MANHUNT FOR TURK

On March 23, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Gunman opens fire on a tram in Holland, wounding several people

By Sara Malm For Mailonline

Published: 06:34 EDT, 18 March 2019 | Updated: 11:59 EDT, 18 March 2019

791

View comments

The 37-year-old Turkish man accused of being behind the deadly ‘terrorist-motivated’ shooting on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht had a lengthy criminal record, according to local media.

Gökmen Tanis, 37, is still on the run after this morning’s shooting, which left three people dead and five others injured, and saw the terrorism threat level in Utrecht raised to the highest possible.

Earlier today, Dutch police tweeted a photograph of Tanis, believed to have been captured on the tram’s CCTV just four minutes before the incident at 10.45am this morning, and urged the public to ‘look out for him but do not approach.’

Local newspaper Algemeen Dagblad reports that Tanis had been due in court on March 4 in connection with a rape case, accused of sexually assaulting his victim several times, and threatening to burn down her home.

In 2013, he was suspected of attempted manslaughter by ‘opening fire on a flat’, and in recent years had been accused of committing burglary, shoplifting, drink-driving and assaulting a police officer by spitting them in the face.

This photo, released by Utrecht police, shows Turkish-born Gökman Tanis, 37, on the tram’s CCTV just minutes before the shooting began at 10.45am this morning

Tanis is seen on the tram just a few minutes before one person was left dead and several others wounded from gunfire

Incident: Emergency services have cordoned off a tram in Utrecht, Holland, where one or several assailants opened fire on commuters at around 10.45 local time today

The gunman, believed to be Tanis, fled the scene of the shooting in a stolen red Renault Clio, which has since been found abandoned in Utrecht, Holland’s fourth largest city with a population of around 340,000.

Police in Utrecht had initially reported the number of wounded as nine, this was however reduced to five in a tweet on Monday afternoon, which did not give a reason for changing the number.

Heavily armed police have been gathered in front of an apartment block some 200 yards from the scene for several hours, however have reportedly yet to raid the building.

Footage from outside the building show officers preparing specially trained dogs and deploying a robot as they seemingly get ready to move in on the apartment block.

Advice to all citizens in Utrecht to remain indoors, was lifted at 4.30pm local time by the city’s mayor, however the terrorism threat level in the province remains at the highest possible.

It is not known if the previous instructions to schools in Utrecht to keep their doors closed had been lifted, although train traffic has now reportedly resumed.

Video and photos from Utrecht shows armed anti-terrorism police surrounding a building where the gunman, or potentially several gunmen, is believed to be located

Several photographs show armed police officers surrounding a building in Utrecht just hours after the assailant fled the scene

Special Police Forces inspect the tram where the shooting took place earlier on Monday as the perpetrator remains at large

At least one person died and a number of people were injured in the shooting on a tram in Utrecht, The Netherlands

Armed police surround building following shooting in Utrecht

Mystifying ‘whirlpool UFO’ appears in the sky in the UAE

School children perform Haka in respect to Christchurch victims

Armed anti-terrorism police surround building in Utrecht

NJ boss tells employee that woman ‘need to be told what to do’

US police officer punches woman in the face as he arrests her

Chilling video of police officer being dragged down by ATV driver

Michael Jackson’s daughter Paris spends time with her boyfriend

Brenton Harrison Tarrant flashes white supremacist symbol in court

Shocking moment Russian throws cat at moose to scare it off

Video shows 52 illegal migrants crossing into California

Painful moment best man faceplants during wedding ceremony

The head of the Dutch counter-terrorism agency Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg said in a statement that the ‘threat level has gone to 5, exclusively for the Utrecht province,’ referring to the highest level, adding that the shooting ‘appears to be a terrorist attack’.

‘The culprit is still on the run. A terror motive cannot be excluded,’ he said in a Twitter message. He called on citizens to closely follow the indications of the local police.

Armed police have remained outside the apartment block near the scene of this morning’s shooting for several hours, with photos showing officers preparing specially trained dogs and deploying a robot as they seemingly get ready to move in on the building.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte convened crisis talks, saying he was deeply concerned about the incident, which came three days after a lone gunman killed 50 people in mass shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.

Mr Rutte said: ‘Our nation was hit by an attack in Utrecht. It is clear there were shots on tram passengers in Utrecht, that there are wounded.’

He said that ‘a terror motive is not excluded’, and added that throughout the nation ‘there is a mix of disbelief and disgust’.

‘If it is a terror attack then we have only one answer: our nation, democracy must be stronger that fanaticism and violence.’

