Occupy!

It seems the rest of the Left has caught on to what I was said in my previous entry. Too many things have gone wrong, so many that you can't tell which issue is most important because the most serious ones have been left to rot by the system for so long.

Say you want a revolution, but when you talk about destruction . . . well, you know . . . if everyone is counted out, revolution doesn't happen. So, how do you have a revolution without destruction?

The only way would be to do what the Occupy movement is doing. Simply camp out and gain membership and support, and with every assault by authorities, it gains more sympathy. I realize it's not the most stirring way to have a revolution, nor is it really, any plan at all, but it avoids the bloodshed that marred previous revolutions in western civilization and made way for the conservative backlashes that always followed. These backlashes were, invariably, international even if the revolutions were local. The violence of the French Revolution made all of Europe and the US terribly conservative for seventy years. The Russian Revolution generated its own antithesis in international fascism.

Warfare and bloodiness traumatize people and make them insane anyway. I'm convinced that Vietnam wouldn't have happened if decisions weren't being made by leaders who suffered through World War II. War, real violence, they do something to people's minds, something that violent video games don't do. Take Vietnam, and Dean Atkinson, who worked in WWII under General Curtis LeMay. The general ordered firebombings of Japanese cities. Those firebombings took far more lives than the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The one on Tokyo alone killed 110,000 civilians. In Fog of War, a film documentary, Atkinson quotes LeMay as saying if the allies had lost the war, they (LeMay and Atkinson) would be up for crimes against humanity.

Just imagine giving the orders that kill tens of thousands of civilians a night, for a year or two. Imagine what that does to your thinking later. Maybe that's difficult to imagine, but I can illustrate it this way: then dropping Agent Orange doesn't seem so bad, even if it might (and did) kill 400,000 people and cause numerous birth defects. That's only one way. There's also paranoia. A people that oppose you look dangerous, even if they're opposing only your presence in their country, not to replace capitalism with communism.

What the Occupy Movement is doing is far better. It avoids the trauma that make people stupid and turns them into monsters. It will avoid the conservative backlash. I hope it continues. And of course I support it.