What's at Stake in Moron Nation's War against Knowledge

LIKE MOST AMERICAN intellectuals, I instinctively trust and respect librarians. They are, after all, the priestesses and priests of Knowledge, a realm I hold infinitely more sacred than any edifice of Abrahamic rites whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic. 

Even now, after 72 years learning the cynicism we in the 99 Percent soon discover is the chief prerequisite of emotional survival here in the Slave World the late Thomas Wolfe so aptly described as “this most weary unbright cinder,” Knowledge remains my Light-Bringer.  Its grail-quest is my only act of faith, its amelioration of ignorance my only act of true contrition. I enter libraries with a secret silent genuflection of the mind as fervent as the overt gesture of obeisance devout Catholics make when they approach their altars.

The only other locales I ever regarded with comparable awe are the long forgotten but eerily potent shrines of vanquished cultures one sometimes discovers in remnants of the American wilderness. These places, their ancient holiness preserved by isolation, are sanctuaries not just of Knowledge but of forbidden divinities and the uniquely sustainable alternatives for living they yet represent, their never-printed texts preserved in the ancient Mother Tongue of our collective unconscious – the lost but vital glimpses of past and future I sometimes blessedly encountered in the years before physical disability combined with our nation's new dystopian locked-gate exclusiveness to banish me  from Nature's own biblioteka: the back country I so loved to explore, usually under the guise of fishing or hunting.

I freely admit it; not just people but books and –  yes –  dogs and ravens and even trees and troutly waters and abandoned roads and standing stones sometimes speak to me. In the City I was always loquaciously a-prowl for new ideas, new songs,  new sensations, new intensities of love, new depths of human connection. But in the country I was silent, capable of extended motionlessness, ever alert to the messages of the environment, ever receptive to the soft barely discernible heartbeat of the forest, ever a-listen for the seductive voices of the river, which are so like women talking fondly in some adjacent room. That is the sort of man I am, a person for whom Knowledge is life itself, for whom the worst most terrifying aspect of death is that it is the end of Knowledge.       

Hence I approach librarians not just as my potential friends but as fellow conspirators in the resistance against censorship and the induced ignorance that fosters  our imprisonment in Moron Nation.  Only twice in my life have librarians disappointed me. One these disappointments was a sadly comical demonstration of ignorance by an employee of the Bellingham Public Library:  when I asked why there was nothing by Tacitus in the BPL card catalogue, the librarian responded by asking me if this classical Roman was a “current author” and if his  works were “current books.”  The other disappointment was  far worse, an astonishing act of anti-Knowledge treachery by one or more politically motivated librarians in New York City, about which I'll elaborate in a moment.    

But I never regarded either of  those dismal episodes to be anything more than anomalies.  Save in Bellingham (where the city's librarians were also infamous for serving the secret police by compiling lists of who borrowed which books), librarians have always my natural allies. Sometimes, by providing vital information, librarians have been my saviors as well – especially in Manhattan.  Hence when I saw Melissa Gira Grant's “Occupy Wall Street Librarians Strike Back,” I read it knowing I would learn something very important, as indeed I did, for the  text detailed an atrocity about which I had hitherto  seen only the most fragmentary reports:  how New York City – allegedly the cultural epicenter of the Western World – maliciously destroyed the 5000-volume free library assembled by Occupy Wall Street. 

Obviously this newest assault on our right to know was ordered because someone (again) adjudged Knowledge to be “dangerous,” an intolerable source of radical agitation. It hardly matters who gave the order or whether it was given at City Hall, at Gracie Mansion or in some clandestine enclave of the Homeland Security Department's secret police;  the salient fact of this story is the wanton destruction of the books, which by its undeniable truth is now proven to be an official policy of governance in the United States.

If this sort of action evokes a troubling deja vu – as surely it might – be assured your mind is not playing tricks;  the deliberate trashing of libraries is nothing new.   But libricide –  that is the proper term for it – is not just a Nazi German outrage. It was also popular in Pinochet's Chile, which makes its appearance on Wall Street hardly a surprise given the Central Intelligence Agency's Nazi, Chilean and New York City Police Department connections. Thus the following comment:   

Anyone who questions the need for a People's Library –  not just in NYC (which allegedly has the finest "public" library in the U.S. and one of the best in the world),  but everywhere else throughout our ever-more-oppressed nation –  should go to my blog for a glimpse of the significant radical history maliciously suppressed by the New York City Public Library itself. 

As I reported in my blog last year, The East Village Other published a fully detailed extra covering the riot, but by 1983 the extra had been removed from NYCPL archives by city librarians –  obviously cut from the microfiche files and the film then professionally re-spliced.  

No doubt the censorship was imposed because the 1967 incident was a genuine police riot –  an outrage in which the cops launched an unprovoked attack (note my photos in the above link) on a group of musicians who had obtained an NYC troubadour permit for their outdoor performance.

Also –  because the cops initially admitted their attack was triggered by two or three  complaints from the Lower East Side's small but disproportionately influential community of Ukrainian immigrants –  the incident raised an enormously embarrassing question.  How was it a few complaints from a notoriously fascistic, adamantly theocratic (Eastern Orthodox) minority had nullified,  for several hours on 30 May 1967,  not just a city-issued permit, but the rights guaranteed by the New York State and United States constitutions?  

The question was especially relevant since a substantial number of those immigrants had allegedly fled the Soviet Union to escape war crimes charges for their collaboration with the Nazis and were  said to be under the sponsorship and protection of  the Central Intelligence Agency.  Then as now, the answer might have revealed disturbing details about the relationship between the NYPD and the CIA, itself already infamous as a haven for Nazi war criminals.   