Armed police surround building following shooting in Utrecht

Mystifying ‘whirlpool UFO’ appears in the sky in the UAE

School children perform Haka in respect to Christchurch victims

Armed anti-terrorism police surround building in Utrecht

NJ boss tells employee that woman ‘need to be told what to do’

US police officer punches woman in the face as he arrests her

Chilling video of police officer being dragged down by ATV driver

Michael Jackson’s daughter Paris spends time with her boyfriend

Brenton Harrison Tarrant flashes white supremacist symbol in court

Shocking moment Russian throws cat at moose to scare it off

Video shows 52 illegal migrants crossing into California

Painful moment best man faceplants during wedding ceremony

Dutch counter terrorism police use a robot as they prepare to enter an apartment block after a shooting incident in Utrecht, Netherlands, just a few hundred yards from the scene of the attack

Safety first: The black labrador

Reporting for duty: The black labrador and the police officer are seen outside the apartment block on Monday afternoon after gearing up

A photo shared on social media shows an armed policeman surrounding a building in Utrecht during the manhunt

Video footage shows police surrounding an apartment block in Utrecht a few hours after the shooting took place

Dutch military police have been ordered to be on ‘extra alert’ at Dutch airports and ‘vital buildings’ due to the ongoing police manhunt.

Police spokesman Bernhard Jens said no one had been detained yet in the shooting, and one possible ‘explanation is that the person fled by car.’  He did not rule out the possibility that more than one shooter was involved in the attack.

‘We want to try to catch the person responsible as soon as possible,’ Jens said.

The first casualty was reported by the Dutch ANP news agency, which stated that the victim was completely covered with a sheet and lying on the tracks between two carriages.

Armed police surround building following shooting in Utrecht

Mystifying ‘whirlpool UFO’ appears in the sky in the UAE

School children perform Haka in respect to Christchurch victims

Armed anti-terrorism police surround building in Utrecht

NJ boss tells employee that woman ‘need to be told what to do’

US police officer punches woman in the face as he arrests her

Chilling video of police officer being dragged down by ATV driver

Michael Jackson’s daughter Paris spends time with her boyfriend

Brenton Harrison Tarrant flashes white supremacist symbol in court

Shocking moment Russian throws cat at moose to scare it off

Video shows 52 illegal migrants crossing into California

Painful moment best man faceplants during wedding ceremony

Video footage filmed just hours after the shooting shows heavily armed anti-terror officers in front of an apartment block some 200 yards from the scene the shooting

Dozens of heavily armed police officers were seen near the building, but there has been no official reports of an arrest

Dutch police said they are searching for the shooter ‘with all possible means’, and have not ruled out multiple assailants

All tram traffic in the city has been shut down in the wake of the shooting on a tram, pictured, this morning

Emergency services stand at the 24 Oktoberplein in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where the shooting took place

Police could me seen amassing some 200 yards from the site of a shooting in Utrecht, Netherlands

One witness told NOS News they had seen an injured person running out of the tram with blood on her hands and clothes who then fell to the ground.

‘I brought her into my car and helped her. When the police arrived, she was unconscious,’ the witness, who was not named, told the broadcaster.

Local resident Jimmy De Koster also witnessed the incident and told De Telegraaf: ‘I was standing at the traffic lights on 24 Oktoberplein and I saw a woman lying down, I think she would have been between 20 and 35 years old.

‘She shouted ‘I didn’t do anything’.’

The Utrecht police said a square at a tram station outside the city centre had been cordoned off as emergency services attend the scene.

Armed police at the scene where a shooting took place, as police say they are considering a terrorist motive

Ambulances are seen next to the tram where the shooting took place on Monday morning, at around 10.45am local time

The Dutch anti-terror coordinator has raised the threat alert to its highest level around the central Dutch town of Utrecht following the shooting incident on a tram in the city, with the shooter still on the run

Officials added that trauma helicopters were sent to the incident at 24 Oktoberplein, and they are appealing to the public to stay away to allow first responders to do their work.

They had no further details about the incident and could not say how badly hurt the victims were, or how many had been injured.

‘Several shots were fired in a tram and several people were injured. Helicopters are at the scene and no arrests have been made,’ said police spokesman Joost Lanshage.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called the situation ‘very worrying’ and the country’s counterterror coordinator said in a tweet that a crisis team was meeting to discuss the situation.

Utrecht is located about 25 miles south of Amsterdam in central Holland.

Dutch military police have been put on extra alert at Dutch airports and at key buildings across the country, including in Amsterdam and The Hague, as the Utrecht manhunt is taking place.

