The Cleveland Five are a sad-sack collection of wannabe
terrorists if there ever was one. The amateurish young men who plotted to
destroy a bridge outside Cleveland last week give the impression of needing the
attention of a guidance counselor as much as a federal prosecutor.
But there’s no mistaking the seriousness of their
attempted act. They allegedly planted what they thought were live bricks of C-4
underneath a well-traveled bridge connecting two suburban Ohio communities and
repeatedly tried to detonate them.
The Cleveland Five have the honor of being the first
bombers spawned by Occupy Wall Street, and may not be the last. They rejected
the nonviolence advocated by Occupy Cleveland’s leaders, but they were active
in the movement and perfectly representative of the “black bloc” anarchism that
is a part of it. If their stupidity and recklessness are different in degree
from their fellow self-styled revolutionaries, they are not different in kind.
The Cleveland Five are the Left’s homegrown terrorists.
Accused ringleader Douglas Wright was noted for his quiet
commitment to Occupy Cleveland. Fellow plotter Brandon Baxter got arrested
protesting foreclosures and organized an event called “Occupy the Heart
Festival” that was supposed to kick-start Occupy Cleveland after a moribund
winter. Another plotter, Josh Stafford, listed Occupy protests on Facebook as
his job. Yet another, Anthony Hayne, signed the lease for a warehouse used as
living quarters by Occupy Cleveland protesters.
The Cleveland Five are the pathetic sons of Occupy —
rootless, underemployed, drunk on a sophomoric radicalism, alienated from the
American system of democratic capitalism to the point of lawlessness. One
Occupy leader told the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer that Wright — a drifter with no
known address and a vaguely checkered past — struck him as altogether
“stereotypical.”
An FBI informant met Wright at an Occupy Cleveland event
where he was part of a group wearing the traditional black boc regalia of masks
and black clothing. They struck up a relationship, and Wright confided that he
and fellow anarchists wanted to make a dramatic statement against corporations
and the United States government. Wright talked about knocking the bank signs
off buildings in downtown Cleveland. The plotters mused about bombing
everything from the Klan to the Federal Reserve until they settled on the
Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge.
It would be instantly rendered a shovel-ready project as
a symbolic blow against the system. Despite their exertions, the plotters
couldn’t set off the inert explosives and were soon thereafter swept up by the
FBI. It had to be a relief to “99 percent” commuters who didn’t know they were
participating in their own repression by driving back and forth on State Route
82 over Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
As far as terroristic “propaganda of the deed” goes, an
Ohio bridge doesn’t make any less sense as a target than the Greenwich
Observatory that anarchists wanted to destroy in Joseph Conrad’s novel The
Secret Agent. Blowing up a bridge is like smashing a window — a favorite
pastime of the anarchists at Occupy protests on the West Coast — only on a much
larger and more hazardous scale. The spirit of nihilistic destructiveness is
the same.
As is the flouting of laws and authority. This tendency
isn’t limited to anarchists but is at the heart of Occupy. Writing in The
Nation, Michael Moore imagines “nonviolent assaults” (whatever that means) on
Wall Street and “wave after wave of arrests” in an attempt to shut it down. The
romance of confrontation with the police is more central to Occupy than any
specific agenda item. The movement welcomes a “diversity of tactics,” which
means accepting the masked anarchists who are delighted so long as stuff gets,
in the charming words of Wright contemplating his bridge, “f–ed up.”
If the Cleveland Five had been right-wing haters of the
government, everyone in America would know their names by now. Instead, they
are a neglected sign of what nastiness lurks in Occupy’s fetid ideological
stew.
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