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Title: The Surgeons of Occupy Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: 2 September 2012 Language: en Topics: Chris Hedges, Occupy, black bloc, nonviolence Source: Counterpunch. Retrieved 5 April, 2013 from http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/09/the-surgeons-of-occupy/
In his February 6 article entitled,
,”Chris Hedges attempts to analyze the political beliefs and practices
of the black bloc, a group he characterizes as the scourge of the Occupy
movement. Although Mr. Hedges evidently conducted at least a little to
research his article, he does not quote a single proponent or
participant of a black bloc, neither within the Occupy movement nor from
any of the many other black blocs that have been organized in the United
States. Such research would not have been difficult. There are a
plethora of anarchist blogs, websites, newspapers, and magazines that
discuss Occupy, the black bloc, and even the use of the black bloc
within Occupy protests.
Despite this major failing, I cannot accuse Mr. Hedges of laziness. He
does, after all, dig up an anarchist magazine published in Oregon ten
years earlier and he quotes one particular article extensively. The
magazine, Green Anarchy, is tied in to Hedge’s tirade on the basis of
the unsupported and inaccurate assertion that anarcho-primitivist John
Zerzan, one of the magazine’s former editors, is “one of the principal
ideologues of the Black Bloc movement”. In fact, the black bloc
evolved–as a tactic, not a movement–in Europe and came to the United
States without any input from Zerzan. Zerzan’s only link to the bloc is
as one of the few public figures to have endorsed it.
So why does he appear at all in Hedges’ article? Presumably to provide
the link to Green Anarchy. And why Green Anarchy? Of all the anarchists
and others who have participated in black blocs in the last decades,
green anarchists or anarcho-primitivists have only been one small part.
Labor union anarchists, anarcha-feminists, social anarchists, indigenous
anarchists, Christian anarchists, as well as plain old, unaffiliated
street youth, students, immigrants, parents, and others have
participated in black blocs.
However, for a mainstream audience susceptible to fear-mongering, the
anarcho-primitivists can easily be portrayed as the most extreme, the
most irrational, and this kind of crass emotional manipulation is
clearly Mr. Hedges’ goal.
Despite the tenuous to null connection between Green Anarchy and the use
of the black bloc within the Occupy movement, he uses a skewed
presentation of that magazine to frighten his readers away from a
reasoned consideration of the political arguments on which the black
bloc is based. For the more intrepid readers, he finishes off the job
with inaccurate and unreferenced generalizations such as, “Black Bloc
anarchists oppose all organized movements [...] They can only be
obstructionist.”
Hedges introduces the widely read Zerzan merely as an apologist for the
ideas of Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber). Referred to by one NBC reporter
as “probably one of the smartest individuals I have encountered” and
“very low key, reasoned, and non-threatening,” Zerzan is a far more
complex figure, but such details fall outside of Hedges’ plan of attack.
His characterization of Green Anarchy, and by extension, of all black
bloc anarchists, is based on a single article that only appeared in GA
as a reprint some ten years ago. Neither does Hedges admit that the
article itself, “The EZLN are Not Anarchist,” generated considerable
controversy and debate among anarchists, nor that GA itself published a
response by several Zapatistas, which criticized the article for “a
colonialist attitude of arrogant ignorance”.
The openness to debate and criticism present in GA, is totally absent
from Hedges’ latest work of journalism. The manipulation, cherry
picking, and dishonesty that underlie his arguments show that for this
award-winning journalist, fairness is only a courtesy one extends to
those rich or powerful enough to press libel charges. This conception
certainly abounds in the pages of the New York Times, Hedges’ longtime
employer.
The medical language of Hedges’ title, referring to the anarchists as a
“cancer,” should immediately ring alarm bells. Portraying one’s
opponents as a disease has long been a tactic of the state and the media
to justify the repression. This language was used against the Native
Americans, against the Jews, against communists, and many others.
Recently the police and the right wing used this same language of
hygiene to talk about the occupations around the country as health
threats so as to justify their eviction and generate disgust and
repulsion.
In sum, Chris Hedges deals with the “Black Bloc anarchists” with
fear-mongering manipulation and without the slightest glimmer of
solidarity. But beneath the black masks, anarchists have been an
integral part of the debates, the organizing, the cooking and cleaning
in dozens of cities. Anarchists also participated in preparing the
original call-out for Occupy Wall Street, and they played a key role in
organizing and carrying out the historic Oakland general strike and the
subsequent West Coast port blockades–probably the strongest actions
taken by the Occupy movement to date.
