The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Tue Apr 01, 2014 3:32 pm

How Right-Wing Libertarians, John Birchers and Conspiracy Freaks Are Trying to Hijack the Occupy Movement

January 24, 2012

"End the Fed" signs, and other Ron Paul-inspired sloganeering have been a staple of Occupy encampments from the birth of the movement. To an extent, that reflects the Occupiers' diversity of ideas. But Paul, who wrote a book called End the Fed in 2009, has a spotty reputation among champions of social justice, which was made worse this week with the release [3] of another round of racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic comments excerpted from a newsletter he published throughout the 1980s.

At many Occupy encampments, “End the Fed” signs are everywhere, and Paul supporters are becoming more and more vocal — using the language of the Occupy movement in service of their extremist anti-government agenda.

For the most part cooler (and more progressive) heads prevail, but to a certain extent in the movement, anger at Wall Street and its bankers is morphing into anger at the Federal Reserve and international “banksters” — a term long popular among libertarians, John Birchers and the armed right-wing Patriot Movement.

The Occupy movement’s evolving agenda is in danger of being sullied by association with Paul, whose position includes at its core a conspiracy theory involving the Federal Reserve — a decades-old right-wing bugaboo. On the web, a crucial battleground in the era of the online revolution, the Occupy Movement’s central critique of the obscene power of corporations is in danger of being slapped way off course. Ron Paul supporters dominated the conversation in the public forum on OccupyWallSt.org, the movement’s unofficial Web site, throughout the fall. A December post [4] on the forum complained about the Paul-partisan spammers, and warned against forging an alliance with “Wall Street's religious fanatics, the libertarians, espousing their predatory free-market religion.”

A few weeks ago, the forum’s anonymous moderator finally banned Paul’s supporters from propagandizing:

“We do not support an election campaign for 2012. At all. We have removed election material for Obama, Paul, Warren, Paul, Cain, Paul, Perry, Paul, the green party, Paul, Nader, Paul, and did I mention Paul?”


At the same time, the forum mod announced a ban of “conspiracy theories, including any attempt to spam material by David Icke, Lyndon LaRouche, David Duke or Alex Jones.”

But elsewhere on the web, the Occupy message is being shanghaied by radical libertarians, Tea Partiers and worse.

On Martin Luther King Day, as the Occupy the Dream marchers were on the move in 13 cities, I Googled “Occupy Federal Reserve,” and the first result was a link to Infowars, a Web site run by Alex Jones, a Texas-based wingnut radio host. Jones, a longtime Ron Paul supporter, believes that the government staged both the World Trade Center attacks and the Oklahoma City bombings; that the Gates Foundation is a eugenics operation; and that the government has been taken over by agents of the New World Order who are planning to release a cancer-causing monkey virus.

Since the Occupy protests began, Jones, whom Rolling Stone has labeled “the most paranoid man in America,” has added a wrinkle to his shtick, ranting and blogging relentlessly on behalf of OWS and the 99 percent, while threading attacks on the 1 percent into his vitriolic rants. He also began to call (loudly) for the Occupy protesters to turn their attention to the Fed. Apparently it has become his chief mission to embrace — and be embraced by — the Occupy movement. His gambit may be working.

While Occupy the Fed appears to be largely a creation of Jones and other right-leaning libertarians, it is having some success weaving itself into the fabric of the movement. The Facebook page “Occupy Federal Reserve” contains status updates from thousands of Friends apparently affiliated with the mainstream Occupy movement. It also contains hundreds of updates posted by radical libertarians and wack-job conspiracy freaks. Days after launching, @OccupyFederalReserve posted a link to the 2007 documentary Zeitgeist, which claims to prove that 9/11 was orchestrated as a pretext for the creation of a police state, that the Fed and the IRS are criminal enterprises and, by the way, that Jesus Christ did not exist.

A later update, a link to another YouTube video, rails against “Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve.” Those familiar with this topic could not be surprised to see this odious slur — it is commonly found at the root of anti-Fed conspiracy theories.

Among the results of any “Occupy Wall Street” YouTube search is a sickening eight-minute tirade [5] by David Duke, the neo-Nazi former Louisiana congressman and KKK Grand Wizard, in which he inveighs against Wall Street and declares support for the Occupy movement, meanwhile blasting “Zionist bankers, Zionist prosecutors, Zionist judges and Zionist media.”

To their great credit, many of the men and women who have stepped up as leaders in the Occupy movement have spoken out loudly and clearly against the anti-Semitism that has erupted, in rare instances, at Occupy encampments and online. But they have more pernicious enemies to battle than blatant bigotry: the selfish naiveté that allows radical libertarians to believe a completely unfettered market will lead to economic justice, and the paranoid naiveté that fuels conspiracists like Alex Jones.

Post-Rational Cynicism

For many of the people involved in the Occupy movement, this is their first involvement with political activism. Their openness to new ideas and reluctance to embrace any one political dogma is refreshing. But as the saying goes: “It’s good to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”

There is something undeniably romantic about radical libertarianism, with its fundamental commitment to individual liberty and its utopian belief in free markets. Its appeal can be found in the skyrocketing popularity of the film Thrive [6].

A breathtaking concoction of New Age pseudoscience and paranoid conspiracy theory, the film starts off with ancient aliens delivering the secret of free energy to Earthlings, proceeds to show how the secret is being suppressed by an evil cabal — and somehow winds up as a treatise on radical libertarian politics.

Makes sense as political narrative, when you think about it. All of our problems are magically solved. But wait: the government’s squelching our space secrets? Abolish the government!

Thrive, which was purposely released on 11-11-11, is in heavy rotation on both Ron Paul and Occupy message boards. As is America: From Freedom to Fascism [7], another urgently paranoid (and thoroughly debunked [8]) litany of conspiracy theories, from the illegality of the Fed and the IRS to the threat of human-implanted RFID chips.

Bill Chaloupka, author of the book Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America, sees the eruption of interest in wiggy conspiracy theories as something familiar — a populist expression of anger and skepticism. He’s not surprised, or overly concerned, that some people involved with the Occupy movement have been swept up in it.

“The most important thought that so many of these folks have is their disbelief,” he says. “They find these scraps of information — some credible and some not. They feel that they can recombine all of these scraps of information any way they want. And as far as they’re concerned, their combination is just as good as CNN’s.

“This astounding sense of disbelief is part of contemporary culture. We find it with the Tea Partiers and we find it within elements of the left as well.”

Chaloupka points out that the Occupy movement’s anarchistic impulse — an impulse he applauds — makes it somewhat vulnerable. But having witnessed the occupiers develop what he considers a consistent political identity, and having worked with other grassroots organizations, including Earth First, which employ this “anarchistic process” strategy, Chaloupka believes the movement is not in grave danger of being co-opted.

“The Occupy culture knows how to repel this stuff,” he says. “The rap on Occupy — they don't have an agenda; they haven’t identified specific demands — that’s bogus. From what I can see, they’ve developed a coherent political culture. And that’s the most important thing. As a community, they’re obviously not going to give serious consideration to this kind of nonsense.”


http://www.alternet.org/story/153821/ho ... y_movement
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Apr 04, 2014 2:27 pm

“The rap on Occupy — they don't have an agenda; they haven’t identified specific demands — that’s bogus." -- Chaloupka.

Reminds me of...

Image

"You don't seriously believe this is a leaderless movement, do you?" Cecily McMillan, a 23-year-old graduate student at the New School, asks me one day. Not possible, she says, that's an illusion crafted by the OWS secret elite, who she insists are unresponsive to the demand for a concrete agenda by the "actual 99 percent."

McMillan is Northeast regional organizer for the youth section of the Democratic Socialists of America, which bills itself as the largest socialist organization in the United States. She's been involved with the Occupy movement since August, despite sharp differences with most of the people in the park. "I believe in a constrained view of revolution," she says, by which she means putting pressure on mainstream politicians. And for this, she says, she has suffered. "I have been called a terrorist. I have been called CIA, FBI. I have been called a Democrat!" Like Lasn, she wants regime change. Unlike most of the occupiers, she believes it requires the guidance of those, like her, possessed of what she calls "cultural capital."

She's a former cheerleader; she used to want to be a politician. She says her studies and her work – she's also a nanny – prevent her from sleeping in the park. But she's not afraid to put her body on the line. She was arrested after she charged Wall Street three times, a "direct action" that even some veteran anarchists – militant and masked – considered wildly courageous, if foolish. A cop thought so, too, blasted her with pepper spray, knocked her down, stepped on her head and snarled at her, "Shut up. You get what you deserve, cunt bitch."

We met in the atrium of 60 Wall Street, built in 1989 as a headquarters for JP Morgan and sold to Deutsche Bank right after 9/11. It looks like a bad Italian restaurant – white-tiled columns, mirrored ceiling, a grotto, stunted palms. This is where many of the movement's working groups meet. At any given time there might be a half-dozen of them – the People's Kitchen, Alternative Banking, Tactics, Medics, Sanitation. McMillan had just come from a gathering of one of the biggest and most influential groups, Facilitation, responsible for setting the agenda of the daily General Assembly. She was there as the least bristly representative of the working group that bluntly calls itself Demands, and her first demand was a place on the agenda, which she claimed had been denied by "infiltrators." She wasn't talking about police; she meant other occupiers opposed to her ideas.

--from Jeff Sharlet's outstanding history, Welcome to the Occupation


Worth noting Ms. McMillan is currently on trial for being uppitty in the NYC administration zone.
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Fri Apr 04, 2014 3:45 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Fri Apr 04, 2014 1:27 pm wrote:Worth noting Ms. McMillan is currently on trial for being uppitty in the NYC administration zone.


Also, very worth noting, but not necessarily stopping one's activities for:

David "Debt" Graeber evicted, implicates NYPD intelligence, claims revenge-harassment for OWS participation

Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am Thu, Apr 3, 2014

David Graeber, author of Debt: the First 5000 Years, was evicted from the home that his family had lived in for 52 years yesterday. He says that the NYPD intelligence department played a role in establishing a "technicality" on which his family could be evicted, despite not having missed a single payment in 52 years. He blames the eviction on retaliation against high-profile Occupy Wall Street activists, whom he says have been targeted in a wide-ranging series of administrative attacks: "evictions, visa problems, tax audits..."

Abi Sutherland has a great post on this on Making Light:

I am sure that there will be people right along to ask how anyone can really know whether he’s being evicted, and if so, whether it is really for the reasons he states. And of course, I don’t know; I’ve never met the guy, and I am not acquainted with his circumstances. I don’t know the functionaries either, nor the officials who ordered them to act. I know that I have seen the tweets, but beyond that, I am out of the world of facts and into one of speculation, inference, and guesswork. So are most of us. Even Graeber himself cannot really know the reasons why anything has happened to him.

But, assuming arguendo that the facts and causes of the matter are exactly as stated, we are back to the matter of knowledge from a different angle: the knowledge of who was involved in Occupy Wall Street from the beginning. And not just abstract knowledge, but usable knowledge on an institutional level, knowledge that can be dispersed and acted upon, both officially and unofficially.

Knowledge is power, and there are people who have more of it than we do. Some work for governments, but some don’t. Call them, if you will, the Powers that Be. We individuals have to filter out our knowledge out of a soup of misdirection, denial, fragments1, and propaganda. TPTB, meanwhile, seem to get their knowledge undiluted at source2.

(Not that they always get good information, nor act on it when they do, mind.)

This imbalance is a palpable problem, not just for Graeber, but for us all. Whether it’s prosecution for the three felonies a day we are all alleged to commit, or mere public humiliation, the risk of abuse by means of knowledge (and the lying pretense of knowlege) is a real engine of fear. I don’t know anyone who has not chosen to do or let be, speak or be silent, with an eye to whom they might piss off and what the consequences could be.


[url=http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/015820.html]It’s not what you know. It’s not who you know, either. It’s who knows what about you.[/url]
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Sat Apr 05, 2014 7:17 pm

From Conspiracy Theories to Attempted Assassinations: The American Radical Right and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement

http://datacide.c8.com/from-conspiracy- ... -movement/

This article on the rise of the Tea Party “Movement” from late 2007 to the present does not function as an affirmation of the liberal, progressive, or Democratic Party agendas in counter distinction to Republican and far right politics. Rather, I aim to offer a critique of how the democratic system operates in both elections and civil society, in order to demonstrate how this political system does not lead to total emancipation for all but rather to the propagation of ideological positions that are deterrents to freedom and left-communism. Furthermore, this article highlights how conspiracy theories are twisted into a false form of political analysis that heavily dominate the ideologies of right wing groups, the TPM, as well as the Republican Party. Conspiracy theories pervasive within the TPM and the radical right are based on dualism, scapegoating, demonization, apocalyptic aggression, racism and Anti-Semitism.

The Tea Party “Movement” is analyzed through several stages: First, the seeds of tea party development in the campaigns of Libertarian/Republican Ron Paul; Second, the tea party protests; Third, the complicated story of interactions between “grassroots” and corporate, national tea party organizations; Fourth, the demographics and opinion polls of TP supporters; Fifth, a critical discussion of TP/Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections. Then, this article addresses the close ties between the radical right and the TPM by examining: First, the “birther” conspiracies that Obama was not born in America, thus ineligible to serve as president; Second, the controversial Arizona state law 1070 on so-called “illegal” immigration; Third, attempts to repeal birthright citizenship guaranteed with the 14th Amendment; and Fourth, the intersections between gun right advocates in the “open carry” movement and armed militias. The religious right, in all its facets from Christian reconstructionism, to apocalyptic Christians, to white nationalists, to connected organizations like the John Birch Society, are only briefly mentioned here, but are central to the rise of the TPM and has been the subject of extensive research in various must-read articles and books. This article is therefore a critical overview of some of the most disturbing socio-political discourses in the US through the lens of the interactions between the Tea Party Movement and the radical right.

The Tea Parties, gun rights advocates, the birthers, anti-immigrant groups, white supremacists and the neo-Nazis all share a 3-pronged strategy through which to agitate transformations of American politics, culture and society:

- Electoral change: The American democratic capitalist political system is based on two political parties, Democratic and Republican. While other parties on the right, such as the Libertarian party headed by Ron Paul (R-Texas) and the Constitution Party, and on the left, the Green Party, do exist, these so called “third parties” gain less that 5% of the national vote in presidential elections and are therefore a marginal force in electoral politics. Today, however, the American radical right is attempting to displace so-called “establishment” Republicans, and elect representatives to congress who are from the TPM. One example of the TPM organizing for electoral change is the successful campaign of Republican Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, for the US Senate seat in Kentucky. However, this potential “change” through the democratic system does not generate any “new” ideological positions as is claimed by the TPM, but rather a historical re-expression of racial, gender, and class resentments within the Republican party. The range of conspiracy theories that are expressed by TPM and Republican elected officials demonstrate an acceptance in the larger American population of those same positions.

- “Grassroots” organization: All the groups under discussion, the tea parties, gun rights advocates, the birthers and neo-Nazis have diverse national organizational strategies that originate in towns across America. The TPM encompasses grassroots organizations mostly operating on a local level with a presence created through the internet.v However, the TPM is largely dominated by various national organizations sponsored by major corporations and political action committees (PAC) with multi-million dollar budgets. The grassroots nature of the TPM can be further called into question with the continuous backing by Fox News owned by Rupert Murdoch, which gives extremely positive publicity 24 hours a day. In 2010, Fox New Network was the number one syndicated primetime cable television network, and was voted most trusted news channel in America.

Weapons ownership and violent insurgency: the third strategy used by all of these groups to change American society is arming with weapons. Within American contemporary culture, the right to have weapons and use them is a guarantee for all citizens under the second amendment of the American constitution. There are multiple convergences between individual gun ownership, the open carry movement, membership in the National Rifle Association and the more militant, insurrectionary radical right. The insurgent right groups in particular have other agendas primarily spurred forward by conspiracy theories. For example, the Michigan Huratee militia believes that the government is going to enslave the American population into a New World Order, and therefore must be combated through an armed white nationalist revolution. Nine members of the Huratee militia were arrested by the FBI in April 2010 then charged with seditious conspiracy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction.


One of the most controversial and well-known Tea Party candidates is Rand Paul, son of Libertarian/Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul. For the Kentucky senate race, Rand Paul beat in the primary the Republican Party pick, Terry Grayson. Then Rand Paul easily beat his Democratic opponent in the general election, thus becoming one of five new TP-Republican senators in the 112th Congress. Paul’s win was hailed as a major victory for the TPM and helped solidify the far right position of the Republican Party. Like many other Republican congressmen, Rand Paul supports a so-called “human life amendment” which would change the US Constitution to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest thereby completely eliminating a woman’s right to choose. Like his father, Rand Paul is an outspoken opponent of the Civil Rights Act. Rand Paul garnered considerable controversy by stating on the Rachel Maddow tv news show that the federal government does not have the constitutional power to impose de-segregation of private businesses, for example, when forcing private owners to serve all people regardless of race. Therefore, Rand Paul supports segregation, discrimination and racism tying him closely to other white nationalist movements. The John Birch Society enthusiastically endorsed Ron and Rand Paul and praised Rand’s Tea Party backed win. This racist conspiratorial group views Paul’s win as the culmination of “their game plan and their principles developed over the last 51 years.” While being interviewed by conspiracist Alex Jones, Rand Paul made several erroneous historical revisionist “parallels” between Hitler and Obama, suggested that the US government will impose martial law thereby leading to the NWO, and expressed sympathies with Jones’ 9/11 truther claims. Jones has for many years supported Ron and Rand Paul. While Rand Paul cannot be labeled a Christian Reconstructionist, he has personal connections through his father with the movement’s main leader Howard Phillips, who also founded the Tax Payer / Constitution Party. Rand Paul was the featured speaker at the Constitution Party of Minnesota’s “event of the year” in April 2009.


Guns: The Open Carry Movement and the Oath Keepers

There are extensive linkages between the TPM and an expansionist view of gun rights guaranteed under the 2nd amendment of the US constitution. The US Supreme Court recent legal ruling reinforced the broad right, much more so than in European countries, for individuals to own weapons, even when the intent is to use the weapon to kill or to operate against potential “tyranny” by the US government. Gun ownership laws vary widely amongst the 50 states, as well as federally imposed gun laws such as the assault weapons ban (which doesn’t include semi-automatic weapons). The National Rifle Association (NRA) is one of the most powerful and well funded lobby organizations in America, which aggressively promotes at all levels (local to national) of government the broadest realization of gun rights. There are 250+ million privately owned firearms in the United States. The number of guns typically rises by about 4.5 million every year. Many individuals in the US own weapons for the reason of so-called “self defense.” With the election of Obama, gun and ammunition sales of all types rose dramatically, and even sold out for long periods, because of totally undocumented and unfounded conspiracy theory that the Obama administration would restrict gun laws. In fact, gun laws have loosened considerably since Obama’s election. For example, it is now legal to take concealed (not visible to the observer) weapons into national parks. The NRA is vehemently opposed to barring people on Homeland Security’s “terrorism watch-list” from purchasing firearms. Many gun advocates are attempting to make it legal to bring concealed weapons onto public university campuses for so-called “self protection”. The Texas state legislature along with several others states are considering such laws in light of the numerous school and university shootings that happen every year. Even more shocking for the sheer idiocy is the fact that in Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona state legislators have made it legal to bring concealed weapons into bars, therefore it is possible to get drunk while carrying a (loaded) gun.lxiv

The open carry movement is part of the larger initiative to even further expand the possibility of carrying openly visible (armed) guns to public and private locations including restaurants, bars, airports, state and federal property.lxv The laws regulating what “open carry” means varies widely amongst the states, especially concerning whether guns can be armed and if not, how ammunition must be carried on the person. In California, as well as many other states, there is a phenomenon in which the open carry advocates test the laws of individual businesses and corporations governing guns on the premises. For example, Starbucks Coffee corporate policy does not ban guns in their chain shops. Therefore, even in the San Francisco Bay Area, considered one of the most liberal districts of the US, Starbucks stores were overrun by meetings of open carry advocates. Individuals, groups and even families with children have met together with their guns visibly displayed, ordered iced moca frappacinos, and hung out at the Starbucks shop. Many other businesses all over the country have been challenged by the open carry movement to allow guns inside their premises. In many states, including Minnesota, it is illegal to not allow someone with a gun into the business unless the owner has a sign outside the establishment explicitly prohibiting guns.

As was already mentioned, the SPLC has documented the dramatic rise of patriot, militia, and nativist extremist groups in the US during 2009. One of the more prominent groups is the Oath Keepers, which claims to have at least one chapter in every state made up of current and former law enforcement officers and military personnel. The Oath Keepers publicize themselves as defenders of US citizens and the constitution through armed resistance against a plethora of purported government conspiracies.lxvi The ten “orders we will NOT obey” Oath Keepers pledge include conspiracy theories such as the government setting up (FEMA) concentration camps to hold citizens, the institution of martial law as the first step towards the New World Order, door-to-door confiscation of citizens’ legally held firearms, and orders to use foreign military troops on US soil. Other orders the Oath Keepers won’t obey including conducting warrantless searches, imprisoning citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants”, and putting restrictions on free speech and protests are well-documented cases of current abuses by the US government.

