Slavoj Zizek, the Slavonian Marxist Ideologue, addressing the OWS.
Some points from his presentation:
There is a need to reinvent Communism
The OWS should radicalize the Marxist notion of the proletariat
In the background of all anarchist efforts, the state should remain
A limited amount of state terror is justified (Note: he is advocating state terror in reaction to imperialist efforts to subvert or stop it through coups or CIA infiltration)
OWS should be a real movement
“It’s not quite the ringing endorsement they were hoping for but Occupy Wall Street protesters on Monday received the support of the American Nazi Party, more commonly referred to as the ANP.
Also known as the National Socialist Party the group released the following statement on their website:
“[Occupy Wall Street] is TAYLOR [sic] MADE for National Socialists,” while they urge their members to “Produce some flyers EXPLAINING the ‘JEW BANKER’ influence—DON’T wear anything marking you as an ‘evil racist’—and GET OUT THERE and SPREAD the WORD!”
The ANP isn’t the first communist movement to back Occupy Wall Street, the Communist Party USA has also backed protesters and during a board member speech on Saturday in Chicago they told the crowd:
“I bring greetings and solidarity from the Communist Party. We are here, marching side-by-side. We’ll sleep here. We’ll be with this movement ’til the very—’til we make all the changes that we know we have to make.”
While many protesters don’t agree with the parties overall message they did meet the show of support with hoots and applause.
I don’t believe in the overall messages that are routinely being delivered by the ANP or the Communist Party USA however it’s still nice to see so many groups of varying political backgrounds joining in the movement to raise awareness about economic distrust around the world.”
Comment:
Communists and Nazis are backing OWS. I’m not going to use that against them, though. because a lot of Nazis supported the Tea Party too. Not too many, of course, because the Tea Party was filled with Austrians, none of whom believe that banking and the charging of interest is evil.
Unfortunately, too many of the OWS supporters entertain such ideas.
What’s more, economic nationalism was just the path that the German Nazi party took….
On the positive side, America is not Germany, the 21st century is not the 20th, and we are not determinists.
“In fact, almost all military strategy comes not from a large mahogany desk with maps strewn across it with a calculating general hovering above, but rather from institutions like AEI and other corporate-funded think-tanks including the Brookings Institution or the RAND Corporation. Frederick Kagan, along with other “resident scholars” at AEI, have also developed the current strategies being employed in Afghanistan and soon in Pakistan [6]. One might say that Petraeus, and many other lack-luster officers in the United States military are nothing more than empty vessels with administrative and operational capabilities merely carrying corporate-funded, crafted, and serving policies onto the battlefield, while equally empty vessels for politicians sell the policies and their tremendous costs back at home to the American people.
AEI’s board of trustees represents a wide variety of corporate-financier interests including those of the notorious Carlyle Group, State Farm, American Express, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co (also of the CFR). Dick Cheney also acts as a trustee. Joining policy wonk Frederick Kagan as members of AEI’s “research staff” are warmongers Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, Richard Perle, John Yoo, and Paul Wolfowitz. AEI’s work is done entirely with the concept of “American exceptionalism” in mind, or in other words, American global hegemony. The AEI’s own annual report is rife with talk of US strategic preeminence and its assertion over the sovereignty of foreign nations in the form of sanctions, military operations, invasions, and occupations. The AEI, in tandem with the Heritage Foundation, Foreign Policy Initiative, and many others, all with interconnecting memberships and corporate-financier sponsors, are literally the “Project for a New American Century (PNAC)” in motion.If a general commanding the summation of America’s military might and now America’s immense, omnipresent intelligence network, being bent to the will of corporate-financier interests who literally write the script from which he acts isn’t frightening enough, then maybe is the fact that these same apparently “Neo-Conservative,” “right-wing” organizations are also engineering and executing the latest “liberal-humanitarian” war in Libya.
In fact, as notorious “Neo-Con” Paul Wolfowitz, an AEI “visiting scholar,” expounded the merits of “Obama’s war” in Libya [7] and the desirable effect it could have on helping topple regimes in Syria and Iran, one might recall Wolfowitz’ aspirations back in 1991 where he spoke with General Wesley Clark about an opportunity to clean up the old Soviet “client regimes” before the next super power rose up and challenged western hegemony [8]. Amongst these “client regimes” were Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and Iran. It would appear than one linear agenda serving these corporate-financier interests unfolds regardless of who is in office.
