sepermeru
"The highway is alive tonight
Where it's headed everybody knows.
I'm sitting down here in the campfire light
waiting on the ghost of Tom Joad."
And use this “reformist” to co-opt the language of the movement and promise to promote the movement’s core aims through the electoral process.
Counterinsurgency campaigns, although they involve arms and weapons, are primarily about, in the old cliché, hearts and minds. And the tactics
employed by our intelligence operatives abroad are not dissimilar to those employed by our intelligence operatives at home. These operatives are, in
fact, often the same people. The state has expended external resources to break the movement. It is reasonable to assume it has expended internal
resources to break the movement.
The security and surveillance state has a vast arsenal and array of tools at its disposal. It operates in secret. It dissembles and lies. It hides
behind phony organizations and individuals who use false histories and false names. It has millions of dollars to spend, the capacity to deny not only
its activities but also its existence. Its physical assets honeycomb the country. It can wiretap, eavesdrop and monitor every form of communication.
It can hire informants, send in clandestine agents, recruit members within the movement by offering legal immunity, churn out a steady stream of
divisive propaganda and amass huge databases and clandestine operations centers. And it is authorized to use deadly force.
How do we fight back? We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The
legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatus of our oppressors, even on a small
scale, we will unleash widespread paranoia and fracture the movement. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening
for agents provocateurs who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets we give authorities an
excuse to fire their weapons.
All we have, as Vaclav Havel writes, is our own powerlessness.
Václav Havel obituary
Czech playwright and former dissident who led his nation after the collapse of communism
By WL Webb
December 18, 2011
www.guardian.co.uk...
And that powerlessness is our strength. The survival of the movement depends on embracing this powerlessness. It depends on two of our most important
assets—utter and complete transparency and a rigid adherence to nonviolence, including respect for private property. This permits us, as Havel puts
it in his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth.
vaclavhavel.cz...
And by living in truth we expose a corrupt corporate state that perpetrates lies and lives in deceit.
Havel, who would later become the first president of the Czech Republic, in the essay writes a reflection on the mind of a greengrocer who, as
instructed, puts up a poster “among the onions and carrots” that reads: “Workers of the World Unite!” The poster is displayed partly out of
habit, partly because everyone else does it, and partly out of fear of the consequences for not following the rules. The greengrocer would not, Havel
writes, display a poster saying: “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient.” And here is the difference between the terror of a Josef
Stalin or an Adolf Hitler and the collective charade between the rulers and the ruled that by the 1970s had gripped Czechoslovakia.
“Imagine,” Havel writes, “that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He
stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in
himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the
lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a
concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.”
This attempt to “live within the truth” brings with it ostracism and retribution. Punishment is imposed in bankrupt systems because of the
necessity for compliance, not out of any real conviction. And the real crime committed is not the crime of speaking out or defying the rules, but the
crime of exposing the charade.
“By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such, he has exposed it as a mere game,” Havel says of his greengrocer. “He has
shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He
has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted façade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of
power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the
greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the
truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms
whatsoever on which it can coexist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it
in its entirety.”
Those who do not carve out spaces separate from the state and its systems of power, those who cannot find room to become autonomous, or who do not
“live in truth,” inevitably become compromised. In Havel’s words, they “are the system.” The Occupy movement, by naming corporate power and
refusing to compromise with it, by forming alternative systems of community and society, embodies Havel’s call to “live in truth.” It does not
appeal to the systems of control, and for this reason it is a genuine threat to the corporate state.
Movements that call on followers to “live in truth” do not always succeed. They failed in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1970s and
1980s, as well as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, triggering armed insurgencies and blood-drenched civil wars. They have failed so far in Iran, the
Israeli-occupied territories and Syria. China has a movement modeled after Havel’s Charter 77 called Charter 08.