The one I found, amidst the debris of democracy that was being hauled off to the dump, was Brave New World Revisited, by Aldous Huxley.

Yeah, except that didn't happen, did it?

There is something troubling when police, dressed as storm troopers, are set onto ordinary citizens under cover of darkness and using riot tactics against middle aged people. It is the same the world over. Policemen willing to defend those who pay their wages, not the people they are supposed to protect. The speed of action taken when dealing with tent people is in stark contrast to the inability to arrest one banker. Wouldn't it be nice to see just one policeman saying I am not doing this. It doesnt take much, as those Arab policemen proved. It takes a little bit of moral courage.

1968. Prague Spring. Days of Rage. MLK. RFK. The embryonic New Left Movement had just emerged.

I first read Brave New World in 1968. It was not coincidence, either.

ReturnOfTheKing
16 November 2011 8:56PM
There is something troubling when police, dressed as storm troopers, are set onto ordinary citizens under cover of darkness and using riot tactics against middle aged people. It is the same the world over. Policemen willing to defend those who pay their wages, not the people they are supposed to protect. The speed of action taken when dealing with tent people is in stark contrast to the inability to arrest one banker. Wouldn't it be nice to see just one policeman saying I am not doing this. It doesnt take much, as those Arab policemen proved. It takes a little bit of moral courage.

There is no morality in The Establishment. These are the same people who psychopathically bomb children. Do not expect normal human behavior from psychopaths.

The criminalisation of dissent.

Hail.

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Many other Occupy protest sites have been raided recently. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted to the BBC that she had been on a conference call with 18 cities, discussing the situation.

It's a symbol that OWS has run its course when a progressive Democratic mayor is fed up.

Echoes here of Goebells and the big bonfires of 1934.

Many American families are faced with a stark choice... health care for themselves and their families, or an education for their children. No wonder people are pissed off.

'When they burn books they will soon burn people; said Heine.

That's just too easy. To really impress you have to make your point by finding something by J.K. Rowling, Stephen King or Jackie Collins. A good Mickey Spillane-Detective Mike Hammer allegory would've been awesome.

But noooooo, it's Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley, probably neslted between Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and No Logo by Naomi Klein.

There is much to be deplored about this 'clearance' and there are echoes of totalitarianism and social cleansing, ones that could be said to be presaged by Huxley (and others).
However, I flatly refuse to believe the magic symmetry/coincidence that meant that you came across a copy of Brave New World on site, at that point. bad things are being done, so report them truly an accurately and don't take liberties with artistic licence to add 'colour' to stories (c.f. Laurie Penny writing about student riots and mentioning "the stench of cordite") It undermines your credibility and actually damages the cause of those with whom I presume you sympathise, namey the protesters.

Billionaire Bloomberg Burns Books.

It is Fahrenheit 451

*Ray Bradbury

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

The novel has been the subject of various interpretations, primarily focusing on the historical role of book burning in suppressing dissenting ideas. Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship, but a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of factoids, partial information devoid of context.

Perhaps we're over-reacting a bit, here.

The civil authorities are there because they lack fully mature brain development and are easy to manipulate by the oligarchy. During late adolescence, the fine dendritic development occurs in the cortex that results in a proper adult cause-and-effect and risk/reward analysis capability. This does not happen in about 25% of the population, which seems to remain in a late adolescent stage of development where tribalism and fantasy predominate.

The sad consequence is that undeveloped brain power is given public safety authority-- the absolute LAST thing we should allow a marginally-psychopathic adolescent. We see the results.

It is not so much a Brave New World as it is a frightened limbic adolescent world. The pathology of a child or adolescent's brain is reflexively attuned to the fight-or-flight response in lieu of more adult cortical reasoning. When presented with a level challenge, the adolescent mind reasponds with paranoic fear. In fact, government really are, paranoically, pathologially afraid of their people and act irrationally in response to that fear.

The civil authorities just can't help their behavior. They are pathologically stuck in a permanent adolescent mind state without possibility of escape. There can be no reasoning with such a state at the adult level, and no expectation of normal mature behavior.

We must remember that this is part of a process.

The Aboriginal Peoples of North and South America have been engaged in this process for nearly 300 years. They continue to engage in this process.