The intermingling of various factions in the radical right is made evident by the development of the Oath Keepers in terms of conspiracy ideas, activities and supporters. In March 2009, the Oath Keepers (OK) organization was founded by Stewart Rhodes, who had previously worked as an intern on Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign. Numerous libertarians claim membership in the OK including James Surga who helped initiate the money bomb fundraisers for Ron Paul’s campaign.lxvii In April 2009, Rhodes and the organization used the outcry over the publication of DHS’ leaked memolxviii naming credible threats of right wing extremism to quickly recruit thousands of members. The memo targeted for suspicion Ron Paul supporters/libertarians, returning military war veterans, the militia movement, and white supremacists. The radical right including the patriot movement had no objections to another leaked DHS memo against so-called “left-wing extremism”, which the DHS viewed to be the most threatening. Oath Keepers representatives have been sent to numerous Tea Party meetings especially in lead ups to the big rallies such as on tax day April 15, July 4, and September 11. Furthermore, the Oath Keepers annual conference in Las Vegas was replete with birthers, 9/11 truthers, and various patriot and nativist members. The Oath Keepers participated in the April 19, 2010 “second amendment” rally in Washington DC on the 235th anniversary of the start of the American revolutionary war, which drew a couple thousand armed participants.lxix The rally date also references the anniversaries of the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City federal building by white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols and the 1993 FBI’s raid of the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventist Waco compound, thus further suggesting OK sympathies for radical right causes. The second amendment rally included a speech from Gun Owners of America (GOA) director Larry Pratt, who is a known white supremacist sympathizer and former presidential campaign worker for extremist Pat Buchanan. Several top-tier members of GOA including the lawyer Herb Titus and Larry Pratt use the organization to spread Christian reconstructionist ideas, and therefore maintains extensive ties in the religious right.lxx The GOA also endorsed the major Tea Party 2010 candidates including Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Marco Rubio, and Jim DeMint.

In an interesting turn, the Oath Keepers and TP tried to employ publicity damage control to cover up their connections with Charles Allan Dyer because his activities exposed the real agendas of these groups. He is a member of the Oath Keepers and a supporter of various tea party groups, which was made evident in his various youtube videos and online ramblings. Dyer proved his “do not obey” credentials when he left his position as Marine sergeant after being sentenced in a military trial for threatening insurrection against the ‘tyrannical’ US government and espousing other Oath Keepers conspiracy ideas. Then Stewart Rhodes personally sent Dyer to work as the militia’s spokesman at an Oklahoma Tea Party rally on July 4. Dyer was also deeply involved in setting up other militia groups and giving military training to local civilians. Dyer became a “problem” for these groups when he was arrested on January 12 for rape of a 7 year old, at which time police also found several illegal guns and a Colt M-203 40-millimeter grenade launcher that had been stolen from a California military base several years previously. All evidence of Dyers ties were expunged from the websites of the militia and tea party groups, with Rhodes falsely claiming to all the national news shows that Dyer had never been a member. However, the white armed nationalist American Resistance Movement promoted their ties with Dyer by claiming he is “the first Prisoner of War of the second American Revolution.”
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Mon Apr 07, 2014 9:24 am

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics- ... d-beliefs/

John Miller

Politics of Hate in the USA, Part II: Right-wing Mysticism and Beliefs


The following text, which is the second of three installments, traces back to a conversation I had with Mike Kelley in 1994, “Too Young to be a Hippy, Too Old to be a Punk.”1 Christophe Tannert at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin had invited us to discuss underground political and aesthetic culture in the US for the first issue of Bethanien’s Be Magazin. One year later, I followed this up with a narrative account and analysis of the subject, “Burying the Underground.” Meanwhile, a series of sieges, armed standoffs, and bombings made Americans increasingly aware of a growing polarization between the US federal government and what was hardening into a grassroots militia movement: Ruby Ridge (1992), Waco (1993), Oklahoma City (1995) and Fort Davis, Texas (1997). I began to see this as a right-wing counterpart to militant leftism. In fact, the right seemed to be mirroring tactics that had previously belonged to the leftist underground. This led me to write a complementary essay, “Heil Hitler! Have a Nice Day!, the Politics of Hate in the U.S.A.” By 2001, the militia movement had run out of steam. When al-Qaeda terrorists staged the September 11 attacks, however, these so closely resembled events described in William Pierce’s pseudonymous manifesto, The Turner Diaries, that I had initially suspected the radical right. Although unemployment and economic dislocation drove the militia movement, the Great Recession has not provoked a similar response. Instead of overturning—or seceding from—the federal government, the far right, now exemplified by the Tea Party, wants to work from within the political system by downsizing government and converting it to a states’ rights model. This shift is evident in the current Republican debates leading up to the next presidential election, where candidates have tried to turn “moderate” into a pejorative term.

John Miller

Continued from “Politics of Hate in the USA, Part I: Repressive Tolerance”

***

Conspiracy Theory

Modern conspiracy theory traces its roots to the French cleric Abbé Barruel. In 1797 Barruel wrote an account of the French Revolution focused on the Jacobins. Behind the Jacobins he saw a conspiracy of three secret societies: the Order of Templars, the Order of Freemasons and the Illuminatti.2 In 1806 the retired army officer J.B. Simonini praised Barruel’s analysis in a letter to him, but pointed out “the omission” that Jews had founded both the Freemasons and the Illuminatti for world domination.3 In his book Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, the Scotsman John Robison further argued, “Nothing is more clear than that the design of the Illuminatti was to abolish Christianity.”4 Many in the United States, clergymen especially, greeted the French Revolution with suspicion. In May1798 the Reverend Jedidiah Morse warned of a Jacobin-derived plot against American political and religious institutions. Soon after, journalists exposed the Robison book as fraudulent. By the end of 1799 the Illuminatti affair was, for the time being, over.5

Around 1891 the novel Biarritz, written by Prussian postal worker Hermann Goedsche under the pen name Sir John Retcliffe, gained notoriety throughout Europe. What captivated many of its readers was a sensationalistic chapter entitled “In the Jewish Cemetery in Prague.” In it, elders from the twelve tribes of Israel gather at the grave of the most venerable rabbi and discuss the progress of their plot to take over the world. This text was reprinted as a pamphlet called “The Rabbi’s Speech” and distributed throughout Russia and France. In time, readers came to accept this story as fact and it became the basis for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols purport to be a transcript of lectures given by leading Jews at a 1840 world congress in Cracow, Poland.6 They were pieced together between 1872 and 1895 from various sources: the writings of Barruel, Simonini, Goedsche plus books by Maurice Joly and Gougenot des Mousseax. 7 James Ridgeway has summarized them as follows:

The Protocols argue that people are incapable of governing themselves, and only a despot using armed force can govern effectively….[The Jews have plotted their] rise to power by pitting the Gentiles against one another until, eventually…[they] will be able to enlist the masses in overthrowing their indolent gentile leaders. Thereafter the masses will be kept under firm control through an efficient government that will banish unemployment, apply taxation in proportion to wealth, and promote education. During this messianic age the Jewish masters will shrewdly promise, but never deliver, liberty.8


Although London Times correspondent Philip Graves showed parts of the Joly’s book had been plagiarized in the Protocols, they too became accepted as fact. Shortly before the October Revolution, the czar’s secret police published another version in an attempt to smear its opponents.9

Image
The Jew Bolshevic Emblem surrounded by the
Symbolic Serpent in the Protocol book.


In the 1920s Henry Ford widely distributed the Protocols in the United States. His weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, included them as part of a series on “the Jewish international conspiracy.” According to the Independent, Jewish influence was everywhere. Jews forced William Howard Taft to break a commercial treaty with Russia (thereby weakening the czar). They controlled Woodrow Wilson’s administration, particularly through Bernard Baruch, chair of the War Industries Board. (Wilson initiated the League of Nations, forerunner to the far right’s much hated United Nations.) Communism itself was a Jewish plot. The Independent also charged that Paul Warburg intended to control the US financial system with the Federal Reserve. Ford later anthologized the entire series as The International Jew and distributed the book worldwide. Half a million copies circulated in the US alone. In Germany, it became a cornerstone of fascist propaganda. In 1927 Aaron Sapiro sued the Independent for libel in its series “Jewish Exploitation of Farmer Organizations.” Although the lawsuit ended in a mistrial, Ford closed the newspaper.10 During this highly publicized case, the Independent’s editor, William J. Cameron, took full blame for the newspaper’s policies. Wilson and the Warburg family also challenged Ford’s accusations. Ford retracted them, claiming his employees had published the material without his consent. Yet, in 1938, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, becoming the first American to be decorated with that medal.11 Christian Identity expert Michael Barkun has noted the irony of Ford’s anti-Semitism:

The so-called “pseudo-agrarian” movements…beginning in the 1890s…sought to blame rural and small-town social dislocations on an urban, plutocratic conspiracy. More often than not, this cabal was identified as explicitly Jewish, and it became a convenient scapegoat for those troubled by departures from traditional social values. It was ironical that Henry Ford, himself an agent of some of these changes…became…one of the principal voices for an anti-Semitic politics of resentment.12


In the 1930s a new religious revival swept across the US, reviving, among other things, the anti-Semitism Ford had espoused earlier on. Just as a convulsive modernization left Germany open to Nazism, so economic turmoil and rapid urbanization drove many Americans to fundamentalist religion. With fire and brimstone preachers grimly warning of the coming apocalypse, paranoia and racism were overlaid on these beliefs. Three figures dominated the fundamentalist movement: Gerald B. Winrod, William Pelley and Gerald K. Smith.13

Image
The Dearborn Independent newspaper printed by Henry Ford, 1925.

Gerald B. Winrod preached that Christ would soon return for the Battle of Armageddon. He believed that while anti-Semitism is founded in Biblical prophecies, only a “certain element” of world Jewry advocates subversion. The widow of Christian Identity minister Wesley Swift believes that it was Winrod who introduced her husband to British-Israelism, the paradoxical forerunner to the Identity movement that first identified with Jews, then turned anti-Semitic.14 What distinguished Winrod from other preachers was his 1938 bid for US Senate in Kansas. He finished third in the Republican primary elections with considerable support from Mennonite communities and the Ku Klux Klan.15

At the outset of his career, William Pelley had been a supporter of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. In 1927, he underwent a sudden mystical transformation, withdrawing from society and experiencing a “rebirth” during which he claimed to have heard voices from other worlds. He came back to public life believing in reincarnation—particularly in the reappearance of “demon souls” as Jews. Later, Pelley embraced the work of “pyramidologist” David Davidson, who was a follower of British Israelism. By integrating Davidson’s work with anti-Semitism, Pelley helped lay the groundwork for Christian Identity. 16 After Hitler came to power in Germany, Pelley founded the Silver Legion—or Silver Shirts as Pelley sometimes called them, after the Brown Shirts. Pelley even claimed that Christ himself had accepted his offer to become an honorary Silver Shirt. In 1942, trying to quash nativist reactionaries, the Roosevelt administration charged both Pelley and Winrod with sedition. Pelley spent fifteen years in prison.17

Like Winrod, Gerald K. Smith was a fundamentalist who entered politics. In 1933 he joined Pelley’s Silver Shirts, then went on to help manage Huey Long’s presidential campaign. After Long’s assassination in 1935, Smith unsuccessfully ran for office himself. He then formed the Union Party with Father Charles Coughlin and Francis Townsend. The Union Party ran William Lemke against Roosevelt in the 1936 election, but received less than a million votes. Smith next moved to Detroit and met Henry Ford who sponsored his radio broadcasts and furnished him with investigators for compiling the “Ford Company Red File,” a list of known or suspected communists. This work inspired feverish visions of Jewish conspiracy in Smith’s mind. He proclaimed, “Communism is Jewish” and speculated that Roosevelt never died, but that Jews had hidden him to later bring him back as “President of the World.” Even after the Second World War, Smith maintained that people had misunderstood Hitler and that the holocaust was a hoax. Despite his bizarre speculations, Smith was a commanding speaker who could rally large audiences. During the Second World War he met with Christian Identity theologian Wesley Swift and converted to the obscure sect that now provides a religious and ideological foundation for many recent hate groups.18 As an agitator, Smith helped politicize the Identity movement; using key Identity figures to forward his own political agenda, he lent coherence to an otherwise fragmented movement.19

Kenneth Goff, a Christian Identity minister and protegé of Minuteman founder Robert DePugh, claims the conspirators have continued to control international politics even today. According to him, Benito Mussolini, Nikolai Lenin and Colonel E. Mandel House (a chief aide to Wilson) laid the plans for the First World War at a conference in Belgium during the early 1900s. After House convinced Czar Nicholas II to abdicate his throne, Jacob Schiff, through the financial firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., engineered Lenin’s rise to power. To cover their tracks, Zionists launched a “disinformation campaign” portraying their allies, the Russian Communists, as anti-Semitic. Goff claims that the international Jewish banking cabal further consolidated its hold on the world economy through marriages between the Loeb, Rothschild and Warburg families. To win sympathy, they fabricated accounts of the holocaust in Nazi Germany and continue to use the charge “anti-Semitic” to disable their critics. The “Jewish” agent Alger Hiss, served on the US delegation to the Yalta Conference and helped arrange to grant the Soviet Union veto power in the United Nations.20 From Goff’s perspective, a secret cabal controls mainstream television, radio and newspapers as well: the so-called “Jews’ media.” Those who subscribe to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have come to call the Federal government the Zionist Occupation Government—or ZOG, for short.

In 1991, Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order became a New York Times bestseller with almost a half million copies in print. The book has effectively legitimated the bizarre ideas of the patriot movement within a broader evangelical Christian community. Although his book simply updates well-established conspiracy themes, Robertson, then unofficially heading the Christian Coalition, disavowed that approach.21 Nonetheless, he claimed to have traced “an invisible cord” of influence connecting “[Woodrow] Wilson…to the JP Morgan bank, to the Rockefellers and the Council on Foreign Relations…to the powerful Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, to the United Nations, to Henry Kissinger…,to the Trilateral Commission, to Jimmy Carter, to George Bush.” Critic Michael Lind attacked Robertson’s implicit racism in the February 1995 New York Review of Books:

Not since Father Coughlin or Henry Ford has a prominent white American so boldly and unapologetically blamed the disasters of modern world history on the machinations of international high finance in general and on a few international Jews in particular.22


Robertson responded, “I deeply regret that anyone in the Jewish community believes that my description of international bankers and use of the phrase “European bankers” in my book refers to Jews.”23 Even so, Robertson quoted the work of well-known anti-Semites Nesta Weber and Eustace Mullins in support of his theories.24 Defenders of the book dismissed its anti-Semitism by pointing out Robertson’s support for Israel. For a dispensational premillennialist such as Robertson, backing Israel does not necessarily preclude anti-Semitism. According to this belief, the Jews must return to Israel before the Second Coming.

Michael Barkun has described how conspiracy theory relies on an inverse logic of credibility: one that stigmatizes ideas bearing the approval of prestigious institutions and that legitimizes, by default, those not associated with such institutions. He links this inversion to British sociologist Colin Campbell’s notion of the “cultic milieu”:

[which] refers to a society’s “rejected knowledge,” beliefs considered unacceptable by such authoritative institutions as conventional religion, universities, the state, and the mass media. Second, the cultic milieu refers not simply to this body of rejected knowledge but to its expression in the form of a “cultural underground,” a “network of individuals, groups, practices, institutions, [and] means of communication.” 25


Clearly, this inverse logic is a compensatory rationalization of otherwise unacceptable social changes. It pertains not so much to active cultural dissent itself as it does to withdrawal from status quo adversity. A disaffected person is always the most susceptible to this form of belief. One can always more easily scapegoat another than confront one’s own failings. Consensus within a cult, moreover, can intensify and seemingly objectify almost any belief. Laird Wilcox, a critic of the radical right, points out that once people enter conspiracy discourse, they become “insulated from outside forces, they listen to themselves and no one criticizes them….You have an internal myth built up by this incestuous feedback.” 26 Political analyst Chip Berlet further observes that once a group establishes this insularity, “instead of engaging in a political struggle based on debate, compromise, and informed consent, . . . [conspiracy theorists only] want to expose and neutralize the bad actors.” 27 Recently, the emergence of the Internet has reinforced this kind of thinking. There, when verification for these ideas is lacking, predisposition—i.e., a fervent need to believe—sanctions them anyway.

Image


Apocalypticism

Apocalyptic visions sometimes drive radicalism on both the left and right. For example, Walter Benjamin’s conception of jetztzeit (based on the Jewish messianic vision of history) posits a break with the “dead time” of bourgeois society. This idea has become central to the postmodern critique of progress. The Jewish messianic tradition similarly inspired Abbie Hoffman. Myth drives revolutions, in the end, more than rationalism. If the left’s vision is characteristically expansive and utopian, religious fundamentalism and a sense of creeping social deterioration distinguish the right’s sense of the apocalypse. That sense, moreover, is literal, not allegorical. The Book of Revelations prophesies a final Battle of Armageddon; the Catholic Douay Version of the Scripture calls this book the Apocalypse.28 “Revolutionary millenarianism” rejects the gradualism of ordinary political struggle with its demand for immediate and convulsive social change:

It is characteristic of this kind of movement that its aims and premises are boundless. A social struggle is seen not as a struggle for specific, limited objectives, but as an event of unique importance, different in kind from all other struggles in history, a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge totally transformed and redeemed.29


By the end of the Second World War the arrival of nuclear weaponry made apocalyptic biblical predictions technologically possible. Thus, if the prospect of thermonuclear annihilation did not produce enough anxiety by itself, some further saw “the Bomb” as the instrument of religious prophecies. In 1971, future President Ronald Reagan warned the California State Senate:

Ezekiel 38 and 39 says that Gog, a northern power, will invade Israel. Gog must be Russia. Most of the prophecies that had to be fulfilled before Armageddon can come have come to pass. Ezekiel said that fire and brimstone will be rained upon the enemies. That must mean that they’ll be destroyed by nuclear weapons. 30


This was the same man who joked “Start bombing in five minutes” and initiated the “Star Wars” defense system. His Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, ordered the clear-cutting of national forests thinking that, in the not-too-distant future, no one would be left to enjoy them anyway. As the Reagan Revolution pushed forward (or backward), author Hal Lindsey published a series of bestsellers interpreting global politics according to the Book of Revelations. These include The Rapture, The Terminal Generation, There’s a New World Coming, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon and The Late Great Planet Earth. The last title, in which Lindsey interpreted current events according to the biblical Seven Seals, sold more than 18 million copies. 31

Fear of a coming apocalypse sparked a survivalist movement across America. Christian Fundamentalists, however, are not prone to survivalism because they believe in the rapture, i.e., that Christ will appear and bring them to heaven for the Tribulation. In contrast, historic premillenialists such as Identity Christians expect to actively battle the Anti-Christ during Armageddon.32 Because urban centers would be the first to go in a missile strike, survivalism took root in the countryside. Just as air-raid sirens and fallout shelters sprouted up all across America during the 1950s, people today take matters into their own hands by stockpiling freeze-dried foods, water, clothing and weapons. Survivalism, however, is at root anti-social. It signals that one has somewhat abandoned normal social intercourse as an adequate basis for personal and public life:

[T]he act of radical withdrawal can engender a siege mentality, a sense that one is surrounded by enemies and that the battle is even now beginning. Thus survivalists are prey to the self-fulfilling prophecy, in the sense that their very preparations may lead them into actions that set them at odds with political authorities.33


Dug in and braced for the Bomb, some start to regard a nuclear holocaust as a solution instead of a problem.

Despite the very real threat of nuclear weaponry, Apocalypticism is symptomatic of forces that are, by default, excluded from its mythology. Its radical themes and iconography distract discussion from the root causes of rural crises:

To most of us, apocalyticism, at least in its thoroughgoing manifestations, is so spectacular, so potentially destructive, that is difficult to look beneath its surface….As one can see from the history of it, it nearly always arises in times of suppression, chaos, fear, or disadvantage. As such, its first appearances are a register of the degree of social and psychological pain people are suffering.34We are dealing with frightened people caught in the jaws of history, not kooks.35


Image
Film still from Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising.


Left to Right Militants

Much of the political instability of the 1990s concerns the disappearance of a familiar foe: Communism. During the Cold War, Americans of all persuasions found themselves ready to unite against a common enemy, putting aside even their longstanding xenophobia. The period’s two ultra-right organizations, the John Birch Society and the Minutemen, focused their ire almost exclusively on the Soviet Union. Yet, by the end of the 1980s, the Eastern European Communist bloc was falling apart. On September 11, 1990, President George Bush proclaimed the triumph of Western capitalism with the unfortunate choice of words, “new world order”:

We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment….Out of these troubled times…a new world order can emerge; a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace, an era in which nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony.36


Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, outlined its specific implications for US foreign policy:

[The New World Order] means that the US and other democratic nations agree to be governed by a rule of law whereby any country breaking that law is treated much as criminals are in each country. They are tried and, if found guilty, punished. The process will be carried out in the same manner that police and courts enforce local laws.37


Among conspiracy theorists, these statements resurrected fears of a secret, global cartel. In mainstream America the old xenophobia vigorously reasserted itself through a return to isolationism and bigotry. Ironically, from the standpoint of nuclear threat, this was the worst possible time to turn to isolationism. The Soviet nuclear arsenal fell into far less reliable hands, making the possibility of a nuclear holocaust now more likely than during the Cold War.