Emergency services attend the scene of a shooting in Utrecht, where at least one person is reported to have died

Police forces and emergency services stand at the 24 Oktoberplein as local media reported that counter-terrorism police was present at the scene

Members of the military police arrive to heighten security around the Binnenhof in The Hague, as security was increased at key sites across The Netherlands in the wake of the shooting

Hugely concerning news of a gunman opening fire on a tram in Utrecht, no doubt with innocent people just getting on with their day. We are in contact with Dutch authorities, urgently seeking further information. The UK stands with the people of the Netherlands

German police say they have upped surveillance on the country’s border with the Netherlands and are on the lookout for the gunman believed to be responsible for the Utrecht shooting.

Heinrich Onstein, a spokesman for the federal police in the border state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said additional police had been added to watch not only major highways, but also minor crossings as well as railway routes.

He says the federal police are in close contact with authorities in the Netherlands and have a description of the suspect.

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt tweeted his concern in the wake of the incident, saying the UK ‘stands with the people of the Netherlands’.

‘Hugely concerning news of a gunman opening fire on a tram in Utrecht, no doubt with innocent people just getting on with their day,’ Mr Hunt wrote.

‘We are in contact with Dutch authorities, urgently seeking further information. The UK stands with the people of the Netherlands ‘

All major political parties including Rutte’s VVD announced that they were suspending campaigning ahead of Wednesday’s local elections which will determine the make-up of the Dutch senate.

The Netherlands has been largely spared the kind of attacks which have rocked its closest European neighbours in the past few years, but there has been a series of recent scares.

In August, a 19-year-old Afghan with a German residence permit stabbed and injured two American tourists at Amsterdam’s busy Central Station before being shot and wounded.

In September, Dutch investigators said they had arrested seven people and foiled a ‘major attack’ on civilians at a major event in the Netherlands.

They said they had found a large quantity of bomb-making materials including fertiliser likely to be used in a car bomb. The men were arrested in the cities of Arnhem and Weert.

In June, two terror suspects were arrested while close to carrying out attacks including at an iconic bridge in Rotterdam and in France, prosecutors said.

The men aged 22 and 28, who were of Moroccan origin, made a film at the Erasmus bridge in which they sang a martyrdom song, they said.

The world is becoming a scary place nowadays

Share what you think

The comments below have been moderated in advance.

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

By posting your comment you agree to our house rules.

Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline?

Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual.

Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline?

Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual

We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. We’ll ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook.

You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. Your details from Facebook will be used to provide you with tailored content, marketing and ads in line with our Privacy Policy.

Trump vs. McCain: an American Horror Story

On March 23, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Why is Donald Trump deliberately picking a fight with the ghost of John McCain? It might seem he has nothing to gain and much to lose from this battle.  Therefore many believe this is just more evidence of his narcissism, impulsiveness, and thoroughly nasty personality.  Beware of underestimating Trump’s skillful and devious political acumen.  As often, the president is speaking in coded language to his base, which regards McCain as the Judas who betrayed all those thousands of American POWs left behind in Vietnam.

In public culture, especially in the corporate media and on the national political stage, John McCain is almost universally acclaimed as a great “American hero.”  Why?  Traditional American heroes in our wars engaged in some heroic combat action.  Sergeant Alvin York, the most celebrated American of the First World War, saved his squad from German machine gunners, personally killing twenty enemy soldiers, including six he shot with his .45 pistol when they charged with bayonets.  The most decorated American of the Second World War was Audie Murphy, who at the age of 19 single-handedly held off an entire company of Nazi soldiers for an hour and led a counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition.  Growing up in World War II, I knew the names of these heroes.  Do you know the name of any authentic American hero of the Vietnam War?   How about Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, who landed his helicopter in My Lai, ordered his gunners to shoot any American soldiers who continued to fire, and personally saved a number of Vietnamese jumbled with the mass of dead villagers in a ditch?

As for John McCain, he was shot down by a missile while bombing the thermal power plant responsible for providing electricity to the Hanoi civilian neighborhood in which it was located.  McCain was and is hailed as a great hero not for any of his actions in combat but for what he claimed he endured during his captivity as a prisoner of war.  There are two groups of American heretics who do not revere McCain.  One remembers him as the senator who never saw a war he did not favor.  The other despises him for pretending that America did not abandon many POWs in Vietnam after the war.

Before going any further, let’s get one thing straight.  Only one U.S. POW was left behind in Vietnam: Robert Garwood, who had defected and become an officer on the other side.  Those who still believe otherwise should read my M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America.

