Kenneth J. Ruoff in Imperial Japan at Its Zenith did an in-depth study of the year 2600 (that’s 1940 to you Westerners) but neglected to mention the World’s Fair that Japan had planned for that year. It was to have been a grand affair on the Tokyo seaside, running from March 15 to August 31. But like the Japan Olympics planned for that year, World War II put a damper on things. This was all the more unfortunate because the World’s Fair committee had already begun raising funds for the event by selling 10-yen tickets, which equates to a large amount of money today, something like 50 to 100 US dollars.
A collective duty was felt that these tickets must not become useless– a duty which apparently extended beyond reasonable lengths of time. When the city of Osaka held its World Expo in 1970, organizers accepted tickets to the cancelled 1940 World’s Fair as permitting free entry to their own event! They didn’t even take the antiques, they just inspected them and gave them back with a complimentary entry ticket. And when Aichi held a World’s Fair in 2005, they did the same! Apparently as many as 90 tickets from 1940 were used to gain access to Aichi in 2005– to this, Japanese Wikipedia adds the obligatory disclaimer, “citation needed”.
The tickets now sell for over $200 on Yahoo Auctions, but that could be a bargain, depending on how many Japan World’s Fairs you and your descendants are planning on attending.
Posted: February 6th, 2012 | Japan | No Comments »
Below, I translate an article by Nobuo Ikeda, Japanese economist and noted commentator on nuclear issues in the Japan blogosphere. This article and its translation are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.
I thought that opposition to nuclear power is not about individual concerns but an overriding sense of “moral duty”, but it seems like recently it’s shown itself to be simple selfishness. The local citizens’ brigade to “halt the scattering of radiation” list the towns and cities which have received rubble from the earthquake as part of an effort to stop all rubble from being buried.
As explained by Taro Kono, most of the areas devastated by the tsunami were unaffected by the Fukushima Daiichi accident and it thus makes no sense to refuse all rubble from Tohoku. The radiation in most of Tohoku is no different from Tokyo or Yokohama. Without the ability to clear the rubble and dirt from Tohoku, the reconstruction of the affected areas will hit a brick wall. Even Osaka City Mayor Hashimoto, who was stirring up fears about radiation last year, agrees that rubble does not have any problematic level of radiation.
On this citizens’ brigade website, there is a “doctor’s written opinion on accepting rubble into your hometown” which states that “regulations must be strengthened to 10 becquerels per kilogram”. The basis of this is an article written by one Yuri Bandashevsk. Cesium-137 is said to cause “functional modifications in the cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, immune, reproductive, digestive, urinary excretion and hepatic system,” but the only evidence given for this is experiments made on rats! [Actually, if you merely glance at the linked article, you'll see that Mr. Bandashevsk is clearly unqualified to do this kind of evaluation. --Avery]
Zero-risk fundamentalism like this makes it impossible to evaluate risk quantitatively. Looking at a page like this, you might be led to believe that “radioactive pollution is worse than an atomic bomb”, but in fact Fukushima Prefecture found that 99.8% of residents of evacuated areas will receive a real dose of less than 1 millisievert throughout their lifetime. I’d like to see the three self-styled physicists who wrote this opinion make a quantitative evaluation of the effects of 1 millisievert of radiation over a span of 50 years.
The anti-nuclear movement claims the great moral duty of protecting the environment, but trying to block the importation of rubble has nothing to do with this moral duty, but is rather based in the selfish principle, “I don’t care what happens to the victims of the tsunami, but I want zero risk in my backyard.” Yukio Hayakawa and Kunihiko Takeda, who torment an entire prefecture with vitriol like “Fukushima’s produce is poison,” operate on the same principle. When the movement becomes this depraved it is only a matter of time before it dissolves entirely.
Posted: February 5th, 2012 | Japan | 1 Comment »
The 32nd issue of “Kikan Kiyomizu“, published in the 9th month of the 7th year of Heisei, is a special edition on “70 years of Kiyomizu City and Toda Bookstore”, containing an article entitled “Memoirs of 70 Years of Toda Bookstore” published by the former chief librarian of Kiyomizu City Public Library, Harumori Yamanashi, in which we may read the following description of a bookstore ship.
