Infiltration, violence and media framing—an example for Occupy

As if by magic comes this Rick Perlstein piece on cop infiltration. Occupy, take note. It touches three bases I touched on earlier — infiltration, violence and media framing. (This post also concludes my thoughts on Occupy and violence; it makes the rest of my case.)

Perlstein's intro (my emphasis and the usual reparagraphing for our narrow columns):

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act violently.

At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship.

A third, however, argued for a big bridge – "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450.

Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies.

Can you smell the setup?

The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did.

Note the goal — to make the "Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic." In the battle for hearts and minds of the well-washed undecided middle, violence sways the undecided to the well-washed cops.

First the mechanics, then the why. The mechanics:

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant.

The merchant was an FBI agent.

The bomb, of course, was a dud.

And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men [whom] federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place.

One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling "very pressured" by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: "We're in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don't cut it," he said. "And it's actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that."

Though when Cleveland's NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it "Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence."

And there's your trifecta. The FBI (or NYPD or LAPD or ATF or LSMFT) infiltrates a group; they pressure the group toward violence; and the media frames the bust as "Violent Anarchist Foiled". (The rest of that headline is often: "And Accidently Breaks His Head During Kid-Gloves Arrest".)

By the way, are you noting the press emergence of the term "anarchist"? "Terrorist" is losing its sting.

Perlstein's sums up this part of the story (and his emphasis):

[The feds] are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.

Nice to see someone else capitalize "the State" — it's a dominant player in the drama all by itself, isn't it? After all, who needs national leaders when you have all the money you'll ever need, a hard-baked infrastructure, and institutional momentum? It moves by itself.

There are many more stories in Perlstein's nice piece. Please do read.

Now the why. Why does this matter for Occupy?

I'm looking at the Antiwar Movement of the 1960s and 1970s as a model. That movement reached critical mass — a momentum that could not be stopped or ignored — by absorbing into it masses of the middle-class middle.

Movements like Occupy see the world differently than the apolitical middle-class. The middle class sees the Matrix, the Republican and Democratic self-presentation, the Ozian manipulation, and miss completely the man behind the curtain.

Movements don't reach critical mass until large numbers of those in the see-what-they're-shown center start looking past the curtain, past the Matrix, to what's really going on.

That only happens in a couple of ways. A great national crisis of pain will do it (example, the Great Depression, which radicalized a whole bunch of people against their rulers and manipulators). We didn't get that last time round, the crisis we could have been handed in 2008.

In the 1960s, the compulsory national draft got the attention of a whole generation, in a deeply personal way. Everyone was affected or knew someone who was. And the price of losing that lotto was potential death in a rice paddy. Hard not to care.

In both of the examples above, the movement for change reached critical mass, its members educated themselves, and the nation had no choice but to respond. (Read here about the importance of movement self-education.)

What does Occupy have to do to reach critical mass? It's not certain they will.

But what they must not do, in my humble opinion, is alienate the convincible middle before the middle can be recruited. Allowing the State — through its agents and media partners — to turn people off before Occupy can turn them on could be a death sentence for Occupy.

And with this, I'll rest my case. Occupy. Effectively. Reach critical mass.

GP

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Occupy: This is how you know you have their attention

You still have it, Occupy. They're still looking at you.

A lot happened in Chicago over the weekend at events related to the demonstrations against NATO. Depending on where you go or who you ask, you get a different picture. It's a real kaleidoscope of images and viewing angles.

I want to look at some of the kaleidoscope, then add things up.

■ First this image (click to big):

as referenced in this tweet:

United front of bike-cops and long-baton riot troopers protecting Chicago from vegans with flags twitpic.com/9nhnhy

— Kenneth Lipp (@kennethlipp) May 21, 2012

Remind you of this? It should — they're back. Per Sam Seder, there were also anecdotal reports of LRAD deployments.

■ Next this taste from the Chicago Sun-Times:

Chicago Police in riot gear battled with [...] protesters at Michigan and Cermak on Sunday, with officers raining down baton blows, pushing taunting protesters back and leaving some bloody.

I've left this report brief (and edited) because I've read many non-mainstream accounts that conflict with those from mainstream media, whom I strongly suspect of "framing" rather than reporting.

