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LETTER: Protest speculation inaccurate

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Staff

While I really appreciated the interviews with various people involved in the Occupy movement, I was less impressed with the speculation by people who weren’t actually involved. The “What’s wrong with this picture?” article (Nov. 17) said the anarchists in town are happy breaking things to further their agenda, then referenced the Greenbridge protest as a mini-riot. Something’s either a riot or it’s not, and in my book spraying silly string and moving furniture is not. The level of misinformation around this event should have been obvious when Tim Toben claimed in the Indy that a window had been broken, and later in that same article a list of damaged items noticeably did not include a window. As somebody who was one of the legal protesters outside, I can say that the reason for this discrepancy is because Toben was lying to drum up outrage around what was really not that crazy of a protest.
Similarly, the author implies the building occupation somehow damaged property. Anyone with one eye could see from the graffiti that had collected on the inside of the windows that the building was already unlocked. “Breaking and entering” is a charge that covers entering any building illegally and does not mean that anything was actually broken; not differentiating just sounds ignorant.
But the real problem here is that both these instances take the story of those in power as the truth, which is just bad journalism.
In Mark Chilton’s essay, the level of historical revisionism engaged in when he claims that Indian independence, civil rights and especially the end of South African Apartheid were achieved through nonviolent means would make any high school history teacher blush. In the case of India, this view only flies if you view the entire movement as one man and entirely ignore all the armed groups fighting for liberation at the same time and that the British negotiated with Gandhi because he was the leader that wouldn’t disrupt their business interests in India.
Similarly, the civil rights movement was a wide variety of groups including Deacons for Defense; Black Panthers; Monroe, N.C. NAACP; Black Liberation Army; autonomous militant groups in Oxford, N.C.; and of course Malcolm X – none of whom were nonviolent and all of whom were very influential in that movement.
As for South Africa, the ANC was every bit a militant group that engaged in armed struggle.
To rewrite history in this way one would have to be ignorant in a way I don’t think Chilton is, and so it really just comes off as disingenuous.

Mike Cohen
Orange County

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