10-09-2009, 08:25 AM
the Bonus March
“On 28 July, 1932, Attorney General Mitchell ordered the police evacuation of the Bonus Army veterans, who resisted; the police shot at them, and killed two. When told of the killings, President Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to effect the evacuation of the Bonus Army from Washington, D.C.
At 4:45 p.m., commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the 12th Infantry Regiment, Fort Howard, Maryland, and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by six battle tanks commanded by Maj. George S. Patton, Fort Myer, Virginia, formed in Pennsylvania Avenue while thousands of Civil Service employees left work to line the street and watch the U.S. Army attack its own veterans. The Bonus Marchers, believing the display was in their honour, cheered the troops until Maj. Patton charged the cavalry against them — an action which prompted the Civil Service employee spectators to yell, "Shame! Shame!"
After the cavalry charge, infantry, with fixed bayonets and adamsite gas, entered the Bonus Army camps, evicting veterans, families, and camp followers. The veterans fled across the Anacostia River, to their largest camp; President Hoover ordered the Army assault stopped, however, Gen. MacArthur—feeling this free-speech exercise was a Communist attempt at overthrowing the U.S. Government—ignored the President and ordered a new attack. Hundreds of veterans were injured, several were killed — including William Hushka and Eric Carlson; a veteran's wife miscarried; and many other veterans were hurt.”
“Perhaps the Bonus Army's greatest accomplishment was the piece of legislation known as the G. I. Bill of Rights[citation needed]. Passed in July, 1944, it immensely helped veterans from the Second World War to secure needed assistance from the federal government to help them fit back into civilian life, something the World War I veterans of the Bonus Army had not received. The Bonus Army's activities can also be seen as a template for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, and popular political demonstrations and activism that took place in the U.S. later in the 20th century.”
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
Sand Creek
“ I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces ... With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors ... By whom were they mutilated? By the United States troops ... ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
Wounded Knee
“By the time it was over, about 300 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux had been killed. Twenty-five troopers also died during the massacre, some believed to have been the victims of friendly fire as the shooting took place at point blank range in chaotic conditions.[3] Around 150 Lakota are believed to have fled the chaos, with an unknown number later dying from hypothermia. The massacre is noteworthy as the engagement in which the most Medals of Honor have ever been awarded in the history of the US Army.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
“We can change the world, Re-arrange the world,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4CmRB0hed8
It's dying ... to get better”
10,000 demonstrators came to Chicago for the convention where they were met by 23,000 police and National Guardsmen…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5wvCnkOnnA
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
Kent State [/FONT]
![[Image: 250px-Kent_State_massacre.jpg]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/65/Kent_State_massacre.jpg/250px-Kent_State_massacre.jpg)
“…The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds…”
“Just five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C. against the war and the killing of unarmed student protesters. Ray Price, Nixon's chief speechwriter from 1969-74 recalled the Washington demonstrations saying, "The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That's not student protest, that’s civil war."[8] Not only was Nixon taken to Camp David for two days for his own protection, but Charles Colson (Counsel to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973) stated that the military was called up to protect the administration from the angry students, he recalled that "The 82nd Airborne was in the basement of the executive office building, so I went down just to talk to some of the guys and walk among them, and they're lying on the floor leaning on their packs and their helmets and their cartridge belts and their rifles cocked and you’re thinking, 'This can't be the United States of America. This is not the greatest free democracy in the world. This is a nation at war with itself.'"[8] … President Nixon and his administration's public reaction to the shootings was perceived by many in the anti-war movement as callous. Then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger said the president was "pretending indifference." Stanley Karnow noted in his Vietnam: A History that "The [Nixon] administration initially reacted to this event with wanton insensitivity. Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, whose statements were carefully programmed, referred to the deaths as a reminder that 'when dissent turns to violence, it invited tragedy.'…. After the student protests, Nixon asked H. R. Haldeman to consider the Huston Plan, which would have used illegal procedures to gather information on the leaders of the anti-war movement. Only the resistance of J. Edgar Hoover stopped the plan.[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings#cite_note-Nix_Prez_Rev-7"][8]
[/URL]
Ten days after the Kent State shootings, on May 14, two students were killed by police at the historically black Jackson State University under similar circumstances, but that event did not arouse the same nationwide attention as the Kent State shootings.[25] ….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
http://www.ohiomm.com/mp3/news/ksu/ksu_s..._tapes.mp3
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05...ate&st=nyt
[URL="http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/an-order-to-fire-at-kent-state/?scp=1-b&sq=kent+state&st=nyt"]
[/URL]
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
Wounded Knee II
“During the preceding months of the Wounded Knee occupation, civil war brewed among the Oglala people. There became a clear-cut between the traditional Lakota people and the more progressive minded government supporters. The traditional people wanted more independence from the Federal Government, as well as honoring of the 1868 Sioux treaty, which was still valid. According to the 1868 treaty, the Black Hills of South Dakota still belonged to the Sioux people, and the traditional people wanted the Federal Government to honor their treaty by returning the sacred Black Hills to the Sioux people.
