by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Chen Guangchen, the Chinese human activist, got four separate articles in the New York Times for May 5.
Jane Perlez and Michael Wines reported from Beijing on the deal that would get Chen and his family visas to the US, for him to take up a fellowship at NYU.
Andrew Jacobs weighed in with the news that “Once exiled, nettlesome prisoners of conscience, like Chen Guangcheng, almost invariably lose their ability to grab headlines in the West and to command widespread sympathy both in China and abroad.” The op-ed page carried Wang Dan reflecting that “It’s the right decision for Chen Guangcheng to study in the United States. Democracy and human rights are of great importance, but so are a family’s love and affection.”
A mop-up NYT editorial declared that “What seems to have been forgotten in all the political roiling here is that this episode is first and foremost an embarrassment for China and a glaring reminder of its abysmal mistreatment of its own citizens.”
Let’s suppose that Chen remains spunky once he’s settled in at NYU, and decides some time during the summer to join an Occupy demonstration, along with his wife.
Here’s what they might reasonably expect by way of treatment from the NYPD, if we are to believe – which I do – a report on new police strategies against protestors by David Graeber, anthropologist and creative force in the Occupy movement, on the Naked Capitalism site for May 3.
Graeber begins with a conversation with an old friend:
A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.“What happened to you?” I asked. “Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.” “Again?” someone said. We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.
“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.“ Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken….Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting “stop resisting!” as she shouted back “I’m not resisting!” At one point though, she said, she did tell them her glasses had fallen to the sidewalk next to her, and announced she was going to reach over to retrieve them. That apparently gave them all the excuse they needed. One seized her right arm and bent her wrist backwards in what she said appeared to be some kind of marshal-arts move, leaving it not broken, but seriously damaged. “I don’t know exactly what they did to my left wrist—at that point I was too busy screaming at the top of my lungs in pain. But they broke it.”
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