[Peace-discuss] pepper spray fun

[Carl G. Estabrook]

UC Davis Pepper-Spray Incident Reveals Weakness Up Top

Taibblog

by: Matt Taibbi

Was absolutely mesmerized last night watching the viral video of the  
UC-Davis pepper-spraying. It was totally amazing, simultaneously one  
of depressing and inspiring things I’ve seen in many years.



To recap for those who haven’t seen it: police in paramilitary gear  
line up in front of a group of Occupy protesters peacefully blocking a  
road. Completely unprovoked, they decide to douse the whole group of  
sitting protesters with pepper spray. There is crying and chaos and  
panic, but the wheezing protesters sit resolutely in place and refuse  
to move despite the assault.

Finally, in what to me was the most amazing part, the protesters  
gather together and move forward shouting “Shame On You! Shame On  
You!” over and over again, and you can literally see the painful truth  
of those words cutting the resolve of the policemen and forcing them  
backwards.

Glenn Greenwald’s post at Salon says this far better than I can, but I  
think there are undeniable conclusions one can draw from this  
incident. The main thing is that the frenzied dissolution of due  
process and individual rights that took place under George Bush’s  
watch, and continued uncorrected even when supposed liberal  
constitutional lawyer Barack Obama took office, has now come full  
circle and become an important element to the newer political  
controversy involving domestic corruption and economic injustice.

As Glenn points out, when we militarized our society in response to  
the global terrorist threat, we created a new psychological atmosphere  
in which the use of force and military technology became a favored  
method for dealing with dissent of any kind. As Glenn writes:

The U.S. Government — in the name of Terrorism — has aggressively para- 
militarized the nation’s domestic police forces by lavishing them with  
countless military-style weapons and other war-like technologies,  
training them in war-zone military tactics, and generally imposing a  
war mentality on them. Arming domestic police forces with para- 
military weaponry will ensure their systematic use even in the absence  
of a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil… It’s a very small step to go from  
supporting the abuse of defenseless detainees (including one’s fellow  
citizens) to supporting the pepper-spraying and tasering of non- 
violent political protesters.
Why is that such a small step? Because of the countless decisions we  
made in years past to undermine our own attitudes toward the rule of  
law and individual rights. Every time we looked the other way when the  
president asked for the right to detain people without trials, to  
commit searches without warrants, to eavesdrop on private citizens  
without even a judge knowing about it, we made it harder to answer the  
question: what is it we’re actually defending?

In another time, maybe, we might have been able to argue that we were  
using force to defend the principles of modern Western civilization,  
that we were "spreading democracy." Instead, we completely shat upon  
every principle we ever stood for, stooping to torture and  
assassination and extrajudicial detention.

 From the very start we unleashed those despotic practices on  
foreigners, whom large pluralities of the population agreed had no  
rights at all. But then as time went on we started to hear about  
rendition and extralegal detention cases involving American citizens,  
too, though a lot of those Americans turned out to be Muslims or  
Muslim-sympathizers, people with funny names.

And people mostly shrugged at that, of course, just as they shrugged  
for years at the insane erosion of due process in the world of drug  
enforcement. People yawned at the no-knock warrants and the  
devastating parade ofnew consequences for people with drug convictions  
(depending on the state, losing the right to vote, to receive  
educational aid, to live in public housing, to use food stamps, and so  
on).

They didn’t even care much about the too-innocuously-named new  
practice of "civil asset forfeiture," in which the state can legally  
seize the property of anyone, guilty or innocent, who is implicated in  
a drug investigation – a law that permits the state to unilaterally  
deem property to be guilty of a crime.

The population mostly blew off these developments, thinking that these  
issues only concerned the guilty, terrorists, drug dealers, etc. And  
they didn’t seem to worry very much when word leaked out that the  
state had struck an astonishingly far-reaching series of new  
cooperative arrangements with the various private telecommunications  
industries. Nobody blinked when word came out that the government was  
now cheerfully pairing up with companies like AT&T, Verizon and  
BellSouth to monitor our phone and Internet activities.

Who cared? If you don’t have anything to hide, it shouldn’t bother you  
that the government might be checking your phone records, seeing what  
sites you’ve been visiting, or quietly distributing armored cars and  
submachine guns to every ass-end suburban and beyond-suburban police  
force in America.

We had all of these arguments in the Bush years and it’s nothing new  
to assert that much of our population made a huge mistake in giving up  
so many of our basic rights to due process. What’s new is that we’re  
now seeing the political consequences of those decisions.

Again, when we abandoned our principles in order to use force against  
terrorists and drug dealers, the answer to the question, Who and what  
are we defending? started to change.

The original answer, ostensibly, was, "We are defending the peaceful  
and law-abiding citizens of the United States, their principles, and  
everything America stands for."

Then after a while it became, "We’re defending the current population  
of the country, but we can’t defend the principles so much anymore,  
because they weigh us down in the fight against a ruthless enemy who  
must be stopped at all costs."

Then finally it became this: “We are defending ourselves, against the  
citizens who insist on keeping their rights and their principles.”

What happened at UC Davis was the inevitable result of our failure to  
make sure our government stayed in the business of defending our  
principles. When we stopped insisting on that relationship with our  
government, they became something separate from us.

And we are stuck now with this fundamental conflict, whereby most of  
us are insisting that the law should apply equally to everyone, while  
the people running this country for years now have been operating  
according to the completely opposite principle that different people  
have different rights, and who deserves what protections is a  
completely subjective matter, determined by those in power, on a case- 
by-case basis.

Not to belabor the point, but the person who commits fraud to obtain  
food stamps goes to jail, while the banker who commits fraud for a  
million-dollar bonus does not. Or if you accept aid in the form of  
Section-8 housing the state may insist on its right to conduct  
warrantless "compliance check" searches of your home at any time – but  
if you take billions in bailout aid, you do not even have to open your  
books to the taxpayer who is the de facto owner of your company.

The state wants to retain the power to make these subjective  
decisions, because being allowed to selectively enforce the law  
effectively means they have despotic power. And who wants to lose that?

The UC Davis instant crystallized all of this in one horrifying image.  
Anyone who commits violence against a defenseless person is lost. And  
the powers that be in this country are lost. They’ve been going down  
this road for years now, and they no longer stand for anything.

All that tricked-up military gear, with that corny, faux-menacing,  
over-the-top Spaceballs stormtrooper look that police everywhere seem  
to favor more and more, it’s a symbol of the increasingly total lack  
of ideas behind all that force.

It was bad enough when we made police defend the use of torture and  
extrajudicial detention; now they’re being asked to defend mass theft,  
Lloyd Blankfein’s bailout-paid bonus, the principle of Angelo Mozilo  
not doing jail time.

How strong can anyone defending those causes be? These people are weak  
and pathetic, and they’re getting weaker. And boy, are they showing  
it. Way to gear up with combat helmets and the submachine guns,  
fellas, to take on a bunch of co-eds sitting Indian-style. Maybe after  
work you can go break up a game of Duck-Duck-Goose at the local Chuck  
E Cheese. I’d bring the APC for that one.

Bravo to those kids who hung in there and took it. And bravo for  
standing up and showing everyone what real strength is. There is no  
strength without principle. You have it. They lost it. It’s as simple  
as that.
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