Klinika Attacked by Neo-Nazis

Following a day of protests in Prague both for an against migration in Europe, the autonomous social center Klinika came under attack last night. During the days demonstrations, a legal permitted march against “fortress Europe” organized in cooperation with Klinika's collective came under attack more than twenty fascists and neo-nazis. They came from behind the march as it turned a corner attempting to cut it in half. As the peacefully protestors in the march turned to protect themselves from the fascists, an overwhelmed group of police offers intervened to stand between the two groups. The neo-nazis began throwing whatever they could find at the marchers; eventually rocks, sticks, and small explosive devices. The marches defended themselves by returning the projectiles and eventually the much larger numbers of the march intimidated the attackers into retreat as they turned and ran away.

This group had been antagonizing people throughout Prague earlier in the day. I personally saw the same group earlier that day on public transport as I went to the rally. They were very aggressive with riders, including accosting one young women – trying to get her to come with them. She quickly left the train, visibly shaken, upon which one of them – previously speaking Czech – claimed she was a good “Deutsches Mensch.” I got off at the same stop as them and while we went different ways, me towards the beginning of our march, they went in a direction that would put them exactly where they attacked the march from.

Upon completion of the march – which included continuous antagonism from nationalist elements, and a few more radical characters – people made their way back to Klinika at differing speeds. When I arrived, there was a small group of people there that had just learned that the Nazis were coming to attack Klinika. We prepared as best we could but quickly came under attack. We pepper sprayed them which kept them outside long enough for us to lock and barricade the door. At this point they started throwing rocks at the windows, shattering the old medical clinics windows with ease. As we attempted to barricade the windows, glass and debris flew everywhere. One member of the Klinika collective was hit, opening a gash on his forehead. The rocks were followed by a lit flare sending sparks and fire all over, but it got caught in the shards of the multi-paned glass still jaggedly protruding from the window. We quickly put this out as the rocks stopped flying.

At this point, things calmed down for a few seconds and we were all able to check on others throughout the building. However, the calm quickly ended as one collective member yelled fire! Several of us ran into the hallway where the smoke was coming from and found thick smoke throughout the entire atrium the entire downstairs cafe area was full of smoke with flames leaping from the window at the entrance. They had apparently broken the windows there in the same fashion as upstairs and thrown another incendiary devise in which lit the drapes on fire. We were still able to put it out without much permanent damage to anything but the windows and furniture.

This attack though, was a brazen and coordinated attack on an autonomous social and community center in the heart of Prague that offers a free non-commoditized space for people of all ages and persuasions to take free language lessons, have a quite beer, take their kids to nursery school, attend free lectures, and even attend meditation classes. However, the center has also been a hub for aid and relief for migrants, and therefore a target within the migrant crisis gripping all of Europe. The center acted as a staging area for relief goods going east and south for newly arriving refugees from the war torn areas of the middle east and central Asia. Given the days protest event against migration in Europe, the escalating anti-muslim rhetoric and political climate it foments, it could easily be said to be the rationale for the attack – if there ever could be a rationale for such an irrational act of violence; or better put, terrorism. For that is what this was, definitionally, an act of terrorism. This group of fascists attacked an innocent group of people providing a safe space for the community and aid for those in need.

Whether you agree with Klinika's politics or not, with migration or not, there is – and can be no – justification for the same type of terrorist attack that these fascists and their nationalist brethren portend to be against. If you hate Muslim people because .000001% are engaged in radical politics and use violence in an attempt to get their way, then how is anyone to condone the same thing within our own midst? Again, whether you agree with Klinika's politics or not, if this is a democracy and everyone is entitled to their political beliefs, then you have to respect Klinika's political efforts and condemn this brazen act of violence against peaceful protestors and an autonomous community center simply trying to help people. It is in peace that Klinika exists, and here now – as 400 plus people come to show solidarity – that Klinika survives and excels in defiance of violence and terrorism.       

The many faces of Ebola

Reports of a "Riot in Freetown. Okada riders are now attacking police officers or vehicle with police officers..."

Guns

So I've got to weigh in on this gun debate given the rash of large scale shootings that seem to litter the news every other day now.   At what point are we going to stop saying that these are individual actors acting singularly and in isolation?  There is just too many of them:

"More than 32,000 people in the US die from gunshot wounds yearly—five times the number of US servicemen and women killed in over a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another 70,000 or so are wounded by guns presenting the troubling statistic of an average of 280 Americans shot daily."

