Supressing Dissent
Martin and I had a small disagreement about the title of his post about the UCLA tasering last night: I thought perhaps he’d been a little inflammatory, he thought it was perfectly fine. Not that I disagree with him that the police are not our friends, far from it – I just thought the title was maybe a teensy bit injudicious in today’s constantly surveilled world, though I shouldn’t have been surprised at it really, as there’s a deep streak of bloody- minded anti-authoritarianism in the Dutch psyche, and Martin is nothing if not Dutch.
But then I saw this report at MyDD and I thought, no, fuck it, Martin’s right, it’s too bloody late for shilly-shallying here, these are not isolated incidents of violence: these attacks on civilians by police are just a small part of a sustained campaign of international authoritarian violence designed to cow anyone who threatens to step out of line and threaten the corporate status quo.
Houston Police Run Over Striking Janitors with Horses
by Matt Stoller, Fri Nov 17, 2006 at 10:49:46 PM EST
Houston police trampled on striking janitors with horses last night. The janitors make on average $20 a day with no health insurance. The companies responsible? Chevron. And Hines Interest, the city’s largest hometown building owner.
These people make on average $5.35 an hour. With no health insurance. That is frakking ridiculous. It is wrong. And when these workers protested peacefully, the Houston police department rode into a crowd with horses to intimidate and injure the workers. It worked, as they arrested 44 workers and hurt 4 of them, including an 83 year old janitor.
I don’t care if you don’t like unions. This is insane. And if you are a politician reading this site, or a 2008 candidate, now’s your chance to stand up and issue a strong statement condemning these actions and demanding that Chevron and Hines Interest pay these people responsibly.
Here’s video.
Tags: Houston, SEIU, labor (all tags)
I’ve been on the receiving end of this sort of thing at demonstrations in the UK ; I and anyone else who’s ever tried to protest anything at all within the last 20 years or so will recognise the police for what they are, the vicious paramilitary wing of corporate interests, not the cuddly constables or daring detectives the media would have us think. Midsomer Murders, CSI and Law & Order are fiction – the true face of modern policing comes full-face helmeted, riot- shielded, booted and batoned, with all identifying numbers removed. And more and more frequently, also armed. For example British airports are patrolled by machineguns-toting police and there is a permanent state of emergency and a de facto shoot-to-kill policy in London.
On the 20th of July, Carlo Giuliani, a young protestor, was shot dead in Genoa in Piazza Alimonda.
Because of the violent attacks on the marches, more than 500 persons were forced to get themselves treated in hospital; another 600 were assisted by the doctors of the “Genoa Social Forum”. More than three hundred persons denounced violence by the police forces. Independent international observers have referred to the days in Genoa as the biggest act of mass repression in Europe of late. Tens of persons were arbitrarily expelled (of the 87 petitions that were lodged, 85 were upheld, but the better part of the expelled did not lodge an appeal).
Neither the Italian Parliament nor the Italian Government have ever answered Amnesty’s appeal, refusing to even create a parliamentary commission of enquiry whose creation had also been invoked by the opposition and by a large number of organisations of the civil society. Only the judiciary remained to investigate the abuses of the police forces.
On the 26th of June 2004, the preliminary hearing on the “search” at the “Diaz School”, that led to the arrest of 93 persons, of whom 82 had to be taken to hospital due to the beating suffered, was initiated. The magistrate has asked to send 29 police officers and executives up for trial. The charges, to varying degrees, are: abstract falsification of documents, slander, complicity in bodily harm. It has now been ascertained [beyond doubt] that an indiscriminate beating up was carried out inside the “Diaz School” and that the arrests were based on false evidence: the presence in the school of two “Molotov” bottles. The two bottles, as testified by the very police agents, were taken into the school by the police itself. One policeman is charged with having simulated an aggression with a knife by one of the 93 guests at the school. Among the accused are very highly placed executives of the State Police. None of them has felt it necessary to resign while waiting for the outcome of the process. Some, in the mean time, have even been promoted: to the command of anti-terrorism or to a role of responsibility in the European “Task Force” on international terrorism.
And there we come to it. To protest against the increasing corporate control of our lives is considered to be terrorism, and thus any violence used against such dissidents is justified and rewarded, which is why there’s an increasingly apparent tendency with many police departments to go for muscle rather than brains and SWAT teams rather than specialist crime-solvers.
