Anarchic Tendencies

Harpers Magazine… Publishers Note On The Burgeoning American Police State: “In Boston, An Exercise in Intimidation”

Note: After 9/11 I had the feeling that if another violent shock to the social system occurred in America most of us would be begging to live in a police state. I was wrong. No one begged. They simply did as the were told and went home as instructed by the authorities.

Boston during Rush Hour the day of the Marathon bombing

Publisher’s Note — May 16, 2013, 11:55 am

In Boston, An Exercise in Intimidation
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, why did so few people protest the decision to lock down parts of the city?

By John R. MacArthur

[This column originally ran in the Providence Journal on May 15, 2013]

I remember the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, as if it were last week, but until I heard the news of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, I had forgotten several of that November day’s salient details. About the same time my grammar-school principal, Marshall Benjamin, gathered us to announce the shooting of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald was fleeing the scene of his crime — in a municipal bus, a taxi, and on foot through the busy streets of Dallas. Sought by the police (since he was the only employee of the Texas School Book Depository missing from work), he killed an officer who tried to question him and eventually took refuge in a movie theater. Thanks to an alert shoe-store manager, who had noticed Oswald sneaking into the Texas Theatre without buying a ticket, the police were called.

Oswald was apprehended after briefly watching War Is Hell — an out-of-competition selection for the 1961 Cannes Film Festival — but not before he tried to shoot the arresting officer with a pistol from his seat in the back of the cinema. Less than an hour and a half after the president was shot, Kennedy’s assassin was in custody, and very much alive for questioning.

I relate these incidents to emphasize the differences between the respective manhunts in Dallas and in Boston, nearly fifty years later. Comparisons may be odious, but in this case they usefully highlight how much America has changed, and for the worse, since Kennedy was murdered — but also since 9/11… [In Full @ Harpers]

“Freedom and High Anxiety in the USA” —- Historian Lawrence Davidson via The World According To Bill Fisher

[Detroit Free Press Headline, 1967 disturbances]

As one friend of mine, Peter Loeb of Boston, has put it, “the word ‘terrorist’ has become equated with ‘Arab/Muslim’ in the American mind.” Thus, referring to the recent Boston Marathon bombing, ABC news reports that “the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 has left many people anxious. But Muslim Americans await the identity of the perpetrator with particular dread.”

This Analysis (23 April 2013) was written by Lawrence Davidson, who is a university history professor. It is well worth a read. ~Bill

Part I - High Anxiety

Americans may assume that public insecurity is a condition you find under dictatorships, where the agents of the state can burst through your door and cart you away without a warrant. That can now happen in the USA too, but only to those the government calls “terrorists.”

Perhaps naively, ordinary folks see themselves as immune from that sort of treatment. However, public insecurity has many roots. Americans actually experience, but almost never acknowledge, the fact that there is a correlation between U.S. democracy’s relatively broad array of freedoms and public high anxiety.

Here are some of the ways this works:

Economic freedom can, theoretically, break down class barriers and open up opportunities for enterprising citizens. It also leaves you free to become abjectly poor and produces a socio-political environment in which ideologically driven leaders hesitate to use the power of the state to solve the consequences of poverty. Being poor is, usually, a high-anxiety state.

Political freedoms can become lopsided in favor of well-organized special interests with the financial ability to corrupt the political system. It might be that 90% or more of Americans favor reform of the gun laws and would feel safer if there were universal background checks on those purchasing firearms. It does not matter, though, because this majority does not know how to effectively use its political freedom to achieve this end. As a consequence lobby groups that specialize in working the system (such as the National Rifle Association) can easily override the wishes of the majority and, as just happened, arrange for the most innocuous of gun reform legislation to be defeated in the Senate. Moved by the same lobby influence, the Senate is expected to reject the recently created UN Arms Trade Treaty. Thus the rest of us, and our children, are stuck in a situation that is very free for gun owners who can give their fantasies full play, but spells high anxiety for the rest of us.

Media freedom, such as it is, is perhaps the greatest contributor to public insecurity because it has produced a consistent concentration on the negative. This occurs because either those who own the media outlets, and thus literally select the news we receive, hold an anxiety-producing worldview, or they see such an approach as good business. The spectacularly negative seems to sell newspapers and boost ratings.

At this point, one can ask who are those who are most inclined to use freedom, either as economic, political, or media policy makers, or leaders of special interest groups, to promote practices and policies that are anxiety producing to great majority? It is often rigid, single-issue protagonists who are anything but free in their own minds. In fact their single-mindedness has blinded them to broader community interests and needs.

Take for instance, the Christian and Jewish ideologues making up such groups as Christians United for Israel and the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The former is an your classic Christian Zionist organization which claims to be “the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States serving 1.3 million members.” AIPAC, of course, is one of the most influential lobby groups in the country. And just how do these groups “serve” their constituents? Well, one way is by going around trying to convince the rest of us that we are in mortal danger from a nuclear Iran (which happens to be a country at odds with Israel).

They have done a good job of implanting this anxiety-producing fantasy in the minds of both the public and many members of the U.S. Congress. But, how do I know the claim that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons is a fantasy? Because every time the heads of our government’s intelligence services are asked about this they say it isn’t true. Oddly, this gets very little press.

Such Zionist organizations also spread public insecurity through the promotion of Islamophobia, another fantasy, which states that just about every Muslim in the U.S. is an al Qaeda agent.

As one friend of mine, Peter Loeb of Boston, has put it, “the word ‘terrorist’ has become equated with ‘Arab/Muslim’ in the American mind.” Thus, referring to the recent Boston Marathon bombing, ABC news reports that “the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 has left many people anxious. But Muslim Americans await the identity of the perpetrator with particular dread.”

Part II - The Example of the Boston Marathon

The recent anxiety that hit the nation over the Boston Marathon bombings is good example of just how exaggeratedly frightening a world our freedom (in this case media freedom) has created for us. If one bothers with the facts, one learns… [In Full @ The World According To Bill Fisher]