America has a societal problem, and it's of epidemic proportions. We have a society that is rotting from the inside, and practically handing out the lethal tools to act out our angers and aggressions.  But, this issue is so much deep than the economy or guns, its about a country and a society in decline.

Lets just take this most recent rash of incidents.  A doctoral student reportedly to have schizophrenia loses it and kills/wounds over sixty people trying to watch a movie.  Then a white supremest kills another six "dark people" while they're trying to exercise their religious freedom and go to the equivalent of church on a Sunday.  Today, a man starts firing indiscriminately when someone tries to show up to evict him from his home?  Doesn't take much to put together pieces of a decrepit puzzle together here.

I have a cousin with schizophrenia that lives in Colorado.  The care is atrociousness.  He just can't really get any.  He hasn't been able to get on disability, can't keep and income or a home, has gone after his mother with a knife, and was found naked in over a foot of snow having walked up a mountain in the Rockies.  He thinks he is Jesus Christ, King James, and himself all together as if time was nonlinear.  But even with all that, he can't get proper care.  He's tried going to Minnesota and California but still can't sort it out.  I wonder what kind of care the Aurora shooter was getting?  I also wonder how much student debt he had (or that his relatives now have as it can roll over with death).  What do you think his job prospects were for when he finished school?  Or those around him that he cared about?

Fast forward to Wisconsin and we find a white supremacist trained by the army to kill, and perhaps even trained in the army to kill "colored" people.  A whole army base becomes notorious for issues with basically breeding white supremacist communities in the nineties, yet has anything been done about it?  And what about his life now?  He lost his home not to long ago, foreclosed on of course (at least he didn't shoot the people that came to kick him out - they were probably white).  How did this happen?  He couldn't stick in the army long enough for a pension, reportedly due to his racist tendencies (but maybe due to spending cuts). So he's thrown out to the wolves, but he's trained to kill, he should be fine, right?  So he struggles to make ends meet as a truck driver, ends up down on his luck.  Hate fostered deep within him, a scapegoat right around the corner, and what it seems he must have thought was nothing to lose.

Now what about Texas today?  "You aren't gonna evict me from my house!"  I can just hear him yelling out the window.  How do you think he felt about his luck?  About his prospects for the future?  What do you think his socio-economic situation was?  I'm pretty willing to bet he wasn't so close to the 1% (despite apparently living on George Bush Blvd).

It's pretty obvious here people.  What we have is a society in decline and disrepair.  Disparity of incomes have sky rocketed over the last several decades, poverty is rampant - 15% of the population, almost 50 million people (most of which are children).  Unemployment nationally is above 15% when you include everyone not working that  wants to, but some places like California have unemployment rates over 20%.  All these numbers are pretty similar to the numbers of people that have no health care.  Sadly, these are not all the same people in each of these statistics.  House after house is being foreclosed upon, job after job is being shed, a drought stricken heartland is collapsing while the government subsidizes making fuel out of corn to feed our car addiction, our inner cities are seeing rising poverty levels, epidemic crimes statistics, brutal police repression, and overflowing prisons, while everywhere is seeing shrinking service programs for the needy and plummeting education budgets.  Yet our "leaders" go on vacation while their approval ratings have flirted with single digits.  And lets not even get started on 20% of our GDP going to servicing a national debt mostly owed to China and various middle eastern enclaves that we claim we need to defend ourselves from, or on the walls we are putting up around our boarders, or definitely on the rich sitting on their verandas buying political power.

This disaster is of course all happening while we are bombarded with useless distractions throughout our daily existence.  Billboards pollute our eyes with visions of uselessness, TV's fill our ears with aimless chatter of "real" world scenarios that none of us will ever live, medications "alleviate" joint pain only to cause, dry mouth, headaches, runny noses, occasional aches and pains, impotency, possible cardiac arrests, insanity, and in "a very small percentage of test cases" death.  Advertisements for giant manly trucks help dry up the Midwest, toys, clothes, bags, TV's, video games, cars, boats, whatever!  We don't need them all, but our whole lives have become about obtaining them all - consuming them.  The message is all sitting there directly in front of us.  Obtain everything, you need it.  It will help distract you from all the things that suck about the world we live in.

