Category: War

an early image of the “Me Worry?” kid, possibly from the 1920s according to Wikipedia

Going back at least as far as The Yellow Kid, we’ve always had our Alfred E. Neumans, but we never used to make them emperors.
The upshot of telling a citizenry over and over again for two hundred years that anyone can become president is today’s reality that anyone can become president – unless of course they’re smart or work hard to deserve the honor and responsibility.
Mournful thoughts about the current occupant of the White House and the two cyphers whom the corporations are about to nominate to succeed him are the occasion for my reflection on this baleful subject.
We now know that Bush clearly wasn’t an accident, and McCain and Palin scare me perhaps more – if that’s even possible.

[image from wikipedia]

The Minnesota September 1st “March on the RNC and Stop the War” began in St. Paul at 11am local time today (CDT is one hour earlier than New York). Marchers planned to start with a rally at the state capitol, go to the Xcel Center in a “permitted” march and return to the capital, but things are already getting interesting as I write this. For more information see marchonrnc.org.
For continuous updates, go to this page on the Twin Cities Indymedia site or check out the MnIndyLIVE twitter feed.

Should you need more context for this, see my earlier posts from August 28 and August 30, and this Salon.com piece by Glenn Greenwald published just 24 hours ago. It’s excerpted here:

So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it’s not difficult to see why. As the recent “overhaul” of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated — preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror — we’ve essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.
Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they’ve done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our “freedoms” in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic — but we’ve decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it’s therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

It seems we’re now leaving it up to the kids to defend liberties we all used to pretend were ours. I hope that somehow both they and the genuine patriotism which inspires them survives. At the moment they aren’t being given much support, or even the recognition which a real media would owe them, the rest of us, and the entire world.

[image from marchonrnc]

A throng of media members and interested observers crowd together in a yard next to a house on Iglehart Ave. that was raided by police Saturday afternoon.[Minneapolis Star Tribune caption]

UPDATE: Before going off to a restless sleep, I will note that up to this moment (it’s Sunday, 2:30 am EDT) I can find absolutely nothing about these raids on any of the popular alternative political blogs. As usual, they’re all totally distracted by the agenda laid out for them by the criminal establishment they are supposed to at least critique and creatively resist. I mean, come on, Sarah Palin? Right now she’s just a zero operating as a smoke screen.

I thought New York in 2004 was pretty horrible, but I can’t keep up with and can’t begin to cover here all the developing stories about the police state tactics employed this year in both Denver and the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
It’s not just the nausea induced by these increasingly appalling reports. They already exceed even the expectations of my cynical imagination, and now I’m sure there will be much more, since there is nothing in place to stop the successful progress of our special brand of American authoritarianism. What’s happening at the sites of the two political sales conventions is part of a system designed to secure not us, but the reactionary corporate state which has succeeded in turning relatively-free citizens into medicated subjects meaningful to it only as consumers.
If you can still take it, I suggest searching online for news using the key words “police” “arrests” or “Convention”. You’re going to be shocked.
Ah hah! Barry is sitting just across from me as I’m writing this and he’s invited me to look at two posts he’s just completed. He’s put it all together better and more quickly than I could imagine any one writer could. Look at Bloggy’s “It’s all ultimately one big (political) party” and “Crackdowns on protestors and press in Denver and Twin Cities“.
The second post begins:

[at the homes of activists in the Twin Cities] They are knocking down doors and coming in with semi-automatic weapons to arrest people and confiscate belongings, including computers, journals, and political pamphlets. They have also arrested National Lawyer Guild lawyers trying to find out more information.

This is me again now: I thought a moment about finishing my last post two days ago with the hope that no one tries to burn down the Capitol building in Washington. Now I’m thinking it absolutely wouldn’t be necessary this time.

[image by David Joles from StarTribune, where there are more photos and a story]

nothing to see here, folks – keep moving*

Move over, China and Zimbabwe: Make room for America. Okay, so I exaggerate a bit; let’s just say instead that the gap is definitely narrowing between us and those nasty foreign governments whose practices we decry, when it comes to what can be done to prop up an unrepresentative regime.
Four weeks ago we were told that in Denver demonstrators who wished to address those attending the Democratic Convention (that is the unpaid, unprofessional, unworthy lobbyists, the unwashed multitudes) were/are not permitted to get within a quarter mile of the gates to the arena. A high-wire-fenced free speech pen was set aside somewhere in the boondocks where attendees would not be able to hear or see the people who want to approach their supposed representatives and the media which fawns on those official politicos. Not surprisingly, no one showed up. And then I have to read Markos of Daily Kos report from inside, with the chosen:

I listened in briefly to a cop and some convention goers having a nice chat as we tried to get a cab to the hotel. He was saying how uneventful the convention had been, how well-behaved protesters had been, and how everything appeared to be going nice and smooth. Knock on wood, I suppose. I don’t know how the TV blowhards have been portraying that stuff, but from my vantage point, it’s been quite civil and — dare I say it? — even tame.

