From construction worker.
The Occupy Portland website has gone out of its way time and time again to needlessly vilify anarchists and anyone else who dares to be so insolent as to promote or practice basic self-defense. How can we combat this fear-mongering and divisiveness?
The Occupy Portland website has gone out of its way time and time again to vilify anarchists and anyone else who dares to be so insolent as to promote or practice basic self-defense. How can we combat this fear-mongering and divisiveness?
For example, in a recent article on the website about how the media team really, really insists that the occupation adhere to their particular brand of ‘non-violence,’ they denounced the very idea that they might be appealing to such known trouble-makers as anarchists as a means of bolstering defense for the occupation. The implications are as obvious as they are offensive, especially considering, as many have pointed out, that much of the occupation is built on firmly anarchistic foundations, and that anarchists have played crucial roles in organizing and maintaining the occupation.
For a well written piece on how Occupy Oakland draws from anarchist inspiration, as does our own occupation, see here:
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/11/10/18698644.php
I, like many others, am hard pressed to make it to enough general assemblies or special committee meetings to make much of a difference in this regard – due to my work schedule.
Would someone be interested in bringing a proposal before the GA to stop the media/website team from slandering anarchists in particular, and perhaps others as well?
This could take the form of some sort of code of professionalism that they would have to adhere to, or perhaps set up some sort of oversight mechanism so that these insults and also the somewhat frequently confusing/contradictory action updates could be edited out. Let’s have some more transparency for goodness sake!
Or, on a more basic level, could someone at least check in on them to make sure that they’re not doing anything as vile as submitting the e-mail addresses of people posting “incendiary” or “pro-anarchist” comments on the website to the police? I recall that certain “organizers” of the Seattle occupation were collecting the names of known anarchists from social networking websites in order to hand them to the police, and while I don’t have any reason to suspect this is the case, I’d hate for us to find out too late about the same sort of activity here.
The website moderators are sitting in a powerful (dangerous) position. Shouldn’t we break up their elite cliquishness?
GREY COAST ANARCHIST NEWS 