🚀 go-pugleaf

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/16/which-way-for-the-occupy-protests/

headline:

Which Way for the Occupy Protests?
February 16, 2012
The Occupy movement is at a divide, with the initial encampments
mostly disbanded but with new plans for marches and civil disobedience
this spring. There are also schisms between non-violent activists and
some anarchists who favor more aggressive action, a split that
Stephanie Van Hook addresses.


By Stephanie Van Hook

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before Martin Luther King Jr. was
murdered, he spoke passionately in a sermon at Riverside Church in New
York about the war in Vietnam.

In this gripping speech about the hypocrisy of bringing democracy
through napalm and the audacity of fostering a brotherhood through war
and killing, he made a daring confession: “I could never again raise
my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without
having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today — my own government.”


Police -- some in Hazmat suits -- clear away Occupy DC on Feb. 4
(Photo credit: OccupyWallStreet.org)
Likely, the most significant social movement in the U.S. in the coming
months will be the Occupy movement, as it returns in some numbers to
the street. Yet, as the Occupy movement grows more polarized over the
strategies of its upcoming spring activities, it might do well to
reflect on the logic of Dr. King’s brave statement.

Contrary to what Peter Gelderloos and others have claimed, it is
violence and the stasis of a dysfunctional system of oppression that
protects the state, not nonviolence. How does violence protect the
state? Do a few general Internet searches on the Occupy movement in
images to see how that movement is visually narrated (not to mention
how it feels to see the portrayed reduction of a promising national
movement into a series of police confrontations).

Examining these images with some detachment, we might wonder how this
civil war with police began. This examination might also give us some
clues about the general population’s confusion about “what Occupy
wants,” and the U.S. citizenry’s preference for political candidates
who do not create violence on the streets — even if those elected
officials ultimately maintain systems of greater violence within our
society and between it and other nations.

If the choice is between unruly demonstrations and elections, Occupy
risks becoming a reason to turn to politics as usual.

Paradoxically, while the public will be fascinated by police/Occupy
confrontations, and while the media will mock activists’ lack of moral
character and strength for accepting violence as an effective
strategy, it will only make the way safer and clearer for greater
state violence to be perpetrated in the name of national security.

Who knows, we may be pulled into a new war with Iran in the coming
year — what better way to stifle a movement: delegitimize it (through
violence), and then unite Americans against a common enemy!



Violence in opposition to the State relieves the State and the
citizenry of any guilt for a brutal response to all protesters — and
it refocuses from the nominal issue to the issue of violence by
protesters. Thus any violence by protesters serves the state well
(just ask anyone employed by the government who has hired an agent
provocateur).

It is a weapon of mass distraction. Stop worrying about the uptick in
home foreclosures, the dead being shipped back from Afghanistan, and
the new increases in the Pentagon’s proposed budget — look at the
violent window-breakers from Occupy who threaten us all! ... (cont)