One final scene which resides in my heart is that of a small boat which sat at the bend in the river afore the household of Shin’ichi Shibano loaded up completely with what appeared to be brand-new books. It was a perfect subject for photos and indeed seemed quite an appropriate motif for a port city.
The bookstore, which swayed gently with the ripples on the river, was one of my Kiyomizu rediscoveries. I later learned that it was made for the fisherfolk who went out to the ocean for many long, idle hours at a time, and who had thus requested such a bookstore ship.
A bookstore ship swaying on the river would be a picture of some grace, and I imagine if we were to search for photographs we might still find some remaining. It’s a sight I’d like to see.
Translated overliterally from the Jinbo Town Nerd’s Diary.
Posted: February 4th, 2012 | Japan | No Comments »
Reading Whittaker Chambers’ Witness for the first time, I was intrigued by his mention of an innocent Japanese college student swept up by the Communist underground in America. Hideo Noda (野田英夫, 1908-1939), nephew of the peace-loving socialist politician Prince Fumimaro Konoye and student of Diego Rivera, was a warm-hearted and talented man apparently drawn to Communism by a genuine sympathy with the poor. You can see in his 1933 work Scottsboro Boys (pictured) a portrayal of working-class urban life that should be familiar to any visitor to an American city. After a discussion with Chambers, Noda eagerly agreed “to go to Japan to work as a Soviet underground agent”, although Chambers does not make it clear if Noda realized that this work would involve espionage.
At this point I decided to Google Noda’s name, and found both an unrelated Japanese-American nisei painter with the same name (crazy coincidence!), and an English biography on the website of a museum which carries his work. This biography is curiously whitewashed of his Communist adventures, although according to Chambers, they occupied a great part of his life after 1934.
Here is how the museum describes his later life:
Noda didn’t adhere to authority or strive after a false reputation. He was a humantistic [sic] painter who turned his eyes to the world of the mind and continued painting the working class, immigrants, circus performers, the unemployed and children from the bottom strata of society. In 1938 he was diagnosed with a brain tumor but continued to paint, holding his eyelids open with adhesive tape. Noda died prematurely at the age of 30.
Seeing such an incomplete biography inspired me to write this quick post to correct the Internet on this matter.
The attempt to establish a Soviet network in Japan failed, and his Tokyo contact John Sherman was commanded to go on to Moscow and barely escaped death there. Noda was also stuck in the underground and it appears he was eventually destroyed by it. Here is Chambers, meeting Noda for the last time:
I saw [Noda] only for a moment [in 1938], to give him the address [of his next meeting place]. I did not ask, of course, where he had been since I had sent him on to a hotel in Southern France. Before Noda had been alert, somewhat as birds are, as if in him mental and physical brightness were one. Now he seemed a little faded and tired. Our brief meeting was stiff… I suspect that Noda was so silent because, had he begun to speak, the words that came out would have been: “Oh, horror, horror, horror!” … In 1939, the New York Times published his rather impressive obituary. In Tokyo, the promising Japanese-American painter Hideo Noda had died suddenly, of a “cerebral tumor.”
John Sherman refused to testify on the subject of Noda, pleading the fifth. This means that there is no information on Noda in English that does not either derive from Whittaker Chambers’ account or whitewash his Communist background. There is no Japanese-language equivalent to Google Books that would allow me to research this quickly, but none of the Japanese accounts of Noda online mention his underground work, except for one blog post which hints vaguely at “information collection”, but fails to mention any of his multiple trips overseas during the treatment of his “brain tumor”, if indeed he was diagnosed with a tumor at all. It is striking that the museums that hold his work do not realize what he was doing when he died, but it seems that Witness really is our only standing witness to the Communist underground at least on this detail.
