Outside the Bubble

As I was walking through the center of Barcelona yesterday, I happened upon a pro-Palestinian and frankly anti-Israeli protest march. See the video I shot of the event here. As an American, I have to say I found this quite refreshing considering the Goebbels-style "big lie" idiocy that has been served in the US press concerning the Gaza Flotilla slaughter, and it appears, widely adopted by most of the movers and shakers in the US government.




But the content of the protest was not the only remarkable thing to these American eyes. There were a number of things that contrasted sharply with how such an event--that is if such an event could ever take place on the largest Avenue of a very large city on a Saturday afternoon without months of previous planning--would occur in today's USA.



The first of these was the near total absence of police presence. Yes, police were there, but they were there as passive onlookers, citizens looking at other citizens with neither fear nor a desire to intimidate. Remember how it used to be before the advent free speech zones and the wholesale recruitment of police into the business of suppressing dissident thought? Well that's what we had here.

The second was the fact that the crowd was largely Catalan, that is, made up of people from this city who were publicly demonstrating a concern for people very far away.

Remember before the press constantly told us that "all politics are local" and that people "always vote their pocketbooks"? I do.
Back then, people used to have a belief that the mistreatment of people far away was also their concern, especially if it involved monies from their own government. But here I was in the midst of a crowd from a country that is not generally implicated in the Middle Eastern mess that, on the face of it, still seemed to believe that politics could be or should be something more than a referendum on one's pocketbook or on one's parochial concerns.



Silly them. Don't they understand that being concerned with mistreated peoples in other places is so yesterday? Don't they understand that they are citizen are there merely to carry out the "missions" that the empire has mapped out for each and every one of them?

The third was the crowd's ability to, as our blessed press likes to say, connect the dots. Where we come from people are not real big on cause and effect. Rather, we prefer to wallow in a strange mixture of self-pity and historical ignorance. But here in Barcelona we had a protest leader screaming into the microphone, a man by the way from a labor union, who was chanting about the fact that Israel's impunity was made possible by the indulgence of the European Community and by Israel's overwhelming control of certain financial sectors, and from there, large swaths of the media landscape.

Well, there must be a lot of anti-Semites in Barcelona. Either that, or a lot of people with a very tenuous grasp of international political realities in the US. Take your pick.