punishment

Sanctioning Syria

By Chris Ray

This was originally published at Monthly Review.

The United Nations was willing to pay for doors, windows and electrical wiring in Alaa Dahood’s apartment but not for repairs to her living room wall torn open by a mortar strike. That was deemed to be ‘reconstruction’—an aid category forbidden in Syria. “My mother and I used our savings to fix the wall ourselves,” Alaa, a primary school English teacher, told me.

Alaa lives with her widowed mother Walaa in Saif al-Dawla, a suburb of Aleppo that became a frontline between government troops and opposition forces in 2012. After their low-rise housing block came under sniper fire the family fled to a government-controlled sector of the city and, later, to the relative safety of Damascus.

“The stress was too much for my father; he was a nervous man and he died from a heart attack in 2013. My mother and I came home in 2017, when Aleppo was safe,” Alaa said as she served spiced coffee in the living room of her modest two-bedroom home.

More than 521,000 war-displaced Aleppans had returned home by the end of 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported. Very few found their properties undamaged. However, in all of Syria, only 42,000 residents got UN ‘rehabilitation’ aid—the assistance category that covered Alaa’s repairs. UN help was largely restricted to short-term emergency relief—the only aid category acceptable to major UN donors who oppose the continued rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

Alaa got no help with her wall but her UN-financed windows are at least made of glass. In Hanano, a suburb of eastern Aleppo previously under rebel control, a young security guard, Mohamed, showed me his family apartment, which overlooks a football field crammed with the skeletons of burned-out buses and cars. Mohamed installed windows made of plastic sheeting last winter, when the temperature fell below freezing. He got the plastic in a UN-supplied Do-It-Yourself ‘shelter kit’ that included pinewood for window frames, fiberboard for doors, expansion foam, nails and tools.

“Plastic is no good for winter but it is better than nothing,” said Mohamed, who did not want his last name published. Despite a severe fuel shortage he managed to buy enough heating oil to warm the bedroom of his frail 13-year-old sister, Asma, for a couple of hours every night. Mohamed has replaced plastic with glass in one window and is putting aside money to do the rest.

Shelter kits come under the heading of short-term emergency aid. The UNHCR says the kits covered about 92,000 Syrians in 2018—more than twice the number who benefited from home rehabilitation. The UN values shelter kits at around US$500 but recipients often sell them for much less or burn the wood for fuel, according to Syrian agencies that implement internationally-funded programs.

One of the UN’s biggest Syrian partners, the Greek Orthodox aid agency Gopa-Derd, refuses to distribute the kits. “We won’t be a part of putting plastic sheets over window frames where there should be glass. Plastic sheets are not going to fix a hole in a wall or keep a family warm in winter,” said Sara Savva, Gopa-Derd’s deputy director.

Another UN partner, the Syria Trust for Development, which managed Alaa’s repairs, wants shelter kit money redirected to rehabilitation. “We did 1000 shelter kits in 2017 then decided no more. They are a waste of time and resources,” said the Trust’s Aleppo director, Jean Maghamez. He added, however, that the Trust’s rehabilitation program covered only 200 Aleppo apartments in 2019 due to UN funding cuts.

A March 2019 joint statement by the governments of the  U.S., UK, France and Germany reaffirmed their opposition to any reconstruction assistance in Syria until “a credible, substantive, and genuine political process is irreversibly underway.” The UN’s position was set out in a 2018 internal directive from its Office of Political Affairs, then headed by a  U.S. career diplomat, Jeffrey Feltman. “Only once there is a genuine and inclusive political transition negotiated by the parties, would the UN be ready to facilitate reconstruction,” it said.

A negotiated settlement remains distant, however. A UN-backed peace plan drawn up in 2012 is moribund. Separate talks overseen by Assad’s patrons Russia and Iran together with Turkey, which supports elements of the jihadist opposition have also made little progress.

Use of UN funds to rebuild the wall of Alaa Dahood’s apartment would have risked crossing what UN staff in Syria refer to as a “red line” between rehabilitation and reconstruction. Neither term is clearly defined but the line is zealously policed. UN staff in Damascus told me they frequently field questions from governments, other UN donors and “human rights monitors” alert to any infringement of the reconstruction ban.

June report by New York-based Human Rights Watch wagged a disapproving finger at the UN Development Program (UNDP), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Oxfam and others for having rebuilt water sanitation networks and healthcare facilities in government-held Syria. Any project aimed at “rebuilding and sustainable restoration of infrastructure, services, housing, facilities, and livelihoods can carry risks of entanglement in serious human rights abuses,” Human Rights Watch claimed.

To avoid breaching the reconstruction ban, the Syria Trust generally will not rebuild any apartment wall with a hole bigger than two square meters, its lead engineer in Aleppo, Ragheb Al Mudarres, told me. Gopa-Derd wants rehabilitation broadly interpreted to allow homes to be made safe for occupation. “If there is a hole in the wall we block it, if water drips from the ceiling we fix it, if there is no door or windows we install them. Some donors consider this to be reconstruction—we don’t,” Sara Savva said.

UN employees say they follow an unwritten guideline to avoid work on any public building with more than 30 percent structural damage. In one case, the reconstruction ban obliged agencies to reject a neighborhood committee’s plea for help to rebuild three schools. Funds were available, the proposal was technically sound, and the schools were in eastern Aleppo—once hailed by regime-change supporters as a bastion of revolution.

Across the country, 1.75 million children have no school to attend and the need in eastern Aleppo is particularly acute. However, its population apparently can expect little help from former foreign sponsors who walked away after the shooting stopped.

The UN describes Syria’s humanitarian needs as “staggering.” About 5.6 million people have gone abroad—about two thirds as refugees—and about 80 percent of the 18 million who remain need assistance. One third of the housing stock has been destroyed, leaving more than six million people without a permanent home.

