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,
> 
> 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.