Another severe problem on the Pine Ridge reservation was the strip mining of the land. The chemicals used by the mining operations were poisoning the land and the water. People were getting sick, and children were being born with birth defects. The tribal government and its supporters encouraged the strip mining and the sale of the Black Hills to the Federal Government. It is said that at that point in time, the tribal government was not much more than puppets of the BIA.“
http://www.essortment.com/all/siegewoundedkn_rmpq.htm
[URL="http://www.essortment.com/all/siegewoundedkn_rmpq.htm"]
[/URL]
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
The Myth of Protest Violence
By David Graeber, The Nation
Posted on August 26, 2004, Printed on September 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/19676/
It is a little-known fact that no one at an anti-globalization protest in the United States has ever thrown a Molotov cocktail. Nor is there reason to believe global justice activists have planted bombs, pelted cops with bags of excrement or ripped up sidewalks to pummel them with chunks of concrete, thrown acid in policemen's faces or shot at them with wrist-rockets or water pistols full of urine or bleach. Certainly, none has ever been arrested for doing so. Yet somehow, every time there is a major mobilization, police and government officials begin warning the public that this is exactly what they should expect. Every one of these claims was broached in discussions of the protests against the Summit of the Americas in Miami in November and used to justify extreme police tactics, and we can expect to hear them again approaching the Republican convention in New York.
Such claims have an interesting history. They first emerged in the months immediately following the WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999, with a series of pre-emptive police strikes against activist threats that, much like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, never quite materialized:
[/FONT] April 2000, Washington, DC[/FONT]
Hours before the protests against the IMF and World Bank are to begin, police seize the activists' Convergence Center. Chief Charles Ramsey loudly claims to have discovered a workshop there for manufacturing Molotov cocktails and homemade pepper spray. DC police later admit no such workshop existed (in reality, they'd found paint thinner used in art projects and peppers being used for the manufacture of gazpacho); however, the center remains closed, and much of the art, including the puppets, has been appropriated.
July 2000, Minneapolis
Days before a scheduled protest against the International Society of Animal Geneticists, local police claim that activists detonated a cyanide bomb at a local McDonald's and might have their hands on stolen explosives. The next day the Drug Enforcement Administration raids a house used by organizers, drags off the bloodied inhabitants and appropriates their computers and outreach materials. Police later admit there never was a cyanide bomb and they had no reason to believe activists were in possession of explosives.
August 2000, Philadelphia:
Hours before protests against the Republican convention are to begin, police, claiming to be acting on a tip, seize the warehouse where art, banners and puppets are being prepared, arresting the seventy activists inside. Chief John Timoney announces the discovery of C4 explosives and water balloons full of hydrochloric acid. Police later admit that no explosives or acid were found; those arrested are not, however, released. All of the puppets, banners, art and literature to be used in the protest are destroyed.