I try not to scream.
In Minnesota, one week before the Republicans meet in St. Paul, the local constabulary shows looks like they’re trying to outdo the NYPD Brownshirts. They’re taking on the aspect of a Secret Police: Artist/videographer/journalists of the Glass Bead Collective, who were responsible for releasing the video of the New York cop body slamming a cyclist, were detained and searched yesterday morning by Minneapolis police. Their equipment was confiscated. No reasons were given.
They’re in St. Paul as members of the independent press documenting the Republican National Convention. Three police and sheriff cars stopped and photographed them at 2 in the morning as they were returning to their rooms. They were videographed by the police and questioned individually about their travel plans and what they intended to report on. They were forced to line up against a police vehicle and they were first searched and then their personal belongings, including notes, phones, computers and personal objects, were confiscated, even though they were released without charges.
The obvious assignment for these thugs with badges was to get information on the identity and plans of anyone planning unregulated speech during the Democratic Party Convention and to intimidate anyone who might be thinking about exercising rights these officers should be protecting. Do not fail to watch this powerful video; if we survive this regime, it will become an important document of these times.
Today we learn that a billboard company has abruptly canceled a contract [signed August 8, revoked last week] which a recognized New York artist had for her “Soldier Billboard Project” to be mounted on billboards in St. Paul next week while the Republicans were in the city. The large-scale photographs of Suzanne Opton are powerful portraits of American soldiers between tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
An executive of the advertising company involved (owned by CBS) provided this statement, apparently trying to explain his corporation’s censorship:

“The reason we have advised you that we cannot post these as billboards is that out-of-context (neither in a museum setting or website) the images, as stand-alone highway or city billboards, appear to be deceased soldiers. The presentation in this manner could be perceived as being disrespectful to the men and women in our armed forces.”

It’s now clear they’ve got us where they want us, wherever we live. All they have to do is say that what we do is what terrorists do, and that seems to be enough for our frightened or doped fellow citizens. The new fascism: Don’t expect a formal announcement.

*
Agence France-Presse caption:

Members of the Denver Police Department patrol Auraria Parkway outside the Pepsi Center as activists protest prior to the Democratic National Convention on August 23, 2008 in Denver, Colorado. A tight security net enveloped Denver as the city braced Sunday for the arrival of tens of thousands of supporters and protestors for the Democratic Party’s political extravaganza.

[image by Doug Pensinger from AFP]

Roland Freisler presided over the show trials of another regime

I’ve been buried among memoirs and histories of Nazi Germany lately so the news of today’s verdict by an illegitimate, burlesque* court operating inside a room of an abandoned airport control tower within our remote, bargain-rental military base at Guantanamo Bay brings to my mind the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) established by the Nazi regime after the Reichstag fire. That court continued operating (eventually without Freisler, who was killed in an Allied bombing raid February 3, 1945) until the end of its creators’ own gruesome unjustifiable war, initiated several years later.
No, in spite of our government’s attempt to maintain the contrary, including commissioning a special film, this is no Nuremberg trial. Interesting fact: Roland Freisler may have been a screamer and a monster, but at least the Nazis had the courage of their convictions: their show trials were open to the public – and filmed exhaustively.
One more thought: Does it mean anything that after all this time we still don’t even know the name of this dangerous terrorist, the little man from the other side of the world whom the full power of our state condemned today? It’s not in any headline I’ve seen, and you’ll find you have to go well into the first or second paragraph of a news story to find it.
I’m ashamed of my country’s government, and don’t talk to me about our mute Democrats, the frightening-loyal “opposition”. At this moment I see no reason to hope for an end to our fundamentally stupid or simply abominable policies at home or abroad. The patriots of the German Resistance eventually came to understand that only a German defeat could save their country, Europe and the world. It would be good to be able to believe we haven’t gone that far ourselves, but I’m not willing to bet on it right now.

*
The prosecution has announced that even if a defendant ends up acquitted, he (so far they are all men – or boys, at the time they were rounded up) can be thrown right back into a Guantanamo cell or imprisoned in some other rathole which would be equally or even more isolated.
Can we pinpoint the moment when a nation sold its soul?

[image from a currently-inactive site, germanika]

Wait, wait, are you kidding me? Is this real? Where does the U.S. get off building big prisons in other people’s countries just willy-nilly? We already have less than 5 percent of the world’s population but something like a quarter of the world’s prisoners inside our own borders, and now tonight I’ve just come across this NYTimes report:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.
The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

40 acres, no mules – and no exit.

[image from jsfbooks.com]