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well, there's a side of me that's inclined to drop it as well, but at the same time, this seems to be the central point of the thread as i understood it--what are the limits of a police action? at what point does a police action spill beyond what should be its limits? personally, i don't think that lincoln's position regarding the csa was more than rhetorical, any more than i think his opposition to slavery was (read the lincoln-calhoun debates for a thorough-going demolition of his view on the matter)--but that's beside the point.
personally, i think that the entire history of american opposition to left political mobilization is an unacceptable blurring of the line between police and military action. it was "justified" by setting up left political militants as outsiders who happened to be physically inside the nation-state physically--whence the fifth column rhetoric. i see the 68 chicago actions as in a direct line with earlier and far more violent acts of de facto war on the political left, one which runs back in some ways to haymarket. (chicago seems in the middle of all this stinkiness for some reason--i kinda like the place, too. i always found being there strange, however, because i knew i was walking around the belly of the beast in many ways)...
the war on the left, particularly in the late 19th-early 20th century was pretty murderous stuff--but it didn't happen in major cities for the most part and was not subject to the bizarre effects of television--which of course the 68 convention actions were, just as was kent state a couple years later--this is not to trivialize the latter actions, but it's hard to imagine the colorado coalfield wars, or the wars against union organizations in west virginia or pennsylvania or around teh automobile industry through the 1940s (river rouge anyone?) happening in a television context--**if**they got coverage (hard to say whether they would have, given the ability of the networks to "miss" most political protest of any scale over the past 20 years)
there is a way in which police violence against citizens whose politics are "unacceptable" to the right is a central and foul aspect of a multi-dimensionally foul history. of course it is not *all* foul, that history--but it is not all *other than* foul either.
and genocide is another matter--whether police or military, it remains genocide. that point, i drop for now.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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