Bill Quigley, Dissent Weakened, Police More Militarized

     After 9-11, Congress quickly passed and Pres. Bush signed a bundle of laws that reduced our liberties.   And what did they call them?   In classic doublespeak, they called them the Patriot Act:: cripple freedom and call it patriotism.  It was now patriotic to diminish freedom.  Clever, especially when our deluded troops were fighting and dying for “freedom.”

     So now what do you and I do?   Now the Peace and Justice Movement, having lost the initiative as has so often happened during the past decade and before, must struggle to regain constitutional grounding.   We must, and we can, show how misguided, how destructive to democracy is the Patriot Act, and how futile it has been in the so-called “War on Terrorism.”   We must ridicule the name “Patriot Act,” by showing how false and unpatriotic it is, until it s abandoned, and we must, and we can, remove that gang of laws that lied about what freedom actual is and can and should mean in the US.

     And what else can we do (we are not ignorant, timorous wabbits)?   We can educate the public about the history of fascist attacks on constitutional liberties, and mobilize them to educate their representatives and to mobilize the public to opposed ignorant representatives who choose imagined security over liberty.   For example, the Nazis used the 1933 fire that destroyed the Reichstag in Berlin, which they had instigated, as a pretext to suspend civil liberties and in other ways to help clear the way for the Nazis’ rise to power.   We need to be well-informed about the histories of failed democracies, we need to know the process of their destruction to enable us to examine our own.    (The emergency method of grasping power is also common in commerce, by which corporations move into vacuums of human or natural catastrophes to buy cheap land, buildings, businesses, as Naomi Klein has show in Shock Doctrine.)  We need to be prepared to hold steady against fear and panic, and to demand the same from our representatives.

     We are already doing this nationally and locally, obviously insufficiently, feebly, with not enough money or determination.   The ACLU,  the Center for Constitutional Rights, the BORDC and other excellent groups had helped strengthen the Bill of Rights and build walls against congressional failures; they are challenging the hypocritical “Patriot Act” laws; and they deserve our time and money.   Our national peace and justice movement educates and agitates for constitutional freedoms with justice.   The local arm is composed of the OMNICenterfor Peace, Justice, and Ecology, the WorkersJusticeCenter, and other groups.   OMNI publishes this and related newsletters online.  

But nationally and locally, we should also be looking ahead to the next shock sure to undermine liberties if authoritarians and imperialists have control; we should be planning for more shocks sure to come—like that of 9/11-- from US imperial expansion around the world, over 1000 bases globally in over 100 countries, and their ruinous expense and arousal of pushback (for example, look at a map of US bases facing China in the Pacific and surrounding it west to east, north to south, or a map at the global bombings against US invasions and occupations and drone assassinations).   Likewise, we should be preparing for the shocks from climate change already also happening (Katrina, Sandy, forest fires, droughts) with their empire-size immense expenses, displacements, refugees, and deaths—to care for the victims while retaining our liberties.    The UN High Commissioner for Refugees in its 2010 trends report estimated 43.7 million refugees and internally displaced people.

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http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2008/02/francis-boyles-protesting-power-war.html