The United States of America in the 21st century has two national flags. One is the colorful red, white, and blue banner created during the American Revolution, with stars that represent, in the words of the 1777 Continental Congress, “a new constellation.” The other is the black and white POW/MIA flag, America’s emblem of the Vietnam War.

The POW/MIA flag is the only one besides the Star-Spangled Banner that has ever flown over the White House, where it has fluttered yearly since 1982. As visitors from around the world stream through the Rotunda of the US Capitol, they pass another giant POW/MIA flag, the only flag that has ever been displayed amid the epic paintings and heroic statues, a position of honor granted in 1987 by Congress and the president of the United States. The POW/MIA flag flies over every US post office, thanks to a law passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1997. During the 1980s and 1990s, the legislatures and governors of each of the 50 states issued laws mandating the display of this flag over public facilities such as state offices, municipal buildings, toll plazas, and police headquarters. The POW/MIA flag also hangs over the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and waves at countless corporate headquarters, shopping malls, union halls, and small businesses. It is sewn into the right sleeve of the official Ku Klux Klan white robe and adorns millions of bumper stickers, buttons, home windows, motorcycle jackets, watches, post cards, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and Christmas-tree ornaments. Much of my speaking in the 21st century has been to saltwater fishing clubs meeting at the local headquarters of the VFW, Elks, American Legion, and Knights of Columbus, and over each of these buildings flies the POW/MIA flag.

The flag displays our nation’s veneration of its central image, a handsome American prisoner of war, his silhouetted head slightly bowed to reveal behind him the ominous shape of a looming guard tower. A strand of barbed wire cuts across just below his firm chin. Underneath runs the motto: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN.

This flag has flown and still flies as America’s understanding of the meaning of the Vietnam War. In 1991, that meaning shifted dramatically, as it came to symbolize America as a heroic warrior, victimized by “Vietnam,” but reemerging as Rambo unbound. Those black and white flags had been transformed into symbols of American pride, not shame. This is what George H. W. Bush meant on March 1st, 1991, when he proclaimed “a proud day for America” because, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” How many people knew back then that Bush was really celebrating the beginning of our epoch of the Forever War?

A month after Bush’s proclamation, Jane Franklin and I were on our way to Japan, where I was to teach American Studies for a few weeks as a visiting professor at Tokyo’s Meiji University. I had just finished the manuscript for M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, a history of how Richard Nixon created the “POW/MIA” category and used it to prolong the war, and how and why the preposterous belief in POWs in postwar Vietnam came to possess our nation. I thought I understood everything about the history and meaning of the POW/MIA myth, but I was wrong. And I was about to learn something crucial about American culture and culture in general.

Where does a society’s culture exist? Obviously in the artifacts, cultural productions, and discourse of the society, and of course inside the minds of the people who constitute that society. That’s why sometimes it can be hard to understand or even see what is most peculiar or even bizarre about one’s own culture; it’s inside one’s own head. Learning that in Anthropology 101 is one thing. Discovering how that works in your self is something else.

One night several Japanese scholars of American Studies, from Meiji and other universities, expressed their keen interest in the POW/MIA myth. They said that, on some levels, they understood it, that from their study of POW movies and other cultural artifacts they saw that the prisoner of war was functioning in American society as an icon of militarism. “But,” one said, “that’s what we find so puzzling. When militarism was dominant in Japan, the last person who would have been used as an icon of militarism was the POW. What did he do that was heroic? He didn’t fight to the death. He surrendered.” I was flabbergasted and totally flummoxed. Here I had been studying the POW/MIA myth for years and I had missed its most essential and revealing aspect.

After we got home, I had to look once again at the cultural artifacts vital to the POW/MIA myth.  Because the postwar POWs are imaginary beings, elaborating the POW/MIA myth and implanting it deep in America’s collective imagination has been the job of art forms specializing in imaginary beings: novels, comic books, TV soaps, video games, and, of course, movies.  Although the story of American prisoners abandoned in Southeast Asia could not become a major American myth until the dream factory geared up its assembly line for mass production of the essential images, Hollywood was actually involved in creating bits of the history that its POW rescue movies would soon fantasize.  President Ronald Reagan and Clint Eastwood jointly sponsored raids in Southeast Asia by retired Colonel Bo Gritz, a would-be POW rescuer.

