A Very American Execution

The execution of Alex Pretti, shot ten times in Minneapolis by a Border Patrol agent while on his knees, came just weeks after an ICE agent murdered Renee Good in the same city and just one day after US security forces extrajudicially executed two men in the Eastern Pacific.

These extrajudicial executions at sea were the continuation of a months-long campaign of extrajudicial executions which have seen dozens of people executed, without rights or trial, by security forces of the US government.

The at-sea executions preceded a burst of on-land violence which saw agents of the US security state execute numerous Venezuelans in the process of kidnapping their leader, Nicholas Maduro.

All of these recent executions by US security forces come a few months after American mercenaries executed Palestinians in Gaza at so-called humanitarian aid sites, killings which came a decade or so after the execution of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These executions of innocent Iraqis and Afghans came three decades after the execution of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, executions which had followed those in Korea less than a decade earlier and came two centuries after US forces murdered thousands of native Americans on their own soil.

These executions, committed by relatively newly-minted Americans, had followed the execution of thousands of native Americans by wannabee Americans in the European colonial period.

And in between all of these mass execution events are numerous other executions, of civilians, journalists and politicians the world over and at home by US regime security forces, including the mass execution in 1970 of student protestors at Kent State University.

Mary Ann Vecchio screams over the body of murdered student Jeffrey Miller at Kent State University in 1970

The execution of Alex Pretti, as shocking, cowardly and barbaric as it was, is just the latest in a very long list of extrajudicial executions committed by agents loyal to the US regime.

The US carries violence in its soul.

There was much talk on social media after the murder of Alex Pretti that this was an example of the ‘imperial boomerang,’ the idea that what the US does in other countries eventually comes home.

But in reality there is no boomerang.

There is only a perfect circle of American violence, a continuous, forever-flowing river of blood.

The executions in Minneapolis would be, as Chris Hedges wrote, unsurprising to the residents of Fallujah or Helmand Province. They would also be unsurprising to Venezuelans, Palestinians, Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Cheyenne and Arapaho and the Sioux. They would be unsurprising to the residents of Minneapolis itself, where US forces have murdered numerous people in recent years, including of course, George Floyd, in 2020.

The killings that shock are the ones captured on camera or video.

But so many are not.

The US has some of the highest rate of police murders and deaths in custody of any country in the world. The government’s own figures put the number of deaths in the high hundreds, but independent investigations believe these numbers to be an undercount, with the data subject to serious manipulation in order to cover-up murders committed by police forces.

For every George Floyd or Alex Pretti caught on tape, hundreds of people are murdered in the dark corners of the American carceral state, a state that imprisons more people per capita than any other in the world. A state that imprisons people for profit then constructs a system that funnels penal labour to the brand names of American capitalism.

And for every leaked video of an American war crime, for every known execution of another person in another land, millions lie dead in the shadows, their deaths mere collateral to the imperial project, the savage consequence of American supremacy.

Which is why Barack Obama’s response to Pretti’s death was grotesque, dripping with the dishonesty you’d expect from the leading political charlatan of our time.

Obama said the “core values” of the US are increasingly under assault.

If the structural foundations of the US are built atop blood, guts and stolen treasure, its social foundations are constructed on myth and fairytale.

Extrajudicial execution is a core American value. Pretti and Good’s murders are not anomalies, as many want to believe, but a long-held American standard.

You’ll also notice that even in his weak condemnation, Obama can’t help but simp for empire, claiming immigration agents have a tough job. Because terrorising the weakest in society, murdering people in cold blood, with impunity and with the full backing of the state, is such a tough job.

But then he is hardly likely to be overly critical of a monster he helped create.

It was Obama who inherited ICE as a fledgling agency and proceeded to increase its budget 300%. It was under Obama that ICE established a nationwide network of detention centres and expanded the 'secure communities' enforcement program from 14 counties to all 3,181 legal jurisdictions in America.

It was Obama who first hired Thomas Homan, now Trump’s border czar.

It was Obama who awarded Homan a presidential rank award, the highest civil service award in the US, given to him for ‘extraordinary results,’ which included record-high deportations.

It was Obama who expanded and normalised ICE, handing Trump the tools for a domestic terror force.

It was under Obama that the use of special Pentagon programs facilitating the transfer of military weapons to domestic security forces massively accelerated, going from around $80 million worth of equipment in 2007 to nearly half a billion dollars by 2015.

Which is why the responses to events in Minneapolis laying everything at the feet of Trump are so fraudulent, so full of denial and wishful thinking.

The murders of Good and Pretti can be traced back directly to Obama and the architecture of domestic terror he played a central role in establishing.

The murders of Good and Pretti can be traced back to Venezuela, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, to every imperial assault of the last seventy years.

Their murders can be traced back to a military-security state that spends over a trillion dollars every year on weapons of mass murder, to a state that has dissolved the distinction between its military and domestic forces.

Their murders can be traced back to the plains, to Colorado, to the hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho women and children executed at Sand Creek, to the slaughter of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee, to the Shoshone and the mass murder of women and children at Bear River.

America is violence.

It was born in it, is soaked through with it, revels in it and is sustained by it.

Pretti is the latest casualty.

And until the US breaks free from two-party oligarchy, while empire and imperialism remain its true core values, there will be many more.

Because American violence, and the military-security state that it flows effortlessly from, is a joint political project.

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