We know when the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protest movement began. On September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, approximately 1,000 activists gathered to “occupy” the space for a peaceful protest against the economic and social inequality suffered by “the 99%” and caused by the corruption and greed of “the 1%.” The planning for OWS began months earlier. In July of 2011, Adbusters Media Foundation, a not-for-profit anti-consumerism magazine based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, published a poster calling for a demonstration against Wall Street, and the international precursors of the movement go back even further. We even know exactly when the FBI became involved.

Government surveillance of the OWS movement started before anybody showed up in Zuccotti Park. In late 2012, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) obtained FBI documents and reported them as “showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011.” That is when the FBI met with the New York Stock Exchange and began notifying businesses that protests against them were imminent. The PCJF report also states that the Department of Homeland Security was part of the coordinated effort to warn corporate America about OWS.

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies conducted preventative actions in cities throughout the United States. Some were wholly unnecessary: “The FBI’s Indianapolis division released a ‘Potential Criminal Activity Alert’ on September 15, 2011, even though they acknowledged that no specific protest date had been scheduled in Indiana,” the PCJF report states. Other actions were entirely misplaced: the Richmond, Virginia FBI communicated information about the local OWS protest to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI obviously had not been there listening when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in a press conference held two days before the OWS demonstration began in Zuccotti Park, said, “People have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we’ll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it.” To their eyes, the protestors were potential, and likely, terrorists.

In January of 2013, The Huffington Post reported reported on the FBI’s surveillance of OWS, telling the story of Tim Franzen, a member of Occupy Atlanta who was investigated by the FBI to determine whether he “might have a cache of weapons for a future violent revolution.” The Huffington Post article implies that the FBI targeted Franzen, who was 35 years old and a Quaker community organizer when he participated in OWS Atlanta, because of his past arrests and imprisonment for teenage drug use and involvement in robberies, stating that “the feds interviewed three different activists at their homes about his activities and beliefs.” (Watch a live television interview with Tim Franzen after his arrest along with the other occupiers at Woodruff Park in Atlanta.)

The FBI took full advantage of its resources to investigate what it saw as the terroristic implications of OWS. The documents uncovered by PCJF show communication between the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), the Federal Reserve, and the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC). DSAC describes itself as “a strategic partnership between the US government and the US private industry that enhances communication and promotes the timely and effective exchange of security and intelligence information between the federal government and the private sector.”

What timely security and intelligence information did DSAC feel it needed to communicate to Wall Street businesses about a nonviolent protest? According to Nicole Colson in a January 2013 article for The Socialist Worker, “despite the Occupy movement’s nonviolent practice—the FBI labeled Occupy protests as potentially violent criminal actions (often by simply using the shorthand label of ‘anarchist’) or even terrorist threats. This later helped justify the police assaults on Occupy encampments in cities across the U.S.”

The FBI’s efforts paid off in just a few short months. On November 15, 2011, the New York Police Department began to evict the occupiers in Zuccotti Park after “a judge upheld the city’s move to clear the park and bar the protesters from bringing back their tents or sleeping overnight,” according to a New York Times article. The article includes Mayor Bloomberg’s statement at the time; he said, “New York City is the city where you can come and express yourself . . . What was happening in Zuccotti Park was not that.”

What was really happening, though, and not just in New York, but in Occupy demonstrations all across the country, according to Naomi Wolf, writing in The Guardian in December of 2012, was an FBI-instigated, big bank-coordinated, top-down crackdown that included “violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves.” She states that the FBI documents “show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.”

The lesson here: when the authorities tell you “People have a right to protest,” they don’t really mean it. Your protest is very likely to be investigated and, as Mara Verhayden-Hilliard, executive director of PCJF, was quoted in The New York Times in December of 2012, “The collection of information on people’s free-speech actions is being entered into unregulated databases, a vast storehouse of information widely disseminated to a range of law-enforcement and, apparently, private entities . . . people do not know when or how it may be used and in what manner.” This must be stopped.

The New Red Scare

Lately, one cannot help but notice that despite the “end of history” and the total discrediting, debunking, destruction, looting, pillaging and castration of Marxism, anti-communist propaganda is actually on the rise both in the United States and especially Europe, to a level rivaling the era of McCarthyism. The European establishment, through the passage of bans on certain symbols and public declarations, seems resolute in their endeavor to equate communism with Nazism to a point where Nazism, or at least Nazi Germany, seems to enjoy slightly better treatment than the ultimate evil that is Marxism. A specter is haunting Europe indeed.

If Marxism is so truly discredited, one wonders why increase the propaganda flow now, twenty years after the great “victory” of capitalism? If we look at the results of various polls reported by Reuters, AFP and the Pew Centre, the answer isn’t hard to imagine. What these polls show is that an increasing, and in some countries rapidly increasing, portion of residents in the former Eastern Bloc are beginning to say that they had a better life under communism. There is also a sizable portion which, while not necessarily holding favorable views toward socialism, is skeptical about capitalism’s viability and benefits. This is not only happening in countries like Russia or Belarus but also in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine and other centers of nationalistic anti-communism. Add to this a major world crisis and a series of recent imperialistic wars on the part of the US, NATO and Russia, and it isn’t difficult at all to imagine why the European establishment, embodied by the organs of the EU and the OSCE, wish, in fact must, attempt to terrify the workers with a distorted view of non-existent states.

The Irony of Capitalists Chastising Socialism

What does this technique boil down to exactly? Why, as our capitalist masters proclaim, should workers reject communism and suffer every humiliation, every false promise and every bloody war, all in hopes that one day the men in suits will suddenly find their fortunes on the rise again, and if we are lucky we might be able to catch a few crumbs from their table? Why should Marxism, communism and socialism be totally off the table, unacceptable, unthinkable and locked away in the dustbin alongside an ideology that proclaimed the virtue of one race of people exterminating others without mercy?

