MUST SEE: RACIST HISTORY OF OUR DRUG LAWS

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On December 23, 2003,
Chris Herz lillianpherz@juno.com wrote:

     Perhaps one of the reasons why the present Bush regime has chosen to veil for reasons of "national security" the records of both the Bush I and Reagan regimes is to hide the true nature of the drug war. It is, and it always has been, an attack upon communities of color.
 
     I would bet my life that the reactionaries, upon coming to supreme power, chose this path to cripple a key constituency of the liberal coalition. And they did it knowing full well that the white liberals would never come to the aid of their beleaguered black compatriots. And I say this as a white person myself.
 
     Thus not only were these past and present administrations able to discount the needs and demands of the African American community, they were – by transferring large numbers of black males to prisons in rural white areas -- able to increase the electoral strength of safely reactionary communities at the expense of inner cities. They were also enabled to use funds generated in the drug trade to both prop up the value of the dollar and to fund covert warfare in Central America and elsewhere.
 
     And the precedent from the Nazi holocaust shows that any community can be totally disorganized ... rendered politically and socially impotent ... by the removal of only five percent of its members. This has been accomplished by the fascists of both corporate factions, and their main tool has been the drug war. At this very moment, the USA incarcerates a greater number of its black citizens than the Nazi regime did of its Jews for the first eight or nine years of its existence.
 
     Thus once again we can see the importance of the drug war as an undergirding structural member in the bizarre corporate/chauvinist sort of regime we now enjoy. Perhaps we can even say that anti-Black racism is eternally essential to the constitution of American conservatism.
 
    Any historian can tell you what a key role was played by German Jews, because of their liberation from the ghettos by the French Revolution and nineteenth century liberalism, in the Liberal, Social Democratic, and, yes even the Communist Parties before the Nazi takeover.  All German conservatives -- not merely Nazis -- were outraged at the presence of emancipated Jewish liberals in their polity.  Why should it be different here and now?
 
    I think African Americans deserve reparations not only for the vile periods of slavery and of "Jim Crow", but also for the inexcusable Policies of white "mainstream" politicians and their real, corporate constituency.
 
     Furthermore, I will never rest until at least the most obnoxious of the responsible individuals stand before the International Criminal Court in the Hague for what they have done to our justice system and our most prominent national minority.
 
     I sign my name to this essay as a gesture of disdain for the Fascists now ruling in our land, and as a gesture of solidarity with their victims.
 
 
  MAIL - Chris Herz