Ted Rall Wants OWS to Choose the Path of Violence Over Reform

Ted Rall Wants OWS to Choose the Path of Violence Over Reform

John Hinderacker/Powerline

He was a featured speaker at October2011, the DC companion movement to Occupy Wall Street. Now he’s got another op-ed once again pining for blood in the streets:

OWS has become so impressive, so fast, that it’s easy to forget its half-assed origin. No matter. The fact that the French Revolution was partly set off by the drunken ravings of the Marquis de Sade hardly reduces its importance.

It also ended in the Reign of Terror and mass murder as Rall surely knows.

As I saw at STM/Occupy DC, there is an ideological split between revolutionaries and reformists. Typical of the reformists: This week OWSers urged sympathizers to close their accounts with big banks like Citibank and Bank of America and move their savings to credit unions and local savings and loans. If revolutionaries get their way, there will be no banks. Or one, owned by the people.

Guess which side Rall supports.

For most citizens, who have been shut out of politics by the fake two-party democracy and the corporate media, simply talking and being heard is an act of liberation. At some point down the road, however, the movement will come to a big ideological fork: do they try to save the system? Or tear it down?

He’s right. They will face that choice.

Trotsky argued for the issuance of “transitional demands” in order to expose the uncompromising, unjust and oppressive nature of the regime.

Yes and he participated in the mass murdering regime of Stalin which, again, doesn’t seem to trouble Rall at all.

reformism is naïve. The system is plainly broken beyond repair. Trying to push for legislation and working with establishment progressives will inevitably lead to cooption, absorption by big-money Democrats and their liberal allies and irrelevance.

Reform, i.e. working within the system, could also lead to a stable four party Republic as I suggested here.

Revolution means violence in the streets. Reform means failure, and the continued, slow-grinding violence by the corporate state: poverty, repression, injustice.

And there it is. That’s as close to saying he wants violence in the streets as Rall will get. But it’s clear that is what he wants and he hopes OWS will deliver. I don’t think he’s right about that, but that doesn’t mean some violent splinter group–a modern day Weather Underground–won’t arise from this. It very well could or perhaps already has.

http://www.verumserum.com/?p=31141