Masters of Provocation

 Ever since Trump started deploying federal troops to U.S. cities, I've been calling this Trump's "Peterloo." I quoted the lines from Shelley in response to the 1819 massacre—when British troops open fired on protesting workers: 

I met Murder on the way

He had a mask like Castlereagh 

With all the controversy over the masks that Trump's agents wear—to disguise their identities as they go around tackling and manhandling people in courthouses and places of business—I thought the lines (indeed, the very title) of Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" seemed eerily apt. 

There was only one thing, though, that kept this episode from being an outright Peterloo: nobody had been shot yet. 

But last night—that suddenly changed. Federal agents shot and severely wounded someone in Chicago. And now, Illinois is the latest target of Trump's plans to mobilize the National Guard—the latest "training ground," as Trump sees it, for the military's combat operations. 

We get closer to another Peterloo; another Kent state; an American Tiananmen, by the day. 

Of course, in the shooting that happened in Chicago, there are already competing narratives about who was the aggressor in the encounter. 

But this too is a constant feature of these kinds of episodes. Since we're talking about Chicago—let's mention another famous shooting of protesters that happened in that same locale—the Haymarket massacre of the 19th century, in which police opened fire on striking workers. 

There, too—there are multiple divergent versions of the story as to who shot first, who made and lobbed the bomb that caused police to open fire, etc. 

But one thing is clear: no one would have gotten killed if there hadn't been such a heavy-handed and militarized response to the workers' simple, reasonable plea for an eight hour work day in the first place. 

So too, in this case: I don't know who started the altercation yesterday in Chicago; but I do know this: so long as Trump is mobilizing troops to tackle people and brutalize them on city streets; so long as he is abducting innocent people and separating parents from their children; it will constantly create incendiary situations ripe for violence. 

Trump is, after all, a "master of provocation"—as the left-wing poet Harry Alan Potamkin once described the cops and bosses responsible for the massacre in Haymarket Square. 

Masters of provocation! Pinkertons of prey! as Potamkin wrote. 

Of course, setting up these scenes of violence is exactly what Trump wants. That's what makes him such a master of provocation. It enables him to justify sending in even more troops and loosening even more civil liberties. 

After all—is not Trump's new favorite move to try to invoke the specter of "anarchism" and "antifa violence" to justify cracking down on progressive civil society—instigating bogus federal criminal investigations into mainstream liberal NGOs and philanthropic organizations? 

(Viz. Trump's current antisemitic persecution campaign—borrowed from the playbook of Viktor Orban's Hungary—of George Soros's Open Society Foundations.)

This too has resonance with the experience of Haymarket—which proved the pretext for a nationwide hysteria over the menace of anarchism, resulting in several unfair trials and the wrongful execution of four alleged instigators of the riot. 

It was his condemnation of these events—his criticism of the hanging of the anarchists in Chicago—that got Carl Hamblin tarred and feathered, and his press wrecked, in Edgar Lee Masters's great poem from the Spoon River Anthology. 

And so too—I have no doubt that the violence in Chicago and other cities that Trump is actively trying to instigate will in turn prove the pretext for the wrecking of many more liberal presses—and the tarring and feathering of many a progressive dissident.