Some 7.6 million suffer from an acute lack of clean drinking water and 4.3 million women and children are malnourished. Previously eradicated diseases like polio, typhoid, measles and rubella have returned and one in three children misses out on life-saving vaccines. About 1.5 million people live with permanent, conflict-related disabilities.

In this environment, restrictions on foreign aid are onerous but trade and financial sanctions are lethal. They have “contributed to the suffering of the Syrian people” by blocking imports of anti-cancer drugs, antibiotics and rotavirus vaccines, medical equipment, food, fuel, crop seeds, water pumps and other essentials, the UN Special Rapporteur on sanctions, Idriss Jazairy, reported in 2018. Jazairy called the sanctions “pernicious” and said they obstructed efforts to restore schools, hospitals, clean water, housing and employment.

U.S. measures are the most punitive of overlapping sanctions regimes also applied by the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia and others. In the words of a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, the U.S. is waging “economic war” to “strangle to death” Assad’s government. The casualties are the poor, the sick and children—not the political and business elite.

In Damascus, rebel rockets no longer fall on residential districts that have remained loyal to the government through almost nine years of war. However, rather than celebrating the relative safety, Syrians I meet are exhausted by prolonged and worsening economic hardship. “I lived with war every day for seven years and got used to it. I can’t get used to not being able to feed my family,” a state employee said.

EU and U.S. fuel embargoes have hit hard, with nationwide electricity shortages and long queues for rationed petrol and bottled gas. Pharmaceuticals are even harder to obtain than fuel. The World Health Organization says sanctions block the import of anti-cancer drugs, which were subsidized at low prices by the public health system before the war. Sara Savva said medicine for diabetes or heart disease, when available, could cost an average employee a month’s salary. “Forget about chemotherapy or cancer medication—that’s ridiculously expensive,” she said.

Medical equipment is obsolete because the health ministry can’t import parts or update software. Doctors at a major Damascus hospital told Reuters about 10 percent of patients suffering from kidney failure are dying due to the hospital’s inability to source parts for European-made dialysis machines.

Humanitarian exemptions from sanctions supposedly exist but are difficult and costly to obtain. In any case, financial sanctions have isolated the country from global banking and payment systems, which is why foreign ATM and credit cards are useless in Syria. Even international aid organizations are forced to carry cash across the Lebanese border in vehicles or use informal money traders. So tightly drawn is the noose that European banks have refused to open bank accounts for UN staff when the word “Syria” appeared in their job title.

The UN has not endorsed sanctions but their effect on humanitarian aid has been “chilling,” Jazairy said. Exporters, transport companies, and insurers have refused to do any business with Syria for fear of inadvertently violating U.S. sanctions, which are extraterritorial. They apply to any transaction which involves a U.S. connection, such as goods with more than 10 percent  U.S. content, or use of  U.S. dollars.

In one case, European manufacturers declined to tender for supply of wheelchairs to the UN in Syria. The market is potentially big—about 86,000 Syrians have reportedly lost limbs in the conflict—but not lucrative enough to justify the risk of losing access to  U.S. customers. In his 2018 report, Jazairy argued for the release of Syrian central bank assets “frozen” by the EU. His suggestion that the money be set aside to pay for wheat and animal fodder imports to meet the “urgent survival needs of the population” was ignored.

The UN says its Syrian operations merely complement the work of state bodies, which are primarily responsible for meeting the humanitarian emergency. However, the 2019 national budget was set at less than US$9 billion—half the 2011 level—and actual expenditure is almost certainly lower. In eight years of war, GDP has fallen by between one half and two thirds. During December 2019, the Syrian pound fell to around six percent of its pre-war value.

The government still subsidizes fuel, bread, rice and other staples, but, with ministry budgets shrinking, welfare services are increasingly delivered by local non-government organizations such as the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, Gopa-Derd and the Syria Trust. In the Aleppo suburb of Hanano, the Trust runs a UNHCR-funded community center housed in a former Islamic State prison. On the day I visited, a teacher was helping children to model the Earth’s relationship to the Sun with the use of globes and torches. Legal aid was on offer to divorced women seeking child custody and a female doctor was seeing patients.

The center also provides what its English teacher, Walaa Kanawati called a “psychological counselling service.” She said it was in high demand from parents worried about children’s behavior and women subjected to domestic violence. According to Kanawati, the center spends a lot of time trying to teach children and young adults how to disagree without fighting. “We role-play two individuals or two teams and help each side to defend their opinion,” she said. “We pose topics that come out of society, like early marriage, which is a big problem in this area. We’ve got mothers as young as 15.”

The Trust was also holding remedial English and math classes for children who missed years of school when living in rebel-held districts. Kanawati said those children struggle to keep up with lessons and often drop out of school.

Alaa Dahood, the primary school teacher from Saif al-Dawla also talked about the challenge of educating students from what she called “the other side.” “They are two, three and four years behind other children and I have to stay back after class to teach them to read and write,” she said. Some got no schooling in opposition-controlled zones while others were only given religious instruction. But, “parents from the other side usually appreciate education. They want their children to be as good as their classmates,” Alaa said.

In Damascus Gopa-Derd operates a UN-funded community center in the eastern suburb of Dweila. The area is an uneasy mix of residents subjected to years of mortar fire from neighboring Ghouta, a jihadist wartime stronghold, and Ghouta refugees who fled air strikes leading up to the army’s takeover in 2018.

Center staff try to promote integration by making services available to both groups. They also encourage boys and girls to attend classes together. Families displaced from opposition areas typically believe sexes should be segregated at a young age and “only boys are important,” said Remi Al Khouri, a Gopa-Derd manager. She said single-sex primary school classes were unknown in Syria before “the crisis,” adding: “We want to show that it is normal for boys and girls to go to class together and play together.”