It's the conditioning, the internalisation of the System's core values - which amount to nothing more than moralistic judgementalism - that is part of the key to making those changes we most wish our children to benefit from.

This conditioning process is often unwittingly carried out by parents, intentionally by schooling, if unintentionally by many teachers, whose generosity is subverted by the rules and operational instructions they are coerced by, it is carried through quite intentionally by media, by many academics (witness the child abuse story of Penn State University) and artists, by priests, nuns, rabbis, Imans and others.... whose work and good intent is subverted by the Institutions they serve, that pay them.

The name calling, which is a distraction procedure, by the hostiles, be they right wing or left wing ideologues, religious or conspiracy theorists (ALL religion is merely theory...) reveals how deep and widespread that internalisation process goes....

Have we in the west got the stamina, the honesty and the determination, the generosity of spirit to commit to this work, even if we might not see any of the benefits in our own lives?

For whom do we do this work?

Do we understand the mind-set of those whose urge to power is so intense that they ignore the harms, obvious to all, that so many suffer?

Do we understand the mind-set of those good people who comply with all this?

Do we know HOW small children, babies grow into human beings who behave like that?

Can we understand all this without recourse to judgementalism?

Do we know how to prevent abuse, rather than punish, which is always after the fact and as yet appears to be unable to prevent adverse behaviour?

Brave New World was written at a time when these questions could not be answered, because they were never asked.

Since Alice Miller, James Prescott and Carl Rogers empathic insights in the 1940s, 1970s and 1980s we have some of the answers to those questions....

There is clear evidence that the loss of self empathy inherent in all Hierarchical Power systems,, most often through the disruption of empathic experiential learning processes, increases a lack of empathy, generates fear and psychopathy in abundance.

These are the non-technical issues that must be raised, along side the obvious issues of Banking Fraud and Greed, Corporate Intrusion into Governance (which goes WAY back.....) etc....

My children's children children will bless the memory of me, and yours of you, if you, if we address the matter of human empathy, and the disruption of the biologically mandated empathic learning experientials as part of this work.

In first paragraph :

I raced down with the "Democracy Now!" news team to Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square

You could have thought of a better name couldn't you ?

In last paragraph :

A New York state judge ruled late Tuesday that the eviction will stand, and that protesters cannot return to Zuccotti Park with sleeping bags or tents. After the ruling, a constitutional attorney sent me a text message: "Just remember: the movement is in the streets. Courts are always last resorts." Or, as Patti Smith famously sings, "People have the power."

I guess it got renamed back then ?

coreluminous
16 November 2011 9:19PM
We must remember that this is part of a process.

The Aboriginal Peoples of North and South America have been engaged in this process for nearly 300 years. They continue to engage in this process.

It's the conditioning, the internalisation of the System's core values - which amount to nothing more than moralistic judgementalism - that is part of the key to making those changes we most wish our children to benefit from.

This conditioning process is often unwittingly carried out by parents, intentionally by schooling, if unintentionally by many teachers, whose generosity is subverted by the rules and operational instructions they are coerced by, it is carried through quite intentionally by media, by many academics (witness the child abuse story of Penn State University) and artists, by priests, nuns, rabbis, Imans and others.... whose work and good intent is subverted by the Institutions they serve, that pay them.

The name calling, which is a distraction procedure, by the hostiles, be they right wing or left wing ideologues, religious or conspiracy theorists (ALL religion is merely theory...) reveals how deep and widespread that internalisation process goes....

Have we in the west got the stamina, the honesty and the determination, the generosity of spirit to commit to this work, even if we might not see any of the benefits in our own lives?

For whom do we do this work?

Do we understand the mind-set of those whose urge to power is so intense that they ignore the harms, obvious to all, that so many suffer?

Do we understand the mind-set of those good people who comply with all this?

Do we know HOW small children, babies grow into human beings who behave like that?

Yes we do.

Fine points all - thanks for posting!

I just mentioned that for about 25% of the human population, the fine dendritic development in the cortex at late adolescence fails to complete. Such an individual remains in a late adolescent stage with incomplete risk/reward and cause-and-effect analysis expected for adulthood. These people are operating at the stage of adolescence where they are most susceptible to manipulation and at the greatest need for peer acceptance and tribalistic tendencies.

