The International Intifada of Greece by Cassandra Troy is incredibly important. Hats off to her for a terrific exposure of an under-reported threat and an aggregation of significantly related articles. Why is this information important to Conservative activists? It has to do with rapidly developing a firm appreciation of the power of technology to propel social movements - for better and for much, much worse.
I'll begin by recapping the most salient feature of Cassandra's post:
Over the coming days, the rioters that numbered between 1,500-2,000 people (30% of those immigrants-mostly Muslim), were able to move from one part of the city to another in a quick way using a variety of methods, such as public transportation in small groups, motorcycles or even riding taxis alone and gathering in a specific "meeting place".
Lastly, they used extensively the internet, mobile phones and instant messaging services to alert against police and gather information of what the media were transmitting. In a few words, they were trained in a fashion that distincts them from the usual "Athenian rioters". They seemed to have international experience and plenty of hideouts within the city centre. (...)
Modern technology and communications such as large television screens, the internet, and cell phone text messages allowed Yushchenko to rally support despite the fact that much of the media was controlled and censored by authorities.
Unless you were under a rock or suffering from poverty and had no TV, then you heard about the terror attacks at Mumbai. Evidently, the mode of communication was relatively simple. While we would never big up terrorists (unless its one of our homies terrorizing the box, or gals going all rodeo queen on some poor sap) they had to show some creativity to go with a not well laid out plan. Once the party started, the rumor is that they jacked cellies to stay in communication. Research in Motion, or RIM, should be happy to know that they went with Blackberrys.
Today's activists, both violent and nonviolent, are applying technology to tactically deploy resources such as supplies, weapons, people, transportation and media coverage to strategic geographic locations at strategic times to achieve very strategic goals. Most significantly, they are achieving extraordinary results - like, say, the non-violent overthrow of governments, the disruption of major economies and the ability to marshal forces to win national elections. On our shores, we can look to the Obama campaign as a premier example. When Obama drew 75,000 attendees in Portland, OR was it specifically because that many voters wanted to hear Obama, or did it have as much to do with the vastly under-reported but extremely popular punk band (the Decembrists)? It doesn't matter - once the perception of the ability to attract hundreds of thousands was created, it influentially drove the next event toward a similar goal. We also know that the Obama campaign was ever-vigilant at collecting the cell phone numbers of millions of attendees as well as attracting them to the campaign website.
There is always a master plan behind these events, and when the participants follow it they can achieve spectacular results.
Conservatives must not only analyze technology-related public activism, we must adopt it. Like it or not, the time is coming when Conservatives will, in fact, have to seriously put aside our natural reticence to take to the streets for the purpose of driving the news cycle and influencing public opinion. The alternative is to risk being permanently dominated by others who are not afraid to take to the streets and drive the news cycle themselves. This may be especially true for College Republicans because the public tends to sympathize with youth activists, although it's just as effective for the rest of us.
Case in point: Saul Anuzis and the Michigan Republicans staged a small but extremely radical (because it was so Conservative!) demonstration in Ann Arbor during the summer of 2008 to protest Nancy Pelosi's book signing after she shut down the House while House Republicans were in the midst of an energy debate (Drill Here, Drill Now, #dontgo). When you see these pictures of what everyday Michigan Republicans were willing to do for this cause, imagine what a coordinated group of Conservative activists can do using professional organizing methods and high-tech communication. The photos of people who look like Mom and Dad with the Kids taking to the street in business attire as well jeans and t-shirts is powerful, relevant, and is going to be absolutely essential to our future survival because we cannot survive unless we can recruit and proliferate our values. Compare that image to those of violent RNC anarchists with their faces covered (organized by a group called "United for Peace and Justice" LOL!) creating chaos and mayhem, and the branding potential is absolutely brilliant. It's Mom, Dad and the Kids versusThe Creepy Anarchist Bandits from Hell.
Republicans also protested Nancy Pelosi's book signing in Florida, which was covered not in the news but in the Miami Herald's blog (Naked Politics). No photos were included. Even though people took to the streets this was obviously seen as weak, non-newsworthy filler. To be sure, the Michigan Republican protest was primarily covered by the blogs, and barely covered by the local news. However, this YouTube video should have been virally proliferated using a coordinated email/cellphone/blog strategy and circulated to the YouReport websites for Fox and other national news affiliates.
