I'm a great believer in civil disobedience--demonstrations, strikes, teach-ins,
crying "Theater" in a crowded fire as St. Abby used to say. (Yeah, I know he was a Jew. In my pantheon, Jews can attain sainthood as easily as anyone else.) I don't much think we can change the course of our alleged civilization without major citizen involvement.
I despise violence. I was in the old Madison antiwar movement and watched it essentially destroyed, first, by the burning of a neighborhood grocery store and then by the insane bombing of the Army Math Research Center. Violence does not good. Nobody is going to win with rocks & bottles against the militarized police, the National Guard, and the military itself if it comes to a last resort.
A very impressive study by Chenoweth & Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, provides most of the empirical for what I'm saying. They show 2 essential things. First, nonviolent revolutions have historically had a better chance of succeeding, and second, violent revolutions, even when they succeed in displacing the old regime, generally end up replacing one dictatorial system with another. In other words, do you want to end up being like Denmark or like Stalin's Soviet Union?
So--I was very interested in the innovations and general style of the Occupy movement. It looks like a promising beginning.
But there is one very dark, miasmal cloud that has infiltrated the citizen actions across the country. That cloud is often referred to as the "Black Bloc," and they are generally identified as anarchists. They are not, in fact, anarchists. They are nihilists, and they are very destructive to social-change movements. In fact they are so destructive that I would be totally unsurprised to learn that they are false-flag agents sent out to create riots in order to justify police crackdowns and to provide propaganda footage for the Establishment press.
So--here's the question. What the fuck can we do about them? Ideas?
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