> I know that seems hard to swallow. I get the sense that a lot of people
here are so excited by OWS that they're
> unwilling to believe that an
appreciable fraction of the people in it hold views so much at variance
with their own
But how much of an "appreciable fraction" are people like Natasha? Honestly, anarchist cranks and weirdos have been an irritant in all mass social movements. Despite contemporary anarchists trying to claim the legacy of the IWW, for example, Bill Haywood actually had contempt for them. Or the Seattle and post-Seattle movement, where anarchists tried to stake some sort of ownership claim on the movement. In fact, here in Berlin, the most visible and effective force organizing buses to Genoa in 2001 was Linksruck, a Trotskyist group affiliated to the British SWP, and not any "anarchist" forces.
Anarchist love to presume to speak for social movements. As Hal Draper and August Nimitz have documented, the anarchists have always been the most excessive vanguardists going back to the era of Bakunin.
As Carrol has pointed out with regard to various crazies in American SDS: they're always there. You work around them.