OpEds: Shock and (L)Awe

 

We were shocked and outraged, yet the murderers were not imprisoned, and eventually the Guard paid a little fine to the families, and most of us forgot about it.  Except we didn’t forget, exactly.  We remembered just enough to make us fear protesting anymore.By the time the FBI shot up the Jumping Bull Ranch on Pine Ridge, they had convinced us that even in self-defense shooting back at the FBI who attacked you unprovoked meant to expect the full force of the Police State (as it was then) would be upon you, fabricated evidence or not.Someone would pay.They had to make an example of what happens to anyone standing up to the State.  Yet, as cruel and wrong as it was, as corrupt as every iota was, Leonard Peltier got a trial and is in jail.The 80’s brought a more complacent time, Ronnie Raygun’s forays into the Middle East did not garner reaction.  In a time of relative peace and prosperity, services for our mentally ill were cut, and military spending skyrocketed. We needed Star Wars technology for security, and the ramping of hypernationalism began.By the 90’s Ruby Ridge and Waco happened. It was the beginning of normalizing extra-judicial murder.  They painted stories of bad people, likely true, and the brave heroism of the Feds who torched 76 women and children and men. They told us the people set themselves on fire.  The abuses of the Feds fed the fears of the fringe, the crazy became crazier, and militia movements surged.  Enter the insane Timothy McVeigh, and domestic terrorism was born.  The man and his partner Terry Nichols killed 168 people and injured over 800. He was rightly found guilty, and executed for his crime.We all know what the New Pear Harbor brought.  9/11 changed everything, right?  At first we got upset about warrantless wiretapping.  Then it became the new normal.  We didn’t like it, but got used to every keystroke we make being monitored, and the idea that any phone call may or may not be under surveillance.We tortured.

We incarcerated people indefinitely without charge, trial or evidence – many over 10 years now.

We started wars with people that had nothing to do with 9/11, and while people objected?

The newest normal became “free speech zones” in which anti-war protestors were kettled behind barbed wire, out of the view of the media, and away from the politicians they sought to influence.  We were told this was for “security.”

PAT Acts came and went and were replaced by ever more extreme PAT Acts.  A ‘panty bomber’ who was walked onto a plane by Homeland Security managed to torch only his genitals, and forever burn away our right to not be strip searched in public.

Tasers became the new toy, and the floodgate of our tax dollars were opened to the MIC’s R & D departments for ever more draconian means of crowd control.

Our new Hopium-filled donut of a President deemed by Executive decree that US citizens could be killed on sight if he considered them a threat, and because it was only a “brown Muslim” father and son…  America did not object.  One has to wonder how many we do not hear about that just disappear.  The creamy filling of the Brand D puppet was that and the sickening NDAA.  Now even journalists can be charged with abetting the “enemy” for reporting anything that reveal our “enemy’s” perspective.  And the enemy is not just Al Qaida, it is anyone the Government deems to be a “terrorist.”  Now, version 8,673 of CISPA is on the table again.  You will comply. Governors are taking over cities, disenfranchising the people, austerity is coming as the rich got 3x richer in the last 2 years.

The Occupy movement was kettled, beaten, maced and tased into submission. Laws were passed to make it a federal felony to protest anywhere that a Secret Service Officer may or may not be present, with or without your knowledge.  Protestors were called violent, when by and large they were not.  They were called a threat to security by the police that abused them.  They were called terrorists.

I have painted a meager, bleak picture of a timeline of lost rights, and new-found aggression against our citizens for a reason.  You cannot take the recent events without understanding its historical genesis and realizing that each slip down the slope becomes a precedent for a new normal that is NEVER diluted or changed.  Once gone?  Our rights never come back.

Think of 300 unarmed black men slain a year by Police, most notably in Oakland, California and its surrounding area – and no policeman is ever found in the wrong.

Fast forward to Boston and the bombing that occurred in that city. As stated in my report at the time:

IF THE SHUT DOWN OF ALL OF BOSTON WAS TO “PROTECT” THE CITIZENRY – THEN WHY WAS IT LIFTED HOURS AND HOURS BEFORE THEY CAUGHT DZHOKAR???

The only answer to that is obvious.  It was never about their security.

They are treating this as terrorism, feebly trying after the fact to connect it to extreme Islam with sudden “discoveries” of new evidence that fits the narrative; evidence they did not have when they made the terrorist claim in the first place.  Convenient, yes?