The first POW rescue movie began shooting amid the media hoopla about the Gritz raids.  Starring Gene Hackman as a thinly-veiled counterpart of Gritz, Uncommon Valor made it to the screen for the Christmas season of 1983.  Reviewers, who at first dismissed it as a “grind actioner” and “bore” with “comic-strip-level heroism,” were soon trying to comprehend the startling audience response to what turned out to be the “biggest movie surprise” of the 1983-84 season.  The best explanation seemed to come from “an ordinary moviegoer who said with satisfaction of the bloody ending in which dozens of the enemy are mowed down by the Americans, ‘We get to win the Vietnam War.’”  The film presents a tableau of a nation run by bureaucrats, politicians, and shadowy secret agents in business suits who revile and betray its true warrior heroes.  The idealism, virility, martial powers, and heroism of men who dedicate their lives to rescuing their abandoned comrades, sons, and fathers are presented as the alternative to a weak, decadent America subjugated by materialism, hedonism, and feminism.  Hackman reestablishes patriarchal order by recruiting a team composed of Vietnam veterans who have all been victimized by an American society that castrates military and manly virtue.  Their rescue mission also rescues themselves from the corrupting and degrading bonds of civilian life, and their most revealing salvations are of team members liberated from emasculating women.

The following year came Missing in Action, with Chuck Norris as retired Special Forces Colonel James Braddock, a fantasized version of Colonel James “Bo” Gritz.  Here the myth took more potent shape, with Norris as lone superhero‑-incarnate in a fetishized male body‑-replacing Hackman’s buddy-buddy team of manly warriors and graphically dramatizing how much more erotically exciting it is to make war, not love.  There is no secret about the meaning and tremendous popular allure of Missing in Action, which were expressed in full-page ads showing Chuck Norris, headband half-restraining his savage locks, sleeves rolled up to reveal bulging biceps, and a huge machine gun seeming to rise from his crotch.

The fully mythic Rambo arrived in 1985.  As he is set free from the American prison, he asks his famous question: “Do we get to win this time?”  Rambo’s superhuman powers come from America’s glorious past.  He despises modern technology and science.  His weapons are bow, arrows, knife.  His final victory comes when, after rescuing the POWs, Rambo hurls himself on top of the prostrate Murdock–the arch bureaucrat who embodies feminized, devious, emasculating civil society–and forces this fake man to whimper and moan in terror of our hero’s gigantic phallic knife.  Thus Rambo projects a fantasy in which the audience gets to violate the enemies of everyday life, the boss and his computerized control over work life, the bureaucrats and politicians who conspire to emasculate America’s virility and betray the American dream.

Only after looking at these and the other POW/MIA films once again did I comprehend this myth of imprisonment, a myth that draws deep emotional power by displacing onto Vietnam the imprisonment, helplessness, and alienation felt by many Americans in an epoch when alien economic, technological, and bureaucratic forces control much of their lives. The man on that flag is American manhood itself, beset by all those bureaucratic and feminine forces seeking to emasculate him. The man incarnates that once great America, now an imprisoned victim, waiting to be rescued by a great man who has contempt for anyone or anything seeking to restrain him.  Someone named, say, John Rambo or Donald Trump.

To understand the roles of the myth in American culture and politics, one needs to look at its history.  For the first fifteen years of U.S. covert and overt combat in Vietnam‑-that is, from 1954 to 1969‑-there was not even a POW/MIA concept.  Its seeds were sown in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive and its aftermath, including President Johnson’s withdrawal from the election campaign, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the tidal wave of urban rebellions, the opening of peace negotiations in Paris, and the nomination of Richard Nixon as the Republican peace candidate.  Remember that in his acceptance speech Nixon declared that “as we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” and then vowed that “if the war is not ended when the people choose in November,” “I pledge to you tonight that the first priority foreign policy objective of our next Administration will be to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.”

Richard Nixon had no intention of ending the Vietnam War without preserving a U.S. client government in Saigon.  But how many Americans in 1968 could have predicted that he would be able to continue the war year after bloody year until 1973? Perhaps even fewer than those who remembered that back in 1954 as Vice President he had been the first Administration official to advocate sending American troops to fight in Vietnam because, as he put it, “the Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war by themselves or govern themselves.”  Nixon, however, had several formidable problems. Negotiations had already opened in Paris.  The Tet Offensive had convinced most Americans and even much of his own Defense Department that the war was unwinnable.  The antiwar movement was growing ever more powerful, domestically and within the armed forces.  There was certainly no enthusiasm for the war.  What could he do?

