Topics:
Capitol, Fascism, America
Photo:
Late capitalism
Watch:
Die Wave (2008)
As the nation considers how to move forward after January 6th, partisan headlines and opinion pieces are debating how we should remember this event; A protest went wrong? Capitol Riot? A few extremists? or was it an insurrection? or maybe a failed coup?
Historic events are built on historic roots. To understand what happened on January 6th, 2021, I will present in three parts a collaboration of public records to break down exactly what happens, and what it means for America.
This is part 3, of 3.
A Presidency
Well, was it a protest that went wrong? Capitol Riot? A few extremists? or was it an insurrection? or maybe a failed coup? It was all of those things, to different people; But more importantly, I hope it was a shock to a sleeping giant.
In The Federal City, I worked to create a scale in which the response to Trumps’ The March to Save America could be measured. Often when news breaks such a story, it’s a question of how could this happen? But in reality, often the better question, is how could it not?
It was a day that echoed the systemic racism that goes back to the core of this country. This isn’t a new challenge to American democracy, but it also isn’t isolated to the extremes. The lack of response was systemic, whether it be an overt choice by Trump, differences in policy, the news coverage, or even our own reactions.
We must face the hard fact that many Americans would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans but simultaneously a dictatorship over Black Americans.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, 10 May 1967, Atlanta.
Institutional racism is why there was not a Governor of D.C. to provide a check on Presidential powers with the local militia, but it’s also why all the furniture that was damaged in the Capitol will be rebuilt using nothing other than Unicor’s [ Prison | Slave ] labor. It’s why the FBI didn’t see an attack coming.
With 30,000 people showing up to Trump’s rally, we have seen this before. While it may not have looked the same, and it was supported by slightly different companies, America has been through periods of great inequality before.
In 1939, at the end of the Great Depression, 20,000 Americans got together in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism as the world would begin its way into the second great war. American history has a tendency to forget these moments; Like how IBM and Ford worked to produced machines for Nazi Germany.
As we step into a new administration, that promises that we will get back to the normalcy of ‘character and decency‘, new anti-protestor laws will be pushed around the country, with budgets increases because the goal of everyone involved is to protect the state, at all costs.
“I think that we will probably get a 20% increase in our budget because it came to Congress’s doorstep and when things touch them, they pretty much just write a check and say whatever you need is what you get,”said one officer.
These laws might get applied to those who’ve now been arrested, but most of them will be applied as additional penalties towards the “more legitimate” forms of protest moving into the future; Regardless of where you draw the line, by simply a factor of time.
Storming the Capitol was already illegal, but criminality is based on enforcement, not the law. While a little over 120 people have been arrested for breaching the Capitol, that’s still less than half of arrests made during just one day in June.
And just how will this money get used?
“Let’s be very clear, we are here for Congress,” a veteran officer said. “We are the buffer so that Congress doesn’t have to deal with the mess that they create in their respective districts, so they don’t have to deal with the public. That’s primarily what our mission is — police work is kind of a second thought.”
“We don’t have to comply with the Freedom of Information Act. How can you not be transparent? That’s just mind-boggling,” they said. Because the Capitol Police force reports to Congress, which is not subject to freedom of information laws, it is hard to know what is really going on. “[Transparency] would improve this department on every level. We’re paid by the taxpayers — they should be able to access anything that goes on within this department within reason.”
As for Trump, he lost the keys of power. That was much as adjudicated by the tech kings who finally deplatformed him, but that doesn’t mean that the culture that created him is going away on its’s own.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. - Theodore Roosevelt
However, you chose to remember The 6th or Trump’s Presidency, let it not be forgotten, but not out of some sense of fear; but out of a sense of humanity for a country divided between the haves and have-nots.