But we don't seem to be able to put two and two together.  To recognize that we have created a cycle of disrepair and disrepute.  This sordid society is eating itself from within, and giving itself the tools to do it more quickly - guns.

Personally, I think a gun is too much power for one person to hold in there hands at one time.  I don't want to have the power to so easily kill in my hands.  A simple twitch of a finger and you're dead.  Not for me.  But I also, who am I to tell others what to do and how to think?  I can only lead by example and express my views with little or no expectations.  So, I'm not going to tell you not to have your guns, but I am going to tell you that you must live with the repercussions of a society foundationally infused with them.  In a perfect world guns could exist, no one would use them.  But we don't live in utopia.  We live in the the real world, and that world is falling apart.  People are desperate, they want, they need, and they can't have - they just simply don't have the means, and it is becoming entrenched.  As a society we are no longer moving up the class ladder in ways we did in the past.  Real wages have been dropping for decades, yet we've learned to live with the expectations of a society built decades ago on different parameters and with different rules.  We have become full of desperate, hungry, angry, disenfranchised people and are having problems with it.  But you give all those people access to guns, and you've got a massacre.  Just like in Aurora, Wisconsin, Texas, and every major city in the US everyday. 
And this is the saddest thing about the society we've created.  There was on average 280 people shot today in America.  But we only heard about seven of them.  This shit happens EVERY day, all the time, yet we do nothing.  70,000 people a year don't act alone.  They are not isolated individuals.  They are a large part of a society that glorifies guns and criminality, and then gives people every reason and desperate desire to resort to crime, anger, and despair during the last desperate moments of their struggles.

Yes, I AM for much stricter gun control, draconian control actually given the way our society is today.  And maybe it wouldn't always have to be like that.  Maybe someday we could live in a society without the desperation and hopelessness that we see more and more today.  A society that's taken the desire to kill away from people.  If the Aurora killer had proper medical care and didn't think he had to get an advanced degree he couldn't pay for to get a job he believed he had to have to be able to survive, would we still be in this place today?  Would I still be awake writing this crap?  Maybe, because we'd also have to stop creating killer after killer in the name of controlling oil wealth and mineral rights across the world with desperate "volunteers" from our failed education and economic systems.  These issues are so big, so intertwined and never ending.  What the biggest thing I'm for is a country that starts realizing that WE are the problem.  Yes, us, our country, our society, and our choices are creating the images and society we see in the news and the individuals that perpetrate this news.  Is individual choice and culture so different in England where they have 58 something gun murders a year?  Or what about in Germany where the police shoot 85 bullets PER YEAR IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY!!?!  In America we can drop that on one "perp" in one night.

Our society is sick.  It is sick at it's core.  And just as it is rotting away from the inside, we must heal it from the inside.  We have to focus on the sick and gangrenous parts: the unemployed, the destitute, the impoverished, the uninsured, the indebted, the marginalized, the hopeless.  Because they are in fact our brightest asset, the part of America with the biggest up side, the most talent and aspiration left unfulfilled.  Now of course there are a lot of different philosophies on how to do this.  But I can assure you that if we don't start there with every ounce of our efforts, it doesn't mater what we do with taxes, marriage equality, abortion rights, or even guns, we'll go straight downhill no matter what - just like we are right now.  The problem that we're having within all this though, is that we're neither controlling our anger and despair, or what we do with that anger when we are consumed by it.  Until we can figure out how to support and provide for our entire society, we can't allow people the means to so easily take others with them to the deepest depths of their despair.

 

Oh, and that cop that got shot today, yeah, he had a gun on him - didn't help him much though did it?

