From: fedora@fea.st   
      
   Even poor students of history can see what’s happening to the U.S.? ?   
   ROBYN URBACK? G&M   
      
   In 1935, American author Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen   
   Here, a dystopian novel about the rise of a populist demagogue named   
   Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who becomes the U.S. president after   
   cultivating a cult following for his nationalism, anti-elitism, and   
   quixotic promises. Windrip was fixated on restoring domestic   
   production of material goods and hated the press.?He establishes a   
   paramilitary force called the “Minute Men,” or “M.M.,” who are   
   initially primarily made up of retired military personnel, but grow to   
   include farmers, industrial workers and even former criminals, all of   
   whom to appear to revel in the opportunity to wield control and power   
   over their fellow citizens. M.M. officers spy for the state and   
   violently break up protests, and as Windrip’s presidency metastasizes   
   into authoritarianism, they arrest and execute perceived dissidents   
   with complete impunity. The regime justifies these actions by claiming   
   the M.M. only targets malicious agitators: “The way to stop crime is   
   to stop it!” Windrip declares to great fanfare.?   
   Mr. Lewis’s novel was of course informed by the real-life tyranny   
   engulfing parts of Europe at that time, but his point was that America   
   was not impervious to those same forces. “All dictators followed the   
   same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of   
   sadistic etiquette,” he wrote. “And now, in the humorous, friendly,   
   happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, [Americans] saw the homicidal   
   maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in central   
   Europe.”???   
      
   There is a video, taken this weekend in Minneapolis – nearly a century   
   after Mr. Lewis wrote his book – of an ICE agent clapping after his   
   colleagues execute an American citizen on the street. That American   
   citizen – 37-year-old Alex Pretti – was recording ICE agents   
   conducting their work when he went to assist a woman who was shoved to   
   the ground by one of the officers. Mr. Pretti asks her, “Are you   
   okay?” and then is immediately pepper-sprayed in the face and tackled   
   by a half-dozen officers. One agent removes a firearm that Mr. Pretti   
   had in its holster – which Mr. Pretti had the right to carry under the   
   Second Amendment – and only after Mr. Pretti is disarmed and on the   
   ground, the agents execute him, firing a handful of bullets into his   
   body. It’s in that moment that one of the ICE agents starts clapping.   
   In the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, we see   
   the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had a century   
   ago in central Europe. ?The regime then came out to justify the   
   killing, just as it had weeks ago, when an ICE agent shot another U.S.   
   citizen on the street – Renee Nicole Macklin Good, also 37 – whom the   
   White House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently   
   labelled a “domestic terrorist,” though she was actually a mom in an   
   SUV who seemed to be turning her car away from the agent in front of   
   her. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem almost immediately   
   declared that Mr. Pretti “attacked” law enforcement and was   
   “brandishing” a gun, which were lies easily disproven by various   
   videos of the interaction. But White House staff persisted with the   
   fiction that Mr. Pretti “tried to murder federal agents” anyway,   
   telling Americans not to believe what they could plainly see with   
   their own eyes. The people being executed by state agents on the   
   street were effectively criminals-in-waiting, according to the White   
   House, and the way to stop crime, of course, is to stop it. ?Opinion   
      
   A witness to the killing of Mr. Pretti gave a statement hours later in   
   which she said that the story that the DHS has fed the public is   
   wrong. But just as disturbingly, she said she fears reprisal from the   
   government because she witnessed what actually happened. “I feel   
   afraid,” she said. “Only hours have passed since they shot a man right   
   in front of me and I don’t feel like I can go home because I heard   
   agents were looking for me. I don’t know what the agents will do when   
   they find me.”?   
      
   Even poor students of history recognize what it means when governments   
   shrug off their own citizens’ rights, as members of the Trump   
   administration have done in insisting that Ms. Macklin Good and Mr.   
   Pretti decided their own fates. They know what it means when an   
   administration blocks investigations, when citizens are afraid that   
   members of a masked, state-backed militia might show up at their homes   
   to interrogate them or worse, when innocent people are executed on the   
   street, and when the public is fed lies about agitators and domestic   
   terrorists. It happens slowly, and then all at once. And as Mr. Lewis   
   presciently noted, it could happen anywhere.   
   --   
   Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain   
   Don't get political with me young man   
   or I'll tie you to a railroad track and   
   <<>> to <<>>   
   Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?   
   dares: Ned   
   does not dare: Julian  shrinks in horror and warns others away   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)