Trump dreigt met paramilitair geweld in de VS

Het is het beest Trump nu geheel en al in de bolle kop geslagen, de hufter durfde 13 maart jl. in een interview voor Breitbart te zeggen dat hij het leger, de politie en motorbendes aan zijn kant staan, maar dat ze gelukkig (nog) geen geweld plegen.....* (motorbendes: je weet, wel van die gewelddadig misdadige 'volwassen' jongens met veel te grote brommers en oude stinkauto's) Met andere woorden: als Trump z'n zin niet krijg, of men probeert hem af te zetten, is dat nog lang geen gelopen race, sterker nog die race zal niet eens van start gaan......

In feite dreigt Trump met een burgeroorlog mocht men hem proberen af te zetten, met de lullige toevoeging dat hij aan de sterke kant zal staan met paramilitaire troepen om zijn tegenstanders op te pakken, dan wel te vermoorden.....

Ben het overigens niet eens met wat Sasha Abramsky, de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel, zegt over Putin: Rusland zit toch echt nog voor het stadium van een totale dictatuur. Bovendien hebben we aan Putin te danken dat het in Syrië niet volledig uit de hand is gelopen, wat betreft de andere wereldmacht, of beter gezegd terreurentiteit VS. Eén ding is zeker als Trump, of noem nog maar wat VS presidenten, op de plek van Putin hadden gezeten met hun administratie, waren we waarschijnlijk al in een wereldoorlog verwikkeld geweest >> WOIII.....

Steve King, een (fascistisch) ideologische partner van Trump en witte nationalistische ploert, hield vorige maand zijn volgers een cartoon voor en gaf ze de boodschap mee dat een burgeroorlog mogelijk is en dat dit een feest zou zijn voor conservatieven wapenfanaten, 'een feest' om slappe liberalen, 'die niet weten welk toilet ze moeten gebruiken', neer te schieten.....

Zoals gezegd: Abramsky is de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel dat o.a. verscheen op Information Clearing House (ICH). Hij haalt het verleden erbij, o.a. de SA van Hitler, paramilitairen die tekeergingen tegen Joden, homo's, of beter gezegd wat we tegenwoordig Lgbt mensen noemen, maar ook tegen Roma, Sinti en linkse tegenstanders.......

Het feit dat Trump met paramilitaire acties dreigt is uiteraard te zot voor woorden, hiervoor zou hij afgezet moeten worden, niet voor het sprookje dat men Russiagate is gaan noemen, maar waarvoor niet één nanometer bewijs is gevonden, zelfs niet na 2 jaar diepgravend onderzoek........ (nieuws van deze dag: aanklager Mueller adviseert de zaak verder te laten rusten, ofwel hij heeft nul komma nada bewijzen voor Russiagate gevonden!)

Beste bezoeker, nog even dit: lullig misschien, maar wat mij betreft mag de pleuris uitbreken in de VS en wel zo erg dat het leger uit andere landen moet worden teruggetrokken, kan de wereld eindelijk een ademhalen, zonder de hete 'bloedige adem' van de grootste terreurentiteit op aarde in de nek te voelen.......

Het artikel verscheen op Information Clearing House (ICH) en werd eerder gepubliceerd op truthout (nam het artikel over van ICH, de foto komt van truth):

Trump Threatens to Unleash Paramilitary Violence in the US

By Sasha Abramsky

March 21, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - This has been one of those whiplash weeks where so many particularly monstrous words have emanated from Donald Trump’s mouth and Twitter-fingers that it becomes almost dizzying.

Where to focus my outrage? Should I be most concerned about the fact that the supposed “leader of the free world” stumbled through a series of non-answers when asked about the growing threat of white nationalism in the wake of the grotesque massacre of scores of Muslims in New Zealand? Or the fact that last weekend, instead of tweeting sympathy to the victims of that massacre, Trump chose instead to tweet out insults and lies about a dead senator? Or the fact that he threatened to sic the Federal Communications Commission onto a comedy show he didn’t like, while at the same time stepping into the editorial fray to urge Fox News to stand behind two particularly noxious commentators whom he does like?

All these are bad, but none is as bloody awful as his musings on unleashing paramilitary violence if things go too wrong for him in the political arena. In his trademark “I didn’t say it” way, Trump talked in a March 13 Breitbart interview about how he had the police, the military and the biker gangs in his corner — and how wonderful it was that they weren’t violent … for now; the clear nudge, nudge, wink, wink, subtext being that all he would have to do is give a signal, and his armed proxies would go after his enemies. A few days later, white nationalist Rep. Steve King, one of Trump’s closest ideological soulmates on Capitol Hill, forwarded to his followers a cartoon about the possibility of a modern-day U.S. civil war, and how gun-toting conservatives would have a field day shooting down wishy-washy liberals who couldn’t even work out what public bathrooms they wanted to use.