The success of 1960s and 70s progressive social movements left many on the right feeling that by the end of the millennium, American society will have fallen apart completely. The result has been a strident white, male backlash. A sense of going from persecutor to persecuted has created some strange identifications. Neo-Nazi propagandist Gary Lauck compared his exile from Germany with Lenin’s exile. Conspiracy theorists likened the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City to that of the Reichstag fire, seeing it as a plot to discredit the militia movement. Moreover, right-wing militants often adopt rhetoric and tactics from the very leftist activist groups they blame for social degeneracy. The name of David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People, for example, mocks the venerable NAACP. Another group, calling itself the Men’s Rights Association, claimed that after feminism’s inroads into power, “Hard working men are reduced to the position of donkeys.”38 White Aryan Resistance (WAR) leader, Tom Metzger, explains his own political orientation vis-a-vis the legacy of the New Left:

We began to think a little broader and look into some of the left-wing positions, and we started evolving something that can’t be called right-wing. It can’t be called Marxist and it’s not really…The word populist has been ruined by the right wing, by the manipulations of [Willis Carto’s] Populist Party. We don’t accept that. We began to take on a lot of the positions of the left, and we started recruiting people from the left.39


Metzger is trying to reformulate National Socialism for the 90s; the Brown Shirts too were populists. Even so, as Catherine McNicol Stock explains, populist rural politics do not fit neatly into a conventional left/right opposition:

In its members’ contempt for the federal government, profound antiauthoritarianism, mockery of big business and finance, dedication to complete local control of the community, and desire to establish wilderness compounds, the new rural radicalism of the 1990s sounds surprisingly similar to the counterculture rhetoric of the far left in the 1960s. In fact, in northern California, the Pacific Northwest, and the rural Northwest it is not uncommon for gun-toting paramilitary leaders to live next door to latter-day hippies and marijuana growers. The…Murrah Federal Building [bombing] reminded some observers of the 1970 bombing of the University of Wisconsin’s Army-Math Research Center by a member of the local Students for Democratic Society.40


Some SDS-ers, like Lyndon LaRouche, have even switched camps, from left to right.41 New rightist groups, nonetheless, stridently oppose the social ethos of the left. Overall, their intent is the “resublimation” of culture: to turn back the advances of the previous thirty-odd years. This resublimation characteristically takes the form of a crackdown rather than increased compassion and understanding. If an “eros effect” drove, up to a point, the left movement, a politics of hate drives that of the right.42 A key figure in this broad ideological shift was not an ideologue at all, but a delusional schizophrenic: Charles Manson.

Image
MSNBC docu-drama that follows Charles Manson at the Spahns Movie Ranch
and the final days leading to the 1966 Tate/La Bianca murders.


Helter Skelter

Responding to an early morning call on August 9, 1969, Los Angeles police officers discovered grisly evidence of what would become the most publicized crime of its day: the slain bodies of Steve Parent, Voytek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate Polanski at 10050 Cielo Drive in Bel Aire. Scrawled in blood on the front door was the word “PIG.” Assailants had shot Parent, Frykowski and Sebring with a .22 caliber pistol. They stabbed everyone but Parent with a bayonet. Tate, seven months pregnant, received multiple wounds in the abdomen. The next evening, other police investigators found Leno and Rosemarie LaBianca dead in their Los Feliz home, pillow cases tied over their heads with cords. Knife wounds covered their bodies. An ivory handled carving fork protruded from Leno LaBianca’s stomach; the word “WAR” was carved into his torso. “DEATH TO PIGS” was printed in blood on the north living room wall; “RISE” on the south wall and “HEALTER SKELTER” (sic) on the refrigerator in the kitchen. About ten days earlier, music teacher Gary Hinman had met a similar fate in his Malibu home. His living room wall bore the phrase “POLITICAL PIGGY,” also in blood.43

Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi believed that these three crimes were all the work of Charles Manson and a group he had formed around himself called “The Family.” Because Bugliosi had little direct evidence implicating Manson—whom he considered the ringleader, he had to show that the group, at Manson’s bidding, had conspired to commit a series of premeditated murders. In other words, he had to unravel and articulate Manson’s idiosyncratic vision of Armageddon. Drawing on the conservative breakdowns of the 1960s, Manson prophesied that black people all over the world would soon rise up and slay their white oppressors. Meanwhile The Family would retreat into caves around Death Valley. After the purge, they would return to reclaim their rightful position of power and regenerate the white race. Manson, of course, would rule the world. He had seen the coming apocalypse prophesied in songs from the Beatles White Album: “Helter Skelter,” “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” “Sexy Sadie,” “Revolution” and “Revolution No. 9.”44

Charles Manson grew up a perpetual outsider—moving from foster homes to reform schools to prisons—with only brief interludes between. It was during his last such period that he ran completely amok, leaving a remarkably deep impression on the disaffected elements of American society. As an aspiring rock musician, he once brought The Family to live with Beachboy Dennis Wilson. Wilson’s friend Gregg Jakobson unsuccessfully tried to interest producer Terry Melcher (then married to Candice Bergen) in Manson’s music. Manson took Melcher’s indifference as a personal affront. Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were unlucky enough to have taken over Melcher’s lease at 10050 Cielo Drive; revenge was clearly one motive for the killings there. Although Wilson had downplayed his opinion of Manson’s talent to Melcher, the Beachboys later recorded his song “Cease to Exist” as “Never Let Your Love Die.”45

Other Family members had tenuous links to parts of the counterculture as well. Before hooking up with Manson, Bobby Beausoleil knew film maker Kenneth Anger and played Lucifer in Anger’s film Lucifer Rising.46 At the Hinman murder scene Beausoleil drew a bloody paw print on the wall in an attempt to implicate the Black Panthers—and by that precipitate “helter skelter,” the black uprising. Manson had also bragged about “killing a Black Panther.” It turned out, however, that the man in question, drug dealer Bernard Crowe, had never been a Panther—nor did he die after Manson shot him. Although Manson was a white supremacist, he regarded Black Panthers and Black Muslims as “the true black race,” i.e., as groups destined overturn the corrupt white establishment. The erosion of traditional patriarchal underpinnings was just one sign of that corruption; Manson believed that women should eventually be re-subordinated to men.47

When The Family moved to the abandoned Spahn Movie Ranch, its cultist activities and beliefs intensified. The ranch once served as a set for Westerns starring, among others, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Johnny Mack Brown, and Wallace Beery before it fell into disuse. There, Manson combined techniques derived from Scientology with LSD and group sex to indoctrinate new members into his cult. This combination effectively broke down initiates’ sense of self and severed earlier familial and social identifications. Psychically leveled, they bonded absolutely to their charismatic leader. Oddly enough, the resulting social structure bore an uncanny resemblance to the “primal horde” postulated by Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo; The Family’s very name parodied the nuclear family.

Throughout Manson’s murder trial, Family women kept a vigil outside the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles. Imitating their leader, they carved first crosses, then swastikas into their foreheads. After the guilty verdict, all those convicted shaved their heads. Later, various Family members either stated outright or implied that the group had been involved in an additional 20-30 murders, including that of Manson’s own “hippie attorney,” Ronald Hughes. Officials never solved most of the other cases. Of those convicted, all involved in the Tate-LaBianca slayings remain behind bars.

Inside prison, the Aryan Brotherhood purportedly contacted Manson during the 1970s.48 On the outside, various subcults, of all political persuasions, celebrated—and continue to celebrate—the Manson myth. Yet, after twenty-eight years, all but two Family members have renounced their former leader. Charles Watson (who had once called his victims “just blobs”) and Susan Atkins became born-again Christians. Only Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sandra Good remain unreformed—and, of course, Manson himself.

Image
The Family outside the courthouse during the trial of cult leader Charles Manson,
having shaved their heads in protest.


Manson and the Radical Right

Undoubtedly, part of The Family’s appeal during the tumultuous 1970s had been its promise to purge the established order of its hypocrisy, by—ironically—replacing repressive tolerance with outright repression. Throwing the status quo into sharp relief, Manson did manage to expose something of its arbitrariness. Family members cynically understood murder as a deliverance from the world’s evils—that “when you stab someone, it feels good when the knife goes in.” This absolutism, however deranged, came across as a potent antidote to the hippie movement’s growing complacency, particularly “flower power’s” shallowness.

More psychopathic than ideological, Manson’s deeds and posturing nonetheless carried a political charge. They became a symbolic screen onto which other left extremists could project their own fantasies. Before she went underground, Bernadine Dohrn told an SDS convention, “Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.” Jerry Rubin echoed her cavalier adulation, “I fell in love with Charlie Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on TV.” Tuesday’s Child, an underground newspaper that called itself “the Voice of the Yippies,” made Manson its Man of the Year.49 This misguided adulation of Manson registers the extent to which cynicism had overtaken the movement. Manson’s popularity as a cult figure thus marks the beginning of a shift from left to right in the underground paradigm.

In at least three respects The Family anticipates the survivalist movement and the racist religious sects of the 1990s. First, its apocalyptic racism prefigures the white backlash to affirmative action and civil rights. As racist and sexist social structures began to break up, many white men saw themselves as a new, specially persecuted minority. They blamed their declining standard of living on the social and economic ascendence of women and minority groups. Echoing Manson’s delusional cosmology, William Pierce’s influential novel The Turner Diaries offers a futuristic vision of an African-American takeover of the white population and an ensuing race war. Although it is fiction, this book later served as a template for all-too-real terrorist acts.

Second, The Family exemplifies how a terrorist cell can be modeled on the “intentional community.” This term denotes a community brought together for a deliberate purpose: overriding the refractory social and economic forces that typically bring diverse groups of people together. In the United States, early intentional communities include the Amish and the utopian communes of the nineteenth century. More pertinent, though, are the hippie communes out of which the Family emerged. These favored the group over the individual; their goal was to abolish egoism. With few individualist ambitions, these communal groups might then fall prey more easily to gurus and con artists. A fundamental motivation for the hippie commune, moreover, was dropping out, which meant breaking with mainstream society and constructing an alternative culture. Although Manson was no hippie (he could be construed as an anti-hippie), he took this principle to an extreme. Self-styled prophets Jim Jones, David Koresh and those of the more recent Heaven’s Gate cult—though not pointedly right-wing—have followed in his wake. The Family, however, was homicidal, not suicidal. More recent racist Christian groups, such as Aryan Nations and The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), update the hippie tactic of dropping out through the rubric of survivalism. Like The Family, they are militant—more so in ultimate objectives. They differ tactically in that Manson only wanted The Family to instigate a race war, not actually wage one. In The Turner Diaries, William Pierce outlined a similar role for the Order:

Finally, the far right believes in the subjugation of women. Although he relied almost exclusively on women to carry out his plans, Manson believes this too. Ironically, his own lifestyle obliterated even the most rudimentary semblance of home and family which, for the right, define femininity. Where Manson differs most significantly from the recent hate groups is that he was not overly concerned with anti-Semitism, populism or Constitutionality.50


Christian Identity

In present-day America, the Christian Identity Movement codifies a hatred and paranoia analogous to Manson’s. The movement’s precursor was, oddly enough, a philo-Semitic theology: British-Israelism. John Wilson, the son of a radical Irish weaver, set forth this belief in an 1840 book entitled Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin. Edward Hine definitively reshaped Wilson’s doctrine in his 1871 book Identification of the British Nation with Lost Israel.51 It construed Anglo-Saxons to be the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and also belonging to God’s chosen people. As a millenarian belief, British-Israelism survived through a combination of specificity and vagueness, leaving its predictions open to constant revision. It was highly decentralized and subject to variation. As the Zionist movement came to the fore in Britain, aspects of the belief took on a low-key, anti-Semitic inflection. Because Anglo-Israelites believed that both the House of Israel (the Anglo-Saxons) and the House of Judah (the Jews) must return to the Promised Land before the Second Coming, Zionist exclusivity presented an obstacle to their redemption.52

British-Israelism first came to the United States around the late 1870s. Joseph Wild of the Union Congregational Church of Brooklyn was one of its first American preachers. Under the doctrine then, America—or Manasseh—would play a subordinate role to Britain in salvation. In the US, however, what had been philo-Semitism mutated into outright anti-Semitism via a focus on racial origins. A combination of Victorian-era pseudo-science and specious scholarship continuously defined and redefined these, progressively denigrating Jews. In the 1930s Howard B. Rand emerged as a key popularizer of British-Israelism. He founded the influential Anglo-Saxon Federation of America. Rand’s group embraced James Larratt Battersby’s The Holy Book of Adolf Hitler, which portrays der Führer as a religious saint. Among other things, it advocates polygamy to better propagate the Aryan race.53 Rand made Detroit the Federation headquarters and it was there where he met a fellow believer: William J. Cameron, the former editor of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent. Having written and edited much of The International Jew, Cameron sometimes lectured on “Biblical economics” to church audiences. As a professional publicist he aided in spreading the belief as a vehement anti-Semitism.54

More than any other, Wesley Swift was the figure around whom a fully-formed Christian Identity belief—with no remaining ties to Britain—coalesced. A friend of Gerald K. Smith, Swift successfully popularized Identity in right-wing circles through a combination of extremist religious, racial and political platforms. Swift’s theology embraced a Manichaen world view which merged religion and politics. It reinterpreted the book of Genesis, postulating a “two seed theory,” according to which both Adam and the Devil, as the serpent, impregnated Eve. It construed the name “Adam” to mean “showing blood in the face.” This ability to show shame or embarrassment is what supposedly distinguishes the Aryan race from others.55 Anglo-Saxons are therefore the “Adamic race,” while Jews are “spawn of the Devil” and thus, absolutely demonized. Yet, this portrayal creates an obvious contradiction. On one hand, Identity warns of an overwhelming Jewish threat; on the other, it claims that Aryan supremacy is inevitable. Other races, or “mud people,” are “pre-Adamic,” i.e., created by God before he perfected the first full-fledged human beings.56 Because Christian Identity churches view the United States as “God’s Country”—or more specifically as New Israel, Jews no longer play any part in the End Days. The return of the True Israelites to the Promised Land presages Armageddon, the ultimate battle between good and evil prophesied in the Book of Revelations. Identity followers believe they had already reached this stage during the Revolutionary War. Again, it is Michael Barkun who clarifies the radicalization and separatism that arise from this twisted logic:

Since the essence of conspiracy theories is their claim to parsimony—explaining all evil through single causes—the incorporation of satanic paternity into already existing theories of a world Jewish conspiracy gave to the theory ultimate parsimony: everything that was or is undesirable in the world has come from a single source. If that source is destroyed, the world will be perfected and the millennium will begin. Further, as with all conspiracy theories, this one defies falsification. A plot of such cunning is presumed to be able to mislead those who would try to detect it, so that any evidence that appears to contradict the theory must necessarily have been fabricated by the conspirators themselves. Paradoxically, as far a conspiracy theorists are concerned, the more innocent the putative conspirators appear to be, the more clearly they are implicated, for their apparent innocence is taken to be proof of their complicity. Thus the theory becomes a closed system of self-referential ideas, from which all contradictory information has been excluded.57


Moreover, Richard Abanes warns against the dangers Manichaenism presents in the Christian Identity movement:

A Manichaen world view…becomes dangerous if combined with militancy. For militant Manichaens, persons outside the realm of absolute good are seen as utterly evil opponents who must be destroyed. When militancy and Manichaenism are blended with apocalyptic ideas about the world’s end being near, the potential for violence grows very great.58


Swift founded his church in Lancaster, California in 1946 and later changed its name from the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation to Church of Jesus Christ Christian (as opposed to Jesus Christ, King of the Jews). He had also been involved in an attempt to revive the California Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and later headed the California Anti-Communist League. During the 1960s he was reputed to have formed links with paramilitary groups: the California Rangers and the Christian Defense League.59

William Potter Gale, a retired lieutenant colonel who had served under General Douglas MacaArthur in the Phillippines, joined Identity in the 1950s and became active in the Christian Defense League as well. Heading the League was yet another Identity preacher: Richard Girnt Butler.60 Gale became one of the few to attempt to systematically articulate Identity doctrine in his 1963 pamphlet “The Faith of Our Fathers.”61 More recent figures with Identity links include Tom Metzger, David Duke, Pete Peters and Robert Miles.

Barkun assesses the status of the movement:

Identity is, even by the standards of American sectarianism, a tiny movement. Accurate estimates of its size are impossible to obtain because of its decentralized character. It has no denominational structure, merely shifting and overlapping groups with family resemblances to one another. However, even the guesses have placed its maximum size at no more than one hundred thousand, and it may be less than half that. Further, there is no evidence Identity can attract large numbers of new members, although it has proselytized among small populations of the alienated (e.g., skinheads and white prison inmates). Consequently, it cannot look forward to a foreseeable future as a mass movement.62


Even so, it exerts a disproportionately large ideological influence. James Ridgeway notes:

Identity theology provides both a religious base for racism and anti-Semitism, and an ideological rationale for violence against minorities and their white allies.

Identity followers have little use for fundamentalist Christians on the New Right (who, in turn, view Identity theory as heresy). The fundamentalist belief in “rapture”—the instant during the last days of the world when God will suddenly appear to protect his true believers and call them bodily into his presence—seems absurd to Identity worshipers. An Identity Christian isn’t about to wait for God to save him; he puts more faith in….direct political action.63


The movement brought together many otherwise antagonistic factions. As its name implies, the psychological basis of Christian Identity concerns identity formation and reinforcement. This process typically requires the construct of “otherness” to fortify a sense of self. The belief has come into prominence just as so-called processes of globalization have most dramatically challenged accustomed identities and social roles. In contrast to these uncertainties, Christian Identity guarantees a pan-historical selfhood. Real-life identities, however, are historically variable; one period’s distinguishing features may, at another, become insignificant. An aggressive ambivalence also marks the belief. Although its hostility arises from the paranoid suspicion that the Jews may really be God’s chosen, a latent Anglo-Israelite identification with Jews persists. More devout Identity Christians, for example, assiduously copy the dietary and sexual codes of orthodox Hasidim.

Image
Christian Patriots Defense League paramilitary training at Illinois compound, May 1981.

Aryan Nations

Aryan Nations began when Richard Butler took over the California Christian Identity Church upon the death of its founder, Wesley Swift. Butler’s lackluster preaching, however, made him unpopular with Swift’s old congregation. As a result, Butler moved the church to Hayden Lake, Idaho. Under the slogan “one God, one Nation, one Race,” he augmented the church with a political wing: Aryan Nations. Butler reasoned that other races had their national homelands, so why not Aryans? He proposed a ten-percent solution, where one-tenth of the United States would be set aside for the exclusive use of Aryan Christians. The Aryan Nations were to consist of the Pacific Northwest states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Butler planned to develop a congregation of 144,000 as foretold in the Book of Revelations. The movement would continue to expand until it could take control of this area through sheer numbers.64

To this end, Butler inaugurated a program of annual Aryan World Congresses, to attract and consolidate white racist groups internationally. He initiated the Aryan Brotherhood, a program of prison recruitment, but this was more trouble than it was worth. He soon abandoned it. Aryan Nations congregants began harassing Jewish and African-American locals. One day Sidney Rosen came to work to discover swastikas and the slur “Jewish swine” spray painted over his Hayden Lake steakhouse. Rosen put the property up for sale and closed his business within a year. Posters soon appeared in nearby Couer d’Alene and Spokane,Washington showing a target with a black man’s silhouette, the words “Official Running Nigger Target” printed underneath.

One early morning in June 1981, Butler and his wife awoke to a loud explosion. Outside, Butler saw smoke pouring out of Aryan Hall. Someone had targeted him. Butler suspected the Jewish Defense League, but the bombing remains unsolved. Shortly after that he built a 29-foot guard tower at Aryan Hall and a sentry post with a sign “Whites Only” at the property’s entry gate. Rocky Mountain News reporters Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt described the new atmosphere inside the compound as “an offbeat blend of Walden Pond and Berchtesgade, there was insular affection intermingled with fortress mentality among the people there.”65

In September of 1982 a citizens’ group called the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations formed to combat racist harassment. It successfully sponsored a bill making it a state crime to harass or intimidate anyone because of race. The penalty for such a crime was set at five years in prison with a $5,000 fine.66 Even so, through the annual Aryan World Congresses, Aryan Nations has continued to serve as the focal point for a growing extremist movement.

For the most part, the kind of right-wing religious militancy espoused by the Christian Identity movement or Aryan Nations belongs to another era. Instead, the sentiments that once drove radical separatism now instead seek to transform the mainstream. Witness Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s recent assessment of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Baptist ministers in Houston, a speech that reaffirmed Constitutional separation of church and state. Santorum said it made him want to “throw up.” What is perhaps most alarming in this is that it signals a perceived feasibility of merging church and state. Separatism is no longer necessary. Part III of this essay, “Posse Comitatus/ Grassroots Rebellion/ Secret Societies” will examine the open conflicts that took place between the radical right and the U.S. government in the form of seiges and stand-offs during the 1990s.
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Wed Apr 09, 2014 10:36 am

https://soupyone.wordpress.com/2013/10/ ... en-racism/

OCCUPY WALL STREET AND OPEN RACISM

The Occupy Wall Street movement is not a single organisation, however, that does not excuse the presence of plain and simple antisemitism on related Facebook pages.

This is one example:

Image


A cursory glance across their page reveals other little snippets or links to neo-Nazi material:


ImageThe bottom part links to the IHR, infamous Holocaust deniers & wandering antisemites, the other leads to Jew Watch, a hard core antisemitic site run by a neo-Nazi.

This is a small sampling. There is probably much, much more racism further down the page.

Their presence on Facebook is attached this site and the OccupyWallSt Twitter account.

Scary, but their main page has 623,988 likes!

Update 1: New posters should read the Comments Policy and re-read!

Update 2: We should not forget that racism comes in many shapes and intensities, so it is with this Occupy Wall Street Facebook page.

These dog whistles of racism often include a photograph or cartoon which conveys a secondary message.

The one below is suggestive that President Obama is subservient to Jews.