In the nearby suburb of Kashkoul, another Gopa-Derd community center was focused on combatting sexual abuse of children. According to the center’s manager, Lina Saker, child abuse got worse during the war. I observed a class of boys and girls aged between five and ten engrossed in an exercise on “body safety and personal boundaries”; a female teacher used a wall chart to indicate the body’s “no touch” areas. “Some of these children are already victims and we want them to know it is unacceptable for people to touch certain parts of their body,” Saker said.

Getting children off the streets and into school would make them less vulnerable but displaced families often rely on sons and daughters to earn income. The center is trying to help children as young as nine who sell bread on the street, prepare shisha pipes in cafes, collect rubbish for recycling and help out on construction sites. It arranged medical treatment and schooling for a 14-year-old girl whose health suffered from her work in a charcoal factory.

While the body safety class was in session, the children’s mothers were in a nearby room talking about early marriage. Most had married before the legal age of 18 and a center employee was encouraging them to open up about the physical, emotional and material consequences. “We want to persuade them to stop their own daughters from marrying early and to give them a good education,” Saker said.

Melting the Ambiguity and Power of ICE

By Canyon Ryan

In less than a week, the people of the world have forced the President of the United States of America to no longer allow detained immigrants to intentionally be separated from their family members. Such an inhumane practice has been permitted at more than 400 detention facilities supervised by ICE agents in the United States.

What this piece aims to do is delineate ICE as an organization and provide a critical analysis of U.S. foreign-policy initiatives, the proposed solution to the ICE facility attention, and an honest call to action.


ICE: Its History and Functions

When discussing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there is an ambiguity in consideration to its foundation. We know that ICE is the problem, but what is ICE?

ICE was born in 2003, in accordance with the Homeland Security Act of 2002 following the events of September 11, 2001. Since, ICE has become the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, the second largest body of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the second largest "criminal investigative agency" in the U.S. (trailing the FBI). There are more than 20,000 ICE employees in over 400 offices in the U.S. and in 46 countries abroad.

ICE has two primary arms: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Each are equally important.

There are approximately 6,500 HSI agents. HSI agents have the authority to enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act ( Title 8 ), U.S. Customs Laws ( Title 19 ), general federal crimes ( Title 18 ), Controlled Substances Act ( Title 21 ), as well as Titles 5, 6, 12, 22, 26, 28, 31, 46, 49, and 50 of the U.S. Code .

The HSI agents are to investigate national-security threats such as human rights violations, human trafficking, drug trafficking, document and benefit fraud, transnational gang activity, cash smuggling, money laundering, and the like.

Their international offices are used to combat transnational criminal activities and work with governments abroad to prevent such activities from entering the U.S. This policy framework can be considered something similar to the "National Security States" used in Central America to repress what was then considered a communist infiltration, known as the supposed "Real Terror Network". Today, we must keep in mind that we've passed the "end of history". Communism is out, terrorism is in. With terrorism at the frontline is bred the dehumanization of the migrants, no longer the Reds. The war on communism has morphed into the war on terror; and ICE, with its HSI agents, are spearheading this new war.

There are other functions of the HSI, but this synopsis should do. Next, we will investigate the ERO.

The ERO are the ones primarily responsible for the current national spotlight. Their function is to capture illegal immigrants and assure their removal from the U.S. In the time between this removal, the families being expedited are held in government and "charity-sponsored" detention camps, or in the case of the Brownsville Detention facility in Texas, a shelled-out Walmart.

The ERO has been strengthened by the Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g) , which allows ICE to cooperate with state and local law enforcement agencies. In doing such, it authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to also work with state and local law enforcement agencies, permitting officers to perform immigration law enforcement functions. As such, ICE provides these law enforcement officers with the training to identify, process, and detain immigrants.

In detainment, the so-called aliens are placed in the detention centers (similar to jails) mentioned above. Something very important to note here is that, as of 2009, the U.S. Congress has mandated that ICE detention centers must have at least 34,000 people confined each night. Thus, by law and similar to prisons again, there is a requirement (quota) for detention.

Between 2003 and 2007, 107 people died in ICE custody. The New York Times reported that in some cases officials used their supervisory roles to cover up evidence of mistreatment and avoid media coverage of "substandard care or abuse". Between 2010 and 2017, The Intercept reported that 1,224 sexual assault complaints had been made in ICE detention facilities, with only 3% being investigated.


U.S. Foreign Policy: Fighting "Terrorism" with Terrorism

Considering the youth of ICE as an agency, as well the timing of its inception, ICE is undoubtedly a component of the "war on terror." Created by the Bush administration, emphasized and vastly expanded by the Obama administration, and now mushrooming under the Trump administration, we must recognize that ICE is part of a much larger conglomerate. While it is ICE that is attracting much attention, it is not just ICE that we should call into question. Its purpose is to refuse all "aliens" who are "infesting" the U.S., but it is simply a bullet in the gun.

We must see this segment of the government as piece of their new war against the people of the world. The wars that the U.S. have escalated abroad, causing mass refugee migration crises in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa, are primarily responsible for such successions. With the rise of climate change as well, we will soon have a world unstable to support current and expected living standards.

Clearly then, ICE's purpose is to fend off migrants and refugees developed from the wars promoted by the US's other militaristic forces. Last year, people were worried about Syrian refugees flooding the states. Today, the focus is back on the Mexican border. In the future, expect further crises in Africa. HSI operates abroad, they are the international eyes for the ERO. Working with both foreign and domestic law agencies, ICE has created in less than two decades a global force of supervision and detention.

