Yesterday, I watched a fantastic documentary on PBS called “The House I Live In” by Eugene Jarecki. The film reveals the 40-year failure of America’s precious War On Drugs. In the USA, we’ve spent over $1 trillion on arresting over 45 million people and we still have a major drug problem. The War On Drugs is a failure when it comes to getting people straight, but wildly successful when you consider the increase in long-term incarceration, guaranteeing profits for private jails and communities that rely solely on prisoners to faith their economies.
The movie is heavily influenced by Holocaust author Raul Hilberg, but the history of the White Power Majority punishing the immigrant poor with harsh drug laws and mandatory incarceration is another damning fascination.
When the Chinese came to build our railroads in the 1860’s and they smoked opium as part of their culture, we outlawed smoking opium and put the workers in jails and ghettos to keep them from rising to power.
When immigrant Mexicans arrived to work our agricultural land in the 1950’s, and brought hemp and cannabis with them as part of their culture, we gave cannabis a new, scary, foreign-sounding name — “marijuana” — and outlawed it and we put the Mexicans in jail to keep them down and out from seeking political power.
When the Southern Blacks migrated — immigrated! — from the South into Eastern Urban centers to fill factory jobs nobody else wanted from 1915-1960, the White Power Elite marginalized them in ghettos, and later made Crack possession 100 times more punishable than powder cocaine when the only difference between the two was adding baking soda, water and heat to make Crack.
Since we’ve run out of immigrants to punish with new drug laws, the White Power are now focusing on the most hated Americans — the Trailer Trash Poor — and those marginalized “White Folk” are being imprisoned with life sentences for owning a gram or too much Meth.
One point the documentary makes quite solidly is that people take drugs because they are unhappy. We do not reach out and lift them up from their depression. We only seek to keep them down by ravaging their addiction with imprisonment. As one expert in the documentary commented, “Punishing the corner drug dealer is like punishing the drive-thru worker at McDonald’s. Neither have any power, they’re both bad for your health, and they’re only distributing product for the real moneymakers.”
When people have no legitimate way to survive, they will turn to illegal means to stay alive. That is a natural, and expected, progression of the human condition and being able to predict that want to live more easily helps to enable the functional annihilation of the unwanted.
The documentary also clearly explained the process for how we kill people in America, and it all happens in five, simple, steps. This process has been used the world over in the Warsaw Ghetto, and against Native Americans in the USA and now against the Black Community in America. The process is so easy and invisible that it naturally resolves its own ultimate solution. These steps carry a momentum that nobody has to force:
1. Identification: A group of people are identified as the causes of problems in society. We show how they are bad, evil and worthless and we label them so they cannot hide.
2. Ostracism: We learn how to hate those we have identified and we take away their jobs. They can’t survive on their own. They have no money and no place to live and no access to the justice system. They are forced to live apart from the majority in ghettos. They are isolated and separated from the rest of society.
3. Confiscation: Next, the identified and ostracized lose their rights and civil liberties. We change laws and those people are more easily stopped on the street and searched so their property can be forfeited and confiscated. Take the property, then take the people.
4. Concentration: We huddle them together for their safekeeping and ours. We use prisons and camps and other facilities. Those people have now lost all their civil rights and even if they get out of our incarceration, they cannot get a good job and they are not allowed to vote. While concentrated in prisons, they cannot see their children or procreate. Their labor is systematically exploited.
5. Annihilation: We remove them from society by killing them. We can kill them indirectly by not giving them food or medical care or by inhibiting new births. Or, we can directly kill them by inflicting force or other necessary means.
Now you know the five easy steps to permanently removing unwanted minority voices in the world. Start with a label. End with a bang.