Adbusters, the radical, Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine,
credited by many media outlets for launching the Occupy Wall Street protests,
has put out an ad calling for 50,000 protestors to “Occupy” the G8 summit in May. And they are not calling for peaceful protest.
The
Adbusters ad shows a picture of policemen beating up a defenseless protestor, and comes with the caption: “In the Tradition of the Chicago 8.” The Chicago 8 were radicals who incited riots in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention. The 1968 convention unrest became so legendary that the band Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young) wrote a
song about it called “Chicago.” The “tradition” of the Chicago 8 included calling for displays of
public fornication and attacking police.
According to the
official statement of Adbusters (titled Tactical Briefing #25), “On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.”
The ad threatens to shut down the economy if their demands are not met: “And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.”
So the same group that
called for the Occupy Wall Street protests in the first place is now calling for protestors to shut down the entire economic system of a city if their demands are not met, in the tradition of people who brought us the 1968 Democratic convention riots.
The claim that the Occupy Movement is composed of peaceful protestors seeking constructive and meaningful change stopped being credible long ago.