All you have to do is re-read Cassandra's article and all her links very thoroughly and see the consequences of inaction. The future is ours to create, BUT (and that's a BIG BUT) we must prepare to engage in marrying technology with committed in your face, in the streets activism in order to make the news that influences the people to help us create it. Either get ready to go, or get ready to get out of the way and let others take command of public opinion while we sit back and passively watch the fruits of their labor create far-reaching changes to our culture and politics.
I started a comment response to Briefs (@daltonsbriefs for those who use Twitter) in my last post (cross-posted here at The Next Right), and realized it was becoming a post in and of itself. Briefs said he'd be curious as to my thoughts and our other "rebuild" and "dontgo" and "nextgengop" and "redstate" friends as to how we reach more people, not just network those of us already in the fold.
Here are my thoughts:
80% of my colleagues (including the techies in Corporate IT) do NOT read blogs and do NOT use social networks. The other 20% who do use these media are either activists like myself, or are Millenials for whom being plugged in is just second nature.
However, *everyone* uses email, even grandparents, great-grandparents and other low-tech folks. At my house, we tend more and more to throw away RNC, Heritage, and other related direct mail because after awhile it becomes redundant junk that begs for money without providing real value to us for the time we spend reading it. The good stuff from the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, etc. is only available online, not in direct mail.
Email gives us the ability to provide teasers with links to sites which provide value in the form of real information, without constantly asking for $$ in return. The trick is to incorporate marketing/influence strategies in email with links to websites with great, up to date, compelling content that motivates people to *want* to donate and get involved.
If we can show people that they can take polls or respond to surveys online that provide information which our politicans actually respect enough to pay attention to, and we show them that they can ask questions and obtain responses from the people they elect (or should elect!) in Twitter, that will generate a lot of excitement. Last night on my way home, Hugh Hewitt said he'd introduced the concept of Twitter to his listenership and had received over a thousand emails asking him "What the heck is this Twitter thing?". I repeat - he received over a thousand emails, and that's where we should focus the cultural outreach primarily to lead people gently online. Like any behavior change, it will take time and require reinforcement to become a habit.
It's a science as well as an art, and it requires funding, commitment and a full time team of core professionals who can help out the part time volunteer activists tremendously. It will also take a lot more time than 22 months, although I think we can obtain some viable returns in that time frame in some locations. The trick is to built a persistent information strategy that reaches out to less technical users ~ up to and including phone calls and face to face get-togethers to help manage the cultural change. We literally need to provide "user training" to the base and others whose contact information we obtain.
If we develop an always on, 7/24 campaign for hearts and minds (nudge-nudge Ruffini!) - then the $$ and votes should follow, yes?
It is a road map to further strengthen the corporate's anti-fiscal conservatism in pursuit of higher profits
My vision is to create an integrated network, a knowledge and a database supporting a two-way conversation between Conservative constituents and our leadership. There are two objectives:
Inform voters of upcoming decisions that they might want to weigh in on - creating a virtual "voter lobby" to compete with the special interest groups for leadership attention.
Inform leaders of voter input on local, State and National policy which the Republicans can support in the form of bills and debates (think: Drill Here, Drill Now).
Measurable key performance indicators linked to these objectives are:
A clear message of what the Republican Party represents in the 21st Century
Accurate reporting on which local, state and national Republican lawmakers promote legislation and policies which reflect Conservative values
Increased participation in the democratic process by Conservatives
Increased donations to races where Conservative candidates can win
Increased registration and get out the vote efforts
Improved technology and integration in websites dedicated to Conservative activism
Improved communication between legislators and constituents
Improved ability of Conservatives to represent the needs of local communities and develop local solutions which could become models for national solutions
Because my career has been in Corporate IT, I'm proposing a solution which is within my experience. To say we should not use Corporate Business Intelligence as a model because we're against Corporate bail-outs and lack of Corporate fiscal responsibility is to throw out the baby with the proverbial bath water. In doing this we limit ourselves to a potential solution which establishes the GOP as an Enterprise in which the leadership provides benefits to its constituents, who are in turn viewed as shareholders in the Enterprise. Let's not confuse a corporate BI model with a corporate culture that's broken because of the low ethics and accountability of those who utilize it.
