A journalist myself, I was outraged by the arrests of The Register-Guard reporter and photographer who were on their professional duty to report the brutal attack against the Cascadia forest defenders at the Warner Creek protest site. Outrageous is too light a word to use... It reminds me very much of those atrocities and human rights violations that I evidenced and confronted personally being a journalist and participant in a dissident movement in the former Soviet Union. This insolent seizure of a newspaper photographers camera with film and of a reporters notes by federal officials -- it is exactly what the KGB used to do...

Well, after seven years of living in the United States I no longer have illusions about the American so-called "democracy". But the longer I live here, the more I see obvious and direct similarities between the Soviet communist tyranny back in Russia and the capitalist "democracy" here.

Those few idealists in this country who still care and who courageously are putting their young lives into danger trying to protect the last remains of Oregons old growth forest are pretty much like those martyrs and heroes in the former USSR, dissidents who sacrificed themselves for a better future for the silent majority. Cascadia forest defenders are fighting to save precious ancient trees, to save Oregons nature from destruction by the timber industry which is driven by profit and blinded by greed. Those young men and women want to preserve it for all of you, for the future generations of Americans.

On the other hand, U.S. Forest Service enforcing their questionable "law" custom-made by sold-out corporate whores on Capitol Hill in Washington, are acting now just like the KGB, going as far as a serious violation of constitutional First Amendment rights and freedom of press.

As I see it, this outrageous attack on the Warner Creek protesters, the arrest of two newsmen, and keeping those four innocent young girls (who, by the way, can fully qualify as a political prisoners) for nothing in jail, it make me believe that in some respects the reality here is already getting as bad or even worse than it was in the totalitarian Soviet system.

August, 1996

This article was first published in The Register Guard, August 22, 1996
and also in The Other Paper, September, 1996