There's an old insult, "It takes one to know one."
You call someone a crook, the response is, "It takes one to know one."
It's not really true.
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You don't have to be a crook to recognize one. But it helps.
I provide this wisdom as the backdrop for offering my insight into what the occupation movement is all about.
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I know what you may not understand because once upon a time – a long while ago – I was one of them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I would have been out there with the vociferous miscreants currently making a nuisance of themselves on Wall Street and in other major cities across the country.
These are the shock troops, the storm troopers, the beer-hall kampfbund, and the lumpen proletariate of previous revolutions and attempted socialist coups of the past.
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Communists and Nazis often used such ruffians as tools to create chaos, instill fear and anxiety and bully their way to power.
When I saw Oakland burning, it reminded me of the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. It may have seemed like senseless acts of random violence, but there was a point to it.
This is the beginning of America's intifada. And while many Americans are expecting these hooligans to go quietly into the night as the weather gets colder, I know better. This is orchestrated at the highest levels of American power – not with the idea of violently overthrowing the government, in this case, but in expediting a coup that has been under way, in earnest, since Jan. 20, 2009.
See the video based on this column:
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If you want to understand the occupy movement, just think of Adolf Hitler's "brown shirts" or Benito Mussolini's "black shirts."
I fully anticipate these forces are going to get stronger and more militant in the days and weeks and months ahead.
When you think of the movement in these terms, you begin to understand their inarticulate agenda – from seething anti-Semitism to other equally absurd forms of mindless scapegoating. They don't have any answers, but they have plenty of grievances.
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No, I was never a Nazi sympathizer, nor do I suggest all of the occupiers are. But they are well-represented among those in enough locations to spot a trend. But the Nazis were socialists. And I was definitely a strong supporter of socialism in my misspent, misguided youth.
So I recognize what's taking place inside this movement. It is very familiar to me. I recognize the mental illness at work here. I know how their minds have been twisted and manipulated to believe that they are victims of an evil system, rather than perpetrators of an evil agenda.
I am also experienced enough to understand that this movement represents the vanguard of the revolution that is already under way.
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Once Barack Obama assumed the power of the presidency and did everything in his power deliberately to break the back of the capitalist system, handing out billions in cash to his supporters along the way, he knew that he likely could not be re-elected – at least not without the help of some shock troops, some new crises about whose origins he had at least plausible deniability insofar as personal responsibility.
But make no mistake about what this movement represents. It's just a new phase of the same revolution Obama initiated upon taking office.
Their intent is, as socialist ideology explains, to heighten the contradictions of capitalism. Their goal is to make economic conditions worse in America. If it takes burning down businesses, they will do it. If it takes looting, they will do it. If it takes other forms of terrorism, they will do it.
This is not a spontaneous movement. This is orchestrated. The occupiers are simply marionettes at the end of strings. And they will do whatever is required of them by their puppet masters.
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Remember where you heard it.