Posted: January 3rd, 2012 | World Peace | No Comments »
In the old days they didn’t have cars. The shortest way to get from Yamauchi to Imari was to walk over the mountain. That’s right, walk over the mountain. You know how many trail markers they had? Just one. This one.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 11th, 2011 | Japan, Travel | 3 Comments »
This is a warning to online researchers. The website JapanFocus.org describes itself as a “peer-reviewed, open source journal” and regularly announces its articles to interested academics and mailing lists. However, it is not peer reviewed in the ordinary sense of fact checking, editing, and examination of credentials. In fact, it is peer reviewed in the same way the conspiracy website Journal of 9/11 Studies is peer reviewed: the editors only publish unedited, often untrue blog posts from their friends (“peers”), people they want to invite, and any Ph.D.s foolish enough to be taken in by their scam.
Nothing published on JapanFocus.org should be taken as factual until it is double-checked in a disinterested, unbiased source.
Here are some examples of utter crap being published on this site:
A conspiracy theorist named Makiko Segawa published an article claiming that “the Japanese government has moved to crack down on independent reportage and criticism of the government’s policies in the wake of the disaster by deciding what citizens may or may not talk about in public”. There was no evidence for this, only a link to a voluntary program to help stamp out scams and baseless rumors like reports that the skies would be filled with toxic rain. From this, Ms. Segawa comes up with the absurd, paranoiac translation “illegal information”, which through further hyperbole becomes “independent reportage”. Ms. Segawa has no credentials; JapanFocus describes her as “a staff writer at the Shingetsu News Agency”, without explaining that this is actually her personal blog. Because JapanFocus markets itself as a peer-reviewed journal, this article was uncritically posted to Slashdot, where readers mocked it.
One of the editors of JapanFocus.org, Mark Selden, published an article about the disputed Liancourt Rocks that concludes that they rightfully belong to South Korea, based not on his half-assed legal argument but rather on Selden’s personal emotions, which he identifies with “morality”. The article absurdly accuses Japan of ignoring legal issues about the rocks by talking about completely unrelated issues. The reality, that Japan has requested international arbitration on the dispute several times, but that this has been turned down by Korea every time over the widespread fear that they have no legal standing, is not discussed anywhere in the article. Just in case you were unable to perceive the author’s fact-free bias, he refers to the rocks as “Dokdo” throughout. This is in a journal that is supposedly about Japan.
Most of the other articles at JapanFocus.org are much more subtle, resembling academic papers, and only lacking their commitment to neutrality. They are meant to be the fodder for citations to “prove” that such and such a view is wrong, even though they achieve this “proof” only through manipulation. For example, a student named Mark Winchester is published in English only at JapanFocus.org. He writes a long article, the basic point of which is to insult a Japanese writer named Kobayashi Yoshinori who disagrees with him. He says that Kobayashi “appropriates” another writer, whom Winchester and Kobayashi see in different ways. Here we can understand why it is no surprise that Winchester was only able to publish this on JapanFocus.org rather than a real academic journal, because his argument is basically name calling and does not amount to anything convincing. I think it would be much more apt to say that Winchester, a foreign observer, is “appropriating” the name of a Japanese intellectual being described by another Japanese intellectual. What does that word even mean? Winchester also lambastes Kobayashi’s widely distributed, popular essays as a “mass-consumer, aesthetic form”, putting an image in my eye of a Catholic monk writing on vellum, describing the mass printing and reading of Bibles as gross populism. Clearly we should only respect the arguments of distinguished authors who are able to be published on JapanFocus.org.
The senior editor of JapanFocus.org, Gavan McCormack, is unhinged from reality. McCormack supports North Korea’s nuclear program and criticizes Japan for opposing it. That’s right: he criticizes Japan for not supporting the campaign of an insane cartoon archvillain who has kidnapped their citizens to acquire nuclear weapons. He denied the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s and wrote a book honoring another “journalist” who also did so.
JapanFocus.org’s advertising in academic publications makes it out to be a serious journal, but it is not, and it does not measure up to the standards of a print publication. It is, basically, a blog, and not even a trustworthy one. Take great caution when citing it yourself.
