When Will It Be 'Enough'?

by William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Stormtroopers and Child-Snatchers

Within the space of about a day, New Jersey experienced two public displays of organized intimidation by paramilitary thugs. The first involved an armed assault by black-clad bullies whose conduct was indistinguishable from the criminal street violence of the Nazi SS. The other was merely a public protest by the local chapter of the National Socialist Movement.

The family of Elsie Wenzel, a beloved school lunch lady who died at age 71, gathered for a memorial service at a funeral home in Hamilton (a small town near Trenton) on April 15. Charles Wenzel, one of her grandsons, "had ... something like a seizure," related Elsie's widower, Edward, in an interview with The Trentonian. The family called 911 to summon the paramedics. Unfortunately, if you call the paramedics, the police are part of the package deal, whether they're wanted or not – and they have an unfailing talent for making matters worse.

When Charles had another convulsion, he committed the unpardonable offense of defiling one of the sanctified bully-boys through physical contact. This constitutes "battery on an officer," and so the offended cop and several of his boyfriends attempted to handcuff Charles while he was lying on the ground receiving medical treatment.

"We didn't call you for this!" exclaimed a witness as several other people, including a granddaughter of the deceased, tried to intervene to protect Charles from the criminal assault. The officers responded by pepper-spraying the mourners and throwing several of them – including Edward's middle-aged granddaughter – to the ground. 

One of the officers called in a report that a "riot" was in progress – "riot" being defined as any situation in which Mundanes loudly criticize the anointed purveyors of consecrated violence for their crimes against innocent people. Apparently the funeral parlor was located near a donut shop, because within seconds at least a dozen police vehicles were on the scene. 

One of Elsie's sons, who was to be a pallbearer at the funeral, was jumped by "seven or eight" of the armed tax-feeders and thrown to the floor of the funeral parlor, Edward Wenzel reported. Another eyewitness who drove by the scene was alarmed to see police swarming four other prone, helpless men.

By one account, at least a half-dozen of the pallbearers were arrested to sent to the hospital as a result of gang violence by the police. When police attempted to "escort" him from the chapel, Edward Wenzel refused; if they had laid hands on the bereaved elderly widower, an authentic riot might well have ensued. 

A day later in nearby Trenton, a battalion-strength contingent of riot police was on hand to provide "security" during a protest staged at the Statehouse by about fifty members of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), a pathetic little outfit that – in terms of authenticity – has the same relationship to the Third Reich that Spinal Tap has to Led Zeppelin. 

As is typical in events of this kind, the NSM nitwits were outnumbered about three-to-one by counter-protesters. Events of this kind are an orgy of overtime for the unionized gendarme, and the April 16 protest was no exception: Every law enforcement agency – local, state, and federal – sent a contingent of uniformed trough-swillers to strut and preen in riot gear.

The familiar ritual of neo-Nazi protests reminds me a bit of Voltaire's description of the typical 18th Century Parisian dinner party, where one would experience "the usual unintelligible chatter, witticisms, false rumors, bad reasoning, a little politics, [and] a great deal of slander...." 

Every time neo-Nazi numbskulls conduct a protest, the air will be clotted with the same familiar slogans, the standard assortment of insults will be exchanged, and all of the familiar poses will be struck. 

All of this, I'm convinced, is incidental to the real two-fold purpose of such displays: Allowing the local constabulary to run up overtime, and reinforcing the notion that the police are the valiant protectors of the innocent, rather than the most significant threat to their life, liberty, and property.

It wasn't neo-Nazis of the NSM variety who disrupted Elsie Wenzel's funeral. It would be interesting to find out how many of the paladins of public order who pulled "riot duty" in Trenton on Saturday, April 16 had taken part in the police riot in Hamilton on the previous day. In similar fashion, it's quite likely that nobody who attended Elsie's funeral had ever been the victim of criminal violence apart from that inflicted on them by the Hamilton police. 

Domesticated neo-Nazi groups like the NSM have a way of Bogarting all of the civic outrage wherever they materialize, including outrage more properly directed at the local branch of the Ordnungspolitzei. This is one reason why the Feds are eager to feed and care for groups such as the NSM – which also act as useful vehicles for federal provocateurs.

The likelihood that the National Socialist Movement – or any similarly situated neo-Nazi group – could become a menace to individual liberty and dignity comparable to that posed by the State's punitive priesthood is so small that it couldn't be detected by en electron microscope. Neo-Nazis are almost impossible to find, unless one seeks them out in a few rural habitats in the Northwest and Deep South. The police, by way of contrast, are almost impossible to avoid, and their behavior – as I've noted before – increasingly resembles that of an army of occupation. 

