How the Alphabet Agencies and Cops Are Responsible for Chicago Violence
I’ve already talked at length about how mainstream media will address Chicago as a totem for anti-Black fears and copaganda purposes. How reactionaries talk openly (and White liberals silently) about ‘Black-on-Black’ crime in metropolises such as Chicago but obfuscate the larger systems of violence done to and on our communities — disinvestment, hyper-surveillance, mass incarceration, denial of access to quality care, school closures, etc etc. But until recently, I did not realize the depths that the capitalist state has deliberately worked to destroy and destabilize Black communities.
Ten years ago, I dismissed as fantastical and conspiratorial the idea that the CIA and Reagan flooded Black neighborhoods with crack, but instead focused solely on the ten-fold Crack Divide. But, alas, it’s true — the CIA ran cocaine planes to fund their dirty war on the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and run death squads, killing thousands of civilians that the bourgeois felt threatened their rule. On the other end, the CIA was able to, through drug dealers like Rick Ross, channel and flood a more dangerous variant we know as crack into Black neighborhoods. The police and the expanded prison system would then swoop potential Black leaders away for decades at a time.
Once you start understanding the absolute depths that this government will do to keep certain people (in this case, Black communities and Central American communists) down, it becomes easier to spot all the ways that these police and “intelligence” agencies will specifically kill off Black communities and keep them from uniting and strengthening — which is convenient for them as it allows growth of these same state agencies.
More money for the FBI and CIA and DEA and Border Patrol to counter the very War on Drugs they’re waging. More money for rightwing governments to kill off communists, Indigenous activists, and sympathetic peasants while continuing to spread these toxins. More workers leaving their homes and communities in Central and South America for the US, where, if they make it past the Border Patrol and manage to survive, they will be funneled into super-exploitable positions of manual labor, and their children will be propagandized to believe they lucked into the Land of the Free and eventually sign up for these same alphabet agencies of death.
But the police-alphabets went much further to fuel gang violence than just supplying the drugs. They also armed them with military and police stockpiles; sent in informants to turn gangs against other gangs, members against members, and gangs against radical organizations. A prime example is when William O’Neal and other pigs forged letters to get the Black Stones and Young Lords to turn on the Chicago Black Panthers under Hampton, much as they would make up or hype up divisions among the Nation of Islam against Malcolm, or the West Coast, East Coast and Algerian factions of the Black Panther Party in the late 60s, early 70s, or the East Coast/West Coast feud between rival rap factions in the early 90s.
The police force gang members (and those loosely affiliated with them, such as those whom merely live on the block) into jails and prisons where they are further trained. The police often end gang truces and threaten gang members and low-level drug sellers.
And when gang leaders try to radicalize and organize to demand change, they are diverted. Or disappeared.
These are not secrets in our communities — these facts and observations are just often marginalized.
So the CIA/FBI/DEA/ICE and local police work — sometimes in tandem, sometimes stumbling over themselves — to not only create the conditions in which criminal and violent elements terrorize our living spaces, but also specifically directed and equipped gang violence. Much the same way the funneling of Latin American refugees would fuel a type of super-exploitation in agricultural and manufacturing labor as well as a police state in the borders — complete with death camps — so did they use drugs and their phony War on Drugs to keep Black families and communities in general as a sub-Working Class category. Despite sixty years of promises, the median Black family makes 1/3 less than the median white family. Roughly 1/5 of all Black households make less than $15,000 a year, and a third make less than $25,000 in the US. These are not incidental and should not be treated as just “set-backs” on some fictional road to racial reconciliation.
Ending racism will require nothing less than ending the capitalist hegemony imposed by the US’s networks of police and intelligence agencies. This necessitates not ignoring gang violence or using it as a deflection against other forms of violence (school shootings, for instance, as Gregg A-butt did), but connecting it to its causes, which are White Supremacist in nature and deed.