I suggest you do likewise — strongly suspect the mainstream media of "framing," not just reporting.

■ But this really got my attention. Via David Swanson (my emphasis and some reparagraphing):

A huge crowd gathered for several hours and marched for over two miles in the hot sun to oppose NATO and U.S. wars on Sunday in Chicago. Finishing the march outside the NATO meeting, numerous U.S. veterans of current wars denounced their previous "service" and threw their medals over the fence, a scene not witnessed since the U.S. war on Vietnam.

This event, with massive turnout and tremendous energy, saw the participation of numerous groups from Chicago and the surrounding area, including students, teachers, and activists on a variety of issues ... No one can have been disappointed with the turnout, but it might have been bigger if not for the fear that was spread prior to Sunday. In the face of that fear, Sunday's action was remarkable.

The fear was the result of a massive militarized police build up, rumors of evacuations, the boarding up of windows, brutal police assaults on activists, preemptive arrests, disappearances, and charges of terrorism.

A segment of the activist world plays into these police tactics, wearing bandanas, shouting curses, antagonizing police, and eroding credibility for claims that violence is all police-initiated. Yet the vast majority of the crowd was disciplined, nonviolent, and effective.

Swanson adds editorially:

It is critical that the people of Afghanistan know the people of the U.S. oppose what NATO is doing to them.

Agree or disagree, that was the message.

Veterans demonstrate against war in Chicago, May 21, 2012.
(Photo: peoplesworld)

UPDATE: More images of the soldiers' protest here.

■ About those "disappearances" you might start here. There are many more reports like that. It paints yet another picture, this time of covert police intel ops, likely infiltration, and "preventive" uncharged detentions.

Were there also agents provocateurs sprinkled among the boys in black? You guess.

What does this add to?

These images sum to an establishment that's frightened and feeling under siege. They are afraid that Occupy will have an effect and are determined to stamp it out.

This is excellent news, in my opinion. It means:

• Occupy still has their attention (thank you, spirit in the sky).
  
  
• The Masters of the State are determined — stupidly in my opinion — to make themselves and their cops the news; to send a message, as it were.

Message sent. I was worried during the winter hiatus that Occupy would become ho-hum, last week's newspaper. The State's preoccupation (heh) means Occupy might still build critical mass.

What to do next

It seems clear that Occupy leaders (you know you exist) should be certain to embrace non-violence. You don't have to police your ranks (the cops will do that for you — by infiltration and by beating). But define violent attack (yes, even against property) as outside the Occupy Movement circle.

I've expressed that argument here. The additional reason is infiltration.

You know you will be infiltrated, Occupy. You've certainly been infiltrated already. The first mark you should put on someone espousing violence is "cop candidate". You'll be right at least part of the time, and you can't afford to be wrong, to assume the sincerity of the violent.

If you divide around violence, you will shrink and ultimately fail. If you unite against violence, you retain the best PR advantage you have — "We're not the 1%. We're not Them."

In my opinion, this is your most promising growth path.

And your success matters. As I wrote earlier, the whole rest of the resistance, of which Occupy is just a part, needs you to grow. Critical mass.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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Justice Dept. supports right to film police

It's one of the few good moves to come out of this Justice Department. Police forces across the US have increasingly been abusing their power during legitimate protests, including taking away video recordings that show abusive police behavior. While such tactics may be normal in some countries, we should never accept that behavior in the US.

More via Wired:

In a surprising letter (.pdf) sent on Monday to attorneys for the Baltimore Police Department, the Justice Department also strongly asserted that officers who seize and destroy such recordings without a warrant or without due process are in strict violation of the individual’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The letter was sent to the police department as it prepares for meetings to discuss a settlement over a civil lawsuit brought by a citizen who sued the department after his camera was seized by police.

In the lawsuit, Christopher Sharp alleged that in May 2010, Baltimore City police officers seized, searched and deleted the contents of his mobile phone after he used it to record them as they were arresting a friend of his.

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Chicago police purchase ear-damaging weapon

Police via Shutterstock

For a country that defeated the Evil Empire, we should know better than to accept this kind of evil. More on the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) that Chicago just purchased Salon:

“This is simply a risk management tool, as the public will receive clear information regarding public safety messages and any orders provided by police,” Chicago Police spokeswoman Melissa Stratton told the Guardian.

