As the Cold War was ending, journalist Christ Hedges found himself meeting in a Leipzig cafe with leaders of East Germany’s underground opposition movement. They told him they were really hopeful that change could come soon – maybe even in a year or two.

It was November 9, 1989. Within hours, the East German regime had given up and the Berlin Wall was coming down. Revolutions can happen fast, when the regime is rotten enough.

In a talk this week to Occupy Harvard, the TruthDig columnist lays out in detail how the Occupy Movement can bring about the same peaceful transformation here in America.

“I think,” Hedges says, “that this corporate system is as decayed, as corrupt, as hollow and as vulnerable as the Communist regimes that I saw topple in 1989.”

For Eastern Europeans, breaking the back of the Communist oligarchy was a matter of personal survival. But Hedges says that this time, it’s a lot more than personal. If we don’t win this time, “We will be finished. Not just finished economically, but finished in terms of the assault on the eco-system on which the human species depends for survival. This is, quite literally, a fight for life.”

Highlights (courtesy of NBBooks at DailyKos):

“Harvard exists to feed the plutocracy… It is an institution that epitomizes the dead ideas of the one percent.”

America today is well down the track described in Crane Brinton’s 1938 book, The Anatomy of Revolution – including the creation of a rapacious oligarchy, the destruction of the middle class, and the breakdown of the process to train and absorb lower-class members into the system.

“Remember, in the seventeenth century, speculators were hung.” He notes that Solon forgave all debts in the Athenian empire after “the criminal class took control. And that’s essentially what we have.”

“They made war against all those elements in society that had the power to transform… There’s a huge difference between teaching people what to think and teaching people how to think. There is a very subtle and very pernicious assault on those disciplines that teach you how to think, because thinking is subversive. Thinking forces you to challenge assumptions and structures, and question them…”

[The East German leadership] sent a paratroop division down to Leipzig – but they won’t attack the demonstrators. It’s always when the foot soldiers of the elites won’t carry out the forms of draconian control, that these dead regimes crumble. That’s why it is so important not to respond to police provocation, and to respect the blue uniformed police who are working class.

That’s why it is so important not to respond to police provocation, and to respect the blue uniformed police who are working class. “We have something to offer and something to say. And the only language they’re capable of is that of force. And it just exposes them for who they are.”

When he was arrested in front of the White House, along with military veterans, many police officers – almost all of whom are also National Guard vets and had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan – quietly told them, as they handcuffed them, “Keep doing what you’re doing. These wars stink.”

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