History shows us it is easy
for 'grassroots' campaigns to become co-opted by the very interests they are
fighting against.
A 21st-century grassroots movement faces many pitfalls. This was as true back in 1968 as it is today. It could be infiltrated by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, or co-opted by a major party.
A 21st-century grassroots movement faces many pitfalls. This was as true back in 1968 as it is today. It could be infiltrated by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, or co-opted by a major party.
As the state continues to
creep further into our lives, activists can expect that it will use all its
resources ~ not just the violent reaction seen in New York
overnight, but also its agents,
informants and surveillance packages ~ in its effort to monitor both sides of
any serious social debate.
Even bleaker, however, is the
possibility that the movement was actually planned and launched by the very
establishment activists thought they were waging a battle against in the first
place. The larger the movement, the more interested a major party becomes in
absorbing it into either the left or the right side of the current two-party
paradigm.
The sudden emergence of America's Tea Party movement in 2007 is
a good example. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, its inventor, used
it as a springboard to highlight libertarian and constitutional issues during
his 2008 campaign. Soon after, it was co-opted by key political and media
influencers from the US right wing, associating itself less with a libertarian
manifesto, and more with emerging figures within the Republican
establishment. Now it is has morphed into nothing more than a block of voters
whom the Republican Party can rely to strike a deal with during an election
cycle.
Arguably, the Occupy Wall Street movement has already drifted
into the shadow of the Democratic party ~ with a number of Democratic
establishment figures from the top down endorsing it.
The Democrats' own media fundraising and media machine, Move On, has
visibly adopted the cause.
Like the Tea Party before it, the Occupy block would swing a
close election during a national two-party race, functioning as a
pressure-release valve for any issue too radical for the traditional platform.
Alongside this is the threat of being infiltrated. Scores of
declassified documents, along with accounts from veteran activists, will reveal
many stories of members who were actually undercover police, FBI or
M15.
In the worst cases of infiltration, undercover agents have acted as provocateurs. Such
incidents normally serve to radicalize a movement, thus demonizing it in the
eyes of society and effectively lessening its wider political appeal.
Although the global Occupy movement has branched out in an
open-source way, many of its participants and spectators might be completely
unaware of who actually launched it. Upon investigation, what one finds is a
daisy chain of non-profit foundations, all tied together by hundreds of
millions per year in operational funding.
The original call for Occupy Wall Street came from non-profit
international media foundation Adbusters. Like many non-profits, Adbusters
receives its funding and operating capital from other behind-the-scenes organizations.
According to research conducted
by watchdog Activistcash, Adbusters takes a significant portion of its money
from the Tides Foundation, an organization partnered with one
of Wall Street billionaire oligarch George Soros's foundations, the Open
Society Institute.
Although mostly hidden from the public eye, all major
foundations and professional thinktanks undertake research and host training
seminars, which are used to influence certain public and foreign policies, and
thus, must have a political agenda. Theirs is the venue of choice for
activities that cannot officially be conducted on the government clock.
Freedom House is another of Soros's Open Society partners. It
supports the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (Canvas), an organization
started by Serbians Ivan Marovic and Srdja Popovic.
After playing a pivotal role in the CIA-backed deposing of
Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, the western media hailed Marovic as a democratic
genius, but it came out later that his programme came out of an elite Boston
thinktank's "regime change" manual, From Dictatorship to Democracy, written by
Harvard professor Gene Sharp.
Sharp's book is a bible of the colour revolutions ~ a
"regime change for dummies". His Albert Einstein Institution has received
funds from the National
Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society
Foundations, and his work serves as a template for western-backed
opposition leaders in soft coups all around the world.
There are also reports of Canvas activity during the early days
of Occupy Wall Street, including a video of Marovic
himself addressing the general assembly. Currently, Canvas are touting their
recent role in working with Egyptian and Tunisian protesters
from as early as 2009, teaching skills that helped bring down their presidents
and spark regional revolt.
When the dust settles and it's all said and done, millions of
Occupy participants may very well be given a sober lesson under the heading of
"controlled opposition". In the end, the Occupy movement could easily
end up doing the bidding of the very elite globalist powers that they were
demonstrating against to begin with.
To avoid such an outcome, it's important for a movement to have
a good knowledge of history and the levers of power in the 21st century.
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