Source: Global Research.caProf. John McMurtry
Review of Andrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy (2011), New York: St. Martin’s Press/Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp.
Many
readers may have thought the U.S. is “like a police state” - - think of
the security dress down of everyone boarding a flight within the U.S.
sphere of control. Political scientist Andrew Kolin goes far beyond
hasty analogue. He argues with rich factual substantiation that the U.S
is a police state all the way
down – not only since the stolen elections and war state of George Bush
Jr., but before and since in a cumulative throughline of bureaucratized
despotism across borders.
Documented examples are reported in detail from 1950 on to disclose a record that is as systematic in suppressing public dissent as its client dictatorships elsewhere – albeit far more successfully kept out of public and scholarly attention. Since the electoral contests of, by and for the rich in America are proclaimed as “the leader of the Free World” in the ad-vehicle media many still watch and read, an example helps to clarify the reality not reported. When three nuns protested before the war-criminal bombing of Iraq in 2002 where no war crime was left undone, “they were arrested, handcuffed, left on the ground for three hours and then jailed for seven months before trial - - [for] sabotage and obstruction of justice” (p. 153).
Every step of their police repression was within the laws that had been concocted before and after 9-11, in particular by the provisions of “the Patriot Act” – with here as elsewhere the legislative title as integral to the Orwellian language of rule. The symbolic action of the nuns - painting blood on a missile silo – was in fact backed by international law against the “supreme crime” of non-defensive armed invasion of another country. Indeed their protest occurred just before the saturation bombing of civilian Baghdad which ended in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. But mass-murderous facts, citizen responsibility, moral courage and peaceful expression of the law of nations do not detain U.S. legal machinery. It is this legal machinery that Kolin focuses on to make his case that the U.S. is a police state.
Documented examples are reported in detail from 1950 on to disclose a record that is as systematic in suppressing public dissent as its client dictatorships elsewhere – albeit far more successfully kept out of public and scholarly attention. Since the electoral contests of, by and for the rich in America are proclaimed as “the leader of the Free World” in the ad-vehicle media many still watch and read, an example helps to clarify the reality not reported. When three nuns protested before the war-criminal bombing of Iraq in 2002 where no war crime was left undone, “they were arrested, handcuffed, left on the ground for three hours and then jailed for seven months before trial - - [for] sabotage and obstruction of justice” (p. 153).
Every step of their police repression was within the laws that had been concocted before and after 9-11, in particular by the provisions of “the Patriot Act” – with here as elsewhere the legislative title as integral to the Orwellian language of rule. The symbolic action of the nuns - painting blood on a missile silo – was in fact backed by international law against the “supreme crime” of non-defensive armed invasion of another country. Indeed their protest occurred just before the saturation bombing of civilian Baghdad which ended in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. But mass-murderous facts, citizen responsibility, moral courage and peaceful expression of the law of nations do not detain U.S. legal machinery. It is this legal machinery that Kolin focuses on to make his case that the U.S. is a police state.
