Martial Law in Microcosm:The Beating of Pastor Steven Anderson

“I’m a police officer; I’m ordering you out of the car,” snarls a uniformed tax-feeder in the newly released video of the April 14 beating of Pastor Steven Anderson near Yuma.

“What am I being arrested for?” asks Anderson.

“For failing to obey me right now,” huffs the armed parasite.

In addition to being a splendid specimen of the martial law mind-set (a guy in a uniform barks, and the rest of us timidly submit), this is a museum-quality example of something far too many* uniformed goons do far too well: Manufacturing a “crime” to justify beating down a civilian who fails to render proper subservience.Anderson had prompted the ire of the Border Patrol by refusing to submit to an unconstitutional search at a “border enforcement” checkpoint well north of the border with Mexico. The Boyz in the Brown Shirts initially created a pretext by claiming — dishonestly — that one of their dogs “alerted” to Anderson’s car after the Pastor refused to permit a search.

That pretext was abandoned entirely after knuckle-draggers arrived from the Arizona State Police. After vandalizing Anderson’s car, they tased him — despite the fact that he put up no resistance and posed no threat to the platoon-sized mob of law enforcement personnel — and ground his face into the shattered glass of his ruined car windows.

Note well that the tasers were out before Anderson had time to put up any violent resistance. This provides an example of yet another crime routinely committed by police nation-wide: The use of the Taser as a “pain compliance” instrument (that is, an implement of electro-shock torture), rather than a less-lethal alternative to a firearm. The pitiful screams of the unresisting Baptist pastor attest to the Taser’s barbarous effectiveness in that role.

It’s interesting and appropriate that the last part of the video is set to the strains of the Christian hymn Be Still My Soul, which takes its melody from Finlandia, composed by the heroic Jan Sibelius. At once patriotic and proudly subversive, the Finlandia Hymn was a protest against the political repression of the Finns by the Russian Empire.

We’ve clearly reached the point at which any authentic American patriot is going to be treated as a subversive by the armed enforcers of Washington’s empire.

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*No, not every police officer does this kind of thing. Many of my acquaintance are just as alarmed as I am over the growing militarization of law enforcement, and the pathological arrogance of the rising crop of uniformed enforcers.

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12:02 am on May 13, 2009