Even before some of them girded themselves for combat with police, donning masks and wielding black shields emblazoned with skeletons, the “Occupy” protesters in Oakland, Calif., engaged in a willfully destructive act.
They shut down the fifth-busiest container port in America. Why would anyone acting in the name of people harmed by the Great Recession interrupt the flow of commerce, especially at a hub employing dockworkers and truckers? It was a symbolic blow against our economic system as such, and by definition a radical act.
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It’s become clear during the past few weeks that there is a lawlessness at the heart of Occupy Wall Street. It has created little ungoverned spaces in cities around the country, into which homeless people, addicts, and criminals have flowed. It believes that the rules of a fundamentally corrupt system shouldn’t apply to it, and its self-image depends on conflict with the agents of that system, the police.
When asked to do something by an officer of the law, the instinct of most people is to comply, especially if they are violating a rule. The instinct of many of the Occupy protesters is to resist, then inflate their arrests or clashes with the police into a monumental struggle with the forces of oppression. “The whole world is watching.”
There is an honorable tradition of civil disobedience in America. If an injustice is so grave and the system is so rigged that it can’t be changed through normal democratic means, as in the Jim Crow South, breaking the law may be a recourse. The civil-rights protesters did it peacefully and with dignity. The difference between them and the Occupy protesters challenging the cops is the difference between self-sacrificial heroes and ideologically drunk punks and whiners.
In Oakland about a week ago, when police cleared out an encampment near City Hall, protesters fought back, and roughly 100 of them were arrested and one gravely wounded. It was all avoidable if they had peaceably complied with an order to vacate their illegal makeshift campsite. In retaliation, the protesters called for a “general strike,” a phrase redolent of revolutionary action.
The strike wasn’t anywhere close to general, since most people with jobs don’t have time for idle political indulgences. But the protesters turned out a few thousand. Even before it truly got out of control at night, protesters were smashing windows and spraying graffiti on walls. After shutting down the port, a black-clad contingent headed downtown, where they set fires and threw firecrackers, rocks, and bottles at the police. In a perfect expression of wanton destructiveness, they attacked road signs.
Other Oakland protesters tried to restrain the violence, without much luck. Such is the dynamic of mobs. With no specific agenda and no standards for disentangling legitimate demands from lunacy, the Occupy movement is prone to get more extreme rather than less. A free-floating radicalism is written into its DNA.
The catchy, initial promotional poster for Occupy Wall Street designed by the left-wing magazine Adbusters depicted a ballerina standing on the iconic Wall Street bull surrounded by riot police. In its absurdist aesthetic and forecast of conflict with the authorities, the poster presciently represented the future of the Occupy movement.
Everyone acknowledges the right of the Occupiers to protest and to live however they please. They can request permits to march every day, and try to levitate the Federal Reserve building if they want. They can, in a fine American tradition, go off and create freakish communes where they hold goods in common and live in splendid squalor. But they shouldn’t be allowed to break the rules while building fetid encampments on property not their own, and their contempt for the police should be tolerated by no one.
Mere protests probably won’t satisfy the movement, though. It is a self-styled “occupation,” which inherently involves taking what is not yours. It’s already ugly and will probably get more so.
Your remark questioning why they would target the Port of Oakland is likely answered by the involvement of the unions who "stand in solidarity" with the OWS people. Yes, they work there, but they're not shy about exhibiting a little muscle towards the "greedy capitalists" with whom they collectively bargain. Didn't stop them from an attack in Washington a month or so ago. And looking at the oddly all-black uniformed rioters suggests that a part of this movement is hardly the "spontaneous, independent" movement that Nancy Pelosi supports, but something tightly organized and perhaps sinister.
And where is the President? Where is the call for a stop to violence? A stop to interfering with economic activity? A call for obeying the laws and municipal codes?
He foments and supports via the absence of what he SHOULD be saying.
Obama is a lefty community organizer. That seems to be his most-apparent skill. His playbook includes rules for demonizing, isolating and dividing others - on healing divisions or bringing people together? Not so much.
It was only a complicit media and liberal wishful thinking that allowed this man to be portrayed as a healer and uniter. He is a far left, rigid ideologue who really doesn't care much for the country he volunteered to serve.
It is not surprising to me that the OWS mob inflicted violence on the Oakland port where many dock hands and trucker work. I participated in the Vietnam anti-war movement in the 60s. I know these people and I understand the mentality of leftists.
They chant 'power to the people' but it isn't really the people that they serve. Their actions are meant to serve the cause of violence. They like it. Hitting 'the man' where it hurts him is what they are about. Destruction and Disruption are their credos and their objectives.
