It's spring, and OWS is back, with its sly and fraudulent "democratic" demonstrations, pushing on police fences, pushing on policemen physically, and calling themselves a "non-violent movement" -- confusing -- and deliberately so -- the ideals and traditions of civil disobedience, i.e. the passive and peaceful sit-in -- with in-your-face aggressive "direct action" and self-justifying mendacious law-faring to pretend such disobedience shouldn't earn an arrest. I notice Ad-busters CEO, Kalle Lasn, uses the term "militant non-violence" to cunningly describe the OWS mode. It's really deceptive -- don't literally have a knife or a gun or a club in your hand or throw rocks (at least most of the time), but push and shove and yell and get in your face and pretend you didn't encroach or grab to avoid arrest for urban camping after hours.
Wall Street Journal reporter and columnist James Taranto got it exactly right. Jeff Rae, an OWS demonstrator who was among those who blocked the Brooklyn Bridge and crowed about it on Twitter, taunting police, can't exactly cry "foul" when police use his tweets as evidence of his intent to block the street. What's so disgusting about these OWS infantiles is that they demand the "right" to block a bridge in the name of the First Amendment, they insist on the "need" to engage in what they claim is "non-violent civil disobedience" because they think there is a deeper wrong with Wall Street and capitalism, but they won't be accountable and face the music of the consequences for those actions: that they will be arrested.
Instead, they think they can go on huffing and puffing about "police abuse" and whine well past the sell-by date that "the whole world is watching" when the whole point of civil disobedience is that yes, you do get arrested -- and hey, you aren't so civil. Video shows how much they push fences and police; one OWS protester is on trial for elbowing police; another is on trial for trying to grab a gun and radio. This isn't going limp and falling to the ground and putting out your hands to be cuffed.
Taranto, in calling out the "criminal stupidity" of OWS really upends the whole argument the "Internet freedom fighters" are waging to demand maximum access for disrupters and riots on social media and minimum -- or no -- interference by government:
These people may be tech-savvy, but they're so street-dumb that it apparently didn't occur to them not to post incriminating statements all over the Internet. A further irony is that the claims of "entrapment" are not only false but inverted. The lawbreaking "protesters" evidently sought to provoke arrests, which they then claimed were unjustified. If we were prosecuting these cases, we would demand a formal apology to the NYPD as a condition for any plea bargain.
As Mayor Bloomberg acidly put it: "You want to get arrested? We'll accommodate you." That is indeed what you have to say to the entitlement-happy law-faring nerds in OWS who think they can have their "civil disobedience" cake and eat it to -- without eating the dry PB&J they have down at central booking.
Today, OWS has some competition downtown at 26 Wall Street as the Catholics are protesting the HHS decision inflicting the demand to pay for contraceptives and abortion-inducers with health care plans. Good! The demonstrations are in cities all over the US today. I don't know how well they will be attended but Catholics are getting visibly organized against this menace from Obama, a deliberate assault on freedom of conscience. OWS has focused more on Marxist economic prescriptions and class hatred, but if they feel they can advance their cause, I won't be surprised if they take up the sex/cultural war-cries of the left as well, especially if they literally have Catholics demonstrating nearby.
I think as spring fuels the young men's fancies to occupy, we will see the Marxist-Leninist underskirts showing much more in the movement than ever before. That's because the strategy is to use the weakness of the Obama administration and the confusion and disruption he has caused to push harder from the left to radicalize him. That means more "direct action" and forthright destructive calls. Obama himself is gambling that radicalization and more "in your face" policies are going to win the elections -- that's why he has assaulted the Catholics on the HHS decision.
There isn't any doubt that the radical leftist and anarchist views that the Bolsheviks disseminated and installed on the Eurasian continent are very much the spring of inspiration for OWS.
Streetwise Professor had an excellent column aptly datelined November 7 last year which traces a likely "agent of influence" in the OWS/RT/Anonymous blogosphere named "Zero Hedge". I had missed it but noted it now because Edward Lucas flagged it today. Sure, the guilt of the father doesn't extend to the son, who in fact may not be any kind of actual agent of influence but simply more of a fellow traveler. The method doesn't have to be "paid for by Moscow gold" still to be used by the extreme left -- packaging the memes inside a sandwich of legitimate news.