Though at first it appeared Ruling Class Media would adequately report the details of this atrocity –  note for example my photo in Newsweek –   the reportage quickly deteriorated back into oppressive conformity with the cops-as-heroes/hippies-as-demons motif  that characterized all "mainstream" coverage of the Countercultural rebellion in any and all of its forms –  anti-war, feminist, back-to-the-land, new music, alternative press, alternative spirituality etc. –  with EVO's unprecedented extra the sole documentation of what actually obtained that dreadful day in Tompkins Square. 

The extra's deliberate destruction by the city's librarians –  another act reminiscent of "the worst regimes imaginable" –  is therefore not just a ruinous loss, but a damning example of how "public" libraries can be co-opted to serve the will of the One Percent. Hence it might be revealing to know how many of the destroyed People's Library books had already been "disappeared" from NYCPL, whether catalogued (but never available for circulation) or deleted entirely. 

Obviously, the Ruling Class intends to keep our minds imprisoned in Moron Nation –  the 21st Century's artificially induced equivalent of the ignorance that paralyzed the peasants of  pre-Revolutionary Russia –   even as our bodies are herded ever closer to de jure enslavement.

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Apparently it is this unspeakable purpose – the imposition of ignorance so paralytic it cannot be overcome even by collective effort and so bottomless it cannot ever be escaped – that has clandestinely motivated much of the domestic policy inflicted on us by the One Percent since the end of World War II.

First was the demonization of intellectuals – psycholinguistic warfare that made “intellectual”  synonymous with “subversive” and even “traitor.” This brainwashing – or, more accurately, “brain-warping” – was cleverly sandwiched within the purges of Communists and socialists that began literally hours after the Japanese surrender.

For people too young to remember those years, one fact should suffice as portraiture: throughout the 1950s, my younger half-siblings and I were sternly instructed never to reveal to anyone our household included a substantial library, our father's lifetime collection of books. Even then, possession of Knowledge – unless of course one was part of the Ruling Class – was already a de facto crime: just ask the hundreds of thousands of classroom “brains” who were jeered, beaten, raped, and otherwise bullied into feigned stupidity.  The public elementary schools and junior highs were bad enough, but public high schools – in which vicious children had grown sufficiently large and strong to inflict severe and sometimes fatal wounds –  were realms of genuine horror, a topic to which we shall return. 

Meanwhile the quality of public education deteriorated steadily, a decline so obvious it was triggering school-reform controversies even before the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik I in the fall of 1957 and thus forever claimed for Communism the title “First into Space.” 

Though post-Sputnik panic brought about momentary improvements in public education under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the rebellions of the 1960s once more frightened the One Percent with the power of Knowledge to inspire and agitate, and by the end of the decade, the deliberately induced decline in educational quality was again evident. The conservatives, especially the more overtly fascist John Birchers, loudly blamed “Communists” and “Com-symps,” but the outcry – as always – merely functioned to conceal how capitalism was transforming public education to serve its long-range goal of reducing the United States to its United Estates – eventually a realm of the corporate equivalent of antebellum plantations, literally a nation of slaves. The real villains were of course the One Percent, their malevolent Ayn Rand influence clandestinely applied at every level, a do-not-dare-tell-it truth recognized at least subconsciously by any reasonably perceptive reporter who was assigned to cover public education during those years.

                                                   *** 

As I implied above, we cannot discuss the origins of Moron Nation without discussing bullying, a manifest hellishness I encountered in every public school I attended.

It was especially prevalent in the southern public high school where I endured ninth and tenth grades. Throughout my freshman year and into the first weeks of my sophomore year, I was bullied relentlessly: not only had my “Yankee” origins taught me to “talk funny”;  I was also smallish and slender, dyslexically clumsy and  dark-haired enough to be suspected of being Jewish. But I finally taught my slow-learning tormentors a sufficiently discouraging lesson:  attack me, I'll fight you;  and even if you win the fight, I will damn well inflict substantial hurt. In eleventh grade I attended school in urban Michigan, where a variety of factors combined to ensure I was not bullied.  But familial dysfunction involuntarily returned me to the South for twelfth grade,  and though I was in the same semi-rural district where I attended ninth and tenth grades, my enrollment in a newly constructed school apparently nullified my reputation for violent response. 

Because the act of writing is so often also an act of vivid recollection, working on this essay brought back the following long-forgotten incident in all its wrenching fear, anguish, rage and mortification:  

During class change maybe the first week of that final high-school September, a gang of at least a half-dozen football players attacked me in the hallway, forcibly yanked down my pants and hurled me into an adjacent girls' restroom, a vicious “prank” the purpose of which was to get me caught in pantless trespass by the school authorities and thus branded a pervert. But the hateful scheme failed. I fought my assailants with anything-goes ferocity,  inflicting enough pain they were unable to de-pant me completely, and when I was flung through the forbidden door, it was with one leg still trousered.  Then – much to my surprise – the girls themselves not only aided my escape but refused to rat me out. When word got around I was again carrying the modified bicycle chain with which I had notoriously avenged myself on a bully two years earlier, the jocks quickly found other targets.     

Given the perspective of 55 years and work on several in-depth education stories, I now recognize   schoolyard bullying as a central part of U.S. education: it is how we are psychologically prepared to function under capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – whether we are destined to be predators or prey. It is also how we are all taught to behave under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else. Schoolyard or workplace, the bullies maintain the capitalist order: executive attire, athletic jerseys or badges and uniforms, under capitalism they are all licenses for savagery and sadism, differing only in price and permissiveness.  That's why all the official pronouncements against bullying are ultimately nothing more than Big Lies – additional examples of the same sort of propaganda by which this Nation of Falsehood hypocritically denounces the savagery its policies intentionally perpetuate.

