The Occupy Wall Street movement is now spreading out of New York and overseas. I witnessed some of it first hand while just recently in America. I already wrote about the foolishness being promoted by these protestors, and how – as usual – they have got things wrong big time.
In another piece I stated: “As I was walking through Madison Wisconsin today, a college town known for its radicalism, there were a group of these ‘Occupiers’ there with all their usual confusing and meaningless signs. One of the demonstrators proudly held up a sign with these words, ‘Down with greed!’ This encapsulates perfectly what is wrong with leftwing ideology. It reflects precisely the typical moral and mental meltdown of the secular left. They are somehow convinced that people out there (capitalists, bankers, etc) are drowning in greed, while they are somehow pristine bastions of altruism and charity.
“This has always been the fatal weakness of leftist analysis. Marx thought that the bad guys were the owners of the means of production, while the good guys were the poor exploited workers. But this assessment is far too superficial and inadequate. Evil is not in certain classes of people (the bosses, etc) but in the human heart. Sin affects every single one of us, and so too does greed. The guys holding their signs trying to shut down Wall Street and other places (with all their corporate gadgets – fancy sneakers, iPads, smart phones, etc), somehow think they are immune from greed and other evils.
“But they are as full of it as anyone else. We all are. That is because we are all selfish and sinful, and in need of a saviour. But the lefty radicals think that if we can destroy American corporations and the banking and finance system we will see heaven come down to earth. These guys are dreaming. But the radical revolutionaries continue to war against the very things which have allowed them to live the good life in the first place. Such misguided and deluded activism is not just a product of America. It is a sad but fixed part of the Western world.”
As the protests spread, one has to ask just what is going on here. I guess with Obama in the White House and Julia in the Lodge, the lefties have been feeling a bit let down of late, with no one to protest. There is no more Bush or Howard to kick around, to blame for all the world’s ills.
Thus they have to find yet another cause to make a stink about, and produce a lot of damage and destruction along the way. We have seen it all before of course. The left forever wants to tear down and destroy, while conservatives, as the name implies, seek to conserve and preserve. David Horowitz nicely offers the contrast here:
“A friend of mine sagely observed that the difference between conservatives and leftists is that we are creators and they are destroyers. You couldn’t have a better picture of that than the contrast between the peaceful Tea Party demonstrators and the mobs defacing cities and causing millions of dollars in damage all over America and now the world. That’s because the Tea Partiers love their country and respect their communities, even those they disagree with. Whereas the destroyers respect nothing and are driven by their primary emotions which are envy, resentment and hate.
“Make no mistake about who these people are. This is the same global communist movement that attacked the World Trade Organization and ‘evil corporations’ in 2001, and that took to the streets to defend Saddam Hussein and call Bush Hitler in 2002. The forces behind this movement are identical: Soros, the Shadow Party, gangster socialist unions and a ‘progressive’ intelligentsia whose hatred of the capitalist West has caused it to lose its collective mind.”
Ann Coulter also focuses on the major differences between the two groups: “Tea partiers didn’t block traffic, sleep on sidewalks, wear ski masks, fight with the police or urinate in public. They read the Constitution, made serious policy arguments, and petitioned the government against Obama’s unconstitutional big government policies, especially the stimulus bill and Obamacare. Then they picked up their own trash and quietly went home. Apparently, a lot of them had to be at work in the morning.
“In the two years following the movement’s inception, the Tea Party played a major role in turning Teddy Kennedy’s seat over to a Republican, making the sainted Chris Christie governor of New Jersey, and winning a gargantuan, historic Republican landslide in the 2010 elections. They are probably going to succeed in throwing out a president in next year’s election. That’s what democracy looks like.”
Or as Michelle Malkin put it: “When fiscally conservative tea party activists held protests over the past two years, they filed for all the required permits and paid for their own power. Occupy Boston, by contrast, neither sought nor obtained any proper permits at any level, according to the Boston Globe. Instead, city and park officials have been cowed into providing them gratis electricity and camp space lest there be ‘conflict.’