Perhaps the comments are closed now because I couldn't get a comment to go through, so here it is:
Very good public service, thank you. RT is definitely in the tank with OWS and visa versa, the old propaganda shop of the KGB just never got dismantled and still tracks that Soviet third-worldist anti-Western groove. And of course, look at RT's recent talk show host acquisition, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks' antisemitic rep in Russia.
Sublime Oblivion: so what if "most Russians" (on the Internet, anyway) applaud your pro-Kremlin anti-Western and anti-capitalist blog posts? One thing you can say about the Soviet Union, it metastasized the sovok very effectively. They massacred some 50 million people deliberately, and that included some of the best intellectuals and educated, thoughtful persons, and they have never recovered. If the "aggressive-obedient majority" (as Yury Afansyev called them) shows up in numbers to applaud your blog or sneer at my blog (as they did when it was in inosmi.ru the other day), so what? They have a lot of help getting that way with their totalitarian past, their zombie state TV and Nashisti and other type of state organizations penetrating all aspects of civil society. Where else could you put video cameras in every polling station and still expect to win by cheating, especially in the Caucasus? Because you already own the TV and the NGO and party registration process. Prevailing doesn't mean you are right, it merely means you are more of a thug.
Every time Putin rages about "Hillary" funding some little Russian NGO with some tiny grant from NED or something, I simply point to RT and its budget and the way it has introduced itself into the meme stream everywhere, even with ads on New York City bus shelters. Yeah, brilliant branding that "RT" -- it's like how KFC took the word "fried" out of the view.
In general, I think studying the active measures and agents of influence of Russia is a worthy occupation, especially on the Occupation.
You can learn a lot from just the Post's visit to the camp, Salon, which is pro-OWS, in this piece about Kalle Lasn, and from the Mondoweiss interview or see these hilarious critiques of Ad Busters from disgruntled Anonymous rank and file.
The point is not to say OMGZors Ohnoes Lasn is a communist agent and OWS is a communist plot blah blah blah! The right-wing conspiracy blogs make much of this and find books mentioning him as a socialist, etc. He doesn't appear to be an avowed socialist but is more of an anarchist and conceptual artist.
He fled communist Estonia as a child and his family for a time had to live in a DP camp in Germany. But what's relevant is that Lasn is typical of a certain kind of East European refugee who in fact does articulate a set of anti-Western, anti-corporate views and whose experiences have shaped those views, coming from a country with both resistance and collusion with communism and fascism. Some refugees from the "Captive Nations" become staunch conservatives and anti-communists; others are the opposite, and it's more than fine to debate them. Some become nihilists.
These are ideological battles fought fiercely in their homelands, and to some extent in their adopted countries. The problem with liberal politics in America is that no one can ever debate communism without being smeared as a McCarthyite, so it dumbs down debate. I've always rejected those attempts, because I think condemnation of communism is legitimate because it's antithetical to human rights.
I've written some on the Marxist-Leninist ideologies in OWS -- I marvel that people so strenuously try to deny this, but denial is in fact one of the hallmarks of this kind of Bolshevik-style stealth socialism -- in posts here, here, here and here.
Why is it important to track and identify the socialist and communist underpinnings of OWS? Because these are criminal and deadly ideologies that have demonstratively led to mass crimes of humanity in a number of countries, with millions of deaths, and, needless to say, they don't work without coercion and violence. They don't work, period. It's not as if you can posit some "better" version of them in some better setting in some wealthier country where you can do less damage. The criminality is contained within the ideology, and it's no accident, comrade, that crimes such as theft, rape, drug abuse and even murder have emerged in the camps. This is human nature. Communism and socialism do not fix human nature; they exploit its weaknesses with terrible outcomes. Capitalism, with all its flaws, has the means within it to correct its flaws; communism doesn't. And so on.
It's not a debate you're going to win with Mr. X or Sublime Oblivion, but you keep going over the arguments so that you can consolidate a following and can resist the Bolshevik-style takeovers.
The Big Lie is alive and well with Occupy Wall Street -- cunning and manipulative just like their long-ago Bolshevik ancestors, they first of all lie about their nature (extreme leftist); they lie about their intentions (to overthrow capitalism) and their lie about their methods (that they are just "peaceful" or "civil disobedience"). But as Jesus said, by their fruits ye shall know them.
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