Let me be perfectly clear here.  YOU ARE IN NO MORE DANGER THAN YOU WERE BEFORE 9/11 NOW.  YOU ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE HIT BY A FALLING SATELLITE THAN TO BE HURT IN A REAL TERRORIST ATTACK.

The Martial Law of Boston was less than shocking to us…. remember it was a mere few weeks prior that combined police forces stormed a mountain in California, with the FBI at their sides to burn Chris Dorner alive rather than bring him in and try him.  There was Military grade equipment on that raid too.  But not nearly as much as in Boston.

Think about the fact that in a manhunt for one person, we have become accustomed to tanks and armored personnel carriers rolling through our streets.  All they have to do is utter the WORD terrorist and illegal search, human right abuses and murder become ordinary.

The normalization of these kind of actions requires a great deal of fear-pandering to the public.  The Left was appalled at the treatment of Occupy, which was generally a leftish movement.  The Right was calling for them to be taken down as dirty, lazy, hippie scum. To them, Socialists and Communists are terrorists.

The right is usually on board with law-n-order badass policing. In order to get the centrists to back it, another attack by “Muslims” had to trigger the Pavlovian fear carefully bred by the Rovian disinformation campaign of 9/11. White middle class is horribly xenophobic, that is their trigger, and they want the “terrorsist” caught by ANY means necessary.

How to get the Left on board? In the wake of the failed attempt at sane gun control, trot out some right wingers with guns, and they too will be crying “terrorists” with the right, happy to have the Government step in with extreme prejudice and keep them safe. Guns are their fear-trigger. Even the leftish rag Salon is pandering to that fear, citing the chance that some Libertarian doofus will get a 1000 men to brave marching on Washington with loaded rifles to prove they have 2nd Amendment rights.

 In 1968, the ACLU backed the right of the KKK to march through a Black neighborhood.  In 2013, types who once believed in that sort of thing want to tag these idiots “terrorists” and see them taken out by any means necessary.If they break the law, let them be arrested, charged, tried, and pay the penalty.  As Dorner should have been. As perhaps the Tsarnaev’s should have been.  You know, old fashioned police work, without the Military Police State….

Once there is a group who you want stripped of their rights to be treated as citizens, rather than enemy combatants, you lose those rights for you and your target group as well.  There is no grey area on the slippery slope to hell.

Its not just the big takeovers to fear.  It’s not just the sound cannons that can either drop you to your knees in pain, or suffocate you by making a vibration so hard your lungs cannot inflate nor the microwave cannons that will burn your skin off your body should they every want to put down a protest. It’s the everyday treatment of US citizens that should really make your skin crawl.

Kill a cop 40 years ago?  You are a newly branded TERRORIST! (with all that implies including and up to murder by drone)

Show insolence to a cop now, and the Police shoot you.  They have ways of making you confess. Ask Bradley Manning.

No, there is more. The newest tool in the arsenal really, really goes back to the unthinkable of electronic slave collars.  I shit thee not.

A corrections officer friend of mine reported: 

Electronic control cuffs, which are worn around the ankle and cannot be removed by the wearer, can be activated to cause pain compliance through electric shock, by remote control. This is of great concern, and not just do to the potential for torturing inmates, but because the technology can go far beyond controlling inmates. People could be required to wear one to gain access to political or sports events, while driving, in the class room, or in the work place.

So if torturing you into compliance wth remote control pain application isn’t enough?  They can inject you with sedatives against your will with a different set of cuffs.

How did we survive the murder of a president, a million hippies marching against Vietnam, race riots and hundreds of US wars without all this?  Without calling citizens “terrorists,” while still allowing legal counsel and trials, while having privacy and free speech?  Without indefinite detention and torture?

How did we survive it?

Because we hadn’t been brainwashed into the fear.

When they break out the suffocation cannons, and microwave cannons to put down a demonstration of people we hate or fear, will we applaud? Because once that is acceptable for ANYONE, they now have carte blanche to use that on us. Once accepted as the new normal, they will always be able to justify its use.

V for Vendetta could not have been more prophetic.

The have Shocked us, and in our Awe we have let the Law become Lawless.

We have let freedom become slavery.  We have let We have let “Terrorism” become the tool by which we ourselves are terrorized by the state.

In 1968, unthinkable science fiction.  In 2013, reality.  I know why you did it, too.

Because they weren’t coming for you….

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Diane Gee is editor / founder of The Wild Wild Left. Her Facebook group, Links for the Wildly Left is among the most respected political discussion venues on FB. She lives in Michigan.