Salon rewrites history of violence at Occupy Oakland
From Verum Serum
Writer Rebecca Solnit has a piece up at Salon arguing that Occupy Oakland has been horribly misunderstood. They’re not violent, they’re the victims of violence. Her piece is titled The Truth About Violence at Occupy and the subhead is “In Oakland, the camp coincided with a significant drop in crime. But that wasn’t the story we were told.”
It’s a longish piece with a number of fairly significant problems. For instance, in her litany of example of police violence she writes:
The most important direct violence Occupy faced was, of course, from the state, in the form of the police using maximum sub-lethal force on sleepers in tents, mothers with children, unarmed pedestrians, young women already penned up, unresisting seated students, poets, professors, pregnant women, wheelchair-bound occupiers and octogenarians. It has been a sustained campaign of police brutality from Wall Street to Washington State the likes of which we haven’t seen in 40 years.
