I just heard about what happened in Oakland. Rather than threatening lawsuits against the police, the OWS movement should use this moment to make a public appeal to protestors and say that destruction of any kind will not be tolerated by the OWS movement.
For Gandhi, even unduly embarrassing the opponent was considered counter-productive. And inducing fear in them was out of the question. If one of his satyagraha campaigns had gotten out of control like this, he would have called an end to it immediately. And he would have criticized his supporters more than his opponents, because he understood that things like this turn events to the advantage of his opponents: the oppressors.
The OWS movement was a good idea, but it seems to have been their last good idea. Of course, the vandals and flag-burners may have been clandestine agent provocateurs, but all the more reason that their actions should be publicly denounced, otherwise authorities will soon turn events to their advantage.
I can't understand why the OWS movement has such trouble understanding these social dynamics. They are complete pushovers for provocative authoritarian tactics used against them. Gandhi was not so easily fooled. That's why he was able to take on the British Empire, pluck the crown jewel from the crown, and then convince the British to leave voluntarily. No easy feat.
The OWS is not that smart. And because they won't wise up, they are perpetually on the precipice of hurting not only their own cause but the cause of all Americans who want to be free of government tyranny. But I suspect it's because they really want to destroy everything related to the old system. They don't know when enough is enough. The American system of government is like a person with cancer, and the OWS movement was a doctor, they are misjudging the dose of chemotherapy. What they have in mind seems to be the death of the patient not the cure of him. Something is wrong with their minds.
The OWS are like puppets on a string. They will end up doing exactly what authorities want them to do so they can justify a crackdown, not just on the movement, but on all Americans. THIS member of the 99% no longer wants the OWS movement to speak in his name.
While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.
Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”
Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbro will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories.
Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change. In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.
The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent. When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena.
In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24.The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million!
5.0 out of 5 stars Baseline Reading, VERY Dense, A Long Study,January 29, 2012
I read this book in galley form and forgot to post a review after the pre-order period ended. This book was a direct inspiration to my own forthcoming book from the same publisher that I am evidently not allowed to link to here at Amazon, The Open Source Everything Manifesto:Transparency, Truth, and Trust.
From the author:
It [noosphere] is a whole-systems paradigm that melds prophecy and analysis of current world trends. It is a perception that the transformation of the biosphere is inevitably leading to a new geological epoch and evolutionary cycle, and it is due to the impact of human thought on the environment that this new era — the Noosphere — is dawning.
This is a capstone work that integrates all the author's past works, each linked here.
NOTE: This is a book review, extraction from the work above, not personal reflections inspired by the book, and is offered as such–a gleaning from Lyotard's 1979 work.
. How do we define ‘knowledge’ in a postindustrial society equipped with new media, instantaneous communication technologies and universal access to information? Who controls its transmission? How can scientific knowledge be legitimated?These are the questions Lyotard asks in The Postmodern Condition. He believes that the method of legitimation traditionally used by science, a philosophical discourse that references a metanarrative, becomes obsolete in a postmodern society. Instead, he explores whether paralogy may be the new path to legitimation.
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I. The Field: Knowledge in Computerized Societies
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The nature of knowledge itself is shifting from being an end in itself to a commodity meant to be repackaged and redistributed. In order to be valuable, learning must be able to be reformatted into these packets of information in computer language, so that they can be sent through that channel of communication. Today, we increasingly hear the words “knowledge economy” and “information society” to describe the era we are entering. As was always the case, knowledge is power. Now, in an increasingly complex world, those with the ability to sort through the vast amounts of information and repackage it to give it meaning will be the winners. Technologies continue to solve problems that were formerly the source of power struggles between nations (i.e. the need for cheap labor is diminished by the mechanization of industry, the need for raw materials is reduced by advances in alternative energy solutions), and so control of information is most likely to become the 21st century’s definition of power.