Indeed, bullying IS capitalism, the perfect micrososm of its predatory psycho-dynamics. But to connect capitalism and bullying (or to name capitalism as the perpetrator of its many other atrocities) is to commit heresy, to utter a statement so subversive, so taboo,  none dare do it publicly: a topic on which Richard D. Wolff has a great deal to say in a new book entitled Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, about which more in a moment.   


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A Chris Hedges Essay We Should All Read at Least Once

Apropos our slave-pen economy, a month ago Chris Hedges published a provocative essay entitled “The Implosion of Capitalism,” which I bookmarked for recommendation and comment but then set aside as events later dictated. Now though in the aftermath of Memorial Day, which presumably   turned our thoughts to the costs inflicted on ourselves, our fellow humans and our planet by capitalism's relentless quest for “growth,” I offer it as an appropriate meditation.

Here, in the hope they will encourage you to read the essay from start to finish, are a few significant lines in which Hedges suggests the direction we must take if our species is to survive:
 
“Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies...Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels.”

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Shameless Promotion of What I Hope Will Be a Vital Book

A few paragraphs ago I mentioned Wolff's Occupy the Economy, a chapter of which was printed recently by Truthout. Here is a sample paragraph:

“Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.”

I have not yet read the book, but I surely will. Wolff's potentially widespread public exposure of the taboo against naming capitalism as our adversary – a topic of Outside Agitator's Notebook since its inception in 2009 – is long overdue.

Perhaps now we've at last begun the national discussion that is prerequisite to our liberation.

LB/28 May 2012

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How Citizens United Is the Death of All We Hold Dear

NOW WE ARE WITNESSING how the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision ensures our eternal enslavement by the One Percent. It has not only slain our fragile experiment in constitutional democracy; it is murdering our collective conscience as well.

In fact I cannot doubt the Citizens United date of 21 January 2010 will live in infamy centuries after 7 December 1941 is forgotten. Pearl Harbor was but an initial loss in a victorious war. CU marks the end of the United States as We the People had known it, the moment of our descent into terminal Ayn Rand barbarism and resurrected Ku Klux bigotry – as deadly to our civilization as the events of 4 September 476 were to Rome's.

Meanwhile the ugly extent to which Citizens United has transformed our elections becomes ever more obvious. It was most recently demonstrated by a scoop-the-world New York Times exposé of the blatantly racist anti-Obama hatemongering planned by one of the many Republican political action committees.

Though The Times failed to note how the proposed attacks were facilitated by the CU decision, the omission – or more likely the deliberate suppression of fact – was partially remedied by Lee Fang, a United Republic investigative reporter. The ruling, wrote Fang, “may unleash a new level of ugliness in (U.S.) campaigns. Technically, the decision only allows corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts in elections. But in practice, Citizens United might fuel a wave of advertising designed to stir racial divisions and hatred against minority groups.”

Unfortunately Fang's use of “may” and “might” severely weakened his analysis, a flaw all the more perplexing given his Asian-American ethnicity. But even the timid wording of his conclusion could not dilute the obvious – that Citizens United has bolstered to new extremes an already raging resurrection of white racism in the United States. The burgeoning bigotry Fang curiously reduced to mere potential became clearly visible during the 2008 election campaign. It was already apparent three years beforehand in the genocidal aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Its resurgent Ku Klux hatefulness is evident on even the earliest Teabagger picket-signs and in literally all the pronouncements of the anti-Obama birther cult. Now – bolstered by CU's approval of limitless expenditures for election propaganda – the One Percent are using their inconceivably vast wealth to catapult white racism out of our national closet and back into the Moronic Majority's mental mainstream.

At the very least, Citizens United allows the Republicans the endless funding to fulfill their Southern Strategy, methodically restoring bigotry to all its de facto Jim Crow venom and perhaps even launching the re-imposition of de jure segregation. At the worst, CU gives the Ruling Class carte blanche to infect the huge Moron Nation segment of our population with the Nazi mindset the barons of Wall Street and Big Business have fervently sought to impose on the U.S. since the days of Adolph Hitler.

Are they succeeding? Note the Trayvon Martin target, a best-selling outrage that would have been unthinkable outside a Ku Klux Klavern even a few months ago. Surely somewhere in Hell Josef Goebbels is chortling with glee.

Within the same week, as The Times revealed and as Fang repeated in his own lead, Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, was close to finalizing the plans for a $10 million race-baiting advertising blitz intended to guarantee Obama's defeat. The ads – a formidable combination of video and print – were to be launched so late in the campaign Obama could not muster an effective counterattack. And even if the plan were canceled, as seemed likely late Saturday, Citizens United denies us any protection against advertising that would be equally vile if not far worse.

A day earlier, after Fang's report was further disseminated by Truthout, I had realized Ricketts' ploy – or any other such defamation now encouraged by CU – would doom the Obama presidency as surely as the Willie Horton ad doomed the Michael Dukakis candidacy in 1988. I commented accordingly:

I don't normally make election predictions this far in advance, but the outcome of the 2012 presidential vote just became obvious.

Given the malevolent racism of U.S. whites – a national characteristic already evident in the statistically proven hostility of Caucasian males toward a Black President in the White House – Citizens United's hatemongering will combine with the bitter legacy of Obama's multiple betrayals to ensure his defeat in November.