This analysis goes along with the U.S. Commission on National Security which stated , "In the new era, sharp distinctions between `foreign' and `domestic' no longer apply." Accordingly, former President Barack Obama noted , "there is no distinction between homeland and national security". The importance here lies in the conundrum considering that U.S. foreign policy initiatives have been disastrous, for the soldiers sent abroad, for the world in general, and for democracy as a whole. The same values the U.S. government claims to represent in every war it initiates are those which it refuses to allow develop without its supervision, and what ICE and the quotes above illustrate is that the leaders of our country are very aware of their dwindling control over the masses, and specifically who the masses are that they must control. But this conundrum posed appears common knowledge, thus we begin to ponder why we keep making the same mistakes?

Simply put: the U.S. is the producer of terror. It is the producer of terror abroad and thus the engineer of the very terrorism it aims to fight. This is not the result of stupidity. This is its purpose. Such social stratification is ideal for the ruling class. If they can decimate countries abroad, they can go in and offer their assistance. This assistance of course comes with loans. Those loans of course come with interest. Yes, the U.S. is the most indebted nation, but it also makes its money by indebting other nations! These are not mistakes, they're markets.

The terrorism that the U.S. has promoted in the overthrow of governments in Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Haití, Greece, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and so on, is on a scale never seen in history. This is what the U.S., as the main facilitator of the global capitalist system, strives for. The U.S. just passed a $716 billion defense budget. The U.S. allowed the Pentagon to misplace $21 trillion in 17 years. Across the world, the U.S. has promoted right-wing, ultra-conservative, authoritarian regimes, reaping the benefits while the workers of these countries are murdered and forced to live at starvation wages. Even today, the U.S. operates with approximately 75% of the world's dictatorships. Our policy is not democracy, it is detention. Thus, the same military that caused many to flee their homelands is now being asked to detain them at home.

A quick historical contextualization of the "Mexican immigrant crisis" is needed. The U.S. under President James K. Polk went to war with Mexico over territory and conquered 525,000 acres of land in 1848. Afterwards, the Native Mexicans, now Americans, were exterminated by a California state-sponsored genocide that massacred over 80% of their population. Come 1914, the U.S. intervened after the Mexican Revolution, toppling the government in order to protect its imperial interests in Mexico's oil, mines, and railroads, which were predominantly owned by USAmericans. In 1938, after discussions of reparations which were not paid to Mexico after the U.S. invasion, Mexico decided it would nationalize its oil reserves. Consequently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided not to imperialistically intervene, though during the great depression the U.S. did expel between 400,000-2,000,000 Mexicans from the U.S. (60% of who were birthright citizens). In 1982, during the world oil crisis, the nearly 150% drop in oil's worth meant that Mexico's foreign debt more than doubled . This foreign debt was owed to the U.S.-sponsored World Bank. And after NAFTA passed in 1994, Mexico's government became so reliant on the U.S. that now over 88% of its exports go directly to its neighbor, the U.S.

NAFTA has made it more difficult for Mexican workers to organize, thus wages have plummeted and corruption has run wild in the country. This is perfect for the neocolonial empire as it creates an austere society, with money coming from the top to colonialists, who then protect those giving them money if threatened. By destabilizing Mexico, they allow the society to fight itself at the bottom, while the corrupted officials remain floating above the general public.

What CIA-trained forces did during Operation Condor in Central America has passed. The Japanese internment camps during World War II were temporary. But what they have being built now, these ICE detention facilities, they are here to stay. They are here to stay unless we stand up and fight back against such terror. We cannot become desensitized to these detention facilities, as we have with the creation of a military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the slaying of innocent young black men. We must fight.


Trump's Solution: A Crumb to the Beggars

President Trump recently signed an Executive Order that will no longer allow families to be separated unless criminal laws say otherwise. For this, I have seen liberal praise. We must reject such gains as "wins". Such an order goes along with another liberal argument I've seen that separating families in the detention facilities is morally wrong. Yes, indeed it is. But so is the blanket detention of non-violent immigrants. So is the containment, isolation, entrapment, and debilitation of so-called aliens. The liberal "resistance" seemingly wants us to settle for allowing them to be in cages so long as they are together in these cages.

What this Executive Order does not do is mend the separation that has already taken place. Moreover, it seeks to indefinitely detain these families-- calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to file a request in court to change the settlement in Flores v Reno. What's more, it calls for families to be detained at military facilities, as well. The same military that has brutalized the world, trained torturers, tortured others themselves, and killed on mass scale, is now being called upon to "care for" detained immigrants. This is a scary revelation. The average citizen cannot just walk on to military facility grounds. We cannot walk into jails for inspection, let alone military facilities. What they hid before, they will hide again.

Such detainment facilities are beyond just immoral, they are abhorrent. They are heinously inhumane and such institutions should not exist anywhere. There are borders today, yes. There are laws and rules, and there are important procedures in place to protect our citizens from potential terrorists. This, however, does not require the detention and deportation of all "illegal" families. In fact, prior to 2012, such a notion was not only unheard of, it was structurally impractical.


Our Solution: A Call to Action

The protest-blockade against the ICE facility in Portland, Oregon is unprecedented. Here, protesters have effectively shut down and ICE detention facility by sheer will of the human body. They blockaded the garages so that ICE vehicles could not exit. For a while, ICE employees even could not exit the facility. Eventually police were called in to escort them out of the building.

Such direct action should set as a reminder that we the people have the power. In numbers, when organized, we have the potential to shut down each facility in the U.S. Approximately 1,000 citizens surrounded the building, the garage, and even ICE employee's cars (provoking the police to arrest one demonstrator) in Portland. These protestors were so effective that the ICE center was actually shut down indefinitely, due to security concerns!

