PoliticalChic
Diamond Member
1. "If income equality is the new political religion, occupied Zuccotti Park was its Mecca. Liberal journalists traveled there and spewed forth torrents of ink on the value of protest, the creativity and spontaneity of the occupiers, the urgency of redistribution, and the gospel of social justice. Occupy Wall Street was compared to the Arab Spring, the Tea Party, and the civil rights movement. Yet, as many a liberal journalist left the park, they lamented the fact that Occupy Wall Street wasnÂ’t more tightly organized. They worried that the demonstration would dissipate without a proper list of demands or a specific policy agenda. They suspected that the thefts, sexual assaults, vandalism, and filth in the camps would limit the occupiersÂ’ appeal.
2. Ever since September, when activists heeded Adbusters editor Kalle LasnÂ’s call to Occupy Wall Street, itÂ’s become a rite of passage for reporters, bloggers, and video trackers to go to the occupiersÂ’ tent cities and comment on what they see. Last week, the day after New York mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to dismantle the tent city in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the New York Times carried no fewer than half a dozen articles on the subject. Never in living memory has such a small political movement received such disproportionate attention from the press.
3. The truth is that the violence is not an aberration and Occupy Wall Street should not be laughed away. What we are seeing here is the latest iteration of an old political program that has been given new strength by the failures of the global economy and the power of postmodern technology....The occupiers have a lot more in common with the now-decades-old antiglobalization movement. They are linked much more closely to the “hacktivist” agents of chaos at WikiLeaks and Anonymous....The idea is utopian socialism. The method is revolutionary anarchism.
4. ...dream of cooperative villages where workers would see their poverty alleviated and their spirits transformed. Inspired by the success of his New Lanark community in Scotland, where employees lived in hospitable conditions and the children of laborers received early childhood and primary education, ...to bring to America exquisitely planned spaces where a new, improved mankind would come into being. Owen thought his scientifically organized village would “lead to that state of virtue, intelligence, enjoyment, and happiness, in practice, which has been foretold by the sages of past times, and would at some distant period become the lot of the human race!” Utopia, according to Owen, was not confined to the printed page. Utopia could be realized.
5. Things did not work as planned...“new empire of peace and good will to man” fell apart within four years. But the socialist utopian impulse lives on to this day. ...[In these] utopias, competition is to be replaced by cooperation, private property is to dissolve into communal ownership, traditional family structures are to be transformed into the family of mankind, and religion is to be displaced by the spirit of scientific humanism.
6. The men and women behind the utopian movements drew inspiration from the French Revolution, which proclaimed the liberty, equality, and fraternity of all, and from the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who taught that individuals born free and equal were made subservient and estranged through the institutions of society and private property. Lost freedom could be recovered by dismantling the obstacles that prevent man from being true to himself. The reconstruction of society along rational lines would allow us to reclaim the state of natural bliss that had been lost.
7. When he looks at the world, the utopian is repelled by two things in particular. One is private property. “The civilized order,” Fourier wrote, “is incapable of making a just distribution except in the case of capital,” where your return on investment is a function of what you put in. Other than that, the market system is unjust. Economics is a zero-sum game. One man holds possessions at the expense of another.
8. The utopianÂ’s other great hatred is for middle-class or “bourgeois” culture. Monogamy, monotheism, self-control, prudence, cleanliness, fortitude, self-interested labor​—​these are the utopianÂ’s enemies. “Morality teaches man to be at war with himself,” Fourier wrote, “to resist his passions, to repress them, to believe that God was incapable of organizing our souls, our passions wisely.” What were called the bourgeois virtues had been designed to maintain unjust social relations and stop man from being true to himself. Thus, to recover oneÂ’s natural state, one “must undertake a vast operation of ‘desanctification,Â’ beginning with the so-called morality of the bourgeoisie,” wrote the twentieth-century utopian Daniel GuĂ©rin. “The moral prejudices inculcated by Christianity have an especially strong hold on the masses of the people.”
Anarchy in the U.S.A. | The Weekly Standard
I hope all have time to read the entire article....it represents what many of us have been saying....just better written.
2. Ever since September, when activists heeded Adbusters editor Kalle LasnÂ’s call to Occupy Wall Street, itÂ’s become a rite of passage for reporters, bloggers, and video trackers to go to the occupiersÂ’ tent cities and comment on what they see. Last week, the day after New York mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the NYPD to dismantle the tent city in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the New York Times carried no fewer than half a dozen articles on the subject. Never in living memory has such a small political movement received such disproportionate attention from the press.
3. The truth is that the violence is not an aberration and Occupy Wall Street should not be laughed away. What we are seeing here is the latest iteration of an old political program that has been given new strength by the failures of the global economy and the power of postmodern technology....The occupiers have a lot more in common with the now-decades-old antiglobalization movement. They are linked much more closely to the “hacktivist” agents of chaos at WikiLeaks and Anonymous....The idea is utopian socialism. The method is revolutionary anarchism.
4. ...dream of cooperative villages where workers would see their poverty alleviated and their spirits transformed. Inspired by the success of his New Lanark community in Scotland, where employees lived in hospitable conditions and the children of laborers received early childhood and primary education, ...to bring to America exquisitely planned spaces where a new, improved mankind would come into being. Owen thought his scientifically organized village would “lead to that state of virtue, intelligence, enjoyment, and happiness, in practice, which has been foretold by the sages of past times, and would at some distant period become the lot of the human race!” Utopia, according to Owen, was not confined to the printed page. Utopia could be realized.
5. Things did not work as planned...“new empire of peace and good will to man” fell apart within four years. But the socialist utopian impulse lives on to this day. ...[In these] utopias, competition is to be replaced by cooperation, private property is to dissolve into communal ownership, traditional family structures are to be transformed into the family of mankind, and religion is to be displaced by the spirit of scientific humanism.
6. The men and women behind the utopian movements drew inspiration from the French Revolution, which proclaimed the liberty, equality, and fraternity of all, and from the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who taught that individuals born free and equal were made subservient and estranged through the institutions of society and private property. Lost freedom could be recovered by dismantling the obstacles that prevent man from being true to himself. The reconstruction of society along rational lines would allow us to reclaim the state of natural bliss that had been lost.
7. When he looks at the world, the utopian is repelled by two things in particular. One is private property. “The civilized order,” Fourier wrote, “is incapable of making a just distribution except in the case of capital,” where your return on investment is a function of what you put in. Other than that, the market system is unjust. Economics is a zero-sum game. One man holds possessions at the expense of another.
8. The utopianÂ’s other great hatred is for middle-class or “bourgeois” culture. Monogamy, monotheism, self-control, prudence, cleanliness, fortitude, self-interested labor​—​these are the utopianÂ’s enemies. “Morality teaches man to be at war with himself,” Fourier wrote, “to resist his passions, to repress them, to believe that God was incapable of organizing our souls, our passions wisely.” What were called the bourgeois virtues had been designed to maintain unjust social relations and stop man from being true to himself. Thus, to recover oneÂ’s natural state, one “must undertake a vast operation of ‘desanctification,Â’ beginning with the so-called morality of the bourgeoisie,” wrote the twentieth-century utopian Daniel GuĂ©rin. “The moral prejudices inculcated by Christianity have an especially strong hold on the masses of the people.”
Anarchy in the U.S.A. | The Weekly Standard
I hope all have time to read the entire article....it represents what many of us have been saying....just better written.
, as postulated by the ideologists of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was an archetype of a person with certain qualities that were said to be emerging as dominant among all citizens of the Soviet Union, irrespective of the country's long-standing cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity, creating a single Soviet people, Soviet nation.[1]