None of this stuff is remotely funny, and it has no place in a functioning democracy. Of course, many U.S. politicians in the past have called out the hard-hat brigade when it suited them; segregationist Southern governors during the civil rights struggle routinely stoked white mob violence in an effort to block reforms. In 1968, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley unleashed the police against anti-war protesters with the intent of busting open as many heads as possible. In the Tammany Hall days, machine politicians weren’t averse to making unholy alliances with street gangs. More recently, demagogues from Louisiana politician Huey Long to Red Scare architect Joe McCarthy have all-too-well understood the power of the crowd and the potency of the threat of political violence in an already combustible situation.

But for the most part, presidents have tended to stay away from such a dark and dangerous path. They have done so not necessarily because of moral scruples, but out of an awareness of the ferocious (and ultimately uncontainable) forces that can be unleashed when a person with the power and reach of the president of the United States abandons all pretext of democratic governance; of respect for the rule of law; and of an understanding that the game of politics has to be bound by a set of rules or else it will degenerate into strong-man rule, and, eventually, the unfathomable horror of civil conflict.

Trump has, since he first announced his candidacy back in 2015, shown little patience for the limits, the nuance and the necessity of compromise that constitutional governance necessitates. He has, from the get-go, shown himself temperamentally to be an autocrat, a man with dictatorial ambitions who is far more comfortable in the presence of rulers such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, than democratic leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Over the last two years, the Trump regime — and it is far more a regime than an administration — has bent the GOP firmly to his will on this.

Were Trump’s outrageous comments about biker gangs and military intervention in domestic politics just the random utterances of an egocentric authoritarian, things would be grim enough. But over the last two years, various GOP organizations around the country have invited white supremacist groups including the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepersand the Proud Boys to either provide “security” at their rallies or to “spice up” their events with speakers who advocate violence. All of these groups are paramilitaries-in-the-making; all are — or at least were before being brought into the mainstream by Trumpite Republicans — on the far margins of the political process, their worldview more closely aligned with fascist visions of society than with what passed as GOP mainstream beliefs in the pre-Trump era.

Over these last few years, the GOP has increasingly come to resemble a political party whose raison d’étre is simply to nurture the cult of the personality around Trump rather than to contribute anything genuinely resembling ideas into the political discourse; a political party willing to embrace the most violent and thuggish elements for partisan advantage. The scale of this degeneration was on display last month, when Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz publicly threatened congressional witness and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, and then blithely claimed he was just contributing to “the marketplace of ideas.”

Let’s be real. Publicly blackmailing a witness is no more about “the marketplace of ideas” than a mobster’s threat to make someone “sleep with the fishes” if they cooperate with the police. Using the presidential bully pulpit to goad an already angry and wrathful “base” to consider violence against political opponents is, again, no more simply part of the democratic rough and tumble, the contest for hearts and minds, than would be the burning of a cross on the lawn of a perceived enemy.

Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of power-hungry rulers turning to paramilitary violence when it was politically expedient. The Sturmabteilung (SA) were the backbone of early Nazi power in Germany. Their sadistic foot soldiers were unleashed against Jews, trade unionists, communists, LGBTQ folks, independent journalists, artists, academics and so on. In Latin America, paramilitaries were instrumental in the dirty wars that decimated a generation of progressives. Elsewhere, paramilitaries have been turned to in recent times by leaders such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as well as by genocidal leaders such as those in Rwanda and in the Balkan states in the early 1990s.

In his powerful essay, “In Defense of the Word,” written during a decade when most of Latin America had fallen to dictators backed up by paramilitary forces, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote that the combination of authoritarian leaders and armed militias had paved the way for “the development of methods of torture, techniques for assassinating people and ideas, for the cultivation of silence, the extension of impotence, and the sowing of fear.”

We think we are different; we are, after all, Americans, and in the U.S., we say to ourselves with a healthy dose of hubris, that we don’t do things that way. But how different are we really? How thin is our veneer? How vulnerable are we to the siren calls of political violence issued from the biggest dais on Earth and amplified by the instruments of social media?

Trump and his acolytes are now truly playing with fire. The more Trump’s legal woes mount up, the more he seems willing to embrace his own Götterdämmerung vision, a willingness to create maximum chaos simply to insulate himself from justice.

In an essay titled “Fascism in Latin America,” Galeano observed that, “In the slaughterhouses of human flesh, the hangmen hummed patriotic songs.” Trump, with his musings about the army, the police, the biker gangs, his literal hugging of the flag at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and his repeated conflation of dissent with treason, is humming loud and clear these days.

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Originally from England, he now lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife, daughter and son. He has a masters degree from Columbia University School of Journalism, and is currently a senior fellow at the New York City-based Demos think tank.