These protests were against Trump's separating of families. What is important is not allowing this Executive Order to calm the fire. We must fight ICE at every step, we must melt ICE. Starting with preventative care, we can help our immigrant communities know their rights by circulating literature on how to defend from ICE raids. It is also important that we verify when ICE is in the neighborhood and document it. We owe gratitude to Sam Lavigne, who doxxed the Linkedin profiles of the majority of people working as ICE agents. We now we know who our enemy is. We have the locations of ICE detention facilities (via ICE's own website), we know where they are stationed. What happened in Portland can just as easily happen in any US city!

We must take a stand. Times are ripe, people are awakened to the monstrosities of this administration because it is Trump, and because it is Trump it is profitable for the media to "uncover." The capitalists only think of money, not the substance. And this substance is accidentally revolutionizing our country. Come an economic collapse, which we are due for as it's been 10 years since the 2008 recession, the honest Left should and will be ready. We must begin organizing and fighting now, and it starts against ICE.

The Endless American Horror: Lynching and Police

By Devon Bowers

This article was originally published on AHTribune.com.

Please note that this article contains graphic descriptions of lynchings. Discretion is advised.



In 1918 Brook County, Georgia, a local plantation owner was killed by Sidney Johnson, a black man who had been leased out to the plantation via the convict lease system, in a dispute over unpaid wages. Upon hearing this, the white community went on a rampage and lynched not only Johnson, but anyone they thought to even be remotely involved in Johnson's decision. One of these men was Hayes Turner. Not only was he lynched, but also castrated.

Turner's wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant at the time, began to speak out against her husband's lynching; unfortunately, she too, became a victim. A white mob "hanged her by her feet, set her on fire, sliced her stomach open, and pulled out her baby, which was still alive." They stomped on the child's head, killing it. Then the mob "[took] the time to sew two cats in Mrs. Turner's stomach and making bets as to which one would climb out first."[1]

This can be described as nothing short of demonic. In many ways, even that fails to fully encompass the horror and pure wickedness of this event. Though, the only thing more horrid is that in a way, lynchings continue in the form of police murder.

Before delving into the connections between the aforementioned violence, it is imperative to first understand lynching. The origins of lynching truly lie in slavery where "there were numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or judicial processes. Justice depended solely upon the slaveholder." [2] Punishment ranged from lashings to family separation to mutilation and branding. The overall idea behind these actions were that black people were not human beings, in a way, they weren't even property, they were just things, lesser than both humans and animals. This mindset continued in the post chattel slavery era, where slavery took on the form of both the convict leasing and sharecropping systems respectively. Yet, it also took place in the form of mob violence against blacks.

There have been many explorations as to the reasoning behind lynching. E.M. Beck, a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, posited the argument that lynching was linked to the cotton markets. He argued that lynchings "[increased] during times of sparse cotton revenues, and declining with increasing cotton profits." The lack of profit from cotton led unemployed whites to want to replace black workers and that "Mob violence was a form of intimidation to facilitate this labor substitution." [3] While further studies have shown that fluctuations in cotton pricing don't explain lynching [4], it should be noted that white elites would have an interest in fueling white angst into hatred against blacks, effectively utilizing poor whites as foot soldiers in their mission to maintain the current racial and economic hierarchy.

The cause of lynching was first and foremost the culture of white supremacy that had existed for the past two centuries or so. Blacks became scapegoats for many of the problems that were going on and thus a subculture of violence that had arguably already taken root in the days of slavery, took on new form. "The existence of a subculture presupposes a complex pattern of norms, attitudes and actions" which "reflects 'a potent theme of violence current in the cluster of values that make up the life-style, the socialization process, [and] the interpersonal relationships of individuals living in similar conditions." [5] Effectively, violence becomes normalized and is used as a tool of to socialize and condition people as to how the society operates.

This normalization and conditioning can be seen in the form of the lynching. Lynchings were very much a community affair in which legal authorities seldom if ever got involved as "the judge, prosecutor, jurors and witnesses-all white-were usually in sympathy with the lynchers" and "local police and sheriffs rarely did anything to defend Negro citizens and often supported lynchings." [6] Newspapers as well were extremely biased in covering lynchings. "Southern editors often used sympathetic language in describing lynch mobs while reserving callous damnation for lynch victims. The southern press was extremely creative when it came to providing moral, if not legal, justification for the action of lynch mobs."[7]

We can see the affect that journalists had on the public's view of lynching in the case of the murder of the Hodges family in Statesboro, Georgia.

Henry and Claudia Hodges lived on a remote farm, near a black community, some of whom were the employees of the Hodges. Late on the night of July 28, 1904, two men saw the Hodges home aflame. They went to investigate and found the mutilated, charred remains of the entire family. The suspected motive was robbery as it was known that Hodges was better off than most farmers and it was even rumored that he possibly had several hundred dollars stashed away on his property.

The following morning, Bulloch County sheriff John Kendrick formed a group to hunt down the killers. After discovering strands of hair, a knife, a shoe, and tracks of mud, they were led to a small shack occupied by Paul Reed, a black laborer. While Paul denied involvement, he, along with his wife Harriet, were arrested and taken to jail. When being interrogated, Harriet broke down and revealed that her husband and another black man, Paul Cato, had planned to rob the Hodges. The shoe matched the one found on the Hodges farm and blood stains on his clothing seemed to seal the deal with regards to Paul Reed's guilt, however, no money was found. The sheriff also arrested thirteen other blacks who lived in the general vicinity.

