Louis Proyect wrote: > > raghu wrote: > > In the long list of all the misery and suffering in the world, 300-odd > > terrorism suspects wrongfully imprisoned, doesn't even make my top-50. > > You miss the point entirely, it would seem. The willingness to > imprison people for life without a trial is unprecedented in > American history. If this occurred in Egypt, it would not be worth > mentioning. We are dealing, however, with a problem of erosion of > democratic rights in a country that has long been considered > exemplary on that front. It is a sign of the growing crisis of > American capitalism, as might not be obvious to somebody who has > not been trained to detect illnesses in the body politic.
This is important. Le me add to it. When Nixon launched the War on Drugs/Crime that war had nothing whatever to do with drugs or crime. It had two other quite different goals: The context was the complex of powerful movements we know as "The 60s," which had seriously freaked Nixon (and probably many of his advisors) out. In that context, tht war had two goals: 1.Ideolgoical. It exploited the common belief that "Where there was fire there was smoke. Launching with great fanfare a "War on Crime" created the smoke, and was intended to arouse fear among the public of individual threats to security, and the focus on drugs involved giving racism a renewed grip on white Americans. 2. It justified the ramping up to unprecedented extent the available repressive machinery, with grants to local police, the building of prisons, and so forth. That is, those measuree did reflect, not necessarily an _actual_ threat to social stabiality (crisis of capitalism) but certainnly a perception of such a threat and extravagant efforts to meet it. The War on Terror (which goes back to the Clinton Administration) repeats and intensifies that original purpose. The phrase "erosion of democratic rights," however, has the feel of an objective process while I would think it is a deliberate and planned "whittling away" of democratic rights. This is one reason that an at all coherent and serious left would have as a central part of its program an attack on the whole prison system and defense of the rights of convicts as well as those on trial. Trivializing the infraction of the rights of terrorists shows a complete indifference to political reality, not just a lack of training in American tradition. Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