This article was originally published by "truthout" - 
==========================================
* Gezien het enorme en onevenredige geweld van de politie tegen gekleurde VS burgers en andere ambtenaren tegen vluchtelingen, is die uitspraak een gotspe!

Jair Bolsonaro (president Brazilië) heeft nauwe banden met fascistische paramilitaire doodseskaders

In een zoals gebruikelijk voor Glenn Greenwald uitgebreid en uitstekend schrijven, vertelt hij in het hieronder opgenomen artikel over de nauwe banden, die de fascistische president van Brazilië en zijn zonen hebben met de paramilitaire extreemrechtse terreurgroepen, of beter gezegd fascistische doodseskaders in dat land.....

Zoals uit het voorgaande al blijkt bestaan deze doodseskaders uit (ex-) politie- en legerpersoneel,  ze zijn o.a. verantwoordelijk voor de moord op de populaire Braziliaanse rechter Patricia Acioli...... (het lijkt wel het Italië uit de 80er en 90er jaren van de vorige eeuw...) Acioli werd vermoord door 2 ex-agenten van de militaire politie, die NB nauwe banden onderhielden met Bolsonaro en zijn misdadige familie....... (zie de berichten onder het hieronder opgenomen artikel)

Ook wethouder van Rio de Janeiro Marielle Franco werd door zo'n doodseskader vermoord..... Deze 2 moorden werden gepleegd omdat Acioli en Franco zich NB bemoeiden met de vervolging van misdaad en corruptie!

Bij het onderzoek naar de moord op Franco vond de politie een groot arsenaal aan wapens en munitie van VS makelij.......

De zogenaamde strijd van Bolsonaro tegen de misdaad en corruptie in Brazilië is dan ook een strijd gericht tegen links en de kleine misdadigers onder de Braziliaanse bevolking..... Intussen heeft Bolsonaro een regering met uiterst corrupte figuren gevormd, terwijl hij het presidentschap won door te beloven de corruptie en de misdaad aan te pakken, hebben de grote misdadigers vrij spel, waar de meeste Brazilianen in armoede moeten leven en die grote misdadigers veelal juist verantwoordelijk zijn voor de regie op de kleine misdaad....... (ofwel de misdaad wordt amper aangepakt, zelfs minder dan onder voorgaande regeringen en dan moet je bedenken dat Bolsonaro nog maar relatief kort president is....)

Bolsonaro wordt door de reguliere westerse media en veel westerse politici geprezen voor zijn 'aanpak van corruptie en misdaad', zonder dat ze daar voorbeelden van kunnen geven...... Opvallend is de houding van de westerse media wel gezien het feit dat op dodenlijsten van deze paramilitaire groepen naast mensenrechtenactivisten, ook journalisten staan genoemd......

Lees het volgende artikel, eerder verschenen op The Intercept en geeft het door, in de reguliere westerse media is er geen aandacht voor het fascistische gehalte van de huidige Braziliaanse regering, die nu al meer corrupt is, dan de vorige 2 regeringen in alle jaren bij elkaar lieten zien (en dan moet nog opgemerkt worden dat die 2 regeringen voor het overgrote deel valselijk werden beschuldigd van corruptie...)..... Als de linkse ex-president Lula da Silva niet op valse gronden was veroordeeld, had hij op zeker de verkiezingen gewonnen van Bolsonaro..... (er was dus alle belang bij, ook voor de VS, dat Lula vast bleef zitten en dat Bolsonaro daarmee de verkiezingen zou winnen en zo gebeurde....)

Video: As Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro Prepares to Meet Donald Trump, His Family’s Close Ties to Notorious Paramilitary Gangs Draw Scrutiny and Outrage

Glenn Greenwald, Victor Pougy

March 18 2019, 4:56 p.m.

LEIA EM PORTUGUÊS 

Brazil´s president Jair Bolsonaro is in Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. While the trip officially is focused on the joint efforts of the U.S. and Brazil to change the government of Venezuela, it is being billed by the Bolsonaro government as a “restart” of his presidency and image after multiple, serious scandals crippled the first three months of his presidency.

But when it comes to recreating his image, the timing of this trip could hardly be worse. Key news events of the last several weeks — including the arrests of two former Rio de Janeiro police officers for the March 2018 assassination of Rio City Council Councilor Marielle Franco — have highlighted the most damaging and, to many, most terrifying revelations about Bolsonaro and his three politician sons: their extensive, direct, multilayered, and deeply personal ties to the paramilitary gangs and militias responsible for Brazil’s most horrific violence. is in Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. While the trip officially is focused on the joint efforts of the U.S. and Brazil to change the government of Venezuela, it is being billed by the Bolsonaro government as a “restart” of his presidency and image after multiple, serious scandals crippled the first three months of his presidency.