What he needed was something to wreck the negotiations, shift the apparent goal of the war, counter the antiwar movement, and generate some zeal for continued combat.  Soon after his inauguration, Nixon and an enterprising businessman named H. Ross Perot solved his problem by concocting a brand new issue: demanding a “full accounting” for Americans missing in action and the release of American prisoners of war as a precondition of any peace accord.  This was truly a brilliant, albeit demonic, strategy.

This issue created, for the first time, sizable emotional support for the war.  It deadlocked the Paris negotiations for four years.  It counteracted the antiwar movement. It even provided a basis for continuing economic and political warfare against Vietnam for decades after the United States had conceded defeat.  The POW/MIA issue also neutralized another White House and Pentagon problem that had been building throughout 1968: American revulsion at the torture and murder of the prisoners of U.S. and Saigon forces.

Domestically, the issue was a masterful stroke.  After all, how else could any deeply emotional support for the war be generated?  Certainly not by holding out the old discredited promises of military victory. And who would be willing to fight and die for the notoriously corrupt generals ruling Saigon?  But supporting our own prisoners of war and missing in action was something no loyal American would dare oppose.  It also seemed easy to understand, requiring no knowledge of the history of Vietnam and the war.  Before the end of the war, fifty million POW/MIA bumper stickers had been sold and ten million Americans were wearing POW/MIA bracelets 24 hours every day.

Perot was put in charge of building mass support, and he was soon rewarded.  Thanks to White House intervention, his EDS corporation got 90 percent of the computer work on Medicare claims, enabling Perot to become what one writer in 1971 dubbed “the first welfare billionaire.”

Perot was to buy “full-page ads in the nation’s 100 largest newspapers” and run “United We Stand,” a heart-wrenching program about POWs on TV stations in 59 cities.  Perot himself appeared on the top TV interview shows.  Perot’s United We Stand on November 9 ran full-page advertisements featuring the picture of two small children praying “Bring our Daddy home safe, sound and soon.”  Headlined THE MAJORITY SPEAKS: RELEASE THE PRISONERS, the ads demanded the immediate release of all U.S. POWs.  In December, the Senate and House unanimously passed an outlandish resolution demanding the immediate release of all U.S. POWs.

Nixon used the POW/MIA issue to deadlock the peace negotiations until 1973, when he finally accepted the terms, mostly word for word, which he had been offered when he took office in 1969.

In 1980, while running for president, Ronald Reagan coined the term “noble cause” to describe the Vietnam War, and it was during his presidency that the POW/MIA issue evolved into a full-blown cultural myth exerting enormous political power.  His successor was to bear some of the consequences.

In 1992, while the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was conducting hearings amid a flurry of phony pictures of purported POWs, President George H. W. Bush was fighting for his political life. The very man who had boasted that his war had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all” was trying to win reelection by turning what Bill Clinton had or hadn’t done during the Vietnam War into a major campaign issue.  Meanwhile Ross Perot was campaigning for the White House as the wartime champion of the POWs and as a Rambo who would finally rescue all those still alive–as well as the nation itself.

Unlike Bush and Clinton, Perot had no national party apparatus.  What he used as an effective substitute was a ready-made national infrastructure, a network of activists motivated by religious fervor and coordinated by grassroots organizations: the POW/MIA movement.  Perot chose ex-POW James Stockdale as his running mate and ex-POW Orson Swindle as his campaign manager.  At his typical rally, Perot sat with former POWs and family members on a stage bedecked with POW flags.  POW activists and organizations were central to the petition campaigns that got Perot on the ballot in every state.

Portraying himself as the lone outsider from Texas ready to ride into Washington to save us from its sleazy bureaucrats and politicians who had betrayed the POWs and the American people, Perot cut deeply into President Bush’s constituency.  In the national debates, Perot aimed almost all his fire on Bush and Bush’s Iraq war. Without Perot’s deft undermining of Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton would probably not have gotten to reside in the White House.  And Perot’s national organization would prove to be the incubator of the Tea Party and other organized forces that would take over the Republican Party and elect Donald Trump as America’s savior.

The POW/MIA myth was deployed as a weapon in each of the first three presidential elections of the 21st century.  In each case, the candidate targeted by the weapon lost.

In 2000, John McCain, running as America’s late 20th-century iconic hero—the Vietnam POW—overwhelmed his four Republican opponents in the New Hampshire primary, crushing runner-up George W. Bush by 19 points.  But in the next primary, in South Carolina, his “Straight Talk Express” was derailed by an explosive charge:  that as a member of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs he had viciously betrayed those hundreds or thousands of his fellow POWs left behind in Vietnam.  The main ingredients for the charge came from a 1992 article by Ted Sampley, “John McCain: The Manchurian Candidate,” which claimed that he had been brainwashed by the Vietnamese and might very well be acting as their secret agent.  McCain’s campaign never recovered from the defeat and shattered image inflicted in South Carolina.