If we are to take the propaganda at face value, their reasoning for this, the reason why we cannot even consider communism as a legitimate ideology, is because the handful of socialist states since 1917, most of which no longer exist today, jailed and executed people. In other words, Marxism and communism are totally off limits because those states inspired by the theory engaged in more or less the same activities that capitalist states have engaged in on a much greater scale for centuries and in fact are still engaging in today.

Yes, it is a double standard, but apparently we workers are supposed to accept it. If you can’t understand this concept, here is a helpful guide, constructed from useful tidbits of information gathered over the years from numerous anti-communist sources. This will certainly help you eke out an existence as you search for jobs and wait for our “natural betters” to sort out this crisis so we can all go back to buying shit we can’t afford.

Moral Guide for Capitalists

Capitalism: capitalism and capitalist countries cannot really be blamed for any atrocities they commit, because unlike socialist countries they did not use the term “capitalist” in their official political titles. They also did not, to the best of my knowledge, acknowledge “capitalism” as a system in their constitutions and/or relevant legal documents. It’s no use pointing out all the atrocities committed in the name of anti-communism. Things like the Vietnam War, coups throughout Latin America, Europe and Asia and imperialist invasions and military campaigns cannot be used to indict capitalism because there were people in those countries who disagreed with such policies, and many people feel bad about them today.

Trust our ruling class, they have evolved past the old tactics of assassinations and foreign interventions, and in the future they will do better. They just need to wrap up things in Afghanistan and Iraq first…and prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons…and oversee Cuba’s transition to liberal democracy…and secure Colombia…and…uh…er…Change! Hope!

Communism: communists are directly responsible for all early deaths which occurred in the countries they controlled. Any attempt at communist revolution will inevitably lead to more excesses, et cetera. Communists do not seek to improve anyone’s lives—all they are concerned with is power.

Capitalism: if someone points out how communists and suspected communists as well as leftists were persecuted, arrested, jailed, shot and lynched in the United States, always be sure to point out that this was far less than the number of people sent to the Gulag system in the USSR, ignoring for example, that the percentage of the adult population behind bars in America today is much actually higher than that of the USSR under Stalin. Numbers only make a difference if a specific death toll in a non-communist nation was less than that of a socialist one. If the opposite is true, then numbers don’t matter; it’s democide either way.

Communism: if someone tries to point out that “Stalinist” Albania had far lower amount of deaths attributed to the regime even by its enemies, this is unacceptable. Numbers don’t matter – 20 million, 10 million, 5 million, 1 million, a few thousand…it makes no difference and the liberal democratic establishment is terribly outraged by the idea that anyone would try to make comparisons. One death is too many. Unless, if you are a conservative, that individual is an anti-American Muslim, a communist, or just some jackass who isn’t thrilled about the United States or European Union running his or her nation. If you are a liberal democrat, the aforementioned state-sponsored killing is just as acceptable so long as it is not done unilaterally, but rather with the help of powerful European allies and sanctioned by the United Nations.

Capitalism: yes, Munich was a major mistake, and since you had to go and bring it up, so was the non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War but…oh right, yes, the active support for the fascist nationalists from US corporations and the tacit approval of the Royal Navy who watched German ships shell Spanish cities…yes that was a mistake too but…oh okay yes, there was that naval treaty England signed with Nazi Germany to allow it to re-arm…however you must consider…okay yes, there was all the stonewalling against the USSR to prevent any sort of collective security agreement…but if you would kindly stop bringing up those damned historical facts for a second, you would understand that the European countries were just tired! They were tired of war, and because they didn’t want war they decided it would be much better to let a previously weak and poorly armed country transform itself into a heavily armed nation under the aegis of a party whose leaders glorified war with every breath. Everyone knows this is the best way to prevent a war!

Communism: Stalin started WWII! Remember the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact! Remember it and nothing else, particularly anything that occurred before 1939! The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact started WWII, because it was the last major diplomatic action that occurred prior to the war’s beginning. As we all know, the last thing to happen in a sequence of events is automatically the cause of the event which happens after it.

Capitalism: people need to learn to get over things like slavery, imperialism, colonialism, racism, media consolidation, two-party oligarchies, bailouts, aggressive wars, corporate welfare and so on. Why dwell on the past? The Democratic Party is working on a solution; the only thing holding them back is that damned Lieberman! He’s like a one-man army. Just get over with it, and start buying stuff on credit again real soon. Get a mortgage too.

Communism: Katyn!

Communism: A one-party state! Oh, the horror!

Capitalism: behold, a two-party state! That is so much better than a one-party state! Why it’s twice as good as a one-party state! Two parties is democracy!

So as you can see my fellow workers, adjusting and accepting the capitalist narrative isn’t really that hard. You just need to toss out something called logic, and then be willing to accept the moral pronouncements of liberal and conservative commentators and intellectuals at face value, whatever they may be. I can’t wait till they fix this crisis and I can get a mortgage!

The transnational property is located in the Tien-Shan mountain system, one of the largest mountain ranges in the world. Western Tien-Shan ranges in altitude from 700 to 4,503 m. It features diverse landscapes, which are home to exceptionally rich biodiversity. It is of global importance as a centre of origin for a number of cultivated fruit crops and is home to a great diversity of forest types and unique plant community associations.

A teenager is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his friend, Dr. Emmett Brown, and must make sure his high-school-age parents unite in order to save his own existence.