Response to Vulpes7, 16 November 2011 9:04pm

Echoes here of Goebells and the big bonfires of 1934.

Yes, this is definitely analogous. No hyperbole at all.

Many American families are faced with a stark choice... health care for themselves and their families, or an education for their children. No wonder people are pissed off.

Of those that can afford to have a "choice" in the first place, many American families are faced with a choice between health care and a lot of other necessary things. Education for their children is not one of those things, unless you're concerned that they're going to forego health care to send their children to private schools.

'When they burn books they will soon burn people; said Heine.

Yeah. Obviously the secret purpose of booting OWS out of Zucotti was to get rid of the books.

Get a grip.

Response to ngavc, 16 November 2011 9:04pm

No! It's about corruption and friends in high places, after all this is the Country that produced corrupt politicians like Richard Nixon and George W Bush. Democracy is being eroded piece by piece and those who are defending the right to protest deserve support not disdain!!

Lest we forget, it was a bunch of protesters who founded America-- which can probably be said for most modern nations....

Of course, when you cut through the over-reach at symbolism this article wallows in you realize that this has nothing to do with Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451. There was no "library" burned, merely a collection of second hand books that are widely available both online and in bookstores. There was no effort to suppress thought or speech...merely the cleaning of unwanted debris from private property.

It's wild claims like this that costs the OWS movement credibility with the American public. They end up looking like a bunch of spoiled college kids acting out fantasies of being a "revolutionary" that they learned in Freshman Lit.

It seems that for some people change can only come about by allowing themselves to be be beaten to the ground whilst doffing their caps and saying....'thank you Sir I know my place'.

I raced down with the "Democracy Now!" news team to Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square

This single line sums up the self-obsessed, over-entitled, disregard for the rights of others that the Occupy "movement" has come to symbolise.

Zuccotti Park is privately owned: you have no more right to be there than you do to set up a permanent camp in my garden.

By what process of debate or consensus with the owners of the park, or other New Yorkers, did you determine you had a "right" to rename the place?

You're like a bunch of children abandoned on a desert island with no adult supervision. You need interventions to prevent you going feral and hurting each other. Have you actually read Lord of the Flies?

OWS has forfeited the sympathy of the 99%, whatever illusions they may fondly harbour. They have nothing to say; they are bankrupt of ideas.

My children's children children will bless the memory of me, and yours of you, if you, if we address the matter of human empathy, and the disruption of the biologically mandated empathic learning experientials as part of this work.

Your writing reads very much like a Christian's who is convinced they know what they mean by love and what the command to love their neighbors means. If you ask such a person to explain and define love and the mechanics of loving their neighbors, after a point it becomes hard fro them to do so . If you ask people from a variety of different churches in America what they mean and how they act on this principle you get wildly varying accounts. These range from extremely right wing gun carrying xenophobes to quiet pacifistic Quakers. I think empathy will suffer the same distorting reinterpretations in the neurotypical mind .

Your empathy only functions up to a point and it becomes self delusion and self centered, but your minds trick this is not the case - that is when you need to combine it with objectiveness, methodology and fact, and test your feelings and inner senses with reason.

Hysterical hype and nonsense.

You can all go home now and get a job, do something productive and earn a living.

Response to Dreagon, 16 November 2011 9:47pm

If insignificant, then why eradicate it?

Why the fear inherent in the authorities?

Why employ violence?

If no threat exists from "spoiled college kids" and "second hand books," why the extreme reactions and attempt to control press access?

Logic, as employed by a fully matured brain, tends to ask such questions in a manner consistent with critical thinking.

The answer is that The Establishment is bereft of any long-term cause-and-effect analytic capabilities and falls victim to imbalanced risk/reward assessment typical of late adolescence. The response of an adolescent to a level challenge is the typical fight-or-flight limbic response. Since the authorities are backed by a potentially psychopathic application of lethal force, they can gather behind those "apron strings" and exercise the "fight" portion of the limbic system.

Response to Benulek, 16 November 2011 8:49pm

Ha, it sounds slightly Johann Hari-esque in its combination of convenient prescience and complete unreliability.