At the same time, there are web technology experts (Patrick Ruffini, David All, Eric Odom come quickly to mind) who may review the requirements and propose (or invent!) a much more agile solution than mine which provides essentially the same functionality of fully integrated two-way communication.
I don't believe I recommended that this project should be "funded by Corporate money", only that it should be well funded (by donations, whether corporate or individual). The idea is to retain a permanent team of skilled, salaried technology experts and project managers reporting to a Chief Information Officer (CIO) who are able to obtain consistent, repeatable results and assist local GOP staff and interested independent web activists to plug into the network.
Another colleague wrote:
The problem with waiting for the "thousand gardens to bloom" is the clock; with midterms arriving in 22.5 months and the primary season in 38 months a long learning curve and lots of trial and error experiments may not be feasible. And if we go into the next couple of cycles with the same lame campaign architecture we used this year we are screwed.
Any large undertaking such as this generally undergoes many iterations, beginning with a pilot project Proof of Concept. If the pilot project obtains the desired result, then it becomes a model, a template, a Center of Excellence for corresponding projects. The short term objective targets just one specific region, with 4 and 6 year long range objectives.
The idea is to grow a sustainable, interactive, networked Conservative community, motivate our leadership to articulate Conservative ideas that map to core values shared by this community, and implement strategies to get out the vote once the foundation of ideas, values and communication infrastructure are in place.
The basic premise is that the Democrats network and organize along the lines of a labor union and community activism model. Republicans, on the other hand, can successfully organize along the lines of a business enterprise model which aggregates information and accurately reports on issues, ideas and decisions of interest to both leadership and voters, and engages millions of registered Republicans and independent Conservatives via both email and interactive websites.
We've seen the Gold Standard, the Housing Standard, and the Dollar Standard. What's next? Will the Information Standard be the real measure of value that we often refer to as "wealth"? How we create, accumulate, aggregate, package, protect, invest and proliferate information is what's most likely going to influence and grow monetary, sociocultural and political capital.
With the exception of technologically innovative methods of knowledge accumulation and proliferation, the methods of creating and promoting Liberal Intelligence have remained fairly consistent since the rise labor unions and labor activism which evolved into the civil rights and social justice activism of the 20th Century. These methods include printed materials, public demonstrations, speeches, rallies, civil disobedience, literature, theater, art, music, film, and media coverage which cumulatively result in mass participation which lead to public and academic support.
Conservatives don't usually embrace mass demonstrations and don't enjoy the same media coverage or support from the arts, students and academics. Watching the success of Liberal grassroots movements online, it's tempting for the Right to follow the successful lead of its opposition. The thought that if only the Right had its own version of the The Nation, Daily Kos, AlterNet, Talking Points Memo, MyDD, Open Left, et al, we would have a more cutting edge capability is fine until one realizes that we already have National Review Online, RedState, InstaPundit, PowerLine, Michelle Malkin, Free Republic, The Next Right, and so on - all helpful, with many more great sites such as #dontgo, Team Sarah, Rebuild The Party, SmartGirlPolitics, not to mention Twitter aggregates, MySpace and Facebook groups on the way.
But what can Conservatives create that's separate but equal to Liberal collective action? I believe that Conservatives have an ability to both centralize and decentralize authority, to delegate up to representatives and down to the grassroots in a networked hierarchy that rolls individual contributions into a consensus that can be mobilized.
Opinion can be "Interesting and Thepautic", but it's not Quantifiable Data
Most of the sites mentioned above proliferate opinion. Several of the Liberal Information sites seek to drive behavior, which can be especially powerful during a campaign. But opinions expressed in the form of large blocks of text are not quantifiable data. What I mean by quantifiable data is a small block of information which can be stored in a database, linked to relevant associated data, and either reported back to the public in the form of "the public needs to know this!" or reported to executive decision and policymakers in the form of "the voters want leadership to know this!". Think binary (yes/no, good/bad, accept/reject) responses to survey questions, think brief statements, URLs, or Tweets as opposed to blog posts, diaries or comments.