The president's oft-repeated transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer has turned the energized progressives of 2008 into the dejected nonparticipants of 2012 – a mass of voters whose initial chants of "yes we can" have become a barely audible mumble of "whatever."

Given the ruinous magnitude of those betrayals, I cannot but wonder if Obama himself intended he would never be more than a one-term president. Could it be his real service to Wall Street – his actual repayment of its overwhelming financial support in 2008 – was opening the political doors to the final triumph of imperialism abroad and ChristoFascism at home?

Surely that's what happened in 2010, when Barack's betrayals cleared the way for unprecedented Republican victories. And now – note how Obama's Democratic National Committee has abandoned the Wisconsin recall effort – it's obviously happening again.

As bad as the theocratic misogyny of the Romney presidency will be for women, its tacitly Nazi atrocities will be infinitely worse for those of us who are elderly and disabled (I am both) or otherwise no longer exploitable for capitalist profit.

Indeed, for us – we who face extermination via the cancellation of Social Security pensions and the end of Medicare and Medicaid – the deadly realities of a Romney presidency are tantamount to the horrors facing German Jews as Hitler was sworn into office.

Welcome to the Fourth Reich, where methodical destruction of the social safety net serves the same murderous Ayn Rand purpose that was served by the Third Reich's death camps.

Such is “change we can believe in.”

***

But are the Caucasians of the United States truly so irredeemably racist such hatemongering would ensure the president's defeat?

Sadly, I believe the answer is an unequivocal yes. And not just because of the Trayvon Martin target.

A white male in the southern Civil Rights Movement (Knox County Jail, 1963), I was publicly damned by my fellow Caucasians as a “nigger-lover” – all the more vehemently since I had been raised partly in the South. The denunciations and the accompanying attempted murders and other acts of violence gave me a unique opportunity to experience the hatefulness suffered by African-Americans literally from birth. Perhaps because I myself was always something of an outcast – a vindictively unwanted child, an abused and bullied teenager – I had developed as a survival mechanism what I suppose is an acute sensitivity to hatred and contempt. Thus in the context of the struggle for black civil rights I found myself in constant agreement with blacks who saw many manifestations of race-hatred to which most other whites were self-servingly blind.

But the evidence for the toxic depth of the white citizenry's lingering hatred of blacks is far more political than personal. The most telling examples come from the genocidal intent implicit in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

An academic study entitled “Perceptions of Racism in Hurricane Katrina” is also worth reading. Not only does it reveal the substantial number of blacks who (justifiably) suspect the New Orleans levees were bombed by the government to murderously flood the black neighborhoods of the city, it recovers the forbidden 1927 history in which the levees were so destroyed.

The most telling part of “Perceptions” is its public-opinion data. In a Pew survey conducted shortly  after the disaster, 77 percent of the white respondents denied the racism 66 percent of the African American respondents recognized in the lethal sluggishness of the government’s response. An even higher proportion of blacks – 71 percent of compared with 32 percent of whites – felt the disaster revealed the persistence of white racism as a major cultural undercurrent in the United States. 

More significantly, 70 percent of the black respondents told Pew they were angered by the events that followed the storm. But only 46 percent of whites expressed similar sentiments. In other words, 54 percent of white America was sufficiently racist it was not troubled by Katrina's genocidal aftermath.

Combined with present-day statistics on the skyrocketing growth of hate groups in the United States, that 2005 number – 54 percent – is probably the margin by which Obama will lose.

***

Lest we forget, one of the parties to blame for the Citizens United decision is the American Civil Liberties Union, which provided an amicus curiae brief in support of corporate personhood and the One Percent's contention there should be no limits on the money spent to obliterate constitutional democracy and replace it with ever-more-authoritarian capitalist tyranny.

In response to the ACLU's back-stabbing revelation of its true colors, untold numbers of its members, myself included, resigned in protest. Untold more people refused to renew their memberships. But the organization – which lives entirely on dues and grants – seemed curiously immune to the boycott.

Which raises three questions. (1)-When and for how much money did the One Percent buy off the ACLU and turn it into another instrument of oppression? (2)-When did the ACLU receive sufficient corporate funding to immunize it against disaffected members? (3)-Given its obvious servitude to the One Percent, was the ACLU functioning as a latter-day Father Gapon? That is, was it collecting names of dissidents to be turned over to the secret-police agencies that protect and serve the One Percent?

Question (3) is made especially relevant by the police-state reality of today's United States, which beyond the obvious technological differences is increasingly indistinguishable from that of Tsarist Russia.

As Lev Bronstein observed, “In any gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana.”

***

During the on-line discussion triggered by Fang's analysis of The New York Times report, a poster who hides behind the screen name Howienica denounced me for characterizing the United States as the Fourth Reich, calling me “extreme even for Truthout.”

Because my response reviewed many taboo elements of U.S. history, all of which can be Googled for confirmation, it too is worth reproducing here:

Not extreme, Howienica, just historically accurate, as demonstrated by the following points:

(1)-We are ruled by capitalism – infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue. Exactly as urged by Ayn Rand, capitalism is the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species has ever uttered. This is indisputable, proven so by capitalism itself.

(2)-Capitalist governance – the principles of capitalism expressed in federal, state and local policy – means absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us. This is the New Order gradually imposed on the United States following the coup of 22 November 1963. It too is indisputable, proven beyond argument by the history of the subsequent decades, particularly the methodical destruction of the New Deal and the equally methodical reduction of the 99 Percent to inescapable debt slavery.

