A Series of Tubes

Executive Vice Chancellor Kliger sent out a comment on the new occupation.  You can see his comment along with two photos of a building tagged and a door being barricaded here.  His post is titled Vandalism at Humanities building.

In response to this, one of the occupiers wrote a blog post.  It is a must read:

http://occupyca.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/letter-to/

There are two things about the post that I want to highlight.  First is the assertion that the intent of the protest was peaceful: “Most American school children with even a cursory knowledge of the history of nonviolent protests from Gandhi to Dr. King, would not fail to recognize the true nature of last night’s events.”

This is an awesome and comically false assertion.  Take a look at the photos on Kliger’s post.  There is a picture of the building tagged with the words “RIOT: coming soon.”

Also read the words of previous posts in order to gain support for the occupation here:

“We only catch sight of the fires of the insurrection to come on the morning after the unrest of the night before.”

fires of insurrection sure sounds peaceful to me.

“Peaceful marches, rallies and symbolic protests, attracting spectacular media attention, will never increase our ranks because this very process of mediation reduces us to passive observers of what is supposed to be our own activity. Organization for action has become an end in itself cut off from the reality of capitalism in decline.”

I mean seriously occupy CA, do you even read your own posts?  This quote is hands down a rejection of peaceful protests.

The second point that occupyca makes that I want to comment on is this:

“as to EVC Kliger’s assertion that students were provoking police officers, this is simply untrue. He was not there, and has relied upon the accounts of the police officers who were. Perhaps he would be interested in hearing what others saw, but I doubt it. There are dozens of eyewitnesses who saw, as well as video footage showing, what actually happened”

Watch the video and see if you hear the words “fuck the police”.  There is yelling and obvious provocation.  If occupyCA is reading this, please watch and listen to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNxCaXi28OQ&feature=player_embedded