With the Occupy movement becoming increasingly confrontational nationwide, there are indications that the anti-capitalist movement is turning violent deliberately. The adroit agitators intermixed among the idealistic but misguided young people, the street radicals bent above all on attacking the U.S. economic system, see violent revolution as a key route to the transformation of our country into their version of the socialist utopia.
A look at the organizers of the most recent pre-planned Day of Action spotlights a large, radical group, a latter-day Red Army of seasoned activists who have been discreetly guiding Occupy since the movement’s onset and whose history is colored with previous mayhem while their plans for the immediate future raise serious questions. Just yesterday, the Occupy movement posted online plans for “alternative forms of protest,” including flash mobs that can be deployed nationwide.
Just over a week ago, Occupy Wall Street held a three-day “Direct Action Preparation and Training” course in downtown Manhattan to gear up for the latest round of riots, including last Thursday’s three-course meal of in-your-face tactics aiming to block subways and bridges as well as shut down the stock market.
Revealingly, official resources provided on the Occupy site as part of the planning for last week’s chaos shows several manuals from the Ruckus Society, whose mission is to provide “environmental, human rights, and social justice organizers with the tools, training, and support needed to achieve their goals”; this includes training radical activists in direct action techniques.
The same Ruckus Society that helped to spark the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, which devolved into violent unrest, was listed as a “friend and partner” for last week’s Day of Action.
The Ruckus training manuals provided at the Occupy site leave little to the imagination. Titles include: “Blockading for Beginners,” “Anonymous Riot Guide,” “Define White Supremacy,” “Uncle Sam the Pusher Man” and, of course, the (still!) Communist Party-connected National Lawyers Guild’s “Legal Observer Manual.”
Is the “50 Crucial Points for Nonviolent Struggle” manual offered tongue in cheek? A closer look at Ruckus reveals an even larger brigade of extremists who are now deeply tied to Occupy:
Ruckus is funded by the Tides Center, a massive money hole foundation that channels fiscal sponsorship to a who’s who of conspicuously far-left groups.
Another beneficiary of Tides is Adbusters magazine, which is reported to have come up with the Occupy idea after so-called Arab Spring protests toppled governments in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. The Adbusters website currently serves as a central hub for Occupy’s nationwide planning.
The Tides-funded MoveOn.org has coordinated with Occupy and has used the movement’s activism to springboard its own initiative to take on capitalism with a Make Wall Street Pay campaign.
A major Tides donor is the billionaire financier George Soros.
President Obama himself once helped to fund the Tides Center. From 1999 to 2002, Obama sat alongside the aggressively unrepentant Pentagon-bomber Bill Ayers as a paid director on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago nonprofit that channeled money to a number of “progressive” groups, including the Tides Center. Last month, Ayers gave a teach-in to Occupy Chicago entitled, “Non-violent direct action,” in which he implied the movement should take a revolutionary turn while laughing at the idea of Occupy protesters’ behaving lawfully.
Last week’s stepped-up tactics were not meant to serve as the movement’s grand finale. Indeed, Occupy shows no signs of relenting any time soon. A forum on the Occupy Wall Street website is called for protesters to “occupy” the malls on Black Friday while plans are afoot to shut down all West Coast ports.
Citing the success of the recent so-called Day of Action protests, Take to the Square, one of Occupy’s main online planning forums, has devised an “Alternative Day of Action” to coincide with international Human Rights Day on Dec. 10. The Occupy forum calls for “alternative forms of protest” and “new forms of action with a creative spirit” including “public forums, workshops and flash mobs.”
A flash mob refers to a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place to perform a collective act and then disperse. While flash mobs have been organized in the past for entertainment purposes, such as for satire or live television shows, recently the concept has also been used for criminal intent.
Flash mobs of mostly teenagers have reportedly attacked random targets in Philadelphia, Maryland, Cleveland, Chicago and Washington, D.C. Philadelphia’s recently reelected mayor, Michael Nutter, imposed strict curfews in response to the incidents.
While the exact nature of any future Occupy flash mob was not immediately clear, already one Occupy site – Occupy Oakland – did host a dancing flash mob this past weekend in conjunction with Dancing Without Borders, an Oakland nonprofit, and the radical antiwar outfit, Code Pink.
The deployment of Occupy flash mobs could provide the anti-Wall Street movement with a tactical advantage. Occupy mobs appearing at sites without warning could damper the planning of countermeasures by cities, citizens and law enforcement.
It’s helpful here to draw a distinction between optimistic, generous, youth-energized movements demanding an end to corruption while wrongly working outside the framework of the law – with Occupy – and another, less-visible crew: the intellectual grandchildren of the Soviet ideologues of the mid-Twentieth Century. It’s hard to believe that, two decades after the Soviet Union blew up and expired, there still exist bands of self-described deep thinkers who want one more chance to prove that Marx, Engels, Feuerbach, Lenin, Papa Stalin and that charmer Mao were on the right track to solving the biggest human dilemma: how can we all get along with each other in a cosmopolitan society?
History proves, to borrow one of their phrases, that heirs to Eurasian Marxism are not fussy about means to ends. Stalin killed 20 million of his own citizens; Mao actually killed at least 70 million Chinese people, both Han and “Little Nationalities.” These are unthinkable numbers, mainstays of that last century we managed to escape in hope that this one would turn out better. Normal citizens are astounded to see gray-haired vestiges of that tradition hand in hand these days with teenagers and college students, kids who clearly have no idea what a mess the Marxists made of practical life – and how bitterly corrupt the Party leaders inevitably became.
It’s an eye-opener, therefore, to learn that Obama and Ayers also channeled Woods Fund money to a major Saul Alinsky-based training outfit, the Midwest Academy, whose founder, Heather Booth, has recently been advising unions on how to utilize the economic crisis.
An arm of Midwest, Citizens Action of Wisconsin, was one of the main orchetsraters of last February’s protests against Gov. Scott Walker. Those protests seemed to be the domestic litmus test for Ocuppy. If Occupy can simmer along for a few months, and all signs indicate that it can, the most ambitious escalation seems set to coincide with major NATO and G-8 summits in Chicago next May, when world leaders convene to focus on global economic issues. A gilt-edged list of radical groups, including those behind the 1999 WTO riots, have already petitioned the city for permits to demonstrate. It’s the perfect storm for Occupy chaos, for nudging closer to the ultimate goal of “fundamentally transforming” – read: overthrowing – the American system.
Aaron Klein is senior reporter and WorldNetDaily and host of Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on WABC Radio. His most recent book is entitled, Red Army: The Radical Network That Must Be Defeated to Save America.
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