However, during its first outing at a U.S. protest, during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh in 2009, police blasted non-lethal sound waves from the device as a crowd deterrent. Unlike firing tear gas or swinging batons, deploying the LRAD does not create a dramatic media spectacle; indeed, videos from the Pittsburgh protests capture the LRAD emitting little more than a high-pitched siren. Those within the sound cannon’s range, however, have described immense pain and severe headaches and — in some cases — irreversible hearing damage. LRAD Corp., which produces the weapon for the military and domestic policing, said that anyone within 100m of the device’s directed sound path will experience “extreme pain,” according to Gizmodo.

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Kent State, 1970, new tape evidence: "They heard someone shout 'prepare to fire' then give an order"

As you know, this week is the anniversary of the Kent State Killings.

On May 4, l970, members of the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine. One of the wounded was paralyzed permanently.

This post is a fast three-parter.

■ First, the new evidence. Via Digby we learn, after all these years, there was indeed an order to "Fire" (my emphasis and paragraphing):

Inevitably, National Guard leaders insisted that the Guardsmen had not been ordered to fire; either they shot in self-defense or, at worst, acted on their own. Three hundred FBI investigators found no proof of a plan to shoot students; the Department of Justice closed the case three times in as many years. It took until 1979 for a civil suit to be resolved, with the state of Ohio issuing a mild statement of regret and paying $675,000 to the victims and their families.

And yet there is no resolution of this tragedy. Just before the May 4th demonstration began, a Kent State communications major who lived in a dorm overlooking the Commons decided to record it. Setting the microphone of his tape deck in his window, he created the only real-time account of the shooting.

The original was destroyed by the Department of Justice in 1979, but a copy of the tape surfaced in a collection of evidence given to the Yale University Library.

In 2010, at the request of two Ohio newspapers, forensic experts used technology not available in the 1970s to evaluate a digital CD of the tape.

They heard someone shout "prepare to fire" and then give an order. Two seconds later, the gunshots begin.

■ Kinda reminds you of this, doesn't it?

It does me. Welcome to the State, protecting itself.

■ Finally, another version of the music Chris featured. (Sorry, this one may come pre-ad-dled; it's from the copyright owners themselves, WMG. Our Betters; gotta love their love of property rights.)

Neil Young in concert, 1971, acoustic only:



Occupy, folks — and be sure to do it non-violently, or you will fail to grow. We do need you to grow.

GP

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Occupy Wall Street should explicitly reject violence

This is an editorial, not a news item.

There has been a lively (but not too loud) debate within the Occupy movement about the issue of violence. Prior to the winter hiatus, almost all Occupy-related violence has come from the police — the muscle arm of the State in these matters, the designated suppressors of the "outside" resistance to the Rule of the .01 Percent.

• Side note: "Outside resistance" is sometimes called the "outside game" — the populist protests, the action in the streets — as opposed to more institutional responses like lobbying, law-making, and awareness writing. I'll be using the term "outside game" a lot in this context.
  
  Tahrir Square, for example, is an outside game. The Berkeley Free Speech movement is an outside game. Every rebellion needs one to complement its inside — institutional — game. It's the way this stuff works.

This one-sided violence has started to change, however. Police are no longer the only violent element at the protests. There are groups "within" the vaguely-structured Occupy movement that not only advocate violence, they seem to relish it (as a form of art perhaps, or frustration release). And so far, Occupy has not stepped up to reject violent solutions.

One of the aftermaths of the May Day demonstrations earlier this week are stories of violence.

• Here's what that looks like in the corporate press.
• Here's what that looks like in the Foxified press.
• Here's what the response looks like at the mayoral-police planning level.

I get that Occupy doesn't want to be a top-down movement. Outside games are always a mix of multi-headed leadership–organizing and broad bottom-up participation.

But by fetishizing "leaderlessness" the Occupy movement is doing two things wrong, in my view.

And if Occupy leaders (organizers) don't take on and reject violence, they will do lasting damage both to Occupy and to the broader movement of which Occupy is just one part.

