Is it Fascism Yet?

 

Above: Your tax dollars at work, protecting you from foreign college students

 

A video went around recently of FBI agents using a battering ram to smash down a door of some college students in Michigan. The agents presented no warrant prior to breaking in, even though they seem to have had one.

Similar raids were conducted in “multiple homes in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Canton Township, Michigan”.

 Several laptops were taken by the federals, and four students were hauled into custody, then later released.

 All of the students thus  harassed had one thing in common: they had been involved in protests against the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinain civilians by the U.S. and Israel.

The raids are reminiscent of actions once witnessed in some of modern history’s cruelest authoritarian regimes. Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Pinochet’s Chile come to mind, just to name a few.

You might have also seen the recent   video of six federal agents grabbing a college Tufts University student off the street, forcing her into a car, and whisking her away to nobody knew where. (It was eventually revealed that she had been packed away in an I.C.E. jail in Louisiana, some 1.700 miles away.  As of today, she is still there.)

As you can see in the video, several of the agents wore masks (masks!) and only one of them very briefly flashed some ID. They might just as well have been private thugs kidnapping her for ransom.  Instead, they were public thugs kidnapping her for the crime of having written a  piece of wrong-think for the Tufts University student newspaper.

Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk. She is from Turkey. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and currently a doctoral student in Child Study and Human Development.  And here’s a pic of her. Note the murderous look in her eyes.

 

 

Rumeysa Ozturk: Enemy of the (Fascist) State

You can read her op-ed piece here. You might bear in mind, as you peruse it, that you reading evidence that Oztirk is a “Hamas sympathizer.” You might also notice that the piece was co-authored by three other students.  Why only Ozturk was singled out for detention without due process is not for us to know.

The most radical sentence I could find in the article is shown below. Maybe it’s the one that convinced federal agents she needed locking up:

“what the collective voice of the student body is calling for are for the University to end its complicity with Israel insofar as it is oppressing the Palestinian people and denying their right to self-determination — a right that is guaranteed by international law.”

 

Well, these are only a few examples of our rapid descent into fascism.  If you are reading this, you probably have your own favorite examples. Maybe it’s the sending of citizens to jail in El Salvador for having tattoos. Maybe it’s the deliberate refusal to obey court orders. Maybe it’s the huge tax cuts for the already super-wealthy. Maybe it’s the blaming of the impoverished for being poor. Maybe it’s the bullying of schools into teaching a sanitized version of American history. Maybe it’s the shameless supplication of Republican officials toward their buffoon of a leader.

Welcome to America, kids. There’s enough fascism now for everybody.