Bedtime for Democracy

[magicalspork]

On Tuesday, November 9th, 2004 - the 66th anniversary of Kristallnacht - there were tanks on the streets of L.A. (link contains full movie clip - 6.8 Mb)

This was a peaceful protest like any other, and the state responded with the same audacious tactics commonly employed by dictators in third-world countries. Fucking tanks? Is this part of

Comments

[anhline]

There's an Army National Guard unit on Federal Ave. just outside of Westwood and if you've ever lived or hung out around the area long enough, you would have at some point seen tanks, armored vehicles, and soldiers conducting routine business in and around the area. I've never seen them on Wilshire Blvd. in front of the Federal Building though. Anyway, I seriously doubt they were explicitly deployed over there to "quell" the situation. They were probably already out on an exercise and decided to fuck w/ those protesters.

Pulling Back the Curtain

[magicalspork]

I hope you are right about this one. It seems like overkill, using such tactics to instill fear in the minds of dissenting individuals. Hopefully, this was a one-time thing; I'm certainly not used to sights like that - and it seems unusual to me that something like this would have occurred at all, for any reason, under any circumstance.

Isolated incident or not, it's still a disturbing sight to behold. I suppose I've been dreading something for quite some time now; something that would herald the the end of democracy as we know it. Maybe it's too soon for that, but one thing is for sure: it is inevitable.

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre."

- Frank Zappa

Just found this.

[magicalspork]

Beaverhausen  (1000+ posts)
Wed Nov-10-04 04:58 PM
Original message

Tanks at LA Protest - NOT what you thinkThis is from the LA Indymedia site

Re: Just found this.

[anhline]

Thank goodness. Yeah sending 2 armored vehicles in response to what seemed like a handful of peaceful demonstrators would have been way overkill. Like I said, you don't ever see military vehicles on Wilshire over there, so it makes sense that those were just some lost Marines.