OWS Is Almost Entirely Socialist/Marxist

You might have guessed this. The outrage here is that the media refuses to report the facts accurately.

Given that the media is advising them in crafting a message that can (in theory) appeal to a broader segment of the population, that's no surprise.

The standard portrayal of the Wall Street protesters goes something like this: Ragtag group of unemployed young adults, venting often incoherent but overall legitimate populist outrage about economic inequality. But go down to the movement’s headquarters, as I did this past weekend, and you see something far different.

It’s not just that knowledge of their “oppressors” -- the evil bankers -- is pretty thin, or that many of them are clearly college kids with nothing better to do than embrace the radical chic of “a cause.” I found a unifying and increasingly coherent ideology emerging among the protesters, which at its core has less to do with the evils of the banking business and more about the evils of capitalism -- and the need for a socialist revolution.

It’s not an overstatement to describe Zuccotti Park as New York’s Marxist epicenter. Flags with the iconic face of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara are everywhere; the only American flag I saw was hanging upside down. The “occupiers” openly refer to each other as “comrade,” and just about every piece of literature on offer (free or for sale) advocated socialism in the Marxist tradition as a cure-all for the inequalities of the American economic system.

Kevin D. Williamson finds the same:

I’ve been spending as much time as I can down at Occupy Wall Street, listening to the speeches, reading the literature, talking to the organizers. Here’s something to keep in mind: You’ll hear in a lot of the conservative media that this is some kind of socialist/communist enterprise piggybacking on a populist protest. In reality, it is much worse than even most of the conservative media is reporting.

Almost every organization present at OWS is explicitly communist or socialist. Almost every piece of literature being handed out is explicitly communist or socialist. I don’t mean half, and I don’t mean the overwhelming majority — I mean almost all of it. Yes, there are the usual union goons trying to figure out how to get OWS to do the bidding of the AFL-CIO and the Democratic party, and the usual smattering of New Age goo (the “Free Empathy” table) and po-mo Left wackiness (animal-rights nuts), the inevitable Let’s-Eradicate-Israel crowd (“Free Palestine, from the river to the sea!”). But, that being said, almost every organized enterprise and piece of printed material I have encountered has been socialist or communist. It’s been a long time since I saw anybody peddling books by Lenin. It’s been a long time since anybody told me the Ukrainians had it coming.

The media found the one or two racists in the Tea Party and made them the face of the movement; meanwhile, it finds the one or two people who are not avowedly Marxist and makes them the standard-bearer.

This is why lefties say the media is biased, by the way: Because the media refuses to report on "People's Movements" accurately.

They're correct in that. But the media is not airbrushing them out of the picture do to a rightwing bias, but due to a practical bias and a liberal one: The media wants liberalism to succeed, and may or may not be actually socialist but does not consider socialism viable as a political matter. So leftwing movements become "center-liberal" ones in the media's telling.

That is a kind of bias, but it's not a different bias or a new bias. It's the same liberal bias conservatives complain of all the time.

But I agree with the lefties: The media should report on such leftwing movements accurately. Not made all soft and cute (and standard liberal) for public consumption.

posted by Ace at 12:04 PM

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