That is a common theme found on many neo-Nazi/hardcore antisemitic web sites. Now it is a point that this Occupy Wall Street Facebook page echoes, more racism by the day.

Update 3: There is an almost hourly link which connects to odd bits of antisemitism or makes sweeping generalizations on this Facebook page. I suggest readers and OWS supporters study that page and learn to spot this form of racism along with its motifs.



Image
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Sat Apr 12, 2014 8:23 am

http://www.social-ecology.org/2012/09/s ... apitalism/

Seven Left Myths about Capitalism


G.B. Taylor

Occupy Wall Street has renewed hope for a left political renaissance by challenging economic inequality and the neoliberal discourse that legitimated it, and reintroducing the word capitalism to political debate. The “greed” of the “1%,” counterpoised to the hardworking, rule-abiding 99%, has emerged as the dominant political frame of OWS. Rhetorically powerful, the slogan’s elegant simplicity conceals as much as it reveals. The language of “corruption,” the betrayal of Main Street by parasitic Wall Street bankers, and nationalist appeals to “take America back” all express a deep confusion as to the nature of the current crisis. This often results in a highly personalized moral critique of capitalism rather than a systemic one.

The crisis wracking capitalism today cannot be understood as simply the evil actions of greedy bankers and the 1%. In fact, as Max Weber pointed out, unlike the ostentatious opulence of earlier economic forms like feudalism, capitalism actually has tendencies which check greed – for example how intra-capitalist competition forces firms to save and reinvest. Thus the logic of states wielding coercive external power in human form as armies and police is quite different from that of capitalism, wherein power is more difficult to pinpoint or assign personal agency to. Conflating these two modes of power leads to very different political demands and outcomes. Capitalist power acts not only or even primarily on us from outside, but through us, as worker and capitalist alike are caught up in an impersonal competitive imperative that would quickly bankrupt any turncoat bankers or CEOs who might suddenly take Occupy’s message to heart.

With this in mind, I would like to examine seven myths about capitalism commonly found on the left that offer an incomplete critique of capitalism that points in the direction of insufficient reform or towards reactionary rather than emancipatory forms of anti-capitalism.

Greed

Why is decrying greed problematic? Because focusing on greed personalizes what is a structural problem, making it individual rather than systemic in nature. Although there are certainly greedy people, this is not a moral failing or “human nature,’ but people acting quite rationally within the structures of capitalism. Our present age of mergers and megacorporations is no accident; they are the winners within a capitalism driven by a grow-or-die imperative fueled by never ending competition. Within capitalism there is little space to act “ethically,” as institutionalized competition forces everyone – from owners looking to cut costs, workers seeking to maximize gain, and consumers hunting for the best price – to act immorally. By subjecting them to economic calculation, capitalism makes a mockery of our deepest ethical values. An analysis emphasizing greed points towards changing morality, when what is really needed is to get rid of the institutions that incentivize such behavior.

Corruption

Another familiar charge in the current crisis is corruption, that greed drove bankers to corruption, breaking their own rules and wrecking the economy in the process. But capitalism obeys only one fundamental rule: generate ever more profit or perish. The language of corruption implies exception, a situation wherein something has gone wrong; but the problem is rather the rule: the ordinary workings of capitalism. Although there are always scandals where outright deception, bribery, or insider trading occur, the reality is that very few laws were broken in creating the current crisis. Calls for getting money out of politics only get us to the point of nations with strict election finance laws, like England, where politicians still govern according to the needs of capital. Corruption is not the problem.

Economic Nationalism

Strong nationalist currents have also surfaced in Occupy Wall Street. Whether it’s purple armbands that signify the mixing of the red white and blue of the flag, or the language of “Take America Back,” there’s a strong desire for a return to normalcy, defined as a middle class standard of living. But the idea that the state, like “the economy,” is a neutral and unified entity that works for the good of all is a falsehood: the nation-state never protected anyone from capitalism, but rather provides for its smooth functioning. Likewise, there was no “Golden Era” when capitalism somehow respected national borders in its search for new exploitable resources, labor, markets, and profit. At best it struck a compromise with a small percentage of mostly white workers in the West for a short time post WWII. America’s post-war economic dominance has faded; international competition has brought the austerity it once imposed on the third world home. In addition to reinforcing the state, such economic nationalism displays a callous disregard for people in other nations, as well as immigrants; a poignant reminder why rightwing libertarian elements were prominent in the early days of Occupy. But we don’t want to go back to an American Dream that was built largely on the backs of people of color both in the US and abroad. Capitalism has never worked for “the people,” American or otherwise, and never will.

Finance Critique

Another line of argument identifies finance as the culprit, contrasting the speculative greed of Wall Street to an honest and hardworking Main Street which produces tangible goods and services. It is claimed that Wall Street is a casino economy that doesn’t produce anything useful, has no loyalty to American workers, and is run by amoral CEOs who make astounding salaries. But this distinction between a real and unreal economy is a fiction, Main Street operates according to the same logic as Wall Street on a smaller scale, and may even finance parts of it. But more fundamentally, to single out banking misses the point: all capitalist enterprise exists to produce profit, not meet human needs.[1]

Finance as a sector has certainly grown in size and importance, but this must be contextualized within a larger trajectory of capitalist development – the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) economy became central to the neoliberal project because, aided by technological development, it was a convenient and low-cost strategy for dealing with the crisis of capital accumulation in the 1970s – finding new ways to extract profit in the face of international competition, automation, and the gains of workers’ movements.[2] But Wall Street is no more or less parasitic than any other sector of the economy. This populist analysis blames opulence, money, and abstract exchange while ignoring the equally problematic nature of good old fashioned exploitative wage labor, or how the two are mutually intertwined. Furthermore, both lines of argument must also cope with a present reality wherein to even be exploited as waged labor is increasingly the luxurious privilege of a dwindling few. The irony is that workers today appear to need capitalism more than it needs them.

Size/Anti-Corporatism

The American left has often substituted a critique of corporations in place of a critique of capitalism. And it’s easy to beat up corporate giants like WalMart, Coca Cola, Bank of America, whose global operations obviously do much harm. However, the problem is not a quantitative one of size or scale, but rather qualitative. Capitalism is a social logic which impels small companies to act the same way, and sometimes even worse. Large corporations, because of their size, reach, visibility, and superior resources, are often in a better position to be unionized or otherwise pressured to pay better and offer benefits smaller businesses simply can’t offer.[3]

In a conversation during the early days of OWS, activist “preacher” Reverend Billy expressed exactly this critique, stating that Brooklyn bodegas (corner stores) posed an alternative to “the 1%” economy because they build community – you might know the person behind the counter or be able to momentarily leave your kid there while running an errand. Yet these same bodegas are often family businesses employing family members who are un- or underpaid, work long hours and lack vacations or health care. OWS has suggested moving money out of big banks like Bank of America and Chase and into smaller credit unions. Unfortunately, it turns out many credit unions are engaged in the same practices as larger banks, only at a local level.[4]

Focusing on large corporations also has the tendency to reduce politics to aesthetics: absent a critique of the common logic behind large and small firms, politics becomes a search for authenticity too easily channeled into consumption and individualism. Size is not the problem; the only real difference between WalMart and Etsy is taste and market share.

Conspiracy

These various partial critiques easily combine to produce conspiratorial views of capitalism. In this view the problem is the result of a secret, hidden cabal of evildoers – we just need to rip off the façade and – voilà! – liberation. This narrative of redemptive revelation is seductive, but it ignores the systemic nature of capitalism. Marx stated that capitalism operates “behind our backs,” appearing natural and rendering exploitation invisible so that when problems are identified, conspiratorial perspectives become attractive. But the problem is not the secret machinations of the Federal Reserve, bankers, Jews, or the trilateral commission but the fundamentally irrational logic of capitalism.[5]

Alternatives and the Myth of Autonomy

Faced with the ugliness of capitalism, understandably people often look to alternatives such as cooperative enterprises, community supported agriculture, farmers’ markets, local currencies and barter networks. These projects often provide important and desirable things like higher quality products, a sense of community, or increased self-management. However, their limitations are too often overlooked or simply wished away. Embedded in the same capitalist logic and subjected to the same market pressures as traditional firms, they can easily become indistinguishable from entrepreneurship with noble intentions. But you can’t small business your way out of capitalism. The workers’ cooperative of Mondragon in Spain is an instructive example. Forced to compete with traditional firms, their avowed political aims like higher wages, longer vacations, or environmental considerations become a competitive disadvantage in relation to firms lacking such moral scruples. The result is that Mondragon increasingly resembles a typical capitalist enterprise, compelled to make similar decisions only with fewer bosses to blame.

Such projects are often oblivious to the long history of attempts to economically move away from capitalism, or to restrain it politically. In France, 1981 Francois Mitterand tried to implement a moderate socialist program and was rewarded with massive capital flight, he quickly changed course. In Greece, it was socialists who presided over post-crisis austerity. The “market” also recently punished France for its insolence in electing a socialist president. If even powerful nation-states are powerless to control capital, how can small enterprises expect to fare any better?

In their zeal to transcend the many horrors of capitalism, many of these strategies seek to jump outside of it. But “autonomy” from capitalism is even more impossible than autonomy from the state it has captured. Limited by the competitive pressures of a market economy and private ownership, every social gain won by alternative economic projects or reform-minded politicians constitutes a competitive disadvantage against capitalist firms, or nations, lacking such scruples. The result is typically liquidation or a more self-managed form of capitalism not so distant from the quintessential entrepreneurial dream of “being your own boss.” However, acknowledging Adorno’s insight “There is no right life in the wrong one” is not to admit defeat but instead to demand a politics which squarely confronts the structural limitations – and opportunities – posed by the totality of capitalism.

Why Does Our Analysis of Capitalism Matter?

Having an accurate understanding of capitalism is not simply a nitpicky or academic concern; it is important because different analyses of capitalism lead in very different political directions, not all of which are emancipatory. Unfortunately, some of the critiques put forth by Occupy today unwittingly echo slogans from National Socialism – to “take back” the economy from a disloyal and parasitic class, make the economy work for the “right” national group, etc… The left has no monopoly on critiques of capitalism, and given its present historical weakness there is great danger in the rise of reactionary forms of anticapitalism. Around the world today right wing movements and parties tap into economic discontent and channel it into nationalism, blaming foreigners, welfare recipients, and “disloyal” corporations. One common nationalist demand is to make capitalism work “once again” for the native-born citizens of their respective countries. But such nationalist and fascist critiques of capitalism are false solutions in that they misunderstand the nature of capitalism and pose authoritarian solutions that destroy freedom.

The documentary film “Inside Job” provides a good example of this constellation of false critiques, and the problematic political solutions they imply. It portrays the economic crisis as a classic case of a few “bad apples” whose greed and bad morals, established through their use of cocaine and prostitutes, also happen to ruin the economy. The film even goes so far as to biologize the problem, showing brain scans that allegedly show how excited bankers get when handling money! Its final panoramic shot of the Statue of Liberty suggests a patriotic return to economic nationalism, naively utopian in the face of a globalized capitalist economy that has long since rendered even such mythical notions quaint.

Many historical factors sustain today’s fuzzy thinking about capitalism. One is the legacy of the Cold War: the collapse of “actually existing socialism” and resulting “End of History” consensus only strengthened a hysterical anticommunism that made talking about capitalism, let alone socialism or communism, almost impossible in the United States. Systematic repression from McCarthyism to COINTELPRO also contributed to the rise of a left which largely neglected political economy for 40 years, while more robust critiques and history of capitalism languished in ever-dwindling sectarian Marxist circles. American traditions of pluralism, pragmatism, and anti-intellectualism also work against a deeper theoretical understanding of capitalism. This also sheds light on the current popularity of prefigurative politics. While the desire to model the world we want in the here and now is an admirable one, it also holds out the seductive fiction that we don’t need politics, analysis, or organization – we can lead by example, until so many people join that the world changes. Thus prefigurative politics fills the vacuum of left ideas, allowing populists and anarchists to converge in practical matters while carefully avoiding addressing questions or demands which will inevitably entail fragmenting the perceived unity of the 99% based on how they understand the nature of the problem and preferred solution.

The Need for Radical Thinking

After years of neglect, Left prescriptions on economy have become vague, opportunistic, lacking vision. Many simply nod along to recycled Keynesian solutions of those like Paul Krugman, which fail to explain why social democracy was steamrolled by neoliberalism in the first place. The economic crisis of 2008 revealed that capitalism is only in “crisis” when it hurts capital. But if the fundamental issue is to make the economy serve human need rather than the other way around, then why stop halfway? Capitalism certainly hasn’t – the most “successful” revolution in terms of transforming the globe in the last 40 years has been the market utopianism of neoliberalism. We must also think big: we don’t just want a bigger slice, but the whole damn bakery!

In this regard, we should learn from the capitalists, who ironically have adopted traditional left demands more ably than the left itself has. Automation has made fewer jobs necessary, and everyone knows work sucks anyway, so why should the left valorize toil and beg for useless busywork jobs? Instead of chastising the 1% for their lives of idle luxury, we should be demanding it for all. And sadly it has been the capitalists, not workers, who have shown they have no nation. We can follow suit with a militantly cosmopolitan internationalism that has no more use for borders than transnational corporations does. The “crisis” has revealed that what used to be deemed impossible is in fact a matter of political will, as the state has bailed out banks and nationalized the auto industry while leaving people to fend for themselves. The result is a perverse socialism in reverse: socializing all the risk while privatizing all the wealth. Our task is simple: the current crisis has shown that a society organized around production for the accumulation of profit doesn’t work – even according to its own standards. It’s up to us to reverse this communism for capital, making our vast productive capacity serve humans, not the other way around.

[1] Ross Wolff, “Concerning Greed and Romantic Anticapitalist nostalgia.” http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/11/ ... lism-past/. The Charnel House.

[2] David Harvey. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005

[3] Doug Henwood. “Small is Not Beautiful.” National Post (Canada), September 23, 2003. http://lbo-news.com/2011/11/26/from-the ... ness-myth/

[4] Henwood, Doug. “Moving Money (revisited).” Left Business Observer. November 8th, 2011. http://lbo-news.com/2011/11/08/moving-money-revisited/

[5] Spencer Sunshine. “Occupied with Conspiracies? The Occupy Movement, Populist Anti-Elitism, and the Conspiracy Theorists.” Shift Magazine, November 2011. http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=512
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Wed Apr 23, 2014 8:15 pm

http://www.politicalresearch.org/20-on- ... in-occupy/

20 ON THE RIGHT IN OCCUPY

By: Spencer Sunshine

In my Public Eye article “The Right Hand of Occupy Wall Street,” I detail many of the issues related to right-wing and conspiracy theorist participation in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement—including the false attempts by the mainstream right-wing media to “smear” all of Occupy as antisemitic.1 I also show how genuine Far Right—as well as conspiracy and right-libertarian—elements were drawn to Occupy by its critique of finance capital, welcoming of everyone, ambiguous categories (such as “the 99%” and “the 1%”), and use of franchise activism. Partly because of the original “smear,” many progressive activists simply refused to acknowledge the presence and extent of right-wing involvement in Occupy. For reasons of space and readability, only a part of this documentation was included in the original article. Therefore, a fuller body of research is presented here. (An appendix addresses the overhyped speculation about the possible conjunction of the Tea Party and Occupy.)

Right-wing participation in Occupy fell into four overlapping categories: anti-Federal Reserve activists, conspiracy theorists, antisemites, and White nationalists/neo-Nazis. Their involvement included attending planning meetings, taking part in the encampments, making appeals directed to or attempting to cross-recruit from Occupiers, and co-opting online resources. Most of these actors were from the part of the Right that either directly incorporated some left-wing ideas into their own thinking; saw themselves as “neither left nor right,” while keeping core right-wing political views; or wished to reach out to the Left for a tactical alliance.

A few notes: 1) Despite the presence of right-libertarian, conspiracy, and Far Right elements in Occupy, it should be kept in mind that, overall, Occupy’s politics leaned toward the left—and even left/post-left anarchist in cities like Oakland. In most places right-wing participation, even when it was comparatively strong, remained a numerical minority. I straw-polled about a dozen activists in different cities who were deeply involved in Occupy; they put the number of participants in these four categories, plus sympathizers, at 5­–30 percent, depending on the city and time. (The exception was in Tallinn, Estonia, which was 100 percent.) Still, even at the low end of the guesses, these numbers end up in the thousands. 2) This article refers to the Occupy movement in general; only parts of it refer to New York’s Zuccotti Park Occupation. 3) In some cases, right-wing participation did not go unchallenged. In cities such as Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Kansas City, various actions were taken by anti-fascists against the furthest Right elements; however, it should be noted that in at least two cities (Seattle and Phoenix), anti-fascists ended up in fights with liberal Occupiers, who justified the inclusion of Nazis under the rubric of the “99%.” Similarly, some OWS activists have taken steps against an antisemitic “imposter” OWS Facebook page, while other activists have allegedly refused to invoke their legal rights to have it removed.

1. RON PAUL’S FOLLOWERS: END THE FED

When Occupy Wall Street hit lower Manhattan, Ron Paul was campaigning in the primary for the 2012 Republican presidential candidacy. And while he may have been equivocal about the movement, many of his followers jumped in head-over-heels. Paulists were a fixture in the movement and appeared at most Occupations, even if they remained a small but vocal minority. His youthful fan club, mostly libertarians, seemed to appreciate his positions on drug legalization, opposition to U.S. wars in the Middle East, and condemnation of the Federal Reserve (“the Fed”)—despite his decidedly non-libertarian stances on abortion and same-sex marriage. Paul himself stayed his distance, and it was only at the end of September 2011 that he made guarded pro-Occupy comments, which even then were mostly directed at activists who were forwarding his politics.

Paul is one of the most visible advocates of Austrian economics, an intellectual tradition advocating unrestrained capitalism and associated with thinkers like Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard. Unlike some other Austrians, however, his politics are infused with his Protestant Christian worldview, and he also has long had a history of accepting support from, and dialoging with, White nationalist groups.2 Paul, who advocates returning to the gold standard, believes that the Federal Reserve is the central source of problems today, and has popularized the slogan “End the Fed.”

Paul’s stance on the Federal Reserve is a classic right-wing position, found in both right-libertarian and Far Right circles, which focuses on a specific part of finance capital and often casts the Fed as the active agent in a vast conspiracy. However, this anti-Fed perspective is usually twined with a defense of capitalism in general: either a defense of “productive capital” (versus “finance capital”), popular on the Far Right; or a glorification of the completely unfettered market, in the vision of the right-libertarians.

Paul’s 2009 book End the Fed argues that the Fed is both unconstitutional and immoral. He claims it is “a full-time counterfeiting operation to sustain monopolistic financial cartels,” and compares U.S. capitalism with a central bank to the Soviet Union’s economic system. He thinks that abolishing the Fed will hamper the ability to engage in foreign wars, but will also be a lever to destroy government programs that redistribute wealth. Paul thinks the U.S. is a “huge welfare state” and opposes even basic guarantees like Social Security. He justifies these views with biblical quotes.3 All of these things made him an odd choice as a hero for some in Occupy.

The End the Fed sentiment was so strong that Leftists in the semi-official OWS infrastructure were forced to respond. In early November they held “Federal Reserve Awareness Day,” featuring a phone-in talk by David Korten, in order to co-opt right-wing anti-Fed sentiment. By December 2011, one post complained that libertarians had overrun the OWS online forums.4

2. ALEX JONES: OCCUPY THE FED

Although many Ron Paul followers were involved in Occupy, there was no obvious central organizational mechanism for this. However, a number of higher-profile figures supported both Paul’s candidacy and Occupy, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Jones vacillated in his views on Occupy—sometimes trying to co-opt it himself while at other times wondering whether it was a George Soros-controlled event (a popular conspiracy theory about Occupy), a nest of New World Order supporters, or a pseudo-opposition co-opted by the Democratic Party.

However, early on—and clearly hoping to build the anti-Federal Reserve sentiment existing in Occupy, Jones called for an Occupy the Fed day on October 6, 2011, particularly at the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks. He said that, contrary to media portrayals of the Occupations as liberal or Leftist, “The people on the ground are good, and understand the Federal Reserve is the central organization empowering this world government system. This is a revolt against banker occupation.” Jones personally lead the Occupy the Fed march in Dallas, which was attended by several hundred.5 (The real Occupy Dallas held a separate march the day before.)6

After this day of action, he seemed to quickly lose interest. However, he continued to defend OWS from police brutality and repression and—to his credit, considering his misgivings—after the main Occupy camps were evicted on November 15, said, “We need to stand with OWS now that they are being attacked.”7

3. OATH KEEPERS: OCCUPY THE OCCUPATION

The Oath Keepers were thinking the same thing about Occupy as Jones, and the group put out a national call to “Occupy the Occupiers.”

