dupe

[kskiska]

The smiling face of former New York mayor Ed Koch beams down from posters all over the city. 'The Republicans are coming,' it says underneath. 'Make nice.'

Fat chance. New York is bracing for one of the biggest showdowns in its political history as the Republican national convention comes to town at the end of the month. Meeting the army of delegates, politicians and lobbyists will be a vast array of protest groups that intend to make the Republicans' Big Apple stay as unpleasant as possible. Trying to keep order on the streets will be 20,000 police, secret servicemen and National Guard units. A quiet week seems out of the question.

Jamie Moran certainly hopes so. He is one of the main driving forces behind the protest movement which has sprung up since the Republicans announced they would gather in New York. He and others have been collecting information on all aspects of the convention.

They run a 'snitch line' where people involved in the convention can leak details of events and where delegates have been staying. The protesters are widely believed to have infiltrated several people into working at the convention who will smuggle information out. Moran's plan is to send out teams of activists to disrupt as many events as possible.

more…
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1283404,00.html

[SoDesuKa]

1. Outsiders are Unaware

Outsiders are unaware of how angry New Yorkers are. The city has a tolerance for visitors, but not when the visitors carry on as though they're far more important than the people who live here. Republicans get Madison Square Garden, protesters get the West Side Highway. It's a formula for an explosion, and there will be one.

[FarLeftRage]

2. Yahoo!

I'll bet that this will turn out to be worse than Chicago in '68...

[Slit Skirt]

3. it will be interesting to see if...

it gets covered in the media...they didn't cover the "cages" they set up for protesters in boston
..I hope they raise hell...

[kskiska]

4. Wow!

Polls support that reaction. A recent survey showed that 83 per cent of New Yorkers did not want the convention in their city. 'We all live here,' said Angela Coppola, an office worker who has joined the protest groups. 'We were the victims of 11 September and now they are coming to terrorise us with their asinine convention.'

[NVMojo]

5. we survived

an invasion of cheney this week. It was sick. Can only imagine what it would be like to be around an entire convention of koolaid drinking Bush groupies.

[DivinBreuvage]

6. The Nazis used to DELIBERATELY incite Communists to attack them

knowing that the violence would get the Nazis more print and word-of-mouth publicity (apart from the fact that more than a few of the adherents on both sides genuinely enjoyed getting a chance to smash some heads).

Certainly I'm not equating the New York protestors with 1920s German Communists! I'm merely offering the historical example as proof that unscrupulous people do deliberately incite violence for political gain, although I'm sure that's not a surprise to anyone here anyway.

At first I thought the Republicans chose NY simply to capitalize on September 11, but I'm beginning to wonder if they're not really hoping they'll be able to provoke (or perhaps even manufacture) some sort of violent response. What would they hope to gain by doing that? Well...

I know very little about the Chicago 1968 incident apart from the idea that the defeat of the Democratic candidate was due in part to the violence during the convention, which was instigated by others on the left: yippies, the SDS or whomever. Whether this is the genuine truth is unimportant -- all that matters is that this is the "conventional wisdom" I've picked up on that affair.

It certainly seems possible to me that some of the Republican master planners and strategists, having picked up the same "wisdom" about the Chicago convention as I have, would deliberately try to recreate that situation. They probably picture the majority of New York protestors (please remember I'm speaking here from their perspective, not mine) as long-haired hippie throwbacks, flamboyant gay men, dumpy women with weight issues and unshaved armpits, and the like, and are thinking that if they can get film of such people attacking police, screaming obscenities at well-dressed, respectable white country-club people, or just holding signs and chanting slogans, that the "Chicago Syndrome" will kick in and "Middle America" -- that Ward Cleaver heartland of white, Christian, and very moral citizens -- will be so horrified and outraged by the "true face" of the Democratic party that they will easily give George W. Bush enough votes to win the election or make a fraudulent victory feasible. And doubtless Fox and CNN will be more than willing to help them by focusing on "stereotype liberals", even if they have to crop the shot to shut out the 10,000 "regular" people around them. They always do it anyway and nothing's going to change that.

I'm not one of those posters who cringe at the thought that pasty-faced people of limited intelligence and deep-grained hypocrisy are going to get mad at us if we don't act "nice".