Posted: December 6th, 2011 | Japan | 1 Comment »
1. Hiromichi Kumazawa: Sent letters to various public officials declaring he was Emperor in 1920, and continued protesting his imperial lineage thereafter while running a general store in Nagoya. In 1945, his petition to MacArthur was spotted in the messy GHQ headquarters by a reporter for Life magazine and he became internationally famous for a short time. Lost many of his supporters in 1947 when he formed a political party, at which point he made the unusual claim that the Takenouchi Documents were real and had been stolen from his household by a wandering komusō during the Meiji period. His death in 1966 went unreported in the West.
Prominent supporter, Masanori Arita: Shady right-wing character who supported Kumazawa from the 1920s and cared for him until his death. Became private secretary to fascist underworld power broker Ryoichi Sasakawa who is a well-known philanthropist in Africa. It is unknown if Arita is still alive.
Apparent relative, Terumoto Kumazawa: Claimed that Hiromichi Kumazawa was adopted and that he was the true ruler of the Kumazawa household. (There are four other Kumazawas claiming to be the true Kumazawa Emperor, whom I will not list here.)
2. Tatsukichirou Horiwaka: A mysterious person who was rumored to be the illegitimate child of the Meiji Emperor. Actual place and time of birth unknown. Advocated for Pan-Asianism during the kindai, was involved in the Treaty of San Francisco for unknown reasons, and joined the World Federalist Movement after 1945.
Pretended daughter, Princess Kaoru Nakamaru: Journalist who interviewed business leaders, authors such as Norman Mailer, and world leaders such as Saddam Hussein for PBS in the 1980s, later Illuminati researcher and founder of “Taiyo no Kai” (organization of unclear purpose). Notable Japanese 2012 theorist who has written roughly a dozen books about 2012. Despite her claims it is not generally believed that she is actually Horikawa’s daughter.
3. Yoshimaki Miura: Caused a stir in 1955 by proposing that the Imperial Palace did not belong in Tokyo according to a philosophical system which he himself invented. Many government officials discussed this claim. Also, he claimed to be the true Emperor descended from a previously unknown Hokuriku Court.
4. Toyohiko Nagahama: Claimed to be the descendant of Emperor Antoku who died in 1185, making him certainly the longest of these to get around to staking his claim. Like Kumazawa, he never took on the styles of an emperor or tried to make enemies with the Showa Emperor, but only acted as a friendly old man trying to make the truth known. He never petitioned MacArthur and was thus only famous on the little island of Ioujima, Kagoshima where he lived. Locals referred to him as “Emperor Nagahama”.
Unknown relation, Masakaze Nagahama: Claims to be next in line to the noble and majestic Nagahama lineage, and has started a society to that effect.
5. Jikouson: Founder of the political(?!) cult “Jiu“. When the Showa Emperor renounced his divinity in 1946, Jikouson claimed that the kami which had taken up residence in the Emperor, Amaterasu, had now moved into her, and the Jiu headquarters became the Imperial Palace. Consequently she invented an original Japanese era, constitution, and flag, and named her prominent followers the Ministers of Defense, Culture, etc. in a virtual cabinet. The GHQ spied on her group to ensure it was not a nationalist organization.
There are about a dozen other pretenders but none are so interesting.
Posted: November 6th, 2011 | Japan | 1 Comment »
In the first two weeks of the protests, they achieved nothing. Their tactics seemed similar to the NYU Kimmel occupation, except for lacking explicit demands. In the next two weeks, however, they were spectacularly successful. First, a mass arrest brought them to media attention. Because they were permanent, they were a sustained news story. The media had something to talk about on a regular basis, and it was even more outrageous than the Tea Party; so, they lapped it up, and the entire country learned of the protest.
This seems to have happened out of a necessity from the way the protest was set up. Occupiers committed themselves to a 24-hour protest regime. But there is only so much protesting that can get done sitting around; so, they got up and marched through the city on a daily basis. On October 1 this march took them to the Brooklyn Bridge, where, ignoring multiple warnings from New York police, they blocked traffic, and were subsequently arrested, as a group of 700. Most of the arrested enjoyed their temporary martyr status and went right back to protesting. The fact that they did not go home after being arrested separated them from the NYU Kimmel protesters, and placed them in the hallowed realms of the civil rights movement.