(3)-“The Fourth Reich” is an entirely appropriate label for the present-day United States because its roots – the roots of the New Order – extend to fascist Rome and Nazi Berlin (each financed by Wall Street). These toxic roots then snake back from the Third Reich to Wall Street via the (failed) Bankers Plot of 1934; thence to the official embrace of thousands of Nazi war criminals immediately after V-E Day (especially Hitler's entire intelligence apparatus, which eventually became the CIA); thence to the purge of Leftists and intellectuals that began immediately after World War II; thence to the destruction of the labor movement imposed by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1948; thence to the apex purges of the McCarthy Era; thence to the political murders of the 1960s and 1970s; thence to the war on the 99 Percent that began under Nixon in 1973; thence to the increasingly authoritarian regimes of Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton; finally to the unabashed tyranny imposed by Bush II and intensified by Obama – jackboot imperialism complete with Nazi-type atrocities abroad, police-state fascism and ChristoFascist theocracy at home, the elimination of undesirables either via enslavement in for-profit prisons or death imposed by elimination of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment compensation.

Creation of a “Fourth Reich” is also – by the way – a chillingly accurate description of the intent most of the Nazi war criminals brought to their new homeland.

Hence “the Fourth Reich,” though metaphorical, is nevertheless a brutally accurate description of the nightmare reality in which We the People are imprisoned – the most internally oppressed realm in the industrial world, the most savagely aggressive empire on the planet.

I would clarify only one point, that the steadily escalating capitalist brutality described in items (1) and (2) was equally characteristic of the Third Reich, especially in terms of its huge reliance on slave labor to boost and sustain corporate profits. Indeed German Nazism was merely capitalism taken to its logical 1930s extreme – exactly what our Ayn Rand-minded One Percent is inflicting on us in 21st Century form today.

And I would add one point more. The Republican landslide of 2010 and its subsequent war against women and minorities is already demonstrating how Citizens United facilitates the imposition of Christian theocracy, fascism and racism of an intensity that edges ever closer to outright Nazism. To imagine the 2012 presidential race will not bear similarly toxic fruit is to imagine Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy are all real. The pattern is now obvious, established by 2010's results. That 2012 is the first presidential vote conducted in the Nazified climate of CU is thus reduced in significance to little more than a footnote.

What is most revealing about the 2012 election is the precedent set by the fact it's a contest between two undeniable enemies of the U.S. Constitution. Never before in our national history have we been limited to an alleged “choice” between two unabashed tyrants: Barack the Betrayer versus Mitt the Malevolent. Obama has proven relentlessly hostile to the Bill of Rights, concealing his despotic agenda behind oratorical deception and a few gestures toward women and homosexuals, while Romney is already notorious not only for his enthusiastic embrace of the Republican brand of fascism in general but for his specific antagonisms toward women, homosexuals and dogs.

And this year's shift toward de facto Nazism is not over yet. Now there's a growing possibility we'll witness the emergence of Scott Walker as the true Führer the Republicans and their Ku Klux Christian kinsmen have always sought. If Scotty the Sadist and his endless supply of Citizens United money wins Wisconsin as anticipated, he'll be uniquely positioned to oust Malevolent Mitt as insufficiently brutal, then win the Republican National Hate Rally and emerge as the Betrayer's opponent.

Whatever, there's no doubt the fascists will win.

LB/20 May 2012

-30-

Occupy Tacoma: Prime Target of Secret Police?

Note: I wrote the following report two months ago for the research branch of Occupy Washington D.C. Since then, the events of May Day have proven Occupy Tacoma and indeed the entire Occupy Movement are very much alive, which makes this material relevant not just to Occupiers but to all other emergent protest movements, especially in the ever-more-openly fascist United States. Hence this, edited only slightly for presentation here:

I. SUMMARY: Typical of Occupy Wall Street and its local offshoots throughout the United States, Occupy Tacoma was from its inception vexed by disorganization and chaos. The resultant obstructions – especially in planning and communications – prevailed from OT's birth-period (the last week of September through the first week of October 2011), until 26 February 2012, when the few remaining campers evacuated Occupation Park in peaceful compliance with a state eviction order. How much of the disruption that plagued OT during those five months was merely typical of newly formed grassroots movements? How much was caused or intensified by clandestine operatives working on behalf the One Percent – agents provocateur and other sorts of infiltrators? The question is impossible to answer at this point. But at least a dozen episodes or incidents, each of which is described in more detail below, display one or more characteristics that identifies them as the product of hostile operations.

II. BACKGROUND: In startling contrast to the protest movements of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, where from the beginning there was sufficient awareness of the oppressor's ultimate malevolence (and therefore a magnitude of paranoia that was both profound and entirely rational), Occupy Tacoma seemed dominated by an almost childish naivety – an attitude all the more astonishing given how the protest movements of yesteryear operated under constitutional protections that have since been notoriously abolished. As a consequence, the identification of possible infiltrators within OT was left largely to elderly women who are veterans of the Feminist Movement and a handful of aging males who are, as I am, veterans of the Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam War, Back-to-the-Land and Alternative Press movements. Alas, because of a new and far more politically damaging generation gap – the enormous contempt with which younger U.S. Caucasians so often view those of us who are in our 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond – our cautions typically fell on deaf ears.