Watch our video report on the growing, multilevel, personal, and highly disturbing links between Bolsonaro and his family on the one hand, and the country’s most violent, lawless, and murderous paramilitary gangs on the other:

Just consider how, even before the arrests of Franco’s killers last week, so many deep ties had already emerged between Bolsonaro and his sons, who won office principally on an anti-crime and anti-corruption platform, and the paramilitary gangs composed of current and former military police officers and military members. Bolsonaro himself is a former army captain who served during Brazil’s military dictatorship and left in the 1980s amid allegations of misconduct; yet, even now as the president, he still has his friends and aides address him as “Captain.”

In January, the Rio de Janeiro police executed a full-scale raid against the city’s most dangerous militia, the one that houses within it the terrifying murder-for-hire team known as “the Crime Office.” That assassin team is composed of highly trained police officers who use their specialized knowledge of investigations and assassin skills to carry out murders with very little possibility of detection, and they have long been the leading suspects in Franco’s assassination, given how professional and frighteningly efficient that murder was carried out.

The January raid resulted in the arrest of five of the top six commanders of the militia. The only one who escaped, and is still a fugitive, was the chief of that militia: ex-police captain Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega (pictured under, from a prior arrest). Wanted for other murders, and subject to an Interpol arrest warrant, he has presided as the leader of Rio’s most terrifying militia, the one that police concluded carried out Franco’s assassination with such chilling precision.

That raid led to a shocking revelation: Unbeknownst to the public, the mother and wife of Nóbrega — one of Brazil’s most notorious gangsters — were both receiving salaries from the state. That’s because both of them were formally employed by Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s oldest son, for the entire last decade as he served as a state representative in the Rio de Janeiro state legislature. When Jair Bolsonaro was elected president last November, Flávio moved up to the Federal Senate as a result of winning his election in Rio with a massive vote total.

Shortly after this highly incriminating connection was revealed, a dam collapsed in the interior of Brazil and tragically killed more than 200 people, understandably replacing news coverage of virtually all other events. That resulted in far less attention being paid to Flávio’s close connections to Nóbrega’s family than was deserved. So just reflect on that: Jair Bolsonaro’s son had on his official government payroll the mother and wife of one of the country’s most notorious and psychopathic paramilitary leaders, the fugitive chief of the militia responsible for the assassination of Marielle Franco, among countless other murders.

In February, Flávio’s direct and intimate ties to militias became even more glaring. Checks were found issued in the name of his campaign account signed by the sister of two twin-brother militia members, Alan and Alex Rodrigues de Oliveira, arrested in a large-scale police raid last August. Just months prior to the arrest of these two militia brothers, Flávio posted to his Instagram a photo of himself and his father, then a presidential candidate, at a birthday party for the two militia twins, congratulating them and heaping praise on the family.

IN RETROSPECT, that Flávio had such close personal connections to Rio’s militias that he put the mother and wife of its most notorious chief on his payroll should not have been surprising. As a state legislator, he twice bestowed on the top militia leaders, then police officers, formal awards and honors, praising them for their civil service to their communities.

Far worse, in 2011, Brazilian Judge Patricia Acioli, who, along with Brazil’s left-wing PSOL party, was overseeing a sweeping criminal investigation into militias and heroically sent numerous high-ranking police officers to prison, was brutally murdered outside her home, horrifying not just Brazil but the world. While all Brazilian politicians expressed horror and disgust at this brazen attack on the rule of law — showing that militias could just murder whoever they wanted, even judges sending their leaders to prison — Flávio posted a tweet that basically blamed her for her own murder, criticizing her for provoking the militias:

Jair Bolsonaro himself has a history of multiple ties to Brazil’s militias and several of its key leaders. He has twice, on the floor of the Congress, explicitly praised their death squads as good for the country’s security and crime problems. On one occasion, after various members of Congress from the northern region of Brazil warned of the growth of death squads and extrajudicial murders carried out by growing police-composed militias, Bolsonaro stood to explicitly praise them as crime-fighting patriots and declared them “welcome” in Rio de Janeiro. Since then, those militias have taken over huge swaths of Brazil’s most critical cities, including Rio. A January investigation from The Intercept Brasil found that militias have virtually taken over the entire city.

In sum, the Bolsonaro movement has been fixated on Brazil’s crime epidemic, and anger over growing violence was arguably one of the two main factors in the rise of that movement (the other being anger over systemic political corruption). But when Bolsonaro and his family speak of crime, they almost always try to focus attention on the primarily black drug traffickers who live in the city’s poor favelas, and virtually never speak of the far more menacing, serious, and terrifying source of criminality carried out by the Bolsonaros’ ideological companions and heroes of the country’s sophisticated and skilled militias:

That Bolsonaro — despite how central his anti-crime posture is to his political popularity — is eager to praise, rather than condemn and combat, militias is not hard to understand. Those militias are ruled by his friends, neighbors, comrades, and closest associates.