After the arrest, copycat occupations began all across the United States. Their goals were twofold. First, to hold a General Assembly where all could voice their complaints. Second, to successfully “take over” and “occupy” a public space, creating a sacred space protected against the evils of capitalism that could nurture and grow the General Assembly.
This second goal annoyed some police officers, so supporters of the protests were able to talk about the difficulty of their goal and the suffering they went through to achieve it. But what happens after these goals are achieved? You’ve set up shop in a park, everyone is happy with the Assembly, your “people’s mic” is obediently bringing the message to the crowd and Twitter. Now, what does the Assembly do?
For the majority of people, this isn’t even an issue. The act of occupation, and the difficulties it raises, is the primary focus. The journey is the destination! Occupiers busy themselves distributing food and blankets, linking protesters to each other and the bathroom, recruiting new protesters, working out disagreements within the group, and making friendly contacts with lawyers, media, elected officials, and, yes, local businesses. There are always improvements that can be made in these areas.
But seriously, what happens when the occupation is working? Why are they working so hard to make it last? Speak to three occupiers, and you will get five answers. Does the protest intend to change anything, or is the act of occupation its only goal? On the secret mailing list, the webmaster of the official occupywallst.org website leans towards the latter:
I just removed Adbusters’ verbiage about the “one demand” from the home page of OccupyWallSt.org. It makes no sense to mention a demand that doesn’t exist.
Some disagree with her, pointing out the unprecedented nature of a protest without goals, but others agree:
Let[']s forget about the demand and promote what this movement already is.
We are building the community we WANT in this world. One that feeds, shelters (if we could…), and cares for all it’s members. A community that hears every voice.
What does it mean to “build a community” that separates you from the parts of the world you don’t “WANT”? Does it imply opting out of the larger community? Does it mean opting out of America itself, and building a new country in its place? The OccupyWallSt.org webmaster, a few weeks later, reaches such a logical conclusion:
Our job is to help the people rise up, not to have a privileged white middle class discussion about how we should ask the government should “fix” itself through abstract financial reform. I want a revolution, not another broken promise from a corrupt government.
The only demand I’ve heard so far at the GA that I felt I could get behind went something like this: Rather than demanding something from the 1%, we should make a demand of the 99%. We demand that the 99% start forming general assemblies in their own communities. We demand that the 99% organize to take back the world stolen from them by the 1%.
There we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: even if some Occupy protesters wanted very simple change, the person who runs the website would never declare success if some mere tax or health care bill was introduced. The goal of the protest, as defined by its organizers, is to replace the government with the Assembly.
Is this an achievable goal? It may be in the future, when the failing economy is finally working people harder than they can stand. But for now, no. The situation is bad but not bad enough to inspire socialist revolution. And the Occupy movement, living large off of donations from the corporate world, is doomed to rupture and die.
Whether it dies with dignity and grabs a bit of political power — disbanding the occupation, and reforming into a Tea Party-style group that meets up on a regular basis — or whether it falls apart as a core of true believers tries to stick it out through the winter is really up to the mob at this point.
(Part 3 later.)
Posted: October 18th, 2011 | Politics | 1 Comment »
Excerpts from The Paranoid Style in American Politics:
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated–if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
[For paranoids,] America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms–he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman–sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving.
He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.
Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds…
The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent–in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique.
Posted: October 16th, 2011 | Excerpts | 1 Comment »
The demand to occupy Wall Street originated with a campaign in Adbusters magazine in summer 2011. Adbusters set a time and place, with the goal of “thinking big”, without any clear plan for what would be done hour-by-hour once the squatters had arrived. This was the beginning and end of their involvement.
Meanwhile, over the period June 14-28, a group of professional left-activists based out of CUNY were occupying a sidewalk near City Hall. This movement made the mistake of publishing its list of supporter groups back in March, a mistake that Occupy would not repeat. The list includes some all-stars: Democratic Socialists of America! Socialist Party! Workers World Party! The organizers of this “Bloombergville” occupation held a twice-daily General Assembly. A leader of the group, Larry Hales, spoke to Worker’s World magazine, looking forward to a more serious program of leftist action:
A mass movement is needed: one that understands that these attacks are aimed at permanently destroying public sector unions and vital social services, one that unites all sectors of the working class and uses many tactics with the goal of pushing back this assault.