With this in mind, we see that Petraeus is in no shape, form, or way a “political” or “establishment” outsider, or by any means a hero capable of saving America from its decline. He is amongst one of the most entrenched “insiders” there are, with his position in the CIA digging him in even deeper. His, or others like him, potentially entering into the political fray will be nothing more than a dangerous new ploy used to manipulate the American public. As Republican hopefuls flounder in front of an increasingly skeptical and angry public and the path for real political outsiders is being opened, the American people must be ever vigilant against pretenders like Petraeus, or other “military men” who might attempt to cross the proverbial Rubicon and pose as “reformers,” or “saviors” here to rescue us from our flawed form of government.”
Video: The indispensable Dr. Webster Tarpley discusses Libya, the global economy, and the prospect of General Petraeus’ potential role in bringing Bonapartism openly to America’s shores. Via Tarpley.net.
….Notes
[1] The Telegraph, “David Petraeus for President: Run General, run,” April 3, 2010
[2] The Guardian, “Petraeus in profile: the man who could be president,” April 27, 2011
[3] Council on Foreign Relations, Membership Roster, letter ‘P’ for “Petraeus,” as of September 30, 2011
[4] Council on Foreign Relations, Company Membership, as of September 29, 2011
[5] AEI Speeches & Testimony, “The Surge of Ideals,” May 6, 2010
[6] The Stanley Foundation, “The Case for Larger Ground Forces,” by Frederick Kagan & Michael O’Hanlon, April 2007
[7] AEI via the Wall Street Journal, “Why Gadhafi’s Fall is in America’s Interests,” by Paul Wolfowitz, June 23, 2011
[8] FORA.tv Conference Channel, “Wesley Clark: A Time to Lead,” October 3, 2007
[9] Foreign Policy Magazine, “Rick Perry, the “hawk internationalist,” August 10, 2011
He’ll {Ron Paul will] propose immediately freezing spending by numerous government agencies at 2006 levels, the last time Republicans had complete control of the federal budget, and drastically reducing spending elsewhere. The EPA would see a 30 percent cut, the Food and Drug Administration would see one of 40 percent and foreign aid would be zeroed out immediately. He’d also take an ax to Pentagon funding for wars.
Medicaid, the children’s health insurance program, food stamps, family support programs and the children’s nutrition program would all be block-granted to the states and removed from the mandatory spending column of the federal budget. Some functions of eliminated departments, such as Pell Grants, would be continued elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy.
And in a noticeable nod to seniors during an election year when Social Security’s become an issue within the Republican primary, the campaign says that plan “honors our promise to our seniors and veterans, while allowing young workers to opt out.”
The federal workforce would be reduced by 10 percent, and the president’s pay would be cut to $39,336 — a level that the Paul document notes is “approximately equal to the median personal income of the American worker.”
Comment
OK. This is the first serious cutting I’ve seen and I’m glad to see conservatives recognizing it. One can’t start off too savagely, but there needs to be more than the pusillanimous tinkering that usually constitutes budget cuts.
For an idea of the range and dollar value of NGO activity funded by Ford Foundation (only one of many foreign foundations funding civil society in India):
Contrast the Occupy Wall Street protests with the beginnings of the Tea Party.
While the Tea Party was rife with discussion of 9-11, the NWO, Rothschilds, and the Federal Reserve (in fact, those conspiracy theories are what created the Tea Party), none of that is present at the OWS protests.
The anger has been directed at the 1% at the top and the arguments are broadly anti-capitalist in a revolutionary sounding way, but as far as I can tell, not in substance.
Matt Taibbi (who came by OWS to give advice on specific proposals), has proposed some five reforms that are actually strangely lame and misplaced.
A small tax on all stock and bond trading, for instance, is highly unlikely to hamper the largest high frequency traders. It will burden small day-traders (mostly the middle-class) and smaller professionals. And from the point of view of fairness or morality, it’s completely misdirected, since these people were some of the main victims of the casino markets of the last couple of decades. The big fish were literally living off the losses of the small fry, whom they shook out of the market with each sudden movement up or down.
Changing compensation at Wall Street is also a curiously modest demand for a movement that tries to cast itself as a ground-shaking revolution.
It looks like the rhetoric and imagery are intended to scare.
The ideology is communist, or at least collectivist, but the proposals are reformist. Which makes me still more convinced that the whole movement has come out of the ruling classes to begin with.
It is likely intended to create a groundswell of approval for various kinds of insider generated regulations and redistributions of wealth, as well as for an increase in central power, masquerading as “decentralized direct democracy.”