We know that the Democratic Party mobilized a mighty army of GOTV propaganda and boots on the ground during 2006 and 2008, but how responsive is that leadership to its grassroots, and vice versa? While we heard a great deal of antiwar lipservice throughout the Democratic Primaries and General Election campaigns along with bailing out Main Street as well as Wall Street, the installation of an Obama Administration's centrist/moderate cabinet of Chicago School free market economists and foreign policy hawks would seem to indicate a counterintuitive disconnect. The Republican Party can listen and implement its constituents' needs, and it can do so better, faster and smarter through the application of Business Intelligence.
Use the corporate Business Intelligence model to create Conservative Information Intelligence
We're having great debates on whether we should have a Washington-based Ideas Czar, a British model Shadow Cabinet, whether Libertarian values should override Social Conservative values, whether Realpolitik should supersede Reaganism, and so on. But what do the majority of our constituents really need and want from our leadership? I suggest we take these debates out of the hothouse echo chambers of opinion and march them into the field as follows:
Obtain funding for a GOP Central Information Office (CIO) with an executive and technical staff including Oracle Database Administrators along with web developers, data analysts, report writers and infrastructure (server/network/data security) specialists.
Create a secure central data repository (data warehouse) to accumulate, aggregate and report on information collected from the far reaches of the Conservative Information Network (CIN).
Task the GOP-CIO with outreach to the following types of decentralized Conservative Intelligence gatherers and providers: conservative websites, weblogs and social media sites, local RNC offices, local and syndicated columnists and talk radio pundits (including blog talk radio) and the offices of conservative elected officials at all municipal, county, State and Federal levels.
Task the GOP-CIO with developing a mission, a strategic information management plan, a formal set of requirements for designing the initial warehouse schema, and a set of easily reproduceable templates/widgets for collecting information onsite or forwarding users to formal survey sites (like "MyGOP.com" for example)
Employ a mandatory business rule throughout the CIN of affiliated sites that every user who takes a survey or participates in a poll must provide a verifiable email with voter registration affiliation and demographic information.
Task the GOP-CIO with "data stewardship" to eliminate prank users, spammers and other forms of distraction and disinformation.
Ensure that each site in the GOP-CIO network has the ability to collect donations as well as data, and pay any fees necessary to display a banner such as "McAfee Secure Site".
Enable (train, fund, provide widgets) for each CIN affiliated site to display data feeds from the GOP with the data that "the public needs to know".
Seed the data warehouse with the list of registered Republicans and their email addresses, and task the GOP-CIO with providing a weekly email newsletter indicating "what's hot" and "what the public needs to know" throughout the GOP network of affiliated websites. A good prototype for this is the Sacramento Bee's "Capitol Alert" email.
Identify every elected Republican official's email in the database and aggregate information under the category of "this is what the local, State and Federal leadership needs to know" by district, State and Region to help provide informed decision support.
In the corporate world, managing cultural change in the form of "User Motivation and Training" is always the biggest challenge associated with Business Intelligence. Local RNC chairs may need to draw users in through "Life of the Party" get-togethers and/or send their staff out into the field to knock on the doors of their constituents and literally show them how to log in, bookmark their favorite sites, and use them so that we can have more conservatives participate.
If it turns out that 8 states prefer a Social Conservative national platform but 42 states prefer a fiscal/security conservative platform, then a report could be distributed indicating why the GOP has taken a particular policy position based on participatory democracy - at the same time providing needed information to local candidates within those 8 states indicating how they can best strategize to win their down ballot elections.
There are so many opportunities here to interact face to face as well as online, to collect ideas and consolidate them into workable proposals and projects, to proliferate information virally and help the GOP represent its voters by making better popular policy decisions, collecting donations, promoting worthy candidates and re-forming the Republican Party that it almost seems a no-brainer. Nonetheless it would take a professional, well-funded, well-organized and highly motivated team to make it a reality.
