One of the men goes for her phone. The other grabs at her hands. Ozturk screams. Shock and fear ripple through her voice. Two masked women join them, tugging at her backpack, peeling the straps from her shoulders. “I’m going somewhere, I need to call someone,” she pleads. “We’re the police. Relax,” one of the men says in response.
They surround her. Then, one by one, they pull their neck gaiters up to cover their faces. “You don’t look like police,” a voice off screen says. “Why are you hiding your faces?” The questions continue, but the figures don’t respond. Instead, they cuff Ozturk, cross the street, and put her in an unmarked SUV. She is gone.
For the record, and I know I’m not the first to say it, this woman committed NO crime. She didn’t overstay a visa, she didn’t protest illegally. She wrote something the administration didn’t like.
For that, she was arrested by 8 masked officers in the middle of the street, in broad daylight. She was thrown in the back on an unmarked SUV. She’s received no legal representation. No trial. Not even charges, because again, she committed no crime.
Americans, you realize you’re watching the death of your rights and the rule of law, right? You have no illusions about the fact that you are defenseless? There is no longer any guardrail between you and an El Salvadoran prison camp. In something that reminds me very much of Stalin, an accusation is now a conviction.
Defenseless is a good word, it seems like we’re all just waiting for a savior to show up and rescue us. It doesn’t help that a large amount of Americans see protest as pointless right now. What it feels like is the bystander effect on a national level.
The worst part is how many people either support or just brush it off.
After all that trashing of Russians and why they do not fight against their government, the world gets to see that Americans are basically the same: so many fall for the dumbest possible propaganda and the rest is either afraid or apathetic.
Humans are the same everywhere. Political structures and cultures are not, but humans have evolved for much longer.
Which is why when you (if you do) think about the EU being some land of honey, it would be wise to also think “what am I missing if I don’t see similar problems there”.
I agree. We had over 20% far right votes here in Germany recently. Russian propaganda is going strong, too. Somehow I hope that watching the rapid disassembly of the US under Trump should open the eyes of some of them, but I am grasping at straws here.
Americans have seen a generation of peaceful protests that were crushed and villified. Anti-WTO, Anti-Iraq War, Occupy Wall Street, George Floyd, etc; all failed to achieve any of their stated goals.
And now that the fascists have taken control, peaceful protest is even less effective. For peaceful protest to succeed your opponent must have empathy, and fascists have none.
The last protest movement that accomplished something substantial was the civil rights movement. It was not peaceful, it was militant. I think we need a modern Black Panther Party.
Exactly, you need armed protest.
For peaceful protests to succeed they must attract more people to the cause and gather momentum. Protests now would be useful for bringing people together and emboldening people to resist what’s going on. They are a step in building a movement. To say “protests alone don’t change things” misses this point.
It’s the wheel of life:
Protests help something, but they are hard, violent, inconvenient, people die, money is lost, but they achieve goals and generally people know that protests and breaking everything around is necessary. Cutting infrastructure, beating officials (including police) to pulp, closing roads. Stopping factories (ok, that’s not a problem in the first world), stopping trucks and trains, stopping mail. Causing blackouts.
To avoid that, people talk. They form mechanisms to avoid real protests, but these mechanisms are dependent on real protests. Like gold standard - it’s supported by circulation, so if you can’t fall back to gold, you can’t really call it gold standard. It’s the same with protests. Real democracy is dependent on falling back to protests and just killing a few of the government jerks who think they are some kind of thief aristocracy.
People have long, really long period of questions being resolved by talking. And if it comes to protests, these are soft protests and they - mistake - become too subject for discussion, like let’s not go to those streets, let’s not hurt businesses, let’s follow these rules and obey police.
People get used to that.
The protest gold standard is in fact abolished, you’ve been softly and slowly made a serf, congratulations.
Try protesting now, you’ll get absolutely abused for doing pretty normal things.
OK, I’m from Russia, here people looked at tanks on the streets of Moscow in a few crises and decided they are smart and wise to follow rules made by thieves and murderers.
There have been weekly protests of this shit across the country since the asshole was elected. It’s not helping. And even the “opposition party” is capitulating to the bullshit. What else are we supposed to do?
She also had her visa revoked so can no longer legally stay in the USA to complete her studies, or enter again. This was because she wrote an op-ed disapproving of Israel’s genocide.
