1.

Commentary

THE OLYMPIAN CROSSES THE LINE
By Mark Jensen

** What moral universe do the editors of the Olympian inhabit? **

United for Peace of Pierce County (WA)
November 17, 2007

In an editorial published Wednesday, the Olympian (Olympia, WA) argued that OlyPMR "protesters have crossed the line of peaceful protest and deserve to be punished for their regrettable behavior."

The newspapers' editors display a shocking indifference to the police violence unleashed on nonviolent protesters, asking callously: "What did they expect?" And they accuse Olympia City councilman TJ Johnson of "adding fuel to the fire" when he called a meeting on Sun., Nov. 11, to air testimony about police violence.

"Surely protesters understand that when they put themselves in harm's way they put themselves at risk," the Olympian says. "They cannot expect to be treated gently by police. Videos from the scene show armed police officers repeatedly warning protesters to clear the streets and stop blocking traffic or face arrests. Protesters didn't budge until doused with pepper spray, pushed back on the sidewalks with batons, or arrested and carried away to a police vehicle.

"But they asked for it. Police are literally and figuratively caught in the middle between the port and the fort. Police have a job to do and that's to ensure that laws aren't broken. Blocking streets and interfering with the rights of others are acts against the law and police responded accordingly."

The astonishing view defended by the editors of the Olympian would empower police to punish offenders on the spot with unnecessary and excessive force. It displays so great an ignorance of the nature of the dangerous chemical weapons used against nonviolent subjects that this can only be due to deliberate indifference.

The "job" of police is never to inflict unnecessary and severe pain and suffering on principled individuals who act in accordance with a plausible belief that their behavior is justified by high moral principles and offer no resistance to arrest.

What moral universe do the editors of the Olympian inhabit? The police violence on display in Olympia, recorded for all the world to see by brave videographers, represents a danger to American society a hundred, no, a thousand times greater than direct action in the name of principled resistance against an unjust, immoral, and illegal war widely regarded as the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.

The conduct that the Olympian features as the principal offense of protesters -- "blocking roads, dragging debris into the middle of downtown streets, breaking windows, destroying public property, damaging police cars, and hurling rocks at police" -- can, in fact, be viewed as a response to the outrageous behavior of the Olympia police. While it ought not to be condoned, it is certainly not difficult to understand.

Instead, the Olympian patronizingly declares: "[T]hey clearly crossed the line. Their peaceful assembly evolved into lawbreaking and they must be held individually accountable" -- without the slightest concern that there be accountability for vicious police misconduct, indeed without even acknowledging that it took place.

It is simply false to claim that "When police repeatedly plead with protesters to clear the streets and are met with stubborn refusals, they have little option but to resort to batons and pepper spray." None of the protesters offered any resistance to arrest by police.

Far from "restor[ing] order," the Olympia police created disorder.

Their institutional failure last week in Olympia and the failure of the Olympian properly to understand the situation mirrors the multilevel institutional failure pervasively on display in the U.S. today.

In the United States in this new Gilded Age, Congress, the executive branch, the courts, the military, the media, and both mainstream political parties are all dominated by corporate interests that are being enriched by the Iraq war and the radical free-market fundamentalism that the administration represents, even as broad swaths of the citizenry are impoverished, the Constitution mocked, and core American values gassed, tortured, and trampled in the mud, as though they were just a few more naive protesters.

If the editors of the Olympian are looking for "abhorrent behavior" -- the last words of its egregious editorial -- it is in this travesty that they will find it, not among the ranks of Olympia Port Militarization Resistance.

--Mark Jensen is a member of United for Peace of Pierce County (WA) and of the faculty of Pacific Lutheran University.