The New York Times celebrates Kalle Lasn

 

“it’s very important for us to win,

and [to] worry about how badly we behave later." 

 - Kalle Lasn

 

BtB just two weeks ago shared with you the profile of one Kalle Lasn, from Discover The Networks. In case you don't remember, here are some of the lowlights, complete with DTN's exhaustive sourcing/links:

.... Emboldened further by “that sort of anarchy cred” which the civil disobedience/“hacktivism” group Anonymous had been demonstrating in recent times, Lasn and his Adbusters associates held brainstorming sessions on how they themselves might effect “some kind of a soft regime change” to diminish the political influence of “finances,” “lobbyists,” and “corporations.”

In an effort to “catalyze” a protest movement against those forces, Lasn and Adbusters “put feelers out on our [Internet] forums” suggesting a mass demonstration in the hub of New York City's financial district. Thus was born the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, whose first public rally was held on September 17, 2011.

After some OWS demonstrators subsequently became involved in conflicts with police officers, Lasn said that “police brutality actually helps the movement” by drawing media attention.

While Lasn concedes that every popular movement faces the “danger” that its idealistic leaders may eventually “turn into monsters,” he nonetheless believes “it’s very important for us to win, and [to] worry about how badly we behave later — right now we need to pull the current monster down.”

 

Imagine our surprise on seeing this in today's New York Times:

 

 

Kalle Lasn, the editor and co-founder of Adbusters magazine, says "one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics."

 

 

 The Corporate American Flag, created by Kalle Lasn's Adbusters

 

.... The attention brought by the Occupy protests has revived questions about [Kalle Lasn's] views on Jews and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2004, Adbusters published an article claiming that a large percentage of neoconservatives behind American foreign policy were Jewish(*).

As a result, Mr. Lasn was called anti-Semitic, a charge he denies. He remains incensed that the incident was mentioned in a recent column by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist, and he has been involved in a discussion with the paper’s letters page about how he can address it.

“There’s not an anti-Semitic bone in my body,” he said, adding, “If we’re going to start wars based on the power of neocons’ influence in foreign policy, I think people should know who they are.”

He has also been accused of playing off the image-oriented culture that dominates advertising, instead of rejecting it outright. But Mr. Lasn said he believed in the power of media to subvert traditional power structures.

“If you’re able to come up with a very sexy sounding hash tag like we did for Occupy Wall Street, and you come up with a very magical looking poster that seems to have something very profound about it, these devices push these memes, these meta memes, into the public imagination in a very powerful way,” he said.

 

Who knew?  Lasn and his comrade Micah White had a piece at the Washington Post ~ ... Occupy Wall Street will keep up the fight:

 

.... The people’s assemblies will continue with or without winter encampments. What will be new is the marked escalation of surprise, playful, precision disruptions — rush-hour flash mobs, bank occupations, “occupy squads” and edgy theatrics. And we will see clearly articulated demands emerging, among them a “Robin Hood tax” on all financial transactions and currency trades; a ban on high-frequency “flash” trading; the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act to again separate investment banking from commercial banking; a constitutional amendment to revoke corporate personhood and overrule Citizens United ; a move toward a “true cost” market regime in which the price of every product reflects the ecological cost of its production, distribution and use; and with a bit of luck, perhaps even the birth of a new, left-right hybrid political party that moves America beyond the Coke vs. Pepsi choices of the past.

In this visceral, canny, militantly nonviolent phase of our march to real democracy, we will “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” We will regroup, lick our wounds, brainstorm and network all winter. We will build momentum for a full-spectrum counterattack when the crocuses bloom next spring.

 

   BUT But but...

... in the Times today, Lasn "insists they have no interest in a continuing leadership role, nor is it their job to speak for the movement..."

 

Far be it for me to accuse radical antisemitic leftists, who want to effect "soft regime change," of being inconsistent in their public statements. According to Lasn, we will worry about any "bad behavior".... later.

Shalom,

Yael*

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

These people are out of touch with the real world -- which is what makes them dangerous. After all, Hitler was -- in a very true sense -- also out of touch with the real world, and look at what he wrought. One sentence (out of many) that shows just how out of touch these guys are is this: "The people's assemblies will continue with or without winter encampmants." That sounds like Washington speaking about his troops at Valley Forge. Or take that sentence about floating like butterflies and stinging like bees; these effete punks actually see themselves as latter-day Mohammed Alis. The same grandiosity, the same sense of historic purpose, of doing destiny's work, runs through just about everything these guys write or say. They're in the grips of a utopian delusion, a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Anyone who doubts that such people are dangerous need only read Norman Cohn's "The Pursuit of the Millenium." Scary.