Disposable cities
The occupation of Washington D.C. is winding down as Trump threatens other cities with invasion. His long-term plans have taken an even more sinister turn.
The image of Trump in a cowboy hat in front of a flaming Chicago skyline has been well circulated. His reference to a crazy cavalry commander in the 1979 Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now was obvious, as was his threat that “Chicago (is) about to find why it’s called the Department of War.”
Trump has attempted to soften the impact of his comments, saying he doesn’t intend to “go to war” with cities, but only deal with deportations and crime fighting. Such a distinction is meaningless.
The occupation of cities by the US military and National Guard as a form of policing is essential for the consolidation of authoritarian rule.
It must be resisted at every level.
This resistance is about to become more difficult in the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Right-wing forces are using his death to label critics of state violence “wicked.” Activist Laura Loomer has called for deploying new measures in a “war” against “ideological adversaries” from the media to the Democratic Party and private citizens backing leftist causes.
At a time when murder is being normalized by presidential whim, we should have no illusions about the possible consequences of the unfolding vengeance for the killing of Kirk. Kirk is being cast as a martyr. As Chris Hedges explained:
His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.
Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.
The sacrifice of whole cities is no longer unthinkable. Such sacrifices are now being cast as the necessary result of a just crusade. There are no moral constraints on the violence that those in power are willing to use.
Two decades have passed since Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans, killing 1392 people and $125 billion in damages. While nature provided the force, political antipathy allowed the city to languish, and greed and racism to shape its reconstruction. Now, with diminished capacities for predictions and recovery, we can expect natural disasters to be more destructive, and our collective efforts to restore and recover to be minimal.
Our past is filled with such instances.
Twenty years before Katrina, politicians terrified by the efforts of people to create liberated lives showed they were willing to sacrifice whole sections of their cities to maintain power. In 1985 Mayor Wilson Goode of Philadelphia ordered the police department to bomb a house occupied by members of MOVE, a black liberation organization. The resulting fire swept through the entire neighborhood, killing 11 people, including 5 children, and destroying 61 homes.
The drive to use the military to police dissent, create fear, and kill those who are deemed “evil” will accelerate in this atmosphere.
People in every city need to be prepared for this. We, in Detroit, should have no illusions about where we stand in the eyes of this administration. While we are rarely named as one of the “hellholes” to be targeted, a glance at documents guiding the drive to fascism names us as a particularly troublesome place. In “Marching Toward Violence” published by the right-wing Capital Research Center, Detroit organizations are displayed in rings of fire as “domestic terrorists.” The named organizations include Black Lives Matter-Detroit, the National Lawyers Guild, the Peoples Forum, the Allied Media Projects, and Muslim associations.
Today, the majority of people are disturbed by the idea of federal troops in our cities. In preparing for what is coming, we need to draw deeply on our histories of resistance and our imaginations of a more just world if we are to move this majority toward more human ways of living and being together.