Five of One...

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Naming the group after their city of origin and its number of members since the nihilistic left won't own them, Rich Lowry notes that the "Cleveland Five" aren't getting much press from media outlets otherwise sympathetic to the Occupy movement.

Who are the Cleveland Five?

The Cleveland Five are a sad-sack collection of wannabe terrorists if there ever was one. The amateurish young men who plotted to destroy a bridge outside Cleveland last week give the impression of needing the attention of a guidance counselor as much as a federal prosecutor.

But there's no mistaking the seriousness of their attempted act. They allegedly planted what they thought were live bricks of C-4 underneath a well-traveled bridge connecting two suburban Ohio communities and repeatedly tried to detonate them.

The Cleveland Five have the honor of being the first bombers spawned by Occupy Wall Street, and may not be the last. ...
Lowry spends much of his piece arguing that these terrorists are hardly fringe figures in the movement, but then ends with the following interesting observation:
If the Cleveland Five had been right-wing haters of the government, everyone in America would know their names by now. Instead, they are a neglected sign of what nastiness lurks in Occupy's fetid ideological stew.
Lowry is correct that the terroristic element of Occupy is being ignored, but it's interesting to consider why. Are these men not modern-day "folk" "heroes" of the press because idealism (however naive) no longer animates the left? Or is it so conventional nowadays to want to steal from the "One Percent" that further admitting where that road will lead might cause too many people to start questioning such wisdom? I think it's a little bit of both.

Occupy isn't a reawakening of the left: It's a death rattle. This is why it no longer suits the left to lionize its own terrorists, while leftists are more than happy to smear their opponents by association with non-leftist terrorists.

-- CAV

2 comments:

Jim May said...

Option B -- fear of clarity -- is the dominant motive here. The emotional essence of it is a sort of anger at mere physical -- or in this case, logical -- reality to conform to their wishes.

As to whether it's a death rattle, I don't know. The rewriting of history the Left used to detach itself from the National Socialist movement was a similar move, done from similar motives. It's 70 years later, and socialists are still being elected worldwide and increasingly here in America.

Seems more like an undead zombie rattle to me.

Gus Van Horn said...

Jim,

I think the left is dead in the sense that it can't easily pretend to offer something untried or revolutionary to thinking individuals.

But, yes, in terms of its being a default ideology that most people just slip into, it's undead and well, so to speak.

Gus