Brown: G-20 police overkill
By Jacob Brown / Columnist
published: Mon, 28 Sep, 2009
I found salvation in “The O.”
After getting the University’s emergency text message alert to stay near my residence Friday night, I naturally had to check out the action. Come on, we only have so many times to witness history, and the G-20 Summit happened to be one of those moments.
After I found a way to Forbes Avenue, weaving through buildings and police lines, I thought the night might come to a standstill. I was wrong. Behind me, a group of armored police with shields came charging down from the William Pitt Union. It felt like the running of the bulls, and I was in their way.
So I ran into “The O,” hoping I could find a place to hide. I hadn’t eaten there since freshman year, but that moment seemed like a good time to reacquaint myself with it.
Looking outside, the Pamplona in Pittsburgh suddenly became more like Tiananmen Square. I saw police throwing OC gas. I saw students being clubbed to the ground. I saw hell.
My fortress on Forbes Avenue kept me safe — and well-fed — while I looked outside at a world I didn’t think I’d ever see. The police were trying to ward off anarchists. But the anarchists weren’t there.
Instead, the only people I saw facing the wrath of the police were students. Our campus had suddenly become a battleground where there were no innocent bystanders.
The G-20 brought Pittsburgh to the forefront of places to assemble.
Compared to the 50,000 protesters who descended upon Seattle during the World Trade Organization assembly 10 years ago, this event turned out almost incident-free. County Executive Dan Onorato said the G-20 was a success on all accounts.
But after the big-name news stations left — after the celebrity politicians left, after Mayor Luke Ravenstahl had his photo op with President Obama — the police spared no mercy for those who remained in the area.
Watching YouTube clips of riots and police state events is one thing. But when you’re there to witness them firsthand, your heart pounds in your chest and your breathing becomes more difficult with each inhalation of OC gas.
It’s a surreal high of fright and exhilaration at the same time.
I love the United States and its principles. On the first night of protest in Schenley Plaza, I proudly wore my “John McCain for President” T-shirt in quiet dissidence. I can do that because the United States is a free country.
But the second night of Oakland protests was nothing more than an eradication of all life.
As it all happened, I asked myself, “Where did my college go? Where is my Oakland?” I didn’t recognize this place. This wasn’t my home. The principles of the United States had been lost in the wake of martial law.
I couldn’t walk to my South Oakland apartment because the police would have arrested me or worse. Even if I could, for the first time in my life, I was scared of my own government. During the protests, a cold terror in the back of my mind told me to flee to the nearest shelter I could find.
When I called them, both the city and Pitt police told me I just had to wait it out, and if I had a problem, I could file a grievance. If the anarchists had a message to spread, it wasn’t through throwing rocks at officers. It was in the subtle fact that with their stutter steps, they provoked chaos in Oakland. They turned our own police authorities into authoritarians.
The anarchists won.
As I sat down in “The O” with my fries and a cold beer, helplessly watching the outside world, I realized that even with low numbers, the anarchists proved their point.
Authorities forgot about the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights while they prepared for war on the streets. The anarchists embraced those documents as a symbol of where America had gone wrong — and they used them against the supposedly educated masses.
During the first night of protests, when an anarchist read the First Amendment from his pocket-sized Constitution, a student wearing a Pitt basketball shirt asked me what kind of garbage was spewing from the guy’s mouth.
The Pitt student seemed oblivious to our country’s most basic set of laws. He exemplified the ignorance that allows extremist groups to flourish.
On Friday night as the police disbursed, students returned to Forbes Avenue. It was like any other blissful weekend night in Oakland. It was as if the riot police, the SWAT teams and the armored vehicles had never been there.
As I left my shelter of french fries to go home for the night, I felt relieved that the G-20 circus and all of its sideshows were on the way out of town and that Pittsburgh’s civility was on its way back. Finally.
E-mail Jacob at jebrown13@yahoo.com.
Comments
This column must represent a
This column must represent a rather sobering admission for someone sporting a "John McCain for President” T-shirt.
And if the Tea Party and healthcare town hall protesters seek to escape charges of gross hypocrisy, they too will express outrage and solidarity with the Pitt students. And, indeed, perhaps there are a handful of principled conservatives and libertarians. Could we put Ron Paul into that category?
But I fear the tea-baggers and healthcare protesters confront a much more profound problem than just their bad temper and worse manners. For it appears that most do not hail from the ranks of bona fide liberals or libertarians, but instead from the ranks of neoliberals and neoconservatives.
The neocon/neoliberal ideology is pretty straightforward, relying on force or the threat of force to spread the American Way of Life, or, as the writer Max Boot has with unusual candor observed, “imposing the rule of law, property rights and other guarantees at gunpoint if needed” (“American Imperialism? No Need to Run from Label,” USA Today, May 6, 2003).
Another famous neocon/neoliberal was Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago economics professor and author of The Road to Serfdom. He visited Chile a number of times after the military dictator Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende. As the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes describes in The Buried Mirror:
In a savage action, Allende partisans were rounded up, gathered in a stadium, and murdered en masse. Others were sent to concentration camps, and still others were exiled and sometimes murdered abroad. Pinochet did all of this in the name of democracy and anticommunism.
And Hayek was to be one of Pinochet’s greatest and most loyal cheerleaders. “My personal preference,” Hayek told a Chilean interviewer “leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/grandin11172006.html
There is of course nothing new to any of this. Almost 80 years ago, Reinhold Niebuhr, probably the most preeminent Christian theologian of the 20th century, spoke out against the hypocrisy that inheres in what today has become known as neoliberalism and neoconservatism:
When economic power desires to be left alone it uses the philosophy of laissez faire to discourage political restraint upon economic freedom. When it wants to make use of the police power of the state to subdue rebellions and discontent in the ranks of its helots, it justifies the use of political coercion and the resulting suppression of liberties by insisting that peace is more precious than freedom and that its only desire is social peace. A rational analysis of social facts easily punctures this pretension also. It proves that the police power of the state is usually used prematurely; before an effort has been made to eliminate the causes of discontent, and that it therefore tends to perpetuate injustice and the consequent social disaffections.
--Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man & Immoral Society
Who is John Galt?
Who is John Galt?
One of the best rebuttals
One of the best rebuttals I’ve seen to the New Atheists (both the old New Atheists like Ayn Rand as well as the new New Atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris) is this lecture by David Sloan Wilson:
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-enlightenment-2-0/da...
Re: Brown: G-20 police overkil
Indoctrination of our youth, they don't teach the Constitution anymore. I sat in my living room watching youtube, students getting videos up as fast as they could. I live in Ohio, I am 47, a mom and grandma...I cried for these young people. I remember the footage of the spectators, innocently watching from high up in the tower, when the New World Order Mob Squad seqestered and gassed them, keeping them in that small area, not allowing them to get to fresh air, one young lady was bleeding and pleading with the "officers". It was horrifying to watch. And guess what? Mainstream aka Fringe Media barely reported it at all. In fact, there are lots of people that don't even know about the Summit! Our Liberties are almost gone, the brilliant lamp that was the Spirit of the United States of America is fading into a somber twilight. They will have our children become zombies, dumbed down, slaves for their corporations. The debt will never be repaid. In the words of The One's counterpart in Evil: “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed”.
She is right, we will never go back to our lives as usual, because they have taken them away.
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