“Many of these occupiers are primarily occupied as paid rent-a-mobsters for unions, left-wing think tanks and the radical Working Families Party. While one collective hand soaks the taxpayers, the other hand is busy soliciting free stuff. Occupy Los Angeles activists took to Skype on their laptops to solicit donations of iPhones and iPads. Occupy Wall Street members on Twitter organized an ongoing ‘#needsoftheoccupiers’ drive for everything from batteries and tarps to ‘gently used’ coats and sweaters, wool socks, sleeping bags and energy bars. Occupy Austin organizers publicized their wish list, including a free barbecue grill, portable toilets, extension cords, a Bobcat forestry cutter for clearing brush and network cameras for a livestream.
“These are not principled advocates of fiscal responsibility. They are professional freeloaders. Unlike tea party activists who focused like a laser beam on politicians in both parties responsible for redistributing wealth to Big Business cronies by force, the Occupy Wall Street movement is everywhere and nowhere. The entitled Kamp Alinsky Kids are poaching WiFi and trespassing on private property under the guise of ‘social justice’ but in plain service of themselves.
“Their T-shirts and speeches glorify Marxist radicals Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata and Chairman Mao. They lionize convicted death row cop killer Troy Davis and WikiLeaks collaborator Bradley Manning. They condemn ‘Nazi Bankers,’ Jews, Fox News, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker, the Koch family and the New York Police Department (‘Pigs!’). They promote the illegal alien DREAM Act and 9/11 Trutherism.”
Indeed, the amount of ugly anti-Semitism alone should be a concern for every citizen. As Derek Hunter explains, these demonstrations are filled with every nutter, anarchist and radical around, complete with plenty of Jew-haters: “Meet ‘occupier’ Patricia McAllister. Patricia works for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She also hates Jews. She told Reason.tv, ‘I think that the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government, they need to be run out of this country’.”
Even better than description are the actual images of these demos. It may be best to contrast the Tea Party versus the Occupiers by means of pictures. See here for example: toddkinsey.com/blog/2011/10/10/tea-party-vs-occupy-wall-street-in-pictures/
And pictures are a good way to expose the gross hypocrisy of these guys as well: www.lewrockwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Evil-Corporations.jpg
As countless reporters have already discovered, most of these marchers don’t have a clue why they are there. They just seem to want to make a stink, and capitalism is once again a handy target. Marybeth Hicks offers some concluding observations about all this: “Now, after nearly a month of pointless protests, the Occupy Wall Street movement predictably is attracting the unfortunate and the unmotivated: homeless folks looking for free food and young people looking for a rager and an excuse to have exhibitionist sex in a public park (in the spirit of responsibility, organizers are giving out condoms at supply tents); not to mention unionists and political opportunists from every radical leftist interest group with poster board and a marker.
“Who’s surprised? A directionless mob that can’t articulate a concrete purpose virtually screams, ‘Lead me!’ As the saying goes, since they don’t know what they stand for, they’ll fall for anything. Perhaps there is some earnest yearning fanning the flames of outrage among the Occupiers. It’s possible this generation is so in need of a moral compass that it’s simply searching for true north. Sadly, having been left for so long to the devices of liberals, this generation of would-be revolutionaries mistakes emotion and placards for ideas and ideology.”
Indeed, rage and protest signs are always easier to come up with than is clear thinking and moral discernment. As I noted earlier, the “sins” which are being targeted here are just as true of those on the left. As Solzhenitsyn once rightly reminded us, evil is not out there somewhere, but runs across every human heart.
But pretending that bigger government, more handouts, more socialism, and less responsibility are somehow going to make everything better will in fact help no one. Indeed, we have already tried the socialist alternative, and it has been the costliest and deadliest failed social experiment in human history.
Indeed, it is the “God that failed” as one collection of essays by former communists penned in 1949 put it. We have been there and done that. But today’s radicals, who clearly have learned nothing from history, want to inflict all this horror and misery upon us once again.
While the free market is not perfect, it is far and away to be preferred to the sorts of solutions being demanded by these spoiled radicals. If they want to return to the stone age, let them, but they better not insist on dragging the rest of us down with them.
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/15/the-destroyers-1/
http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2011/10/05/this_is_what_a_mob_looks_like/page/full/
http://patriotpost.us/opinion/michelle-malkin/2011/10/14/costs-of-the-occupiers/
http://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2011/10/16/democrats,_the_media_and_the_heart_of_the_occupy_movement
http://townhall.com/columnists/marybethhicks/2011/10/12/wishing_i_was_wrong_about_the_occupiers
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