Perhaps we can expand the story further with unverifiable personal anecdotes about how the author met the soulful eye of a tormented policeman, anguished at the dilemma he faces as both an enforcer of the law and a member of the 99% these people claim to represent. Then he would no doubt blurt out some teary confession over an organic coffee, before shedding his oppressive tough guy image and indulging in an unlikely romantic liason with the Hari-esque narrator.

dogsbodyNYC
16 November 2011 9:57PM
Response to Benulek, 16 November 2011 8:49PM
Ha, it sounds slightly Johann Hari-esque in its combination of convenient prescience and complete unreliability.

Perhaps we can expand the story further with unverifiable personal anecdotes about how the author met the soulful eye of a tormented policeman, anguished at the dilemma he faces as both an enforcer of the law and a member of the 99% these people claim to represent. Then he would no doubt blurt out some teary confession over an organic coffee, before shedding his oppressive tough guy image and indulging in an unlikely romantic liason with the Hari-esque narrator.

There is a possibility that you are accurately describing a sizable percentage of the authorities. IMO, since the phenotype of incomplete brain development is a recessive trait, it is in about 25% of the total population. It is almost inconceivable that the entire 25% homozygous recessive population comprises the total number of the authorities.

I prefer Bloomberg's brave new world to Goodman's (where despite the fact that Bernardine Dohrn was denied admission to the bar on account of her criminal record, she was elevated to the status of lawyer by Goodman on Democracy Now).

If you can't get the facts right, why should I give a tinker's damn about your uninformed opinions?

Response to aleatico, 16 November 2011 10:07pm

Yet with the history of Weatherman, we see how 1968 is being not just re-enacted, but repeated. I am thrilled by the prospect of seeing the New Left reborn. The Great Sixties Cultural Revolution forever changed Western Civilization and we are overdue for some civilization change right now.

Response to SoundMoney, 16 November 2011 9:51pm

Zuccotti Park is privately owned: you have no more right to be there than you do to set up a permanent camp in my garden.

That's definitely not true, at least not according to First Amendment precedent.

Response to ngavc, 16 November 2011 9:04pm

It's a symbol that OWS has run its course when a progressive Democratic mayor is fed up.

So a left-wing movement runs it's course when a reprasentative of a right-wing organisation gets sick of her opposition? Somehow I don't think so.

Rembember the only difference between a "progressive" Democrat and a Tea-Partier is that the Democrat is better at lying.

I can imagine that, had Colonists not assembled in some Boston Square for a protest, we Americans would be "colourful" and not so pesky.

The inability for an adolescent mindset to process long spans of time for the purpose of cause-and-effect analysis deprives them of some very good theses, don't you think?

The Description of big business... i.e. the setup of large institutions run by a few people employing millions sounds just like communism....
Isn't that what you guys want? Except with you as the few people at the top instead of whoever is there now?

How do you sit in a park for 2 months? Surely you would be homeless and jobless by that time.

Response to matteo80, 16 November 2011 10:25pm

Like I said earlier, the inability for an adolescent mind to engage cause-and-effect over time deprives it of the opportunity for a significant thesis.

Response to OSeanachainMor, 16 November 2011 10:18pm

Perceptive. And IMO, the classic difference between The Establishment and Anti-Establishment.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan admitted to the BBC that she had been on a conference call with 18 cities, discussing the situation.

Funny you should mention Brave New World and its strictures on media manipulation. Mayor Quan didn't "admit" to anything, as if she were guilty of a crime, which in your eyes she obviously was. Mayor Quan did, however, state that "I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them,”
Wouldn't it be one of those amazing "ironies" that just after her statement, the Mayor found a copy of Brave New World in some Oakland gutter with the passages on propaganda highlighted, and, get this, the book had been given to Ms Goodman by Patti Smith with a flyleaf inscription praising Ms Goodman for her sense of journalistic ethics?

Response to dogsbodyNYC, 16 November 2011 9:57pm

Another report noted that the FBI and Homeland Security have been advising the cities

If these are simply local disputes between private property owners and protestors, why would national agencies such as the FBI and DHS be involved? Does this not strike anyone as worthy of comment?

Response to SoundMoney, 16 November 2011 9:51pm

The park was originally called Liberty Plaza Park after it was created in 1968, it is located next to Liberty Street. Further the park isn't just private property as you've posted. Rather, it is publicly accessible private property, legally the owner must allow the public in the park 24 hours a day. Further, if you look at the history, the reason the park is given such unfettered public access is because the city traded access to space for a building exemption so the developer could build a larger building then was currently allowed. The name of the building that caused all the fuss: One Liberty Plaza.