Despite the lack of hard evidence in the form of money, newspapers assumed Reed's guilt. The Macon Telegraph wrote "The wholesale butchery . . . of the Hodges family near Statesboro by dehumanized brutes adds another to the long list of horrors perpetrated in this state since the emancipation of the African slaves in 1865" and noted that "the people of [Statesboro] ... displayed great moral courage and forbearance in permitting the perpetrators to escape summary punishment without the forms of law,"[8] a statement clearly hinting that lynching was on the table as an option. Others went even further in their demonization of the alleged perpetrators, such as the editor of Statesboro News who penned "Good farmers awoke to the fact that they are living in constant danger, and that human vampires live in their midst, only awaiting the opportunity to blot out their lives." [9] Language such as this only served to heighten white anxiety and fears that a black uprising had occurred in response to white mistreatment, something that had been the in the backs of their minds since the institution of slavery began.

The media actively went and pushed erroneous and misleading evidence, such as was with Morning News which stated that Reed had made a 'partial confession' to the murders, despite there being a lack of legal evidence to support the assertion. The Statesboro News continued to utilize inflammatory language, publishing an article which said in part "Their guilt has been established beyond a doubt - every chain has been traced and all lead to their door." [10] Additional stories argued that the rape of both Mrs. Hodges and their daughter Katy, where the real motives for the motive for the murders, again without the slightest shred of evidence.

Newspapers also noted that Reeds and Cato belonged to a distinct subset of blacks who were lazy and shiftless. This contrasts with the blacks who 'know their place' in society and often work on white farms. The only reason this was even discussed was because there were rumors floating around that the Hodges family may have been killed due to Mr. Hodges being too friendly with blacks, something that only aided to reinforce the region's racial caste system and conjure images of murderous black people who would attack whites were they to let their guard down.

An Atlanta News editorial minced few words in its character analysis: "It is true that the negroes in the turpentine campus of south Georgia are in the main a lot of irresponsible and half-savage vagabonds, apparently hopeless to the redeeming efforts of civilization, and that their presence makes a continual menace and threat to the peace and safety of the people."[11]

On August 15, the court case finally got underway. Superior Court Judge Alexander Daley was forbidden by Georgia law to request a change in court venue, despite his wanting to as to possibly give people time to 'cool off.' This was actually dangerous in some ways as such changes were often used by mobs as an excuse to lynch blacks on the grounds that they may have a chance to 'escape justice.'

When the trial began, the press continued to present rumor as fact. The Statesboro News reported that Reed had admitted to being part of a gang of blacks who were roaming the Bulloch County countryside, robbing, raping, and killing whites. Once again this increased the amount of fear in whites and put them more dead-set on lynching. It didn't help that throngs of whites were milling about outside the courthouse.

The actual trial was incredibly brief, lasting less than a day and a half, with Reed's and Cato's respective defenses lasting barely eight minutes, both men plead innocent. Still, the court sentenced them to hanging. As soon as this was done, the white mobs that had been surrounding the courthouse burst in and took both men, making no effort to hide their identities, despite the fact that soldiers (without any ammunition) had been dispatched to protect the men. Both men were beaten and eventually doused in kerosene and set ablaze and dead by 3:30 pm.

Many newspapers actively defended the lynching. The Forest Blade published an editorial which argued "While we will not say we are in favor of lynching principles, there are crimes - and this is one of them - that fully justified the act," similarly another editorial in the Sparta Ishmelite wrote "What society does not do for them [Georgia's whites], efficiently, they do for themselves." [12] The press played a major role in increasing tensions and outright encouraging lynchings, a serious act which helped to normalize the very act itself.

The normalization of lynching was rampant in Southern society. In 1893 in Paris, Texas, a black man by the name of Henry Smith was lynched for allegedly killing and raping the sheriff's daughter. Smith's lynching was in that a spectacle was made of it. It was the first "blatantly public, actively promoted lynching of a southern Black by a large crowd of southern whites with features such as 'the specially chartered excursion train, the publicly sold photographs, and the wide circulated, unabashed retelling of the event by one of the lynchers.'" [13] It should be examined in detail that there were a number of "event-like themes, such as a float, carnival, and parade" all of which indicates "that within the act of justice, the structures of entertainment were organized. […] In addition, the souvenir scrambling for burnt remains as well as promotional materials for acquisition or purchase provides a similar semblance to paraphernalia purchased at modern-day sporting events." [14]

Thus, what we see is within the context of lynching, there was also an aspect of entertainment and even revelry, as if it was something to be celebrated and loved. The squabbling over Smith's remains reinforces the unbroken idea from slavery that black people aren't human beings, but rather just things, in this case a trophy.

The situation went even further in the case of Jesse Washington, a 17 year old mentally disabled boy who was accused of murdering a white woman and subject to a kangaroo court. Children were even bought to view his horrific lynching:

Fifteen thousand men, women and children packed the square. They climbed up poles and onto the tops of cars. . . . Children were lifted up by their parents in the air. Washington was castrated, and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the iron chain that lifted him above the fire of boxes and sticks. Wailing, the boy attempted to climb the skillet hot chain. For this the men cut off his fingers. The executioners repeatedly lowered the boy into the flames and hoisted him out again. With each repetition, a mighty shout [from the crowd] was raised. [15]

It is in acts such as this, with the involvement of children and, as with Smith's lynching, the selling of Washington's remains as if they were memorabilia, that the murder of black people becomes normalized and something beyond a source of maintaining racial hierarchy, something akin to a form of entertainment. Among this murderfest, though, there were those who fought back such as Ida B. Wells.

Wells was a black woman who was mainly focused on battling racial discrimination and penning articles. This changed in 1892, "when a close childhood friend of hers, Thomas Moss, was lynched" in Memphis [16] Wells was of the mindset that lynching was an overreaction by whites against rapists, however, her views quickly changed given the fact that Moss was lynched for defending his grocery store from armed whites and being lynched for the simple act of self-defense. On top of this, Memphis law enforcement didn't even bother to lift a finger to arrest the lynchers, who were publicly known.

