Meatspace,

[Faustine]

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,
> 
> 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
> communist 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.


The FBI explioted this mindset to the hilt--COINTELPRO kept them all 
twitching like galvanic frogs. The merest stimulus and they exploded right 
on cue. Getting your enemies to destroy themselves, what a strategy. 

The whole thing is a depressing reminder of what happens when hot-headed 
idealism faces off against cold-blooded realism. Call me a fence sitter, 
but there's got to be another way.


Here's a great link, if youre interested: 


The COINTELPRO Papers 
Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars 
Against Dissent in the United States 

by Ward Churchill & Jim Vander Wall 
South End Press ISBN 0-89608-359-4 

http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointel.htm


~Faustine.