[/FONT] While it is possible that we are dealing with a remarkable series of honest mistakes, this looks more like a series of attacks on the materials activists were intending to use to get their message out to the public. Certainly that's how the activists interpreted the raids. One of the big discussions before every new mobilization has now become where to hide the giant puppets. In Miami the City Council actually made the display of puppets illegal during the month of the summit – ostensibly because they could be used to conceal weapons – and the police strategy consisted almost entirely of pre-emptive strikes against activists, hundreds of whom were swept up and charged with planning, but never quite actually performing, unspeakable acts.
The press, meanwhile, has been airing increasingly outlandish accounts of what happened at Seattle. During the WTO protests themselves, no one, including the police, claimed that anyone had done anything more militant than break a plate-glass window. Yet just three months later, the Boston Herald reported that officers from Seattle had come to brief the local police on how to deal with "Seattle tactics," such as attacking police with "chunks of concrete, BB guns, wrist rockets and large capacity squirt guns loaded with bleach and urine." When a few months later New York Times reporter Nichole Christian, apparently relying on police sources in Detroit, claimed that Seattle demonstrators had "hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks and excrement at delegates and police officers," the Times had to run a retraction, admitting that Seattle authorities confirmed no objects had been thrown at human beings. Yet somehow the exact same claims continue to resurface. Before the Miami protests, for example, circulars distributed to local businessmen and civic groups, attributed to "police intelligence" sources, listed every one of these "Seattle tactics" as what should be expected, insuring that when the protests began, most of downtown Miami lay shuttered and abandoned.
[/FONT] Some police officials have become notorious among activists for their Gothic imaginations. Timoney, the former Philadelphia police chief who took over Miami's department before last fall's protests, is fond of peppering his press conferences with stories of activists caught planning to release poisonous snakes and reptiles among the citizenry, officers hospitalized because of acid attacks and activists assaulting his troops with a variety of bodily fluids. Such charges invariably make splashy headlines at the time, only to be later exposed as false or fade away for lack of evidence. Timoney has also become notorious for brutal tactics: In Miami his men opened fire on activists with an array of wooden, rubber and plastic bullets, tazer guns, concussion grenades and a variety of chemical weapons.Despite calls from groups ranging from the United Steelworkers to Amnesty International for an investigation, Timoney continues to be hired as a security consultant for major protests and appears on television frequently as an expert on protest movements.
Probably one of the police's purposes is simply to rally the troops. As commanders discovered in Seattle, police often feel a little uncomfortable about orders to conduct a baton charge against a group of unarmed 16-year-old girls. A deeper reason, though, may have been a perceived need to address a crisis in public perception. To the frustration of high-level officials who were finding their meetings regularly ruined by acts of civil disobedience, the American public largely refused to see the global justice movement as a menace to society. True, the media tried to create hysteria over a few broken windows, but to surprisingly little effect. The question then became, What would it take to cast protesters in the role of the villain? The answer appears to have been a calculated campaign of symbolic warfare: Remove the images of colorful floats and puppets; replace them with images of bombs and hydrochloric acid. And if it has worked – which seems to be the case, considering the public's relative indifference to police destruction of protest art and banners in Philadelphia, or to the extraordinary preemptive violence in Miami – it is because on matters of public security, it rarely occurs to most Americans that so many of the officials charged with protecting them could be intentionally, systematically lying.
http://www.alternet.org/election04/19676..._violence/
[URL="http://www.alternet.org/election04/19676/the_myth_of_protest_violence/"]
[/URL]
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations [sic] were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”
Samuel Huntington
"If violence accomplishes nothing, how do these people believe the civilized conquered in North and South America and Africa, and before these Europe, and before that the Middle East, and since then the rest of the world?! The indigenous did not and do not hand over their land because they recognize they're faced with "a higher stage of social and cultural development." The land was (and is) seized from and the people living there were (and are) slaughtered, terrorized, beaten into submission. The tens of millions of Africans killed in the slave trade would be surprised to learn their slavery was not the result of widespread violence. The same is true for the millions of women burned as witches in Europe. The same is true for the billions of passenger peasant pigeons slaughtered to serve this economic system. The millions of prisoners stacked in gulags here in the US and elsewhere would be astounded to discover that they can walk away anytime they want, but they are not in fact held there by force. Do these people believe that women submit to rape just for the homeless, and not because of the use or threat of violence? The reason violence is used so often by those in power is simple: it works. It works dreadfully well."
