Who owns the copyright?
Popular movements so often loose their way. Look at ‘Occupy Wall Street': its original goal was to end government subsidies to corrupt banks ‘too big to fail’. Now, it’s fractured into a thousand little movements with different causes. The Tea Party was supposed to make government small– frightening enough to the well-heeled– but thanks to pundits like Glenn Beck, the Tea Party became conflated with other social issues, shrinking its potential supporter base and creating a convenient boogeyman for America’s establishment.
Two things strike me. Occupy and Tea Party, ‘left’ and ‘right’ movements with a lot of cross-over appeal, both began by pushing for ‘less government money for special interests’. They are both popular movements; but their clear aims are undermined with a plethora of tag-along, divisive issues. Their political potential is being dissipated.
The same thing is happening with the Snowden revelations. It began when the media focused on international-state-spying instead of the NSA’s, and other countries’ intelligence services’, domestic spying operations. I had to laugh when Greenwald tweeted this:
Important point from @KenRoth: key to NSA story internationally isn't spying on leaders- it's bulk spying on citizens theguardian.com/commentisfree/…—
Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 11, 2013
Yes, true that. Shame you came to the realization so late, Glenn.
The political charge from Snowden’s revelations is being dissipated by confusing the issue at hand. Take, for instance, the ‘Stop Watching Us’ marches. Part of the meme: angry protestors in Guy-Fawkes-masks from the Hollywood movie V for Vendetta. These masks are also symbolic of hacker groups comprising ‘Anonymous’.
Why those masks? Because Edward Snowden leaked documents through Anonymous? Because Snowden’s girlfriend wore a mask in her blog-photo? Or because Anonymous organizers want some of Snowden’s stardust to rub off on them, to merge his heroic act into the hacker groups’ general confusion? Anonymous itself has slipped into anarchy, getting involved in everything from high school rape, to squabbling with Wikileaks, to stealing Stratfor data. Oh yeah, and the FBI managed to penetrate and use Anonymous along the way.
Movements that command wide support are frightening to people in power. That’s why ladies like Dianne Feinstein get bitchy when the public threatens to take away their security blanket domestic surveillance powers.
The only people who benefit from frustrated popular movements are those in power and their lap-dogs. Do these movements frustrate themselves through the inherent incompetence of the general public? Or do folks like Glenn Beck, or Jacob Appelbaum, or Glenn Greenwald, do what they do with purpose? Is it possible that government agents penetrate domestic political movements with an eye to castrating them, or does that sort of thing only happen under Tsars, dictators and one-party-states?
It seems, readers, such political tinkering can and has happened in civilized democracies. You may be surprised by my example of one such manipulation: the charmed life of Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, feminist extraordinaire and champion of woman’s rights.
Mrs. Pankhurst built a small, but very visible, political movement around limited suffrage for rich women like herself. To that end, she condoned arson and other violence. Her tactics earned her attention well beyond what her popularity supported and she became a ‘face’ of the wider women’s suffrage movement.
On the eve of World War I, however, Pankhurst told her followers to change their focus. Instead of women’s rights, they would promote the war at all costs.
Why this sudden change of stance? According to historian John Simkin, Mrs. Pankhurst began negotiations with the British government at the start of WWI. The British leadership provided her with GBP 2000 to stop fighting for privileged women’s suffrage and to support the war effort instead. The British Government released all criminal suffragettes from prison too.
Recap: ‘the man’ threw a lot of money at Pankhurst so that she would use her people in service of his war effort.
Pankhurst’s suffragettes stopped breaking windows and burning buildings. Instead, they bullied young men into fighting a stupid war. These were the ladies handing out ‘white feathers’. They charged people who opposed them with being ‘ethnically German’ (!); labor leaders who didn’t support Pankhurst were ‘bolshevik'; dovish politicians were ‘traitors’.
“Mrs. Pankhurst toured the country, making recruiting speeches. Her supporters handed the white feather to every young man they encountered wearing civilian dress, and bobbed up at Hyde Park meetings with placards: “Intern Them All.”
None of this behavior has much to do with rich women’s right to vote, does it? Mrs. Pankhurst’s dogs were turned on the government’s enemies. Now, Emmeline has a memorial statue outside the Houses of Parliament. Who said cheaters never prosper?
We can look back on Pankhurst’s legacy with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. We know that the British government had some clever tricks in their political play-book, and not just in the colonies. We know that for GBP 2000, Mrs. Pankhurst was willing to undermine suffragettes’ work, with no guarantee that their sacrifices would ever be rewarded. We know that Mrs. Pankhurst was a paid political agitator.
Mrs. Pankhurst acted with a definite purpose, and I propose that the guys on our screens– the Appelbaums, Greenwalds and Becks of the world– do too. They’re our very own foundation-caked Okhrana.
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It may interest readers to know that Alva Belmont, mother to Consuelo Duchess of Marlborough, was an ardent supporter of Emmeline Pankhurst and paid to bring Pankhurst’s militant ways Stateside. (It was Consuelo’s fortune that paid for Chruchill’s political career.)
As part of her feminist efforts, Alva Belmont hired a young step-and-fetch called Clare Boothe. Clare would eventually become a congresswoman, famous for her affair with British spy Roald Dahl, her support of America’s involvement in WWII and her penchant for black ops. It’s a small, small world.