Though I was involved with the Occupy movement in Washington state even before the organization of Occupy Tacoma – I had posted on the Occupy Olympia website seeking information about Occupy activities in Tacoma several days before the Tacoma group was formed – by January all save one of the original approximately 14 movement-veteran seniors, myself included, had been quietly ousted. The primary means of our ouster, which may or may not be relevant to the infiltration question, was the refusal of what emerged as OT's dominant faction to accommodate our very real, health-mandated need for General Assembly meetings in spaces that were both heated and protected from the incessant and dangerously chilling rains typical of Pacific Northwest coastal winters. Rather than grant us the sheltered space we demanded, the OT core faction continued to meet in frigid and often torrential downpours until all but one of us stopped participating. Only then – after we were gone (and thereby silenced) – was a community tent erected in Occupation Park. Whether this was coincidence or something darker could not be determined.

The following report is therefore the product of two kinds of sources. Its primary source is my own on-the-spot observation through mid-December 2011, which given my 55-year background in investigative reporting, photography and journalism in general is definitively the work of a trained observer and analyst. (For details of my qualifications, see the resumé I sent with my e-note of 1 March 2012). The secondary sources, none of whom I am at liberty to identify, are a few people within Occupation Park and OT in general with whom I remained in contact from mid-December until the encampment's formal demise on 26 February 2012.

III. VITAL HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: When reading the following it is imperative to bear in mind the reluctant admission by Watergate felon John Ehrlichman that Washington state and the Puget Sound region¹ in particular is the One Percent's favorite domestic laboratory for perfecting its techniques of oppression. The late Ehrlichman, a Seattleite who climbed the Republican ladder to achieve infamy as one of All the President's Men, testified during the Watergate hearings, and it was there he revealed his home state's hitherto-secret rat-lab role. This disclosure made headlines in Seattle, particularly in the alternative press. But the news reports of Ehrlichman's revelations have all seemingly vanished down the proverbial Orwell hole. Hence no verification links exist – at least none I've been able to find. Moreover my own Watergate reference files – clippings and notes on the Seattle area's many connections to various Nixon outrages – were destroyed in 1983 by the same mysterious house fire that burned up all my life's significant work including two books in progress. Nevertheless Ehrlichman's description of the state and especially the Puget Sound area as a Ruling Class proving ground might explain a curious paradox of Washington's Occupy history: the astounding tolerance the authorities granted Occupy Tacoma, this in contrast to the anti-Occupy violence of the police elsewhere in the region, especially in Seattle, where the cops were so brazenly brutal they attacked an 84-year-old woman.

IV. TWELVE RELEVENT EPISODES: Here in chronological order are a dozen examples from Occupy Tacoma's first five months that strongly suggest infiltration or infiltration attempts, the activities of agents-provocateur and a miscellany of other hostile actions:

(1)-In angry, significantly unionized working-class Tacoma, the two-fingered peace sign of the 1960s is considered a symbol of silliness (if not outright submissiveness), and in union circles it is generally viewed with contempt. But this symbol mysteriously ousted the clenched fist of today's economic rage and thus – undoubtedly to Occupy Tacoma's detriment – became the movement's defining logo. Just how this came about is a mystery I was never able to solve, and I pursued it with reportorial diligence for several weeks. But the answers to my questions were always variants of “it just happened.” Indeed the peace sign, which I as a socialist have always found objectionable, was seemingly cemented in place even before OT became functional. (I was the first contributor to OT's “why I joined” testimonials, this on 6 October 2011.)  Indeed by then the peace sign had already become sacrosanct, so that every attempt to challenge it was shouted down – never mind that (in the words of one of my more articulate neighbors), it publicly declared OT, “nothing more than a bunch of kids trying to be hippies and relive the '60s.” The result was that OT was never taken seriously by the community at large. Was this curious choice of symbols – self-defeating in any context and downright inexplicable in working-class Tacoma – the product of infiltration? I don't know. But I regard it with profound suspicion. (Update: sometime after I filed this report with Occupy Washington D.C., OT did indeed replace the two-fingered peace sign with the clenched fist [scroll down to May Day], though the peace sign persists in all its insipid self-defeating obnoxiousness on OT's Facebook page. )

 

(2)-A few individuals whose online comments marked them as likely agents provocateur were evident from the moment the OccupyTacoma.org website opened its forum; the identities of these individuals will be obvious to anyone who peruses the forum's contents. Indeed many OT activists, myself included, stopped posting there because of its domination by posters whose sole purpose seemed to be antagonism and provocation. (Update: OT's website was destroyed by hackers in mid-March but was rebuilt by the end of the month.)

(3)-At OT's second GA, a longtime (and therefore presumably credible) local activist repeated in seemingly good faith a warning Tacoma City Council had recently amended its ordinances so that if anyone in a demonstration was charged with a felony – say felonious vandalism or assault on a police officer – everyone who had any connection with the demonstration (even non-demonstrating members of participating organizations) could be identically charged and arrested. That such a measure is reportedly being urged on states and municipalities by the Department of Homeland Security made the warning all the more believable – and all the more terrifying. But it was patently false. My own investigation revealed that no such measure had been considered – much less enacted – whether by Tacoma, Pierce County or any other municipality within the county. Nor could I trace the warning to its source; it was always “so-and-so said,” and then when I questioned “so-and-so,” the source was invariably somebody else. The fact similar rumors spread through Occupy organizations elsewhere suggests a classic combination of disinformation and psychological warfare – this of a sophistication that in turn evidences the most skilled sorts of military or secret police operations.

(4)-OT's communications were constantly disrupted. The email addresses of key work-group personnel were mysteriously blocked. E-messages went astray; important information was never delivered. At least one OT activist was worked into a state of psychological exhaustion by the associated frustrations. These obstructions clearly suggest communications countermeasures that, again, are indicative of military or secret-police capabilities.

