Jim wrote:
BTW, I am wondering about the Bushies' response to the peace movement. Are they simply ignoring it? or are they doing Cointelpro again? or what?
Good question. Conceding that in the opening
years of the 21st century in the United States there really is no
such thing as paranoia -- Big Brother is here and reading this -- I'm
going to wallow in it for a minute anyway.
Cointelpro never went away. The case of the '88
bombing of Judi Bari illustrated this very clearly. The FBI worked
very hard and covertly to undermine Earth First!, planted agents who
instigated illegal activities like taking cutting torches to power
lines. In her discovery actions (which took years due to FBI
redaction and refusals) Bari learned that the FBI had transcripts of
the conversations of two people walking alone in the Arizona desert!
I think there is plenty of evidence that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation has never been about LAW enforcement but POLITICAL
enforcement. The Bari bombing put the blame on forests activists long
enough to defeat the Forests Forever Initiative that was winning
until then.
As a marcher in the San Francisco demonstration
nine days ago, I felt an eerie sensation that not all was right.
Don't get me wrong -- the demonstration was a wonderful collusion of
people of peace of all ages, colors, financial states, religions and
political hues. It was peaceful, fun and non-confrontational,
assertive but not angry. And it was hopeful. The eerie part was the
studied invisibility of the police. It's easy, and probably somewhat
appropriate, to say that San Francisco has a long history of dealing
with large demonstrations and it has learned its lessons in crowd
control.
But the invisibility of the police was not just
a San Francisco phenomenon. The various peace forums I
monitored all said the same thing about demonstrations in other
cities -- Portland, Reno, Las Vegas. The press called them peaceful
and generally uneventful and, of course, it reported fewer
participants than the actuality (as is a governmentally sycophantic
press wont to do), but participants noted that the police were
low-key when visible. Even the Washington DC police, normally brutal,
bossy and provoking, kept to a presidential motorcade
motif.
In the Seattle WTO protests, the police were
everywhere, thousands of them for 60,000 protestors. During the day,
protestors were actively trying to keep WTO delegates from getting
into the conference, and the crowds were angry as well as assertive.
But when the confrontations were over for the day, and people were
just hanging around, chanting, singing, and peacefully demonstrating,
the police sweep across the city stopping at each intersection to
fire off tens of rounds of tear gas indiscriminately. (I broke into
This Land is Your Land on my banjo-uke.) The protestors scattered and
immediately emptied the streets. The only ones left were the cops,
who apparently smashed numerous store windows, an action blamed on
the protestors the next morning. The local police chief later took a
lot of heat for giving the order, but I suspect he was acting on
orders from the Clinton Administration.
The uniformity of police response in the recent
demonstrations is very likely a coordinated effort of the Bush
Administration and Das Homeland Security cadre. Ridge has made it
clear that the US government has been working very closely with local
law enforcement agencies including college campus police. An American
Krystalnacht (sp?) is yet to come.
It's the American people who are in the way of
the Bush agenda, not Saddam. And it is the American people who have
the best shot at stopping the quest of the filthy rich to steal the
rest of the planet. Here's an observation from a German
friend:
"Our government, for instance, likes to say the one
and do the other. Especially in Berlin, we had a lot of protest
marches against the weak words of our lords. The German history was a
good lesson for it. Even very young Germans know what it means to be
hated by their neighbors for things which their weak grandfathers did
or respectively didn't do. In Germany and in other European
countries, people always say that the most serious danger comes from
America. Now, I and many of my friends know that the Americans are
the greatest hope as well and we are thinking to Americans like you
and all the people who were on the streets in Washington and San
Francisco last weekend. These Americans are wonderful and I hope that
they are strong enough to be successful."
Dan Scanlan