What Occupy is doing wrong

In early stages, movements like Occupy are naturally amorphous; by definition they must spring up on their own. This bottom-up energy is what feeds and waters them; it's what allows them to reach "critical mass" if indeed they ever do.

But leaders always emerge, and leadership doesn't have to be all or nothing — absent or totally controlling. Mario Savio, for example, was clearly a leader (along with a number of others) in the Free Speech Movement. He didn't control it, but he guided it, and through his voice and mind the movement had focus.

There's a necessary symbiotic relationship between leaders and non-leaders in a truly populist movement. Dr. King (and others) had that relationship with the Civil Rights Movement of his era. There are many more examples.

By rejecting the place of leadership, Occupy risks rejecting two critical resources that leaders provide: education and guidance.

Education — Leaders don't just lead, they organize education. As I wrote just recently:

One of the most valuable and beneficial activities of the Vietnam War era were the teach-ins, where the Movement educated itself about what it was facing.

With that education, people understood how the U.S. replaced France in the fight against Ho Chi Minh, their former WWII ally, to whom they promised a free Southeast Asia after Japan, and later France, were defeated — that the "anti-Communist" frame, in other words, was a lie. Unity around a common understanding is both powerful and necessary.

I'll say that again — Unity around a common understanding is powerful and necessary.

Want a thought experiment to test that? Independent of strategy ideas (about which there can be differences), progressives who don't get that Obama is a corporatist cannot add positively to the Progressive Coalition for change and return to Rule of Law. Want to see the coalition that contains that confusion? Watch the Democratic Party.

This isn't a statement about how best to implement Progressive reform (Under Obama or Romney? Let's think about scenarios). It's a statement about how to understand what you see in front of your face.

Resistance movements that don't take self-teaching seriously are doomed to dilution. A cadre of leaders in a movement like Occupy (or in the Progressive movement of which Occupy is a part) is essential to guarantee that education. That's just a fact.

Moral and tactical guidance — I'll split these two in a minute. But it almost goes without saying, Not everyone with an idea has a good idea. Some ideas won't ever work, and some are immoral. For a great many of us, violence is immoral.

Seems obvious, right? Apparently not to Occupy. Care to split yourself into the OK-with-violence people and those who hate it? Go for it; those who hate violence will leave. From a morals standpoint, leaderlessness doesn't grow a movement; it reduces it to its least moral component.

As for tactical guidance, you need that to get good outcomes. In a resistance, it's not just about process. In a government, democratic process is critical, since running a nation or a city is all about the process. Think about that; the whole point of having a democracy as your government is the process.

But only part of the point of an outside game is the process; by definition an outside game also seeks an outcome. By fetishizing leaderlessness, Occupy could (perhaps very soon) surrender all ability to influence the outcome of its actions. All of your enemies are waiting for you to turn violent; I think they know what's good for them.

What happens if Occupy does not reject violence

Occupy is the tip the outside game resisting the Rule of the .01%. Police violence is the response.

You don't stop police violence with non-violence; but you justify it by violent acts of your own. Your violence guarantees escalation of violence on both sides, and guarantees that their violence (police beatings; pepper-swabbed eyeballs and throats; multiple strip searches; extended stays in urine-soaked solitary cells) will be sold as "necessary" by the entire troop of millionaire news-blond(e)s.

Dear Occupy — Is that the outcome you want?

Because if you don't develop leaders — and respect for leaders — who will teach and guide, that's the outcome you will get.

And not only you, friends in Occupy — the rest of us as well. Occupy is not the whole resistance movement, only a part. Does Occupy bear a responsibility to the resistance movement as a whole?

If it does not care about outcomes, it abandons all responsibility to achieve what it says it cares about, and it risks being seen by the ungenerous as indulgent — much the way "drum circles" are seen within Occupy itself.

What am I asking?

I'm asking for one thing — that leaders within the Occupy movement, as a group, publicly reject violence and promote non-violent resistance.

That's the whole of my request. I'm not asking you to control the violence; I'm asking you to make sure that Occupy embraces non-violence as a non-negotiable core value.

I'm not asking on moral grounds (though those exist). I'm asking because I care about outcomes, and we need you to succeed.