Wells took a bit of an academic-esque approach to the situation, thinking that if lynching were exposed as the incarnation of racial hatred it was, it would no longer be socially acceptable. For three months, she traveled around the South investigating lynchings and interviewing witnesses. She found that not only were Black men lynched for having consensual relationships with white women, but also virtually all lynchings became about rape after the lynching went public. She took her information and published a pamphlet entitled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Eventually due to threats on her life, she fled Memphis and moved to Chicago, where she continued to write and speak out against lynching. Still, there were others who took a more hands on, self-defense approach to lynching as took place in Decatur, IL.

On June 3, 1893, in Decatur, IL, a black day labor by the name of Samuel L. Bush who had been accused of rape, was taken from the Macon County jail and lynched by a white mob after they had went on a rampage searching for him from March 31 to June 2. During this time, rather than meet with members of the black community to discuss Bush's situation, "State's Attorney Isaac R. Mills, Decatur Mayor David Moffett, Deputy Sheriff Harry Midkiff, and Decatur Marshal William Mason were meeting with Charles B. Britton and Charles M. Fletcher, the leaders of the vigilantes." They attempted to appease the leaders, with Mills stating that if Bush wasn't sentenced to death, "it would then be time to resort to extreme measures." [17]

Despite days of lynching rumors floating around, the authorities allowed for nearly one thousand people to gather across from the jail where Bush was being held and made no effort to move or in any way ensure Bush's safety. Just before 2 AM, "a mob composed of some of the county's leading citizens broke Sam Bush out of jail and lynched him." [18]

In response to the lynching, Wilson B. Woodford, the only black lawyer in town that Bush had hired, published an open letter to blacks living in Decatur, urging them to attend a mass meeting where a strategy for dealing with the lynching would be formed. At the meeting, Woodford advocated taking the legal route, pushing the state attorney, the same one who had been complicit in Bush's lynching, to take action. Some, such as Edward Jacobs, rejected it and pushed for armed blacks to go themselves and arrest Bush's murderers. The resolutions committee backed Woodford's strategy and messages were sent to both the governor and state attorney.

Woodford and Jacobs were coming from two separate worlds. Woodford, having a legal background, "was predisposed to distinguish between the law and enforcers of the law. Woodford, like other liberal race men and women, believed that racial prejudice and contempt for law and order were the twin causes of lynching" whereas Jacobs questioned this method of thinking. Jacobs acknowledged the cozy relationship between lynchers and the police and knew that "knew the authorities had mobilized the vigilantes to help them in capturing Bush but had rejected African-American support either to protect Bush or to arrest his murderers." [19]

Interestingly enough, the two strategies would merge as both Woodford and Jacobs were members of the National Afro-American League, an organization that push for black development and fight against white responses to said development. NAAL "combined the pre-eminent philosophy of self-help and racial solidarity with the protest tactics of legalism, direct action, and violent self-help."[20]

A year later, James Jackson, a black male porter, was accused of raping a white woman under questionable circumstances. The father of the woman was pushing for Jackson's lynching and stated that help was coming from Mt. Zion. This situation would turn out rather differently than Bush's.

Blacks controlled the streets surrounding the jail. They could be seen in doorways, under stair wells and behind wagons, armed and ready for action. Other African-Americans patrolled the streets scrutinizing whites who happened to be out at that late hour. And unlike at the protest meeting, at least two black women participated. [21]

They continued to patrol the streets around the courthouse, the police didn't attempt to intervene, and there were no attempts to lynch Jackson.

As the case with Bush shows, the police themselves were many times the very ones who were, at best, complicit (not that that truly matters), and at worst, active participants in lynchings. This shouldn't be surprising as not only were the police entrenched in the same racial mindset as the lynchers, but also the purpose of the police was (and is) a tool of social control, especially against black people.

The police themselves came out of slavery as "slave patrols and night watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities." [22] In fact, in 1871 Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, "which prohibited state actors from violating the Civil Rights of all citizens in part because of law enforcements' involvement with the infamous group. "[23] (emphasis added) The police themselves oftentimes were directly involved in lynchings such as with the case of Austin Callaway, a sixteen year old boy.

Callaway was shot and killed in LaGrange, Georgia on September 8, 1940, having just a day earlier been accused of assaulting a white woman. He was arrested and taken to the local jail. Later that night, six men, one of them armed, went into the jail, forced the jailer to open the door, and murdered Callaway.[24] Though the killers were never found, it is known that the police were personally involved. It was noted in 2017 by LaGrange's police chief, Louis M. Dekmar, in an apology regarding Callaway's murder. Specifically, Dekmar said "I sincerely regret and denounce the role our Police Department played in Austin's lynching, both through our action and our inaction." [25] Callaway's story is just one in many[26] where police were directly or indirectly involved in lynchings. It is this historical backdrop in which police actively murder black people that today's police murders continue.

With lynchings, the body would hang for days as both a reminder to other blacks to 'stay in their place' but also a part of the aforementioned spectacle. This spectacle continues as can be seen with "the fact that Michael Brown's body was left on the street for hours after he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson," something "that points to just how little has changed in American race relations since the days of Jim Crow." [27] Leaving Brown's body out to languish was an illustration of the lack of concern and decency the Ferguson police department had for him and is reminiscent of leaving a lynch victim's body out for all to see, to remind everyone where black people stood on the racial hierarchy: the bottom.

The media, too, plays a role in police killings as they did during lynchings. Once again, the Michael Brown case puts this in stark view. Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, described him in disproportionate and even inhuman terms.

