America has both the #1 and #2 armed force in the world. The first is devoted to terrorizing the world. The second is devoted to terrorizing themselves.

That’s right, America has more men at arms occupying its own citizens than the entire military strength of its nearest competitor, China.

The American cops alone are the #3 armed forces, but once you add in their border Stasi, militarized Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI, and vast network of prisons, they’re fucking huge. They’re only competing with themselves.

Military Police

America’s borders are a full war-crime-zone, where human beings are deemed ‘illegal’ and thus fair game. They run concentration camps, paramilitary gangs, even ordinary citizens can get in on the hunt.

In every American city, the police forces are armed with full-on military equipment and have a license to kill. They kill black people in the streets and the only response to the largest protest movement in American history against this has been more funding for the police. Rather than improving their cities, America just wants to keep hitting people till they shut up.

This is violence against the poor because it simply doesn’t happen in the suburbs (where I grew up). We did plenty of shit but they just let us go. As Congressperson AOC said:

“What does an America with defunded police look like to you?” Ocasio-Cortez responded, “It looks like a suburb.”

“Affluent white communities already live in a world where the choose to fund youth, health, housing etc more than they fund police,” Ocasio-Cortez explained. “When a teenager or preteen does something harmful in a suburb (I say teen bc this is often where lifelong carceral cycles begin for Black and Brown communities), White communities bend over backwards to find alternatives to incarceration for their loved ones to ‘protect their future,’ like community service or rehab or restorative measures. Why don’t we treat Black and Brown people the same way?

The bread-and-butter of policing, far from solving violent crimes (maybe 4%), is beating down the poor and protecting the rich (ie property). America has billion dollar police departments that go and destroy homeless tent cities. Instead of, you know, building homes. Instead of helping people they just beat them down further, caging people, destroying families and traumatizing generations of kids.

Since the War on Drugs (drugs won!) the US police force has gotten surplus war materiel, including war criminals back from target practice abroad. Since the War on Terror, the whole thing has been consolidated into one police state under the DHS. With the creation of ICE they have been filling concentration camps with people deemed ‘illegal’. (More)

Cops AND Robbers

Cops have also become the robbers. Through ‘asset forfeiture’ (ie, just taking your shit for no reason), cops are now the biggest thieves in America.

Of course the biggest theft in America remains wage theft, that is the rich stealing both labor and directly money from the poor. Cops are just blue-collar truncheons in this class war, not uniquely human beings, though it certainly is a breeding ground for that.

The job of armed men has always been to protect power, usually under the mythology of some common good. Cops protect and serve property, whether that means rounding up runaway slaves or feeding more forced labor into American prisons. And sometimes the beating is just the point. It lets people know who’s in charge.

In lieu of funding anything productive for society (like city budgets, or housing, or healthcare, or eliminating poverty), America has just deployed an internal military to beat the poor and homeless and literally any ‘problem’ down. When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and boy are Americans looking bent out of shape.

Does this solve any of the ‘problems’? No. Take the case of Mike Anderson, arrested for armed robbery at 23 and then just never put in jail because of a technicality. He took the chance, rehabilitated himself, started a business and family and became part of a community. You know, how rehabilitation works, not in cages. We wouldn’t ‘train’ a dog by caging it for years, and yet this is supposed to work on human beings.

Like with any military, once you deploy it, it’s very difficult to stuff it back in. Nobody wants to look weak, even if what you’re ultimately doing is occupying and weakening your own society.

But the point is not about solving problems. The point is just about selling the idea of vengeance to a traumatized population and making tons of money for cops, lawyers, prisons, and the entire cancerous carceral state. Even the communities prisons are put in complain if they’re taken away. They make money from this misery. It even gives them power.

Like with slavery, prisoners are even counted towards the census of the places they’re caged in (giving those places more electoral power). The prisoners, meanwhile, are permanently disenfranchised and powerless, barely able to receive letters or even read books without paying (at best). And this is supposed to be the land of the free? It has the most people in cages.

Just look. Does this look free to you? New York City looks oppressive as fuck:

This is the funeral of one police officer in New York City. It’s an absolutely dystopian show of force. It lets Americans see just how many people are occupying them, and shows them the consequences if even one gets the treatment they regular mete out.

As former mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world.” The question then is FUCKING WHY? WHY IS THE SEVENTH BIGGEST ARMY IN NEW YORK?

Rather than question this, of course, New Yorkers just elected a cop.

Today the Mayor is a former cop who seems to remain a cop, the police head of a police state within a police state.

Believe Your Eyes, And Be Terrorized

The point of this article is really the pictures. Just look at them. The facts are numbing and almost unbelievable, but you can just believe your eyes.

Does New York look like it’s having a normal one? Is it normal to have so many armed men, showing so much force, operating with the power to beat, torture, cage and kill with so much impunity? What message do you think they’re trying to send?

Doesn’t it look like an occupying army? Isn’t it occupying you?

‘Illegal’ people on your borders and colored people on your global frontier could tell you that America is a police state, but for most Americans in the suburbs, it’s been a vague and distant presence. Well, now it’s coming closer to everyone.

When Trump called out white vans against protesters in Portland they began to understand. What are we, Iraq? people callously asked. Well, no. This is you. It’s always been you, now it’s just happening to you. It’s just armored chickens, coming home to roost.

Once the lame-duck Biden is plucked, once a financial crisis means everyone is fucked, America will return to the brutal mean it was founded on. To a police state. The one you could see out in force in New York.

While White Empire is occupying and brutalizing the world, it devotes the second-largest army to occupying itself. It’s a well-armed police state, well above the law, just waiting for a full-on fascist to pick it up and let it run.

Hitler had to spend years laboriously building the SA, purging it, then reforming it into the SS. The next American fascist won’t have to do anything. It’s got a fucking bow on it. They even have their own flag:

As the Art Of War says, “In general, the way to deploy troops is this: to take the enemy state whole is ideal. Less than ideal is breaking the state up. To take their army whole is ideal.”

Who needs to build a fascist police state in America? You can just take the existing police state whole.

Further Reading, if you enjoy being traumatized:
How America Occupied Itself (Map)
Dear America, You’re The Baddies