'Anyone Shocked By The US Capitol Attack Has Ignored A Lot of Warning Signs'
- 'Anyone shocked by the US Capitol attack has ignored an awful lot of warning signs.'- By Francine Prose, The Guardian, Jan. 12, 2012. Do surprised pundits and politicians not recall militias storming the Michigan capitol last year? Or neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville? - Ed. - Excerpts -
.. Even as the “wild” rioters were scaling the walls of the Capitol, some news media persisted in calling them “protesters” and “demonstrators”. These insurgents were far more than that. Images of politicians sheltering in “safe locations” in the Capitol complex reminded me of how, on 13 November 2015, my son – whose band was playing at the Trianon theater in Paris that evening – sheltered backstage while jihadis murdered 89 people at the Bataclan auditorium, a few blocks away. The difference between protesters and terrorists is critical. Demonstrators are expressing their response to a policy, an event or a series of events – systemic racism, for example.
But terrorists plot violent mayhem, rehearse, fail, come up with a new plan, try again and again until they succeed.
We all recall that the destruction of the World Trade Center was preceded by a 1993 attempt to bomb the WTC parking garage. The attack on the Michigan state capitol and the Charlottesville march were rehearsals for what transpired in DC last week.
- Supporters of Trump rampage through the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump is clearly responsible for the 6 January attack by the crowd that day was an incitement to violence. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the fury and lawlessness of his supporters will disappear when he retires to Mar-a-Lago, goes to jail or begins campaigning for the 2024 presidential election. It’s important to recall that Trump has been the accelerant but not the fuel, not the kindling that has allowed the flames of hatred and bigotry, of anti-democratic rightwing fanaticism to blaze as brightly as they do now. If these Trump loyalists believe – as they kept chanting – that the duly-elected, soon-to-be Biden-Harris administration is not their government, it’s not only because their president told them so. The framed portraits, the statuary, the gleaming chandeliers they saw in the Capitol building were unlikely to change their minds.
The interlopers on the Senate floor looked less triumphant than bewildered, and their bewilderment is not unrelated to the sources of their rage: the massive income inequality, the epidemic unemployment, the opioid and Covid pandemics, the sense of being excluded and forgotten that helps inspire xenophobia, racism, sexism and violence. The rapid decline of our public educational system and the rise of far-right media are not unrelated; among the things that education gives us is the ability to think, to distinguish the truth from the lie, to process and evaluate the information we’re given.
These are the problems and the perils that the Biden-Harris administration will have to deal with, and which all the palliative talk about unity, reconciliation, and “working across the aisle” is not going to come remotely close to fixing.
Let’s be clear: the Biden-Harris administration has exactly 4 years to repair some large part of the damage that’s been done – a short time to begin a massive and necessary project. Otherwise, these violent groups are going to rehearse, retry, recoup, try again and again – until they succeed. With or without Donald Trump, the violence, if it ever goes away, will come roaring back...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/11/us-capitol-attack-warning-signs-charlottesville-michigan
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