Yes, but it's so surprising when it happens to you. The U.S. government has been doing it to everyone else for years but when they turn on you it's always a shock.

I posted an article entitled "OWS, Police Brutality, and the War on Terror: An Empire State of Mind" that talks about when them chickens come home to roost.

i know. i read it. :) and very good points btw. i'm actually not as shocked as some others.

It is getting out of hand. My concern is that it will continue to get worse. No one seems to know what to do to stop it.

This a n event, hopefully you can read it , its on FB.. If you are anywhere near the NYC area, join in...
All Women's Assembly to End Violence Against Women + March to OWS!

I personally believe that it is one of those events in history which must be held with the highest of reverence lest it ever happen again. Tossing the terms around in lesser instances cheapens the horror of the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany. IMHO.

While I believe we need to be ever vigilant and I do believe there is a faction in this country that wants to push us to that direction, I also have faith in this country as a whole. I have a deep faith in the occupiers.

If history does indeed repeat itself, let us not forget, the hippies were right. The Gulf of Tonkin never happened, it was the figment of the imagination of an over excited radioman...according to Robert McNamara himself! Vietnam was a sham. A political sham. So is what is happening now, but I don't believe we are heading down the road to Hitler's Germany as long as we stand up and say "No!" Not as long as we still have judges and lawyers and Congress members that stand up and say "No!" with us. Right now we do. We have people in government who see the wrong. If the other half of this country would stop watching Faux News and start paying attention we might get somewhere.

I couldn't agree with this more. It's not just lesser instances. What the Germans did was on a whole different scale. They committed mass murder and were the most blatantly racist and oppressive regime in modern history.

What is going on today in the US is a crime; our "democracy" is a sham; our civil liberties are threatened and our freedoms are infringed upon. But we are not in danger of being rounded up into camps and being executed for our political beliefs. If it comes to a day where we are in danger of that, then I will say this is like the Nazis.

current genocides happening right now~


In 2004, Yad Vashem, in response to the BBC documentary, "Access to Evil", which includes witness testimonies from camp survivors and a former guard of gas chambers and mass killings occurring systematically in the camps, called on the international community in 2004 to investigate “political genocide” in North Korea, yet no substantial action has been taken to this day to interven.

In September 2011, the Harvard International Review published an article which argued that North Korea was violating the UN Genocide Convention in every possible way, through its systematic killing of half-Chinese babies and religious groups

The ruling military regime in Burma is one of the world’s most oppressive and abusive. Currently, the Burmese government is involved in a military campaign against the largest indigenous ethnic group in Eastern Burma, the Karen. The Karen practice Christianity, whereas Burma is a mostly Buddhist nation. The militarized government has developed plans to eliminate those who do not fit in to what is thought of as being “Burmese.” Many Karen accuse the Burmese government of “ethnic cleansing” due to major counter-insurgency campaigns that have led to widespread mass atrocities against the Karen people. Such atrocities include summary execution, severe torture and rape, as well as forced labor, extortion and displacement. Aid agencies estimate that more than 200,000 Karen have been driven from their homes during the decades of conflict.

The “Darfur Genocide” refers to the current mass slaughter and rape of Darfuri men, women and children in Western Sudan. The killings began in 2003 and continue still today, as the first genocide in the 21st century.

The genocide is being carried out by a group of government-armed and funded Arab militias known as the Janjaweed (which loosely translates to ‘devils on horseback’). The Janjaweed systematically destroy Darfurians by burning villages, looting economic resources, polluting water sources, and murdering, raping, and torturing civilians. These militias are historic rivals of the main rebel groups, the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM), and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). As of today, over 480,000 people have been killed, and over 2.8 million people are displaced.

Since 1996, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC; Congo) has been embroiled in violence that has killed as many as 5.4 million people. The conflict has been the world’s bloodiest since World War II. The First and Second Congo Wars, which sparked the violence, involved multiple foreign armies and investors from Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Chad, Libya and Sudan, among others, and has been so devastating that it is sometimes called the “African World War.”

Fighting continues in the eastern parts of the country, destroying infrastructure, causing physical and psychological damage to civilians, and creating human rights violations on a mass scale. Rape is being used as a weapon of war, and large-scale plunder and murder are also occurring as part of efforts to displace people on resource-rich land.

Today, most of the fighting is taking place in North and South Kivu, on the DRC/Rwanda border. Some fighting is political, resulting from unrest caused by Hutu refugees from the Rwandan genocide now living in DRC, while other fighting results from an international demand for natural resources. DRC has large quantities of gold, copper, diamonds, and coltan (a mineral used in cell phones), which many parties desire to control for monetary reasons. However, money from the sales of these resources has not reached average citizens. Currently the education, healthcare, legal, and road systems are in shambles.


Since 1991, clan warfare has besieged Somalia. The United Nations has called the current situation in Somalia the “world’s worst humanitarian disaster.” At the end of January 2009, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was elected President of Somalia with the hope that his administration will bring stability to Somalia and implement the Djibouti Peace Process of 2000. However, violence has continued unabated. At the end of 2009, nearly 700,000 Somalis were under the responsibility of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, constituting the third largest refugee group in the world after war-afflicted Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively.



and here's the link in case anyone is interested~

http://worldwithoutgenocide.org/about-us

instead we have for profit prisons *shudder* and that horrid guantanamo, where your rights and all moral reason go right out the window.

edited to add....you don't need to be foreign and/or of middle eastern descent to be sent to guantanamo, incidentally.

Persiphone, I didn't say that genocide isn't happening in other countries. It is. Arguably we just deposed two ruthless dictators that were doing exactly that. But that's not the subject here. The subject is occupy wall street and the references are not appropriate to what the police are doing.

Are the police breaking the law? Yes. Will there be repercussions from it? Probably. But they aren't rounding up OWS protesters in the US and putting them in death camps. And outrage still remains at the brutality. When that stops we have a problem.

i didn't say you didn't. my point is simply that genocide is not unique to the holocaust and i'd also like to point out that the infrastructure is certainly in place here by means of for profit prisons and the existence of guantanomo as well as the existence of The Patriot Act. all i'm saying is that while i'm not sure if something along the lines of the holocuast is possible here, i'm definitely NOT saying that something along those lines is NOT possible either. it may not happen identically, but i'm not willing to say that something similar could NOT happen. and i think that it's something that people should be aware of. we clearly don't have the rights we thought we had even in the aftermath of things like for profit prisons, guatanomo, and The Patriot Act and that's apparent by the seemingly endless supply of videos of police brutality on protesters across America. it's just something to think about. i don't think there should be heirarchies of importance on genocides that occur on this planet. because they are all important and all horrific. i don't see one as being less than the other unless you're talking strictly in terms of body count.

That depends on who you are. Something like 10% of black men in their 20's are incarcerated. A disproportionate number of those executed are black men.

is this where i can bitch about methods of voter suppression? :hamactor:

Back to the subject of corporate greed....
 

A huge part of the financial crisis of 2008 was an out of control derivatives market. Derivatives are basically bets that corporations make on whether the markets will go up or down. It's WAY more complicated than that, but that's the best I can do in one sentence. In the late 90's a financial regulator in the Clinton administration tried to impose regulations on over the counter derivatives, and here's what happened:


The scary fact is that the Dodd-Frank bill didn't include any regulation of the derivatives market. So basically, there is nothing in place to prevent the financial collapse of 2008 from happening again just as easily. Gah!

That's what I never understand. If we allow our government to do it to someone else what makes us think they won't do it to us?

Where can I find your article? Is it the one on Common Dreams?