NYPD taking down a member of the Irish Lesbian and Gay OrganizationI have a confession to make: I am a terrorist. Or at least a potential terrorist, in the eyes of the New York Police Department. During the past few days of peaceful demonstrations that surrounded the Republican National Convention, police arrested 1800 people, the overwhelming majority of whom were cuffed and jailed for nothing more than crowding the streets and sidewalks of the Big Apple.
Having felt an equal degree of repression on a smaller scale in Montreal just over a year ago, I can easily empathize with the latest victims of Americaís war on constitutionally guaranteed dissent.
My suggested reading of the week–In First They Came for the Protestors, in which Alternetís Rachel Neumann discusses the growing trend of political repression and the related need for demonstrators to rethink what constitutes effective political protest:
In a country that engages in preemptive war against a small nation that had neither the intention nor the ability to attack us, preemptive suppression of dissent is the next logical step. But the word “preemptive” is misleading here, because it implies that a crime was about to be committedÖ
The protests and arrests in New York raise two interrelated questions. First, how do we hold police and other agencies accountable in blatant examples of “preemptive arrests?” The second, and the one asked less often, is: what constitutes a strategically effective protest in a time of mass media conglomeration and constitutional disregard?
