Police Brutality Doesn’t Kill the Rebellion

Agencies controlled by imperial power do not care much for the chaos that tends to be accompanied by the dissident movement Ladies in White, nor the Cuban exile activities in Miami. But the image is striking: Police fired pepper gas at 84-year-old American Dorli Rainey, a retired teacher and human rights activist.

Rainey supports the Occupy Wall Street movement. Some commentators question whether or not the police thought she was a terrorist. They hit protest symbols to silence the demonstrations. Strategists prefer the leaders of the system to pay the political cost of hitting the symbols, because they understand the urgency of destroying the movement.

Last October, along with 19 fellow Occupy Wall Street activists, police arrested Cindy Sheehan, who between 2005 and 2007 was among the forefront of mothers who posed to George W. Bush the question “Why did my son have to die?”

Sheehan has also protested the continued use of force during the Obama administration. She traveled to Cuba in November and, in a symbolic act, she handed over as a sort of loan the gold chain which symbolizes her son Casey’s memory (who died in Iraq in 2004), to Mirtha and Magaly, mothers of Antonio Guerrero and Fernando Gonzalez, respectively. The “loan” will be in effect until the five anti-terrorists, who are being held in the U.S., return to their lands. Four of them are still in prison.

Rainey and Sheehan have joined the global movement to demand better living and working environments.

Pepper spray and brutal protest scenes during student demonstrations in Chile and Colombia as well as in marches against cuts in the U.S., France, Belgium and other countries, are defining elements of a global police state.

These elements which reverse social movement achievements are evidence of what those in power would like to hide: the illegitimacy of a system that is based on injustice and inequality.