(5)-I heard stories of several supposedly obvious infiltration attempts and encountered one such effort myself. A young man presented himself to the Media Work Group as a graphic artist with a heavy professional background but seemed, by attitude, physique and a certain characteristic look in his eyes, more like a special-forces guy than a cultural worker. I as a key member of the work group thus began questioning him about his education and accomplishments. As we talked I asked if he was familiar with Art Direction magazine, the now-defunct international commercial-art journal of which I was editor-in-chief in 1985 and 1986. He replied that he was indeed familiar with the publication, but did so with the vagueness that invariably reveals falsehood. Shortly afterward he left the meeting – and was never again seen on Occupation circles. Opportunist seeking to hitch his metaphorical wagon to the Occupation star? Infiltrator? I'd guess the latter – emphatically so – but again there's no definitive proof.

(6)-In late October an individual hitherto unknown to OT brought to a GA a proposal the group's communications be restructured to exclude anyone without Internet access. I instantly objected, vehemently so, pointing out that such economically-based discrimination is specifically the kind of class warfare Occupy is protesting. A few others, typically single mothers or elderly people of both genders, expressed their agreement with me. The exclusion advocate sneeringly replied that Internet access was available to anyone willing to make the effort to go to a public library. One woman's response was especially memorable: “How can we go to the libraries when the transit system is being shut down and the libraries are all being closed?” The exclusion advocate merely smirked, saying nothing. Soon however his proposal, though never formally adopted, had become the OT norm, with the result the methodical exclusion of a major part of OT's natural base. Infiltrator? Ayn Rander? I'd say maybe both – because why else would an Ayn Rander be interested in OT?

(7)-When OT was formed, Tacoma's First Methodist Church offered its facilities as an indoor locale for GAs. The offer was gratefully accepted; the frigid rains characteristic of winter on the Pacific Northwest Coast are of such monsoonal intensity as to discourage outdoor meetings – and GA sessions tend to last two, three, even four hours. But not long after OT took its first collectively approved policy stance – a list of formal demands it presented to Washington state's U.S. Sen. Patty Murray – the church withdrew its offer, forcing the GA outdoors in the rain and cold and thereby effectively excluding most elderly and disabled people from the decision-making process. The reasons for the church's sudden reversal have never been adequately explained, though it should be noted most OT activists emphatically assert the cause was nothing more ominous than administrative error and organizational confusion. Nevertheless it's difficult to overlook the fact the excluded seniors and disabled people had been amongst those most active in shaping the demands OT addressed to Murray. Citing Murray's position as co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, OT insisted she block proposed cutbacks in Social Security and prevent further slashing of Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits and federal aid to education. Was the church's ouster of OT a deliberately hostile action (perhaps ordered by the church's state or national hierarchy in response to some DHS edict)? Or was it mere coincidence? In this case it seems to have been the latter – though the demographic identity of the chief victims of the church's sudden denial of its meeting facilities is surely cause for continued suspicion.

(8)-Soon after ouster from the church facilities limited OT to outdoor meetings, a story spread through OT's dwindling ranks that the Teamsters (a union to which I have strong social and familial connections despite the fact I have never been a member), had been kind enough to offer its local auditorium as a permanent meeting place. But one of the leaders who had emerged within allegedly “leaderless” OT was said to have arbitrarily turned down the offer without bothering to consult the membership. If true, this was an anti-union coup. Indeed – especially since there was already growing tension between union members and anti-union “progressives” – I suspected the perpetrator was either a Green or a member of MoveOn.org. Both groups had self-identified members within OT, both share the anti-blue-collar bias that has characterized the nation's so-called “Left” since the class conflicts of the Vietnam Era, and each group is therefore as anti-union as any of its hard-right counterparts. Hence – hoping to blow the cover of an anti-union activist within OT – I telephoned several local union officials in an effort to ferret out the facts. (Disclosure: I am a member of the National Writers Union AFL/CIO, a former member of the American Newspaper Guild.) After maybe a half dozen conversations it became clear no such offer had been made – not by the Teamsters, not by any other union, not by the Pierce County Central Labor Council. Another classic example of what the Russians call dezinformatsiya? In this case I'd bet on it.

(9)-A self-proclaimed Iraq War veteran who belligerently identified himself as an OT activist was arrested and charged with possession of cocaine, this in Olympia during a confrontation between Occupy Olympia and Olympia cops. Ruling Class Media throughout Washington state seized upon the arrest to begin a Josef Goebbels-type campaign of characterizing Occupiers as undesirables. Coincidental? I doubt it – especially since three or four OT people later told me the man had been ousted from Tacoma's Occupation Park for offering free cocaine to campers.

(10)-By the end of December, the sociology of Occupation Park's approximately 30 overnight campers was changing dramatically; the park was increasingly becoming a homeless camp. Sources there told me some of the chronically homeless people – about half of whom were also severely mentally ill – claimed they had been sent to the park by (unnamed) local social service agencies to obtain free food and lodging. Meanwhile – again hardly a coincidence – the Ruling Class Media's hate campaign continued, portraying Occupiers as habitual drunks, drug addicts and mental patients who refused medication.

(11)-By the end of January, threats of violence by hard-core homeless people had driven so many of the original OT protesters out of the park, OT itself was recommending the park be evacuated, cleaned up and given back to the state.  Concurrent with the (imposed?) increase in numbers of chronically homeless people, Ruling Class Media reported a groundswell of complaints from (invariably anonymous) merchants that Occupiers were intimidating their customers and trashing the downtown Tacoma neighborhood around the park. Significantly, Ruling Class Media reporters ignored what – if my sources were correct – would have been a Pulitzer-class story: an equally dramatic increase in numbers of people flung into homelessness by the downsized economy. Typically, I was told, the newly homeless who came to Occupation Park were (bitterly angry) youths whose parents had been first thrown out of work and then evicted from their homes. It was in this context – conversion of Occupation Park into a homeless camp – the state issued its official eviction notice, with which OT then complied.