Don't let Occupy become the "drum circle" within the broader resistance movement. You not only risk yourselves; you risk the rest of us. Right now, you're a big part of the solution. We need you to stay that way; the battle will be even harder without you.

• Side note: "We don't condone" and "We condemn" have two separate meanings. This is not the time for baby steps, in my estimation. Things could go very south very quickly.

Thanks for your ear; I appreciate it.

Singing in the key of Please Condemn,

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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Spanish police rough up protesters in Valencia

It's not Oakland, but it's not pretty either. Lots more videos and photographs from the protests in Spain here. The overall unemployment level in Spain is 23% but the youth unemployment is now over 50%. It's hard to see how this is not a lost generation. If you look at how Greece is being treated in the bailout, the other troubled countries can see where things are going. There's lots of stick and very little carrot which means pain for years to come. As much as we hear about immoral leaders in places like Libya (under Gaddafi) or Egypt or now Syria, destroying a generation or more in Europe is no better. Too bad the political class is more worried about what the banking sector will get rather than the destruction that the banks have left in their wake. Read the rest of this post...

"Slavery By Another Name"

From time to time I'm going to write in keeping with Black History Month. The first post in this series was on February 1, with a reprint of a letter from a former slave entitled "To My Old Master". (If you haven't already read this, do; it's quite a treat.)

This post showcases a PBS documentary, Slavery By Another Name, which tells how slavery persisted in the South despite the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. I'm willing to bet that not one in 100 Americans knows about this system. I know I didn't.

Lindsay Beyerstein of the Hillman Foundation explains:

Slavery By Another Name debunks the cherished assumption that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. In fact, as Blackmon and Pollack show, the enslavement of black Southerners persisted under the guise of convict labor from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II. ...

The polite term for the new slavery was "convict leasing." Southern states criminalized the slightest infractions by black people, real or imagined. It was a crime to be unemployed, or to be employed and look for a better job without permission. Unauthorized black job-seekers could be sent back to their employers to work off their "debt" as convict laborers. Walking along the railroad tracks or speaking loudly in the presence of white women could also condemn a black person to a term of hard labor.

So while indentured servitude was illegal, it wasn't illegal for states to perform "middle-man" services and lease out their prisoners. Since the "debt" was to the state, and the payer was the leasee, the law was satisfied.

Bet you can see where this is headed:

Employers paid the state to "lease" the prisoners. As under slavery, the hardiest-looking men fetched the highest prices. About 95% of the people in the convict labor system were black men between the ages of 14 and 30, because they were the most desirable laborers. Some women were also forced to work as laundresses and cooks. Blackmon's resesarch shows how arrest rates rose to meet the demand for labor.

Are you ready for the next connectable dot?

Blackmon, a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter. ... observed that a "potentially diabolical" conflict of interest arises when the people responsible for making arrests stand to profit by arresting more people.

Which leads us directly to:

■ Law enforcement agencies directly benefiting from "confiscated" property during drug arrests (which a drug-hating, tax-hating environment incentivizes); and

■ Private prison companies bribing (sorry, "incentivizing") state politicians to (a) pass harsh anti-immigrant laws, and (b) build more warehouses for their shared inventory (sorry, "malefactors of dark skintones") — all of which they profit from.

Slavery is America's original sin; always was, always will be. It's not like we're clear of it; those of us lighter-hued folks reap the benefits every day. (Doubt me? When was the the last time the cops searched your car — or bumped you around a bit — for "driving while white"?)

The PBS documentary airs starting February 13. Beyerstein's report on it is here.

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Man arrested for DWI, held in solitary for two years, remembers almost none of it

We go to Raw Story for this hellacious tale (my emphasis):

In August of 2005, Stephen Slevin was arrested for driving while intoxicated (DWI). He spent most of the next two years in the Dona Ana County Detention Center without his case ever going before a judge.

Slevin was rarely allowed to go outside, fungus grew underneath his skin and his toenails curled around his foot because they were so long. At one point, he even had to pull his own tooth.

“He can’t really remember any of it,” Dart Society Reports’ Susan Greene, who interviewed Slevin, told Raw Story. “It’s all sort of lost in his mind, which is a typical trauma response, a pretty extreme though not unheard of trauma response.”

