Vulcan's Hammer vs. Occupy Wall Street

Vulcan’s Hammer, Phillip K. Dick (Kindle) (written in 1960).  The year is 2029 (!) and Earth is ruled by a supercomputer called Vulcan 3.  An anti-computer movement, led by anarchic, monk-like Healers, rises against the computer.  The human head of this so-called Unity government, Jason Dill, seeks advice not only from Vulcan 3, but its predecessor, the obsolete and de-authorized but still fully functional Vulcan 2.  Vulcan 2 warns that Vulcan 3 will develop self-awareness and begin to act on its own behalf and initiative.  For that reason, Dill withholds information about the Healer movement from Vulcan 3, but Vulcan 3 finds out anyway.  A sympathetic sub-director, Barris, is the main protagonist of the story:  he opposes Vulcan 3, but initially cannot bring himself to switch sides to the Healers.  Ultimately, however, he determines that Vulcan 3 has access to thermonuclear weapons and will not hesitate to wipe out the entire human race if it deems it necessary to protect its own interests, so Barris decides that, as anarchic and “we don’t stand for anything except tearing down the system” as the Healers may be, they are less of a threat to humanity than Vulcan 3.  Moreover, the Unity forces upon which Barris could count on to oppose BOTH Vulcan 3 AND the Healer movement are nonexistent; so he allies himself with the Healers.  

            The plot of this story is so much like “Terminator” (even down to the year 2029) that I couldn’t imagine Cameron was oblivious to this story.  But Wikipedia says this:

 In Rome, during the release of Piranha II: The Spawning director James Cameron grew ill and had a dream about a metallic torso dragging itself from an explosion while holding kitchen knives.^[2] When Cameron returned to Pomona, California he stayed at Randall Frakes' home where he wrote a draft for The Terminator. Cameron later stated that his influences while writing the script were 1950s science fiction films, episodes of The Outer Limits as well as contemporary films including The Driver and The Road Warrior.

...Writer Harlan Ellison stated that he "loved the movie, was just blown away by it", but believed that the screenplay was based on an episode of The Outer Limits he had written, titled "Soldier". Orion gave Ellison an undisclosed amount of money and an acknowledgment credit in later prints of the film. Some accounts of the settlement state that "Demon with a Glass Hand", another Outer Limits episode written by Ellison, was also claimed to have been plagiarized by the film, but Ellison has explicitly stated that The Terminator "was a ripoff" of "Soldier" rather than "Demon with a Glass Hand".

As you can see – NO mention of Dick in this whole thing.  He had died in 1982, only shortly before the movie came out, but the story dates from 1960.  It seems his estate was asleep at the switch.   Here, by the way, is the plot to “Soldier” (also from the Wikipedia entry for this particular Outer Limits episode):

Eighteen hundred years in the future, two foot soldiers clash on a battlefield. A random energy weapon strikes both and they are hurled into a time vortex. While one soldier is trapped in the matrix of time, the other, Qarlo Clobregnny, materializes on a city street in the year 1964.

Qarlo is soon captured and interrogated by Tom Kagan, a philologist, and his origin is discovered. Qarlo has been trained for one purpose, fighting, and that is all he knows. Progress is made in "taming" him; eventually Qarlo comes to live with the Kagan family.

But the time eddy holding the enemy soldier slowly weakens. Finally he materializes fully and tracks Qarlo to the Kagan home. In a final hand-to-hand battle, Qarlo sacrifices his life to kill the enemy and save the Kagan family.

In a limited sense, the “time traveling opponents seek each other out” element of the plot is evident in “The Terminator”.  But Cameron’s overall scenario, of Skynet developing self-awareness and destroying the human population to protect itself, is almost verbatim from Dick’s story. 