Accounting for Violence

What a head does to a window in NYPD hands

So what I saw last night was an absolute abomination. Six months of occupy protests, nothing has compared. I have no clue how many arrests there were last night, and I can't feel like there could have been much of any justification for any either. What I do know is that I saw cops fists flying at people on the ground. I saw batons swinging at a pile of people that had been dominoed into each other by the police mercilessly pushing back, and I saw a woman who started having a seizure while being arrested continuous bang her head against the ground while the cops sat next to her wondering what to do. Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

So the day started out simple enough day, I went to the Left Forum and listened to some very interesting discussions on the use of drones in policing, what current day movements can learn from the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, about Occupying philosophy, Education and Capitalism, etc. These were just a few of the hundreds of panels at the left forum this weekend. We had an Occupy think tank in the courtyard on “what a real/revolutionary bank would look like”. I tried to decided between a panel on transnational Africa and globalization, or China rising, but instead stood in the hallway and talked at length about deep thoughts of the day with a few other participants until we decided to head over to Liberty Square and see what was going on.

I had walked over a little earlier as rumors of bedlam had spread throughout the Left Forum (it was only a few blocks away). It wasn't bedlam though, it was a bunch of people in a park having a festive time. Drumming, dancing, talking, rejoicing, holding signs. It was great, the only stories I heard of bedlam revolved around the police “arresting people for dancing”. Not sure how that is, but that was the word on the street. Second time around it seemed about the same, no big deal, generally festive. A group of us went for Indian food and had long conversations about all sorts of things occupy related.

I started getting a bit antsy and wanted to head back to the park, it was 9:30. The park was interesting, just as we came out onto the street we heard cheers and/or shouts from the park, still a couple blocks away. It was loud, like at a small stadium, we hurried along. The march from the Left Forum had just gotten there. Michael Moore and Cornell West had lead a large contingent of people following Moore's evening address to the crowd at the forum. The park was full of so much energy. But no one was doing anything wrong or provoke anything.

Step in the plus brigade I think. There had been a General Assembly. I wasn't really a part of it. I had listened at first but was more interested in seeing the people, catching up with friends, etc. I didn't find myself in such a festive mood in general but couldn't put my finger on it. A lot of ups and downs of late, both in and out of Occupy.

All of a sudden though, the GA seemed to just jump up and move in unison from one end of the park to another. And when I say in unison, I mean in step and chant. Obviously the trail of cops follows along dumbfounded, reacting to a simple adolescent game, with confused looks and way to much seriousness. I wasn't really into it, but a huge group of everyone else was. Myabe I'm too old!! Ha ha!! I just liked watching the cops wondering what was going on. But of course such innocence had to all go wrong.

A few moments passed and the sound of bag pipes were heard. A group of bag-pipers came wondering upon the park into an ambush. They were all dressed in St Patty's day garb, kilted and greened out. The had heavy accents and couldn’t have been more than 20ish. As it turns out they were just a group of french speaking kids out marching around Manhattan playing bag-pipes on St. Patrick's Day – with NO affiliation with Occupy. Imagine it, they turn the corner and there is this mass gathering of people in a park! Woo hoo!! They simply march along and try to enter the park. I mean why not, it's St. Patty's Day, and there's a festive group of people in a park. Let's go march through there, right?

The police attacked them. Grabbing the bag pipes, trying to rip them away from them, a couple go down, they are just trying to scramble and get away. Of course all of the occupiers that had just come joyously bouncing over to greet these random bag-pipers immediately has cameras and lights all on the police brutality unfolding. These kids were scared to death, covering there faces, running wherever they could, police pushing and shoving and grabbing them. I mean, these are innocent kids playing the bag pipes on St. Patty's Day. The plain and simply DID NOT deserve to be “treated like occupiers”. Yeah, I say that because we are treated differently. Hence the counter-terrorism squad members of the NYPD down there That is the way Occupy is treated. Terrorists. Yeah, that's right, non-violent protest is considered terrorism right here in “the land of the free”. 

Just in case that's too blury, it says "NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau"

What has this country turned into?

Oh, this is just the beginning, it gets better (worse, much worse actually). So following this ugly show of police force, the occupation starts bringing out banners and other things. Wrapping the park in the voice of Occupy. One by one, three tents with statements on them pop up. And not pop up to sleep in, but literally pop up on giant sticks. Two person dome tens with protest writing on them. The police start massing, this is obviously a direct a front to their what? “Manliness?” Yes, that's probably a good term to use, that is really what the NYPD is about. Testosterone, lots of it. The police can do what they want and when, laws mean nothing. As a legal observer said to me when I asked if something we were watching was illegal: “it doesn't matter, of course its not illegal, but they'll arrest you anyway because disobeying a police officer can be made illegal. They can do whatever they want, and they get away with it no matter.”