Remember “Better be Russian than a democrat” guys? Well, now they’re Russian!
We have guns. Lots of guns.
Everyone needs to arm themselves and train.
I suspect your government would love it if you started shooting. They’d declare martial law. Goodbye elections, hello police state.
They will do this either way.
There is no bargaining with these people. They will not not escalate from their side. By not escalating from your side you only encourage their escalation as they face no repercussions.
That’s true actually - they are escalating pretty hard already.
As a long-term peacenik though, I hate the thought of gun battles on the streets. I wish you all the very best. I first visited the US in 1976 and have toured around a lot since then. My one single bad experience was Homeland Security when transiting through LAX. We’re tourists not terrorists, jeez cool your jets! I can’t imagine how bad ICE is.
I had a decent amount I got back from taxes that I intentionally spent. I’m mentally ill. I’m off my meds because I cant risk withdrawl from going back on them only to have RFK take them away again. I’ll lose my job. It doesnt pay enough for me to get by anyway. If I kept that money, I know I would have bought that gun. And I would have used it on myself.
I’m still not sure I did the right thing spending myself into this hole to keep a gun away. I know using it on my oppressors wouldnt likely succeed. I’m more likely to use it on myself.
I still dont know if it was the right thing to do to not buy the gun.
Your guns don’t compare to the guns the government use. Nor do you have the numbers to resist even if equally armed. If the 1/3 of voters that didn’t vote, actually voted for for Harris, you wouldn’t be in this mess but there you are.
Yeah well, ask the Afghans or Vietnamese. Turns out you don’t need to have the same fire power to drag your opponent through the mud.
The Afghans and Vietnamese had nothing to lose. Americans, no matter how much they complain online, have everything to lose.
The Vietnamese had some of the greatest strategic minds in their history leading the fight against the Americans.
So far, it doesn’t seem like there’s a single leader for a resistance in the U.S., and certainly none as skilled in tactics.
Where do you expect the resistance leaders to come from?
From the state resistance leadership school, with the public resistance leadership grant? If you dont form a resistance you cannot create resistance leaders
What do you mean about numbers? The state and it’s guards are always massively outnumbered by the people, it’s just a question of organization.
But how many people are willing to risk their life without immediate danger to themselves (yet)?
and if we had a time machine we could fix all this. STFU. GUNS.
We .need to arm ourselves and shoot fuckers like this. If you see fuckets like this trying to take someone intervene and shoot to kill. We need rise up. Because yes we are next.
Just start by protesting, protecting, and block them from doing this shit when possible. If you go directly full terrorist mode, it means they won…
They already won, are you from another species? Are you watching this?
You mean… like these fuckers?
They won a (ok a bit more) battle, not the war! Move your ass, rebuild your democracy and add safeguards so you never let such hateful, retarded people in this position again.
Black Panthers open carried.
The state rests it’s case.
What was written?
She expressed anti-Palestinian genocide sentiments.
In New America that gets you disappeared by masked thugs.
A couple of op-eds for a Student newspaper criticizing Israel? I thought I saw the pieces linked earlier but I don’t see them now. The article linked on this post says it supported a student divestment program and referenced the International Criminal Court calling attacks on Gaza a genocide.
Hardly spicy compared to your average social media post.
https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj
Yes.
America has always been more or less of a fascist state, and this is not new activity, although it is worse and more brazen in a lot of ways. Civil Rights for ethnic minorities has always been pretty iffy.
30% of the country loves this shit, and another large fraction doesn’t even know it’s going on. A lot of us are working to try to change things. The media is not covering all of the demonstrations, but we definitely need more people to get angry.
Also, this is just the rehearsal until they go for political opponents with American citizenship.
What the fuck do we do? I’m in a hyperliberal city in one of the few blue states left. We are relatively safe for now. I make a comfortable amount of money that I use to support my wife and friends who sometimes may not have necessities. I cannot risk my job by taking every day off to protest. Protests also seem meaningless to go to for me in my city because they’re happening in a safer city.
I am donating to the ACLU every month, but idk what else we can be doing. What can we be doing?
Organize armed protests. Connect in your neighborhood, so if this shit goes down, and it will start going down in your neighborhood soon enough, people can show up, free the victim and bog down the attackers.
Time for Canada to annex Pacific Coast states(at least) then we can live in a functioning democracy again.
Cascadia when?