In part, this is because many of them are Reservists or Guardsmen who have served in Washington's military occupations abroad. But even those who have not been deployed overseas are being indoctrinated to think of themselves as combatants in constant peril for whom "officer safety" is the paramount consideration. 

To understand the institutional mindset of contemporary law enforcement, it's useful to juxtapose video records of two incidents. The first took place in Iraq’s Camp Bucca prison in 2005:

"Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!" exclaimed an armed thug after one of his comrades hurled a grenade into a prison enclosure. The scene, described by commentator David Kramer as something out of "Schindler's List," struck me as some perverse hybrid of Wounded Knee and "Jackass": Armed adolescent bullies cackling with juvenile glee as they gun down desperate, defenseless people.

One wonders how many of these murderous mouth-breathers are now employed in domestic law enforcement. And then one wonders how many of these sadists had been employed as police before being called up by the Regime to serve as hired killers overseas. And that thought leads us irresistibly to the second video:

In 2003, two years before the episode at Iraq's Camp Bucca, riot police in Miami carried out a full-scale military assault – albeit with "non-lethal" weapons – against demonstrators who had assembled to protest a summit meeting promoting the artfully misnamed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

"After last week, no one should call what [Chief John] Timoney runs in Miami a police force," observed investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill following the event. "It’s a paramilitary group. Thousands of soldiers, dressed in khaki uniforms with full black body armor and gas masks, marching in unison through the streets, banging batons against their shields, chanting, `back… back… back.’ There were armored personnel carriers and helicopters."

Among the protesters was an attorney named Elizabeth Ritter. She was driven into the streets out of disgust that Miami had been turned into a garrison state. Wearing a modest, professional business suit, she marched in front of Timoney’s stormtroopers carrying a sign that read "Fear Totalitarianism." As if to vindicate Ritter’s point, some of Timoney’s goons shot Ritter several times in the back and legs with rubber bullets. Ritter crouched down and covered her face with her protest sign – only to be shot again by a rubber bullet, which penetrated the sign and struck her in the forehead.

During the  next morning’s mission briefing,  black-shirted thugs commanded by Sgt. Michael Kallman of the Broward Sheriff’s Office of homeland security enjoyed a hearty laugh as they reviewed footage of the criminal assault on Ritter. This led to Kallman being captured in his own "Whoever threw that, that was beautiful!" moment.

"I don’t know who got her," chortled Kallman, "but … it went through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head."

"Can I get a little piece of her red dress?" chimed in one of Kallman’s cretinous underlings from somewhere off-camera.

In a conversation with Major John Brooks, the ranking officer at the briefing, another of the blackshirts showed off a bandana that he had retrieved "from one of the scurrying cockroaches."

"Oh, cool!" exulted Brooks in a fashion worthy of a twelve-year-old. "This is going in my office forever, and it’s going to bring me some very good memories."

Despite the fact that Miami’s Civilian Investigative Panel confirmed that police had committed criminal assaults during the protests, none of the costumed assailants responsible was punished in any way. In fact, the scenes described above were included in a training video, presumably used to instruct the Schutzstaffel in the proper use of what has come to be known as the "Miami Model" of homeland security.

The foundation of the "Miami Model" is a doctrine of overwhelming force in the service of "order": The Mundanes are told to submit or be hurt – or killed. This is the operative principle of every encounter between police and "civilians," which is why every such encounter – even one incidental to emergency medical treatment at a funeral in a New Jersey suburb – is freighted with incipient police violence.

Hamilton Township, New Jersey – described by its municipal government as "America's Favorite Hometown" – is a community of about 100,000 people. It is a reasonably affluent suburb blessed with abundant parks and other amenities – and blighted by a police force capable of busting up a funeral in a fit of official violence that wasn't that far removed from the behavior of the torch-bearing Cossacks who raided the wedding in Fiddler on the Roof.

Earlier in the drama we had seen how Teyve, the Jewish milkman at the center of the story, was on friendly terms with the police chief. That friendship is savagely thrust aside once the chief's "duty" is made clear to him.

"Orders are orders – you understand?"  simpered Anatevka's village police chief to Tevye as the troops under his command carried out their pogrom. After all, the chief had been told by his superior, in no uncertain terms, that his job depended on his willingness to carry out orders: "If you don't want to carry out orders, we will get someone else who will." Such people are never in short supply.

