When the Police chose a Mayor

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Monday October 31, 2016 · 8:55 PM PDT

2016/10/31 · 20:55

Frank Wilkinson chatting with Martin Luther King

In the USA, the police are supposed to be accountable to the people they serve. Police departments should report to elected officials and serve the interests of the public expressed through these officials. In practice police departments are often an independent wing of the government, and may choose to use their privileged position to sway elections.

In the years after WWII, civic officials in Los Angeles developed plans to provide public housing in an airy, pleasant neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles called Chavez Ravine. Poor and working class families would no longer need to live in stifling industrial neighborhoods, but could enjoy the pleasures of suburbia opening up to the middle class of the day. The housing was supported by a popular Los Angeles Mayor, Fletcher Bowron, with Frank Wilkenson, an idealistic advocate for the poor, spearheading the effort as head of the Los Angeles Housing Authority. Noted architects Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander were chosen to design the prestigious Chavez Ravine project.

With the active intervention of the LAPD (and the support of J Edgar Hoover’s FBI), the planned housing would be scrapped. Fletcher Bowron, a favorite to win re-election as mayor, was to lose to an anti-public housing Norris Poulson. Frank Wilkinson was to become persona non-grata. The result was nothing short of a political coup.

Quoting:

Enter the Los Angeles Times. Enter Police Chief Parker, known for his brutality and racism. Enter the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover who had been keeping tabs on Wilkinson since 1942. Cue the personal attacks against city councilmen who favor Elysian Park Heights. Cue an onslaught of editorials linking public housing to “creeping socialism.” Cue the rumors that Frank Wilkinson is a Communist.
On August 29, 1952, while Frank was testifying in a routine eminent domain hearing about Chavez Ravine, an attorney for the real estate lobby suddenly pulled a dossier out of his briefcase and stood up. “Now Mr. Wilkinson, will you please tell us what organizations, political or otherwise, you have belonged to since 1931?” Stunned, Frank turned to his LAHA attorney who shrugged. Frank answered – detailing his professional associations, but refusing to reveal his political affiliations which, he stated, were irrelevant to the issues at hand. At which point the situation swiftly deteriorated. The hearing was suspended; the City Council immediately passed a resolution calling upon the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to investigate; and the courtroom filled with news reporters.
“In thirty minutes,” Frank recalls, “I went from being one of the more respected citizens in city government to being a total outcast.”

The next day, he was suspended from his job.

from www.americanpopularculture.com/...

Frank Wilkinson, in the McCarthy era, was unable to find a job. A Quaker friend hired him as the night janitor at a department store — it was too dangerous to have a known communist sympathizer visible to the public during the day.

The land that had been purchased to provide model low income housing was instead sold to the Walter O’Malley organization to construct a baseball stadium for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Police officials, supposedly serving the public, had participated in a political coup, swaying an election based on unfounded charges of subversion. The charges were amplified through the then-new media of television. An entire community lost their promise of affordable housing due to this political manipulation. Respected government officials had their professional careers ruined.

Law enforcement was the agent for bringing down a popular politician advocating a progressive agenda.

Trump's Rhinoceros

DBoon

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Sunday October 02, 2016 · 9:41 AM PDT

2016/10/02 · 09:41

Corneliu_Zelea_Codreanu_archive_Legionary_Movement_Romanian_Christian_Nationalists.jpg — Romanian Iron Guard rally

European Fascism developed indigenous movements in many countries, not just Germany and Italy. In Hungary, there was the Arrow Cross, in Romania Iron Guard. Croatia had the Ustaše and Slovakia it own variant, clerical fascism under Jozef Tiso's régime When the countries were occupied by the Nazis, these indigenous Fascist movements did much of the dirty work in eliminating Jews and others often with extreme brutality.

Eugene Ionesco grew up in Romania during the time when the Iron Cross seduced many of the young and intellectuals. He observed first hand the seductive power of these movements.

In 1959, Ionesco wrote the play Rhinoceros as a metaphor for this conversion of formerly intelligent and sane individuals into the moral and political equivalent of non-human brutes. He explored the many rationalizations of the folks swept by this movement, how they trivialized and justified submission. He explored the fascination humans have for brute power that made Fascism compelling.

At the start of the play, an individual rhinoceros was sighted rampaging through a small French village and noted as a surprising novelty. Their very existence is questioned, and once acknowledged as real, arguments were made they should not be allowed. The numbers of these wild brutes increased, and it became apparent that they were former humans transformed into beasts. What started as a frightening, unbelievable anomaly was quickly accepted. Staunch opponents of the rhinoceros invasion turned into supporters, believing in their own philosophical rationalization. As one character said, "Humanism is dead, those who follow it are just old sentimentalists". The opposition became co-opted, as what was once a shocking instance of sub human brutality became the norm. At the end there is single hold out, who is reduced to hurling abuse at passing armies of rhinoceros from a window, having no effect on the march of brute power below.

While the fable was meant as an allegory of pre-war European Fascism, it has a broader meaning about the acceptance of sub human brutality. The phenomenon is first denied, then viewed as an an isolated anomaly, gradually subsumes popular discourse, then pushes opposition to the margins. What was once unthinkably inhuman and barbaric becomes unquestionable common wisdom. Opponents are isolated individuals, shouting their disgust from windows, questioning their efforts as a march of unthinking power subsumes them. This is not peculiar to Europe in the 1930s — Rhinoceros applies to any society that can be seduced by an anti-human political movement.

We cannot let the growth of a brutal inhuman political movement be treated as a novelty or as a television reality show. We risk trivializing evil when we attack personal quirks rather than the underlying evil of the entire movement. We need to take the growth of anti-human movements seriously and not let these movements normalize their moral poison.

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