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Originally Posted by Kompressor
You really have no idea what it's like to be opressed, do you?
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If in 2004, thousands and thousands of people in every city in the US rejected the Bush "victory" over Kerry (it was stolen every bit as much as '00, do the research) and took to the streets, even peacefully, it would have been a similar situation in this country. The 1960s were a more politically passionate decade than this one in terms of large numbers of protests, and during that period this country had its own Tiananmen Square with the series of massacres, most notably Kent State. We have our own riot police. During Katrina, the National Guard shat on the Second Amendment when they went through entire neighborhoods knocking on doors and demanding that the citizenry give up any guns. I was in NYC during the 2004 Republican Convention and was one of thousands of protesters relegated to a so-called "free speech zone." Which, by the way, was basically a gigantic cage. (And yes, the DNC, the other side of the same coin, had these "zones" also.) And believe me, if protesters would try to assert that their First Amendment rights apply to any inch of American soil that is not private property, and dare defy the police and their "zones," they would indeed be chased away with clubs and even beaten, just as we've been seeing in scenes in Iran. And, furthermore, I'm sure that many people in America, while gloating over how "free" they are, would probably blame the protesters themselves for getting beaten, arrested, harassed, etc. Oh, they didn't follow the police's edicts, they were engaging in "douchebaggery," yada ya. I can think of some people on this forum who would take such a pro-fascist stance based on past threads.
From Wiki:
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Free speech zones were also used in New York City at the 2004 Republican National Convention. According to Mike McGuire, a columnist for the online anti-war magazine Nonviolent Activist, "The policing of the protests during the 2004 Republican National Convention represent[ed] another interesting model of repression. The NYPD tracked every planned action and set up traps. As marches began, police would emerge from their hiding places — building vestibules, parking garages, or vans — and corral the dissenters with orange netting that read 'POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS,' establishing areas they ironically called 'ad-hoc free speech zones.' One by one, protesters were arrested and detained—some for nearly two days."[14] Both the Democratic and Republican National parties were jointly awarded a 2005 Jefferson Muzzle from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, "For their mutual failure to make the preservation of First Amendment freedoms a priority during the last Presidential election".[12]
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