Don't be surprised that these mobs get more and more violent. They feed on this. Eventually even these passive governments are going to be forced to respond in a forceful way. It is the ONLY way to stop them. The more you tolerate them the more you encourage them to escalate to violence.
You can only stop them one way---you must crush them with overwhelming force. If you do not they will escalate the violence to unacceptable levels and you will be responsilbe through your tolerance of the consequences.
Couldn't agree more, I was there too. Those of us who were on the Left understand things about the dynamics of the movement the paleo cons cannot fathom. Conservatives, please, study the Left. OWS IS the Paris Commune. Alistair Horne has treated this in, "The Fall of Paris, The Siege and the Commune, 1870-71." The Left has a very narrow view of the world and their actions will follow the Jacobin pattern. Perplexed, you would love this book, oh, and that last paragraph of your comment; From your lips, to God's ear.
Of course they have a right to protest; even though what I disagree with what they say, I believe they should be free to exercise their free speech and assembly. What they do NOT have the right to do (but seem to feel entitled to anyways) is to trespass, disrupt traffic and camp out in public places where camping has long been prohibited. Most of them do not seem to grasp the distinction, and those who do reject it due to their revolutionary mentality.
These clowns have been ‘occupying’ a park opposite the state capitol in my hometown of Denver, not far from where I work. They mostly have just been a nuisance, but there have been a few clashes when the politicians finally let the police start enforcing the laws the protesters had been flouting. It’s frustrating to me that it was allowed to go on for so long.
Lots of questions about "Where is the President". Well, he can't come out in support of anything other than OWS. That would seriously damage his leftist bona fides. Since he did that already once, he can rely on that statement going forward without compounding his mistake. Although I am sure he calculates that it is not a mistake. Once the violence escalates to the point that police must also escalate their techniques and responses, O will come out with a statement somewhat to the effect of - "The police acted stupidly."
Van Jones, who cut his revolutionary teeth in Oakland, encourages his minions to create enough trouble that the president will be "forced" to do what he actually wants to do but can't because of the democratic process.
The worse it gets, the more people will demand that something be done to stop the rioting, and suddenly the president accrues even more power to himself.
You are absolutely correct. See how easy it is for people to lose track of how many options O has to blame others and acquire more power. However, what you are talking about, in my opinion, are the first steps toward martial law aimed at shutting down the elections in 2012.
So maybe he goes both routes. The police will "act stupidly" - thus encouraging more violence. He then has to use the military to bring peace under your scenario. After all, only the federal gov't under his control was able to calm the dissent. And the cult of personality is continued and cemented.
"Such is the dynamic of mobs." So many media people I see/hear fail to understand what happens when large numbers of people get together. "Mob mentality" is a very real thing. Even people who are usually quiet and reserved can find themselves caught up.
The left does not inform and persuade, it intimidates and causes discomfort, and it's astonishing that the President of the United States wasn't wise enough to anticipate that with a small amount of encouragement - which he and his side willingly provided - the OWS protest movement would evolve into violence and lawlessness. What will he do now that the Wall Street Zombies have lost favor with the public? Ignore them like he did the Tea Party movement and pretend he hasn't a clue what they're doing out there and why they're doing it?
For years the American people have responded to the left's in-your-face strategy by giving in to it rather than pushing back against it. Unfortunately, too many of us remembered the ugly, violent anti-war protests of the 60's and didn't want to go there again, so we learned to tolerate behavior we detest instead of loudly and decisively rebuking it. The OWS protesters are expressing their point of view in inappropriate and illegal ways because no one with the power to stop them has the courage to do so. As polls indicate, the political value of the OWS protest is gone and now all that's left is the mess for taxpayers to clean-up.
Sometimes one wonders how some self-proclaimed anarchists would really like a world in which there was no effective government force to maintain law and order- in which there were no enforceable laws and therefore no enforceable distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence.
Just as the alliance between Islamic supremacists and leftists is strange (we know what Islamists would do with the leftists once they were no longer useful) so, too, any alliance between unions and anarchists is strange. For how would they get along if they were victorious- and how could they ever have a common definition for “victory”?
After all, public-sector unions would have no employers if there were no governments. Presumably private-sector unions would enforce dues payments using the same tools and methods used by loan sharks, but employers (if any still existed) would use the same to rid themselves of unions. And anarchists (employed or otherwise) would find themselves strong-armed to pay for protection to whatever organizations felt they could get away with doing so. Or enslaved if they were unable to pay.
The public-sector unions’ paradise would be a world in which they could take whatever they wished from the public purse. The anarchists’ paradise would be one of incessant small-scale violence (at least until/unless some warlord became dominant).
Not only are the two “paradises” quite different, But how many would care to live in either?
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