What do Conservatives think?
If you're a Conservative leader, are you interested in acquiring, analyzing and disseminating information in this 2-way fashion and would you actually use public input to drive your policies and decisions based on your voters' values and needs?
If you're a Conservative webmaster, are you interested in belonging to a Conservative Information Network to extend the participatory democracy platform to your users?
If you're a political information consumer, are you interested in using participatory democracy tools to contribute your ideas and opinions to leaders, and to hear directly from them in return?
I have a few theories about this question but none of them are going to be popular. The first theory is that the Right is in the midst of a civil war (read Jon Henke's article at The Next Right article on Mike Huckabee and Libertarians for the latest installment of this debacle).
The second theory is that there really is a difference in neural wiring between conservatives and liberals. I'm convinced that conservatives are not collective action-takers who thrive in the beehive environment with the possible exception of (a) great threat, and/or (b) great opportunity. When faced with great threat/opportunity, conservatives actually will organize and collaborate - but again, it's not in our nature to do so on a daily basis as it appears to be for our liberal brethren. Liberals have bought into the mindset of continuous struggle toward a perfect world, whereas conservatives seem to be of the mindset that life is "good enough for me most of the time".
Conservatives respond very well to rallying around principled leadership, the kind of leadership that can articulate their values and teach conservatism as well as influence its policy implementation through strong personality and charisma. The message we were sent with McConnell and Boehner's continued elevation in the Party was "bend over and we'll drive you home with more of the same". I think this was a major strategic error, just as keeping the current auto industry management in place would be. Conservatives should demand a "restructure" but right now everyone I know is so completely demotivated, which has led to entropy and paralysis. I see people reverting to "comfort activities" which is a form of reality denial.
What I think needs to happen in order for collaboration to occur, is great pressure in the form of crisis, and then strong, articulate, charismatic (hopefully principled) leadership which is able to step in, man the helm, and inspire cohesive group behavior. This is a standard recipe for all historic social/political movements. If Obama does succeed, and the economy recovers, and his administration does reach across the aisle, and he does govern from the center, there will not be enough crisis to motivate conservatives to develop clear, alternative messages. One of the worst practices of the GOP media and campaign strategists is to continually focus on what the Left does wrong instead of focusing on what the GOP is going to do correctly. Articulate, teach, inform us of a conservative message - please.
Another thing that online media evangelists may not be aware of is the fact that 90% of my colleagues in the technology industry spend absolutely NO TIME whatsoever on blogs, activist websites, or use Social Media for purposes other than socializing with real friends. The idea that average Americans, especially conservatives, are somehow "plugged in" online is absolutely untrue. Millenials actually are plugged in politically, but the majority tends to lean liberal. Boomers and Gen X'ers appear to still be relying on email and video (TV/movies). If we developed a conservative television series with the charisma of Mad Men, that could be absolute magic.
This all probably produces more questions than solutions, but I don't yet have the bandwidth to study the science of influence and persuasion that might turn the tide of online participation by older conservatives. Keep ensuring the platform is there (if you build it, they will come?), and don't give up - but we really need to examine this sociologically a hell of a lot more than we have in the past. With every crisis comes great opportunity. We need social scientists, psychologists, and propaganda artists (Hollywood conservatives), but even more, we need A Clearly Defined Message for them to proliferate. This takes us back to the civil war at the top, so until we break out of the loop, I'm concerned that we will continue to rinse, lather and repeat the mistakes and failures that have brought us to this crossroads.
And just like that, the seemingly endless political season is now over. The Democrats ran a tight, focused, unified, flexible, high-tech, inclusive campaign and were rewarded with the most historic Presidential win in the history of the United States. I completely disagree with what I imagine to be Barack Obama's policies (because ultimately, who knows what his policies really are?) but I still congratulate him and all the people who have been lifted up in hope and optimism by his campaign. I've noticed an extremely good mood prevailing this week.
