A Small Town Story - Soft Fascism
I've lived in a few small towns in Texas. They have some good qualities to commend them. They also have some ugly warts, magnified by the big fish in a small town fishbowl effect.
There was one small town, that I knew a few folks in, back in 2001. And this relates to a few stories one could hear back then in the Dairy Queen, or one of the Feed Stores, Bait Shops, etc...
One day this town was rocked by the news that Muslims flew airplanes into the World Trade Center. This upset everyone in the small town. It was a horrible day. People had a right to be upset and angry.
Then the news people got on the TV airwaves and told everyone to report suspicious activity.
Well, everyone that had Not Our Kind (NOKs) for neighbors, knew who they were. They dressed funny. They worshiped funny. They weren't quite right in the head.
So they all called the police and FBI to tell them about their suspicious neighbors. the FBI is reported to have gotten many thousands of leads, all across the USA.
So in this small town, the FBI and the local police went out to visit these suspicious people. They put the men folk in handcuffs and took them to the local jail. Their women wailed and pulled their hair out. This was mighty suspicious behavior.
Then some of the good citizens got visiting privileges with these NOK men. When they came back they bragged and bragged how they wailed on them terrorists, real good. "Punched him real hard!" they would say.
The women were allowed periodic visits, but couldn't drive. So the local law enforcement used those open air sight seeing carts, to drive miles and miles to the jail on the highway at slow speeds, so everyone in town could see the suspicious NOK women going to see their men.
The NOK folks then began to have trashy yards. Garbage would be strewed across their lawns in the morning and the women would go out and dutifully clean it up. The walls of their homes were plastered with eggs and graffiti. Sometimes crosses would get lit on fire in their yards. They worked hard to clean this stuff off of their homes and keep their yards neat.
When Christmas came, many of the NOKs put nativity scenes in their windows. But the town's people weren't fooled.
One day, the NOK men, were transferred to a prison somewhere else.
They hadn't been able to make mortgage payments on their homes, ranches or keep up their businesses since their incarceration. So the banks took those away and sold them at auction. Even the NOK women had to leave.
Now these towns don't have those particular kinds of 'Not Our Kind' of people around anymore.
The End
posted by Weaseldog @ 12:52 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
Sad story... sorry for those ladies... and all the people who were hurt... and pray that the scared small town peoples hearts and minds are opened to differences and they can let their cruelties go. The end.
After 9/11 my mother, in a far northern town on the Canadian border, reported some local motel owners to the FBI. Or rather, she was going to, but my brother convinced her not to, I think. The motel owners were Sikhs, or "towel heads."
Now there is a much increased DHS Border Patrol contingent up there. One of them, a year or two ago, hit and killed a local doctor who had gotten out of his car on a dirt road to remove a fallen tree with his chainsaw. She was driving twice as fast as the legal limit, at least. Despite the cars with lights illuminated the scene, she claimed to not see the man.
The Federal Government has attempted to remove the case from the purview of the local court system, claiming that the state courts have no authority. I haven't researched recently to find out the outcome. The high handedness of the Fed level towards the local, though, smacks of the destruction of our vertical and horizontal separation of powers. The road to serfdom.
I was going to reflexively launch an anti-American diatribe about the fear and prejudice there. I was going to say that there are so many Muslims living in Australia (a little-known fact to most people in the outside world) that such stuff could NEVER happen here.
I Then I remembered the Doctor Haneef case...
Do you recall when a couple arsehole Muslim medical doctors in Glasgow, Scotland, packed their SUV with flammables and drove it through the doors of the airport terminal there? They set their SUV on fire, and one of them burned himself to death, but no one else was seriously hurt. Fucking idiots.
They had a cousin living in Australia who was a doctor in training. His name was Mohammed Haneef. He had visited these guys a few months before, and left his British cellphone SIM chip with them. Still had minutes on it, and he couldn't use it here. When Scottish police started picking through the apartment of the burnt doctors, they found the chip and traced its registry back to this young doctor Down Under.
He was picked up by Aussie federal police and jailed for weeks without being charged with anything. The police lied their arses off about him. It was blown all out of proportion in the media -- used as a political ploy by the fascist lite John Howard government. Poor guy -- he was from India, had recently gotten married, had no terrorist aims. He was down here trying to make Aussies healthy, and he almost got hung out to dry.
Fortunately, this society still has a streak of looking after the little guy. After the initial furore, Muslim and civil liberties groups started a counter-furore. It took a long time, but the guy was freed and got an apology. Not sure if he got paid, too.
But yeah, you put a society under a spell of fear, and the fascism jumps out in a hurry.
Eventually the pissed off muzzies will outnumber the "good white" people in the UK and will launch a few nukes our way. It all works out in the long haul.
Fascism is not a one-size-fits-all thing. People equate it with Hitler's Germany, but Mussilini's Italy came before him, and after him came Suharto's Indonesia, Pinochet's Chile, Franco's Spain,et al. Bush finalized America's form of fascism, and Obama has done precious little to dismantle it.
A good new article that backs up we believers in the existence of "soft" fascism in the USA, by the wonderful Charles Hugh Smith:
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2009/10/when-savior-state-becomes-enemy-of.html
[wapo link]
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2009/10/end-occupation-mission-for-oath-keepers.html
Read it.
Well done, it's a good reminder that evil doesn't always wear jackboots
It might be safe to say 3 years after 2008, that Obama has not implemented any significant libertarian moves. The dont ask, dont tell was dismantled, but since no crimnal conviction results from gay in army, it was not a difference between becoming arrested, fingerprinted, issued a criminal record vs none of the former. It is possible that Obama is saving his more controversial efforts for 2nd term, to avoid becoming unelectable. Only time will tell if Obama will fight harder to amend the laws like the Patriot Act, and other similar ill worded laws, that leaves no one without guilt. Since almost any person can be found guilty, the fear of prosecution by the government, will effectively suppress any dissent. Take for instance the Occupy movement demonstrators beeing charged with 'lynching' felony. The law makers give all the tools to the police, so that the police can arrest as many as they can throw in jail, and the police, and state are at no fault, indemmnified, untouchable. Some argue that it wrong to call USA fascistic state. But if it goes that far, then it is too late to change. Everything you do to resist the state is criminal, so you will get arrested, and since you are a criminal by the text in the lawbook, you will be send to a prison camp to await your sentencing, and will perhaps soon die there after due to loss of health or interrogation methods comparable to your alleged crime. Dont wait to the point where you can say, now we have true fascism. Referring to decency and humanity, will be useless at that point.
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