We are told that many – nay, most – of those employed in police agencies are people of conscience and principle. This is true of several people I know who are thus employed. I sometimes suspect that I've met everybody who fits that description.

For reasons of institutional solidarity – or, what's much the same thing, conformity achieved through the threat of retaliation – such worthy and decent police officers never seem to intervene in defense of innocent people being abused by their costumed comrades. In such instances, any effort made to de-escalate a situation involves admonitions to outraged Mundanes that they must "calm down" in the face of criminal violence being inflicted on a friend, loved one, or clearly inoffensive stranger.

As I've pointed out before, a police officer who actually intervenes to prevent criminal violence by a professional associate can expect to be cashiered immediately. The criminal offender himself, by way of contrast,  can expect a lucrative paid vacation while the local police union spares no effort to preserve his job. 

There was a time, not that long ago, when it was possible for Americans to avoid contact with the police, and the police were trained and expected to leave people alone. Now, however, police are permitted and encouraged to behave like packs of lupine predators, eager to exploit any opportunity to inflict themselves on the helpless.

It's tempting to think that at some point some helpless American is going to become our nation's Mohammed Bouazizi, or Khaled Said – a living (or recently deceased) symbol of resistance to the persistent, unpunished abuse inflicted by the Regime's armed enforcers.

When he was three years old, Mohammad Bouazizi's father died. As the oldest son of an indigent family living in Sidi Bouazid – a town about 160 miles from the Tunisian capital, Tunis – Mohammad was responsible to provide for his mother and two sisters. He earned a computer science degree, but found that it was of little use in Tunisia's deeply depressed economy.

For years, Bouazizi managed to eke out a living as an unlicensed street vendor, peddling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart. Like others who carried out commerce without official permission, Bouazizi endured harassment from shakedown artists employed by the State, who in the course of the typical visit would steal the equivalent of seven dollars as a "fine." 

As the song says, talk is cheap, but even nickels add up. Even a single nickel is sorely missed when it's extracted at gunpoint from someone barely managing to earn enough to survive. But the contemptuous, arrogant words emitted by the armed functionary to carries out that theft do damage as well. The cumulative effect of such indignities can be enough to drive a despairing man to do desperate things.

He was driven to fatal despair when a municipal police officer confiscated his merchandise. 

The matter could have been cleared up if the officer had accepted the seven-dollar fine for operating an unlicensed merchant stand. But the sadist insisted on berating Bouazizi, slapping him, spitting in his face, and insulting his dead father. Heartsick with inconsolable despair, the young man set himself on fire. Public outrage over this incident grew into a revolt that eventually unseated the U.S.-supported incumbent dictator.

Khaled Said was a 28-year-old businessman from Alexandria, Egypt. Last June, after Said posted a video he had captured of narcotics officers divvying up the proceeds of a drug bust, he was dragged out of an internet cafe, taken to a nearby police station, and beaten to death. A small bag of hashish of the sort used by police everywhere to plant evidence was stuffed down Said's throat.

News of this atrocity was quickly propagated throughout Egypt, engendering a protest movement that eventually grew into the rebellion at Tahrir Square and the still-unfinished effort to uproot Egypt's deeply entrenched, U.S.-subsidized police state.

In police states of the kind Washington has supported in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the region, people have been willing to endure a great deal of abuse as long as there was some reasonable expectation that they would be able to feed themselves. It's not surprising to see that forbearance evaporate in the heat of the ongoing economic meltdown, which has left many people without the means to feed their families.  

The triggering incidents that set off revolutions in both Tunisia and Egypt were episodes of casual, arrogant abuse by police officers who considered themselves to be imperviously clothed in official privilege. Incidents of that kind are becoming more commonplace here in the putative Land of the Free, and the debt-prolonged illusion of prosperity that has long anesthetized public sensitivities is coming to an end.

Once again, it's not difficult to imagine a situation in which someone, somewhere, is pushed too far by an officious prig in a government-issued costume, an atrocity results – and then all hell breaks loose. 

Given the perverse ingenuity police display in arranging opportunities to impart such abuse, this could happen nearly anywhere, at any time. Meanwhile, those of us who belong to the productive class should avail ourselves of every opportunity to share the following message with representatives of the State's coercive caste:

We don't need you.
We don't want you.
We don't respect you.
We won't tolerate you much longer.

April 19, 2011

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

Copyright © 2011 William Norman Grigg

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