People seem genuinely happy over the Obama Presidency. It's nice to see happy people instead of the angry, hostile, potentially violent crowds we were warned about should McCain have prevailed. Of course we all remember Sorry Everybody... the apology to the world that went out after Bush beat Kerry in 2004. The nicest outcome of the election so far this week was a delightful little valentine titled From 52 to 48 With Love. These loving notes were obviously penned by the Obama supporters who are certain that he's going to usher in a real era of hope that will bring us all into a new Golden Age. Right out of the gate, his appointment of a partisan pit bull like Rahm Emmanuel triggers some cognitive dissonance along those lines, but let's move on for the moment.
Forty years ago in the sixties, those of us who advocated Peace and Love found ourselves oddly (and not always knowingly or voluntarily) aligned with a set of radical Marxist revolutionaries whose take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth policy politics were extremely resourceful, organized, focused and productive. Jonathan Berman's documentary film Commune is a wonderfully revealing microcosm of those times. It's a film about the founders and residents of the Black Bear Ranch, founded in Northern California in 1968 thanks to share-the-wealth donations from counterculture-loving Hollywood stars like James Coburn.
...as Peter Coyote says, you can't imagine that kind of idealism that people had back then, that they could create a whole new society. They were trying something new and experimental.
[um...isn't that what they're trying for again in 2008?]
It's fun to watch them try, and sometimes fail. The women begin to emerge out of the shadow of the men and take some control over the ranch. The reality of raising kids with no schools, and without one committed partner often falls by the wayside. The kid rebels by getting a crew cut. Adults rebel by only sleeping with one partner.
The most interesting rebellion occurred when the Commune was overrun by a group of totalitarian thugs who sought to take advantage of the Idealists. I would heartily advise peace-and-love Idealists to view this film - Conservatives will already have a good feel for how that little bit of business turns out. Let's just say I'll be keeping a very wary eye on the sorched-earth policy hard Leftists over the next several years, and so should you.
Meanwhile, I'll enjoy the smiling faces and the hopey changey love and joy flashback while it lasts.
I'm disgusted that the Republican Presidential campaign has chosen to go out with backstabbing, blame assignment, and media leaks, not to mention a very clean clock.
I was utterly disappointed with the way that McCain ran his campaign in the last week (refusal to hammer the judgment of Obama's radical associations; refusal to hammer the Democrats with the CRA, ACORN, Fannie/Freddie and the economic disaster; obsession with campaigning in Pennsylvania at the expense of Red states).
I'm especially disgusted with his deafening silence on behalf of Sarah Palin - his vice presidential selection - and the fact that he is allowing his staff to anonymously have their way with her reputation in the media.
The buzz is that allegedly senior staffers (and possibly McCain himself?) are motivated to ensure that Governor Palin cannot possibly run for President in 2012. I guess we'll see about that in 2012, but the big question for me is, where is John McCain's formidable honor now? Why isn't he speaking out and emphatically insisting that the responsibility for the failure of his campaign is his alone, as well as a perfect storm in favor of all Democratic candidates? As the Palin rumors grow legs, it appears more and more likely that he'd rather lose an election and blame it on his Vice Presidential partner than remind his staffers that discretion is the better part of valor.
Palin needs to stand accountable for her petulance regarding the Couric interview. That's the only unprofessional public event I know of in her disfavor, however. And even that faux pas pales in comparison to Biden's blacklisting the TV anchors in Florida and Pennsylvania, for which of course he receives a pass and an "atta boy!". Regardless of how challenged she may or may not have been intellectually, regardless of what happened behind closed doors, Governor Palin's public persona was extremely optimistic, professional and appropriate at all times (as were her political instincts about how to run against her opposition).
With failed leadership like this, I'm completely depressed that I contributed so many hours and dollars to a victory effort on McCain's behalf. Now that the whole sordid story has unfolded, I can see how wrong I was to support the candidate I thought could successfully win instead of the candidate who most closely represented my conservative/libertarian values. I've been in denial, I've made excuses about McCain-Feingold, McCain-Lieberman, and McCain-Kennedy. I've been sick about it all week. I've learned how important it is to vote my conscience instead of my interpretation of probability. Lesson learned and duly noted.