The Oath Keepers organization recruits current and former military and law-enforcement employees who swear to defend the Constitution by disobeying federal orders that they believe violate it. (This includes staples of right-wing conspiracy theories such as interning U.S. citizens in detention camps that they believe exist across the country.) The group holds armed marches (in states where it is legal for licensed owners to carry unconcealed weapons in public), and their founder has called for organizing armed units. Their political view is rife with conspiracy theories that generally circulate in the right-wing milieus about a coming U.S. dictatorship.8

On October 5, 2011, the group, with about a half dozen other figures, announced a plan for a national push to promote anti-Federal Reserve politics in the Occupy movement. Interviewed on the Jones-affiliated Infowars, Oath Keepers founder (and former Ron Paul aide) Stewart Rhodes said, “We all had the same idea…that the real target should be the Federal Reserve. Certainly, Wall Street is corrupt and complicit, but it’s the Fed that’s the heart of the beast and the engine of our destruction.”9

The group’s announcement says that, “Oath Keepers is organizing a joint effort along with Alex Jones of Infowars dot com (who himself called for an Occupy the Fed movement); Steven Vincent of End The Fed; Danny Panzella’s Truth Squad TV; Brandon Smith of Alt-Mkt.com; Gary Franch of Restore The Republic; and others as quickly as we can contact them.” Later, Bryce Shonk of the Tenth Amendment Center, and Bob Dwyer, a Boston Tea Party organizer, were added, and the website occupythefed.com was set up for this.10

Members of Oath Keepers said they were at Occupations in New York, Boston, and Seattle, but their main presence seemed to be at Occupy LA (OLA), where they engaged in outreach with the crowds. Numerous videos document their presence, and the director of the Southern California chapter, John Oetken, made a number of posts about the group’s experience at OLA.11

One website documents what was dubbed the “Liberty Encampment” at OLA, where activists from the Oath Keepers, End the Fed, and We Are Change banded together to pitch tents and raise a flag. Supporters were called on to join in with their own tents and bring food and water. Other anti-Federal Reserve sentiment at OLA was illustrated by the huge mural depicting the Federal Reserve as a tentacled creature, in line with conspiracy views about the Federal Reserve. At a November 22, 2011, anti-Federal Reserve march, End the Fed’s Steven Vincent (who said, “I want to break down and collapse the left-right paradigm”) claimed they attracted 400­–500 participants.12

However, Oath Keepers soon changed its tune. An article later in October 2011 claimed OWS was attacking U.S. freedoms by calling for a Constitutional Convention. The next year, its website reposted an article calling Occupy “an anti-social, violent movement of the extreme Left.”13Apparently the double-occupation didn’t take—although it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

4. DAVID ICKE

David Icke is famous for his metaconspiracy theory about how reptilians from outer space have come to Earth, establishing the bloodlines of the global elite, who in turn instigate conflicts and wars so the reptilians can harvest the resulting negative energy. Icke, however, also has a keen interest in political and economic theories; they often involve the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (the antisemitic forgery that was an inspiration to the Nazis), “Rothschild Zionists,” and the Federal Reserve.14 Icke became entranced by Occupy; his website includes numerous posts about it. In October 2011 he made a video to address OWS protestors, “Essential Knowledge For A Wall Street Protestor,” and he made an hour-long “ad-lib documentary” when he visited Zuccotti Park November 15­–17 while in the city for a sold-out talk.

In the “Essential Knowledge” video, which has about 350,000 Youtube views (as of April 2014), Icke explains fractional reserve banking, opposition to which is a mainstay of the End the Fed campaign, and he denounces credit and interest in general. He explains that the private banks and corporations are under the control of a few elite families and networks who are working to centralize power in a world government, and seek to completely control humanity. He also denounces 9/11 as a joint Mossad/U.S. operation, calls George Soros a “Rothschild-controlled bagman,” says climate change is a “bloody giant hoax,” and tells OWS protestors that “it’s vital not to get focused and obsessed with corporations and banks and all that stuff.” Against the centralizing “parasites” and “cabals” he proposes “diversity, diversity, diversity.” He does not mention reptiles.15

His “ad-lib documentary” (viewed about 125,000 times) was mostly filmed at Zuccotti Park; in it, he says, “I love the fricking energy here.” Icke talks to a couple of his OWS supporters, including one activist who says she camped out the entire time (she brags about warning fellow Occupiers against getting the free flu shots that were offered onsite), as well as Luke Rudowski from We Are Change. Icke stresses the need to abandon notions of Left and Right, and join forces with the Tea Party.16

Other Ickeians also became involved in Occupy. For example, Occupy Brooklyn had a particularly distracting run-in with one, who had taken it upon themself to set-up a Facebook page, which gathered 1,500 followers even though it was unaccountable to the group itself. In October 2011, the administrator deleted all posts except the ones about Icke, and made this the top post: “Do you feel the UFO cover-up by the elite 1% is real?”17The real Occupy Brooklyn then became embroiled in having to set up its own social media and regaining control of the Facebook page, rather than working on actual organizing. If nothing else, this shows what a time-consuming distraction conspiracists can be from real organizing.

5–7. WE ARE CHANGE: THE PAPARAZZI, THE POLITICIAN, AND THE ANARCHO-FASCIST

One of the larger “9/11 Truth” groups is We Are Change (WAC), with many chapters internationally. Today the main group is connected to various conspiracy theory and patriot milieus. However, one of its splinter factions, WAC NYC, has members who are alternately connected to the Libertarian Party, while others are members in a group that is part of an international crypto-fascist network. All of them were involved the Zuccotti Park occupation.

5. LUKE RUDKOWSKI

Luke Rudkowski says he founded WAC in 2006. He is a prolific videographer who has made a name for himself partly through a series of paparazzi-style surprise interviews with figures like Michael Moore, Ben Bernanke, Henry Kissinger, and Jacob Rothschild. Rudkowski’s organization promotes a host of conspiracy theories, from 9/11 to the Bilderbergs to the Federal Reserve. For example, one left-wing anarchist group claims that Rudkowski falsely accused one of its members of being the perpetrator of the June 2012 mass murder in Aurora, Colorado. Rudkowski did extensive video coverage from Zuccotti Park, and Icke conducted two interviews with him. Rudkowski also drew praise for his work at Occupy from Stewart Rhodes, national leader of the Oath Keepers. Rudkowski later made a video interviewing Rhodes, who plugged his program to organize armed neighborhood groups.18

6. DANNY PANZELLA

According to online reports, in late 2010 or early 2011, following allegations that Rudkowski had mishandled funds, his former colleagues Danny Panzella and Craig FitzGerald disaffiliated their local from the main group, becoming WAC NYC.19 Both are involved in it today.

Panzella was involved in Tea Party politics, and in 2010 he ran for state assembly in Staten Island’s District 63 on the Libertarian ticket (he was also endorsed by the Constitution Party).20Panzella held demonstrations against the Federal Reserve building in downtown Manhattan even before OWS, and he worked tirelessly to redirect Occupy against the Federal Reserve. (One OWS activist who spent a significant amount of time at Zuccotti Park told me that there were sometimes dozens of marches a day from the park, and a number of them went to the Federal Reserve.) As noted, Panzella collaborated with the Oath Keepers to inject anti-Federal Reserve sentiments into Occupy. He claims, for example, that hundreds of people attended an October 7, 2011 demonstration against the Fed in NYC.21

Many in the mainstream right-wing media denounced Occupy; Glenn Beck famously claimed Occupiers would target capitalists and media and “drag us out into the streets and kill us. If you’re wealthy, they will kill you for what you have.”22 But not everyone at Fox News believed this; journalist Michelle Fields, on the pro-libertarian Freedom Watch, said “what’s interesting about the D.C. protests is that it is very libertarian, everyone that I spoke to said that …they’re actually going to be voting for Ron Paul…so it’s sad that these liberal groups are sort of hijacking this movement.” The program also brought Panzella on the show to talk about right-libertarian participation in OWS.23

Panzella told Alex Jones—who credited Panzella with the idea to “Occupy the Fed”—that “I’m calling for the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to join forces, put down your egos because we can do this. It is game over for the Fed if both grassroots movement merge together and fight against that enemy.”24

Despite past differences, by September 2012 Panzella was working with Rudkowski again in organizing End the Fed demonstrations in New York City.25

7. CRAIG FITZGERALD & NYC NATIONAL-ANARCHISTS

Craig FitzGerald took a different route than Panzella; he and other WAC-NYC members formed the National Anarchist Tribal Alliance-New York (NATA-NY). FitzGerald says he is from a militia family and has a long history of involvement with right-wing groups like the John Birch Society and the Constitution Party, as well as working on Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign.26 NATA-NY is formally affiliated with the National-Anarchist Movement, a post-Third Position crypto-fascist international which extols White supremacy and thinly veiled antisemitic conspiracy theories. One anti-fascist blog posted screenshots of FitzGerald talking about his group potentially doing “a Holocaust truth demonstration in front of the holohoax museum in NYC and handing out a select issue of the Barnes Review” (that is, a Holocaust denial periodical).27 Attack the System’s R.J. Jacob said the NATA-NY was a “a direct outgrowth” of WAC, and that “As a result of Craig’s activism, chapters of WAC in other states have become sympathetic to national anarchists and have even attempted to launch their own national anarchist groups.”28

FitzGerald and others loudly claim they were active in the Zuccotti Park occupation. FitzGerald openly bragged that, “NATA-NY has taken advantage of the anarchistic and decentralized atmosphere of OWS to help promote the NA philosophy with great success.”29

8. ATTACK THE SYSTEM

In addition to NATA-NY, another “bridging” group between White Nationalists and libertarians is Attack the System (ATS). It is the brainchild of Keith Preston, who decades ago was involved in left-wing anarchist groups. Now he advocates “pan-secessionism,” which hopes to create a Left-Right alliance of paleoconservatives, theocrats, racial separatists of all stripes, and Leftists, united against the increasingly globalized, centralized, liberal “system.” Two ATS associate editors, R.J. Jacob and Miles Joyner, made the video “Power to the Neighborhoods (A Message to ‘Occupy Wall Street’),” specifically to court Occupiers. It says, “The diversity of the protest shows the irrelevant and archaic nature of the conventional Left-slash-Right model of the political spectrum. Those who have descended on Wall Street include liberals and conservatives, patriots and populists, libertarians and anarchists.” As is standard for attempts of the Right to woo the Left, they offer a Leftist critique of contemporary problems, and then offer a right-wing solution: complete control by local groups. Preston spells out what this really means when he expresses his hostility towards identity politics and says that he looks for alliances with “racialists and theocrats.”30

9. PACIFICA FORUM

The Pacifica Forum started in Eugene as a University of Oregon-based anti-war group in 1994 and morphed into an antisemitic discussion forum. It has hosted talks by Far Right thinkers like David Irving, Tomislav Sunic, Mark Weber (Institute for Historical Review), and Jimmy Marr (National Socialist Movement). The Southern Poverty Law Center lists Pacifica Forum as a White nationalist hate group.31 Those directly involved in the Pacifica Forum, along with their direct associates, participated in both Occupy Eugene and Occupy Portland.

10. AMERICAN FREE PRESS

The American Free Press (AFP) is the largest antisemitic and pro-White nationalist U.S. weekly. It is heir to the media empire established by Willis Carto, whose greatest accomplishment was the spread of Holocaust denial in the United States. Carto crafted a populist version of White nationalist politics, focused on the critique of finance capital and open to neo-Nazism. He founded the Liberty Lobby, the Institute for Historical Review, the Barnes Review, and the Spotlight. When the Spotlight closed due to a lawsuit, AFP took its place.32

AFP had the most extensive Occupy coverage of any Far Right media.It endorsed Occupy from the start, although initially drawn more to Day of Rage’s more nationalist framing of the protests. The paper ran glowing articles in almost every issue during the two months of the Zuccotti Occupation; reporters attended Occupations in Texas, D.C., and New York City. One article shows AFP staffer Olga Belinskaya at Occupy D.C. burning a “Federal Reserve Note” (i.e., a $20 bill), and claiming she led a march of 60 people against the Fed.33 (Jeffrey Smith, AFP’s New York correspondent, passed the paper out at an Occupy Brooklyn meeting, but an antifascist activist confronted him, and Smith left.) Bill White, a former National-Anarchist who later ended up in full-on neo-Nazi groups, even wrote an article for AFP defending Occupy from mainstream right-wingers.34

The paper cast the Occupy movement as opposing Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and “big media.” They described the “Wall Street money kings” as operating through the Bilderberg meetings, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, the IMF, and World Bank—all classic targets of right-wing conspiracies.35

AFP tried to encourage ongoing right-wing participation in Occupy. In late October 2011, Smith wrote, “While populist and pro-American groups have been present since day one (Sept. 17) of the protests, in recent days their involvement has been less consistent. This has led several key patriotic leaders to urgently petition patriots in a 500-mile radius to come to New York, or at least attend and organize Occupy rallies in a city near them.”36

The paper also defended Patricia McAllister, the LA school teacher whose on-camera antisemitic remarks at an Occupy LA rally caused her to lose her job. McAllister—who said “Jews have been run out of 109 countries through history and we need to run them out of this one” and praised Hitler—was praised by AFP as a “hero” and compared her to Rosa Parks.37

11. LYNDON LAROUCHE

Members of Lyndon LaRouche’s Far Right sect were initially involved in OWS. They have long pushed for restoring Glass-Steagall, a New Deal-era act that limited the kinds of investments that banks could make, which was repealed in the late 1990s. Many believe that it would have prevented the housing crisis, had it remained in effect. During Occupy, two bills were in Congressional committee that would have restored its provisions, and it was a priority for many Occupiers on the Left as well. LaRouche’s followers participated in the OWS meetings before the Occupation started, where Glass-Steagall’s restoration was one of six initial proposals for the never-realized “one demand.” A literal choir of LaRouchites showed up for the first day of OWS, and his organization even claimed credit for making its reinstatement “a leading demand of the movement.”38 Even if they added their voices to the choir, this is no doubt a vast exaggeration. Nonetheless, the participation of the LaRouchuites shows that: 1) Far Right participation occurred prior to the Occupations themselves, so their presence cannot be merely considered “infiltration” of a pre-existing movement; and 2) that the economic views of the Far Right were in harmony with the public calls put out by OWS.

12. OCCUPY KCJOURNAL

There was more than one incident at Occupy Kansas City (OKC). In November 2011, an anti-racist activist reported that one of the main organizers of OKC was promoting the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.In March 2012, a new website was set up by an Occupier, called the OccupyKCJournal, which allegedly promoted racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. They did outreach to the city council to make their presence known. This prompted a press conference from other Occupiers and allied groups denouncing the website. OKC’s Jeremy Al-Haj said, “the 99% includes people of all colors, all faiths, and all sexualities and gender identities…. We will not allow for our movement to be co-opted by racists, anti-Semites and homophobes.”39

13. COUNTER-CURRENTS

Based in San Francisco, this White nationalist book publisher and webpage is one of the leading sources of genteel intellectual fascist and White nationalist writers. Editor-in-Chief Greg Johnson, although wary that Occupy was a Soros-orchestrated event to allow the public to let off steam, still saw opportunities in it: “Given that the protestors are overwhelmingly White, Occupy Wall Street does provide opportunities for White Nationalists. There is nothing to prevent us from getting our ideas into the mix. However, there is no reason to think that our ideas will make any headway given the basic nature of the protests.” (Here, he is referring to Occupy’s General Assembly format where everyone could speak.) “A far more promising angle is for us to ponder how to frame an open-source protest movement that would serve our purposes rather than the establishment’s.” Counter-Currents managing editor, Mike Polignano, claimed he had been to Occupy San Francisco and Occupy Oakland and had given a talk about the possibilities of Occupy at the Institute for Historical Review’s office.40

14. HOOSIER NATION (AMERICAN THIRD POSITION)

Matthew Parrott of Hoosier Nation, the Indianapolis branch of the White nationalist American Third Position party (now the American Freedom Party), attended at least one Occupy Indianapolis gathering.

Just before this, Parrott wrote an essay for Counter-Currents naming the 1% as a “a cosmopolitan cabal of Jews and their technocratic puppets.” Regarding Occupy, he said, “White Nationalists who carried the torch through our darkest decades would have died to have a shot at diving into this civil unrest. They would have loved to wade into leaderless mobs of desperate youths who are angry about international bankers and the Federal Reserve. The overwhelming majority of people showing up for these events are White.”41

A week later he went to Occupy Indianapolis and made a man-on-the-scene video, interviewing various participants. Even though he clearly identified himself as a White nationalist, the video was posted on an Occupy Indianapolis Facebook group (causing a disagreement with an anti-fascist group). He also photographed himself and a friend holding a sign saying, “End the Fed / Occupy K Street, too!” Parrott wrote about his positive reception: “Our experience was peaceful and positive, affirming my suspicion that the majority of the Occupy Indianapolis attendees were fed up with the same corporate and federal abuses the majority of the Tea Party protesters are fed up with.” 42 His colleague “Tristania” posted a comment on the White nationalist website Stormfront, saying that “it was a very good opportunity for outreach” and that “it’s about cherry picking people from those audiences and recruiting them to our side.”43

Parrot has since disbanded Hoosier Nation and, with Matthew Heimbach, founded the Traditional Youth Network—current darlings of the White nationalist scene.

15. AMERICAN FRONT

The American Front (AF) was one of the first U.S. White nationalist skinhead organizations; founded in 1987, it has a history of embracing Third Positionist politics, advocating anti-capitalism and White separatism (as opposed to White supremacy). After leader David Lynch was murdered in 2011, his precursor, James Porrazzo, briefly commandeered the AF’s website and declared himself the leader; shortly thereafter, he and his followers abandoned the ruse and rechristened themselves the New Resistance. During Porrazzo’s brief tenure at controlling the American Front again, the group claimed to have attended at least one Occupation (presumably Occupy Denver) and to have received a positive response. One member reported, “Our being AF has drawn a very positive response here. NO issues with anyone while talking about national revolutionary politics or AF.”44 (However, one antifascist activist connected to Occupy Denver told me that antifascists in Denver were familiar with AF and that there was no public activity at their Occupation.) New Resistance—which retools traditional antisemitic narratives under the rubric of anti-Zionism—also cheered the occupation of the Israeli consulate in Boston by Palestine Solidarity activists in Occupy, and promoted a video of WAC-NYC activists at Occupy AIPAC.45

16. LOUIS BEAM

Louis Beam is a legend in White nationalist circles. He theorized and promoted the concept of “leaderless resistance,” which has become one of the inspirations for both lone wolf attacks and the new wave of decentralized White separatism. According to one comment on a website, he wrote:

“The ‘occupy wall street’ movement is successful in so far as they continue to refuse leaders. Once they accept a leader they will be destroyed. They must also not let the enemy define their friends and enemies for them. That attempt is being made by the establishment media now. Attempts are made here to define them as ‘kids’ or left-wing socialists. They are that but much more. They are also right-wingers, conservatives, and a general cross-section of the nation as a whole. They must make every effort to stick with broad terms such as the ‘99’ percent slogan and remain nonexclusive.

The protestors are on the street instead of in front of the television. That is the first step, and a big one at that for many of them. The first step to resistance is to decide to resist. No mater [sic] how ineffective you may be at the start. You learn as you go. They will learn what works and what does not. At least they are no longer passively watching life go by them. Think how hard it would be to get your neighbors to go downtown with you and camp out for a week to protest the banks. Impossible you say. No, you just have to decide to resist at some point. They are at that point. I will delve into this topic later as I have time.”46

17. TOM METZGER

In the 1980s, Tom Metzger was a pivotal figure in introducing racist politics into the U.S. skinhead scene; his group WAR (White Aryan Resistance) was Third Positionist politically and allied with the American Front. Metzger often railed against international capital and the banking industry, and so it is unsurprising that he endorsed Occupy as well. He described it as “people from all walks of life coming together…their basic gripe is the big banks and big corporations and big government, and the empire operation of the federal government, and that’s at the basis of all this, and so that’s why I support it. Not that there is not people in there that I don’t disagree with in many cases…but I believe any kind of resistance to the system at this time can’t be all bad.” Elsewhere, he said, “In fact, I stood down on the street corner here in Warsaw, Indiana with an Occupy Warsaw, when Occupy was going on. Anything that shows life among the people that something may good come out of it, we want to support it, or be around it. That’s where you find your people.” He even posted a picture on his webpage holding an “Occupy Warsaw” sign.47

18. DAVID DUKE

The most prominent figure on the Far Right to endorse Occupy was David Duke, an elder statesman of the White nationalist movement. The founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, in the 1980s and ’90s helped mainstream White nationalist politics; his greatest success was his election as a Louisiana state representative for a term.

In October 2011 he released the video “Occupy Zionist Wall Street.” Duke’s usual, thinly veiled antisemitism was on display as he denounced the “Zionist thieves at the Federal Reserve” and “the most powerful criminal bank in the world, the Zionist Goldman Sachs, run by that vulture-nosed bottom feeder, Lloyd Blankfein.” After naming several Jewish bankers and employees at the Federal Reserve, Duke ended with the call, “Yes: Occupy Wall Street. Occupy the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and Washington. Bring the biggest financial criminals in the world to justice. Finally Americans are rising up, and it feels great.” To date, the rant has received more than 100,000 views. He later wrote on the Stormfront forum, in a thread about whether White nationalists should participate in Occupy, that “OWS is an opportunity…. Grab this opportunity!”48

19. NEO-NAZI FACTIONS

Neo-Nazis are a small subset of the White nationalist movement in the United States. A number of them endorsed Occupy—although others were ambivalent, or even denounced it.