"There is not a petition campaign to you can construct is going to cause the power and the status quo to dissipate. There is not a legal action that you can take; you can't go into the court of the conqueror and have the conqueror announce the conquest to be illegitimate and to be repealed; you cannot vote in an alternative, you cannot hold a prayer vigil, you cannot burn the right scented candle at the prayer vigil, you cannot have the right folk song, you cannot have the right fashion statement, you cannot adopt a different diet, or build a better bike path. You have to say it squarely: the fact that this power, this force, this entity, this monstrosity called the State maintains itself by physical force, and can be countered only in terms that it itself dictates and therefore understands. That's a deep breath time; that's a real deep breath time.
It will not be a painless process, but, hey, news flash: it's not a process that is painless and now. If you feel a relative absence of pain, that is testimony only to your position of privilege within the Statist structure. Those who are on the receiving end, whether they are in Iraq, Palestine, Haiti, American Indian reserves inside the United States, whether they are in the migrant stream or the inner city, but those who are "other" and of color in particular but poor people more generally, know the difference between the aimlessness of acquiescence on the one hand and the painfulness of maintaining the existing order on the other. Ultimately, there is no alternative that has found itself in reform; there is only an alternative that finds itself – not in that fanciful word of revolution – but in the devolution, that is to say the dismantlement of the Empire from the inside out.”
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
A series of articles on the Police State
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&themeId=7
More to come...
“On 28 July, 1932, Attorney General Mitchell ordered the police evacuation of the Bonus Army veterans, who resisted; the police shot at them, and killed two. When told of the killings, President Hoover ordered the U.S. Army to effect the evacuation of the Bonus Army from Washington, D.C.
At 4:45 p.m., commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the 12th Infantry Regiment, Fort Howard, Maryland, and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by six battle tanks commanded by Maj. George S. Patton, Fort Myer, Virginia, formed in Pennsylvania Avenue while thousands of Civil Service employees left work to line the street and watch the U.S. Army attack its own veterans. The Bonus Marchers, believing the display was in their honour, cheered the troops until Maj. Patton charged the cavalry against them — an action which prompted the Civil Service employee spectators to yell, "Shame! Shame!"
After the cavalry charge, infantry, with fixed bayonets and adamsite gas, entered the Bonus Army camps, evicting veterans, families, and camp followers. The veterans fled across the Anacostia River, to their largest camp; President Hoover ordered the Army assault stopped, however, Gen. MacArthur—feeling this free-speech exercise was a Communist attempt at overthrowing the U.S. Government—ignored the President and ordered a new attack. Hundreds of veterans were injured, several were killed — including William Hushka and Eric Carlson; a veteran's wife miscarried; and many other veterans were hurt.”
“Perhaps the Bonus Army's greatest accomplishment was the piece of legislation known as the G. I. Bill of Rights[citation needed]. Passed in July, 1944, it immensely helped veterans from the Second World War to secure needed assistance from the federal government to help them fit back into civilian life, something the World War I veterans of the Bonus Army had not received. The Bonus Army's activities can also be seen as a template for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, and popular political demonstrations and activism that took place in the U.S. later in the 20th century.”
