From the Community: Is the Black Bloc hijacking the Occupy movement?

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The Cancer in Occupy
Submitted by Incredulous

In an article by Chris Hedges, the Black Bloc anarchists are exposed as the "cancer of the Occupy movement". The group dresses in black, conceals their faces, vandalizes and searches for physical confrontations with police during many Occupy protests. Actively opposing to strategy, "these anarchists represent no one but themselves."

Because Black Bloc anarchists do not believe in organization, indeed oppose all organized movements, they ensure their own powerlessness. They can only be obstructionist. And they are primarily obstructionist to those who resist. John Zerzan, one of the principal ideologues of the Black Bloc movement in the United States, defended “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the rambling manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, although he did not endorse Kaczynski’s bombings. Zerzan is a fierce critic of a long list of supposed sellouts starting with Noam Chomsky. Black Bloc anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.

“The Black Bloc can say they are attacking cops, but what they are really doing is destroying the Occupy movement,” the writer and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I reached him by phone in California. “If their real target actually was the cops and not the Occupy movement, the Black Bloc would make their actions completely separate from Occupy, instead of effectively using these others as a human shield. Their attacks on cops are simply a means to an end, which is to destroy a movement that doesn’t fit their ideological standard.”

The community responds to the recent developments in the Occupy movement:

JanforGore: "Occupy is also being hijacked by politicians who only now come out and talk about constitutional amendments to get money out of politics when they were taking it themselves all along, just to get credit for themselves instead of just doing it. They just can't let the people have their voice. Last week Occupy members stood with farmers outside the courthouse in NYC peacefully to protest Monsanto. Didn't see anyone in the "media" covering that however."

Tyr: "If you really want to enact change then you have to have candidates that can get elected and makes the changes from within....shouting about how " unfair" capitalism is won't get it done...I got all thumbs down then and I expect I will again, but pinning your hopes on this movement is futile, whether or not you like to hear that does not change the reality of it...sorry."

kennymotown: "These anarchist need to wait incase the movement takes a turn for the worse. I fear it will eventually, the Elite like the way things are going!"

EmperorThan: "The government loves Occupy. Either they're non-violent so they're docile enough to round up like cattle and take away, or they are violent and they make the entire movement look bad in the process."

Leen61: "Great article by Chris Hedges. I don't want the Occupy movement hijacked by this Black Bloc movement, either. It's just what they and TPTB want."

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