In 2004, the defeat of Senator John Kerry by incumbent President George W. Bush was widely attributed to the heavily bankrolled “swiftboating” by “Swift Vets and POWs for Truth,” an assault that torpedoed Kerry’s status as a heroic Vietnam veteran.  But even earlier, the campaign to use the POW/MIA issue to destroy Kerry’s Vietnam credentials was launched by Sidney Schanberg, one of the most fanatical of the POW/MIA cultists.  Using long discredited “evidence” that after the war Vietnam held “many” American POWs to be used “as future bargaining chips,” Schanberg’s “When John Kerry’s Courage Went M.I.A” appeared on February 24^th in the Village Voice and was soon widely disseminated. Schanberg claimed that as chair of the Senate Select Committee, Kerry had deliberately “covered up voluminous evidence” of “perhaps hundreds” of these left-behind POWs.

In 2008, Schanberg recycled his anti-Kerry article, plus other articles that he had been reissuing for decades, as “McCain and the POW Cover-up,” an especially vitriolic assault on John McCain, who was then in what seemed to be a tight presidential race with Barack Obama.  As he had done in earlier articles, Schanberg drew heavily on Ted Sampley’s 1992 article about “The Manchurian Candidate.” There was nothing surprising or even new in Schanberg’s piece.  But what some people found startling, indeed shocking, was where it was published: in the Nation, one of America’s leading liberal and anti-Vietnam War journals.

Even more appalling, liberal and progressive media responded by deliriously ballyhooing Schanberg’s POW/MIA fantasy.  DemocraticUnderground.com ran excerpts from and links to the Nation article, along with ads for POW/MIA flags, pins, and bracelets.    Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Alternet.org, and many others reprinted the Nation piece, some adorning it with large images of the POW/MIA flag.  Democracy Now, the nationally syndicated progressive radio and TV show, on October 23 ran a long adulatory interview with Schanberg and linked on its web site to a longer version of his article published online by The Nation Institute. Scattered protests from some historians, antiwar activists, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War were drowned out by denunciations—from right, left, and center—of McCain as a betrayer of all those POWs abandoned in Vietnam.

By then, some observers of the American cultural and political scene were becoming aware of a visible ultra-right movement, growing directly out of the POW/MIA fetish.  A spectacular manifestation of the movement had burst into view in 1988 as the first Rolling Thunder motorcade roared into Washington.  Thousands of bikers, flying the black POW/MIA flag along with the stars and stripes and an assortment of white-nationalist, misogynist, and jingoist insignia, then encamped for two days of heavily lubricated demonstrating for the rescue of the POWs.  In 2018, half a million bikers participated in Rolling Thunder.

When Trump says, “”I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,” he is sending a message, very lightly coded, to this movement.   These are the “second amendment people” he threatened to unleash during the 2016 presidential debates.  When he picks a fight with McCain’s ghost, he revels in the responses from the corporate press and the political establishment because these responses are proof that they don’t know the code language that Trump shares with his most devoted followers.

Remember when the election of 2016 was going to be a showdown between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton?  Well of course Donald Trump deftly disposed of the Bushes and Clintons.  Now he evidently thinks that the ghost of John McCain is interfering with his consolidation of power.  Why? To answer that question, we need to understand why the black and white POW/MIA flags still fly all over America.

Spectacular Violence as a Weapon of War Against the Yellow Vests

On March 23, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Violence is a spectacular weapon deployed by the ruling class to discredit movements from below and justify their repression. It is spectacular in the sense of being a great and powerful political tool for governing the masses, and keeping them in their place. In order to do this, however, the weapon of violence is spectacularin a second sense: it creates a carefully orchestrated mise en scène that seeks to render ruling class violence invisible, while simultaneously transforming acts of resistance into prodigious spectacles of criminal violence.

This is how Act 18 of the Yellow Vests is currently being presented by the mass media: at the precise moment at which the government was concluding its democratic consultation of the people via Emmanuel Macron’s “Grand Débat,” the Yellow Vests have unleashed an inordinate amount of violence that now needs to be repressed in the strongest possible terms. The president of the Champs-Elysées Committee, Jean-Noël Reinhardt, declared in an interview in which he is surrounded by the microphones of many of the major press outlets, that the movement is no longer one of the Yellow Vests, but rather of Black Vests that simply “express hatred and the will to destroy.” Proclaiming that this situation cannot be allowed to continue because of its impact on commercial and tourist activity, as well as its defamation of the global symbol of the Champs-Élysées, his statement bleeds seamlessly into the declaration made by the Prime Minster, Édouard Philippe: new measures will be put in place to prohibit protests in certain locations and allow for even more aggressive police crackdowns.