The militia member who worked as Flávio’s driver for the last decade and whose large money movements — including one into the account of Jair Bolsonaro’s wife — triggered the first scandal of his presidency, ex-police Officer Fabrício Queiroz, is one of Bolsonaro’s oldest and closest friends. When police sought to question him about those money movements to the Bolsonaro family, he unsurprisingly went into hiding in the precise neighborhood, Rio das Pedras, most notorious for being commanded most thoroughly by Rio’s most violent militia.

WHEN TWO OF FRANCO’S KILLERS were finally apprehended last week, just two days shy of the one-year anniversary of her assassination, nobody was surprised that they had both been members of Brazil’s military police. The extreme professionalism with which that murder was carried out, including the still-unexplained coincidence that numerous public security cameras on the path they chose to pursue her had been turned off in the days before the assassination, left no doubt that militias were responsible.

But almost immediately after the police announced the identity of the two assassins they arrested, ties to Bolsonaro emerged. The shooter himself, police Sgt. Ronnie Lessa, lives on the same street as Bolsonaro’s Rio house, in an exclusive gated community: an extreme coincidence given how massive and sprawling of a city Rio de Janeiro is. In other words, one of Franco’s assassins — the man who pumped four bullets into her head — turned out to be Bolsonaro’s neighbor, both of whom lived in close proximity in a very rich neighborhood despite working their entire adult lives on the public payroll.

Shortly thereafter, a photo emerged of Lessa and Bolsonaro together, posted to Lessa’s social media account. Police then confirmed that Bolsonaro’s 20-year-old son and Lessa’s daughter had been dating. While none of those facts are close to dispositive in terms of linking Bolsonaro to Franco’s murder, those are a lot of coincidental connections to have between a three-decade member of Congress and the current president of the Republic, on the one hand, and the murderers who pumped four bullets into the skull of one of Rio de Janeiro’s most prominent and inspiring left-wing politicians on the other.

As part of the police search of the assassins’ properties, the police apprehended the single largest collection of armaments in the history of Brazil’s democracy: 117 M-16 automatic rifles. Notably, they were apprehended not in the favelas on which the Bolsonaros obsessively fixate when talking about crime, but in a luxury condominium owned by a former police officer who is part of the militia that assassinated Franco and which has multiple ties to the Bolsonaro family:

Armaments seized from the house of one of the accused assassins of Marielle Franco, including 117 M-16 automatic rifles, from Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Rio Civil Police

Days later, the police — despite still not having apprehended the people who ordered and paid for Franco’s assassination — insinuated a political motive to her killers. Consistent with Bolsonaro’s denunciation of the sweeping investigation of militias led by Franco’s political mentor, Marcelo Freixo of the left-wing PSOL party (the same party of Jean Wyllys, the gay congressperson who last month fled Brazil and gave up his congressional term under highly specific death threats), reports emerged that Franco’s assassins were overt Bolsonaro supporters.

The police also indicated that they had seized the computers and other electronic devices of the two killers, and discovered that, subsequent to Franco’s assassination, the murderous militia pair had searched and monitored the movements of numerous human rights activists, left-wing journalists, and politicians (one of those specified by the police was my husband, David Miranda, now a congressperson from the same left-wing party as Freixo, Franco, and Wyllys).

All of this mounting evidence — most of which has been unearthed just in the 10 weeks since Bolsonaro’s January 1 inauguration — paints a deeply disturbing and dangerous picture. Brazil — the world’s fifth-largest country, with massive oil reserves and the world’s most critical environmental region in the Amazon that the current government wants to sell off to the highest industrial bidders — is in the hands of a family with multiple, close, and growing connections to the country’s most murderous, criminal, and sociopathic death squads and paramilitary forces.

As Bolsonaro meets Trump at the White House tomorrow, that meeting should be understood first and foremost within this context. Bolsonaro has quickly elevated himself to the top echelon of the world’s most thuggish, violent, and dangerous leaders. And given the stakes raised by Brazil — geopolitically, culturally, economically, environmentally, and militarily — this is clearly one of the most profoundly disturbing developments of the last year. Whatever else is true, the media focus on Bolsonaro’s presence in the White House should feature these facts prominently and centrally if the reporting is to accurately reflect who he is and what he represents.

zie ook:

Jair Bolsonaro Promised to End Corruption in Brazil — Then He Appointed an Extremely Corrupt Cabinet

Who Killed Marielle Franco? An Ex-Rio de Janeiro Cop With Ties to Organized Crime, Say Six Witnesses in Police Report

Jair Bolsonaro’s First 53 Days as President of Brazil Have Been a Resounding, Scandalous Failure

Jair Bolsonaro Is Elected President of Brazil. Read His Extremist, Far-Right Positions in His Own Words.