The New Republic:
“The mystery that will launch a thousand media seminars is: How did a modest encampment in Zuccotti Park morph in less than a month into a global news story?
“At the beginning, this protest seemed fairly small,” said Blair Taylor, a 35-year-old, working on his Ph.D. in political science at the New School, who has been visiting Zuccotti Park since the onset of the protest. “Originally, there was a lot of right-wing sentiment—9/11 Truthers and Ron Paul supporters. Now it’s much more left-wing.” That was certainly my impression at Zuccotti Park as I interviewed at random an herbal beverage brewer from North Carolina; a 55-year-old historian of feminist art and magic who lives three blocks away; a sculptor from suburban Westchester County; and an unemployed construction worker from Staten Island who acknowledged, “These problems are going to take years to fix. It won’t happen overnight.” Maybe I would have come up with something different if I had not conspicuously avoided everyone with large, visible tattoos or a manic glint in their eyes.
My very tentative theory about the media success of Occupy Wall Street begins with the cleverness of the initial concept. Even if no one whom I interviewed at the protests had seen anyone even remotely responsible for the economic meltdown, it is easy to imagine that the demonstrators were confronting Goldman Sachs partners and hedge-fund managers daily on their way to work. Occupy Wall Street has a much more dramatic ring than Camp-Out in Lower Manhattan. Another major factor was the way that the normally astute New York Police Department fanned the movement with their indefensible use of pepper spray and their initial penchant for mass arrests. When you are trying to create a mass movement, it is way better to be martyrs than ignored.
The final aspect is that the Occupy Wall Street protests filled in a missing piece in the political puzzle. Mark Schmitt shrewdly suggested that liberals had long been fantasizing about a Tea Party of the left. But I also think serious journalists had been waiting for some bellow of outrage over the way that Wall Street plutocrats had been laughing all the way to their annual bonuses. Why in popular culture is Bernie Madoff a more notorious symbol of greed than AIG or the bankers who packaged sub-prime mortgages? Someone in America had to get mad other than Elizabeth Warren. So when the demonstrators with their amorphous sense of injustice arrived in Zuccotti Park, media stars were born.”
Éliphas Lévi’s (Bonœ Memoriœ) creed, and that of his disciples.
“We believe in a God-Principle, the essence of all existence, of all good and of all justice, inseparable from nature which is its law and which reveals itself through intelligence and love.
We believe in Humanity, daughter of God, of which all the members are indissolubly connected one with the other so that all must co-operate in the salvation of each, and each in the salvation of all.
We believe that to serve the Divine essence it is necessary to serve Humanity.
We believe in the reparation of evil, and in the triumph of good in the life eternal.”
“To practice magic is to be a quack; to know magic is to be a sage.”-from The Threshold of Magical Science
My Comment
Some believe these teachings to be pure evil, since they deny the divinity of Christ, but then, so do Islam and Hinduism.
But Jesus said “Other sheep have I that are not of this flock” and “In my house there are many mansions”, so at least, from the promise of those words, I don’t think the denial of the unique salvation of Christ damns a teaching.
Hinduism also denies it. Islam only calls Jesus a great prophet.
There’s error in the Bible, except in the eyes of the most fanatical fundamentalists, or for people whose interpretations are so elastic they can read anything into anything.
To those people who say that many of the theosophists were unscrupulous, I say perhaps they were. So were many in orthodox faiths. And many occultists were not unscrupulous.
Many of the great problems in modernity have arisen because of its tendency to see “evil” everywhere. Where the eastern mind sees human error, the modern mind sees devilry. By looking for too many devils in nature, the mind itself becomes devilish
Nothing in Levi’s credo contradicts anything in the gospel, if one reads both of them with an open mind.
Who is not against me is for me, said the protagonist of the gospel. It is not the belief that damns anyone. It is the practice.
Christians have used the words of the gospel to castrate themselves (Origen) and enslave others (Conquistadors). Should we blame Jesus for that?
Everyone receives according to his capacity. Jesus himself spoke in parables so he would reach the most artless peasant and the most learned rabbi, both spiritual novices and the tried and tested.
Just as man’ s technological prowess has outstripped his spiritual development, making every technological advance an equal advance in the science of death, so also religious dogmas in the hands of selfish and immature people have been more destructive than life-giving.
Intellectual studies have to keep pace with personal growth.
Knowledge itself is not evil, any more than nuclear fission or guns. What is evil is the ends to which knowledge is used.