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
Sand Creek
“ I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces ... With knives; scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors ... By whom were they mutilated? By the United States troops ... ”
—- John S. Smith, Congressional Testimony of Mr. John S. Smith, 1865[15]
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
Wounded Knee
“By the time it was over, about 300 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux had been killed. Twenty-five troopers also died during the massacre, some believed to have been the victims of friendly fire as the shooting took place at point blank range in chaotic conditions.[3] Around 150 Lakota are believed to have fled the chaos, with an unknown number later dying from hypothermia. The massacre is noteworthy as the engagement in which the most Medals of Honor have ever been awarded in the history of the US Army.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
“We can change the world, Re-arrange the world,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4CmRB0hed8
It's dying ... to get better”
10,000 demonstrators came to Chicago for the convention where they were met by 23,000 police and National Guardsmen…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5wvCnkOnnA
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
Kent State [/FONT]
“…The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds…”
“Just five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C. against the war and the killing of unarmed student protesters. Ray Price, Nixon's chief speechwriter from 1969-74 recalled the Washington demonstrations saying, "The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That's not student protest, that’s civil war."[8] Not only was Nixon taken to Camp David for two days for his own protection, but Charles Colson (Counsel to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973) stated that the military was called up to protect the administration from the angry students, he recalled that "The 82nd Airborne was in the basement of the executive office building, so I went down just to talk to some of the guys and walk among them, and they're lying on the floor leaning on their packs and their helmets and their cartridge belts and their rifles cocked and you’re thinking, 'This can't be the United States of America. This is not the greatest free democracy in the world. This is a nation at war with itself.'"[8] … President Nixon and his administration's public reaction to the shootings was perceived by many in the anti-war movement as callous. Then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger said the president was "pretending indifference." Stanley Karnow noted in his Vietnam: A History that "The [Nixon] administration initially reacted to this event with wanton insensitivity. Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, whose statements were carefully programmed, referred to the deaths as a reminder that 'when dissent turns to violence, it invited tragedy.'…. After the student protests, Nixon asked H. R. Haldeman to consider the Huston Plan, which would have used illegal procedures to gather information on the leaders of the anti-war movement. Only the resistance of J. Edgar Hoover stopped the plan.[URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings#cite_note-Nix_Prez_Rev-7"][8]
[/URL]
Ten days after the Kent State shootings, on May 14, two students were killed by police at the historically black Jackson State University under similar circumstances, but that event did not arouse the same nationwide attention as the Kent State shootings.[25] ….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
http://www.ohiomm.com/mp3/news/ksu/ksu_s..._tapes.mp3
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05...ate&st=nyt
[URL="http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/an-order-to-fire-at-kent-state/?scp=1-b&sq=kent+state&st=nyt"]
[/URL]
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
Wounded Knee II
“During the preceding months of the Wounded Knee occupation, civil war brewed among the Oglala people. There became a clear-cut between the traditional Lakota people and the more progressive minded government supporters. The traditional people wanted more independence from the Federal Government, as well as honoring of the 1868 Sioux treaty, which was still valid. According to the 1868 treaty, the Black Hills of South Dakota still belonged to the Sioux people, and the traditional people wanted the Federal Government to honor their treaty by returning the sacred Black Hills to the Sioux people.
Another severe problem on the Pine Ridge reservation was the strip mining of the land. The chemicals used by the mining operations were poisoning the land and the water. People were getting sick, and children were being born with birth defects. The tribal government and its supporters encouraged the strip mining and the sale of the Black Hills to the Federal Government. It is said that at that point in time, the tribal government was not much more than puppets of the BIA.“
http://www.essortment.com/all/siegewoundedkn_rmpq.htm
[URL="http://www.essortment.com/all/siegewoundedkn_rmpq.htm"]
[/URL]
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
The Myth of Protest Violence
By David Graeber, The Nation
Posted on August 26, 2004, Printed on September 7, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/19676/
It is a little-known fact that no one at an anti-globalization protest in the United States has ever thrown a Molotov cocktail. Nor is there reason to believe global justice activists have planted bombs, pelted cops with bags of excrement or ripped up sidewalks to pummel them with chunks of concrete, thrown acid in policemen's faces or shot at them with wrist-rockets or water pistols full of urine or bleach. Certainly, none has ever been arrested for doing so. Yet somehow, every time there is a major mobilization, police and government officials begin warning the public that this is exactly what they should expect. Every one of these claims was broached in discussions of the protests against the Summit of the Americas in Miami in November and used to justify extreme police tactics, and we can expect to hear them again approaching the Republican convention in New York.
