>A mock trial, like Yoshie mentioned, would be a good thing if
>handled soberly, free of leftie boilerplate tectonics and with as
>full a command of the facts as possible.
We are not short on sober leftists in full command of all the relevant facts, from Noam Chomsky to Phyllis Bennis. The problem is that sober leftists tend not to make great visual aids, and calm presentations of facts and nothing but facts are likely to put even committed activists to sleep, to say nothing of those who have yet to become politically active. Show trials are after all _shows_, and we all know that good shows need drama.
So, I would argue for show trials staged like potboilers based on facts that make the audience alternately laugh and cry (like Tony Kushner's _Angels in America_) before the plots come to their ends. Sober leftists will have roles to play in such theater, but they won't monopolize the center stage. Bring the victims of the US power elite from all nations in whose politics they directly or indirectly intervened -- US veterans and their families, Iraqis, Iranians, and Palestinians, Koreans and Vietnamese, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, Argentines, Guatemalans, and Colombians, Congolese and South Africans, nay nearly all the nations of the world -- to testify at the show trials.
The show trials should be broadcast live on Al Jazeera and other willing channels, and they should be later edited down to a 60-minute documentary. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>