<DIV>I'm not saying that there weren't excesses by European police forces -- I was in England during the '81 Hunger Strike. I should add, in case it needs to be said, that I do not think that blowing up pubs and department stores was justifiable or legitimate means of struggle either, and I think the people who did those things belonged in jail. The Germans, dealing with the Baader-Meinhof Group were a lot worse than the Brits, btw. And there was the Berufsverbot, bammimg employment of "radicals" in public service (including university positions). </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>But still, and bearing in mind that neither England nor Germany has ever had anything like the extremely extensive set for formal civil liberties protections we have here, there wasn't the sort of relentless, sustained, systematic, and really scary move towards a police state anywhere in nonfascist Europe that I know of -- no assertion of the power of the state to indefinitely detain noncitizens and citizens alike without probable cause or suspicion, to deny them the right to be charged or defended by a lawyer, to commit torture or ship people off to be tortured, to strip people of their citizenship -- need I go on? </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>We've had our police murders and frameups of radicals too, but we're talking about something qualitatively different here, and it's important that we recognize it. jks Lance Murdoch <lbotalk@lancemurdoch.org> wrote:</DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid"> England dealt with the IRA freedom fighters "without the sort of repressive legislation and adminstrative action that Ashcroft has unloosed with the consent Congress"? Does that include the 13 civilians killed by British paramilitaries on January 30th, 1972? And what were those people marching against? Internment - on August 9th, 1971, the government began arresting and indefinitely detaining people without trial for the mere suspicion that they belonged to a paramilitary group - by the year 1975 there had been 1981 people so detained, many of them who had not been connected to any paramilitary groups in any context. As bad as the US's current internment is, it's of foreign-born people in the US - not native-born people who are being interned because they want the right of self-determination. John McGuffin, an anarchist who was the only person of a Protestant background who was locked up when internment was initially implemented, wrote a book called "The Guineapigs" about the fourteen Irish political prisoners the British Army used to experiment with modern torture techniques on. There certainly was repressive legislation and administrative action used by England with dealing with the IRA (and with any Irish republican for that matter). Also, I would disagree with the idea that Franco did not use repressive legislation and administrative action to deal with the ETA. I'm not thoroughly familiar with the ETA/Aznar situation currently, Aznar might be less repressive than Franco, but that is relative, meaning Aznar only looks good when compared to Franco. -- Lance On Mon, 12 May 2003, andie nachgeborenen wrote: > The fact is that terrorism is not (demonstrably not!) such a threat to > civilized life as to require serious curtainlment of civil liberties. > We know this because Europeans societies have dealt with terrorism > from the IRA, the ETA, the Red Brigades, etc., for decades without the > sort of repressive legislation and adminstrative action that Ashcroft > has unloosed with the consent Congress, including the Dems who almost > unanimously voted for USAPA. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk</BLOCKQUOTE><hr SIZE=1> Do you Yahoo!? <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.com">The New Yahoo! Search</a> - Faster. Easier. Bingo.