[Note: I added a good bit of explanation to the original post, because of the danger that someone unfamiliar with these texts would think I was endorsing “devil worship” as most people understand it. Not so. But the figure of the devil varies from tradition to tradition, and even within a tradition. And one needs to have an understanding of the context of the quotation I cited.]
Daniel McAdams at LRC blog:
“According to FBI director Robert Muller, the latest FBI-created-and-miraculously-defeated terror threat –– this time straight out of Iran and straight from the top — was something “straight out of a Hollywood script.” Well, he should know so we’ll take him at his word.
Although the same neocons who are probably writing these Hollywood scripts are screaming “this means war!!”, we cannot help but wonder just how deep is the manipulation of our media and our government by shadow forces both foreign and domestic pushing us covertly toward another war.
Considering the latest news out of the UK, where the male partner of recently departed in scandal Defense Secretary Liam Fox is revealed to have been working covertly with the Mossad to overthrow the Iranian government, these speculations should no longer be written off as the conspiratorial thinking of feverish minds.
Disgraced Secretary Fox had been jet-setting all over the world with his “best man,” Adam Werritty, in tow; Werrittty passed himself off as Fox’s de facto chief of staff and it is in this capacity that he has been engaged over the past several years covertly bumping up the Iranian “opposition” — the same Green Movement that some of us were attacked for suggesting had a very, umm, Western flavor — and attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime.
Just the outlandish suggestion that a booze-addled Iranian immigrant used car salesman was plotting to have the Saudi ambassador assassinated was enough to have the media, ThinkTankistan, and the Left/Right interventionists screaming that an “act of war” had been committed by Iran and demanding an invasion. Yet why is it never an act of war when Western spooks go into Iran in blatant attempt to overthrow its government and foment phony “Green Revolutions” where scores are killed?”
With the Fox scandal breaking big in the UK, it is increasingly obvious that these scripts written to bring the US and its allies to a disastrous war on Iran are more of a collaborative effort, perhaps Hollywood, Langley, and Tel Aviv.”
I disagree sometimes with Arundhathi Roy’s positions and rhetoric, but this issue I agree with her. Arundhathi, an artist, smells something fishy in the Anna Hazare movement.
“The Jan Lokpal bill is a ”regressive piece of legislation” and Anna Hazare has been ”used as a prop by foreign-funded NGOs” to lead the anti-corruption movement, writer and activist Arundhati Roy has said.
In an interview to CNN IBN, Roy said she is glad that the civil society’s Jan Lokpal bill did not go through in parliament. “I am extremely glad that the Jan Lokpal bill did not go through parliament in its current form,” Roy said.
“I think the legislation is a dangerous piece of work. You used the real and legitimate anger of the people against corruption to push through this specific piece of legislation, which is very regressive according to me,” she added.
Alleging that activist Anna Hazare, who spearheaded the anti-corruption movement, was used just as a prop, Roy said: “It was an NGO-driven movement by Kiran Bedi, (Arvind) Kejriwal and (Manish) Sisodia. Three of them run NGOs.”
“I wanted to indicate why these NGOs are participating to mediate in what the public policy should be. World Bank and Ford Foundation fund the anti-corruption campaigns. Anna Hazare was picked up and propped up as the saint for the masses. He was not the brain behind the movement,” she added.
Talking about the Jan Lokpal bill, Roy said that it attempts to create a form of “parallel oligarchy”. “The Jan Lokpal team, including the chairman, is to be selected by a pool of elite people and they are a pool of elite people. You have a bureaucracy which will have the policing power, the power to tap phones, prosecute, charge and judge from the prime minister to the bottom,” she said.
Roy also questioned the media for its 24X7 coverage of Hazare’s 12-day fast. “For a nation of one billion people, the media did not find anything else to report,” she said, adding that “certain major TV channels campaigned for” the movement. “That’s a kind of corruption for me at first place”.
My Comment:
That is of course what I have been saying here for many years….
Being anti-government is a naive position if you don’t understand that there is a shadow government far more dangerous than the folks who hold 9 to 5 jobs at the post office. Really.
It is the entry of the shadow government into the daylight government that has destroyed it.
Some libertarians would say that that emergence is inevitable. I disagree, although I think they are right if they are talking about the governments of empires. But then, the governments of empires are already corrupt by virtue of their nature as the pinnacle of the mercantilist system.
The same thing is unlikely to be true of a local government in a small republic.
The main thing is not to let ideology and slogans get in the way of practical wisdom.
Holding to your principles is right, but nothing wrong with also holding to your knowledge of history and your street smarts.
A map, to repeat myself, is not the road.