I’ve passed by the “Occupy Toronto” campsite a few times, this week. Normally, I’m not much impressed by political demonstrations. In North America, they have proven woefully ineffectual over the last generation. The people who organize them are usually far more interested in the pastime of demonstrating that in accomplishing any goals. In fact, they are mostly counter-productive, because the Powers That Be long ago figured out how to turn them to their own advantage. So I always wince when I see the usual band of scruffy teenagers wearing circle-As, the aging hippies, the predictable “political theatre” stunts, the meaningless slogans, and the dreary chants. Those in power love these people, especially the self-styled “anarchists,” because they re-inforce authority, rather than threaten it. Nothing discredits real opposition in the eyes of the public more effectively than a few seconds of TV footage showing a teenager with his face painted, screaming unintelligeable slogans. They see what appears to them to be a mob of brainless pranxters. The issues can then be safely buried by the media.
In fact, the police and politicians go out of their way to cultivate such antics. During the G20 summit, held last year in Toronto, the Police and the RCMP planned, deployed, and orchestrated a rampage of imported Black Bloc “anarchists” through the financial district, breaking windows. They planted an empty police car on the street, specifically to be burned for the photo-op. Meanwhile, the police went on their own rampage, about a mile away from this, where the real demonstrators were. They committed some of the most obscene violations of civil liberties in Canada’s history, assaulting and beating peaceful protestors (and several innocuous passers-by). It is an absolute certainty that the police planned and organized the vandalism in the financial district: There were literally thousands of police standing less than a block away, who were supposedly unable to stop a handful of teenagers from breaking windows for an hour and a half. The location and intent to vandalize was well-publicized ahead of time. The police had spent a week calling on every large office building and telling thousands of office workers it was going to happen. Every street and access was strictly controlled. For all intents and purposes, the Black Bloc were employees of the Police. The press, of course remained completely obedient to Conservative Political Correctness. Not a word of doubt was cast on the absurdity of the police claims. News stories almost always implied that the protestors at the Parliament Buildings had been the ones doing the vandalism, not the Black Bloc a mile away. The general public saw nothing of the real protests ― only the endlessly reproduced footage of the staged police car burning. All this effectively distracted the public from the monstrous corruption of the ruling Conservative Government, which wasted a billion dollars on what was effectively a frat party for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Harper could not have been more pleased to see the professional protest movement doing exactly what it is supposed to do. No doubt the Black Bloc vandals were well salted with RCMP agent-provocateurs, as this is a venerable, well-documented police tactic.
Nevertheless, there is something different about the Occupy movement. First of all, it’s a local offshoot of the movement that has suddently appeared in the United States. That movement, starting with Occupy Wall Street, was not organized by the usual clowns. It appeared spontaneously, triggered by a handful of tweets from people who were not stereotypical “activists”, and gathered strength through a process quite different from that which creates the standard, formulaic protests. The usual types have been participating, but also a much more diverse assortment of people. Even in Canada, where the protests have been a much tamer thing, they have been attended by people who normally wouldn’t dream of joining a demonstration. One grandmother was there because all her grandchildren had gone through expensive educations, only to wind up working in burger chains. She knew that something has gone wrong with our system, but not what to do about it.
The Canadian protests are a side-show. The real action is in the United States, where the protests have been longer and bigger than anyone in authority ever thought they would be, and the Conservative-controlled media have run out of ways to sneer at them. The usual objection, that the demonstrators are not putting forward any coherent “ideology,” made by virtually every pundit, reveals that it is those in power who are driven by an ideology. Of course the demonstrations have no consistent voice. They are not stage-managed farces, propelled and directed by strategists to achieve a specific goal (like the Tea Party demonstrations, which are financed by wealthy corporate interests, and follow detailed instructions from above). This fact is starting to break through the facade of the Conservative-controlled media in the United States. Even some of those who benefit from the status quo are begining to wonder if their world-view might be false, as this Paul Campos piece in U.S.News demonstrates.
But Campos and others like him have only an inkling of the depth of financial and social disaster that the United States has descended into. The people who are showing up at the demonstrations have more than an inkling, and that’s why they are there. They are simply demonstrating that they are tired of being lied to by the Conservative Lying Machine, and that they know perfectly well that their country has been sold out, sold away, and pillaged by somebody. Wall Street is the obvious address to come knocking at to demand some answers. Nobody believes that the power rests in the Congress of the Republic.
Conservative control of the media is so overwhelming that a huge percentage of Americans, perhaps even a majority, have never in their lives seen or heard any social or economic ideas other than Conservative Political Correctness. Yet the deterioration of American life over the last decade has been so dramatic, that millions are beginning to doubt that orthodoxy. It was very interesting to see what happened when an excentric billionaire, Warren Buffet, publicly stated that billionaires (including himself) where being mollycoddled by the tax system, and should pay a just share of taxes. FoxPravda went into a hysterical frenzy, denouncing Buffet as a “socialist” and talking about “class war.” Republican politicians immediately took up the “class war” slogan.
Now this was very interesting, because it constitutes one of the first big miscalculations by the Political Correctness Machine. Americans have been brought up from birth to believe that they do not have a “class society”, and that only foreign-inspired radicals talk about “class war”. But, of course, the rich and powerful in the United States do believe in a class society, and do believe in class war. The rich live in an entirely Marxist mental universe. They have been waging class war against the rest of us with unrelenting fanaticism, and they have mostly been winning. But, like all fanatics, they are infuriated by any sign of opposition, even if it is purely symbolic. Every enthusiast for aristocratic rule, from Plato to Castro to the Republican National Committee, has the same attitude towards uppity proles: Cet animal est très méchant. Quand on l’attaque il se défend. But few Americans and Canadians have enough direct contact with the super-rich to know this. They assume that the rich believe in the “meritocracy” they peddle in their agitprop. Talk of “class war” coming from the rich and Conservative politicians has created a discordant jangle in the Conservative Narrative. It’s not surprising that one of the few voices of sanity permitted on American television, Jon Stewart’s show on the Comedy Network, was able to skewer it so effectively and delightfully.
What the Conservative Political Correctness Machine fears more than anything is that the phony, controlled and manipulated “grass roots populism” that has been at their beck and call for a generation might suddenly be swamped and overrun by real populism. The real tradition of populism in America, going back to its founding, has nothing to do with the crypto-communist Conservative Ideology peddled by FoxPravda, or with coddling billionaires with tax breaks.
In Canada, it is unlikely that anything like this process will happen. Conservative Ideology does not have the same Soviet-style monopoly here that it has in the U.S., though it is obviously influential. Economic conditions are worrisome, but not the unmitigated disaster they are in the U.S.. But whatever happens next among our neighbours is bound to affect us.
0 Comments.