The Healer movement described in this book is very similar to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement.  As I’ve noted several times in the past, the anti-World Bank/IMF group is extremely vocal in its opposition to capitalism and Wall Street, but is equally silent about its actual goals and objectives, besides simply trying to shut down the system or embarrass as many people as possible.  Among others, the Anonymous movement has been described as “anarchist”.  However, it seems that Adbusters was the primary organization to instigate these protests and Anonymous has simply encouraged its own supporters to join in.

Actually, identifying the Occupy Wall Street movement with the Healers in Vulcan’s Hammer gives the OWS too much credit: the Healers opposed what was clearly a totalitarian dictatorship run by an all-powerful machine, Vulcan 3. OWS appear to be, at best, yet another vaguely articulated attack on capitalism per se by a movement which NEVER explains what type of system it favors.  Are you socialist?  Are you anarchist?  If you oppose capitalism, what do you support?

One thing that Wall Street does not do that Qaddaffi, Syria, and other regimes do:  use armed force to attack protesters.  Where are the Morgan Stanley Armored Divisions?  The Goldman Sachs F-16s spraying Merrill Lynch Napalm on the crowds?  The GM & Ford Riot Police?  Even the Pinkerton strikebusting goons are history, quite literally.  Not even US armed forces, or the National Guard, as “proxies” for their corporate puppetmasters, are present.  In DC, the Mall has always been a place for protest marches, and the DC police only arrest people for not having permits or blocking traffic.  No tear gas, no massed ranks of riot police, no Cossacks with sabers chasing unarmed protesters and their baby carriages down the steps of Odessa.

Whatever else it might be, the US government and Wall Street are not totalitarian regimes – and never have been.  North Korea, Red China, and Cuba still are.  I’ve seen some pictures showing “V For Vendetta” imagery among the protesters.  Neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama – nor any other US President, even the much-maligned Richard Nixon – are or were anywhere close to Adolf Hitler, nor any US regime remotely close to the UK dictatorship depicted in “V For Vendetta”, Orwell’s 1984, or Nazi Germany.  Even Franklin Roosevelt, who co-opted the socialists’ agenda and enacted much of what could be found in the Nazi Party’s 25 Points platform of 1920, did not turn the FBI loose as an American Gestapo, and the very worse excesses of his administration, the Japanese internment camps in California, were just that: internment camps and not Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, or even Dachau or Theriesenstadt.  This plague of “moral relativism” and “moral equivalence” is ubiquitous among the protesters.  By making these bizarre and obviously inapplicable parallels, they completely lose any moral credibility or political coherence they might possibly have.  Lyndon LaRouche makes as much sense as they do.

Here’s your challenge, latter-day Marxists and anarchists:  take what we’ve learned from (1) the Paris Commune, (2) Soviet Russia, (3) Red China, (4) North Korea, (5) “Market Socialist” Europe (Sweden, Denmark, etc.), and (6) the capitalist First World, and give us a coherent, sensible blueprint for a fair and free modern day society: its government (if any) and its economic system.  Tell us how that would work not merely in Belgium, Sweden, or Canada, but also in larger countries like the US and Russia with diverse, multi-ethnic populations and huge, complex modern economies.  When you’ve got that all figured out, THEN you can tear down the current system once you’ve figured out what the hell you’re going to replace it with.

And as for freedom of expression, listen up:  you have a right to say what you want.  You have a right to wave placards.  You have a right to get up on a stage and bark and bray.  And you can invite as many of your comrades as you can get to join you at the same time.  But here’s where your rights end:

1.         No right to block traffic – e.g. roads and bridges - simply to inconvenience others you feel are complacent or indifferent to your political agenda;

2.         No right to obstruct pedestrian traffic to museums and other tourist attractions, again as some misguided attempt to disrupt others’ lives because you feel they don’t care enough about your movement;

3.         No right to blow things up, even if you target unoccupied office buildings at 2 a.m. with a warning call, simply to attract attention to your cause (“propaganda by deed”) and stir the general public out of its bourgeois complacency.  This applies whether your goal was to stop the war in Vietnam (The Weather Underground), the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, or Wall Street.