So, it is said that if you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know kourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Our Enemies in Blue holds up the mirror within which we may see our deepest fault lines, our cracks and fissures. We've the landscaped visage of a war zone.
State violence can disfigure the countenance of a democracy - destabilize its bearing, its moral standing and mental composure. The most visceral and physical manifestation of state violence is police or military violence. With the current foreign wars and occupations - as with most American wars and occupations largely fueled by racially - driven terrors technologies of repression and force migrate back home. Ironically, tragically, or just stupidly, we rarely recognize and acknowledge that armed police are both the antecedents and harbingers of war in the American homeland.
Most wars are fought for territory and property, waged to protect or expand the accumulation of material wealth. It is startling and sobering how those with relatively little material wealth (in comparison to the conglomerates dominating consumer culture through our social, political, and economic lives) still manage a loyalty or obedience, either willingly or unwillingly, to a state run by elites and regulated by police.
Vast resources are necessary for a healthy life, decent housing and health care, clean food, water and air, a vibrant educational culture, and freedom from freelance, entrepreneurial, or officially sanctioned predators. Those who unjustly control those resources unjustly command our obedience through intimidation and force. Or perhaps we do not yet fully know ourselves and how our civic mind(edness) reflects the greed and of the impoverished global majority, we at times grudgingly tolerate that insecurity of those who dominate us. Perhaps, given that our fractional material possessions and (in)security overshadow the material resources "enemy in blue?" Who can tell how much of ourselves we will see in the enemy? It is helpful to remember that it is not mere numbness to the white supremacist and classist aspects of American policing that renders many of us indifferent to and passive before police violence, but the recognition that acquiescence is the price for our unsustainable consumption: This empire permits us to share in the wealth of American excess as long as we permit its policing apparatuses to exist.
If we, as independent thinkers, peace-lovers, or maroons, confuse ourselves with the empire, its consumption and obesities, the obscene levels of violence it employs with "the excessive use of force" or "excessive force, "then we know neither ourselves nor the "other" -this state which increasingly distorts our very appearance as a democratic society with "post 9-11" decrees such as the USA Patriot Act.
To know neither what we have become as critical thinkers and ethical beings nor what others have fashioned themselves to be through coercive technology and violence is to be blind, to be in peril with both eyes shut. To leave one eye open suggests some possibility of survival, although likely without real freedom as we reactively respond to the encroachments of the state: Lose one battle to curb police malfeasance, win another for civil liberties, then begin again. If we recognize structural violence as Kristian Williams outlines it with considerable detail in Our Enemies in Blue, then we might see, with both eyes, that analysis and reflection, judgment and action require us to witness not only police/state violence but our relationships to tragic, traumatic, and stupid practices that shape our everyday extraordinary lives.
Tragic, traumatized, and stupid at times, we nevertheless have the presence of mind to openly scrutinize violence in order to better know ourselves in relation to "others" - police, vigilantes, mercenaries, and private guards or patrols/prisons assuming state duties, violent criminals, and domestic violators - and recognize the manipulation of public phobias against racially fashioned suspects and the impoverished for what they are.
State violence is racist and it is imperialist in its ambition. Yet when we shed our indifference to and fear of confronting state violence and everyday social violence, we increase our ability to recognize a shared humanity. This humanity can work to organize itself in daily resistance to the construction of the outsider, the bete noire that requires the blue beast (or camouflaged troops or tailored homeland security agent) as its counterbalance and counterpart.
Su Tzu's ancient text in opposition to war advocates for (self)knowledge that safeguards us in dangerous battles. Those who work to create and sustain programs to end violent practices and addictions should read Ou Enemies in Blue as part of a long tradition in resistance.