By Dennis Loo
When I heard that police were raiding
– with guns drawn – the homes and offices of prospective
protesters in St. Paul in anticipation of the RNC, because protesters
were concealing weapons – weapons the police didn’t find because they
don’t exist – my first thought was how very deep into a police state
we now are.
Then I thought, how akin this excuse
is to the WMD hoax justifying the Iraq invasion. “They”re hoarding
weapons of mass destruction! Oh my god! We must crush them before they
get us!”
After which I thought, which part of
this is the bigger story?
Is it the fact that gendarmes of the
city, state and nation are behaving worse than those nasty Chinese police
during the Olympics who don’t appreciate the cardinal right to demonstrate
that we in America understand so well?
Is it the fact that the Democratic Party
set up “Democracy cages” in Denver to shield the Democratic Party
and its “Champions of the People” from protestors demanding real
change?
Or is it the fact that these police state
tactics are not deemed worthy of mainstream media attention from
the same media that lauded Bush’s complaints about Russia’s actions
towards Georgia and China’s “human rights” record?
Is it that the pre-emptive criminalization
of protest and of speech, the use of percussive grenades on peaceful
demonstrators, the tearing of peace activists out of their cars, the
arrests of journalists and charges of “conspiracy to riot in furtherance
of terrorism” and so on, are only bad when they”re done outside
the U.S., but they”re democracy in action when they”re done inside
the U.S.?
I honestly don’t know which is worse:
the fascist actions or the deafening silence and the myopic national
chauvinism of the corporate media about any of this.
* * *
At the DNC our-man-of-change Obama chooses
as his running mate a senator who was even more hawkish on Iraq than
were Bush and Cheney – if that is possible – and at the RNC the
maverick McCain chooses a Dominionist who reminds me of an even more
malevolent version of Nixon’s Veep Spiro Agnew – if that is
possible – a lipstick wearing, lying, mean-spirited, Hockey Mom/pit
bull, who mocks the need to give some smidgen of due process to those
being held at Gitmo since they”re all “terrorists” after all.
And the crowd goes wild from her words, gesticulating with signs that
say “Country First,” all the while looking to my eyes like Über
alles all over again.
From the German national anthem during
the Nazi years:
“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,
Über alles in der Welt,
Wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze
Brüderlich zusammenhält.”
English translation:
“Germany, Germany above everything,
Above everything in the world,
When it always for protection and defense,
Brotherly sticks together.”
* * *
Welcome to the free, fair and glorious
celebration of democracy we call elections in America, version 2008.
Like Vista, we need to reboot because
it seems to freeze all the time when we try to write the words: End
the War. Stop the Torture. Impeach the War Criminals.
With the \”pre-emptive\” arrests of those who peacefully protested against those corporate-sponsored fests of fascism which were the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, I often wonder if we Americans have become a nation of Casper Milquetoasts; people who are so terrified, paranoid, stricken with emotional and intellectual paralysis and fearful of everything and everyone due to our deep-seated ignorance, shallowness and overall intellectual laziness.
Of course, our corporate media aids and abets our intellectual laziness and passivity by refusing to be the watchdog who\’s supposed to sound the alarm to warn us, galvanize and encourage us to become a significant point of resistance against the kind of \”Gestapo\” police-state tactics of suppression, repression and \”pre-emptive\” arrests of people who might do something wrong.
What\’s becomeing more evident and more frightening is that those Americans who\’ve been genuinely victimized by the Bush/Cheney Regime are hysterically shouting \”Country First! Country First!\” in an attempt to prove that they\’re still \”Americans\”, who are the exception to every rule there is.
In a bizarre way, we\’re reliving what happened to the unfortunate souls who lived in Weimar Germany just before the Second World War. As the economic crisis in Germany grew, the people yearned for a \”savior\” to get them out of this mess. What they got was Adolf Hitler, and we all know what happened after he became Germany\’s dictator. It\’s true that \”those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them\” and what we\’re seeing now is an American-style twist on that ugly part of history which we have yet again failed to learn.