MEDIA ROOTS — Despite the national economy still tenuously hanging on life support and many cities financially flatlining, police departments throughout the U.S. still creatively invest enormous amounts of money in futuristc, “non-lethal” crowd control weapons. As we arrive at a point in U.S. history when true democracy is fleeting and the 1% breed new ways of absolute control, the necessity to appear less heavy handed in response to large street protests becomes paramount. U.S. power brokers seek ever devious ways to bend protesters to their will, whilst maintaining a positive image in the global media machine.
U.S. cities, such as Pittsburgh and Oakland have already introduced their citizens to the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a devastating weapon capable of causing permanent hearing damage. The latest addition to this high tech class of police weaponry is the Silent Guardian. The Silent Guardian emits a high powered beam of heat, much like a microwave. The beam can generate temperatures over 120° Fahrenheit.
During an era marked by popular unrest, we must ask ourselves, how safe do we feel being increasingly confronted by police weaponry more appropriate for armies and battlefields? As U.S. imperialism delivers deadlier and more efficient violence across the globe, how easily can the same hardware and methods seep into civilian policing at home? The distinction between the police and the military is fading as our two-party system criminalizes dissent and transitions toward paramilitary domestic repression. With the G8/NATO summit coming to Chicago in May likely to be met with mass protest, U.S. citizens may get a more accurate glimpse of what’s to come in the land of the free and home of the brave.
MR
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ZNET — But the prohibition on such repression enforced by those traditions has had an ironically negative and authoritarian aspect in the context of concentrated capitalist and imperial power. It has provided a great incentive for corporate and state authorities to invest heavily in the deadly arts and sciences of propaganda and manipulation. It has encouraged “the 1%”and its servants to develop quieter methods of “taking the risk out of democracy” (Alex Carey) by “manufacturing [mass] consent” (Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky) through public relations, propaganda, media control, education control, highly controlled and personalized election spectacles, among other “soft” forms of population management. At the same time, the proscriptions against sheer repression have also incentivized American authorities to develop more subtle, technically sophisticated forms of repression that operate behind the scenes (the surveillance cameras that are ubiquitous in England and ever more prevalent in the U.S. are a key example) and to deploy forms of coercion that prevent or discourage citizens from assembling and protesting without creating provocative images of state brutality.
The legal and cultural ban on outwardly murderous rule in the nominally free and democratic U.S. has compelled elites and their servants to develop new, less provocative ways to “incapacitate” angry and active citizens – more quietly sinister methods of repression that are deadly for democracy: penned-off “free speech zones” and “frozen zones”[54] (where protestors are denied access to those they seek to influence), “rubber bullets” that hurt and harm but do not generally kill, “concussion grenades” that disorient and confuse without generally shattering skulls, tear gas and pepper spray that sends protestors running, Tasers that stun but do not generally kill[55], sonic canons and other acoustic devices that make your eardrums feel like they are splitting, and perhaps – someday soon to be deployed in freedom’s “homeland” – Raytheon’s perfectly named (for the purposes of my argument) “Silent Guardian,” which noiselessly seems to cook human skin and eyeballs and has the capacity “to inflict limitless, unbearable pain.”
Repressive acoustic and heat ray technologies can bring special technical dividends for those who wish to coerce without seemingly overly coercive. As Xeni Jardin explained as LRAD-toting troops with the Louisiana National Guard patrolled otherwise abandoned and black New Orleans in September of 2005: “Crowd control is a constant challenge to law enforcement — how to stop potential troublemakers without endangering those who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rubber bullets can kill, tear gas drifts with the wind.”[56] Jardin might have added that mass billy-clubbing looks really bad on YouTube in an allegedly free society; so does the close-range pepper-spraying of the faces of young sitting protestors (as occurred at the University of California at Davis and went viral on television and internet last November).[57] Who can forget the live-televised police riot images of from the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention – the wildly swinging police batons landing on the skulls and torsos of white middle class reporters and youth as the crowd chanted “The Whole Word is Watching”[58] (the chant was revived during last fall’s pepper-spray incident).[59] It’s not for nothing that Wall Street super-titan and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his NYPD forced news helicopters to land and ordered a de facto media blackout[60] when they went in for the kill on Occupy Wall Street’s original camp last November.
Better to blare and/or cook the right of public assembly to death in carefully focused and targeted ways without actually killing (Tiananmen Square 1989) or beating (Chicago 1968) anyone (or too many people) if you can help it. And without letting the acrid taste of your repression drift into comfortable middle class neighborhoods as occurred during the break up of the mass marches against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November of 1999.[61] Smart repressors keep it as clean, quick, and contained as possible.
Read more about paramilitary consequences for civilian rights.
©2012 ZNET
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Photo by Flickr user geeves