In this moment of the spectacularization of the damage caused to insured private property of the commercial and luxury industry, which is presented as the quintessence of “violence,” it is notable that the General Secretary of the Unsa police union, Philippe Capon, has publicly explained that the police received the order on Saturday to notintervene, because there was an explicit choice to “let a certain number of things be broken.” The timing could not be better because the government has its hands tied. After a few paltry concessions in December, as well as the discursive theatrics of the “Grand Débat,” the Yellow Vests have not gone home and have survived both the winter and the extreme forms of repressive state violence unleashed against them.

This current spectacle of violence thereby serves two purposes. First and foremost, it dissimulates the structural violence of capitalism and plutocratic oligarchy, which are the primary sources of the current uprisings. Living conditions for the masses are increasingly unacceptable, and the traditional system of party politics and unions is dysfunctional. One of the protest signs that goes to the heart of matters simply states: “Violence is poverty [La violence c’est la pauvreté].” Rather than taking seriously the ubiquitous and quotidian nature of thisviolence, which is the violence of capitalist inequality, spectacular “violence” is constructed precisely in order to distract from the daily destruction of life under capitalist rule. It is understood as a temporary and disturbing interruption of the status quo, which needs to be eradicated. It is the “violence” of burning a bank, rather than that of founding one, or more generally the violence of the banking system in its daily role of securing hegemony for the global ruling class.

Secondly, the spectacle of violence orchestrated by the state and mass media functions in order to attach the scarlet letter of V for Violence to the Yellow Vest movement in order to simultaneously criminalize it and justify its brutal repression. There have been numerous cases where the police have been caught on camera damaging property in order to blame it on protestors, and many officers have been photographed and filmed carrying hammers, presumably for this purpose. At least one member of the riot police has spoken out against the violence deployed against non-violent protestors, which has been encouraged by the Minister of the Interior, as well as against the effort to foment violence in the protests.

Elite circles in France have not been completely successful in this aspect of their propaganda campaign, because even liberal institutions like the United Nations, the European Council, the European Parliamentand Amnesty International have seen through their attempt to render state violence invisible, or at the very least justified. The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, prepared a memorandum on February 26^ththat summarizes some of the violence, while also criticizing the lack of precision and rigor in the statistics being kept by the state and the media: “According to figures from the Ministry of the Interior 12 122 LBD rounds, 1 428 instant tear gas grenades and 4 942 hand-held sting grenades were fired or thrown between the beginning of the yellow vest movement and 4 February 2019.” Based on the calculations of an independent journalist cited in the report, there have been “38 wounds to upper limbs including 5 lost hands, 52 wounds to lower limbs, 3 wounds to the genitals and 189 head wounds including 20 people who have lost an eye.” Medics and journalists have been regularly attacked, and there have been numerous brutal assaults and a record number of protestors locked up.

Nevertheless, significant sectors of the state, the mass media and the punditocracy have gone to great lengths to cloak this systematic deployment of state violence against non-violent protestors, medics, journalists and bystanders. Emmanuel Macron has distilled the very essence of liberal ideology regarding the state by flatly proclaiming that we cannot speak of “repression” or of “police violence” in France today because “these words are unacceptable under the rule of law [dans un état de droit].” Strictly speaking, then, there can be no such thing as “state violence” because the state stands in opposition to violence, and the latter can only come from savage and anarchic forces outside it.

Here we see the double movement of spectacular violence in full force. On the one hand, the state strives to dissimulate its spectacular exploitation through capitalist rule and its equally spectacular repression of any resistance to it. On the other hand, it seeks to incite or create spectacular “violence” in the protests in order to simultaneously discredit them and use this spectacle as cover for its own increased exploitation and repression. These are the two primary aspects of the spectacular violence unfolding in France right now.

It is imperative to identify this tactic for what it is, and to find new strategies for struggling against its extremely pernicious effects. Otherwise, we risk succumbing to the ideological inversion diagnosed so presciently by Malcolm X in a lecture given on December 13, 1964, in which he explained that the press is so powerful in its “image-making role” that “it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s a criminal.”

This article was collectively workshopped in the Radical Education Department.