An Incident of Domestic Terrorism

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Kevin Labriado ... was charged Sunday with two counts of second-degree assault on a law enforcement officer and child endangerment.

Police said in court records that Labriado rammed a police car from behind about 8:35 p.m. Friday in the 1100 block of Riverview Boulevard. The two officers in the car, 33 and 25 years old, were on patrol at the time and believed it was an accident until Labriado struck their squad car a second time.

... Police grabbed him, and as they were arresting him, Labriado yelled several times that "This is for the black people!" Several other people were in the car with Labriado at the time, including his 5-year-old daughter, police said.

I doubt that anyone in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement leadership (if it has any) ordered Labriado to attack the officers, any more than other incidents of black on white violence has been ordered. But it is part and parcel with the BLM philosophy.

The International Socialist Review describes BLM thusly:

The strength of today’s Ferguson-inspired movement can be gauged in a number of ways. For one, the movement has been militant from its inception. One of the movement’s most popular refrains in street protests and social media is “shut it down!” Beyond a rhetorical slogan, this has found expression in the real world as activists in dozens of cities have marched onto highways to disrupt traffic; linked arms across railroad tracks to stop trains; sat down in urban intersections; delayed sporting events; and temporarily occupied shopping malls, major retail stores, police departments, and city halls. Activists have concluded en masse that anti-Black racism is a systemic problem that should be confronted through the disruption of work, commuter travel, commerce, and other circuits of the daily functioning of US society.

... The movement quickly connected with and inspired other movements. Palestine solidarity activists have had visible contingents at many of the protests, with organizations highlighting extensive cooperation between US urban police departments and the Israeli state. ... On December 19, there was a Native Lives Matter protest in Rapid City, South Dakota, inspired by Ferguson, which protested police violence against Indigenous people in the United States. Low-wage workers active in the Fight for 15 campaign were present at some of the earliest protests in Ferguson. ...

(Underline added).

The Black Lives Matter website includes an article entitled "Strange Fruit, Revolutionary Violence, and a Love on Fire" which states, in part:

In this essay, I explore the relationship between Christian love and revolutionary violence in the context of racialized terror and a liberating God. ... I turn to James Cone’s seminal work Black Theology and Black Power as a theo-political tool useful in our struggle to cast out the demon of white racial supremacy. Here Cone helps us think about not only the relationship between love and violence but also the connections between race/ism, Christian religion, and revolutionary struggle. Ultimately I argue that under conditions of white supremacist terror, revolutionary violence can be an expression of Christian love. 

* * *

Embracing the institutionalized violence of the State while denouncing the revolutionary violence of those whom the State represses is morally hypocritical. ... For this reason, black theology neither begins with the Western distinction of right and wrong nor the white definition of Christian and unchristian. ...

* * *

... Black theology does not ask whether violence is right or wrong, good or evil, Christian or unchristian. It asks how are blacks to respond to the institutionalized violence already at work in our lives. Presenting nonviolence as the only possible Christian response to racial terror is not only unreasonable, but unrighteous. It denies black humanity. It asks blacks to be superhuman while treating us as subhuman. It wants us to love white people while telling us to hate ourselves. How can one love someone that treats them like a thing? How are we to love our white neighbor whose existence is paid at the expense of our suffering? According to Cone: “If the riots are the black man’s [sic] courage to say Yes to himself, then violence may be . . . the only expression of Christian love to the white oppressor.” 

What about reconciliation? Since black theology is a biblical theology grounded in the good news of liberation, it takes seriously the promise of reconciliation. But first it must ask: on whose terms are we reconciled? “Reconciliation on white racist terms is impossible,” Cone writes, “since it would crush the dignity of black people.” Insofar as reconciliation is a theology of colorblindness—forcing blacks to deny our beauty and embrace “the white thing”—black theology must reject it. As Cone insists: “Black people can only speak of reconciliation when the black community is permitted to do its thing.” If the sole purpose of black theology “is to apply the freeing power of the gospel to black people under white oppression,” then the “thing” for black people in America is revolution! 

... Christian love is the blackpower to say No! to white supremacist terror, even if saying No to racial terror means saying Yes to revolutionary violence. 

Jesus told his disciples: every tree that does not bear good fruit should be thrown into the fire. Strange fruit keeps on growing in the harvest of American life. That fruit is watered by the blood of Michael Brown, Emmet Till, Tarika Wilson, and countless other black bodies sacrificed on the altar of white racial supremacy. But what if we took Jesus seriously. As the old Negro Spiritual proclaims: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time!”

 (Underline added; footnotes omitted). This poem by Shelby Courtland seems to express a belief within the black community that even its internal violence--the drug gangs and associated murders--is also the fault of "white privilege". Here is the pertinent parts:

How you think I got the drugs?

Did you ever wonder why

I can get a gun and drugs

and make your ass so high?

I was low on the totem pole

and I always knew the score.

Get your head from out your ass.

You know why I was poor!

I was born to be a loser;

to end up dead or in the pen.

You know the goddamn truth.

I was never meant to win.

Blame me for the corruption

that comes down from the top.

You know who calls the shots

and who protects a dirty cop.

But it’s convenient to blame me

for the violence in the hood.

And ignore the burning cross

or the Aryan Brotherhood.

The single most important thing to take from the foregoing is the "othering" of whites. There is a conscious attempt to teach others that, come what will, whites "deserve" it. We have seen this over and over in history, and it is often the prelude to pogroms and genocide.

It is ironic--sad really--that the authors of the foregoing BLM article and poem cannot grasp that the current condition is not the result of whites generally (a classification so broad that it is meaningless), or "white privilege," but decades of socialist programs and single-party control of major cities. They (the authors and those of similar mindset) twist the teachings of Christ, reject the ideals expressed by the civil rights leaders of the 19th Century and Martin Luther King, Jr., and then wonder what happened to the dream. When I read these, I realized that the authors have a visceral hatred of whites, and Western culture, that demands blood. They (and I hope that these views are not held by the majority of blacks) want a civil war--a war they cannot win. The hubris of the cultural Marxists behind this is that they think they can unleash this storm, and successfully master it to their own ends.

Related Post: "Pulling Back the Curtains."

Update: The comment below points out that Zero Hedge has reported on a recent speech from Louis Ferrakhan urging violence:

While the US has had its share of deadly social violence over the past year, much of split along along racial lines, it has mercifully avoided a full-blown racial war. However, in recent weeks there has been a troubling increase in invocations toward even more violence, and even more deaths, which seek to achieve just that: a United States gripped in racial warfare.

The latest such call for violence was caught on tape just a few days ago, when on July 30 during a speech delivered at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Miami, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan called for black Americans to "rise up" and "kill those who kill us" if the federal government fails to "intercede in our affairs."