> Behind the Privatization of the UC, a Riot Squad of Police
> November 27, 2009
> By GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
>
> [...]
>
> Particularly egregious in this respect was Democratic Party “framing”
> strategist and self-styled movement guru George Lakoff. Visibly
> angered by the occupiers’ refusal to leave Wheeler voluntarily
> (without any of their demands having been met, of course), Lakoff
> seized the megaphone to spew the morally bankrupt argument that since
> the students knew they would be met with police violence, they would
> themselves be responsible for creating that violence if they chose to
> remain. No more repulsive a phrase was uttered that day. And were this
> not sufficient, Lakoff was even heard lying repeatedly to the
> occupiers, insisting that there had been no police violence, no rubber
> bullets, and no injuries outside the building, all in an effort to
> manipulate those inside into abandoning the occupation.
What a dick. This is a pretty old 'framing' too - by coincidence Guy Rundle wrote a piece yesterday on De Maistre. It's with reference to the new leader of the Australian Opposition, but it seems apt here too:
[...]
The Executioner is a trilogue between a Senator, a Count and a Chevalier about the sources of order, and good, and the problem of evil. De Maistre adopts the argument that evil is a consequence of the freedom given to humans, that is necessary for them to love God -- no freedom, no loving relation and God has no meaning without being loved. But there is a second type of evil, and that is the evil we must do against evil -- the torture, the prisons, the executioner. For de Maistre, it is not we doing this evil, but the original evil doers. Consider the executioner, says De Maistre, a man shunned by society for what he does, living apart from society, unable to be called virtuous in his trade, a man whose thought at the end of the day is "no one can break men on the wheel better than I". But says de Maistre:
All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.
For de Maistre, it is the evil doers who are responsible for all evil. It is prisoners who build the prisons, murderers who pay the hangman, traitors who quarter themselves at the city gates. [...] Thus it is that he will have no difficulty in reviving a harsh refugee policy -- not in the manipulative manner of the Ruddock years, but from a deeper de Maistrian conviction that we do not build detention centres, boat people do. There'll be less pussyfooting around trying to blame people smugglers, talking about overcrowding etc etc, and a much greater sense that evil and chaos is the default setting of human existence, from which we preserve a little order by the grace of the axeman's swinging arc.
[...]
(This may be behind a paywall.) http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/08/rundle-abbott-has-a-deep-and-original-desire-to-fail-nobly/
Mike