Today I saw one of the most disturbing videos I have seen in a long time -- possibly ever. It is of a student at UCLA being repeatedly "tasered" -- i.e. electrocuted -- in full view of hundreds of students in the UCLA library. He was handcuffed and repeatedly told "Stand up, or you'll get tasered again" before being... tasered again. His screams of agony reverberate throughout the library, as students scream at the police to stop.
Here is the full story: Furor Over UCLA Student Tasered By Police (by Joe Gandelman, at The Moderate Voice)
Here is the video, which a student took on his mobile phone. (via YouTube)
I think we need to lobby for a ban on the routine use of Tasers by police officers. What started as a "non-lethal" (or the even more ridiculous "less-lethal") substitute for a gun has changed into an instrument of torture for the police to use whenever they meet "non-compliance".
Instead of being patient and letting the student calm down and decide to leave on his own, instead of opening up any kind of dialogue with the student, the police, presumably because of some kind of authoritarian training, robotically repeat their commands. Citizens are treated as subservient to the police, not as equals, not as deserving of any kind of respect. Students who protest (as the article at The Moderate Voice linked to above mentions) are threatened with being tasered themselves.
Is it any wonder that there is such hostility toward the police these days, when such hostility and lack of respect is so widespread? How can we continue to tolerate the widespread dissemination of these instruments of torture on our streets, to be applied to every motorist who questions his speeding ticket, or student who refuses to show his ID? Wasn't it horrific scenes of violence like this that characterized Nazi Germany? We are stepping gradually closer to that kind of police state, where questioning authority is now grounds for being tortured and beaten in public.
I am reminded of an excerpt from They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, by Milton Mayer
Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to "go out of your way to make trouble." Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, "It's not so bad" or "You're seeing things" or "You're an alarmist."
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.
But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to - to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked - if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in "43" had come immediately after the "German Firm" stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in "33". But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying "Jew swine," collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.