The American Nazi Party was the most famous endorser; its leader, Rocky J. Suhayda, said:

This issue is TAYLOR MADE [sic] for National Socialists, as well as WN [White nationalists] who are serious about DOING SOMETHING… After all – JUST WHO – are the WALL STREET BANKERS? The vast majority are JEWS…. I urgently URGE all of you to TAKE PART and JOIN IN when these protests hit your neck of the woods. Produce some flyers EXPLAINING the “JEW BANKER” influence – DON’T wear anything marking you as an “evil racist” – and GET OUT THERE and SPREAD the WORD!49


Support amongst Nazis was not universal, however. The National Socialist American Labor Party condemned Occupy for supporting “the destruction of Western Christian Civilization through forced multi-culturalism, race-mixing, degenerate art, music, and entertainment, destruction of a free market economy, and the destruction of cultural traditions.”50

In October 2011, J.T. Ready of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) and his vigilante U.S. Border Guard came to Occupy Phoenix, armed with AR-15 rifles; they claimed their presence was to show support for the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) and to protect Occupy Phoenix from the police. Other activists did not agree about the meaning of their visit. Some members of the camp reportedly tried to welcome them as members of the 99%, which did not sit well with anti-fascist activists.51(Shortly afterward, Ready murdered four people before committing suicide.)

However, NSM leader Jeff Schoep was more ambivalent. He said Occupy’s “targets being Wall street, and the bankers are right on, but the Movement itself it not something we should ever align ourselves with. The occupy movement is filled with many of our enemies in the extreme far left. The communists, anarchists, and various degenerates have gathered together as part of the occupy movement. That is not to say there are not some good people involved, however the main bulk of these people are the same people we fight at our demonstrations and they are aligned with communism.”52

Billy Roper’s White Revolution saw fewer problems with Occupy. Roper had been in a leadership position in the once powerful neo-Nazi group the National Alliance, which, during its Third Position period, had tried to court anti-globalization and Palestine Solidarity activists. He eyed Occupy for its antisemitic potential, noting that, “in isolated but growing areas of their multi-city protests” there is “a vocal naming of the Jew.” He said, “People from every end of the political spectrum now object to the status quo. Everyone hates the rich. Everyone distrusts the controlled media. Everyone resents the banking industry and the Federal Reserve. We all would like to ‘occupy Wall Street’. More and more people are willing to name the Jew.”53

Finally, Nazis showed up in Occupy Seattle, apparently coming out of a nearby bar at closing time; anti-fascists kicked them out, and then formed a group for self-defense patrols. But just as in Phoenix, some members of Occupy Seattle attempted to defend the inclusion of the Nazis as part of “the 99%.”54

20. OCCUPY TALLINN

The “Occupy” idea was picked up as it spread around the world, and just as in the United States, there was right-wing and conspiracy involvement globally.

Estonia’s Occupy Tallinn has the dubious distinction of having an Occupy group established solely of those on the Right. One left-wing, anti-authoritarian group put out a press release making it clear that the name Occupy Tallinn had been “hijacked” by a group of conspiracy theorists associated with the Estonian version of Alex Jones’s Prison Planet. The press release said:

“Around 100 people gathered to the Freedom Square in the heart of the city for the demonstration called ‘Occupy Tallinn’. Among others people from far-right Independence Party, Estonian Patriotic Movement, conspiracy theorists took part of the event. Judging by the banners held by the small crowd, the main point of their agenda was to protect estonian economic interests from rest of the europe.On their Facebook page you can find racist slur against ‘lazy greeks’ and Barack Obama. Photos from the local National-Socialist Blog were also posted but quickly removed.We hope that occupations in USA and rest of the world will not take Occupy Tallinn as one of them and that any signs of racism, sexism and homophobia within the movement will be confronted as fast as possible.”55


There were problems elsewhere, too. Occupy London, which was plastered with David Icke posters, included members of the Freeman on the Land, a British version of the Sovereign Citizen movement.56However, just as in the United States, the British Right was divided on the issue; Occupy Newcastle was harassed during the day after a joint English Defense League and National Front demonstration, and then physically attacked that night.57In Russia, the recent videos of homophobic thugs torturing gay men, who they lured via online forums, have been conducted under the names Occupy Pedophilia and Occupy Gerontophilia.58 Even further afield, the Iranian government took a special interest in Occupy.59

APPENDIX:

THE TEA PARTY AND OCCUPY—THE GRAND ALLIANCE THAT WASN’T


Countless pundits gushed over the possibility—and, more often than not, desirability—of an alliance between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, the two dueling populist movements of the teens. But from an on-the-ground perspective, these writers’ thousands of words were little more than bricks in castles in the air. No union ever came about, and the possibility of one had more to do with the reified notions of what political movements are about, rather than a hard look at their actual content: what participants believed in, what compelled them to political action, and what their own aims and goals were. Just as a surface reading of Occupy based on certain theoretical models led some to consider it to be antisemitic by its mere structure—no matter the actual views of the participants—a similarly abstract reading led writers to pontificate endlessly on the union of the Tea Party and Occupy.

The visceral disgust of Occupy by many figures in Tea Party organizations was clear. Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express said, “They are a disorganized unruly mob of shiftless protesters that has been reinforced by union and organized labor thugs” whose “goal has been to cause as much disruption as possible and force anarchy.”60Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots said, “We have nothing in common with them other than we are all American citizens.” Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation said, “The ultimate goal of the Tea Party is a reduction in the size of government and a return to constitutional bounds. The goal of these people is ultimately a socialist revolution.”61Sal Russo of the Tea Party Express said, “The left is trying to create a counter force to the tea party, but it’s almost laughable that anyone is comparing the two, because they’re totally different.”62 Some Tea Party members, themselves derisively dubbed “Teabaggers,” took to calling Occupiers “fleabaggers.”

However, these views were not universal amongst Tea Partiers. One pro-Tea Party group, FedUpUSA, announced that it supported Occupy Cleveland.63A number of individual Tea Party members—as well as Occupiers—expressed interest in a coupling of the two movements. A widely circulated letter from a “former Tea Partier” claimed his movement started out as “anarchists and ultra-libertarians” before being co-opted by Republicans, and he gave advice to Occupy on how to avoid recuperation by the “corporate-funded government.”64 Karl Denninger, an early inspiration for the Tea Party, expressed support for Occupy.65

WAC’s Danny Panzella was an uncommon on-the-ground link between the two. Discussions between local Tea Party and Occupy groups were held in at least two cities—Richmond, Virginia, and Memphis, Tennessee—but neither seemed to go anywhere.66They joined in protest against the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in Medford, Oregon, and Worchester, Massachusetts; at a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Irvine, California; and at the annual meeting of the Bilderberg group—one of the main conspiracy theory targets—in Chantilly, Virginia. In Dubuque, Iowa, they jointly protested red-light cameras during a city council meeting.67 In Atlanta, the Tea Party Patriots helped Occupy defeat a bill, aimed at unions, that would restrict political protests.68In October 2012, a friendly debate was held in New York City theater between a group of Occupiers and Tea Partiers (the virulent Islamophobe Pam Geller was present in the latter group).69

But no matter how hard certain people wished for an alliance—or pretended that one already existed—substantive political and cultural issues remained, in most cases, an unbridgeable chasm between the two groups.



ENDNOTES

1. Spencer Sunshine, “The Right Hand of Occupy Wall Street: From Libertarians to Nazis, the Fact and Fiction of Right-Wing Involvement,” Public Eye, Winter 2014, 9–14, 18, http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/0 ... volvement/. This is an extended, post-Occupy version of an earlier piece I wrote while the Zuccotti Park encampment was still in existence; see “Occupied With Conspiracies? The occupy movement, populist anti-elitism, and the conspiracy theorists,” Dec. 11, 2011, https://libcom.org/library/occupied-con ... -theorists (originally published on Shift magazine’s webpage in November 2011).

2. Rachel Tabachnick and Frank L. Cocozzelli, “Nullification, Neo-Confederates, and the Revenge of the Old Right,” Public Eye, Fall 2013, 2–8, http://www.politicalresearch.org/nullif ... -old-right.

3. Ron Paul, End the Fed (Grand Central Publishing, 2009), 109, 69; for his use of Biblical quotes, see 38, 156–57.

4. “OWS – Federal Reserve Awareness Day,” Nov. 9, 2011, http://occupywallst.org/article/federal ... honecast/; “Forum Post: Wall Street libertarians have co-opted Occupy Wall Street forum,” Dec. 22, 2011, http://occupywallst.org/forum/wall-stre ... his-forum/.

5. “The Revolution Against the Federal Reserve Starts Now” YouTube, Oct. 6, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0AJy4pJUE8; “Alex Jones Speaks at Dallas Federal Reserve” YouTube, Oct. 10, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E44HPgxIJJE.

6. Michael J. Mooney, “Two Days, Two ‘Occupy Dallas’ Protests, Two Very Different Groups,” D Magazine, Oct. 5, 2011, http://frontburner.dmagazine.com/2011/1 ... ent-groups.

7. “Alex Jones: Police send mentally ill, homeless, ex-cons to demonize OWS,” YouTube, Nov. 17, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3ua_ZQ4WEk.

8. Justine Sharrock, “Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason,” Mother Jones, Mar./Apr. 2010, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... h-keepers; Michael Mechanic, “Obama-Hating Oath Keepers Aim to Form Paramilitary Units,” Mother Jones,Oct. 15, 2013, http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/10 ... s-default; Ryan Lenz, “Oath Keepers Rally Reveals Radical Politics of Group,” July 25, 2013, http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/07/2 ... s-of-group.

9. “Fed is The Engine of Our Destruction: Stewart Rhodes Reports,” YouTube, Oct. 8, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfS_Hw–51w.

10. “OATH KEEPERS (and Volunteers From Other Liberty Orgs) To Occupy The Occupation!,” Oath Keepers, Oct. 5, 2011, http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/10/05/ ... occupation. (Originally this outreach was announced as a joint effort with the Wayseers organization, but they were apparently dropped after objections from rank-and-file Oath Keepers.)

11. Videos documenting Oath Keepers’ presence and outreach at Occupy LA include: “The Oathkeepers, Federal Reserve, & Ron Paul discussed by Daniel @ Occupy L.A.,” YouTube, Oct. 5, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzgl5Gsaq1w; “Occupy The Fed Now, LA – “MIC CHECK!!” Oath Keeper outreach obstructed by Occupy organizers,” YouTube, Oct. 10, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD5WBYTbwCc; “Occupy The Fed Now LA – Organizer: The Spirit of the Constitution has been lost,” YouTube, Oct. 10, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksN2wDbt8sM; “Occupy The Fed Now, LA – Ethiopian Immigrant: This is a REPUBLIC, NOT a democracy,” YouTube, Oct. 12, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL7AsAVSZno; “Occupy The Fed Now LA – Veteran: ‘The Constitution is a beautiful document,’” YouTube, Oct. 12, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Yy5ec85sis.

For John Oetken’s comments on OLA, see “WE WENT TO OCCUPY LA ON THE FIRST DAY TO SEE WHAT WAS REALLY HAPPENING. HERE IS WHAT WE FOUND OUT! BY JOHN OETKEN OCCUPYLA 10-1-11,” comment posted by Sally Telford, Oct. 6, 2011, http://whatshappening3121.patriotaction ... -one-hour/. See also: “Report RE: Occupy LA from John Oetken October 9th, 2011,” Oath Keepers, Oct. 10, 2011, https://ocoathkeepers.wordpress.com/cat ... squad-tv/; and Comment #1, “We the People’s Bob Shulz at OWS,” Oath Keepers, Oct. 20, 2011, http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/10/30/ ... ulz-at-ows.

12. For the “Liberty Encampment,” see “End the Fed at Occupy Los Angeles,” Occupy the Fed Now, Oct. 9, 2011, http://occupythefednow.com/2011/10/09/e ... s-angeles; for the march, see “Steven Vincent unites Occupy LA for END THE FED,” Occupy the Fed Now, Nov. 26, 2011, http://occupythefednow.com/2011/12/01/s ... -the-fed/; for the mural, see James Brasuell, “Occupy Mural Now Safe with the City of Los Angeles,” Curbed Los Angeles, Dec. 28, 2011, http://la.curbed.com/archives/2011/12/o ... eles_1.php.

13. “Occupy Wall Street to Attack US Freedoms With Constitutional Convention?,” Oath Keepers, Oct. 24th, 2011, http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/10/24/ ... onvention; “Southern Poverty Law Center: Wellspring of Manufactured Hate,” Oath Keepers, Sept. 28, 2012, http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2012/09/28/ ... ured-hate/.

14. For more on Icke’s indebtedness to Far Right theories, see Will Offley, “David Icke And The Politics Of Madness: Where The New Age Meets The Third Reich,” Public Eye,Feb. 29, 2000, http://publiceye.org/Icke/IckeBackgrounder.htm.

15. “David Icke – Essential Knowledge For A Wall Street Protestor” YouTube, Oct. 21, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV9A2IGShuk.

16. “David Icke’s ‘ad lib’ documentary at Occupy Wall Street” YouTube, Jan. 6, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99nvx3m2fbQ.

17. Anonymous, “‘Occupy Brooklyn’ FB – David Icke & the UFOs” (comment), New Jewish Resistance, Oct. 24, 2011,http://newjewishresistance.org/blog/wall-street-protests-marred-anti-semitism#comment-90. (This comment was confirmed as being accurate.)

18. “Denver Anarchist Black Cross Statement on the mass murder at the Aurora Century 16 Movie Complex,” Denver Anarchist Black Cross, July 21, 2012, http://denverabc.wordpress.com/2012/07/ ... -complex/; for Icke, see the later part of “David Icke’s ‘ad lib’ documentary at Occupy Wall Street,” YouTube, Jan. 6, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99nvx3m2fbQ; “David Icke talks with Luke Rudkowski at Occupy Wall Street,” YouTube, Nov. 19, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VICEwwilk-Q; for Rhodes, see “Message from Stewart Rhodes,” Oct. 20, 2011, http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2011/10/30/ ... z-at-ows/; “How to Prepare Your Community for Disaster,” YouTube, Oct. 28, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LHpK3Cn ... e=youtu.be. See also, for example, “Stewart Rhodes: The True Warrior Spirit,“ YouTube, Aug. 14, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNrLzx0tIsM.

19. See, for example, Marla Singer, “With Luke Rudkowski’s Ouster, We Are Change are Left with Just That, Leftover Change,” Redacted News,Feb. 12, 2011, http://redactednews.blogspot.com/2011_0 ... chive.html.

20. “About,” Danny Panzella for Assembly, http://danny4assembly.wordpress.com/about; “Constitution Party of NY Endorses Danny Panzella,” Danny Panzella for Assembly, July 30, 2010, http://danny4assembly.wordpress.com/201 ... -panzella/.

21. “Alex Jones Calls for END THE FED Flash Mob in NYC Friday Aug 12 2011 w/ Danny Panzella,” YouTube, Aug. 11, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FDooKywLS8; Danny Panzella, “Hundreds March During Occupy The Fed NYC, Their Message: END THE FED!,” Occupy the Fed Now, Oct. 8, 2011, http://occupythefednow.com/2011/10/10/h ... nd-the-fed.

22. “Does Glenn stand by ‘controversial’ comments? Yup,” Glenn Beck, Oct. 11, 2011, http://www.glennbeck.com/2011/10/11/doe ... ments-yup/.

23. FitzGerald talking about his group“Everyone I Spoke To At The Occupy DC Protest Said They Were Voting For Ron Paul!” YouTube, Nov. 1, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzSeFOt9Fm4; “Danny Panzella on Freedom Watch w/ Judge Napolitano: What’s the Message from OccupyWallStreet?” YouTube, Oct. 4, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20_NRdXTD4k.

24. “In Defense of Civil Liberties with Danny Panzella,” Infowars Nightly News, Oct. 7, 2011, http://www.infowars.com/in-defense-of-c ... y-panzella.

25. OccupyTheFed NYC, http://www.facebook.com/occupythefednyc.

26. “Wayne Sturgeon Interviews Craig FitzGerald on National Anarchism,” National Anarchist Tribal Alliance New York, Nov. 18, 2012, http://nata-ny.blogspot.com/2012/11/way ... craig.html.

27. For National-Anarchism in general, see Spencer Sunshine, “Rebranding Fascism: National-Anarchists,” Public Eye, Winter 2008, 1, 12–19, http://www.politicalresearch.org/rebran ... narchists/. For FitzGerald’s comments, see “Left, Right, and Wrong: Drawing a Line Against NATA in New York [UPDATED],” Feb. 4, 2013, http://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2013/02/ ... -new-york/.

The “Third Position” is a form of fascism that is both anti-capitalist and anti-communist, seeking to establish a racially based socialism. It endorses racial separatism instead of White separatism, and especially in recent years tends to incorporate ecological concerns. The notion of a “post-Third Position fascism” has its origins in Graham Macklin’s description of the “post-third position’ ideology of ‘national anarchism,’” which embraces decentralization rather than statism as its political endgoal. See Macklin, “Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction,” Patterns of Prejudice, Sept. 2005, http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=2439.

28. R.J. Jacob, “Join, or Die,” Nov. 18, 2012, http://attackthesystem.com/2012/11/18/25057.

29. “Wayne Sturgeon Interviews Craig FitzGerald on National Anarchism.”

30. “Power to the Neighborhoods (A Message to ‘Occupy Wall Street’),” YouTube, Oct. 21, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FwpQiyF94U; Keith Preston, “Why I Choose to Collaborate with Racialists and Theocrats,” http://attackthesystem.com/why-i-choose ... theocrats/. For a critique of Preston, see Matthew Lyons, “Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston’s Authoritarian Anti-Statism,” New Politics, Apr. 29, 2011, http://newpol.org/content/rising-above- ... ti-statism.

31. “Hate Map,” Southern Poverty Law Center, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map#s=OR. Information on local participation was provided to me by a number of different activists in both Eugene and Portland, OR.

32. Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (Guilford Press, 2000), 185–92; “Willis Carto,” http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/i ... llis-carto.

33. Dave Gahary, “AFP Staffer Ignites Federal Reserve Protests,” American Free Press, Oct. 21, 2011, http://americanfreepress.net/?p=1116.

34. Bill White, “Agitators Attempt to Disrupt Peaceful Protests,” American Free Press, Oct. 31, 2011, 6.

35. Michael Piper, “Left-Right Unite: Wall Street, Federal Reserve, Big Media Targeted,” American Free Press, Oct. 31, 2011, 1, http://www.americanfreepress.net/Issue_ ... 2011_1.pdf. The Left also criticizes the IMF and the World Bank, but for very different reasons.

36. Jeffrey Smith, “Wall Street Protests Spread,” American Free Press, Oct. 24, 2011, 10.

37. Editorial, “Free speech — within limits,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 20, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/20 ... -20111020; “AFP PODCAST & ARTICLE: Exclusive Interviews: Patricia McAllister Talks To Victor Thorn & Dave Gahary,” Nov. 1, 2011, http://americanfreepress.net/?p=1238. For more about the question of antisemitism and Occupy, German readers should consult Sina Arnold, “Bad for the Jews?: Antisemitismus und die ‘Occupy’-Bewegung in den USA” [“Bad for the Jews? Antisemitism and the Occupy Movement in the USA”] in Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, ed., Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung [Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism] no. 21 (Metropol Verlag, 2012), 370–91.

38. “Diane Sare Reports from ‘Occupy Wall Street’Rally,” LaRouche PAC, Aug. 4, 2011, http://larouchepac.com/node/18979; Nathan Schneider, Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse (University of California Press, 2013), 5, 16; “‘Occupy Wall Street’ Mass-Strike Process Embracing Glass-Steagall,” Executive Intelligence Review, Oct. 7, 2011, http://www.larouchepub.com/pr/2011/1110 ... ll_st.html.

39. Scission, “OCCUPY KANSAS CITY DEBATES THE “PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION”/ ARE YOU KIDDING ME,” Nov. 22, 2011, http://oreaddaily.blogspot.com/2011/11/ ... s-of.html; Leonard Zeskind, “Racism and Anti-Semitism: Solutions and Problems in the Occupy Kansas City Universe,” Mar. 19, 2012, http://www.irehr.org/component/k2/item/ ... y-universe.

40. Greg Johnson, “Occupy Wall Street: Big Money & No Ideas,” Counter-Currents, Oct. 11, 2011, http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/10 ... -no-ideas; “Ideas Matter: Greg Johnson & Mike Polignano Speak at the IHR,” Counter-Currents, Nov. 14, 2011, http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/11 ... at-the-ihr.

41. Matt Parrott, “Pick Your Poison,” Counter-Currents, Oct. 5, 2011, http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/10 ... our-poison.

42. Matt Parrott, “Occupy Indianapolis Roundup,” Counter-Currents,Oct. 14, 2011, http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/10 ... is-roundup. According to local antifascist activists, he was accompanied by members of the Vinlanders Social Club, a racist skinhead organization.

43. Tristania, “Experiences at Occupy Indianapolis,” Stormfront, Oct. 11, 2011, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t837879/#post9639571; and “Re: Experiences at Indianapolis,” Stormfront, Oct. 14, 2011, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t837879-3/#post9646591.

44. “American Front occupies Wall Street update!,” The Green Star, Oct. 19, 2011, http://americanfront.info/2011/10/19/am ... eet-update. (This article removes the city name for “security” reasons, but the account of 23 arrests matches what occurred in Denver a few days before; see Jordan Steffen, “Occupy Denver protesters’ march for peace results in arrests after food tent stirs tensions,” Denver Post,Oct. 16, 2011, http://blogs.denverpost.com/crime/2011/ ... sions/1986.) For general information on American Front/New Resistance, see “Neo-Nazi Leader James Porrazzo Mixes Racism with Leftist Ideology,” Intelligence Report, Winter 2012, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/i ... h-position.

45. “Occupy Wall Street NOT Palestine!,” The Green Star, Nov. 6, 2011, http://americanfront.info/2011/11/06/not-palestine; “Miguel P: We Are Change at Occupy AIPAC,” Mar. 27, 2012, http://americanfront.info/2012/03/27/mi ... ipac-video.

