January 24, 2011
Reality Check For the NY Times: Piven's Strategy Inherently Calls for Violence
The New York Times long ago ceased being a news organization, and now exists primarily as a propaganda organ for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. It is no surprise that they no only ignore the violence being called for by leading leftist ideologues, they also try to spin the aggressors into being the victims.
The thing is, the left is calling for socialism, and calling for it via violent action.
Calls for the escalation and manipulation of violent rioting have long been central to Piven's strategy. Her 1977 book with Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, detailed the rationale behind the infamous crisis strategy of a decade before. The core argument is that the poor and unemployed are so isolated from the levers of power in America that their greatest potential impact is to withhold "quiescence in civil life: they can riot."At the heart of the book, Cloward and Piven luxuriously describe instances of "mob looting," "rent riots," and similar disruptions, egged on especially by Communist-party organizers in the 1930s. Many of those violent protests resulted in injuries. A few led to deaths. The central argument of Poor People's Movements is that it was not formal democratic activity but violent disruptions inspired by leftist organizers that forced the first great expansion of the welfare state.
Piven has called for violence her entire career, and did so recently in The Nation.
The socialist Left can lie about the Tea Party being violent and themselves being the victims all the want. That's bull, and we have the truth, spilling from the mouths of their philosophical and "moral" leaders.
It does cause one to wonder if American exceptionalism can prevail in the face of such a concerted effort to bring out the worst in us. There is obviously already a large minority that lives close to the edge of violence and hops over it on the slightest of pretexts. But the vast majority of Americans has nothing in common with those. If anything, the greater majority of Americans can be depended on to act to suppress those in the violent minority and the "wioting wabble" wanting the redistribution of other people's wealth.
The core argument is that the poor and unemployed are so isolated from the levers of power in America...
That core argument may not be supportable. Even as most of America feels that our government is out of control, we see the solution as to vote out those who have proven to be untrustworthy, not to bring down the govenment altogether. It will take much more than a few cycles of futile voting to get the greater majority to launch into violence against the government.
Posted by: Professor Hale at January 24, 2011 12:56 PMWell, yes, but it isn't "violence-violence."
/Whoopi
Posted by: Steve Skubinna at January 24, 2011 09:13 PM
