There are two general views about the Occupy Movement, expressed best by Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck. While I generally like and respect Dr Krautahmmer, and Glenn Beck not so much, I have to accept Glenn’s view on this.
You see, Dr Krauthammer believes the Occupy movement to have been a great public relations fizzle while Glenn sees it as sinister force having nothing to do with public relations, predicting a second greater show of force coming soon to America’s streets.
Glenn’s right.
In November, early in round one of the Occupy movement, Bernie Chumm posted here that he thought the Occupy mob had won all their major objectives.
Bernie pointed out some things about the Occupy movement that has become manifestly apparent since then.
Last year’s version of Occupy was designed to:
1) test the waters and the outer defenses of the police forces they would have to go up against, especially considering most Occupy events occurred in leftish Democrat-held urban strongholds where they were never at risk;
2) to locate, tap out and recruit new cadre for vital on-the- ground leadership posts for the coming events of 2012;
3) and to recruit new cannon fodder, i.e., useful idiots
They were successful in all three of these goals, and probably in 2) and 3), beyond all expectations.
Where Dr Krauthammer misses the point is that the Occupy “strategy” has nothing to do with affecting public opinion one way or the other. Quite frankly, and we all know the type, most of these leftie volunteers are impervious to the slings and arrows of public derision anyway. As we’re learning with Sandra Fluke today, they consider their political sluttery to be a badge of honor.
I’m not even convinced their mission is to suppress or intimidate voting at all, or alternately make citizens so angry that conservative voter turnout will double or triple.
People like these don’t care about the numbers.
Their strategy has always been revolution; to end finally the charade of the democratic process America now pretends to go through. Some are communists, some are anarchists, but most are stupid lazy layabouts. But as every field general knows, they can all be strategically placed so that their special skills, or lack thereof, will lend themselves to the overall mission…
…which in the short term seems to be chaos of a nature police authorities cannot control it, that will lead, eventually, later, to the rise of a firm authoritarian hand that will then take control of the reigns of government to quell the population’s fears.
That that hand is already there, waiting just offstage, gives any serious inquirer pause to wonder if there isn’t coordination here. There’s plenty of fodder to fuel this notion, but equally, plenty of life experiences in herding cats to cause one to sit back, almost with a smile, and watch them try to pull it off.
It is what it is, and while they may not be successful in the latter goal, in all likelihood they will be successful in the former, unless checked.
We (my colleagues and I) saw this movement in its embryonic phase, and watched it grow, from 2-3 tiered confabs with seminars to actually staking out ground in public squares around the country. Consider Occupy I to be a training exercise.
All we could do was warn, and no one bit. We could have stopped Occupy dead in its tracks last year, and by we, I don’t mean local authorities, as they played their hands exactly as predicted, according to procedure. In October-November it would not have been difficult to assemble teams of operatives, nor too costly, nor harmful in any physical way, except as to “blight their paths” and protract the bitterness of their pilgrimage (a little license stolen from Mark Twain’s War Prayer).
The coming round two will be more costly, and require far greater assets, but that is another matter.
The Occupy movement was put together by no more than a few dozen professional left-wing provocateurs and specialists. And a nice bit of money. (It’s always the money.) Drafting a few hundred kids with some political or social grievances, who are always looking for a little booze, drugs and sex, to party down in an adventuresome venue isn’t really hard.
In their world, flash mobs are not hard to recruit and assemble, and they shouldn’t in our world either.
As with any regular army officer when mustering militia, the first order of business is to identify “keepers”. i.e., people who seem to have a natural inclination for this sort of business. They stand out quickly. They are serious, have leadership abilities, and are committed. Rather than falling away each night in their tents in a drunken stupor with a co-ed from Georgetown law, they attend to matters of the mission. (This is how Bill Ayers was tapped out.) Some people are just turned this way. The Marines know this, too.
In no time at all, in every Occupy venue from Oakland to New York, these people quickly distinguished themselves to the organizing cadres who enlisted them and were quickly recruited from volunteers into paying jobs, and moved straightaway into off-site training, in every area of agitprop, from security to intelligence to communications and operations. Again, this costs money, which they seem to have.
So when Occupy reconvenes this spring, instead of several dozen trained leftwing cadre disguised as wastrel hippies, there will be several hundred at least. Possibly a thousand.
There’s more, for every gathering of the occupy clans brings about new prospects for leadership, and new fodder for the cannon, so those numbers will increase as the summer passes, for, if Obama is to be thrown down, they will need three-fold the number come February, 2013.
See?
And as to that great mass of wasted humanity who merely sat in front of buildings and played Pac-Man on their iPhones all day long, then retired to their tents in the evening for some booze, later roaming the camp to find Matilda, then some cuddle delight inside an REI Zero Plus poly-filled bag, with the occasional foray outside to relieve themselves up against a maple sapling, adding a certain piquancy to the already pungent aroma of frozen pewk and hash pipes…these may have become the greatest Occupy recruiters of all.
If you think this is the camping trip from hell, think again. These are almost all suburban kids who thought sleeping out in the backyard in the beach tent was a safari. So, the least little bit of discomfort…hard ground, rain, no Kleenex on the night stand, not to mention the sting of freezing cold in their fingertips, becomes embellished and magnified to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, even Schindler’s List levels of suffering, so that, once they warm their little frozen pinkies over a steaming cup of Starbucks latte, they are able later, as Shakespeare reported in Henry V, to remember these wounds “with advantages” (embellishments) as if they had just walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and emerged barely alive on the other side.
In other words, with suffering almost as bad as using the bathroom with the toilet paper dispenser empty, they were allowed to walk away from all the Occupy sites with heads erect, shoulders thrown back, and the proud sense that they had just emerged from the other side of hell.
This was our fault, for these spoiled hedonists have become the movement’s greatest recruiters, going back to wherever back is, telling all their mates about the great sex and booze amidst the greatest deprivations of imaginable, such as no wall plug for their phone recharger.
So come Spring, some of them will come back eagerly, and who will incite far more, new blood, who much like the dreamy eyed kids along the Adriatic who listened to stories of returning Venetian seamen of far-off adventures, then ran away from home, will enlist in Occupy as if it were the Children’s Crusade of the Middle Ages.
This time we must “blight their paths and protract the bitterness of their pilgrimage”, for it is this cannon fodder that gives Occupy its bulk and its weight.
Without these children the Occupy movement is little more than a bunch of hippies in basements.
