Thinking about the police riot at the Toronto G20 Summit made me think about the processes I wrote about when I blogged about having watched the film "
Jarhead."
A lot of people took "Jarhead" the wrong way. They got the impression that the
movie is asking us to feel sorry for US-American soldiers who don't get to kill
anybody. That wasn't the point of the film. The point of the film was that the
US military (the Marines in the case of "Jarhead") trains young men (and now
women!) to become killers. It teaches them to dehumanize their enemies and it
pumps them up to want to kill them. The main character becomes obsessed with the
desire to see "the pink mist" a pseudo-erotic description of the explosion of
somebody's head when a sniper's bullet blasts their skull apart.
I'm sure something much the same was done to the police at the Summit. They were no doubt pumped by "training" sessions wherein demonstrators were referred to as dangerous, lawless, violent anarchists. I'm sure the term "terrorist" was tossed around even more sloppily than it usually is. After the enemy was dehumanized, the police were then all pumped-up with nowhere to go for a couple of days. Like the soldiers in "Jarhead" sweating their balls off in the desert boredom, the cops in Toronto sweltered in their riot gear waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. When the rocks were allowed to fly for half-an-hour and the police cars were sent out to be left to the vandals, the boys and girls in the battle-suits were ready to go ape-shit and the rest is a stain on Canada's history.
Secondly, I'd like to address
the buffoonery of some of the members of Toronto City Council who saw fit to hoot and holler in blind, total support of the violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the rape threats, the physical assaults, the inhumane conditions that aresstees were kept in, and the overall billion dollar incompetence of the Toronto Police Service and the rest of the ISU.
Leading the pack was the
loutish public drunk, Rob Ford, who yammered something about how he would have started attacking people at random on the very same day that the fucking security forces ALLOWED the vandals to smash windows and burn police cars, as opposed to the wholesale mass arrests a day later of people unconnected to the violence. That's because he has shit for brains.
Here's a link to one councillor's letter explaining why they abstained from the ridiculous vote:
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