(12)-As I noted in the section entitled “Summary,” the degree of tolerance displayed by local law enforcement toward Occupy Tacoma is – especially given the unrestrained brutality unleashed against other Occupations in Washington state – not just astonishing but markedly suspect. The apparent coordination between state welfare bureaucrats, some non-profit social service agencies, Ruling Class Media and other state agencies including the Washington State Patrol (which despite its name is a de facto state police force) is strongly suggestive of a carefully planned and coordinated operation. It is especially significant to note that only the Department of Homeland Security possesses the requisite combination of capabilities and authority to impose such coordination. Hence – particularly given the Ehrlichman testimony – it's difficult to escape the conclusion the curious treatment of OT was part of an experiment, probably by DHS, to determine the most effective strategy and tactics (complete with the peace sign's symbolic ouster of the clenched fist) for dealing with rebelliousness sparked by the public's awakening to the savagery of capitalism and the murderousness of fascist governance. OT by its very existence also underscores the Father Gapon factor: providing the authorities with a unique opportunity to identify the largest possible number of activists and potential activists of all ages, genders and ethnicities who live in or near Tacoma.

V. AFTERTHOUGHTS – IDENTIFYING INFILTRATORS AND COMBATING HOSTILE ACTION: The questions of how to identify infiltrators, informants and/or agents provocateur, and what countermeasures to employ against them, were hotly debated during the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. Since these matters are obviously relevant again today, here is list of five principles from the '60s, updated to reflect present-day political and technological realities: 

(1)-Given the escalating imposition of fascist governance², most U.S. locales have longstanding communities of nonviolent resistance from which local Occupations drew their initial membership. The sudden appearance of any self-proclaimed activist who is a total stranger within these communities – particularly a stranger whose claims of radicalism cannot be confirmed – should be viewed with grave suspicion.³

(2)-Given the overwhelming military and police power of the fascist state – which possesses the capability of destroying our entire movement – the absolute necessity of maintaining the often-difficult disciplines of nonviolence is (or should be) obvious to even the most unseasoned protester. Any other course of action gives the authorities the propaganda by which to justify assaulting us with maximum lethal force. In this context, anyone who publicly advocates violence (as in General Assembly meetings or on discussion threads), is almost certainly an agent provocateur.

(3)-Given the Occupy principle of working toward consensus, individuals or groups of individuals who persistently disrupt the consensus-building process should be viewed with grave suspicion. This includes disruptive mentally ill or homeless persons whose presence may have been maliciously encouraged by the Ruling Class authorities.

(4)-Given our extreme dependence on social media (and the huge vulnerability that results from that dependence), we are easy targets for interdiction (outright blockage of communications), disinformation (incorrect dates and times), and illegal acts advocated by agents provocateur who have infiltrated our web sites. Hence people given moderator-access to Occupy websites and other communications media should be screened very carefully. Indeed each local Occupation should develop an access-screening working group.

(5)-Given our vulnerability to entrapment, we should be especially wary of anyone who makes a point of inviting us to break even seemingly minor laws, for example drinking alcohol on public property where alcohol consumption is forbidden. Such a person is best scorned as an agent provocateur. Otherwise – once arrested – we are in the hands of authorities who now today not only have the power to detain us indefinitely but to torture us into whatever confession fulfills their fascist objectives.

In keeping with the non-violent nature of our movement, our single most effective countermeasure is to deliberately plant false information with a suspected infiltrator – for example that 500 people intend to demonstrate in front of a bank. Then when the riot police show up for what turns out to be a non-event, we know the person on whom the false information was planted is indeed an infiltrator. Camera phones are superbly effective too: when the young man who 15 minutes ago was demanding violence is photographed laughing with his cop or soldier buddies around the corner, the evidence is irrefutable.

Above all else we should never forget the United States is no longer the nation into which even the most youthful Occupiers were born. “The Land of the Free” is but a memory. In bitter truth we are the subjects of the most oppressive, most relentlessly policed, most mercilessly punished nation on Earth.

***

¹The Puget Sound area or region includes the cities of Bellingham, Everett, Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia. 

²It should be noted that fascist governance is in fact capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else. Capitalism – infinite greed exalted as ultimate virtue – has always been a powerfully compelling doctrine in the United States, particularly in matters of foreign policy. But after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and the decade's subsequent political murders (Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy), the nation lost the will to resist capitalism's inevitable transformation into fascism, hence the escalating tyranny at home and the brutal – indeed Nazi-like – imperialist policies abroad. The domestic imposition of fascism and the brazen re-emergence of capitalism's innate viciousness was further bolstered by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though the U.S.S.R. was never the “workers' paradise” it claimed to be, its official Marxism appeared to offer an avowedly humanitarian alternative to capitalism. The resultant competition for “hearts and minds” forced capitalism to conceal its savagery, hence the unprecedented growth of the U.S. middle class c. 1945-1973, a pretense brazenly dropped after the U.S.S.R. was destroyed in 1990.

³This is a modern-day affirmation of the affinity-group principle that evolved during the '60s: the fact collectives of people with long mutual histories are extremely difficult to infiltrate. The protection granted by the longstanding solidarity of the affinity group is, by the way, precisely why the capitalists are forever engaged in the destruction and/or prevention of communities.

L.B./4 March 2012, rev. 13 May 2012

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