on the protests attendant on the wto, g-8 and other economic summits:
anyone who studies the history of populist protest movements will quickly learn that they are easily defeated by the sophisticated organizations against which they protest.
they are easily inflitrated, with passive informers as well as agents provocateur (the term enters the english lexicon in 1919, at the height of the anarchist movement in Europe).
by encouraging or simply engaging in provocative actions, these agents provide legitimacy for open hostilities on the part of conventional police, military and paramilitary organizations.
one need not look too far into the past of all nations, including our own for blatant examples of dirty wars: the infiltration of the civil rights movement by the FBI in the 60’s being the most obviously sinister, illegal and insidious in its outcome — by sowing distrust, tacitly encouraging terrorism on the part of white southerners, many disenfranchised segments of this movement have yet to come to peace with a society that doesn’t even acknowledge the wrongs done in the name of justice.
but many other movements were even more thoroughly discredited and destroyed by this mechanism, and remain tainted in the public’s mind and conventional wisdom.
the labor movement, the agrarian populist movement, and the socialist movements among them.
these movements were and are democratic in nature, but run contrary to capitalist interest and so were destroyed intentionally and without remorse.
this is the fate that awaits the environmentalists at the end of their hard journey.
admire them their innocence, but pity them their naivete