Easily the most disturbing part of a disturbing Saturday for this country was watching the tame police response to white men marching around as a heavily armed “militia.”
The only disturbing thing about it is being indicative of the underlying structural racism. Other than that, if the police are (to put it nicely) not exactly allies of progress, it is better if they are not involved. What would I prefer to have to deal with? A hundred untrained racists? Or a hundred untrained racists AND a thousand trained police?
Authority comes from the people, and for some of us, the police are unaccountable yahoos who have no more authority than these militias or anybody else. WE showed up to counter the fascists as equals, which is as it should be. It would be wishful thinking to hope that agents of The State are coming to save us from violent authoritarians, when The State requires cultivating a class of violent authoritarians who can oppress the masses.
When we have the solidarity to disperse police from places like Ferguson and Standing Rock, then we’ll be getting somewhere.
i don’t think it’s bigoted to say americans have some work to do on the way we view the world.
and yes. humility would go a long way to helping. american exceptionalism, america as the best country on earth, these things bring with it an unwillingness to acknowledge the wrongs we’ve done and the wrongs we’re doing.
unlike the perjoratives you listed - which some people seriously consider/ed unchanging attributes of “races” - we don’t have to be a society of people who willingly stick their heads in the sand.
my google fu is failing. i was looking for a survey i saw which found that, in some ways, the police force in a community tends to represent the values ( in this case read: bigotry ) of a community.
while americans believe strongly in the myth of the self-made man, they also love their military. ( that they think their second amendment pea shooters are going to matter if tanks are rolling down the street is precious. )
part of ending the militarized police is ending the belief that being in the miltary makes you a “hero”. that it makes you “a man.” that more miltary is always good. that might makes right - at the expense of repeating myself - because we’re the greatest country on earth.
i do think ( hope ) changing those views will help change the police. ( acknowledging, of course, the present problem in having an administration willing to double down on militarization. and a facist white supremacy eager to team up with them. )
it’s right that these folks can’t be ceded the public space ( be it pipelines or robert e. lee statues ), at the same time we need to find ways to change people’s minds.
Right. We need to get the money out of politics, restore due process, end mass surveillance and torture, reign in the executive branch’s power to wage war, and a slew of other things. We’ve been letting it erode, in part, because most people are happy to overlook what happens when their party is in power.
[quote]Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Monday that the “evil attack” in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend meets the legal definition of an act of domestic terrorism, an early declaration in an investigation after a car plowed into a crowd of protesters.
“It does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute,” Mr. Sessions said on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” referring to a fatal attack on Saturday when a vehicle drove into a crowd protesting white nationalists, killing one woman and injuring others. A 20-year-old man has been arrested and charged by Virginia authorities with second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and failing to stop at the scene of a crash that resulted in a death.[/quote]
Unrelated thought—I wonder if Trump supporters can explain why, if Hitler was a leftist (as they insist), his followers show up to Unite the Right rallies.
No offence, but you’re starting to sound like the police infiltrators people used to warn me about when I was in a union. The one person who kept saying we just weren’t going far enough with our strike action, but they had some new ideas that were bound to be more effective…
If I was telling you to throw bombs or shoot cops, that’d be a fair call. But I’m not.
Again: at no point have I called for violent protest. I can show you multiple examples of posts by myself arguing that violence against the state is counter-productive and doomed to failure.
But “non-violent” does not mean polite and obedient, and the time window in which non-violent methods can succeed is limited.
If people object to the tactics I advocate [1], I am happy to hear about alternatives. What is your solution to the rise of American Fascism?
[1] Which are basically the same as what Naomi Klein is calling for; sustained disruptive non-destructive non-violence.
Yet, you seem singularly focused on the GOP, as though they’re the evil cabal at the source of all the world’s problems, and the solution is simply for Americans to capture their underground lair and round up their leaders. But when you’re talking about US foreign policy, for example, the principal cause is really global capitalism, of which the Republican Party is a militant expression. It’s economic forces creating the impetus for war, and the money flowing into the hands of politicians who espouse the ideologies necessary to rationalize this to the public. It’s the festering human misery wrought by those forces that births the resentments that the Trumps of the world are eager to exploit.
The problem is that people aren’t in control; they’re slaves to an algorithm—capitalism—that frames their immediate self-interests according to its own. This is true of the GOP, it’s true of every CEO. As human beings, we feel threatened and we want to chuck a spear at someone, but we can’t stab an algorithm, so we look for flesh-and-blood culprits. For Alex Jones it’s the NWO. For David Icke, it’s reptilians. Maybe for you it’s the Republicans.
The economic beast at the source of our problems spans the globe and we all share some measure of responsibility for it. Whatever you can do on your front will help us on ours.
Ok, yeah, I’m not exactly serious there. More seriously…
Part of the problem is that a large portion of the norms aren’t obsolete, and that they offer a large amount of protection. Throwing away those protections gives the jackasses of the world the upper hand.
Which has a heck of a lot to do with the fact that manufacturing left the country at the same time as we absorbed economic refugees from the south, making it really easy for some people to believe that the “American Dream” was being handed off to undeserving brown people. Meanwhile, some of the people who live on top of the oil resources that we’re constantly trying to dominate decided to lash out and crash some planes into our buildings. American fascism is driven by economic forces that must be addressed.
I wholeheartedly agree. In the end, I’m probably more of a pessimist than you. You think that the Republicans are the problem, I think they’re a symptom of something much worse. If we put out this fire today but don’t reign in global capitalism, we’re going to be dealing with two fires tomorrow. The economic stresses that gave rise to Trump are nothing compared to what we’re going to experience once climate change really kicks in.
I get that American voters have disproportionate influence over the rest of the world’s welfare and that it’s frustrating to you when we fuck up, but if your whole idea is to get us to hurry up and fix things, then you’re shirking your own responsibility for what is, I repeat, a global crisis.
Look for my comments on climate change if you want to see me in proper pessimistic the-end-is-nigh mode.
Capitalism feeds fascism, sure. But that was the case seventy years ago, too.
Should the lefties of the day have kept the focus on overthrowing capitalism, or were they right to view the defeat of fascism as a more urgent priority?
