Protesters vs. Police PR
The Media offered us the standard coverage to statements from the world leadership that recently assembled for the enormously costly and disruptive Toronto G20 Summit proceedings in Toronto. Sadly, the events surrounding these closed meetings have largely overshadowed the positive spin attached to any such hollow pronouncements, and have actually done far more to damage our social fabric than any amount of new fiscal policy could ever repair.
Even after the fallout from those widely broadcasted and curiously unattended police car fires has settled back to the ground where nothing now remains but the street-stains, it’s become increasingly clear that only certain segments of the mainstream media can be expected to question the status quo, and remark that the Police actually did the most damage to our mild-mannered city not only by failing to keep the peace and apprehending a very conspicuous minority of vandals during their detestably destructive crime spree, but more importantly in visibly perpetrating almost all of the the actual physical violence against our primarily peaceful assemblies of unarmed and passive Citizenry. While thugs appeared to have free reign of the streets,
Photo by Michael Talbot, CityNews.ca
3 Stories Out of How Many?
Here are two obvious issues that the Mainstream TV News wasn’t prepared to dig into…Both represent the absence of Police presence, that was better employed in cracking down on peaceful protests.
The reprehensible (and thankfully well-documented) displays of abused power that were made in response to isolated, largely unchallenged, cowardly acts of hooliganism and fringe vandalism clearly failed to unbalance the mob-mentality and civil behavior of the generally peacefully assembled Protesters, much less actually incite retaliatory violence from those being unfairly targeted. This same aggressive, antagonistic, and and maligned approach to ‘law enforcement’ had curiously also provided the crowds with numerous unprotected and seemingly abandoned police cruisers that were eventually smashed by freely roaming vandals, toyed with for hours, and eventually set fire to, and allowed to burn completely without response from Fire Depts. only seconds away on Adelaide and St.Clarens…Many people remarked on how these cruisers could be allowed to be left unattended for so long, as well as how long they were allowed to burn…yet not a single member of the Mainstream Media has seen fit to question how cruisers could be allowed to burn for so long, much less how they could be allowed to be repeatedly vandalized right under the noses of such well armed, trained and massed security forces…
Seemingly this effectively opened the door for another display of PR tactics being used to manufacture public consent for reprehensible acts. The results of which being that our illusions of peace and justice in a free society were shattered by those vandals who provided the police with license to in turn trample on all our own collective rights. This is an astoundingly slippery slope that law enforcement and government officials have reflexively jumped on, and demonstrates not only belief that their position is unassailable by the Press or Public, but also a level of impervious and institutionalized arrogance, that we’ve never seen put on such utterly shameless display ever before.
The police repeatedly demonstrated overzealous reactions, but incredulously also allowed a minority of thugs and hooligans to create isolated spectacles for the largely impotent mainstream media coverage to spin into justification for more oppressive brutality. This now appears to be another classic case of propaganda methods playing themselves out again and again…It seems that Society has learned absolutely nothing since the Reichstag Fires were set and “Brownshirts” were able to disrupt society enough to plunge the world into Fascist driven violence. Even today, we’re still all too easily swayed by highly publicized acts of arson, and the despicable threat of an unknown “Black Block” that freely circulates and spraypaints police cruisers, above reproach of the law.
Just a minute...I want to go over this a few more times to make sure people can see it...
The bitterly ironic difference now in the 21st Century, is that we can clearly communicate with one another, yet we still prefer to have our own contempt for violent radical elements turned against us in a Media presentation that validates any state sanctioned abuses of Freedoms and Rights…Because we prefer still to be on the side of “Might and Right”…Our fear of disorder has once again been used as a weapon against us, and we’ve succumbed to the false security of believing that the Media is showing us a “reality” where it’s necessary and even desirable for Citizens to band together against violent and dangerous elements, by allowing themselves to forfeit their right to assemble peacefully, and submit to a higher authority from above,
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