Daily Archives: October 27, 2011

Frye on “Pastoral Anarchism”

News report on Marine sergeant and Iraq war veteran Shamar Thomas facing down NYPD officers for assaulting and arresting peaceful demonstrators.

Frye in Notebook 19, c. 1967:

There were always two sides to anarchism: one a pastoral quietism, communal (Anabaptist, Brook Farm) or individual (Chaplinism). Its perfect expression, in an individual form, is Walden, in a communal form, News from Nowhere. The beats & hippies with their be-ins and love-ins, the “Dharma bums,” are the faint beginnings of a new pastoralism. The hysterical panic about organization, full employment, keeping the machines running, & the like, is now waning as it becomes possible to do other things than work. (CW 9, 99)

Occupy Police Violence

Video showing police taking close aim and directly firing upon protesters coming to the aid of someone wounded in the head by a tear gas canister. This is a very dangerous thing to do. It can kill.

After the violent assault on Occupy Oakland — tear gas, rubber bullets, high impact bean bags, percussion grenades, sonic cannons — that left a Marine veteran, Scott Olsen, representing Veterans for Peace in critical condition in hospital — it’s clear that excessive force is now in play. Since Oakland, Occupy protests in other cities and in other countries are receiving ultimatums.

Because the use of overwhelming force to clear public spaces of peacefully assembled citizens has become an option for the authorities, I will now post video of it.

The reason the footage above and below is raw is that police ordered a local television film crew to shut off their cameras before moving in.

Video depicting heavy tear gas attack and injury