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By Dennis Loo

The police state tactics employed at the RNC are graphic evidence of our government's moves to establish a new normal in which free speech and free assembly are disallowed in the name of "national security" and "combating terrorism" and to protect, in this specific instance, the GOP from being exposed in any way to dissent.

If you're a delegate or public official attending the 2008 GOP Convention - if you haven't left the Party in disgust over what Bush,Cheney, Rove et al have been doing (or are a Ron Paulite) - you're pretty far gone and rather immune personally to dissenting views.

Principally the St. Paul gestapo-style tactics were to prevent the country from seeing that the GOP's authoritarian, reactionary populism is very unpopular - reactionaries such as the GOP leadership can only retain their air of pre-eminence when they have the forum all to themselves and aren't challenged in any way.

Allowing dissent to be displayed would also have given heart to the majority in this country who feel distaste, distress, or worse at what our government and the GOP in particular are doing.

Back in 2003 at the Pacific Sociological Association's April Meeting I gave a talk that laid out the relationship between the bellicose, pre-emptive foreign policy being implemented under the so-called Bush Doctrine and the need, if they were to carry this forward, to clamp down on domestic dissent.

I wrote a brief, updated introduction to that talk on March 9, 2007 when I posted my '03 talk here at my blog. That introduction reads as follows:

{xtypo_quote}Aggression Abroad and Repression At Home

This is the text of a talk that I gave in 2003. In it I sketched out the rationale underlying the Iraqi invasion and the USA Patriot Act and related moves (e.g., the recent John Warner Defense Authorization Act) by our government to clampdown on dissent and put into place legal and extra-legal devices in anticipation of much more dissent at home to their plans. Understanding the link between these two - their international plans for empire expansion and the consequent crackdown on the domestic front - is crucial for us. Recognizing this link underscores both the treacherous terrain that we are currently enmeshed in and also the openings for us that are inherent in such a situation. Times of great danger are also times of great opportunity - if we recognize and act on that knowledge.

The other critical point here is that making any concessions to the terms laid down by our government in the name of being 'realistic' (e.g., those who counsel us to back a Democrat for President as the only realistic path) is a fatal strategy. Our government - GOP and Democrats both - has embarked on a risky, dramatic and exeedingly brutal program to restructure the entire world. They are hellbent on this agenda and fully committed to it. (While the Democrats have a slightly different approach, in general favoring more multilateral approaches than unilateral, notice that they have not stood up and opposed the domestic programs such as the Patriot Act and the Warner Act, and that they put up no real fight against the Military Commissions Act - which they could have and should have filibustered. Having inserted us into Iraq, the Bush regime has dared the Democrats to pull us out. It's a dare that the Democrats are reluctant to take because they, just like the GOP, do not want the US imperialist empire imperiled and a humiliating loss would do just that). We are being pressganged down this road and our only hope lies in explicitly rejecting and exposing their plunderous and barbaric moves and providing a contrasting and lofty vision of an entirely different world and future for ourselves and for the rest of the planet.

'Full Spectrum Dominance and the Bush Doctrine: Over There and Over Here'
April 08, 2003 by Dennis Loo{/xtypo_quote}

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