes I lived in there were armed robberies twice in the period I was there.

  

  

Society spends billions to cure the ill instead of educating us about the suffering our racism inflicts on ourselves.
A manufacturer I stayed with had made himself rich producing military equipment for the Vietnam War, but had now rearranged the entire production line to make burglary alarms and teargas guns as a direct result of the country's wasting such great resources fighting the Third World that the "war on poverty" at home had to be given up.

  

  

Everywhere we entrench ourselves against the oppressed. In New York, steel bars shot up over windows at the same speed that steel shrapnel had been spewed at poor Vietnamese. The more people struggle for a so-called "freedom" without social justice, the more they cut themselves off from it, and many Americans can today look at huge army billboards from their own steel barred fortification.

  

  

Slowly but steadily the iron curtain closed in on America. Our stores are turned into closed steel cages. The wealthy can naturally afford more discreet things and invest billions in invisible electronic fortifications between themselves and the ghetto. The more electronic rays replace trust, the more the system closes itself.

  

  

We arm ourselves to death. Many homes have one, two, three, and even four pistols and guns with which to "defend themselves against the niggers" as this family in Michigan said. We know we are digging our own graves, and yet change them to fortified trenches. I don't know what is most shocking: that there are Americans so desperately poor that they can kill for a dollar or that millions of Americans are willing and ready to take a human life just to defend a TV. 130 years ago the value of a life at least could be said to be $1,400.

  

  

As much as I love Americans I could never reconcile it with the fact that the majority of them are secret killers at heart. Now when the old communist countries have given up capital punishment to join the democratic European Union, we realize that America could never join. It is the only developed nation that still supports the civilized communal savagery of capital punishment which is increasingly being widened to include public approval of vigilante on-the-spot executions of unconvicted criminals.

  

  

People intuitively know that they are in the process of digging their own graves, but cannot do anything about it and therefore try to see them as fortified trenches.
The more cars (for lonesome flight rather than the cozy strolling of streets as in Europe), the more weapons (rather than communication), the more fortresses (instead of sharing), the more military build up (instead of sharing with the Third World through its proposed New Economic World Order, WTO, Kyoto treaty etc.) ... all the more does private industry enrich itself on this systematic subversion of society.

  

  

The higher the barriers big business constructs between people, the higher the stocks rise on Wall Street... and in the process people are either made insensitive to or begin to rationalize sights such as this woman standing hungry outside the Stock Exchange... Nowhere have I found the art of rationalizing poverty and racism mastered to such a degree (not least by the intellectuals) as in America.

  

  

When people do not fortify justice it becomes necessary to justify force. The more they try to shoot out a short cut to freedom and security, the more society's actions are revealed as the escapism and desperation of the ghetto. Just as those imprisoned in the ghetto look for quick escapes into awe-inspiring SUVs and violence, so the greater society escapes from its problems by the use of even more awe-inspiring tanks and military violence against the ghetto instead of changing the system creating the ghetto. Such a banana-republic mentality leaves deaths after even the smallest riots (while police in England were not even allowed to use rubber pellets in the riot in 1982).

  

  

It is hard to glimpse the Statue of Liberty behind the huge pile-up of military ordnance - directly stolen from the needy, as Eisenhower forewarned. The more we try to shoot out a short cut to freedom and security, the more we resemble the escapism and desperation of the ghetto.

  

  

How really free are we in God's own country when it has become necessary for thousands of people to watch the Statue of Liberty from behind barred and grated windows?

  

  

Her watchful gaze - which always looked the other way from the enslavement of blacks - is increasingly being replaced by Big Brother's ever-present eye.

  

 

In every building you walk into, every elevator, every store... everywhere you are watched. Under the pretext of fighting crime (or "terrorism"), again and again the anxiety-ridden and alienated population seems to fight the constitution itself.

  

 

In one respect America is dangerously close to totalitarianism. Everywhere it is swarming with secret police. Nobody, absolutely nobody, except those like me who have hitchhiked around in big and small American towns, have any idea how many of these plainclothes cops there really are.

  

  

They were constantly stopping me. Even in small sleepy towns in the South I could, on occasion, discover up to twenty in a single night.

  

 

The more the system closes, the more trust and hope in the actions and values of the whole of society are disappearing. Fear is superseding reason and stifling our concern and compassion for fellow citizens. The criminal escape acts are spreading in society, as we are corrupted by our violence against the ghetto.

  


 


Los Angeles two days after the riots in 1992

 

A ghetto cannot be eliminated from the inside; it is created and perpetuated by outside forces. Paralyzed by fear and violence, the entire society begins to resemble a ghetto as we increasingly feel that we are operating in a closed system in which we have lost our imagined freedom.

  

 

A system which (on fundamental racial issues) cannot he changed from the inside because for generations it has deformed and molded people to such a degree that they cannot imagine alternatives... nor would they (in the short run) he able to live with them if they could.

  

A little background information on this chapter which was written in 1984 as a warning to Europeans not to go down the same path. Unfortunately Europeans went ahead and started a similar ghettoization of it's Muslim immigrants with the same resulting anger and crime from the victims:

And so the entire society becomes a closed system in the same way the South was before 1865 and before 1954 - a system which in spite of its liberals and activists was unable to change from within. It was not least Gunnar Myrdal's theory of the vicious circle that in 1954 helped convince the Supreme Court to rule against school segregation which had the well-known snowball effect giving proof to the theory: White prejudice and discrimination keep the blacks low in standards of living, health, and education. This, in its turn, gives support to white prejudice. White prejudice and the resulting black standards thus "mutually" support or reinforce each other. If things remain as they are, this means that the two happen to balance each other. If some outside forces could cause discrimination to be decreased, this would cause a betterment of the black situation, which might decrease white prejudice still more, which would again allow the black situation to improve, and so on. If instead discrimination increases, the vicious circle will spiral downward. Northern outside interference in the Southern closed system did not break the circle. It only found a new, higher level of balance, raising the median black income in the South from 45% to 55% of white income. In the final analysis the great progress of the 60's may have come about as a result of the international decolonization efforts and the worldwide economic boom after World War II. In 1972 new outside forces interfered. OPEC tried to break out of' the Third World ghetto by charging more realistic prices for oil. The industrial countries built up on exploited cheap energy were therefore thrust into prolonged recession which made the vicious circle for American blacks start spiraling downward. White Americans have been conditioned to think that things can only move forward. However, for blacks there is no reason for such optimism. Twice before they have seen their few gains taken away from them. In 1691 and in 1877 after reconstruction they were thrust into long periods of downward spiraling. In the 1970's their perception of' America as a closed system for them was once again cemented and without outside influence it could very well remain so for the next hundred years. Whites hold the power to eliminate the ghettos, but as long as they are trapped in the enslaving pattern of well-coordinated infernalism and paternalism I see no reason why this would happen. We don't understand the underclass monster they continuously create - therefore turn their backs to it and destroy their own society in the process.

  

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