Zie ook:
'Mensenrechten- en milieuactivisten worden massaal vermoord in Brazilië en Colombia, waar het laatste land NAVO bases heeft.......'

'NAVO gaat VS helpen in Zuid-Amerika terreur uit te oefenen: Colombia lid van de NAVO.........'

'VS commando's vechten o.a. in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika, aldus het VS ministerie van oorlog.........'

'Bolton geeft toe dat de VS een fascistisch beleid voert......'

'Bolsonaro, de fascistische nieuwe president van Brazilië, werd volgens Avaaz en fake news brengers als de NYT gekozen door manipulatie via WhatsApp'

'Bolsonaro wint Braziliaanse verkiezingen >> weer zijn we een fascistisch geleid land 'rijker...''

'Braziliaanse verkiezingen: democratie versus (neo-) fascisme, ook een groot gevaar in Europa'

'Katy Sherriff (Radio1 correspondent Z-Amerika) brandt socialistische partij Brazilië af......'

De evolutie van politiestaat VS o.a. te zien in het buitenspel zetten van burgerrechten in steden als Boston en Charlottesville

Gisteren bracht John Whitehead een opiniestuk op de site van The Rutherford Institute, waarin hij aangeeft 'hoe makkelijk' hele steden op slot kunnen worden gedaan.....

In zijn woonplaats Charlottesville maakte hij het zelf mee: een jaar geleden waren er rellen in Charlottesville waarbij een fascist een moord pleegde op een demonstrant die zich tegen de fascistisch parade in Charlottesville keerde*. Dezelfde dag een jaar later werd voorafgegaan door het met veel bombarie op slot gooien van de stad, waarbij de bewoners werden geacht zoveel mogelijk in huis te blijven. De noodtoestand en de staat van beleg werden afgekondigd, zonder dat daar ook maar één aanwijsbare reden voor was (bijvoorbeeld de aankondiging van de neonazi's dat ze weer een parade zouden houden in Charlottesville...).... 

De politie in de VS is in hoge mate gemilitariseerd, inclusief automatische wapens die de VS o.a. gebruikt in haar illegale oorlogen in het Midden-Oosten en Afrika...... Hetzelfde geldt voor een deel van het rollend materieel van de politie: pantserwagens en zelfs een klein soort tank..... Dit nog naast de National Guard, in feite een paramilitaire organisatie met reservisten, die bij grote rellen e.d. regelmatig te zien is in de straten van de VS en de beschikking heeft over een veel groter deel van het oorlogstuig dat de VS in het buitenland gebruikt (zoals gezegd in illegale oorlogen), dus ook tanks en 'oorlogshelikopters.......' 

Al moet aan het voorgaande worden toegevoegd dat de 'gewone' politie meer en meer wordt gemilitariseerd en daarmee de beschikking krijgt over steeds meer oorlogsmaterieel en er steeds minder verschil is te zien tussen de politie en de National Guard..... Uiteraard 'met dank' aan de lobby van de wapenfabrikanten............

De VS is dan ook verworden tot een politiestaat en dat al enige jaren, het ontbreekt nog net aan volledige censuur, al wordt daar met hulp van Facebook en Google hard aan gewerkt.....** Hoewel de VS keer op keer als excuus voor militair ingrijpen aanvoert dat het democratie wil brengen, terwijl in eigen land 'de democratie' wordt gekocht met enorme bakken geld en het buitenspel zetten van grote groepen (arme en veelal gekleurde) kiezers......

De schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel van The Rutherford Institute, John Whitehead, is het 'niet helemaal eens' met het voorgaande, hij ziet de VS transformeren in een politiestaat. Whitehead gaat o.a. in op de manier waarop de bevolking monddood wordt gemaakt en op bepaalde momenten zelfs geen vrijheid van bewegen heeft in de eigen stad...... Voorts noemt hij o.a. Göring die na WOII op het proces van Neurenberg aangaf wat er nodig is om een bevolking te manipuleren. 

Lees en oordeel zelf:

From Boston to Ferguson to Charlottesville: The Evolution of a Police State Lockdown

August 17, 2018 at 8:17 am

Written by John Whitehead

“It takes a remarkable force to keep nearly a million people quietly indoors for an entire day, home from work and school, from neighborhood errands and out-of-town travel. It takes a remarkable force to keep businesses closed and cars off the road, to keep playgrounds empty and porches unused across a densely populated place 125 square miles in size. This happened … not because armed officers went door-to-door, or imposed a curfew, or threatened martial law. All around the region, for 13 hours, people locked up their businesses and ‘sheltered in place’ out of a kind of collective will. The force that kept them there wasn’t external – there was virtually no active enforcement across the city of the governor’s plea that people stay indoors. Rather, the pressure was an internal one – expressed as concern, or helpfulness, or in some cases, fear – felt in thousands of individual homes.” — Journalist Emily Badger, “The Psychology of a Citywide Lockdown”

(RI) — It has become way too easy to lockdown this nation.