46. See Alexander Mezentsev’s comment (#10), Counter-Currents, Nov. 5, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20131026110 ... ight-today. For more on “leaderless resistance,” see “Leaderless Resistance: The History, Definition, & Use of the Term ‘Leaderless Resistance,’” Political Research Associates, http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/terror ... tance.html.

47. “Tom Metzger – Why I Support Occupy Wall Street” YouTube, Jan. 3, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfIqZPg7I68; “Flashback: Tom Metzger’s second appearance on The White Voice, where Tom details how to infiltrate and recruit the Left into White Nationalism,” spe-lunk-ing,Mar. 8, 2014, http://spe-lunk-ing.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... cond.html; “Tommy Occupied Warsaw Thursday!,” Insurgent News and Views, Oct. 31, 2011, http://www.resist.com/updates/2011/Oct_ ... 11031.html.

48. “Occupy Zionist Wall Street by David Duke,” YouTube, Oct. 20, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKy22KsxX9k; David Duke, forum post #60, Stormfront, Nov. 2, 2011, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t842071-6.

49. “ANP Report for Oct. 16, 2011,” http://anp14.com/news/archives.php?repo ... 2011-10-16.

50. Richard Miller, “AN OPEN LETTER TO TRUE AMERICAN NATIONAL SOCIALISTS” (posted as a comment by “The Hon. Mr. Gilmore”), Stormfront, Oct.18, 2011, http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t839432/#post9658315.

51. “Occupy Phoenix with AR-15′s,” YouTube, Oct. 20, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkM7cdMgcEc; “The National Socialist Movement scum show up armed to counter protest #occupyphoenix,” Fires Never Extinguished, Oct. 15, 2011, http://firesneverextinguished.blogspot. ... -show.html.

52. http://wpww88.com/2011/12/20/wpa-interv ... eff-schoep (link is no longer active; accessed Nov. 15, 2013).

53. Billy Roper, “Occupy Pennsylvania Avenue!,” Oct. 12, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20111231041 ... om/?p=2930.

54. “Capital Hell Commune,” Oct. 30, 2011, http://pugetsoundanarchists.org/node/1052; on liberal protestors, see “Occupy Seattle General Assembly,” Occupy Seattle, Nov. 6, 2011, http://occupyseattle.org/?p=376.

55. Carl Gardner, “The law is not the enemy of protest but an essential tool of impartiality,” Nov. 16, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... y-freemen; Adam Wagner, “Freemen of the dangerous nonsense,” UK Human Rights Blog,Nov. 15, 2011, http://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2011/11/15 ... s-nonsense.

56. “Fascists Attack Occupy Newcastle,” Nov. 2, 2011, Workers’ Liberty,www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/11/02/fascists-attack-occupy-newcastle.

57. “The bad seed of the #Occupy Movement—Occupy Tallinn,” Anarchist News,Nov. 11, 2011, http://web.archive.org/web/201111130336 ... node/17534.

58. Allison Quinn and Ian Bateson, “Anti-Gay Vigilante Groups Face Backlash,” Moscow Times, Aug. 19, 2013, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/arti ... 84774.html. There doesn’t seem to be any “real” connection to Occupy groups, except perhaps the notion of being against a corrupt government; they claim that there is a “pedophile lobby” in Russia.

59. “Khamenei claims Occupy Wall Street protests will topple US capitalism,” Oct. 12, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/o ... sfeed=true.

60. Martin Gould and David A. Patten, “Tea Party Launches Attacks on ‘Occupy Wall Street,’” Newsmax,Oct. 13, 2011, http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/tea- ... /id/414367.

61. Steven Nelson, “Tea party leaders grapple with ‘Occupy Wall Street,’” Daily Caller,Oct. 4, 2011, http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/04/tea-p ... all-street.

62. Robin Bravender and Kenneth P. Vogel, “Tea party goes after Occupy Wall Street,” Politico,Oct. 13, 2011, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65826.html.

63. Leonard Zeskind and Devin Burghart, “Hands Off Occupy Wall Street!!,” Oct. 13, 2011, http://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/tea-pa ... all-street.

64. “An open letter and warning from a former tea party movement adherent to the Occupy Wall Street movement,” Reddit, Oct. 13, 2011 (updated), http://www.reddit.com/r/occupywallstreet/comments/kyjo2.

65. Muriel Kane, “Tea Party co-founder expresses support for Occupy Wall Street,” Raw Story,Oct. 14, 2011, http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/14/t ... all-street.

66. Chris Dovi, “Can Occupy and the Tea Party team up?,” Salon, Dec. 7, 2011, http://www.salon.com/2011/12/07/can_occ ... singleton; Adrian Sainz, “Tea Party Members Meet With Occupy Memphis, Praise Efforts Of Protesters,” Huffington Post, Nov. 18, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/1 ... 01129.html.

67. Gilbert Mercier, “Oregon: Occupy, Libertarians and Tea Party Activists Unite Against the NDAA,” New Junkie Post,Feb. 12, 2012, http://newsjunkiepost.com/2012/02/12/or ... the-ndaa/; Lee Hammel, “Tea party, Occupy groups find common ground in Worcester,” Telegram,Feb. 4, 2012, http://www.telegram.com/article/2012020 ... 9/0/news0; Amber Stephens, “The Billionaires’ Club Gets a Visit From Mitt Romney,”OC Weekly, June 7, 2012, http://www.ocweekly.com/2012-06-07/news ... ort-beach; Ryan Devereaux, “Tea Party and Occupy activists rub shoulders at Bilderberg protest,” Guardian,June 2, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/j ... ty-occupy; “Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party Come Together in Iowa Against Big Brother,” YouTube, Aug. 14, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UdNAOoCX-M.

68. Zaid Jilani, “In Georgia, Tea Partiers And Occupiers Unite To Fight Corporate Assault On The First Amendment,” Republic Report,Mar. 24, 2012, http://www.republicreport.org/2012/in-g ... amendment; Gloria Tatum, “Occupy Atlanta, Tea Party Patriots Defeat SB 469,” Atlanta Progressive News,Mar. 30, 2012, http://www.atlantaprogressivenews.com/i ... b-469.html.

69.“VIDEO: OCCUPY VS TEA PARTY DEBATE, ST. LUKES THEATRE,” Atlas Shrugs, Nov. 3, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20130130220 ... eatre.html. There were dissenting opinions within Occupy ranks about this debate; see MinistryOfTruth, “I’ve been invited to debate Pam Geller. Here is why I am declining with all due disrespect,” Daily Kos,Oct. 26, 2012, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/2 ... disrespect .
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Wed May 14, 2014 8:48 am

http://www.politicalresearch.org/resour ... u-s-right/

SECTORS OF THE U.S. RIGHT

There is much overlap and sectors are not mutually exclusive.
 Methodologies range from cautious moderation, to militant activism, to insurgency, to violence.

Right-wing populist, apocalyptic, and conspiracist styles can be found in several sectors.

Forms of oppression—racism, xenophobia, sexism, heterosexism,
antisemitism, Islamophobia, Arabophobia, nativism, ableism, etc.—vary in each sector.


SECULAR RIGHT

Secular Conservatism (Generic) — Share to some degree basic conservative, “Free Market,”& “Judeo-Christian traditional values,” but not categorized here as part of another sector.

Corporate Internationalism (Neoliberals) —Nations should control the flow of people across borders, but not the flow of goods, capital, and profit. Called the “Rockefeller Republicans” in the 1960s. Supports globalization on behalf of transnational corporate interests.

Business Nationalism—Multinational corporations erode national sovereignty; nations should enforce borders for people, but also for goods, capital, and profit through trade restrictions. Enlists grassroots allies from Patriot Movement. Anti-Globalists. Generally protectionist and isolationist.

Economic Libertarianism—The state disrupts the perfect harmony of the free market system. Modern democracy is essentially congruent with capitalism. Small government.

National Security Militarism—Support US military supremacy and unilateral use of force to protect perceived US national security interests around the world. A major component of Cold War anti-communism, now updated and in shaky alliance with Neoconservatives.

Neoconservatism—The egalitarian social liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s undermined the national consensus. Intellectual oligarchies and political institutions preserve democracy from mob rule. The United States has the right to intervene with military force to protect its perceived interests anywhere in the world. Suspicious of Islam, sometimes Islamophobic.


RELIGIOUS RIGHT

Religious Conservatism—Play by the rules of a pluralist civil society. Mostly Christians, with handful of conservative Jews, Muslims, Hindus and other people of faith. Moral traditionalists. Cultural and social conservatives. Sometimes critical of Christian Right.

The sectors above this line tend to accept the rules of pluralist civil society and PRA calls them part of the “Conservative Right.”

The sectors below this line tend to reject the rules of pluralist civil society and PRA calls them part of the “Hard Right”

Christian Nationalism (Christian Right: Soft Dominionists)—Biblicallydefined immorality and sin breed chaos and anarchy. America’s greatness as God’s chosen land has been undermined by liberal secular humanists, feminists, and homosexuals. Purists want litmus tests for issues of abortion, tolerance of gays and lesbians, and prayer in schools. Often a form of Right-Wing Populism.

Christian Theocracy (Christian Right: Hard Dominionists)—Christian men are ordained by God to run society. Eurocentric version of Christianity based on early Calvinism. Intrinsically Christian ethnocentric, treating non-Christians as second-class citizens, and therefore implicitly antisemitic. Includes Christian Reconstructionism and other theocratic theologies. Elitist.


XENOPHOBIC RIGHT

Patriot Movement (Forms of Right-Wing Populism: Tea Parties, Town Hall Protests, Armed Citizens Militias)—Parasitic liberal elites control the government, media, and banks. Blames societal problems on scapegoats below them on the socio-economic ladder who are portrayed as lazy, sinful, or subversive. Fears government plans tyranny to enforce collectivism and globalism, perhaps as part of a One World Government or New World Order. Americanist. Often supports Business Nationalism due to its isolationist emphasis. Anti-Globalist, yet supports unilateralist national security militarism.

Paleoconservatism—Ultra-conservatives and reactionaries. Natural financial oligarchies preserve the republic against democratic mob rule. Usually nativist (White Nationalism), sometimes antisemitic or Christian nationalist. Elitist emphasis similar to the intellectual conservative revolution wing of European New Right. Often libertarian.

White Nationalism (White Racial Nationalists)—Alien cultures make democracy impossible. Cultural Supremacists argue different races can adopt the dominant (White) culture; Biological Racists argue the immutable integrity of culture, race, and nation. Segregationists want distinct enclaves, Separatists want distinct nations. Americanist. “tribalist” emphasis echoes racial-nationalist wing of the European New Right. Often a form of Right-Wing Populism.

Ultra Right (Sometimes called Far Right or Extreme Right)—Militant forms of insurgent revolutionary right ideology and separatist ethnocentric nationalism. Reject pluralist democracy for an organic oligarchy that unites the homogeneous Volkish nation. Conspiracist views of power are overwhelmingly antisemitic. Home to overt neofascists and neonazis. Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity, Creativity Movement , National Socialist Movement, National Alliance. Often uses Right-Wing Populist rhetoric.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Tue May 20, 2014 7:22 pm

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Web ... sense.html

The following article appeared in Left Business Observer #119, July 2009.

Web of nonsense


Financial crises always spark interest in marginal critics of the system. One that’s attracted interest on the left is Ellen Brown, who’s got a book and a website called Web of Debt. She and her kind should be given wide berth.

Brown is a fine example of a mode of thinking that sees the problems of capitalism—like the polarization of rich and poor and the system’s vulnerability to periodic crises—as primarily financial in origin. She writes on her website:

Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been "privatized," or taken over by a private money cartel. Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions—including the private Federal Reserve. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices—and robbing you of the value of your money.


How people can spend the time it takes to write a book and still get so much wrong? For much of the 19th century, our money system was largely private. Individual banks issued notes of varying reliability, with limited geographic acceptance. And the national and international monetary system was based on gold, an entirely private and stateless standard.

The Federal Reserve is a public–private hybrid, but it’s a lot more public than the system that preceded it. And it’s also brought a measure of stability to the system that was badly lacking in the 19th century. Almost half of the last decades of the 19th century were times of recession or depression. Commodity prices declined steadily, putting great strain on farmers in particular. There is absolutely nothing about the monetary system of the late 19th century that offers a model, unless you’re a wacko libertarian.

Brown’s critique of the Fed as an inflationary force is deeply odd. The standard populist critique of the Fed is that it’s too adamant about keeping down inflation—and to drive the economy into recession to do so. That’s not really been true of the Fed for more than twenty years, but it was true of how Paul Volcker ran the institution in the 1980s. The last thing we need to worry about right now is inflation—and the Fed is busily pumping money into the system to keep things from going down completely down the drain. There’s a lot wrong with they way they’re doing it, but it’s better than letting it all go, 19th-century style.

To argue that the only way that interest can be paid is by issuing more new loans is also deeply odd. Presumably businesses borrow from banks to invest and expand. Higher profits from those expanded activities should more than cover the interest. If not, then you’ve got a problem, but that’s how things work when an economy is functioning more or less normally.

Blurbs
Brown festoons her site with approving quotes. One is from a magazine called Nexus, which promises “the latest information on a variety of topics including e-smog, The Ringing Cedars phenomenon, crop circles, hemp, The Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skull, spirituality, white powder gold, ancient mysteries and extraterrestrials.” Solid stuff!

Another comes from The American Free Press. AFP is a successor to Spotlight, then published by the now-defunct Liberty Lobby. The Liberty Lobby was founded by Willis Carto, a big supporter of George Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1968 who is perhaps most famous for having said “If Satan himself...had tried to create a...force for the destruction of the nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews.”

The AFP is fond in turn of the Barnes Review, whose book club features books on Jewish influence, the wisdom of Robert E. Lee, and a history of the white race “presented from a white man’s perspective” that “would make a meaningful gift for anyone who is tired of seeing the white race ignored, trampled upon, denigrated and defamed.”

Maybe Brown just has poor taste in blurbs, though you'd think that a conscientious author would avoid this sort of creep. Still, it’s quite amazing to see how crackpot monetary theories are so often found in proximity to extreme nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. Here’s a fine example, from a social critic writing in the early 20th century:

Thus, the task of the state toward capital was comparatively simple and clear; it only had to make certain that capital remain the handmaiden of the state and not fancy itself the mistress of the nation…. The sharp separation of stock exchange capital from the national economy offered the possibility of opposing the internationalization of the…economy without at the same time menacing the foundations of an independent national self-maintenance by a struggle against all capital. The development of [the national economy] was much too clear in my eyes for me not to know that the hardest battle would have to be fought, not against hostile nations, but against international capital.


That was Hitler, from Mein Kampf, with only the words “Germany” and “German” removed. Cheap trick, yes, but revealing. This sort of pseudo-radicalism treats financialization and internationalization as problems, and not capitalism itself.

Diagnosis
Why is this wrong? Starting with the easy part: isn’t internationalism a good thing? Shouldn’t people and ideas and art should be free to move around without being blocked by borders or suspicious provincial minds?

The financialization part is harder, but here’s a quickie version. The whole point of production under capitalism is not the satisfaction of needs, but the accumulation of money. In other words, it’s impossible to separate the economic world into a good productive side and a bad financial side; the two are inseparable. The monetary surpluses generated in production—the profits of capitalist businesses—accumulate over time and demand some sort of outlet: bank deposits, bonds, stocks, whatever. It’s going to be that way until we replace capitalism with something radically different.

And we have a consumer debt problem not because of some sinister conspiracy of bankers, but because our managerial class has kept wages down for the last 35 years. In order to maintain some semblance of a middle-class lifestyle, people have borrowed from the rich who’ve claimed most of the gains of an expanding economy. In other words, you can’t easily separate finance from the so-called real economy.

There’s also a curious affinity between these financially oriented critiques and classical anti-Semitism that helps explain why the two go together so nicely. Several writers (like Moishe Postone and Slavoj Zizek) have noted that a lot of the imagery of classic anti-Semitism—greed, deviousness, the hunger for money—separates out some of the bad features of capitalism and pins them all to the mythical demonized figure of “The Jew.”

Let’s leave the paranoid oversimplifications to the far right, where they belong.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby JackRiddler » Wed May 21, 2014 11:04 am

There's a lot to this mode of critique but most of its practitioners are seeking their own simplistic terminal point, where they can pat themselves on the back and sleep free of imagined rightist taint.

LBO's review of Brown baits by beginning to address genuine problems in her work that I also find, then however skips the actual critique and switches to a stout rejection of Hitler. (It's about time!)

Right now I've the energy and time just for one fragment from G.B. Taylor's article:

G.B. Taylor wrote:
Greed

Why is decrying greed problematic? Because focusing on greed personalizes what is a structural problem, making it individual rather than systemic in nature. Although there are certainly greedy people, this is not a moral failing or “human nature,’ but people acting quite rationally within the structures of capitalism...


Why is decrying greed necessary? Because the system propagates not just a highly irrational "rational" practice but a justifying ideology of greed. It tends to advance into positions of management and into the ruling class those individuals who live out their greed in the most ruthless, self-fanatic ways. The most extreme and often criminal cases of such persons, such as the Internet and Silicon Valley sharks and top corporate CEOs generally, are celebrated as exemplary "successes" and "philanthropists" and presented as practically the only worthy role-models for all children.

This is not simply to condemn them for their moral failings -- although a dose of that is appropriate -- but to expose the systemic dynamics at work around greed. "Greed is good" (and its fantasy complement of perpetual growth) is one of the implicit capitalist recruitment pitches for a veritable army of committed destroyer-narcissists: human-resource gurus, useless gadget modifiers, top sellers, smiling controllers, false benefactors and petty tyrants on all levels. The spirit needs to be counteracted in the same way a fever must be broken, even if the fever is not the cause of the disease.

Within capitalism there is little space to act “ethically,” as institutionalized competition forces everyone – from owners looking to cut costs, workers seeking to maximize gain, and consumers hunting for the best price – to act immorally.


From among "everyone" it also advances the worst, those who act immorally with aplomb and find countless ways to make a virtue of their immoralities; the author recognizes a system of incentives, and should therefore also understand it is also system of selection into positions of power and authority. It is imperative to thematize and confront how this value system is also sold to the vast majority through the pervasive ideologies of consumerism, wealth worship and "winner"-ism. Otherwise there will be no effective popular movement against the system.

In seeking to move more people to recognize, learn and reject the actual system, rather than its many diversionary imagos, exposing its true moral wrongs is essential. Damn right the system engenders corruption and this is wrong, even if "corruption" is also constructed into a problem by the bogus transparency advocates who only ever see it in underdeveloped nations and underground milieus, and thus hide how the legal, legit system itself is the primary factor in producing this hell on earth.

George Lakoff has a lot more to offer practically speaking than this dry, faux-structural, mass exoneration of the decision-makers at all levels. If no one is responsible, then no one is capable of making a difference for or against the system.

I don't have time to take on all seven points in detail--the silliest of which is perhaps in the misunderstanding of the most powerful tendency of all capital under capitalism, which is towards financialization--but they're generally simplistic and delivered with an unearned air of superior unction. Regardless of who is speaking and who is audience, the feeling I get with this article is of what people complain about in "mansplaining."
Last edited by JackRiddler on Wed May 21, 2014 12:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

To Justice my maker from on high did incline:
I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

TopSecret WallSt. Iraq & more
User avatar
JackRiddler
 
Posts: 15983
Joined: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:59 pm
Location: New York City
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Wed May 21, 2014 11:58 am

Here's what I wrote in the "Towards Rigorous & Radical Conspiracy Theory" thread:

American Dream » Fri Feb 21, 2014 9:56 am wrote:It is a passion of mine to investigate and expose real conspiracies through investigations that can be backed by strong evidence, investigations that have the potential to seriously benefit our lives through significantly advancing our collective liberation. I think there is great power in researchers with shared values and shared interests working together on shared goals.

Fundamental to this process is a solid critique of White Supremacy, Patriarchy, Capitalism, Homophobia and all the other "isms". Folks that I can think of that are veering in this direction include Tom Burghardt, Peter Dale Scott, Jeffrey Kaye, maybe Robin Ramsay (I never subscribed to Lobster)- and perhaps others, too.

Given the criticism of "conspiracy theories" by structuralist-oriented leftists such as Noam Chomsky, who write it all off due to an overblown "Right Woos Left" kind of thesis, I think we need to develop Conspiracy Theory (with a capital "T") that is solidly anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, anti-misogynist and also intelligently thought out.


Iit seems to me that there is an important issue of dualistic thinking, false dichotomies at play from both the "heavy revvies" and also the deep rabbit hole crew.

The problem with structuralists like Chomsky with regards to conspiracies is not their intent towards rigour, or a left wing political praxis- it is much more their tendencies to make sweeping dismissals of conspiracy research, based on the activities of the very real bozos out there. Equally so, the folks who swallow all kinds of conspiracy swill without examining or chewing can end up perpetuating loathsome far right disinfo and other such shite. If you say something about it, they tend to stubbornly resist engaging with the critique.

So really a lot of it is about developing a synthesis but that means a lot of work in a lot of areas, including "square" topics like political economy, logic and reason, etc. as well as the more groovy topics like mysticism and pop culture.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Thu May 29, 2014 12:44 pm




American Dream » Wed Apr 23, 2014 7:15 pm wrote: http://www.politicalresearch.org/20-on- ... in-occupy/

20 ON THE RIGHT IN OCCUPY

19. NEO-NAZI FACTIONS

Neo-Nazis are a small subset of the White nationalist movement in the United States. A number of them endorsed Occupy—although others were ambivalent, or even denounced it.

