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The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle was named such, because after days of the cops routinely brutalizing and blackbagging both protestors and random uninvolved people…
The people laid seige (I mean a literal siege of human bodies) to the nearby police HQ, to the extent that it was abadoned by the Seattle Police who burned a bunch of documents, packed their shit into a convoy and withdrew from their own building in the dead of night.
So, it was an autonomous zone, as local law enforcement had just run away with their tail between their legs.
That’s so freaking cool… I don’t want to minimize what they went through to pull it off, and the horrors that led them to want it in the first place. However, I still really hope we see more and more of these popping up, and hopefully sticking around too!
Yep.
‘They’.
I mean of course ‘they’, I totally wasn’t personally there or anything.
Nope, no sir mister officer sir.
But uh yeah anyway, you may still be able to find video compilations of the SPD going fucking nuts…
They were blackbagging people who were either good agitators that didn’t actually violate any laws, or just people who were just literally innocent victims that became de facto ‘good agitators’ by everyone seeing what cops did to them.
All the disappeared into unmarked vans shit you see going on with ICE now? Yeah that was all done at BLM protests in Seattle, Portland, around the country.
Typically, they do a 72 hour hold and release without charges or bs charges like resisting arrest, or just existing in a zone that you were ordered to disperse from, while they also physically prevented you from leaving.
They were in panic mode, their orders were to disperse the crowds, but they literally couldn’t do it at an effective scale without breaking the law themsemselves…
Which is why I also wasn’t joking about them burning their own records at the Cap Hill SPD HQ.
For years, it has been known that there were highly suspect emails and other communications between the mayor, Chief of Police, internally within the police… but they all got mysteriously lost or deleted, and the cops investigated themselves and found nothing wrong…
Likely because they documented their own crimes, all the way up to the mayor, in addition to your normal corruption of cops giving themselves overtime pay for bs reasons, etc.
This is why I laugh about people holding up the US constitution as some sort of sacred document, when the right to free speech and the right to peaceably assemble has literally never been respected ever in the history of the country.
Not immediately after the country was founded and the Alien and Sedition acts were passed.
Not when abolitionists were protesting slavery.
Not when unionists were fighting for the right to collectively bargain.
Not during WWII when people were rounded up and put into camps for the crime of being Japanese.
Not during the red scare or the civil rights movement, and certainly not at any point after that.
…when the right to free speech and the right to peaceably assemble has literally never been respected ever in the history of the country.
Not immediately after the country was founded and the Alien and Sedition acts were passed.
Yeah, exactly, anyone paying attention in US History class should have picked up on this pretty quickly, that the US nearly immediately showed that it isn’t actually committed to to Bill of Rights with some kind of religious level of universal reverence, even though it is strongly implied that they were.
Bill of Rights ratified in 1791.
Alien and Sedition Acts passed in 1798.
Yes, they were later repealed, but thats only 7 years for a 180 about-face when its expedient.
All your other examples are good as well, what particularly sticks out to me is that we uh, we treated Japanese immigrants, who’d done nothing wrong…we gave them worse internment conditions than we gave to actual German PoWs.
To add to your list, we barely even mention or teach just… how we have done mass deportation of Hispanics before, during the Great Depression… and it doesn’t even really have a name, doesn’t even have little bullet point sub header title.
I guess I got lucky in a sense, by chancing to get a US History / AP US History teacher who was an Anarchist… set me on the path of breaking out of my right-wing upbringing.
So, it was an autonomous zone, as local law enforcement had just run away with their tail between their legs.
Somewhat related, but i really just want to vent.
I stood at the checkout area of an autozone for 30 minutes this morning. One of two dudes in the store was helping another customer with a return or something. But there wasn’t even an acknowledgement from them.
I left and went to an O’Reilly down the road, and was in and out in 2 minutes.
Sounds like all the more reason 😈