Calls for McCain to just give up and quit, because the race is over
Wild claims of Obama winning states that will shock and surprise you
Repeated insistence that all blacks and young people will decide this election, and they're all going to vote in record numbers for Obama
We've certainly seen #1 and #2, and as for #3, Dick Morris has determined that under-40's are breaking big time for McCain, whereas over-65's are breaking big for Obama due to Social Security disinfomercials, to which McCain's campaign can't afford to respond. Morris feels that the remedy to reclaim the over-65 vote will be the Jeremiah Wright (sorry, I just can't call him "Reverend") ads paid for by the National RepublicanTrust PAC. If you would like to donate to help their ads run in Swing States this weekend, just visit the site today.
Peter Robinson has an article at Forbes called the Point of No Return which helps clearly quantify the ideological differences between the constrained (Center/Right) vision and the unconstrained (far Left) vision of politics. Markos Moulitsas has a chilling article (for those of us on the Center/Right, anyway) in Newsweek called We Say We Want a Revolution which helps clearly define the agenda of the New Left/Progressives, whom I have inevitably come to believe represent the latest incarnation of "small-c" communism launched so effectively by the polar opposite leaders in the Students for a Democratic Society, (moderate) Carl Oglesby and (violent radicals) Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
Back in the Sixties, the genesis of the New Left Revolution, there was a saying: "The Revolution Will be Televised." We certainly saw the Revolution on our televisions along with the attendant jokes about it on Laugh-In (precursor both politically and comedically to SNL), both from the perspective of the war and from the perspective of the anti-war movement. The latter was very effectively organized and managed with many of the same agitation tactics employed by the organized industrial labor movements of the first half of the 20th Century. And just as the seeds of public support for organized labor were sown by the media covering events like the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, the seeds of public support for the Sixties anti-war movement were likewise sown by photographs of hideous violence against innocent children, Buddhist priests and college students by the print and television media. The power of media propaganda in support of these movements cannot be de-coupled from the power of the movement's ideological appeal and its idealistic, youthful energy. In other words, what we're witnessing today is not new.
There's a renaissance of Sixties literature and video, much of which will undoubtedly be used to romanticize the movement much more than to condemn it. However, like Joe Biden's gaffes about an international crisis and Barack Obama's occasional revelations of his spread the wealth agenda, some well-documented history of the Sixties Radical Movements is irrefutably alarming in its glimpse of a very dark flip side to the Golden Age of Utopian Peace and Prosperity for All.
The first video clip below features Larry Grathwohl, who became a member of the Weather Underground as an undercover operative for law enforcement agencies in Cincinnati. His role within the organization was to carry directives from the Central Committee to the operating units in the field.
This is part of Larry's testimony in the 1982 documentary No Place to Hide (h/t Confederate Yankee):
"I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. We...we become responsible then for administrating 250 million people. And there was no answer[s]. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you gonna clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.
They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called "the counter-revolution". They felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing reeducation centers in the Southwest, where we would take all the people who needed to be reeducated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be.
I asked, "well what is going to happen to those people we can't reeducate, that are die-hard capitalists?" and the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers. And when I say "eliminate," I mean "kill."
Twenty-five million people.
I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.
And they were dead serious."
For all you counter-revolutionaries out there who are wondering exactly how we've been brought to this type of public dialogue, here is a Rabbity review of radical reading and viewing options which, taken holistically, can help make sense of how we find ourselves in the midst of a New Left Revolution. For those who have neither the time nor the economy to pursue these separately, I'll be reviewing each item in upcoming articles (not necessarily in this order). Why will I be doing that? Because I hope that in the process, I may learn enough to understand how to leverage the Left's success into the Next Right Revolution.
The video below, titled Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me about the American Empire by Howard Zinn, narrated by Viggo Mortensen, will help you discover what progress has been made on behalf of your children to assist them in learning the diverse history of the United States compared to the one you might have been taught. Zinn's A People's History of the United States is now considered a standard textbook in high schools, colleges and universities throughout the country.
McCain displays some of his natural candor and wit that I used to know and love him for when a kid asks a resonable, yet undoubtedly irritating question on the campaign trail this week.