The American Nazi Party was the most famous endorser; its leader, Rocky J. Suhayda, said:

This issue is TAYLOR MADE [sic] for National Socialists, as well as WN [White nationalists] who are serious about DOING SOMETHING… After all – JUST WHO – are the WALL STREET BANKERS? The vast majority are JEWS…. I urgently URGE all of you to TAKE PART and JOIN IN when these protests hit your neck of the woods. Produce some flyers EXPLAINING the “JEW BANKER” influence – DON’T wear anything marking you as an “evil racist” – and GET OUT THERE and SPREAD the WORD!


Support amongst Nazis was not universal, however. The National Socialist American Labor Party condemned Occupy for supporting “the destruction of Western Christian Civilization through forced multi-culturalism, race-mixing, degenerate art, music, and entertainment, destruction of a free market economy, and the destruction of cultural traditions.”50

In October 2011, J.T. Ready of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) and his vigilante U.S. Border Guard came to Occupy Phoenix, armed with AR-15 rifles; they claimed their presence was to show support for the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) and to protect Occupy Phoenix from the police. Other activists did not agree about the meaning of their visit. Some members of the camp reportedly tried to welcome them as members of the 99%, which did not sit well with anti-fascist activists.
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Right Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Fri May 30, 2014 5:02 pm

1. Where Illuminati Theory Came From

Almost every Illuminati theory is made up of a few main pieces, like the different parts of an urban legend. The pieces can be put together in different combinations, or one piece can be emphasized more than another. But they always combine to tell more or less the same story. You may have heard these different pieces mentioned: the Illuminati, the Masons, Satanists, the Bilderbergs or the bankers. Each of these pieces of Illuminati theory arose at different times in history. In most cases, they were developed by rich and powerful people, who were being kicked out of power by mass movements.


First piece: The Bavarian Illuminati…

Image
Adam Weishaupt, 1748-1830

The first piece of Illuminati theory is based on a real group called the “Order of Illuminists”. The Illuminists were founded in May 1776 in Bavaria, part of present-day Germany (but Germany didn’t exist yet at the time). The leader of the Illuminists, a Bavarian professor of religious law named Adam Weishaupt, wanted to free the world “from all established religious and political authority”. His Order aimed to get rid of the kings and the churches that had ruled Europe since the Middle Ages, and make room for new forms of commerce, science, and democratic government that were struggling to emerge at the time. The Illuminists modeled themselves partly on the Jesuits, an order of Catholic priests, and partly on the Freemasons. They infiltrated Masonic lodges in order to gain influence in society, and pursue their goals.

To understand any group or movement, you have to understand the context it emerged from. The time period when the Illuminists appeared was called “The Enlightenment”. It was a century of ongoing radical change in Europe, stretching from the 1600s to the late 1700s. During the Enlightenment, the old social system that people had lived in for centuries, dominated by kings and priests on top with peasants at the bottom, began to break down. A class of rich merchants arose in Europe, trading with far-flung parts of the globe. New technologies developed, and with them new kinds of skilled workers. These new classes started to wield more power than the kings and queens who were supposed to be on top according to law and tradition. The American Revolution demonstrated the power of these classes to the whole world, when they broke free from the British crown.

As the social world began to change, people began to think differently. Before the Enlightenment, most people believed the physical world, and the social order, were determined by God’s divine law. As the Enlightenment set in, experimenters like Isaac Newton, and philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau, developed modern science and politics. People started to believe the physical world was shaped by natural laws—like the law of gravity—that could be discovered by investigation. They described how governments could be organized without kings, through a social contract among “citizens”.

Soon hundreds of small groups of thinkers and activists caught the spirit of the Enlightenment. The Order of Illuminists was just one such group, alongside others like the Rosicrucians and the Italian Carbonari. During the 1780s the Illuminists grew to about 2,500 members in central Europe. But they weren’t very successful at overturning the medieval order, and soon began facing repression from authorities. They disbanded around 1787. Like so many other groups of its kind, the Illuminists failed to bring about revolutionary changes. But revolutionary change happened without them.

Image
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION LASTED FROM 1787 to 1799

In the decade after the collapse of the Order of Illuminists, massive protests rocked France, culminating in the French Revolution. Rebellions by angry peasants and urban workers overturned the feudal order that had existed for centuries, and sent shockwaves across Europe. Slaves in the French colony of Haiti launched their own revolution, demanding the same freedoms French citizens were winning on the streets of Paris. In France the aristocrats were kicked out of their palaces, and systematically killed so that no king could ever claim the throne again. Churches were burned to the ground, and Catholic priests driven from positions of power. A parliamentary system was established with elections, representatives, and a legislature. It was the first time anything like it had happened in history.

Not everyone celebrated the changes sweeping through Europe, however. People whose social status depended on the old aristocracy and the church tended to resist the changes. Some of them wrote books, and this is how the first Illuminati conspiracy theories were created. In 1798, an English scientist and inventor named John Robinson wrote Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. In 1803, Jesuit priest Abbe Agustin Barruel wrote Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. Both authors disliked the French Revolution, and so they blamed it on a small group of conspirators: the “Illuminati”.

Robinson and Barruel argued that the Order of Illuminists didn’t really disband in 1787, but only went underground. They claimed this “Illuminati” had secretly plotted and carried out the French Revolution, and were still hiding in Masonic lodges, planning to overthrow governments in Europe and America. Robinson and Barruel disliked revolution, and they didn’t think it was possible for millions of people to mobilize together and change the conditions of their lives. To them, ordinary people weren’t organized or smart enough to pull it off. They needed to be guided like sheep by an elite group. In this way, Robinson and Barruel’s original Illuminati theory was a kind of conservative myth, used to make sense of a social reality its authors found confusing and scary. Today’s Illuminati theory follows the same pattern. Even poor people who draw on Illuminati theory, who might otherwise sympathize with protest movements, often view movements as secret ploys by the Illuminati to cause trouble.

…And the Freemasons

Robinson and Barruel’s original Illuminati theory, and Illuminati theory today, talks a lot about the Masons. The original Order of Illuminists established itself in Freemasonry groups, called “lodges”. But Freemasonry had emerged a few hundred years earlier. Originally, Freemasonry was just what it sounds like: a group of people who worked with masonry and stone to build structures. Starting in the 1300s, skilled workers, such as masons, weavers, and blacksmiths, began to organize in groups called “guilds.” Guilds received permission to carry out their trade in a given town, and policed who could do their line of work. They were highly exclusive, and invented rituals and symbolism to distinguish themselves from everybody else.

As capitalism developed, the guilds slowly broke down. New technologies made their outdated tools and skills irrelevant, and most disappeared. But the Masonic lodges were different. In the 1700s Masonic lodges began recruiting rich or influential people, in order to maintain their funds and high social status. They soon lost their association with masonry work, and turned into a fancy social club.

Masonic lodges provided a venue for radical organizing as the Enlightenment set in. The emerging class of rich merchants and intellectuals gathered in Masonic lodges, discussed the changes taking place in society, and planned activist actions. Many famous revolutionaries developed their radical ideas while they were Freemasons. Because of this association with Enlightenment radicalism, people who opposed revolution tended to view Freemasons as the enemy. This is a common pattern: the elite always think revolutions are planned and directed by a small group of enlightened people, instead of by masses of people themselves.

In reality, Masonic lodges are elaborate social clubs for people who want to feel elite. In some places, Masonic lodges have provided a place for intellectuals to discuss how to change society, but they’re usually pretty boring. If you go into a Masonic temple today, you’ll see groups of small business owners talking about how to plant trees on Main Street, not a secret group plotting to rule the world. Nevertheless, their association with the original Bavarian Order of Illuminists has meant they’re always included in Illuminati theory.

The Bavarian Illuminati, and its association with Freemasonry, is the first piece of the Illuminati theory we hear today. But there are two other important pieces to most Illuminati theories: anti-Semitism and the antichrist.

The Second Piece: Anti-Semitism

Distrust, prejudice, and hatred toward Jews arose in Europe hundreds of years ago. Europe was ruled by kingdoms allied with the Catholic Church after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Jews were banned from playing a major role in the economy or gaining political power. Over time, different Jewish communities found ways to survive at the edges of society, doing things that mainstream society looked down upon, like lending money. Soon Jews as a whole became associated with this profession. At first this profession wasn’t very powerful. But as capitalism developed, money-lending—credit—became more important.

Image
FACTORY WORK IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION WAS
EXHAUSTING AND UNSAFE, LIKE IN MANY FACTORIES
AROUND THE WORLD TODAY


As capitalism developed, millions of people were driven of the land, and forced to work for poverty wages in the new factories of industrial Europe. Because Jews were already identified with money and credit, different groups began to view Jews as a symbol of capitalism itself. Many European workers believed Jews used their role as financiers to gain power and exploit people. Jews also provided a convenient scapegoat for the petit-bourgeoisie: small business owners trying to become big-time factory owners. This class resented the debts they had to take out in order to expand their businesses. They viewed financiers as an obstacle to “fair” competition. In the early 20th century, Jewish communities regularly suffered attacks by mobs of workers and petit-bourgeois business owners. Especially in Eastern Europe and Russia, “pogroms” (lynch mobs against Jewish neighborhoods) were a common occurrence.

Anti-Semitism united poor workers with small business owners, despite their opposed interests. The poor workers were angry about their treatment under capitalism, but saw Jews as a bigger enemy than their exploiting factory bosses. The small business owners worked to become the big-time exploiters of the poor workers, and felt Jews stood in the way of their goals. These two classes were fundamentally opposed to each other, but temporarily joined together in a populist movement, because of their mutual, misguided anti-Semitism. Populist movements join poor people with the petit-bourgeoisie, against imagined elite enemies. They speak in the name of the “common man,” but they’re guided by middle class elements, and screw over poor and working participants in the end. Contemporary examples of populism include the Tea Party, some parts of Occupy Wall Street, and the Nation of Islam. Illuminati theories are often populist in character. Many populist theories draw on anti-Semitism to identify an evil elite that runs the world.

Many Illuminati theories make use of a document from the early 1900s called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols claimed to be a secret document written by Jews, about their plans to take over the world. In fact, they were written sometime between 1897 and 1903, most likely by members of the Russian secret police. At the time, Russian nationalists were trying to prevent the breakout of a Russian Revolution against the Emperor of Russia, called the Tsar. Most nationalists were strongly anti-Semitic. They viewed the entire mass movement to overthrow the Tsar as a Jewish conspiracy. The Protocols were written to help fuel the movement against Jews, in order (they thought) to prevent the revolution.

Most of the Protocols was crudely copied from two other books: Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, written by Maurice Joly in 1864, and Biarritz, a German novel written in 1868 by Hermann Goedsche. Despite being exposed as a fake, the document became widely read in Russia and Europe, and eventually the U.S. too. Because of this, Illuminati theories regularly make mention of Jewish banking groups like the Rothschilds and the Bilderbergs, and portray Jews as a secret group intent on world domination. This is the second major piece of the Illuminati theory. The third is the antichrist.

The Third Piece: The Antichrist

Many Illuminati theorists also talk about the “end of days” and the “mark of the beast”. These terms come from a religious movement called Protestant Millenarianism, which arose in the mid 1800s. Millenarian movements believe the end of the world is coming, and try to get ready for it. Millenarians in the 1800s developed a complex timeline describing the Second Coming of Christ, with a sequence of important signs. One of the signs was the coming of the “antichrist.” In the Bible, the “antichrist” is sometimes described as a single person, and sometimes as many individuals or groups. The “antichrist” is supposed to gain dictatorial power over the world just before Christ’s return. Today, many U.S. evangelical Christians are constantly looking for signs that the antichrist is appearing.


Image
GERALD WINROD, 1900-1957

In the early 20th century, World War One, the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism, and World War Two, gave Evangelicals many signs that the end was drawing near. Based on their interpretation of the Bible, evangelicals looked for signs of growing government power, and individuals with cult-like status that might be the antichrist. In the 1920s, U.S. evangelical leader Gerald Winrod claimed that Mussolini, the Italian Fascist leader, was actually the antichrist. He said the League of Nations was a sign of his growing world power. “End of days” predictions continued for years afterward. In the 1950s, some evangelicals predicted that a new invention called the “computer” was actually the antichrist. In the 1970s, others argued that the microchip or laser barcodes were the “mark of the beast,” destined to brand individuals in the antichrist’s name. During Obama’s election, many people thought he was the antichrist.

The figure of the antichrist and the “end of days” has been a main piece of many Illuminati theories since the 1920s. The story works like a game of bingo: believers have a list of signs of the end of the world, and they sit around waiting for them to appear. Every popular political figure, like Obama, can be seen as the antichrist. Every big political organization, like the U.N, can be seen as his growing power. Every development in information technology, like implanted microchips, can be seen as a “mark of the beast.” Theories like these don’t accurately describe reality. Instead, they get people to find evidence for a theory they already want to believe.

The Three Pieces Combined = Illuminati Theory As We Know It

All the pieces we’ve talked about so far were combined in the 1920s, a time of great unrest. Before and after World War I, there were huge working class rebellions against capitalism. Massive workers’ movements with millions of members rocked Germany, Italy, France, England, and even the U.S. Workers finally toppled the Tsar in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and they tried to establish a communist society. To many people, it seemed like a wave of socialist revolution would overturn capitalism, just as capitalism had overturned feudalism a century before.


Image
MILITANT GERMAN WORKERS ATTEMPT A REVOLUTION
IN BERLIN, JANUARY 1919


Just like before, those who depended on the dominant order opposed the revolutionary movement. They felt the need to explain the growing unrest, which they disliked and couldn’t understand. Just like the kings and queens in the French Revolution who couldn’t explain the uprisings against them, the modern capitalists turned to Illuminati theories. They didn’t think workers were smart enough to actually change the world. In 1926, Nesta Webster, an English aristocrat, published Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, The Need for Fascism in Great Britain. Lady Queenborough (also known as Edith Starr Miller), the daughter of a U.S. industrial capitalist, published Occult Theocrasy in 1933. Both writers argued that the revolutionary fervor sweeping the globe was caused by a secret conspiracy. Both combined the old Illuminati theory with new elements.

Webster and Queenborough hyped up the Illuminati more than before: now the Illuminati were said to be descendants of the ancient Knights Templar, and every secret society that ever existed was supposedly an Illuminati front group. They also linked Jewish financiers to the Illuminati conspiracy. The Illuminati, they said, were paid by a secret group of Jewish bankers in their quest for world domination. Webster and Queenborough’s conspiracy theories were preached in the U.S. by Gerald Winrod—the same Winrod described above, who was on the lookout for the antichrist. Winrod wrote a pamphlet in 1935 called Adam Weishaupt, a Human Devil, which drew on Webster and Queenborough’s work. He argued that communism itself was a Jewish conspiracy, and that the Illuminati conspiracy heralded the coming of the antichrist.

Webster, Queenborough and Winrod brought together the three pieces of Illuminati theory under one big umbrella. Their writings established the main core common to the Illuminati theories we hear today: the Illuminati are a secret society, financed by a Jewish banking syndicate, which goes way back to ancient religious societies, and which aims to rule the world. In some cases, the Illuminati are portrayed as followers of Satan or the antichrist, aiming to bring about his rule on earth. Almost every Illuminati theory today builds off this core story.

Originally, Illuminati theories were used by elites to try to explain and stop movements. But if these theories were first developed by elites and other conservative forces, how did they end up being used by poor and oppressed people in the hood?


http://overthrowingilluminati.wordpress ... lluminati/
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: The Left Hand Of Occupy Wall Street

Postby American Dream » Thu Jul 03, 2014 10:09 am

An alternative to all the puerile opportunism around Occupy:


http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2014/ ... e-know-it/

Mark Bray Interview on The End of the World As We Know It
July 2nd, 2014

The New Significance interviews author Mark Bray about his contribution to the book The End of the World As We Know It?


TNS: Hi Mark, and thanks for taking the time to respond to some questions. Before we begin, can you tell readers a bit about yourself and the various projects you’ve been involved in over the years?

Mark: My pleasure! Well, I’m from New Jersey and I’m a member of the new Black Rose Anarchist Federation, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a PhD Candidate in Modern European History at Rutgers University. Over the years I’ve been involved in the global justice movement, the anti-war movement, student and immigrants’ rights work, labor organizing, and other campaigns. I was also an organizer with the Press and Direct Action working groups of Occupy Wall Street in New York City. I recently published Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street about the role of anarchism in the movement based on my experiences and 192 interviews with organizers in NYC.

TNS: In your contribution to The End of the World As We Know It? (AK Press, 2014) you talk about the “strategic presentation” of the politics of Occupy Wall Street that you and others tried to mobilize as organizers within the Press Working Group. Can you describe what you mean by that?

Mark: Essentially the article discusses how organizers involved in framing the politics of Occupy attempted to transcend popular disdain for the words and language of radical left ideology (such as ‘anarchism’ or ‘communism’) while maintaining their anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian politics and attempting to target the underlying affinity that many Americans feel for the content of anarchist politics when understood without its often cumbersome ideological baggage. In other words, many working class Americans distrust the federal government, reject the notion that politicians are looking out for the interests of everyday people, understand that the banks and corporations have played a destructive role in the economy over the past years, are very sympathetic to the concepts of local autonomy, participatory democracy, etc. but when they’re initially presented as components of ‘anarchism’ or more broadly anti-capitalist politics the conversation often ends there.

So those of us in the Press Working Group, for example, framed talking points and wrote press releases that presented an anti-authoritarian message that focused on issues and values that people already shared in order to get them involved and expose them to opportunities for further radicalization.

TNS: One of the tropes that you point out that is used to justify austerity, in particular, but also capitalism generally is the idea that we need to “live within our means.” This is a genius talking point for liberals and conservatives, who argue for cutting social spending all the while syphoning wealth upwards (indeed, the top 7% of earners actually got richer during the crisis, while the rest of us were told to tighten our belts). But you and the organizers you worked with repurposed this slogan creatively. Can you describe that for us?

Mark: So in the article I focus on four axiomatic, ‘common sense’ political/ethical perspectives that many Americans hold that OWS organizers had a fair amount of success mobilizing in order to redirect away from their reactionary popular usage toward a much more radical direction including: “Shining City Upon a Hill,” “A Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work,” “You Will Always Have the Poor Among You,” and, as you mentioned, “Living Within Your Means.” The right mobilizes around the concept of “Living Within Your Means” in order to capitalize on the commonly held belief that individuals and families should balance their budgets and apply that adage to the affairs of state thereby glossing over the vast differences that separate the two examples. This rhetoric has the effect of silencing protest because it makes people think that their sacrifices are shared across class and strengthen their character.

But Occupy organizers continually emphasized that the ruling class was not enduring any sacrifices, despite the fact that they were to blame for the crisis, while working people suffered although they ‘played by the rules.’ So, as the well-used Occupy slogan went, “Banks got bailed out/We got sold out.” The financial institutions got rewarded for living beyond their means while working people got punished for living within them.

So the potential strength of these kinds of arguments is that they start with already shared premises to demonstrate how the rich habitually thumb their nose at them.

TNS: It was also interesting that you note that the term “austerity” never really gained traction in the US, particularly in press reporting on the economic situation after the market collapse. This is fascinating for a couple of reasons, not least of which is that the US has definitely seen similar trends as Europe, where “austerity” is a common signifier for a certain set of political priorities (i.e. state-sponsored supply-side economics, where wealthy elites are given massive amounts of tax dollars because their operations are deemed “too big to fail”; funding for those bailouts provided by the evisceration of social spending and the repurposing of those dollars as handouts to the rich; etc.). Why do you think the terminology never took hold in the States?

Mark: Yeah, definitely. Well I’m not entirely sure, but I think a part of it has to do with a well-orchestrated effort to drain the financial crisis of any historical context and portray the issues it raised as essentially eternal questions of the role of government in the economy. The politicians and talking heads present the issue as a continual tug of war between liberals and conservatives over how much the government should ‘interfere’ with the free market. From their perspective, this struggle sometimes sways one way, sometimes another, but it transcends historical eras. Therefore, this outlook is at odds with the more historical interpretation of the recent crisis having ushered in an era of austerity that, to one extent or another, has affected many different governments around the world especially in the global north.

Therefore, government cuts are portrayed as victories for the right in this morally charged battle rather than concessions to a broader historical ‘mandate’ to cut back on social services. Also ‘austerity’ is just not a well known word in the United States, relative to many other places, so that may have something to do with it also.

TNS: And would you mind telling us a bit about your recent book, Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street? You catalogue some of these issues in the book, correct?

Mark: Yes, Translating Anarchy is a political analysis of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street in New York City based on 192 interviews with organizers and my own experience. Based on the interviews I document the fact that approximately 72% of organizers had explicitly anarchist or implicitly anarchistic politics despite the mainstream media claim that Occupy was a liberal movement whose aspirations were limited to reforms such as campaign finance reform or a millionaire’s tax.

So the book documents this contrast between the anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian organizers that made the movement happen and the larger liberal base of support that generated so much hype for Occupy with a focus on how the radicals at the core of the movement managed to bring people into the movement by orienting their radicalism in accessible language. Ultimately Occupy Wall Street was successful because it brought together this revolutionary core with a liberal support base, and so moving forward those of us serious about transforming society need to put more effort into promoting our ideas outside of left circles. Translating Anarchy reflects on the successes and failures of that project in New York and situates Occupy within a larger historical context of previous social movements and revolutionary struggles.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 49 guests