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2. The Problem: Legitimation
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The definition of knowledge is determined by intertwining forces of power, authority, and government. Leotard draws a parallel between the process of legitimation in politics and of those in science: both require an authority figure or “legislator” to determine whether a statement is acceptable to enter the round of discourse for consideration. In an increasingly transparent society, this leads to new questions:
Who is authorizing the authority figure? Who is watching the watchers?
This documentary World Government Election Fraud 2012 briefly covers many topics about government, politics, energy, sovereignty, sustainability and self sufficiency (not being dependent on the nanny state) to get everyone past the disinformation.
Phi Beta Iota: In our view, 2012 is an opportunity to achieve non-violent revolutionary reform such that we can rapidly redirect toward resilience and sustainability. Public intelligence combined with public integrity is the lever. All signs are that 2012 will be lost, another worse economic crash will occur in 2012, and there will violence in America such as has not been seen since the Watts and Rodney King riots.
“The single most important thing to understand about the Occupy movement[deleted plural ending] is that it is primarily a movement about cultural change, not institutional and policy change. Cultural change means changing the nature of political discourse and the various spheres in which it is carried on, especially mass media. Changing what is salient on the public agenda can open discursive opportunities for various groups seeking specific institutional and policy changes.
The cultural mission of the Occupy movement is to raise consciousness about the corporate domination of American political, social, and economic institutions – and to the enormous inequalities in income and wealth produced by this domination. At the same time, it attempts to build a collective identity within its constituency by making personal suffering a shared experience. While I have no systematic data to prove it has done so, I am quite confident that, when such data is available, it will show that in various forums there has been a sharp increase since September, 2011 in references to corporate power and actual or potential abuse of corporate power and to statistics showing the dramatic increases in wealth and income controlled by the richest one percent or fewer families. Hence, it seems reasonable to argue that, whatever future institutional and policy changes may or may not take place in the future, this movement has already been a major success by changing the nature of U.S. political discourse.
Fact #1: Only one country in the Middle East has nuclear weapons – Israel. The quantity is unknown, with estimates of the Israeli arsenal range between 60 and 400 bombs, the upper range of 200-400 being the most often cited. Fact #2: Only one country in the Middle East has refused to the sign the Non Proliferation Treaty – Israel. These two facts are not in dispute.
While most observers (except for the leadership of Israel and its agents of influence in the west, especially the US) believe making the Middle East a nuclear free zone would be a positive step toward peace, no one is pressuring Israel to give up its weapons. The goal of a nuclear free zone may be great for raising grant money, but without a commitment to pressure Israel into giving up its weapons, it will remain a pipe dream.
On the other hand, Israel and the US claim the unilateral right to insure that all of the Middle East other than Israel remains a nuclear free zone, by preemptive military action, if either country deems it to be necessary. To this end Israel, attacked the Osirak reactor without warning in Iraq (1981) and an alleged Syrian nuclear site without warning in 2007. Ironically, at the time of the Osirak attack, the Iraqi program was moribund and going nowhere, but the attack spurred Saddam into developing a more vigorous covert program. [Pillar] The real purpose of the alleged “nuclear” site in Syria remains in dispute, with some arguing that recent evidence proves it was a textile factory. Ironically, the Osirak attack set in course a chain of events that eventually combined to lead to the US attacking and destroying Iraq in 2003, justified primarily by false claims that Saddam Hussein was close to fielding nuclear weapons.
Now Iran is in the crosshairs for the same reason, although Iran is complying with IAEA nuclear safeguards and inspection requirements. Given the sorry history of “nuclear preemption,” perhaps it is time to ask the unmentionable question: So what? What is the debate really about? The attached essay by William Pfaff takes a stab at this question. One interesting point, an Israeli general indirectly confirmed Pfaff's hypothesis about Israel's real reason for going beserk over the possibility of Iran getting a nuclear weapon — you can find it here, but read Pfaff's op-ed first.
PARIS — The obsession of the American foreign policy community, as well as most American (and a good many international) politicians, by the myth of Iran's “existential” threat to Israel, brings the world steadily closer to another war in the Middle East.
