For The Black Alliance For Peace 250 years of Extraction, Occupation, and Repression is Nothing to Celebrate!
July 3, 2026
“…your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
-Frederick Douglass
The 250-year arc of the United States, a settler-colonial state rhetorically conceived in liberty, yet materially erected through the systematic extraction, commodification, and disposal of Black, Brown, and Indigenous flesh, has run, without interruption, on the fuel of anti-humanity. From the Middle Passage to the auction block, from the genocidal slaughter of Indigenous nations to the convict leasing system that only rebranded chattel bondage, from the terror of Jim Crow to pipelines from schools to prisons that now warehouse millions, from the spatial violence of redlining to the state-sanctioned poisoning of Flint’s children, the U.S. has never known a peace not purchased by the subjugation, immiseration, and premature death of its internal colonies.
This domestic logic of racialized plunder that reduces African/Black life to a commodity and Indigenous life removable also sanctioned the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ecocidal carpet-bombing of Southeast Asia, the CIA’s training of Latin American death squads, the starvation-inducing sanctions and shock-and-awe bombings of Iraq, the unwavering arming of apartheid Israel as it levels Gaza to rubble, and the perpetual, extrajudicial drone campaign across Somalia and Yemen. In just the last several months, this logic has resulted in continued support of genocides in Palestine and Sudan, the deepening occupation of Haiti, an ongoing war on Iran, the bombing and kidnapping of the head of state in Venezuela, tightening the strangulation against Cuba, massacres in the Philippines, and remilitarization and repression of still-colonized Puerto Rico.
What we witness today is the maturation of a coherent architecture of war and repression. The foundation of this settler state has required a military and ideological apparatus to maintain a racial hierarchy against those it exploited and displaced. This apparatus has evolved, not dissolved. The U.S. is a national security state now fusing intelligence, policing, militarization, and ideological discipline into a single, proactive system of control. Its modern manifestation is a seamless, high-tech carceral state where the brutal logic of imperial control abroad is repatriated to govern populations deemed internal threats. It is not reactive or defensive; it is anticipatory, designed to manage populations and suppress dissent, maintaining imperial order amid systemic crisis. This crisis fuels the consolidation of what can only be named as fascism, not as a historical relic, but as the capitalist reform of the state itself, emerging from the contradictions of U.S.- led imperialism and racial capitalism to uphold the dictatorship of capital. The question is not whether this system will be used abusively because it already is. The question is whether we will name it for what it is. The United States is a repressive apparatus whose normalization renders legality irrelevant and freedom an abstract ideal rather than a practice.
The task before us, therefore, is not reform within that architecture, but confrontation, political resistance, and principled opposition with it. The U.S. has spent 250 years perfecting the art of managing contradiction through violence and subversion — domestic and foreign, physical and structural. To resist is to recognize that the architecture of repression is not broken, it is working exactly as designed. And to oppose it is to understand that freedom is not a gift to be granted by the state, but a practice to be seized in defiance of it. This means choosing a freedom based on collective self-determination, human dignity, ecological survival, and people(s)-centered human rights for African/Black and all oppressed peoples. This means organized resistance until victory over imperialist war, domestic repression, and capitalist plunder.
