The Occupy Wall Street movement, for all its merits and its nobility, is plagued with unthinking propagandists. It is plagued by those with romanticized notions of being a freedom fighter, and testosterone fueled youth who view revolution (as if any such thing is happening) as a recreational sport.
Misinformation is so endemic and cacophonous in our society that it is hard to express a view and have someone understand it fully. Not so much because they fail to comprehend the whole point, but more so because they believe they can infer more from this point than they can. For example, if I were to say “The Occupy Wall Street movement is plagued with unthinking propagandists”, the average person would infer from this that I am opposed to the movement. They would be wrong. It is because of this basic premise that I must strongly urge people to take a sentence purely for what it is, independent of its speaker or writer, and with no relation to any notion of ‘sides’ ‘wings’ or party politics. When someone tells you that the movement is full of propagandists they probably mean only that the movement is full of propagandists. You can’t infer from this that they are conservative. You can’t infer from this that they are opposed to the movement. You can’t infer from this that they are opposed to the tactics of the movement or that they are opposed to non-violent protest. All you can infer from this is that they believe the movement is full of propagandists.
I’m telling you all of this because I am about to use the term “these people” and I want you to understand that I’m not referring to the movement or the people who make it up – not all of them, at least. I’m not Rush Limbaugh and I’m not trying to smear or discredit liberal youth with sweeping generalizations. I am referring to a specific subset of people, a specific kind of people who exist within the Occupy movement (and really any movement) who I don’t have a better word or term to refer to by.
These people have read about revolutionaries and rebels and protestors and they have seen documentaries and images of their struggles. They’ve read about Tiananmen Square and Kent State. They’ve read about the civil rights movement. They’ve read about apartheid. Most recently they’ve seen the protests in North Africa and the Middle East. These people, now two months into a protest, have the nerve and the insensitivity to compare themselves to these movements. They’ve made posters with images of the famous ‘Tank Man’ from Tiananmen Square. They’ve justified their actions by comparing them to the actions of Martin Luther King and of Rosa Parks. They’ve cried out that the powers that be are trying to shut them down, just like they tried to shut down the civil rights movement.
Well, not just like that. Three young men in Mississippi were lynched for nothing but the color of their skin. Fred Hampton, a prominent voice in the civil rights movement and member of the Black Panthers was gunned down in his sleep along with his comrade Mark Clark by a tactical unit, with the support and backing of both the Chicago police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI agent Gregg York would later lament that “Only two of those black nigger fuckers were killed”. He had expected about twenty. I could go on. It is also worth noting here that this was an attempt to suppress free speech. I’ll get into why that’s important later. Other than government sanctioned murder of people who spoke their mind, police across the country indiscriminately beat black people in the thousands and sprayed them with fire hoses set at a level that could peak bark off a tree or separate brick from mortar when they took to the street. They released trained attack dogs on protesters. This all happened not just to adults, but children too. People were arrested in the thousands, 2,500 at a single protest in Birmingham. Corruption was rampant. The leaders of the movement had their houses bombed and their families harassed. Martin Luther King was shot in the head. I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that the civil rights movement faced real adversity; many of them were prepared to die in battle with their government, and many of them did.
Just as it isn’t the civil rights movement, it isn’t the Tiananmen Square protest: Hundreds of people were killed in that protest, possibly thousands. Shot at and trampled into the pavement by tanks.
It isn’t, either, the North African uprising. This is, perhaps, the most insulting comparison of all. The injustices suffered by OWS pale in comparison to the human casualties of recent events in North Africa and all that led up to them. In Bahrain, 541 people were hospitalized, and an additional 26 (at least) were killed. In Syria, thousands were injured, at least 3,500 killed. More than 30,000 were detained. In Libya more than 25,000 died, with at least 4,000 missing. 224 died in Tunisia, and on and on.
By comparison, in the United States, two marines were injured while protesting, and maybe a couple of hundred people were beaten with nightsticks. Several people have died, none as a result of police action. It is entirely unremarkable that at least 75 people have been injured in a protest spanning two months and 2,392 cities.
In the end, it is a point that shouldn’t need to be made. It should be readily apparent to anyone with a basic knowledge of history that this movement has received less violent opposition than not only most other movements of its time, but most other movements of all time. And yet there are plenty of people within the movement trying to paint a picture of fascism and the violent suppression of free speech. This is the point I said I would get to, where I would explain the importance of one key fact: The murder of Fred Hampton was a concerted effort by the United States government to suppress free speech.
Whereas, no government body has made any attempt to suppress the free speech of the Occupy movement. This, if not the relative insignificance of the force police have used against the Occupy movement, is the most important point to consider when comparing it to other movements. In all of the previous examples, people were killed because the government didn’t like what they were saying. As for the Occupy movement, people were hurt because the government didn’t like where they were sleeping.
The violent suppression of free speech is quite a different thing to the forceful enforcement of laws. An occupation is quite a different thing to an opinion.
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