counterpunch has a bunch of good/interesting articles this weekend

[donsu]

here's one:

http://www.counterpunch.com/linebaugh10292005.html

Who Are the Real Brownshirts in Toledo?
The Wedges of Hephaestus

Who are the brownshirts in Toledo? A few carloads of the Nazi white supremacists pulled into north Toledo, Ohio, on 10/15, maybe two dozen. Shortly thereafter, a vast, heterogeneous, and youthful crowd assembled and sent them packing. The police liked to take the credit. Credit? Folks naturally wondered who were the police policing, since after the brownshirts were shooed out of town, the police stuck around, the crowd believing that they were protecting the Nazis. The police declared curfew and arrested 114 people from a crowd between six hundred and one thousand. That was the Toledo affray.

Yet, those with ears could hear the wedges chaining Prometheus to the rock begin to rattle, and those with eyes might see him stir.

-snip-

There are two questions:

1) What do the youth want?

2) What is the business of the Nazis?

For young people career planning must involve competition for a few "jobs," or failing that, then perhaps soldiering in Iraq or some other American colony-to-be, but even then with the most careful adherence to protocols of these career routes, one must be prepared that one's resourcefulness can at any moment become criminalized and thus a third option, prison, become realized. Not to mention a disaster, such as Katrina. Thus young people seem to have on offer four options in which violent death is, if not inevitable, then distinctly possible in each of them.

What young people saw after Katrina was not poor people in desperate straits but rich people in malign neglect. They saw a city submerged, a city sunk. And left to sink more. Even the competitive ethos, 'sink or swim,' gets you nowhere. Meanwhile the authorities appeal to the "nature gods" - the weather, the winds, the climate. But we saw fools, incompetents, sadists, shooters, who call themselves "government" and who would not, and will not, cast a rope to the drowning.
-snip-
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