Block Black Bloc?

Sometimes there is nothing better than a good disagreement when you want to better understand an idea. Recently Chris Hedges published an article, in which he called Black Bloc the Cancer in Occupy. Hedges, a war correspondent for decades and now a radical social commentator and activist describes in almost religious terms the need to maintain passive civil disobedience as the only effective means for achieving social change. He warns against the use of violence and specifically what he describes as the tactics of Black Bloc as playing into the hands of establishment forces and their attempts to de-legitimize the occupy movement.

The article caused a lot of very virulent feedback, most of it angry rants against Hedges, but also some excelent responses that detailed the nuances missed by Hedges.

Susie Cagle quite possibly does the best reporting on Occupy Oakland I have run across. In her piece she calls out Hedges for buying into establishment propaganda as well as berating both him and most other journalists for not bothering to do the leg work. As most of the references to Black Bloc violence in the Hedges piece refer to Oakland, she shows him to be both wrong and lazy.

David Graeber is an American anthropology proffesor, anarchist and one of the early organizers of Occupy Wall Street. In an open letter to Hedges, he explains that black bloc is a tactic and not a movement, the use of anonymity when confronting established power and that Hedges' call for imposing peaceful protest as interpreted by him (or someone else) as a  form of violence.

All three pieces are well worth reading and will leave you better informed on the complexities of a democratic protest movement where pluralism is put to the test, how there is a large gap between what is often reported even by those sympathetic to a cause and what people on the ground experienced as actually having taken place and what anarchy and it's tactics represent when not approached as a the destructive dogma it is often presented as being.

Thank you Chris for starting this fire.

Some Facts Are More Equal Than Others

The problem is not Fox news which is obviously identified with the GOP establishment but rather the rest of the mainstream media which continues to pretend to be neutral.  It is nothing short of childish to claim that all arguments are equal. To equate faux evenhandedness with good reporting is disingenuous. For make no mistake, Fox news may not be guilty of pretending to be neutral but it also wouldn’t know good reporting if it spat in its face. Good reporting should be about revealing a truth. By denying our biases we are obscuring part of the truth, much in the same way that we obscure the truth when we refuse to hear arguments we think are counter to the narrative we want to believe in.

The other week  I witnessed an interesting twitter exchange between a couple of journalist. One, Joshua Holland, was calling out Naomi Wolf on an unsubstantiated piece she had written claiming a conspiracy by police departments across the US to coordinate violent crackdowns on occupations nationwide.  Two other journalists, Allison Kilkenny and Mike Elk, although initially more or less supportive of Wolf, upon rereading her piece and taking some of Holland’s points into consideration agreed that the piece was off. Holland eventually published a piece dissecting Wolf’s claims and showing them to be not much more than hearsay. As conducive as a nationwide police conspiracy against OWS might be  to the worldviews of Holland, Kilkenny and Elk, for neither of these three hide behind “fair and balanced” reporting to camouflage their biases, none of them seem to want to base such claims on flimsy conspiracy theories.

What followed was troubling if not entirely surprising. Holland shared some of the feedback his readers had been giving to this latest piece. Suffice it to say that I now know what an asshat and a douchecanoe are. Holland got called every kind of traitor for pointing out inconsistencies in a narrative that a lot of his readers, few who seem opposed to the OWS movement, want to believe. This is very troubling.

How can we on the one hand rage at the obvious lies being peddled on Fox or wishy-washy excuses for journalism in much of the rest of the mainstream media and at the same time reject criticism of stories that are not backed up by facts, just because we want to believe those stories? If we become fundamentalist about the narrative of our protest movement; if we prefer to spend our time with the timidly likeminded; if we cry foul when we are confronted by our own misdeeds, then we are no better than those we are trying to displace.

All this reminds me of Animal Farm. All facts are equal but some facts are more equal than others. What these critics of Holland are saying is basically that although you can’t trust the right for twisting the truth to their own needs and desires, it is both acceptable and warranted when it is done in the service of a noble cause. What they don’t seem to realize is that the strength of our argument, the reason that our movement has struck such a chord, the source of what has got the ruling elite lashing out nervously, is based on the fact the we are expressing a truth that despite many and varied attempts is very hard to deny. Holland performs a service to that same cause by policing our use of the truth. Wolf and her supporters mistakenly believe that we can only defeat our opponents by lowering ourselves to their tactics. They are mistaken.