Who Will Control the Government’s Guns?
Government (in the form of police) violence against nonviolent protesters at the Seattle WTO Meetings had many in The Movement questioning the relevance of strict Ghandian Nonviolence in modern street protest. It also changed a lot of my attitude toward Federal and State gun-control laws. I suddenly noticed that all of these laws were about disarming the People, and not the State.
Things got really awkward all of a sudden. Now, I’m really not a violent guy at all. I’ve always believed that war — and situations that drive citizens to take up arms against their government — are an indication of epic failure: ethical failure, cultural failure, moral failure, and spiritual failure. After Seattle, though, I started thinking more about people in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, who are fighting US-backed state/corporate dictatorships and are forced to literally fight the police — and often soldiers — in the streets, often just for the right to gather in the streets to voice their grievances in the first place…and they aren’t necessarily fighting by Gandhi’s rules. I started thinking about the Palestinians, engaged in their resistance against the Israeli occupation of their country… and, they weren’t exactly holding candles and singing kum-bah-yah, either.
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Heading into the home stretch of Clintontime, all the media gush about the Clinton Legacy conveniently left out the assaults on the Constitution, military adventurism in violation of the Constitution and the War Powers Act, not to mention a little perjury. Oh, wait, yeah, that’s right, we had that big ol’ Impeachment trial coming up; and if your name happened to be Bill Clinton, then there was only one thing to do: War Scare Time again, boys and girls! This time, as I recall, it was Serbia and its head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, who were Enemy Of The Month owing to accusations of “mass murder” or somesuch against Milosevic, in which it was eventually discovered that the “mass” part came to about the total annual murder rate for DC in a good year. So, President Elvis’ Secretary of Snake…uh, Snake, the venerable old Reaganoid Madeleine Albright, was engaged in a round of diplomacy with Mr. Milosevic right about this time — if, by “diplomacy”, you mean “sign this absurdly one-sided, crippling list of our demands*, or else we’ll crater your asses flat”. Nothing, if not Mafia Diplomacy…only difference was, the actual Mafia would’ve let him slide with broken fingers.
Meanwhile, with the “Impeachment Tide Surging” — as USA Today put it — it was time once again for President Bubba to get all Presidential, meaning, of course, to fan up another war scare someplace against a country with no air force and damn near nothing to shoot back with and then fly the most technically sophisticated, most expensive and deadliest air force on the planet over them and stomp the fertilizer out of them for about a month and a half while going on TV with some grim-assed speech about how you had to do it. Also, if you’ve really got your ducks together, you find some fresh-faced young flack from Human Rights Watch to go on the Today Show the week the bombing starts and deliver the most spectacularly convoluted, steaming, quivering mass of triagulation ever seen in any mass media to date in an attempt to show that it really is OK that Clinton’s air force is bombing civilians because they’re defending human rights against Milosevic.
November of ’98, heading towards the end of The Good Old Clintontime, saw the by-now usual Sunday morning spew about the Clinton Legacy. Predictably, this took the form of gushing about “welfare reform” and his Crime Bill, but not a whole lot about the things that were really on peoples’ minds — like the Chinese takeover of American manufacturing, and stagnating wages. What we did hear a lot about, as well, was how well he dealt with the Iraqis, and his decisive action in his missile attacks on The Sudan and Afghanistan — which turned out to have targeted civilians (as usual) and were timed so soon after his video testimony in the Lewinsky Scandal that it could’ve been the premise for a movie (what? wait a minute…)…
…which brings us to the real Clinton Legacy, the legacy of one of most right-wing and violent Administrations ever to be winked at and given a free pass by desperate, fawning, attention-whoring American Liberalism. Let’s see… there was extra-Constitutional military violence against Iraq (twice), the Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Serbia; threatening and dick-wiggling at North Korea, Bosnia, and Iran — not to mention the military assault on the Branch Davidian outfit, with young children and elderly inside, right here in the good old USA. All this — on top of assaults on the Constitution at every possible opportunity, most notably in the form of the 1996 Communications Decency Act which sought sweeping censorship powers over the then-emerging Internet and which was deservedly smacked down by the Supreme Court — gave President Elvis Clinton a legacy that any modern head of state could envy, if his name happened to be Deng Xiaoping.
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It was Sam Smith, writing in his Progressive Review, who beautifully characterized the Clinton Mob as “corporate lawyers with their own air force”, and nowhere was that more evident than President Bubba’s seemingly random, shits-and-giggles cruise-missile attacks on Baghdad in the early fall of 1996, right in the midst of his campaign for a second term, and probably for some random made-up “no-fly zone” violation or something.
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