Such claims have an interesting history. They first emerged in the months immediately following the WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999, with a series of pre-emptive police strikes against activist threats that, much like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, never quite materialized:
[/FONT] April 2000, Washington, DC[/FONT]
Hours before the protests against the IMF and World Bank are to begin, police seize the activists' Convergence Center. Chief Charles Ramsey loudly claims to have discovered a workshop there for manufacturing Molotov cocktails and homemade pepper spray. DC police later admit no such workshop existed (in reality, they'd found paint thinner used in art projects and peppers being used for the manufacture of gazpacho); however, the center remains closed, and much of the art, including the puppets, has been appropriated.
July 2000, Minneapolis
Days before a scheduled protest against the International Society of Animal Geneticists, local police claim that activists detonated a cyanide bomb at a local McDonald's and might have their hands on stolen explosives. The next day the Drug Enforcement Administration raids a house used by organizers, drags off the bloodied inhabitants and appropriates their computers and outreach materials. Police later admit there never was a cyanide bomb and they had no reason to believe activists were in possession of explosives.
August 2000, Philadelphia:
Hours before protests against the Republican convention are to begin, police, claiming to be acting on a tip, seize the warehouse where art, banners and puppets are being prepared, arresting the seventy activists inside. Chief John Timoney announces the discovery of C4 explosives and water balloons full of hydrochloric acid. Police later admit that no explosives or acid were found; those arrested are not, however, released. All of the puppets, banners, art and literature to be used in the protest are destroyed.
[/FONT] While it is possible that we are dealing with a remarkable series of honest mistakes, this looks more like a series of attacks on the materials activists were intending to use to get their message out to the public. Certainly that's how the activists interpreted the raids. One of the big discussions before every new mobilization has now become where to hide the giant puppets. In Miami the City Council actually made the display of puppets illegal during the month of the summit – ostensibly because they could be used to conceal weapons – and the police strategy consisted almost entirely of pre-emptive strikes against activists, hundreds of whom were swept up and charged with planning, but never quite actually performing, unspeakable acts.
The press, meanwhile, has been airing increasingly outlandish accounts of what happened at Seattle. During the WTO protests themselves, no one, including the police, claimed that anyone had done anything more militant than break a plate-glass window. Yet just three months later, the Boston Herald reported that officers from Seattle had come to brief the local police on how to deal with "Seattle tactics," such as attacking police with "chunks of concrete, BB guns, wrist rockets and large capacity squirt guns loaded with bleach and urine." When a few months later New York Times reporter Nichole Christian, apparently relying on police sources in Detroit, claimed that Seattle demonstrators had "hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks and excrement at delegates and police officers," the Times had to run a retraction, admitting that Seattle authorities confirmed no objects had been thrown at human beings. Yet somehow the exact same claims continue to resurface. Before the Miami protests, for example, circulars distributed to local businessmen and civic groups, attributed to "police intelligence" sources, listed every one of these "Seattle tactics" as what should be expected, insuring that when the protests began, most of downtown Miami lay shuttered and abandoned.
[/FONT] Some police officials have become notorious among activists for their Gothic imaginations. Timoney, the former Philadelphia police chief who took over Miami's department before last fall's protests, is fond of peppering his press conferences with stories of activists caught planning to release poisonous snakes and reptiles among the citizenry, officers hospitalized because of acid attacks and activists assaulting his troops with a variety of bodily fluids. Such charges invariably make splashy headlines at the time, only to be later exposed as false or fade away for lack of evidence. Timoney has also become notorious for brutal tactics: In Miami his men opened fire on activists with an array of wooden, rubber and plastic bullets, tazer guns, concussion grenades and a variety of chemical weapons.Despite calls from groups ranging from the United Steelworkers to Amnesty International for an investigation, Timoney continues to be hired as a security consultant for major protests and appears on television frequently as an expert on protest movements.
