“My administration has been closely monitoring the situation in Egypt, and I know that we will be learning more tomorrow when day breaks.  As the situation continues to unfold, our first concern is preventing injury or loss of life.  So I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protestors.
The people of Egypt have rights that are universal.  That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny.  These are human rights.  And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.”
– U.S. President Barack Obama, January 28, 2011 (official statement here).
The events in Ferguson, Missouri went from what could have been just another all too common and tragic incident in which an unarmed black man is killed by an overly aggressive and unprofessional police force, to what may be a historically significant event in American history. So how did this transformation occur and what does it mean going forward? Those are the two questions I intend to address in this post.

There are two primary factors that have collided to create the current out of control situation in a suburb roughly 15 miles northwest of St. Louis, which before this past weekend, almost no one had ever heard of. The first factor is the underlying tension in American society that I have been writing about for several years now. Nowhere is this tension more apparent than in the minority majority inner cities or their outskirts. Being a privileged person, I have thankfully never experienced the dehumanization and oppression felt by so many in these disenfranchised communities, but I can still understand the fact that these neighborhoods are ground zero in the civil unrest that is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.
The second factor is the entirely inappropriate and dangerous militarization of police forces throughout these United States. While extreme tension between impoverished communities and the police has been well documented for decades and expressed through music and movies (I grew up with NWA’s Fuck Tha Police and Colors), the cops were generally speaking merely men and women driving around in patrol cars with guns and batons. Not to dismiss the violence that can and has been inflicted through those means, but the police in recent years have taken things to a whole new frightening level: Total Militarization.
I consider this trend to be such an existential threat to freedom and civil liberties that I have expended a considerable deal of time and energy over the past several years highlighting it. I have covered the topic too many times to list here (I will provide a compilation at the end of this post), but there is one in particular I want to mention. The post was published two months ago and was titled: The Militarization of Police Continues…Machine Guns, Grenade Launchers, Silencers and More. In it I quoted the following from a New York Times article:

During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.
The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of “barbering without a license.”

I then concluded the post with the following observation:

Of all the bad ideas currently being implemented in these United States, turning the police into soldiers is certainly near the top of the list.

Indeed, and we are now reaping some of the rewards from this absurd and fascist policy. One that must be reversed immediately. If you think I or others may be exaggerating the threat here, think again. Social media and the internet generally is filled with veterans reacting in horror at what they are seeing unfold domestically. Here are two of the most powerful tweets I came across:
At this point I’d like to remind everyone that crime in the U.S. has been dropping since the 1990′s. So why has domestic police force militarization been growing exponentially since then? Ostensibly, it is for the “war on terror” and to keep us safe. In reality, we know this is bullshit. Just like the NSA’s constitutional spying hasn’t stopped a single terrorist attack, turning local cops into a domestic army hasn’t done a single thing to make us safe.To the contrary, it is creating an environment where the general public harbors increased resentment and skepticism toward police, and the police view the citizenry as the “enemy.” This takes the societal tinderbox that already exists and makes it downright explosive. Ferguson is just the latest example of the tension bubbling to the surface, but there will likely be many more in the future.

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While the above exposes the excuse for militarization for the lie it is, it doesn’t answer the question. As I have maintained for years now, I believe all police state activities, from NSA surveillance to the militarization of the police, is a entirely deliberate program being implemented by the status quo (oligarchs, Wall Street, politicians, intelligence agencies, etc) to put in place a police state ahead of the civil unrest and dissent they know is coming. How do they know it’s coming? Simple. They know better than anyone else the extent of their collective theft and lawlessness and they know full well domestic blowback is coming. They are just getting geared up ahead of time.