Jim wrote:
there are plenty of SDS and Black Panthers running around today, the vast majority never went to jail.
Faustine:
Of course they didn't. The bottom line is that their organizations were torn apart by operations conducted against them,
James A. Donald:
This is incorrect. The black panthers were torn apart because they murdered dissidents, and "dissidents" came to include anyone who wondered if Newton was snorting too much of the Black Panther funds. The same is true to a greater or lesser extent of most of the other armed communist organizations. The first target of those arms was always themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, though this was most dramatic and bloody in the case of the Black Panthers.
Faustine:
The FBI exploited this mindset to the hilt--COINTELPRO kept them all twitching like galvanic frogs.
To blame COINTELPRO for radical leftist internal violence is as silly as blaming Pol Pot and the Ukraine famine on the CIA.
If those radicals were being murdered by the feds, the radical left would have been eager to have them investigated, instead of closing their eyes and looking the other way, and suddenly dropping vanished radicals down the memory hatch.
The way we all reacted shows that we all knew full well who was doing it.
My point was the feds didn't have to murder anybody--play them off each other and they do it to themselves. Without that extra "push"? You're probably right, chances are they would have self-destructed sooner or later. Though it's true Mao made it work-- no matter how many in his own cadre he killed. I guess hippies waving their little red books around in their stupid marches just wasn't enough, huh. Still, if you read the documentation, COINTELPRO was quite a formidable program. I don't see any reason why contemporary half-baked loopy radical groups who espouse violence should expect anything less. Especially now that the national security bureaucracy and their analytic institutions are getting "information warfare" and deception operations down to a science. Ignore it at your own peril... ~Faustine.
-- On 16 Jul 2001, at 15:52, wrote: James A. Donald:
The black panthers were torn apart because they murdered dissidents
Faustine
My point was the feds didn't have to murder anybody--play them off each other and they do it to themselves.
If they were the kind of people who could so easily be tempted to murder dissidents, perhaps the spooks had the right idea.
Still, if you read the documentation, COINTELPRO was quite a formidable program.
Perhaps. The FBI by its very nature tends to do bad things, and we have seen some bad things done by the FBI to people who post on this list. I took a look at a few web pages reporting COINTELPRO, and found them long on unspecified rumors about things happening to unspecified people at unspecified places and times, and very short on any concrete evidence concerning specific people to which specific things had happened, much resembling web pages reporting widespread use of slaves, or widespread alien abductions. Now obviously we know of some real world activities that correspond to COINTELPRO, notably the attack on Randy Weaver, but it seems to me that there is absolutely zero evidence that the authoritarian and self destructive actions of the radical left during the late sixties, the seventies, and the eighties were the result of evil CIA mind rays. If such evidence existed, it would have been prominently displayed on some of the web pages I encountered. I find it much more plausible that commies did bad things, things characteristic of commies, because they were bad people. I did a web search for KGB and COINTELPRO, to find a web page that mentioned bad conduct by all such agencies. I found no relevant hits, from which I conclude that of all the people so vitally concerned about the bad things done by the FBI in the sixties and seventies, not a one is at all concerned about the bad things done by the KGB in the sixties and seventies. Of course it is reasonable for people in the US to be more concerned about US spies that Soviet spies, since the US spies mostly on US people, and the Soviet Union spied mostly on russian people, but still, zero relevant hits? I find that a little odd. This gives me reason to doubt the sincerity, and therefore the truthfulness, of those reporting COINTELPRO --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG CWUGSojScqdtb2OLwAmSDcwtXUw2BbiGQuFlO+64 4RIC9wK5YzoTa1WEOK1TCXmhoxiOg7zoB1ujHqbdZ
On 16 Jul 2001, at 15:52, wrote: James A. Donald:
The black panthers were torn apart because they murdered dissidents
Faustine
My point was the feds didn't have to murder anybody--play them off each other and they do it to themselves.
If they were the kind of people who could so easily be tempted to murder dissidents, perhaps the spooks had the right idea.
Still, if you read the documentation, COINTELPRO was quite a formidable program.
Perhaps. The FBI by its very nature tends to do bad things, and we have seen some bad things done by the FBI to people who post on this list.
I took a look at a few web pages reporting COINTELPRO, and found them long on unspecified rumors about things happening to unspecified people at unspecified places and times, and very short on any concrete evidence concerning specific people to which specific things had happened, much resembling web pages reporting widespread use of slaves, or widespread alien abductions.
Sure, I agree that 98+% of what's out there is crap. That's why it's useful to examine sources (like the book I mentioned) consisting of primary documents. Ditch the nutcase exegesis and see for yourself: not perfectly reliable by any means but at least it circumvents a lot of the paranoid hype...
Now obviously we know of some real world activities that correspond to COINTELPRO, notably the attack on Randy Weaver, but it seems to me that there is absolutely zero evidence that the authoritarian and self destructive actions of the radical left during the late sixties, the seventies, and the eighties were the result of evil CIA mind rays. If such evidence existed, it would have been prominently displayed on some of the web pages I encountered.
