New Media

Isolated pockets of the Occupy Movement’s anarchic resistance appear to be popping up in cities around North America with almost random timing. The movement is sure to come back hard when the winter snow gives way to Spring sunshine — it’s not like the 99 percent’s complaints have been met (or could be met) so far. And while I have noted with disdain some of the more visible stupidities of the Occupy movement, I’ve also been heartened by some of the signs I’ve seen on the protest sites from Vancouver to New York City.

Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell doesn’t need any more enemies. My latest essay in The Propagandist.

Also, my interview with atheist crusader Ophelia Benson touching on why religion and politics don’t mix very well.

When you consciously align your movement with anarchists, don’t be surprised when the result is anarchy. Years of planning by Vancouver anti-Olympics agitators seems to be up in smoke. Infighting has erupted between more conservative critics calling for non-violence and anarchists throwing out their Leninist vanguard model in favor of Three Stooges tactics.

The pie in lawyer-activist David Eby’s face may not rise to the level of violence in some people’s eyes (despite those inept blowhards who would categorize it as terrorism). Still, it’s hardly a substitute for constructive discourse for a movement that desperately requires a change in tactics if it doesn’t want to become entirely irrelevant over the next few days.

“You just watch seven years of organizing evaporate. It was as if I just watched two chairs through a store window destroy a lot of what lots of people have been trying to do for a long time. There still is that potential to build something bigger. We were on the cusp of grasping something different. We might still, but in my view it took a drubbing on Saturday and it took a worse drubbing on Wednesday. It set such a nasty tone for everything that followed.

“The left in Vancouver is famous for this and there was beginning to be change. That coalition was looking like it could be powerful and change Vancouver’s social justice scene. And then a day later, it faltered. Wednesday’s meeting was one of the nastiest things I’ve ever seen in Vancouver’s political scene.”

The radicals have the initiative. Fortunately for Eby, this time it was just a pie.
Shut Your Pie Hole, Traitor!

I described the protest movement against the Vancouver 2010 Olympics earlier as unable to articulate a unified protest platform to bring in the masses — despite a fairly wide groundswell of anti-Olympics feeling among the general public. This speaks not only to a lack of organization skills (they did have four years to prepare for this, after all) but also very shallow sympathy for the myriad causes stuffed into this counter-culture sausage-fest.

Having failed to win grassroots support, the vanguard has inevitably decided to resort to violence to get the attention they need just to sustain momentum among their relatively sparse membership. This desperation move is just alienating the rest of us even further, at least according to snippets from the local Twitter crowd:

@stephenfung: Olympic protesters are breaking shit downtown and scaring tourists. What’s your cause again? That’s the one I won’t be supporting. K. Thx.

@canucksgirl44: #Vancouver protesters are just a bunch of wannabe hippies anyway. Welcome to the West Coast, lol #realhippieslivedinthe60s

@MitchGarvis: @DanaEpp Yeah but the funny thing is the protesters are all white kids, and the natives are all involved with the games

@steaks: Also protestors damage cause of people they say they are helping. How NGO’s going to raise funds and lobby well when associated to douches?

It’s getting a bit uglier than I expected, given yesterday’s lackluster showing by the perpetually disaffected. But it seems a severely downgraded and ineffective version of the Battle in Seattle is the worst the IOC and the City of Vancouver has to deal with. For now, the Games go on unimpeded.

I wandered among the costumed weirdos and black-masked anarchists at the protest. This was the big anti-Olympics event in Vancouver on the opening day of the Games. I soon came to the conclusion that the Olympics and our city’s politicians have nothing to worry about for the duration of the games and probably for some time to come.

Ask a protester what they were rebelling against that day and you’d almost have to expect Marlon Brando’s answer from the Wild One: “What have you got?” This wasn’t a protest against the Olympics. It was a protest against “the system.” But disaffected oddballs and shadowy loners does not a revolution make.

Accompanied by my friend and fellow National Post contributor Adrian MacNair, I first met a pleasant comrade from the Young Communist League who seemed positively cheerful about the new members his group had signed up. His organization was present to make the point that government ought to be spending more on the housing, students and day care rather than Olympics. Those are actually policies that I’d be happy to get on board with. Still, you don’t have to be a follower of an ideology legitimizing mass murder and gulags to get that done. He seemed awfully polite. I assume he’ll go mainstream at some point an inevitably join up with the NDP.

Then I met the man disguised by a mask imprinted with the words “free speech area”. When I asked him what he actually had to say about the Olympics — or anything, for that matter — he clammed up. Evidently, free speech is a right best reserved for times other than when pretty much everyone in the world wants to know what you have to say.

I met a young Cree woman who carried a sign that claimed “Canada is Illegal”. Her group, “No One is Illegal”, evidently believes that the Olympics organizers ought to have gotten the written consent of every living First Nations person in the country before proceeding with the event. The enthusiastic support of the Four Host First Nations that have actually resided here since before the arrival of the first Europeans evidently wasn’t good enough.

Next up was the lady in town from Sochi to protest having the next Olympics in a region steeped in the memory of the 100-year old genocide of 1.5 million Circassians by Czarist Russia. She seemed earnest enough. But I honestly don’t know if Russians, much less Canadians, will even see a real connection between this historical tragedy and the 2014 Winter Olympics. Besides, if the Russians can’t do anything official on a part of their territory that hasn’t already been steeped in blood or mired in historical injustice, well, the world’s biggest country is going to have an awful time finding anywhere they can hold any sort of international event.

Then there was the group shouting “Shut down the tar sands!” Protest signs indicated that the Olympics were somehow responsible for mass-murder as a result of our odd habit of digging up stuff out of our ground that people all over the world seem to need to run their factories and heat their homes. I have to confess, I never bothered to talk to anyone about this. I’d already gone down enough rabbit holes.

The point is that the protesters against the Olympics are guided by a hundred different agendas. None of them really has much to do with the Olympics. That’s why the event only pulled in a few hundred angry souls, surrounded by a larger number of curious spectators who were not necessarily in sympathy with any of their goals.

The time to disrupt the games was clearly on the first day. But the lunatic fringe seems only to have alienated a wider base by their odd rhetoric. They didn’t pull the numbers and by the time the Olympics opening ceremonies were set to begin, most of the protesters who came out were already sullenly on their way home to plot and plan… and probably do nothing else for the next few weeks. The reinforced lines of police, some on horseback, that came to greet the rally were not pressured as at the “Battle of Seattle” or similar venues. It seems that the Games can safely ignore the divided and not particularly successful protests from here on in.

I decided to find out for myself what these protests were all about