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| Timothy Pratt |
The move comes amid the unprecedented arrests of organizers at a bail and legal defense fund that has helped some of the people arrested while protesting against the multimillion-dollar police and fire department training center planned for a forest south-east of Atlanta.
Cop City came to global attention after police shot dead an environmental protester in a raid on the forest and its defenders on 18 January – the first incident of its kind in US history.
Police staged a Swat-style raid on Wednesday on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF), arresting three of its members. The fund, operating in Atlanta since 2017, has helped some of the 42 protesters so far facing charges linked to protests against Cop City, nearly all of whom have been bailed out.
Continue reading @ Guardian.
Thank you to Timothy Pratt, for the reporting, thank you to Stanley Cohen for the posting, and thank you to TPQ for the platform.
ReplyDeleteAfter vanquishing the natives at home, America projected its bellicosity outwards, in the shadow of, and in imitation of, the greater powers.
Empire building on a minor scale proceeded until about WW I and somewhat thereafter, through the interbellum years.
WW II birthed a superpower, an out of control monster, that has run amok the wide world over, for the last seventy some odd years.
But the waging of war abroad was not enough. America has turned inwards again and has opened up a second front, a war on its own people.
It would be more accurate to say, the war on its own people has been expanded. The natives were never completely exterminated, and the blacks, the minorities, continue to suffer racism.
Those were only the peoples that the state went after first. Then there were the outliers, the separatists, the cult groups, later still, the disorganized yobbos, the useful idiots of the so-called Capitol insurrection, now the environmentalists and those who have become more vocal in shouting abuse back to an abusive power.
It might be said that post WW II war era here in America ended on September 11, 2001. It was superseded by a new war era, that of the Global War on Terror.
Some see where this is heading, we had, we have, our latter day prophets here, our Chalmers Johnsons, William Pfaffs, Sheldon Wolins, Christopher Hedges, Michael Hudsons, Shoshanna Zuboffs, John Whiteheads, Elizabeth Goiteins, Patrick Lawrences, Katie Halpers, Max Blumenthals, ...and so many others, who work, like John the Baptist in the desert, away out in the back of beyond, off the grid of main stream media.
Those of us here in the States, who came to witness the conflict in the North years ago, perhaps at the time had no way of knowing that they were in a laboratory of sorts, where militarized police, a deployed army, agents, infiltrators, provocateurs, state killings, detention centers, a panoply of surveillance techniques, were being perfected for export to the United States. And plastic bullets? They haven't gone away, you know.
The state is seeking to create a new class of criminal here, the "domestic terrorist". No activist will be safe, not those on the front lines of protest, not those expressing written or verbal support, and certainly not those contributing to groups and defense funds.
Strange days are coming.