Probably one of the police's purposes is simply to rally the troops. As commanders discovered in Seattle, police often feel a little uncomfortable about orders to conduct a baton charge against a group of unarmed 16-year-old girls. A deeper reason, though, may have been a perceived need to address a crisis in public perception. To the frustration of high-level officials who were finding their meetings regularly ruined by acts of civil disobedience, the American public largely refused to see the global justice movement as a menace to society. True, the media tried to create hysteria over a few broken windows, but to surprisingly little effect. The question then became, What would it take to cast protesters in the role of the villain? The answer appears to have been a calculated campaign of symbolic warfare: Remove the images of colorful floats and puppets; replace them with images of bombs and hydrochloric acid. And if it has worked – which seems to be the case, considering the public's relative indifference to police destruction of protest art and banners in Philadelphia, or to the extraordinary preemptive violence in Miami – it is because on matters of public security, it rarely occurs to most Americans that so many of the officials charged with protecting them could be intentionally, systematically lying.
http://www.alternet.org/election04/19676..._violence/
[URL="http://www.alternet.org/election04/19676/the_myth_of_protest_violence/"]
[/URL]
>>>>><<<<<[/FONT]
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations [sic] were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”
Samuel Huntington
"If violence accomplishes nothing, how do these people believe the civilized conquered in North and South America and Africa, and before these Europe, and before that the Middle East, and since then the rest of the world?! The indigenous did not and do not hand over their land because they recognize they're faced with "a higher stage of social and cultural development." The land was (and is) seized from and the people living there were (and are) slaughtered, terrorized, beaten into submission. The tens of millions of Africans killed in the slave trade would be surprised to learn their slavery was not the result of widespread violence. The same is true for the millions of women burned as witches in Europe. The same is true for the billions of passenger peasant pigeons slaughtered to serve this economic system. The millions of prisoners stacked in gulags here in the US and elsewhere would be astounded to discover that they can walk away anytime they want, but they are not in fact held there by force. Do these people believe that women submit to rape just for the homeless, and not because of the use or threat of violence? The reason violence is used so often by those in power is simple: it works. It works dreadfully well."
"There is not a petition campaign to you can construct is going to cause the power and the status quo to dissipate. There is not a legal action that you can take; you can't go into the court of the conqueror and have the conqueror announce the conquest to be illegitimate and to be repealed; you cannot vote in an alternative, you cannot hold a prayer vigil, you cannot burn the right scented candle at the prayer vigil, you cannot have the right folk song, you cannot have the right fashion statement, you cannot adopt a different diet, or build a better bike path. You have to say it squarely: the fact that this power, this force, this entity, this monstrosity called the State maintains itself by physical force, and can be countered only in terms that it itself dictates and therefore understands. That's a deep breath time; that's a real deep breath time.
It will not be a painless process, but, hey, news flash: it's not a process that is painless and now. If you feel a relative absence of pain, that is testimony only to your position of privilege within the Statist structure. Those who are on the receiving end, whether they are in Iraq, Palestine, Haiti, American Indian reserves inside the United States, whether they are in the migrant stream or the inner city, but those who are "other" and of color in particular but poor people more generally, know the difference between the aimlessness of acquiescence on the one hand and the painfulness of maintaining the existing order on the other. Ultimately, there is no alternative that has found itself in reform; there is only an alternative that finds itself – not in that fanciful word of revolution – but in the devolution, that is to say the dismantlement of the Empire from the inside out.”
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A series of articles on the Police State
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&themeId=7
More to come...
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"