Stakeholder:
Opponents to the Occupy Movement
This
article is attempting to articulate that the Occupy movement was too
radical. It begins by giving a bit of a
background, and then quickly switches to a more dire tone, conveying the eerie
message that “Occupy Wall Street is both invisible and omnipresent”, meaning
that the real force behind the movement hasn’t gone away. The author believes
this is a serious issue, even going as far as to say that the “movement
promoted anti-American, anti-Western, anti-capitalist revolutionary domestic
change”, an extremely bold statement appealing to the pathos of conservative
America. The real crux of the article is
its constant references to Obama and his sympathies with the “ideals and
tactics of the extreme left”. This is another element of emotional appeal,
there is nothing that modern American conservatives love to hate more than the
president, and all that is required to paint a movement as negative is to show
that he has sympathies for it.
The author even
brings up a comparison to the Arab Spring, and mentions that it promoted
“jihadist islam”. I found this assertion to be extremely interesting not only
because I disagree that the Arab Spring promoted such a thing, but also because
it honestly seems like it’s thrown in the middle of the article just to make a
reference to Islam, another play on the fears of right wingers. I just
completely disagree with everything this article to attempting to convey. Not
only is it poorly written and shows a complete lack of regard for the political
facts of the US at the time, the real topic of the article, that Occupy was a
radical movement, is something I see as completely false. This author seems to
have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is he is condemning, and if he
thinks that people asking for a higher minimum wage is an example of
“anti-Capitalist revolutionary domestic change”, then he has a fundamental
misunderstanding of what it is to be poor as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment