Occupy Wall Street: Nihilism and Communism

Six years ago, what was known as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement situated itself in Zuccotti Park, which is located in the Wall Street district.

The group of mostly millennials protested the worldwide economic inequality emanating from New York’s financial district. Their protest created, or depending upon your point of view, spawned, new terms: “99 percent” and “1 percent,” to illustrate the economic disparity between the majority of the population being controlled and impoverished by the one percent elite that controlled Wall Street and the world’s wealth.

As expected, Left Coast Hollywood, some of the most highly-paid people in the world, felt no hypocrisy about linking their well-fed arms with the protesters. Susan Sarandon, Katy Perry, and Roseanne Barr, among others, pledged their support.

Then-President Obama in a “crisis-is-a-terrible-thing-to-waste” moment, stoked the fire, by saying of the Occupation:

“I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country … and yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place.”

But the blemishes of the movement became quickly apparent, especially with regard to Jews. Mirroring Nazi theories, Occupy members waved signs that read “Jews control Wall Street.”

Small wonder that the American Nazi Party backed the movement.

Moreover, some of the Occupiers even defended bestiality as evidenced in the following chant:

“Everything seems to be possible…You can have sex with animals, or whatever.”

Although unarmed, unless one counts rocks as weapons, Occupy consciously modeled themselves on the armed, violent and pro-Communist Weathermen of the late 1960s. An example was their designating one daily protest as a “Day of Rage,” culling this term from the Weathermen’s “Days of Rage,” in which Weathermen engaged in violent street battles with police.

The Weathermen were, in all senses of the word, violently anti-capitalist, with member Bill Ayers, now a tenured professor, declaring, “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home–kill your parents.”

The Weathermen tried to practice what they preached by trying to blow up banks and corporations. But their actions and sentiments went beyond anti-capitalism and they subscribed to violence for violence’s sake. Weathermen/girl Bernardine Dohrn expressed admiration for Charles Manson and his collective’s brutal murder of pregnant actress Sharon Tate:

“Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild!”

The nihilism of the Weathermen was readily apparent; and although not armed, a sinister armed group lurked in the background. Anti-Fa, a masked group of “anti-fascists,” advocating street violence rather than reasoned debate, were present. Since the election of Donald Trump, the group has stormed buildings, blown up cars and set fire to generators.

Despite all their Marxist rhetoric, many in the group reflected the ignorance of a generation who got their news from the Daily Show, and typified what George Orwell characterized the chanting Stalinists of his time being—“human gramophones.”

I know this, because I was present at one of the protests—not, God forbid, as a participant but as a journalist.

For me, the moment that crystallized the ignorance of the Wall Street protesters was when I talked to one of them who was wearing a Guy Fawkes’ mask. When I asked him who Guy Fawkes was, he immediately answered “the guy from V for Vendetta”.

So it goes.