The casual acceptance of violence and torture
The deliberate inflicting of pain is now being accepted by government as a way of keeping the population in line.
The use of pepper spray in wartime, we should be constantly reminding ourselves, is an official war crime. It's chemical warfare, and it's torture.
If these policemen were soldiers, and the students were citizens of a foreign country, those in uniform would be facing prison sentences for what they'd done. Why do police forces have the right to perpetrate with impunity what are effectively war crimes against their own people? Why do we accept this so easily?
From the Atlantic:
James Fallows: Pepper-Spray Brutality at UC Davis
In case you haven't yet seen the YouTube footage of what happened yesterday at UC Davis, here it is. The first minute has the main drama:
Let's stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful protest against other people's rights to go about their normal lives, and the rights of institutions to have some control over their property and public spaces. Without knowing the whole background, I'll even assume for purposes of argument that the UC Davis authorities had legitimate reason to clear protestors from an area of campus — and that if protestors wanted to stage a civil-disobedience resistance to that effort, they should have been prepared for the consequence of civil disobedience, which is arrest.
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