Attorney Matt Coyte explained to MSNBC.com that police had mistakenly believed that Slevin had stolen the car he was driving when police pulled him over and arrested him for a DWI. Slevin informed authorities that he had been depressed, but instead of getting mental help, he found himself on suicide watch in a padded cell. Three days later, he was transferred to solitary confinement.

Coyne commented: "Their policy is to then just put [detainees with mental health issues] in solitary. He disappeared into delirium...".

It's a horrifying story. Apparently, at some point he snapped alert. Once released, he sued, winning a $22 million award just last week. It's the award that makes this news, but the underlying thought is stunning.

How do you go from DWI to two years in solitary without ever seeing a judge? I knew we were a prosecutorial, punishing lot. But are we that prosecutorial, that mindlessly punishing? Guess so.

I hope it just a species thing, and not something in the American water supply.

One last quote. In an interview, Slevin said this:

“Prison officials were walking by me every day, watching me deteriorate. ... Day after day after day, they did nothing, nothing at all, to get me any help.”

Lord help him. As the article makes clear, he'll have PTSD for the rest of his life. As for the county, they're offering media tours of the facility — apparently there's nothing a PR campaign can't totally cure.

Update: I haven't chased it down, but note this comment. Worth looking into.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Noam Chomsky: Who are the Unpeople?

Who are the Unpeople?

In this talk, Noam Chomsky starts with specifics — the Unpeople of Libya, the Unpeople of Africa — but the heart is the general, the concept itself. Who are the Unpeople of the earth?

Here's a taste. Chomsky starts with the unilateral bombing of Libya "by their traditional imperial aggressors: France and Britain, joined by the United States" — in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973 which "called for a no-fly zone, a cease-fire and measures to protect civilians."

The "triumvirate" blew right past that with their bombing, and the African Union (A.U.) went to the U.N. to object (my emphasis and some reparagraphing throughout):

The A.U. call to the Security Council also laid out the background for their concerns: “Sovereignty has been a tool of emancipation of the peoples of Africa who are beginning to chart transformational paths for most of the African countries after centuries of predation by the slave trade, colonialism and neocolonialism. Careless assaults on the sovereignty of African countries are, therefore, tantamount to inflicting fresh wounds on the destiny of the African peoples.”

The African appeal can be found in the Indian journal Frontline, but was mostly unheard in the West. That comes as no surprise: Africans are “unpeople,” to adapt George Orwell’s term for those unfit to enter history.

You can see where this is headed.

On March 12, the Arab League gained the status of people by supporting U.N. Resolution 1973. But approval soon faded when the League withheld support for the subsequent Western bombardment of Libya. And [then] on April 10, the Arab League reverted to unpeople by calling on the U.N. also to impose a no-fly zone over Gaza and to lift the Israeli siege, virtually ignored.

That too makes good sense. Palestinians are prototypical unpeople, as we see regularly.

Read the rest; it's very good (and available as a video here.)

Who are the Unpeople? Unpeople are those you can abuse and kill, decimate and dislocate, without conscience or consequence, because they aren't fully human — or human at all — in the minds of their abusers.

American Indians were Unpeople, squatting on land just waiting to be "settled" as whites spread across the "empty" American West. Arabs were Unpeople who "crawled like flies" through Palestine (per Agatha Christie), until white Europeans, the only true humans, infiltrated, moved them out, and took over.

Oddly, those same Europeans — ethnic Jews — were Unpeople in the lands they were fleeing. Suffering doesn't always lead to wisdom.

It goes without saying, or should, that the drone-dead in Pakistan are Unpeople. (Feel a tad guilty? Me too.)

Here at home, Unpeople are all around us — the poor, the brown, the black, the homeless, the hopeless, the drugged-out, the cast-out — the wrecks and the unruly. The old. The "losers" in that hyper-Christian "take back America" formulation. The Occupyers and the foreclosed.

All Unpeople are the modern n-word, broadened to include the Unincluded everywhere you find them.

Are you the Unpeople? If you find yourself scooped up by the National Security state, you will be; even that white skin, if you have it, will not set you free.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Hedges: "This is what revolution looks like"

I bring this Chris Hedges piece to your attention, not for its passion or exhortation, but for a few of its informative passages.