This is the world we live in.

So they come enmasse to clear the park. They slowly push everyone to the one end of the park. But a brave group of protesters don't move. They actually lock arms and paivly sit down. They aren't going anywhere. This is a public park. Open to the public 24 hours a day. Or at least legally it is. I see police fists flying. Pushing, shoving, dragging, struggling, punching. No one is provoking anything. It's not the protestors doing the pushing, shoving, dragging, or struggling, punching, its the cops. A wave of blue clad soldiers sweeps the park clean of its voice, of it open space. In come the barricades. The park is cleared. The protestors mass on the edges. A number of them leave on a march. Take it to the streets the say. I stay.

All of a sudden everyone starts moving uphill towards the east of the park. Some kind of commotion, people are crying. It's tough to get close at first, all you can see is a well dressed woman in yellow writhing on the ground. As I get closer she comes up to all fours, gasping for anything, as if looking for a last breath from anywhere, panicking. The cops, seeming dumbfounded again, stand watching. A couple trying to do something, what is unknown. I didn't see what happened in the beginning, but it came to light later that she was being arrested, had handcuffs on and was being dragged and treated fairly rough when she started having a seizure. According to onlookers, everyone but the police abusing her recognized she was having a seizure, the cops apparently just continued to push, pull, yank, and some said even hit. Apparently once they figured out she wasn't struggling but actually having a medical problem they just let her down to the ground.



As this went on for what seemed like an eternity; she alternated between several positions. She would come up on all fours gasping for air, a blank gaze on her face as if nothing was being seen, only felt. They would give her oxygen. Then she would collapse, lifelessly to the ground. Smashing her head to the ground at one point. It was horrifying. This went on repeatedly, they got her on her back at one point, only to watch her go into convulsions and repeatedly hit the back of her head on the concrete sidewalk. Even she felt it. She looked at us for help, the onlookers, as she tried to reach her hand back to cushion the blow. Helplessly, her convulsions wouldn't allow it. The police did nothing, kneeling near her, doing nothing. Yeah, I know, your supposed to let a seizure happen - so long as the person isn't hurting themselves. Cushion her head for god's sake! The ambulance EMT's did little more (called by occupiers of course). Eventually they just picked her up and tried to put her in the ambulance. It wasn't working, back onto the ground she went. The police then made a row of themselves so we couldn't see anymore. Everyone watching was mortified. Their ineptitude. It was such a horrible helpless thing to see. We were penned in behind a barricade, a mass of people behind us trying to see. That was when they started pushing.

I was right at the barricade, seemingly trapped. A mass of people behind us, and angry police pushing the barrier forcefully back. Now I have only not done what an officer asked twice during this protest. Both involved hypocrisy. Once when on was telling me to get back while there was another one telling me not to be in the street behind me. I got bench pressed onto my ass into the street that time. This time again, I was told to get back into a street. Which is highly arrestable, both illegal and dangerous. But it didn't matter what was behind us, they were going to push no matter, and for no reason but because they didn't want us there seeing their ineptitude. The poor woman having a seizure, her skirt up around her waste, no one caring for her or her dignity. The brutalize us to cover up their own incompetence.

So as they push, there is no where to go, I’m trying to back peddle, but I’m not turning my back on them, I wouldn't trust them for a second. My feet can't go back, they get caught between someone else's and the moving barricade. Down I go, trapped under the moving barricade. They stop pushing, I only remember hearing someone say, "man down" and Lily trying desperately to help me with every ounce in her. I get back to my feet, they start pushing again. But there's still no where to go and they don't care. They push us all out into the street, then across it. Everyone seems to be thinking that must be it, we're back, the barricades stay on the other side. Then they just start coming at us. Batons out they start to swing them. All I could see was batons and anger. People start trying to back up, to run if such a thing is possible in such a small space. We manage to get through on our side, but a whole slew of people couldn't get back, there were too many. One falls, then they all do. There's a pile of people trying to get up and all the cops can do is swing their batons at it. Hitting people stranded on the ground, piled upon each other.

We're two blocks away now, the national lawyer's guild is there taking stories, seeing who has video of it. Everyone stands and stares in disbelief, some go to the ambulance for medical attention. Everyone is shaken.