Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

White Chechens Open New Vistas of Repression in America
24 Apr 2013
🖨️ Print Article

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

The Chechens are coming – and they're white! Like other pale-skinned immigrant groups, they appear to be flourishing. Only in America could lightly armed youngsters “represent a threat so awesomely dreadful as to spread fear up and down the great megalopolis stretching from Boston to Washington.”

 

White Chechens Open New Vistas of Repression in America

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“The whole nation has been set up for a new round of domestic repression.”

The United States of America has collapsed into a phantasmagoria – an inverted world conjured up by imperial minds to fool the home population of the planet’s only superpower into believing they are under siege by virtually everyone else on Earth. The formula has worked too well, rendering the society so brittle, so anxious and afraid, it resembles a madhouse in a fortress that is trying to turn itself into a prison.

Once again, white America (and lots of assimilated non-whites) shows it has absolutely no capacity for introspection – only for projecting its own insanities on others. The New York Times for Sunday, April 21st, speculated that the suspects in the Boston bombing were motivated by “echoes” of “plots from the past” in their ancestral Chechnya, in the Caucasus region of Russia – but, in reality, the scenario was purely 21st century Americana. Where else could two young men with small arms and improvised explosives – if the charges are true – represent a threat so awesomely dreadful as to spread fear up and down the great megalopolis stretching from Boston to Washington?

If the two young Chechens were set up by the U.S. government, as their mother says, they are not the only ones. The whole nation has been set up for a new round of domestic repression. It has already begun, with the stripping down of Miranda warnings for persons arrested by police and the lockdown of whole sections of greater Boston, where the authorities treated white neighborhoods as if…well, as if they were Black.

In our post-911 world, we might expect that the events in Boston would lead to drone strikes or invasions of other countries to avenge American “honor.” But Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation, which retains its nuclear arsenal, so that won’t do. Besides, it turns out the FBI was in much closer touch with the older brother than any Russian officials – so, maybe the Russians ought to be the ones asking the questions. These were, after all, American citizens.

“Some have blonde or red hair.”

We hear a lot of talk about naming the surviving brother as an “enemy combatant,” but – a combatant for whom? For Allah? You can’t launch airstrikes against God. The Americans have to be careful about trying to tie their prisoner to the Chechen Islamist fighters who have made such a name for themselves around the world, since many of them are allied with the same gunmen the U.S. has financed and armed in Libya and Syria. In the end, there seems to be no enemy for Washington to punish – except American society, itself.

In this regard, the Chechen brothers’ ethnicity opens new vistas of domestic repression. Many Chechens are white – I mean, really white. Wikipedia describes them as “exhibiting traits typical of European and Caucasian peoples.” Some have “blonde or red hair,” with blue eyes and “typically pale skin.”

Does this mean that white people will lose their immunity from being arbitrarily accosted by Homeland Security? That would certainly be a sea change in American life. But, in the enemy-filled phantasmagoria that the United States has become, anything is possible.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.



Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20130424_gf_BostonBombing.mp3

More Stories


  • prison hallway
    Ben Conarck , Pamela Wood
    Baltimore’s new $1 billion jail will be most expensive state-funded project in history
    27 Mar 2024
    The proposed 854-bed facility will be a hybrid jail, hospital and mental health and substance use treatment facility for people facing criminal charges.
  • Frantz Fanon
    Hamid Dabashi
    War on Gaza: How critics are twisting Frantz Fanon's legacy
    27 Mar 2024
    No amount of verbal gymnastics can escape the simple truth that indigenous resistance is crucial to ending colonial atrocities.
  • Protesters take down US flag
    People’s Dispatch staff
    Puerto Ricans take to the streets against Kamala Harris’s visit
    27 Mar 2024
    Puerto Ricans protested Harris’ visit citing the ongoing US occupation of Puerto Rico and support to Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.
  • Palestinian women marching in a protest
    Saher Al Khamash
    Palestinian women against bourgeois feminism – a commentary
    27 Mar 2024
    In the fight for the liberation of Palestine, reject the reactionary politics of bourgeois feminism and embrace a liberatory struggle led by Palestinian women.
  • Black Agenda Radio
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Radio March 22, 2024
    22 Mar 2024
    This week we hear about right wing forces in San Francisco who worked with the Black democratic mayor to criminalize poverty. But first Dr. Gerald Horne discusses Gaza and Ukraine, the contradictions…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us