Forum Post: Burning an American flag at a protest....

Burning an American flag at a protest....

...is an incredibly counterproductive, destructive act to do. This movement is four months old. It is struggling financially as donations wane. Police evictions are becoming increasingly brutal.

The movement needs the broadest possible support from the American people.

That the movement has lasted this long is, in itself, amazing. Furthermore, it has changed the lexicon of political discourse in this country. Public debate over corporate personhood, the corrupting effects of unchecked influence peddling on an ostensibly democratic system and the inherent economic, political and social inequities enshrined in our laws are all being discussed in a way that would have hardly seemed believable before that handful of brave souls camped out in what we now refer to as Liberty plaza.

The terms 1% and 99% are now household words, and their meanings are universally understood.

The movement surprised the country and the world.

Predictably, corporate interests and the media and politicians who do their bidding at once dismissed the movement and tried to eradicate it. Their lack of success in so doing is a testament to the resilience of the protesters and to the appeal of their message.

"We are the 99%" as a slogan and a social, economic battle cry, is brilliant. Implicit in that message, however, is the identity of the movement as a mass movement, representing the vast majority of the citizenry. Burning a flag, however, is likely to drive away many of the people whom the movement should be trying to recruit.

This issue is not one of free speech. Flag burning is protected by judicial precedent. Burning a flag you do not own, obviously, is not.

This is an issue of how we wish to portray ourselves, and why. Propaganda, for lack of a better term, is a critical part of any resistance movement. It shapes debate. It gains followers.

In any movement, the conduct of those in the movement is, in itself, a form of propaganda. In an age of 24 hour "news" cycles and nearly universal access to visual recording technology, we have to expect that our actions will be recorded and those images distributed.

When pictures of Occupiers burning an American flag emerges on the web, as they have in the wake of recent events in Oakland, we have to expect that they will be used to discredit the movement, its goals and its motives.

The context will not matter. Whether the police attacked the protesters, or vice versa, will not matter.

The damage will be done.

This situation is not without historical precedent. The Lawrence textile strike of 1912 was one of the most dramatic labor victories in U.S. history. It was lead by the IWW a radical syndicalist labor union. Their leaders were jailed on trumped up charges, and were still on trial a year later. They beat the rap, and a huge victory rally was staged. Anarchists, unaffiliated with the IWW arrived, waving a large banner reading: NO GOD! NO MASTER!

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, then in the IWW, later recalled in her autobiography that the sign did incalculable damage to the union, that it was exploited by anti-union forces and that those same forces could not have paid for such an effective tool by which to discredit the IWW.

Flynn would later go on to found the ACLU, so she was hardly an opponent of free speech.

The Occupy movement today faces the same problem as the IWW did then: the difficulty of maintaining intellectual discipline in a non-hierarchical organization.

The IWW distanced itself from the anarchists and from their message (even though many in the union were probably atheists).

Occupy now would do well to consider the effects that the foolish actions of a few can have on the future of the movement.