Quote of the day—Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee

Corporate greed, racial discrimination and oppression, and police brutality and murders are among the many guaranteed products of the capitalist system of production. But exploitation, injustice and oppression inevitably give rise to resistance struggles, with each of these struggles needing to be patiently built in its own right around its particular demands. Yet these seeming separate struggles are greatly strengthened when they fire each other up in united actions against the common class enemy. This is what will happen this Saturday at Westlake, and it will be another small step toward building a revolutionary movement that can win everything.

Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee
October 19, 2011
Join the October 22 march against police brutality!
[I stopped by work today and was handed a piece of paper by the Occupy Seattle crowd. It appears to be word for word the web page linked above.

You might ask, just what is it that they want to win? From the same web page, “We demand everything!” So they want a revolution to win everything? I see…

Since I walk by the Occupy Seattle crowd every day to and from work I have taken a few pictures. This should give you an idea what it is like, minus the chanting:

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October 10, 2011. Lots of tents.

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October 7th, 2011.

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October 7, 2011

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Cropped version of the picture above.

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October 10, 2011

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Cropped version of the picture above.

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October 13, 2011

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Cropped version of the picture above.

Yeah. They aren’t exactly coherent.

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October 14, 2011

I think they are going to need a lot more people supporting them to have a successful revolution. It probably also requires a group of people capable of accomplishing something more than creating and carrying poorly made signs and pitching tents on the sidewalk.—Joe]

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6 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee

  1. As with so many aspects of modern life, the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson already wrote what should be the epitaph for the current crop of anti-capitalist protesters. From his darkly comic opus Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson describes San Francisco’s hippies in the 60’s: “Our energy would simply prevail.”

    From Wikipedia:
    The “wave speech” is an important passage, at the end of the eighth chapter, that captures the hippie zeitgeist and its end.

    “Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run …but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant …

    History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

    My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket …booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) … but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that …

    There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda …. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning ….

    And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ….

    So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

    Some critics and readers believe this wave speech was Thompson’s favourite passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the writing of which he was most proud. Thompson often cited it during interviews, choosing it when asked to read aloud from the novel.

  2. I think it’s interesting that every city is just a little bit different with it’s “Occupation.”

  3. Every time I see one of these signs or hear one of their “speeches”, I am reminded of that old commercial with the frying egg in a pan of sizzling butter; “This is your brain on drugs…….”

  4. They are a pathetically small group, but the President, most in the Old Media and several people in Congress sure love them.

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