There is nothing noble in word warfare. It’s the dirty tricks playbook from Agitation to Zeal, dripping poison into the wells of popular dissent and intoxicating constructive debate with words of division, hatred and conflict. It’s been around since man gained use of words, and is now facing its greatest opponent: the unification of the ongoing protests under a single message. The PTB are not worried about the warm bodies congregated in protest, that’s just crowd control. What scares them is the unpredictable meme stew bubbling in the protestor’s word cauldron cooking up a killer meme impossible to contain.
For a bunch of people to join in protest there must be some sort of cohesive force or attraction at play, a mutual interest or need that creates spontaneous phenomena outside the ordinary social order. What is different about the OWS protests, as with the preceding 15-M movement in Spain, is that the groups coalesce not around a slogan but around a shared feeling of discontent that focuses on many different facets of the same underlying problem. This mosaic of messages is the meme stew, brought to a simmer by the physical exchange between protestors, patiently stirring and waiting for the word to emerge from the alchemy of the collective mind.
But the war of the words is raging far beyond the vanguard of protestors at the front lines. This is not a drill, this is all-out war for command of the message and the hit teams are already in full perception management mode to deflect or coopt the words coming from the OWS. The mainstream media with its usual kneejerkoff labels, the politico machinery trying to “build on” the protests, the whining shills and the planted fifth columnists like the one in the photo below (go gals!) are hard at work filling the battlefield with smoke and noise to shroud the unity of the protesters under the illusion of division.
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