Lastly, the space was renamed by it's new owners in 2006, they called it Zucotti Plaza, because that just happens to be the name of the guy that runs the company that bought it.

So, I'll hope you can see why this is nothing like people camping in your garden, though that certainly sounds pleasant.

hey Chirho and you others here working out ya mr jones routines

sometimes, negativity, cynicism and irony have their place but here you just make it all sound so insincere and narcissistic - without real humor or devastating wit or bright reasoning you're stumbling into lies - and you all sound so afraid

Response to LakerFan, 16 November 2011 10:30pm

great retort, no doubt your ad hom attack is the stuff of a genius mind.

Oh, wait, you're a lakers fan

These protestors should be exercising their second amendment rights, not just their first.

In the US, you cannot set up a library on property that you do not own. In what country could someone actually do this?

If I move into your home and start setting up bookcases, would that be just fine with you? Seriously, people defending this have lost their minds.

Response to Continentaldivide, 16 November 2011 11:17pm

In America.

Wait until the movement gets to the Love-In stage and see what gets set up.

I actually like that the New Left is revving up faster than it did in the 60s.

It's going to be one wild and fun ride.

Response to LinearBandKeramik, 16 November 2011 10:51pm

I commented earlier.

The over-reach is typical.

It is true that governments are afraid of their people; paranoiacally, psychopathically afraid.

About 25% of the human population exhibits a condition where the fine dendritic processing stage of the human brain does not complete in late adolescence. Such people phenotypically show the fundamental adolescent traits of imbalanced risk/reward and inability to process cause-and-effect as would be found in a fully-developed adult brain. In addition, they exhibit the adolescent traits of the need for peer acceptance, tribalism, and enhanced limbic fight-or-flight response to level challenges.

Such adolescents in adult bodies are easily malleable and susceptible to manipulation by oligarchies, hence their preferential use in executing authoritarian measures. As they can hide behind the "apron strings" of violence sanctioned by The Establishment, they can risk the "fight" response of the limbic system with impunity. Without such "apron strings" these adolescents will aimlessly fold faster than the Egyptian Army in Tahrir Square.

Now, the US Geheimland Securitat gets a HUGE chunk of our tax dollars and has to justify its existence by making a big Aryan Rally show over a bunch of hippies. Same thing happened in the 60s, but with the role being played by the US National Guard.

Ther is no ideology at play here, it is pure pathology-- the result of incomplete brain development in adolescence.

Response to Continentaldivide, 16 November 2011 11:17pm

Each night, over 40,000 homeless individuals sleep in the New York City shelter system. This includes more than 16,000 children and 8,000 single adults. Thousands more sleep on city streets and in other public places.

There are over 1,000 soup kitchens & food pantries in NYC and 2,700 in NY State serving 2 million New Yorkers annually. They will serve 60 million meals this year to hungry men, women & children.

Everyday they turn away over 2,500 people.

Response to discuz, 17 November 2011 12:56am

The awareness of NYC's homelessness that OWS has revealed is yet another arrow in its quiver.

Compassion is an element of the New Left that is hard for anyone outside The Movement to understand.

The open hand can grasp and warm the fist. Has always done so.

Response to discuz, 17 November 2011 12:56am

You're confusing NYC with San Francisco on the homeless issue.

Are you suggesting that people who need food should not be fed? that seems harsh.

What does any of this have to do with OWS?

Response to daffers56, 16 November 2011 9:29pm

Why are you talking about Republicans when my point was about a liberal, Democratic mayor?

Yeah, good luck to Michael Bloomberg. Whatever was left of his good reputation just went down the toilet.

This is how he will be remembered, his face, his voice, his words at that press conference when he tried to justify his actions. That clip will be copied and played again and again for decades in documentaries, historical accounts of the change that finally came to America; his will be the face shown when they talk about turning points and masks falling away: "Perhaps nothing exemplifies the power struggle and the attending change in tide more than when Michael Bloomberg..."

Response to grecoverde, 17 November 2011 2:48am

The people got their city back.