Five years ago, the city of Boston was locked down while police carried out a military-style manhunt for suspects in the 2013 Boston Marathon explosion.

Four years ago, the city of Ferguson, Missouri, was locked down, with government officials deploying a massive SWAT team, an armored personnel carrier, men in camouflage pointing heavy artillery at the crowd, smoke bombs and tear gas to quell citizen unrest over a police shooting of a young, unarmed black man.

Three years ago, the city of Baltimore was put under a military-enforced lockdown after civil unrest over police brutality erupted into rioting. More than 1,500 national guard troops were deployed while residents were ordered to stay inside their homes and put under a 10 pm curfew.

This year, it was my hometown of Charlottesville, Va., population 50,000, that was locked down while government officials declared a state of emergency and enacted heightened security measures tantamount to martial law, despite the absence of any publicized information about credible threats to public safety.

As Tess Owen reports for Vice:

One year after white supremacists paraded through the streets, the face of downtown Charlottesville was transformed once again – this time with checkpoints, military-style camps for National Guard, and state police on every corner. When residents woke up Saturday, all entrances to the downtown mall were blocked off, apart from two checkpoints, where police looked through people’s bags for lighters, knives or any other weapons. Up above, standing atop a building site, two national guard members photographed the individuals coming in and out… A National Guard encampment was set up in McGuffey Park, between the children’s playground and the basketball court, where about 20 military police officers in camouflage were snoozing in the shade of some trees. A similar encampment was set up a few blocks away.

More details from journalist Ned Oliver:

Downtown Charlottesville felt like the green zone of a war-torn city Saturday. More than a thousand local and state police officers barricaded 10 blocks of the city’s popular pedestrian district, the Downtown Mall, to prepare for the one-year anniversary of the white supremacist rally last year that left dozens injured and one dead. To enter, people had to submit to bag checks and searches at one of two checkpoints… Preparations aside, unlike last year, no white supremacist groups had said they were going to visit the city, and, by week’s end, none had. Instead, it was a normal day on the mall except for the heavy security, a military helicopter constantly circling overhead, and hundreds of police officers milling around.

Make no mistake, this was a militarized exercise in intimidation, and it worked only too well.

For the most part, the residents of this city—once home to Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president, author of the Declaration of Independence, and champion of the Bill of Rights—welcomed the city-wide lockdown, the invasion of their privacy, and the dismantling of every constitutional right intended to serve as a bulwark against government abuses.

Yet for those like myself who have studied emerging police states, the sight of any American city placed under martial law—its citizens essentially under house arrest (officials used the Orwellian phrase “shelter in place” in Boston to describe the mandatory lockdown), military-style helicopters equipped with thermal imaging devices buzzing the skies, tanks and armored vehicles on the streets, and snipers perched on rooftops, while thousands of black-garbed police swarmed the streets and SWAT teams carried out house-to-house searches—leaves us in a growing state of unease.

Watching the events of the lockdown unfold, I couldn’t help but think of Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering’s remarks during the Nuremberg trials. As Goering noted:

It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country. (Goering was een vuile fascistische ploert, maar dit is wel een waarheid als een koe!!!)

As the events in Charlottesville have made clear, it does indeed work the same in every country.

Whatever the threat to so-called security—whether it’s civil unrest, school shootings, or alleged acts of terrorism—government officials will capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state.

These troubling developments are the outward manifestations of an inner, philosophical shift underway in how the government views not only the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but “we the people,” as well.

What this reflects is a move away from a government bound by the rule of law to one that seeks total control through the imposition of its own self-serving laws on the populace.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much for the American people to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, even if it means submitting to martial law, having their homes searched, and being stripped of one’s constitutional rights at a moment’s notice.

In Charlottesville, most of the community fell in line, except for one gun-toting, disabled, 71-year-old war veteran who was arrested for purchasing cans of Arizona iced tea, a can of bug spray and razor blades, all of which were on the City’s list of temporarily prohibited, potentially “dangerous” items. Incidentally, the veteran’s guns (not among the list of prohibited items) caused no alarm.

Talk about draconian.

This continual undermining of the rules that protect civil liberties will inevitably have far-reaching consequences on a populace that not only remains ignorant about their rights but is inclined to sacrifice their liberties for phantom promises of safety.