The very fact that Occupy Oakland got out 2,000 people to fight the
police for hours in an attempt to occupy a building, at a time when
Occupy in other cities is dwindling or dead, contradicts the parallel
claims that anarchists are trying to “hijack” Occupy and that their
tactics turn people away. On the contrary, anarchists are part and
parcel of the Occupy movement and their methods of struggle resonate
with many people more than the staid, hand-wringing pacifism and
middle-class reformism of careerists like Chris Hedges.
It would be useful to debate the appropriateness of aggressive tactics
in demonstrations, and anarchists themselves have often encouraged this
debate, but Hedges has passed over the critique and gone straight for
the smear. He calls the black bloc anarchists “a gift from heaven for
the surveillance and security state,” choosing conspiracy theory
paranoia to distract from the public record, filled with cases of
government officials and the media alternately serenading and
threatening the Occupy movement into an acceptance of nonviolence.
Its proponents in the Occupy movement have generally protected
nonviolence from an open debate, instead imposing it through
manipulation, fear-mongering, and, when all else fails, turning their
opponents over to the police. Hedges himself implies that illegal or
aggressive tactics cannot exist in a space where “mothers and fathers
[feel] safe”, ignoring the many militant movements built around the
needs of mothers and fathers, such as his own favorite example, the
Zapatistas. He also dismisses the concept of a diversity of tactics as a
“thought-terminating cliché”, demonstrating a willful ignorance of–to
name just one example–the many weeks of thoughtful debate that went into
the
“ that allowed hundreds of thousands of people with a huge diversity of
political practices to come together in 2008 and protest the Republican
National Convention.
Predictably, Chris Hedges uses the name of Martin Luther King, Jr., to
gain legitimacy for his stance, again contradicting his argument that
the “corporate state” wants protestors to fight police and destroy
property, given that this same corporate state venerates King (or at
least a well managed version of King) while demonizing or silencing the
equally important Malcolm X or Black Panthers. Just as predictably,
Chris Hedges does not mention that King vocally sympathized with the
urban youths who rioted, youths whose contemporary equivalent Hedges
calls “stupid” and a “cancer.” Ironically, Hedges refers to the famous
Birmingham campaign attributed with achieving the end of segregation.
What Hedges and pacifist ideologues like him fail to mention is that
Birmingham was a repeat of King’s Albany campaign, which ended a total
failure, all its participants locked up, and no one slightly moved by
the supposed dignity of victimhood. The difference? In Birmingham, the
local youths got fed up, rioted and kicked police out of large parts of
the city for several days. The authorities chose to negotiate with King
and replace de jure segregation with de facto segregation in order to
avoid losing control entirely.
It’s also hypocritical that on the one hand Chris Hedges utilizes King
and parades the dignity of nonviolent suffering while on the other hand
he uses the fear of getting injured by police or spending a few nights
in jail to mobilize his comfortable, middle class readership to reject
the black bloc and the dangers it might bring down on them. “The arrests
last weekend in Oakland of more than 400 protesters [...] are an
indication of the scale of escalating repression and a failure to remain
a unified, nonviolent opposition.” He goes on to detail the horrible
ways police attacked demonstrators, and the conditions in jail.
It’s election year. Those who still have faith in the system, or those
whose paychecks are signed by the major unions, the Democratic Party,
progressive NGOs, or the left wing of the corporate media, know it’s
their job to forcibly convert any popular movement into a pathetic plea
to be made at the ballot box. The unmediated, experimental politics of
the Occupy movement must give way to symbolic protest and dialogue with
the existing “structures of power” whose members must be brought “to our
side”. For the Occupy movement to be sanitized and converted into a
recruiting tool for the Democratic Party, it will have to be neutralized
as a space for real debate, experimentation, and conflict with
authority. Its more revolutionary elements will have to be surgically
removed. It is an operation the police, the media, and some careerist
progressives have been engaged in for months, and Hedges’ contribution
is just the latest drop in the bucket.
This form of co-optation and manipulation is nothing new for a movement
that cynically harvested a few images from Tahrir Square–an unfinished
popular uprising in which hundreds of thousands of people defended
themselves forcefully from the cops, ultimately torching dozens of
police stations–to declare a victory for nonviolence.
Around the world, people are fighting for their freedom and resisting
the depredations of the rich and powerful. In the United States, there
is plenty of cause to join this fight, but as long as people continue
enact a fear-driven, Not-In-My-Backyard pacifism, and to pander to the
corporate media as though they would ever show us in a positive light,
the rich and the powerful will have nothing to worry about.