Going Nazi

[joanna bujes]

At 08:49 PM 01/27/2002 -0500, Chuck G. wrote:
>In other words, in my mind, the institutional tools themselves are the
>essential feature, and not the content of their raison d'etre. These
>tools in particular include defining a broad class of people as
>non-persons and identifying them with generally racial
>characteristics---in this case, middle eastern looking, and
>subscribing to Islam. Next, there are the broadened police powers of
>the state to investigate, arrest, and detain people within this
>designated population, above and beyond the framework of the usual
>powers given to the police and government of a bourgeois democracy. In
>addition there are, the availability of military tribunals, closed
>hearings before unspecified military or government officials,
>and finally the punishments of indefinite imprisonment and or execution
>without either review or appeal to any outside authority.
>
>Sure, these are just the usual police state hardware of any
>self-respecting totalitarian regime. Are we supposed to just wait
>around for lunatic white supremacy diatribes, mass rallies of
>nationalism, and posters of hook nosed arabs done up as rat people
>before we start calling this shit nazis?
>
>But I suppose we can all wait and see if Bush actually uses some of
>this power to start killing people in Guatanamo. That is pretty
>much the bottom line empirical test for me.

Generally agree with Chuck's long post...of which I reproduce only the last 
three paragraphs. But I'd like to propose another bottom line, which is, 
the upcoming legal and economic attack on the middle class.  I say this 
because the attack on the working class and on people of color has been 
going on unabated for well over a generation. At one point in my chequered 
career I was a state park ranger in California: the FBI taught my how to 
shoot, the Monterey sheriffs, how to use tear gas, write tickets, etc. The 
ONE thing I learned in my police training, was that the police have 
absolute discretion as to who gets arrested and what they get charged with. 
You think the laws protect you? Bullshit. The only thing that protects you 
is the color of your skin, the cut of your clothes, and how much lawyer you 
can afford.

So the acid test for me is 1) what happens to the largely middle class 
IMF/war protesters ...coming up in New York and Washington and 2) what 
happens in the continuing saga of the looting of all public goods and of 
the impovrishment of the middle class in the United States.

As an example, note what happened to raisethefist.com (from a subsequent post):

"Raisethefist.com was progresive. It was going somewhere. Kids started
creating clubs in their schools called 'RaisetheFist'.
People started utilizing the collective as a powerful resource for
the activist/anarchist community. The federal government
has been investigating me, and the site very closely, long
before 9-11, and long before such militancy was even portrayed on the
site. They knew the site had potential, that it was turning into
something more than a site, but a strong collective utilized by activists
throughout the world committed to social justice. And that's become a
crime. Justice has become a crime. Freedom has become a crime. Anyone
activly disagreeing with policies of the U.S is now
automaticly rendered a "terrorist" in the eyes of national security....
Where raisethefist.com will go from here, I don't know.
Based on what i've been told, i'll most likely be in jail, so most of my
focus will be towards getting an attorney."

(Before you flame me, please understand that I am NOT saying that the 
working class and people of color do not count. I am just saying that in 
the capitalist equation they don't count in theory or in practice. So the 
real test is what they're willing do to to the middle class and what the 
middle class is willing to put up with.)

Joanna B.