image: "Respecting peaceful protests" in Los Angeles
Every once in awhile a story appears that is stunning in how dramatically it reveals the sheer hypocrisy and duplicity coming out of the Imperial Capital these days. Seriously, you just can't explain this:
The United States called Friday on both Russian authorities and protesters to remain peaceful as opponents of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin prepared major weekend demonstrations against his rule.What unmitigated fucking gall our so-called "leaders" have.
Putin has angrily accused the United States of inciting the protests after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised concerns about the fairness of parliamentary elections that Putin’s party won but with a reduced majority.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that the United States supported the right to peaceful protest in Russia as it does “anywhere in the world.”
“We expect that those demonstrations will remain peaceful on behalf of all parties, whether they’re the demonstrators or whether they are those keeping social order,” she said.
“So our expectation is that if there are protests, that they will be peaceful and that they will be allowed to proceed peacefully,” Nuland said.
How much has the U.S. been respecting "the right to peaceful protest" within the United States? Here is a recent report from The Exiled's Yahsa Levine on the police abuses that accompanied the recent eviction of Occupy LA:
First off, don’t believe the PR bullshit. There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD’s attack on Occupy LA–not unless you think that people peacefully protesting against the power of the financial oligarchy deserve to be treated the way I saw Russian cops treating the protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were demonstrating against the oligarchy under Putin and Yeltsin, before we at The eXiled all got tossed out in 2008. Back then, everyone in the West protested and criticized the way the Russian cops brutally snuffed out dissent, myself included. Now I’m in America, at a demonstration, watching exactly the same brutal crackdown…The sheer hubris and gall of the "leadership" of this country is really a sight to behold. The only thing we can hope for now is that pride really does goeth before the fall.
While people are now beginning to learn that the police attack on Occupy LA was much more violent than previously reported, few actually realize that much—if not most—of the abuse happened while the protesters were in police custody, completely outside the range of the press and news media. And the disgraceful truth is that a lot of the abuse was police sadism, pure and simple:
* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.
* The bus that I was shoved into didn’t move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn’t lift a finger.
* Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That’s because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that’s the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.
* The 100 protesters in my detainee group were kept handcuffed with their hands behind their backs for 7 hours, denied food and water and forced to sit/sleep on a concrete floor. Some were so tired they passed out face down on the cold and dirty concrete, hands tied behind their back. As a result of the tight cuffs, I wound up losing sensation in my left palm/thumb and still haven’t recovered it now, a day and a half after they finally took them off.
* One seriously injured protester, who had been shot with a shotgun beanbag round and had an oozing bloody welt the size of a grapefruit just above his elbow, was denied medical attention for five hours. Another young guy, who complained that he thought his arm had been broken, was not given medical attention for at least as long. Instead, he spent the entire pre-booking procedure handcuffed to a wall, completely spaced out and staring blankly into space like he was in shock.
* An Occupy LA demonstrator in his 50s who was in my cell block in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center told us all about when a police officer forced him to take a shit with his hands handcuffed behind his back, which made pulling down his pants and sitting down on the toilet extremely difficult and awkward. And he had to do this in sight of female police officers, all of which made him feel extremely ashamed, to say the least.
* There were two vegetarians and one vegan in my cell. When I left jail around 1:30 pm, they still had not been given food, despite the fact that they were constantly being promised that it would come.
* There were 292 people arrested at Occupy LA. About 75 of them have been released or have gotten out on bail, according the National Lawyers Guild. Most are still inside, slapped with $5,000 to $10,000 bail. According to a bail bondsman I know, this is unprecedented. Misdemeanors are almost always released on their own recognizance, which means that they don’t pay any bail at all. Or at most it’s a $100.
* That means the harsh, long detentions are meant to be are a purely punitive measure against Occupy LA protesters–an order that had to come from the very top.
I don’t know what to say about this Bill, it’s just mad, the leadership of the Western World are becoming more unhinged by the day. Our lunatics on this side of the Atlantic have just decided that the solution to the Euro crisis is more of the same undemocratic crap that caused the crisis in the first place. I await with bated breath to see what new madcap stuff they are going to come up with next. The image of Nero fiddling while Rome burns, keeps coming into my mind.
ReplyDelete@iwe - I guess it is obvious that any "representative democracy" really doesn't represent the interests of individual citizens when there are tens or hundreds of millions of them. But even the very facade of representation is now slipping away and exposing the ugly truth.
ReplyDeleteYup, I feel like I've fallen down the rabbit's hole. I'm on the train on my way into NY, with my cupcake costume and signs that say "They Said There Would Be Cake" and "Where's the Cake?". There's supposed to be a flash occupy outside a swish hotel where a Governor bought by fracking is holding court. I am really hoping the cops don't start cracking down on mobile protests they way they evicted the parks. I don't want to spend the night in jail looking like a cupcake!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I don't think you have to worry that OWS has jumped the shark. I don't see this going away as long as more and more people have nothing to lose, and we know that trend is permanent.
Daily tally of OWS arrests: http://occupyarrests.moonfruit.com/
And another first person account of OLA gratuitous police violence, from Patrick Meighan: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2011/12/can-it-get-any-worse-oh-yeah.html
You have to understand, these people simply don't see the hypocrisy. They live in a world where the US is good and pure, period, and they ARE the US, therefore they are good and pure, period. This is an alternate universe scenario. These people have so thoroughly brainwashed themselves with their own super-fictional idea of America, that they simply cannot fathom a world different from fantasy in which they exist. Their brains have come to simply reject any information that contradicts that view, to label it as false, and to, in their minds rightly, dismiss it.
ReplyDeleteThese are the people that we (as a nation) continue to send back to Washington again and again.
Madness.
There is a great story about Heinrich Himmler, talking to his SS senior commanders at the Nazi high water mark and complimenting them on doing heroic work in killing Jews and other social vermin. He lauded them as exceptional people who managed to do a very tough job and still remained civilised. This was as bmerson says an “alternate universe “ the Germans were the cultured master race, therefore it did not matter that they were turning Jews into soap, matress stuffing and lampshades on an industrial scale, they were Germans and they were self evidently civilised.
ReplyDeleteThe west (or as bmerson says the US) is stuck in some kind of similar reality warp, our traditions are about democracy, human rights and freedom of expression. We are the inheritors of the mantle of Jefferson and Franklin, we are great compared to all those other morally inferior political creeds, like Putin’s crude gangester politics or Chinese Communism. In fact we are so great and self evidently wonderful that we can torture people in black prisions and quash freedom of assembly at home and lecture the Russians on respecting freedom. We can have our cake and eat it.
@iwe - great point. Like in Nazi Germany, Americans themselves have little to fear from the regime as long as they are not Muslim and they go along with the program. However, like in Nazi Germany it doesn't even matter if you are a war veteran, stand in opposition and you'll make yourself the target of the regime's thugs. The only difference so far is the lengths to which the thugs are willing to go to punish the opposition. There are no DOMESTIC concentration camps--yet.
ReplyDelete