Indeed, the CUNY group’s method of achieving a feeling of egalitarianism while discreetly managing the protest itself brought new stability to the grand dream of occupying Wall Street. One of the last updates on the Bloombergville website invites viewers to a joint General Assembly with Occupy, which soon becomes a series. When a puff piece promoting Occupy hits the Washington Post on September 15, two days before the squatting begins, we can see the same poster has been modified just slightly to promote Occupy, demonstrating that the use of Assemblies was not a mere suggestion but represented the full integration of the CUNY group into planning.
Some of the August planning was leaked in the form of e-mails leaked by Andrew Breitbart, from a secret mailing list called “september17discuss“. These e-mails demonstrate basic distrust between anarchist and socialist factions of the protest, which is only natural, given that anarchists want to eliminate all control, while socialists want control over everything. Harsh words like “thuggish mafiossi” are exchanged, and hippies advise the list to stop hating so much and “hug [it] out”. Members of the CUNY group, which was primarily socialist, stress that they speak only for themselves and are not trying to create a socialist bloc within the planning list.
When a student leader named Will Russell was criticized for expressing his dissent with anarchist factions of Occupy in the Village Voice, he defends himself in these e-mails, saying: “As an individual I fully stand with the GA, which we have all worked so hard together to build.” (Russell himself, the e-mails reveal, is affiliated with the International Socialist Organization.) This planning team worked hard to shape the protest’s decision-making process so that it would be ready to go on September 17, while maintaining an illusion of democracy. In fact, the e-mails attest to the fact that many aspects of the protest were preplanned and ready for media consumption by the end of August. The slogan “we are the 99%” (which mailing list members admit “works great as a rhetorical slogan, but unfortunately is not true”) and the Tumblr blog were among the products of the secret mailing list. Legal information was completely worked out to allow the occupiers to remain for as long as possible.
In the Village Voice interview, Russell accurately notes, “Some of our GAs have gone for seven hours”. The General Assembly is not an efficient way to run a protest. Rather, the Assembly is an interesting innovation: it uses the idea of the filibuster as political spectacle, and simply extends it to the entire decision-making process, so that the entire Assembly is a spectacle of people droning on for hours about petty distractions. Everyone is encouraged to share their opinion, even if their opinion is superfluous or nonsense. The use of the “people’s mic”, an idea roughly a decade old, triples the length of every speech. Its model of “consensus” ensures that decisions take a very long time to reach, and when forced to make a decision that effects all its members, the Assembly may splinter into two.
The General Assembly makes for great entertainment for the masses on Twitter. The incessant speechifying built into the system practically invites Internet users to get out the popcorn and follow along, and it leaves the viewer with a sense of thrill, of having witnessed “democracy in action”. But in an emergency, the Assembly would be unable to respond with anything approaching haste. Given the effort with which the CUNY team “built” it, one suspects that it is not meant to. Rather, the goal is to transform the very meaning of the protest. Before the GA, the purpose of protests was to state demands and leave. Before the GA, an “occupation” was built entirely on an external shared goal. With the novel system of Occupy, the purpose and goal of the protest is to draw attention to the General Assembly. If people want the protesters to issue demands, they must come to the Assembly in person and talk it out, or start their own Assembly elsewhere. When occupiers arrive, they do not force attention away from themselves and onto the evildoers, but contrast the evil of the outside world with the goodness of the democratic Assembly.
Without the Assembly, the vague idea of occupying a square to create a refuge of goodness against global evil is too bizarre to work. The protesters have nothing to do with their copious free time, and may indeed be seen as a nuisance. With an Assembly, preferably a very long one, the protesters are seen, at least to possible new members, as having a Purpose. The more attention the Assembly can draw to itself, the more its method can be propagated throughout the country, and throughout the world.
What the government and corporations are not, the Assembly is. On this unstated but firm belief, the movement was born and achieved impressive strength, and on it it will die.
(Continue to Part 2)
Posted: October 14th, 2011 | Politics | 2 Comments »