"When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan," Wilson, who is 6′ 4″ and 210 lbs., said of Brown, who was 6′ 4″ and 292 lbs. at the time of his death. […]He said Brown tried to get his fingers inside the trigger. "And then after he did that, he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked." [28]

Not only are black people described in nonhuman terms, but there is a constant implication that
they deserve to be shot due to past transgressions. In the case of Akai Gurley, "The New York Daily News ran a headline, Akai Gurley had criminal record, innocent when shot by cop, which they later switched out for ' Protesters call for arrest of rookie cop who shot Akai Gurley as victim's sister says he didn't deserve to die . '"[29] There is also guilt by association. When twelve year old Tamir Rice was killed by the police, the media bought up the fact that the family's lawyer had "also defended the boy's mother in a drug trafficking case" [30] and that Rice's father had a history of domestic violence. [31] Regularly, the media brings up information that has nothing to do with the actual incident in question, but actively works to defame and sully the victim's name.

Where there once were slave owners and slave catchers, the KKK, and lynch mobs, they have all now "become largely replaced by state agencies such as the criminal justice system, and local and federal police." [32] In August 2016, the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent went on a mission to the United States. In their conclusion on their findings, they wrote: "Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching. Impunity for State violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency." [33]

This assessment is quite correct, especially within the ideas of the spectacle and normalization. While there may not be a sports theme to current police murders, there is a spectacle in and of itself in the near constant sharing of videos of black people dying at the hands of police and the footage being played again and again on the nightly news. While one shouldn't discount that videos are being shared to raise awareness and may very well get people involved in activism, at the same time by the videos being shared and viewed over and over, it can very well create a situation where it the death of black people is normalized and an immunity of sorts built up to it. As writer Feliks Garcia notes

To witness the final moments of someone's life is not supposed to be a regular experience, yet it feels like every week, we're presented with a new video of a different unarmed black man-or child-killed by police.

With the reach of social media, each of these videos is viewed ad nauseum, and you have to ask what purpose this serves. Who needs to see these videos at this point?[34]

Due to the constant viewing of black people dying at the hands of the police, coupled with the media's twisted narratives, seeing black people die becomes a normal occurrence.

The ongoing police murders of black people draw strong parallels to lynchings: from the involvement of the police to the utter dearth of justice to the larger social implications. It is both a tragedy and a nightmare, an endless horror.


Notes

[1] This American Life, Suitable For Childrenhttps://www.thisamericanlife.org/627/transcript

[2] Robert L. Zangrando, About Lynchinghttp://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm

[3] E. M. Beck, "The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market For Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882-1930," American Sociological Review 55:4 (August 1990), pg 526

[4] James W. Clarke, "Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South," British Journal of Political Science 28:2 (April 1998), pg 272

[5] Clarke, pg 275

[6] Robert A. Gibson, The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880-1950 , Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute, http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html

[7] Richard M. Perloff, "The Press and Lynchings of African Americans," Journal of Black Studies 30:3 (January 2000), pg 320

[8] Reed W. Smith, "Southern Journalists and Lynching: The Statesboro Case Study," Journalism and Communication Monographs 7:2 (2005), pg 63

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid, pg 64

[11] Ibid, pg 65

[12] Ibid, pg 70

[13] Rasul A. Mowatt, "Lynching as Leisure: Broadening Notions of a Field," American Behavioral Scientist 56:10 (August 2012), pg 1371

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid, pg 1376

[16] Amii Larkin Barnard, "The Application of Critical Race Feminism to the Anti-Lynching Movement: Black Women's Fight against Race and Gender Ideology, 1892-1920," UCLA Women's Law Journal 3:1 (January 1993), pg 15

[17] Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "A Warlike Demonstration,' Legalism, Armed Resistance, and Black Political Mobilization in Decatur, Illinois, 1894-1898," The Journal of Negro History 83:1 (Winter 1998), pg 54

[18] Ibid

[19] Cha-Jua, pg 57

[20] Ibid

[21] Cha-Jua, pg 59

[22] Victor E. Kappeler, A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing

[23] Ibid

[24] Northeastern University Law School, Austin Callawayhttp://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/georgia/austincallaway/

[25] Alan Binder, Richard Fausset, "Nearly 8 Decades Later, an Apology for a Lynching in Georgia," New York Times, January 26, 2017 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/lagrange-georgia-lynching-apology.html )

[26] State Sanctioned, Police and State Involvement with Lynchinghttps://statesanctioned.com/police-and-state-involvement-with-lynching/

[27] David G. Embrick, "Two Nations, Revisited: The Lynching of Black and Brown Bodies, Police Brutality, and Racial Control in 'Post-Racial' Amerikkka," Critical Sociology 41:6 (June 2015), pg 837

[28] Josh Sanburn, "All The Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown," Time, November 25, 2014 ( http://time.com/3605346/darren-wilson-michael-brown-demon/ )

[29] Simple Justice, The Outrage of the Victim's Rap Sheet Must Endhttp://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/11/23/the-outrage-of-the-victims-rap-sheet-must-end/ (November 23, 2014)

[30] Brandon Blackwell, "Lawyer representing Tamir Rice's family defended boy's mom in drug trafficking case," Cleveland, November 24, 2014 ( http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/lawyer_representing_tamir_rice.html )

[31] Brandon Blackwell, "Tamir Rice's father has history of domestic violence," Cleveland, November 26, 2014 ( http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/tamir_rices_father_has_history.html )

[32] Embrick, pg 838

[33] United Nations General Assembly, Report on the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to the United States of America https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/183/30/PDF/G1618330.pdf?OpenElement (August 18, 2016)

[34] Feliks Garcia, "Police brutality is modern lynching- and you may be a part of it," Daily Dot, April 20, 2015 ( https://www.dailydot.com/via/black-men-police-violence-lynching-internet/ )