Nice work. I think that quote deserves attribution. It was Mario Savio. There is a Youtube clip of it.

I spent most of the day monitoring twitter.

http://twitter.com/coldsnaplegal

Coldsnap Legal's twitter and other twitter channel's of those involved in the direct actions. If the cops weren't doing so I'm smarter than they are. No surprise there. So I had a pretty good picture of what this was all about. All one needs to do is read the website. Had I been planning this direct action, I probably wouldn't have broadcast it like they did but these kids are just kids, and amateurs. It's all a big game to them. Fun and games until someone puts an eye out.

I consider Chip Berlet one of my mentors. He's been doing this a very long time (before most of you were born). He is a former vice-president of the National Lawyers Guild.

Chip Berlet is senior analyst at Political Research Associates, and has been an activist and organizer since he joined the civil rights movement as a high school student and youth delegate for National Council of Churches ecumenical projects in the 1960s.

He wrote this article for RESIST in 1999. It's called Abstaining From Bad Sects. You should read the whole article but this excerpt kind of cuts right to the bone:

Cadres and Ultra-Leftism

Cadre organizations are built along strict lines of obedience to the group's ideology, strategy and tactics. They are sects with particular features involving hierarchical structures and organizational practices rooted in Leninism. Often they are obligated to articulate a specific line or script (or "frame" in sociological jargon) regarding a variety of topics.

One way to enforce a single ideological line or a specific strategy or tactic is to use a process called “democratic centralism.” Under democratic centralism, cadre are expected to engage in a frank discussion and debate internally with other cadre and the group’s leadership. However once a specific position is arrived at, cadre are expected to support the decision, and refrain from any disagreement with or criticisms of the "line" with persons or groups outside of the cadre organization. When people talk about "The Party Line," they mean the line the cadre group members are bound to uphold in public.

Ultra-leftism is an egocentric form of mythopoetic martyrdom whereby practitioners anoint themselves as the beleaguered guardians of the one true political line. They read long impenetrable manifestos at public meetings. They show up at mass demonstrations with helmets and hockey sticks for a game of self-fulfilling prophecy that often results in violence as they hurl themselves at police. They inevitably urge a course of action that is hopelessly out of touch with reality. Even Lenin called this an "infantile disorder."

Theory, structure, organizational practice, and individual behavior interact in complex ways.

Cadre organizations indeed resemble "sects" in terms of internal organization and hierarchy, but not all cadre organizations or their members are “sectarian” in organizational practice. Not all cadre organizations engage in ultra-leftist activities. Some cadre members of ultra-left groups can still act appropriately as individuals in mass organizations.

http://www.resistinc.org/newsletter/issues/1999/12/berlet.html

Somehow I think William Timberman might agree. Paul Rosenberg, too. If he thinks about it. Flame away and call me a jack-booted thug. You have no idea how much it tickles my funny-bone to see you all braying like that jack ass G. Gordon Liddy.

But FUCK this administration. And I know they read this. So FUCK you Bush, FUCK you Cheney. Fuck all of you who have turned everything to shit. I hope you are all charged with war crimes and put in a cold cell and tortured, oh, I mean JUST waterboarded, for the rest of your shitty, worthless, miserable lives.

I am sick of 8 years of this shit. And anyone who votes for McCain - fuck you too. You deserve everything bad that comes to you.

Glenn, I hope to meet you one day to shake your hand. You're a great American.

I think if any of you who don't want to look at the totality of a story were here, saw what I saw, talked to the people I talked to - probably about a hundred strangers over the course of the afternoon - and weren't sitting around speculating idle theories, or weren't spazzed out because one of your colleagues was arrested - you'd probably be thinking differently. There are plenty of good people in this town worried about a large crowd getting out of control. The cops are planning on it going on all week. I want people to protest, I don't want them to screw my town up.

So STFU, Kitt.

-- The Plate

In case you are still reading - although I wouldn't blame you for never returning here again - I just wanted to say I believe you.

I had considered myself a member of this "community" since before Glenn moved to Salon. Perhaps I choose to remain more distant than some as that is my nature. And it enable me to keep my objectivity and see things like this exchange with you (and these people I used to think I knew) more clearly. These people, many of whom I had considered - friends in the on-line sense - have finally jumped the shark. It has been interesting, if not somewhat sad, to watch it happen. To watch them become more and more like the very people they now openly hate has been a little unsettling. I think I've seen enough but like any slow motion train wreck, I may be tempted to keep watching it unfold.

Nietzsche was right.

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.”

I've thought all along that "L.W.M." stood for "Little, Wee Monster".

Chip Berlet has a lot of insights, and while there are often "ultra-leftists" (and, by the way, that's not what Lenin was talking about, he was slandering the entire leftist opposition to Bolshevik centralization, not some gaggle of Moscow black shirted protesters), it's not a magical incantation.

For example, this post by Glenn started off by discussing police raids of people in their houses, and continued emphasizing the arrest of a journalist.

There are lots of discussions one could have of bone-headed individualist protesters more interested in their own weird models of 'provoking' a situation, but that said, it isn't always and at all times the most relevant discussion.

Of course, since at any given protest there is the imminent possibility that individuals & groups may show up to commit provocations or small scale vandalism, maybe it is indeed preferable to lock down any area which is likely to host protesters and pre-emptively arrest journalists & lawyers in order to control these infantile disorders.