Be warned: these lockdowns are just a precursor to full-blown martial law.

The powers-that-be want us acclimated to the sights and sounds of a city-wide lockdown with tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead.

They want us to accept the fact that in the American police state, we are all potentially guilty, all potential criminals, all suspects waiting to be accused of a crime.

They want us to be meek and submissive.

They want us to report on each other.

They want us to be grateful to the standing armies for their so-called protection.

They want us to self-censor our speech, self-limit our movements, and police ourselves.

As Glenn Greenwald notes in The Intercept:

“Americans are now so accustomed to seeing police officers decked in camouflage and Robocop-style costumes, riding in armored vehicles and carrying automatic weapons first introduced during the U.S. occupation of Baghdad, that it has become normalized… The dangers of domestic militarization are both numerous and manifest. To begin with… it degrades the mentality of police forces in virtually every negative way and subjects their targeted communities to rampant brutality and unaccountable abuse… Police militarization also poses grave and direct dangers to basic political liberties, including rights of free speech, press and assembly.” (!!!)

Make no mistake: these are the hallmarks of a military occupation.

Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests.

Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

We are already under martial law, held at gunpoint by a standing army.

Take a look at the pictures from Charlottesville, from Baltimore, from Ferguson and from Boston, and then try to persuade yourself that this is what freedom in America is supposed to look like.

A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the American people of any vestige of freedom.

It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Unfortunately, with the Constitution under constant attack, the military’s power, influence and authority have grown dramatically. Even the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it a crime for the government to use the military to carry out arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other activities normally handled by a civilian police force, was greatly weakened by both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who ushered in exemptions allowing troops to deploy domestically and arrest civilians in the wake of alleged terrorist acts.

Now we find ourselves struggling to retain some semblance of freedom in the face of police and law enforcement agencies that look and act like the military and have just as little regard for the Fourth Amendment, laws such as the NDAA that allow the military to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, and military drills that acclimate the American people to the sight of armored tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, and combat aircraft patrolling overhead.

We’ve already gone too far down this road.

Add these lockdowns onto the list of other troubling developments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more, and the picture grows even more troubling: the expansion of the military industrial complex and its influence in Washington DC, the rampant surveillance, the corporate-funded elections and revolving door between lobbyists and elected officials, the militarized police, the loss of our freedoms, the injustice of the courts, the privatized prisons, the school lockdowns, the roadside strip searches, the military drills on domestic soil, the fusion centers and the simultaneous fusing of every branch of law enforcement (federal, state and local), the stockpiling of ammunition by various government agencies, the active shooter drills that are indistinguishable from actual crises, the economy flirting with near collapse, etc.

Suddenly, the overall picture seems that much more sinister.

The lesson for the rest of us is this: once a free people allows the government to make inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government.

Remember, a police state does not come about overnight.

It starts small, perhaps with a revenue-generating red light camera at an intersection.

When that is implemented without opposition, perhaps next will be surveillance cameras on public streets. License plate readers on police cruisers. More police officers on the beat. Free military equipment from the federal government. Free speech zones and zero tolerance policies and curfews. SWAT team raids. Drones flying overhead. City-wide lockdowns.

No matter how it starts, however, it always ends the same.

Remember, it’s a slippery slope from a questionable infringement justified in the name of safety to all-out tyranny.

These are no longer warning signs of a steadily encroaching police state.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the police state has arrived.

By John Whitehead / Republished with permission / Rutherford Institute / Report a typo
===============================

* Zie: 
'FBI 'legt link' tussen links-radicalen en islamistische terroristen, de tijden van McCarthy zijn terug........'

'Among the Racists' (met mogelijkheid tot vertaling)

'Before Trump, Clinton Democrats Invoked the Term ‘Alt-Left’ to Demonize Critics'

'Charlottesville: wat er fout ging voor de verzamelde gewelddadige en bewapende fascisten..........'

'Charlottesville: twee schuldigen? Of is het de taak van eenieder te vechten tegen fascisme?' 

'Charlottesville: Trump haalt antifascisten toch onderuit.........'

'Neonazi terreuraanslag in VS, westerse media spreken 'op hun best' over 'een daad van agressie......''

** Met deze censuur wordt tevens de berichtgeving van de reguliere media als enig zaligmakend neergezet en daarmee wordt de hersenspoeling van het volk geïnstitutionaliseerd.... Zie wat dat betreft ook: 
'Censuur op het internet met vliegende start in de VS, 'het land van het vrije woord....'

'Eis een nee tegen censuur op het internet!' 

'Facebook wil samen met door Saoedi-Arabië gesubsidieerde denktank censureren.... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!'

'Trump wijst elke bezuiniging af op de hulp van de VS voor de genocide die Saoedi-Arabië uitvoert in Jemen'