downas

in most nation-states around the world, the military spends as much time repressing uprisings against colonial capitalism as it does fighting “foreign” enemies. the united states is no exception, as this brief look at a national counterinsurgency campaign in one section of u.s.-occupied ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ (anishinaabewaki) will show.

as the may-june 2020 uprisings against the police took place, the michigan national guard supported a curfew in grand rapids by maintaining vehicle barricades, boarding up stores, and otherwise giving operational support to city and state police, who beat protesters, shot tear gas, and made arrests. the troops were summoned by the mayor.

they did much the same in kalamazoo, where the mayor also requested national guard reinforcements after declaring a curfew—threatening jail for noncompliance—as his police force tear-gassed demonstrators at point-blank range. in lansing, national guard troops were deployed to similar ends.

many people infected by the u.s. left's racial, colonial, gendered, and [dis]ableist biases act as if national military forces are different from—specifically, not as bad as—police. this bias is especially easy for u.s. citizens to maintain, since the overwhelming majority of victims of “the troops” suffer and die outside the physical and conceptual borders of the country. but as demonstrated above, elites in the imperial core who believe their positions are seriously threatened call on those same troops when the cops aren't enough. and on more than one occasion, the army national guard have proven themselves able to take part in lethal repression “at home” when ordered.

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this has been written in solidarity with efforts to stop camp grayling.