Imprisoning Protest

[Echo In Light]

Imprisoning Protest
by Tom Engelhardt

Quote:If you had followed May Day protests in New York City in the mainstream media, you might hardly have noticed that they happened at all. The stories were generally tucked away, minimalist, focused on a few arrests, and spoke of “hundreds” of protesters in the streets, or maybe, if a reporter was feeling especially generous, a vague "thousands."

I did my own rough count on the largest of the Occupy protests that day. It left Union Square in the evening heading for the Wall Street area. I walked through the march front to back, figuring a couple of thousand loosely packed protesters to a block, and came up with a conservative estimate of 15,000 people. Maybe it wasn’t the biggest protest of all time, but sizeable enough given that Occupy, an organization without strong structures but once strongly located, had been (quite literally) pushed or even beaten out of its camps in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere across the country and toward oblivion.

<snip

The fact is that, in a country whose security forces are up-armored to the teeth from the Mexican border to Union Square, just behind any set of marchers, you can feel the unease of those in power, edging up to fear. And no wonder. We remain in a “recovery” that’s spinning on a dime. Let the Eurozone falter and begin to fall, the Chinese housing bubble pop, or the Persian Gulf go up in flames, and hold onto your signs. Like Bloomberg in the Big Apple, many mayors sent in their paramilitaries (with a helping hand from the Department of Homeland Security) to get rid of the “troublemakers.” Only problem: their real problems run so much deeper and when the next “moment” comes, Occupy could look like a march in the park (which, in many inspirational ways, it largely was). In the meantime, the streets increasingly belong to the weaponized. Americans who protest blur into the “terrorists” who, since 9/11, have been the obsession of what passes for law enforcement.

[Refuse/resist]

A major step toward full-blown Fascism is common/repeated police state brutality aimed at dissension and protest by the little people. We've arrived, full-blown, sadly.

Fascists view these protests as left-wing elements. So did Hitler and Mussolini.

Fascists attack, arrest, brutalize, imprison PEACEFUL, NON-THREATENING protesters. Just Like M&H.

They're cut from the same cloth.

[reggie the dog]

the way they deal with protesters in the usa is horrible, here in france you can take your little toddlers to protests with you as about 99% of our protests have no violent police repression. the usa is fucked.