The Feds are monitoring
The New York Times on the fascist insurrection in Oregon:
Federal officials said on Sunday that they were monitoring the armed takeover of a remote federal wildlife refuge in the rural southeastern corner of Oregon.
Ok let me stop you right there.
Why are they monitoring it? Why are they allowing armed men to grab and hold a federal building, however small and remote? Would they be simply monitoring it if the armed men were black or foreign or Muslims?
The occupation, which began Saturday afternoon, appeared to be led by Ammon Bundy, a rancher whose family became a symbol of anti-government sentiment in 2014, when his father inspired a standoff between local militias and federal officials seeking to confiscate cattle grazing illegally on federal land.
What do they mean “anti-government sentiment”? It’s pro-theft sentiment is what it is. Federal land doesn’t belong to them personally to exploit for free for their personal profit. It belongs to all of us collectively, which means that we don’t get to exploit it for free for our personal profit. Bundy can’t put his cattle on his neighbor’s land, so why should he be able to put them on our land? Bundy wants to help himself to a public resource and threaten to shoot people who try to stop him. He’s an armed robber. Normally the law doesn’t “monitor” armed robbers on the job.
The Bundys have been organizing opposition to the government case against the Hammonds on social media in recent weeks, which they described as a tyrannical use of federal authority.
“We’re out here because the people have been abused long enough,” Ammon Bundy said in a separate video posted to Facebook on Saturday.
He called the prosecution of the Hammonds “a symptom of a very huge, egregious problem” that he described as a battle over land and resources between the federal government and “the American people.”
“The people cannot survive without their land and resources,” he said. “We cannot have the government restricting the use of that to the point that it puts us in poverty.”
Mr. Bundy described the federal building as “the people’s facility, owned by the people” and said his group was occupying it to take “a hard stand against this overreach, this taking of the people’s land and resources.”
He said the group would remain there indefinitely and told an interviewer that he hoped more supporters would join them. “We have a facility that we can house them in,” he said, referring to the occupied building.
“We pose no threat to anybody,” Mr. Bundy said. “There is no person that is physically harmed by what we are doing.” He added that if law enforcement officials “bring physical harm to us, they will be doing it only for a facility or a building.”
They’re armed. Of course they post a threat to anybody.
The government should extradite them to Ferguson.
I for one find your solution Salomonical. So there.
“Would they be simply monitoring it if the armed men were black or foreign or Muslims?”
The federal precedent involving nonwhite activists which comes immediately to mind here is the months-long occupation of Alcatraz. Monitoring definitely played a part.
Interesting point; I hadn’t thought of that.
But I’m pretty sure they were unarmed. The Wikipedia account doesn’t spell that out but it implies it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Alcatraz
I think if they’d been armed the entry would say so.
It’s the letting armed men take over a facility with impunity that’s so outrageous and so out of step with how non-white people are shall we say dealt with.
Well, Ophelia, maybe if they had armed themselves with water pistols….then maybe they’d be seen as dangerous enough to do more than monitor.
There may be some instance in which armed nonwhite activists occupied a public space, here in the U.S., but nothing comes to mind. I’m guessing that would go down about as well as Ruby Ridge or Waco, but who knows?
Here’s hoping the governor actually does something about this instead of sits on her arse like the feds did last time. Armed bullies can’t be allowed to just sit there being “monitored” again.
Damion – there was the fire-bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia in 1985…but that wasn’t public space, it was people having guns and using them when the cops arrived to arrest them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE
At any rate it bears out my point (the point many many people are making) – the response was rather different. The police dropped two bombs on the row house, causing a fire that killed a lot of people, including occupants of neighboring houses who had nothing to do with MOVE.