The National Guard, the organization typically associated with natural disaster response, flood rescue missions, and wildfire fighting crews, shot and killed an American civilian, Tyrin Johnson, today in Memphis. Memphis, a city that has been occupied by the National Guard for roughly a year now under direct executive order. Memphis, occupied because it is a majority Black city, the same reason its representative district was systemically dismantled when the Civil Rights Act was ruled unconstitutional by our unelected Supreme Court.
Tyrin Johnson, aged 20, was killed by a U.S. soldier on U.S. soil, in the city of Memphis, the place he called home. And it is not the first time this has happened. We all learn about Kent State in school, but we do not necessarily learn that the majority of people, based on polling, believe the National Guard was just and justified in their killing of unarmed student protesters that day.
Memphis, the birthplace of cultural icons like Young Dolph, Elvis, was once a union town. The sanitation workers' strike in 1968—where Martin Luther King was assassinated—was a strike for dignity and a living wage. Today, Memphis has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation, one of the lowest rates of union density, and one of the most aggressive policing regimes. This is why the regime occupies it. A city, a black majority city, that once organized for power must be occupied to prevent it from organizing again. The National Guardsmen who occupy it serve the same role as the white mob did in Tulsa.
Two moms. Two lives. Two paths.
Because on one hand, there is a mother who will never see her son again, never speak to him, never hold him. She will never get that late-night call from him, just to chat, because it has been a while. That mother no longer has that opportunity. She raised a child into a man—twenty years old, the ripe age at which he was gunned down by a U.S. soldier. A civilian.
And on the other hand, you have a mother who was almost certainly proud of her son finishing basic training. She bought into the propaganda, like so many of us. "Of course I want my son to be a National Guard soldier. He's going to help with the wildfires. He's going to help with the hurricanes. He's going to help the people." That is what you are sold. That is what the recruiter tells you. That is what the recruiting advertisements sell.
How would it be if those two mothers met?
Do you think the mother of the soldier is proud of her son for killing? Perhaps. The right propaganda, the right Facebook feed, the right Fox News programming—you can get anybody to believe anything. It is not hard to see a narrative arise wherein she is proud of the killing. One man's life taken to make another boy a man. Mommy's son, mommy's little baby, mommy's boy got his first body.
What a cynical world to live in, where that is a possibility.
But perhaps there is another possibility. The possibility of disappointment, of shame. The possibility of a promise broken. Soldier-killer-boy, Your mother wanted you to join so you could help the people. Your mother wanted to see you better than you were. And now, because you have killed an innocent civilian, an American citizen—the exact people you pledged to protect—your mother will likely experience the same loss his mother did, except it will unfold over a slow period of time, culminating in the same type of death.
Because killing someone who is innocent—it wracks your heart, it wracks your soul. That is why they fill your mind with things like "honor", "courage", "selfless sacrifice", to justify the crimes being committed. But that killing will certainly eat at this soldier, and potentially the rest of his unit, until ultimately he turns the trigger on himself. It will not happen overnight. It will not happen in a week, or even a month. But it will happen. It starts with the bottle. It starts with finding peace with Jack Daniels. It starts with the isolation, the guilt, the waking up and seeing what you imagine his mother would look like at her son's funeral—the son of an American civilian that you killed in his own city. The fist hits the mirror, the bottle hits the throat, and the suicide potential becomes cemented.
No amount of imperialist propaganda can change that reality. That is why twenty-two veterans a day kill themselves. Because some acts are so heinous, so egregious, and so against the sanctity of human life, that the resulting alienation becomes so overwhelming that no other option will feel reasonable to the man who pulled the trigger. The realization that he has been made into an instrument of class violence against his own class will be what kills him as he killed.
Do you think the mother of that soldier expected her son to kill a man in cold blood? When he walked across the field at basic training and her eyes welled with tears, do you really think that woman thought her son would take another son from another woman—all the same?
I would hazard to say, probably not. Probably not what she thought.
But it is the reality. It is the reality that every single soldier who is currently enlisted must sit with. The oath you take is optics. The principles ingrained in you are marketing, propaganda. Any organization that asks you to kill your working class brothers and sisters has no honor.
Two mothers. Two working class families.
Both mothers work jobs that do not pay enough. Both mothers have watched their neighborhoods emptied of factories and filled with patrols. Both mothers were told that the military was the only ladder out of a life that the regime had already decided was worthless. Two mothers who raised two sons. One son the killer, the other son the killed. Both working class, neither profiting from weapons contracts that drive a 1 trillion dollar "defense" budget. If the national guard helped people, it wouldn't kill them. If you enlist, you are serving the the same machine that closed the factory, that evicted your neighbor, that decided your city was worth occupying, that gunned down your fellow worker. The recruiter will not tell you this. He will lie to you at every turn. But the soldier who refuses to fire knows it. And the working class that organizes against occupation knows it too. Make no mistake, to enlist today is to betray your people in a name of a "country" that has already sold you to Blackrock.
I was in the National Guard. I joined basically as soon as I graduated high school, with the same recruiter who came to my high school a half dozen times to pitch us selfless service, to pitch us environmental response, to pitch us contributing to our country and supporting our countrymen, through the largest propaganda machine in the world. There is no greater scum on God's green earth than a military recruiter. The men and women who are paid to convince the working class to kill for capitalist profit. When my unit was called to quell protests in Baton Rouge in 2018, the refusal rates were so high that they could not send us. It would have been mutiny. Black majority unit. Black soldiers sent to maim other black members of the working class. Because of this, the state was forced to activate a unit nearly 8 hours away from Baton Rouge, not connected enough to the local, majority white unit. Imagine if they had refused too.
Two mothers, two lives, forever changed. Two sons: one dead now, one dead in spirit, who will almost certainly turn the gun upon himself, forcing his mother to carry his casket the same way he forced another to carry her own son's casket.
This is the reality of enlisting in the U.S. military. It is not 2012. It is not 2003. We are all well aware of what the military does. We are well aware of how it operates, and we are well aware of the crimes being committed every day, both abroad and now here in America. The soldier who killed Tyrin Johnson was trained in the same facilities, by the same instructors, using the same manuals, as the soldiers who killed civilians in Gaza. The National Guard that occupies Memphis is the National Guard that occupied Baghdad. The only difference is that now the Pentagon no longer pretends that the enemy is foreign. The enemy is the American working class, and the war has come home.
The news of this soldier murdering a U.S. civilian on U.S. soil will almost certainly be ignored, downplayed, forgotten. This post is just a small hope that the people who decide to enlist in an organization of bastards do something to rebuke this murder.
Where are the soldiers' councils?
The question is not whether individual soldiers have conscience. The question is whether they have organization. If you are in the National Guard and you do not want to be the next soldier who kills a Tyrin Johnson, find the others who feel the same way. Refuse orders collectively. Get organized. Learn your rights. They need your body for their dirty deeds, refuse to let them use it. If you really want to serve your people, this is the path you must take.