Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Drums and Showers ...

And yet the protestors who gathered in the actual Occupy encampments, like the young couple I met in New York, often stepped away from the classic forms of Anarchism by excising clear moral purposes from their protests. They typically took it as a point of pride, as a moral principle, that they would not specify exactly what they wanted—for "Demands imply condition, and we will never stop. Demands cannot reflect the time scale that we are working with." In doing so, they found themselves recapitulating not the history of anarchistic revolution but an old religious history of apocalyptic movements, aghast at the failure of God to bring an end to the mess, the evil, they thought they could perceive so clearly.
They didn't know this is what they were doing, of course, and given their extreme anti-Christianity, they would resist the explanation with all their strength.

1 comment:

  1. They accomplished nothing, but at least their smug self-satisfaction will keep them warm at night.

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