"There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power, and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Paul Craig Roberts, Good-Bye: Truth has fallen and taken Liberty with it.
Early in the morning on Friday, September 24, FBI agents in Chicago and Minnesota's Twin Cities kicked in the doors of anti-war activists, brandishing guns, spending hours rifling through their homes. The FBI took away computers, photos, notebooks and other personal property. Residents were issued subpoenas to appear before a grand jury in Chicago. It was just the latest in the ongoing crackdown on dissent in the U.S., targeting peace organizers as supporters of "foreign terrorist organizations."
Veterans of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are now challenging the occupation of Chicago.
This week, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is holding the largest meeting in its 63-year history there. Protests and rallies will confront the two-day summit, facing off against a massive armed police and military presence. The NATO gathering has been designated a "National Special Security Event" by the Department of Homeland Security, empowering the U.S. Secret Service to control much of central Chicago, and to employ unprecedented authority to suppress the public's First Amendment right to dissent.
Rick Salutin used to be a respectable columnist at The Globe & Mail. Then he got fired, and happily (as he tells it), became “unrespectable” again.
But the fact that the left-wing dissident ever had a weekly column in a national mainstream publication speaks to the evolution of dissent in Canada, he argues.
“Think about the media for a minute in the 1960s,” Salutin told a crowd of over 100 people who gathered at the Ottawa Public Library for a lecture on the health of dissent, hosted by Prism Magazine on April 21.
Reading AK Thompson's book Black Bloc, White Riot kept bringing to mind one particular memory from the Summit of the Americas protests in Quebec City a decade ago.
Join us for a public dialogue about the politics of dissent.
Keynote speakers:
- Peter Rosenthal, G20 lawyer
- Farrah Miranda, No One Is Illegal - Toronto
10 a.m. - 5:30 a.m.
WLU Social Work, 120 Duke St. W
7 p.m.
Evening keynote, Little Bean Cafe
Academic freedom, journalism & democracy, creative resistance, the Radical Choir and more!
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