I think MK-ULTRA is the project the "evil CIA mind rays" people hang their hat on; you're even more unlikely to find reasonable commentary on that one. Embarassing, really.
I find it much more plausible that commies did bad things, things characteristic of commies, because they were bad people.
True: but then there's always the gray area of exactly what's done in the name of "what bad people deserve" that keeps me uneasy about the whole thing. Have you read Gordon Thomas' book about the Mossad, "Gideon's Spies"? He was allowed to interview all the top agency people, so you can be sure nothing got out the agency didn't want out. Even still, it's a fascinating, hard-hitting look at what happens when an organization of brilliant, ruthless people come to exist in a system with limited accountability: hardcore realpolitik at its most elemental. Interesting to compare to the way things get done (and don't get done)in the US. For instance, they don't have any qualms at all about using state-sponsored asassination a tool of policy--it gets the job done, but at what price? How much of a difference does it make that they face a near-immediate threat from all sides; if the same became true of the US would it somehow become a more appropriate strategy? No easy answers.
I did a web search for KGB and COINTELPRO, to find a web page that mentioned bad conduct by all such agencies. I found no relevant hits, from which I conclude that of all the people so vitally concerned about the bad things done by the FBI in the sixties and seventies, not a one is at all concerned about the bad things done by the KGB in the sixties and seventies.
Besides the obvious hypocricy, part of that comes from the unfortunate tendency to care about "what's close to home" at the expense of a more significant larger picture. Come to think of it, I can't believe more isn't on the web about the horrors of the Stasi; did you catch the stories about how they contaminated people with radiation as a form of tracking and had a huge collection of little jars containing scent samples of all dissidents, in case they needed to round them up? Horrible, check it out.
Of course it is reasonable for people in the US to be more concerned about US spies that Soviet spies, since the US spies mostly on US people,
I don't know if that's really true of the US, I'm sure it depends on which agency you're talking about. Given that the NSA is so much larger than the rest of the agencies combined, it stands to reason that tips the scale toward "foreign", but I could be wrong. Not something you can really know without hard data.
and the Soviet Union spied mostly on russian people, but still, zero relevant hits? I find that a little odd. This gives me reason to doubt the sincerity, and therefore the truthfulness, of those reporting COINTELPRO
No doubt, chalk it up to the crap factor. The original documents say a lot though. ~Faustine.
On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Faustine wrote:
Besides the obvious hypocricy, part of that comes from the unfortunate tendency to care about "what's close to home" at the expense of a more significant larger picture. Come to think of it, I can't believe more isn't on the web about the horrors of the Stasi;
Do some research on the US Army in the 50's... To hark back to a older topic, Black Box and illegal street activity. Consider the "Boston Tea Party". -- ____________________________________________________________________ Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, "Let Tesla be", and all was light. B.A. Behrend The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
--
I find it much more plausible that commies did bad things, things characteristic of commies, because they were bad people.
Faustine
True: but then there's always the gray area of exactly what's done in the name of "what bad people deserve" that keeps me uneasy about the whole thing. Have you read Gordon Thomas' book about the Mossad, "Gideon's Spies"? He was allowed to interview all the top agency people, so you can be sure nothing got out the agency didn't want out. Even still, it's a fascinating, hard-hitting look at what happens when an organization of brilliant, ruthless people come to exist in a system with limited accountability: hardcore realpolitik at its most elemental.
We know the spooks do bad things. They have done bad things to people who post on this list. We also know commies do bad things. The argument I object to is that all the bad behavior, the authoritarianism, the crimes, the repression, that we saw from the new left during the seventies is somehow the fault of the spooks, and somehow not the fault of the people who were doing it. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG jPlXakhxGCRandRTr/nKWOWtDxJX5Ry/EdBKmGPk 48oYFhL2YWrsHQTQ5bqQ6kvR/ZoWWOypTg9iDTuDD
On Tue, 17 Jul 2001 jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
Still, if you read the documentation, COINTELPRO was quite a formidable program.
Perhaps. The FBI by its very nature tends to do bad things, and we have seen some bad things done by the FBI to people who post on this list.
Really? Who? If you're refering to either Bell or CJ, in both cases the individual acted in a premeditated and intentional manner in order to provoke a responce. When you yank on a dogs chain, and the dog bites you. It isn't the dogs fault. But this isn't going to make much impact on somebody that thinks they're somehow above answering to others for their actions. Another example of how the C-A-C-L "I got a right to...." (eg kill people) is full of shit for the simple reason they forget the "...until it interferes with anothers expression of their rights".
I find it much more plausible that commies did bad things, things characteristic of commies, because they were bad people.
'bad' to who? It certainly wasn't bad to them. Hitler thought he was doing a 'good' thing 'in the big picture'. More of that 'ends justifies the means' crap that seems so popular in C-A-C-L philosophy. -- ____________________________________________________________________ Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, "Let Tesla be", and all was light. B.A. Behrend The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
participants (4)
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Faustine -
jamesd＠echeque.com -
Jim Choate -
Jim Choate