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• Saturday, August 30, 2008 12:02 PM

  Here's a question: Why are Americans

  so easily intimidated by these sorts of police state tactics?

  That's not to say that anarchists and the like are intimidated, because they aren't. Ordinary Americans are intimidated from protest or even dissent. And that, it would seem, is the whole point of these tactics. Show force of Authority and Americans, by and large, collapse.

  I maintain this is a major reason why there is so little active resistance to the corporatism and imperialism that rules this country. There is some, to be sure, but it is hardly a mass movement; realistically, it's becoming more and more marginal all the time.

  And yet, without active resistance -- including mass protest demonstrations, general strikes and the like, none of which attract anything like the support they once did -- there is no way to curb, let alone stop, the march of corporatism/imperialism/fascism. Our votes won't do it when our choices are either this corporatist/imperialist or the other one. Our lawyers too often are jockeying for positions within the corporatist/imperialist state or its private sector offshoots. Courts sometimes make quite a display of independence but they have no ability to enforce their rulings.

  And the People remain largely passive.

  Europeans, on the other hand, will take to the streets over anything that displeases them; they will get gassed and watercannoned, bludgeoned and dragged off to prison, and still they will fight, and their governments -- at least from time to time -- actually pay attention to their riled publics and have even been known to change their policy direction in response to public outrage. Same in Latin America and Brazil. Lawyers -- lawyers!! -- in Pakistan went to the streets and got their heads bashed in and were dragged off to the dungeons against the lawless actions of Musharraf's dictatorship.

  It's unimaginable that lawyers here would take such personal and professional risks for the sake of the Law. It's almost too silly to think of. They won't do it.

  What happened to make Americans so easy to manage?

  —Ché Pasa Read Ché Pasa's other letters
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