Frankly, the idea of living through revolution scares the bejesus out of me, and should frighten you as well. Revolution is the worst way to resolve social disputes, and only occurs when one side (in our case, the rentier creditor class) forces everyone else in the country to resort to it.

Here's Hedges on the necessary precursors to revolution (my emphasis & paragraphing, because I wanted the list to look like a list):

The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are

▪ discontent that affects nearly all social classes,
▪ widespread feelings of entrapment and despair,
▪ unfulfilled expectations,
▪ a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite,
▪ a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class,
▪ an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens,
▪ a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle,
▪ a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally,
▪ a financial crisis.

Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering.

Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.

That whole quote is worth looking at twice.

First, check the list I bulleted. Then check the bolded quote immediately above — "making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power" has a real meaning. It means, asking politely to fix the political order and end the war on the lower social orders.

It's important that requests for changes of this magnitude be escalated from ... well, requests. It's important that the offending power elite say No at each stage prior to escalation. (Why? One, you may just get lucky, and get a Yes. How good would that be? And two, you always want to make it their fault for refusing; mass support for revolution depends on legitimacy, both real and in appearance.)

Hedges adds this from his personal experience:

I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day.

He's saying what I've been saying (and not saying alone) — at some point, those militarized union police will face their own Tahrir Square moment. Will they fire?

One final point: The Occupy Movement must be and remain non-violent. Hedges agrees:

[D]efections [among the ruling class] are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies.

Play to win, but keep it clean. Their hubris — and their violence — are the Movement's best friend.

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"Family Guy" writer: My Occupy LA arrest (violence alert)

Patrick Meighan is one of the writers on the series Family Guy and a member of one of L.A.'s Unitarian Universalist churches (those infamous "UU"s, the ones where you don't even have to believe in Jesus to join, the Buddhisty bunch that Ralph Waldo Emerson had a hand in transforming).

Back to Occupy L.A. and our story. Meighan offers this first-hand account of this arrest. Needless to say, he was treated very badly while offering no active resistance [corrected for accuracy].

Here's the worst of it, though the jail part was no trip to the executive dining room. First, the set-up (h/t Naked Capitalism for the link):

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

Then the cop pulled out knives (which they had conveniently remembered to bring) and ripped to shreds everything these people owned and had brought with them — every tent and everything in the tents.

Then they calmly took on the people. Those who refused to unlink arms (a high crime, it seems) were treated like this (my emphasis):

Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

Read that again, especially what happened to him after he promised not to resist.

There's much more, including the "why won't you take my bail" story. Please do read.

President Obama, in his "I get it" speech, nobly rejected an us vs. them mentality. His nation's militarized police force is getting a different message. Patrick Meighan's face touches the ground so Charles Prince's feet don't have to.

There are two take-aways from this, not just one:

■ This really was a violent attack, not just a rough arrest. Cops using shields as opportunities to cause pain. A violent attack.

■ This was deliberate and reflects training. In other words, the violence was planned and the cops were trained in these techniques.

It's the second one that concerns me. There's evidence of national coordination in these militarized Occupy responses. Expect more coordinated attacks like this one.

This is the Top 0.1% linking their own arms, fighting back. At some point, those union cops are going to have the Tahrir Square choice. Good luck with that.

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Off duty NC cop sprays pepper spray at crowd of Walmart shoppers

It's becoming more obvious why some countries ban this stuff. If trained police can't figure out the right time and wrong time to use it, maybe it's time to stop equipping them with it. It doesn't matter if it was a single "puff" or not, it's not to be used in such circumstances. What kind of an idiot thinks this is the right thing to do? NBC News:

Kinston police are disputing accounts of the incident, telling NBC News that they fired a single "puff" of pepper spray when a large group of people tried to grab products before Walmart employees were finished putting the items on display.

An officer sprayed "a puff" of pepper spray in the air to have the crowd "regain composure," police said. They told NBC News that none of the substance was sprayed into anyone's eyes or face and that no one requested medical attention.

Police confirmed that one man was arrested but wouldn't confirm his identity as reported in local news accounts.

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