Category: Police Repression

The NYPD’s Mini-Rebellion, and the True Face of American Fascism

By Andrew O’Hehir
Progressive America Rising via Salon

Jan 5, 2015 – In 1935, with Hitler and Mussolini forging a historic alliance in Europe and the world sliding toward war, Sinclair Lewis published the satirical novel “It Can’t Happen Here,”which depicted the rise of an indigenous American fascist movement.

Lewis is a fine prose stylist, but this particular book has an overly melodramatic plot, and is highly specific to its era. It has not aged nearly as well as “Brave New World” or “1984,” and not many people read it today. (At the time, it was understood as an attack on Sen. Huey Longof Louisiana, the populist firebrand who was planning to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, but was assassinated before he could do so.)

But certain aspects of Lewis’ fascist America still resonate strongly. His clearest insight came in seeing that the authoritarian impulse runs strong and deep in American society, but that because of our unique political history and our confused national mythology, it must always be called by other names and discussed in other terms.

Oh, yeah — Happy New Year, everybody! Now let’s get back to fascism. When the “Corpo” regime installed by tyrannical President Buzz Windrip in “It Can’t Happen Here” strips Congress of its powers, tries dissidents in secret military courts and arms a repressive paramilitary force called the Minute Men, most citizens go along with it. (Yeah, some of that sounds familiar — we’ll get to that.) These draconian measures are understood as necessary to Windrip’s platform of restoring American greatness and prosperity, and even those who feel uncomfortable with Corpo policies reassure themselves that America is a special place with a special destiny, and that the terrible things that have happened in Germany and Italy and Spain are not possible here. No doubt the irony of Lewis’ title seems embarrassingly obvious now, but it was not meant to be subtle in 1935 either. His point stands: We still comfort ourselves with mystical nostrums about American specialness, even in an age when the secret powers of the United States government, and its insulation from democratic oversight, go far beyond anything Lewis ever imagined.

I’m not the first person to observe that the New York police unions’ current mini-rebellion against Mayor Bill de Blasio carries anti-democratic undertones, and even a faint odor of right-wing coup. Indeed, it feels like an early chapter in a contemporary rewrite of “It Can’t Happen Here”: Police in the nation’s largest city openly disrespect and defy an elected reformist mayor, inspiring a nationwide wave of support from “true patriots” eager to take their country back from the dubious alien forces who have degraded and desecrated it. However you read the proximate issues between the cops and de Blasio (some of which are New York-specific), the police protest rests on the same philosophical foundation as the fascist movement in Lewis’ novel. Indeed, it’s a constant undercurrent in American political life, one that surfaced most recently in the Tea Party rebellion of 2010, and is closely related to the disorder famously anatomized by Richard Hofstadter in his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”  (Continued)

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Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: Black Lives Matter Movement Hits Counterreaction

 A crowd of law enforcement officers turn their backs on a screen broadcasting Mayor Bill de Blasio’s remarks from inside the funeral service for Officer Rafael Ramos, outside Christ Tabernacle Church in New York, Dec. 27, 2014. Union officials have attacked the mayor for what they see as insufficient support for the police and excessive sympathy for protesters. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

 

By Nicholas Powers

Truthout | News Analysis

Jan 2, 2015 – A crowd of law enforcement officers turn their backs on a screen broadcasting Mayor Bill de Blasio’s remarks from inside the funeral service for Officer Rafael Ramos, outside Christ Tabernacle Church in New York, Dec. 27, 2014. Union officials have attacked the mayor for what they see as insufficient support for the police and excessive sympathy for protesters. (Victor J. Blue/The New York Times)

On December 20, a Friday, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley eyed a parked NYPD cruiser where Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu sat; he pulled out a silver, semiautomatic gun and shot them dead. First and foremost this is a human loss that, like the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, has left families broken by pain. But quickly their murders were transformed into a political spectacle used by interlocking sectors of the ruling class to delegitimize the Black Lives Matters movement.

Justice will come when the vast majority “sees” that the state, specifically the criminal justice system, is not the cure for crime, but is in part, the cause of it.

On the streets of New York, protesters struggle against the police, conservative media and politicians. Each side fights for the power to shape public opinion. At stake is our social consensus on the limits of the state’s monopoly on violence. The Black Lives Matter movement demands we measure all life equally, which in practice, means sending police who kill innocent black men and women to jail. Whole swaths of reactionary society are lined up against them because they fear a “domino effect” – that if traditional authority is compromised, step by step, we will descend into chaos.

Who wins will determine the very visibility of violence itself. A huge gulf separates the media representation of violence from its lived reality; in that limbo lays the promise or betrayal of justice. It will come when the vast majority “sees” that the state, specifically the criminal justice system, is not the cure for crime, but is in part, the cause of it.

Narrative Visibility

We don’t see with our eyes, but with ideas. Narrative visibility is like a magnifying glass in the brain, it’s the ideological distortion that forces us to “view” some phenomena and be blind to others. Like every city, New York is an imagined community of old-time locals and immigrants, a few rich and the many poor, a boiling metropolis held together, in part, by the story it tells of itself to itself. In the newspapers and TV come endless tales of crime. Some are the hilarious hijinks of passion-addled people. Mostly though, we see the threatening faces of young men of color, tattooed necks and cold eyes. (Continued)

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NYC Police Killings and the Haymarket Massacre: Lessons for the Movement

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

In every vibrant progressive social movement there comes a moment when a psychologically or emotionally disturbed person, an agent provocateur, or a political extremist commits an atrocious act that is seized upon by the State and/or the political Right as a means of attempting to discredit or outright repress the movement.  The action, committed for whatever reason, is sufficiently heinous that confusion develops within the movement and the movement can lose both its momentum as well as a segment of its less committed or more ambivalent supporters.

In 1886, at the height of the Eight Hour Day movement, a bomb was set off at a worker’s rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago.  The rally was called to both protest police killings of worker protesters as well as to support striking workers fighting for the 8 hour day.  The rally was attacked by the police and a bomb was thrown at the police.  To this day no one actually knows who set off the bomb, including whether it was an agent provocateur, or a deranged or infuriated activist.  What is known, however, is that the bombing became a pretext for governmental effort to discredit the protests and the workers movement, and to suggest that the entire movement was led by cold, cruel anarchists who were only interested in violence.  Charges were brought against key leaders of the movement and in a kangaroo trial, eight individuals were convicted for their alleged involvement in the bombing and four were subsequently hanged.

The reaction by police unions, the political Right and much of the mainstream media today, in the aftermath of Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s alleged killings of two NYPD officers, is eerily reminiscent of the aftermath of the Haymarket massacre.  Intense and manipulative efforts are underway to paint those who have protested police violence, or even those who have simply spoken up against it, as allegedly having blood on their hands since they supposedly created the tension between the police and the community.  New York City Mayor de Blasio, for instance, has been demonized by the Right, with the suggestion that he and Rev. Al Sharpton created the incendiary environment that resulted in the murders of the two officers.

In this moment it is critical that progressives counter these arguments actively, vocally and with immense vigor.  These arguments and allegations are cynical and disingenuous efforts to discredit and derail one of the most important movements of the recent past.  Let us be clear as to what has been unfolding.

An apparently mentally and/or emotionally disturbed career criminal allegedly carried out the attempted murder of his girlfriend followed by the murder of the two officers.  This individual had no connection with any social justice movement, had no apparent connections with New York and was certainly not a leader of the movement against police violence.

Second, the tension that exists between the police and communities of color was not manufactured by any one.  It was and is the result of YEARS of police lynchings carried out in African American and Latino communities. 

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