This kind of repression happens all over Europe already. Look at the vicious crackdowns against anti-neoliberal protestors in nice, civilised places like London and Geneva. Look at the many, many repressive laws passed under Blair, allegedly to tackle terrorism, but in actuality used to stifle anti-corporate dissent, criminalise animal-rights advocates and evict squatters.
If such state brutality is increasingly common in Europe, how much more so is it in the US, with its modern history of murderous strike breaking, repressing union activity and violently stifling free speech?
I’ve been reading a lot of the comment threads on liberal blogs who’ve published the UCLA video, and so far as of last night (obviously this is not a scientific survey, nor does it pretend to be) the proportion pro/anti the idea that the onlookers were right not to physically intervene is running about 3 to 1, the general justification for this being they might’ve got tasered too. Jesus wept, have American liberals already forgotten the the shootings at Kent State, the beatings in Chicago and Bull Connors on the Alabama bridge? (The commenters at Steve Gilliards haven’t, that’s something at at least, but they do seem the exception to the rule.)
One commenter said they shouldn’t’ve resisted, even non-violently, because they hadn’t been properly trained. What does he suggest, militia camps in the Rockies? Oy.
The police are not there to protect us: they are there to control us. It’s recieved wisdom that in a liberal democracy, policing is by consent – but to agree with that premise you must first accept you actually live in a real democracy, which I’m afraid is something I absolutely do not accept. When 2 million peaceful protestors can be completely ignored and an unpopular government elected on less than 20% of the available electoral vote, when a government can sell seats in parliament, that is not a democracy.
In the US there is an escalating chorus of eliminationist rhetoric against progressives from the right-wing, stoked by talk-radio demagogues, tacitly approved by and possibly even orchestrated by the White House, and all supplemented by the slow drip-drip of negatively spun stories about liberals in the (allegedly liberal itself) main-stream media.
I’m afraid Americans will have to get used to the increasing frequency of events such as the brutality in Houston and LA – either that or fight back. Every time someone stands by and says or does nothing they are giving their tacit approval. It’s all very well videoing the beatings and sueing after the fact – all that means is next time they’ll make sure they confiscate all phones or clear the area first. Next time you might be videoing a murder, like Carlo Giuliani’s.
These may all seem isolated, unconnected incidents, but together they add up to a broad-brush picture of organised international political repression by right-wing interests. You don’t think all those new shared international terrorist databases are just for brown people, do you?
If you choose not to accept the status quo and choose as a free person to exercise your free speech and say so in public, in today’s repressive political climate it’s likely you’ll encounter some kind of police violence at some point. Then you really will have to choose what to do, take it or fight.
You can blog until the cows come home about truth and justice and democracy but unless you stand up for it where it counts it means fuck-all. I wish I were more hopeful that Western people will indeed stand up and be counted, but I fear this is more likely to be typical of the public response:
Bill Styron and John Marquand Jr. were also in the bar and there was a certain undeniable decadence in the way we sat there, drinks in hand, watching the kids in the street getting wiped out. Tear-gas fumes began to permeate even the locked door, and at the height of the slaughter five or six kids were pushed through a plate-glass window on one side of the bar. The cops rushed in after them. “Get the hell outta here!” a cop was yelling, which they were trying to do as fast as possible. But something was wrong with one of them, a thin blond boy about seventeen. “I can’t walk,” he said.
“You’ll walk outta here, you little son of a bitch!” said the cop and clubbed him across the side of the head with his stick. Two of the others seized him by the shirt and started dragging him across the floor of the bar and through the lobby.
Next to me a middle-aged man, wearing a straw hat with a Hubert Humphrey band, watched the incident with distaste.
“Those damn kids,” he muttered, “I haven’t seen a clean one yet.” Then he looked back out into street where, at that moment, a flying squad of blue helmets and gas masks, clubs swinging, charged straight into a crowd obviously of bystanders.
“Hell,” he grunted, “I’d just as soon live in one of those damn police states as put up with that kind of thing.”
Read more: Police brutality, Protest, Terrorism, Houston, UCLA tasering, G8,Video, YouTube
