Losing Control in the
1970s
excerpted from the book
Voices of a People's History of
the United States
by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove
Seven Stories Press, 2004, paper
p483
Howard Zinn, "The Problem is Civil
Obedience" (November 1970)
I start from the supposition that the
world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong
people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that
the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of
power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the
world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but
to require a drastic reallocation of wealth. I start from the
supposition that we don't have to say too much about this because
all we have to do is think about the state of the world today
and realize that things are all upside down. Daniel Berrigan is
in jail-A Catholic priest, a poet who opposes the war-and J. Edgar
Hoover is free, you see. David Dellinger, who has opposed war
ever since he was this high and who has used all of his energy
and passion against it, is in danger of going to jail. The men
who are responsible for the My Lai massacre are not on trial;
they are in Washington serving various functions, primary and
subordinate, that have to do with the unleashing of massacres,
which surprise them when they occur. At Kent State University
four students were killed by the National Guard and students were
indicted. In every city in this country, when demonstrations take
place, the protesters, whether they have demonstrated or not,
whatever they have done, are assaulted and clubbed by police,
and then they are arrested for assaulting a police officer.
Now, I have been studying very closely
what happens every day in the courts in Boston, Massachusetts.
You would be astounded-maybe you wouldn't, maybe you have been
around, maybe you have lived, maybe you have thought, maybe you
have been hit-at how the daily rounds of injustice make their
way through this marvelous thing that we call due process. Well,
that is my premise.
All you have to do is read the Soledad
letters of George Jackson, who was sentenced to one year to life,
of which he spent ten years, for a seventy-dollar robbery of a
filling station. And then there is the U.S. Senator who is alleged
to keep 185,000 dollars a year, or something like that, on the
oil depletion allowance. One is theft; the other is legislation.
something is wrong, something is terribly wrong when we ship 10,000
bombs full of nerve gas across the country, and drop them in somebody
else's swimming pool so as not to trouble our own. So you lose
your perspective after a while. If you don't think, if you just
listen to TV and read scholarly things, you actually begin to
think that things are not so bad, or that just little things are
wrong. But you have to get a little detached, and then come back
and look at the world, and you are horrified. So we have to start
from that supposition-that things are really topsy-turvy.
And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience.
As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying
our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem....
Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of
people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the
leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions
have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is
that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys
march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people
are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation
and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people
are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all
the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our
problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the
problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People
obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they
should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have
showed them. Even in Stalin's Russia we can understand that; people
are obedient, all these herd-like people.
But America is different. That is what we've all been brought
up on. From the time we are this high and I still hear it resounding
in Mr. Frankel's statement-you tick off, one, two, three, four,
five lovely things .~ about America that we don't want disturbed
very much. But if we have learned anything in the past ten years,
it is that these lovely things about America were never lovely.
We have been expansionist and aggressive and mean to other people
from the beginning. And we've been aggressive and mean to people
in this country, and we've allocated the wealth of this country
in a very unjust way. We've never had justice in the courts for
the poor people, for black people, for radicals. Now how can we
boast that America is a very special place? It is not that special.
It really isn't.
Well, that is our topic, that is our problem:
civil obedience. Law is very important. We are talking about obedience
to law-law, this marvelous invention of modern times, which we
attribute to Western civilization, and which we talk about proudly.
The rule of law, oh, how wonderful, all these courses in Western
civilization all over the land. Remember those bad old days when
people were exploited by feudalism? Everything was terrible in
the Middle Ages-but now we have Western civilization, the rule
of law. The rule of law has regularized and maximized the injustice
that existed before the rule of law, that is what the rule of
law has done. Let us start looking at the rule of law realistically,
not with that metaphysical complacency with which we always examined
it before.
When in all the nations of the world the
rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the
people, we ought to begin to recognize this. We have to transcend
these national boundaries in our thinking. Nixon and Brezhnev
have much more in common with one another than - we have with
Nixon. J. Edgar Hoover has far more in common with the head of
the Soviet secret police than he has with us. It's the international
dedication to law and order that binds the leaders of all countries
in a comradely bond. That's why we are always surprised when they
get together -- they smile, they shake hands, they smoke cigars,
they really like one another no matter what they say. It's like
the Republican and Democratic parties, who claim that it's going
to make a terrible difference if one or the other wins, yet they
are all the same. Basically, it is us against them.
Yossarian was right, remember, in Catch-22?
He had been accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which
nobody should ever be accused of, and Yossarian said to his friend
Clevinger: "The enemy is whoever is going to get you killed,
whichever side they are on." But that didn't sink in, so
he said to Clevinger: "Now you remember that, or one of these
days you'll be dead." And remember? Clevinger, after a while,
was dead. And we must remember that our enemies are not divided
along national lines, that enemies are not just people who speak
different languages and occupy different territories. Enemies
are people who want to get us killed.
We are asked, "What if everyone disobeyed the law?"
But a better question is, "What if everyone obeyed the law?"
And the answer to that question is much easier to come by, because
we have a lot of empirical evidence about what happens if everyone
obeys the law, or if even most people obey the law. What happens
is what has happened, what is happening. Why do people revere
the law? And we all do; even I have to fight it, for it was put
into my bones at an early age when I was a Cub Scout. One reason
we revere the law is its ambivalence. In the modern world we deal
with phrases and words that have multiple meanings, like "national
security." Oh, yes, we must do this for national security!
Well, what does that mean? Whose national security? Where? When?
Why? We don't bother to answer those questions, or even to ask
them.
The law conceals many things. The law
is the Bill of Rights. ;'~ fact, that is what we think of when
we develop our reverence for the law. The law is something that
protects us; the law is our right-the law is the Constitution.
Bill of Rights Day, essay contests sponsored by the American Legion
on our Bill of Rights, that is the law. And that is good.
But there is another part of the law that
doesn't get ballyhooed- the legislation that has gone through
month after month, year after year, from the beginning of the
Republic, which allocates the resources of the country in such
a way as to leave some people very rich and other people very
poor, and still others scrambling like mad for what little is
left. That is the law. If you go to law school you will see this.
You can quantify it by counting the big, heavy law books that
people carry around with them and see how many law books you count
that say "Constitutional Rights" on them and how many
that say "Property," "Contracts," "Torts,"
"Corporation Law." That is what the law is mostly about.
The law is the oil depletion allowance-although we don't have
Oil Depletion Allowance Day, we don't have essays written on behalf
of the oil depletion allowance. So there are parts of the law
that are publicized and played up to us-oh, this is the law, the
Bill of Rights. And there are other parts of the law that just
do their quiet work, and nobody says anything about them.
It started way back. When the Bill of
Rights was first passed, remember, in the first administration
of Washington? Great thing. Bill of Rights passed! Big ballyhoo.
At the same time Hamilton's economic pro gram was passed. Nice,
quiet, money to the rich-I'm simplifying it a little, but not
too much. Hamilton's economic program started it off. You can
draw a straight line from Hamilton's economic program to the oil
depletion allowance to the tax write-offs for corporations. All
the way through-that is the history. The Bill of Rights publicized;
economic legislation unpublicized.
You know the enforcement of different
parts of the law is as important as the publicity attached to
the different parts of the law. The Bill of Rights, is it enforced?
Not very well. You'll find that freedom of speech in constitutional
law is a very difficult, ambiguous, troubled concept. Nobody really
knows when you can get up and speak and when you can't. Just check
all of the Supreme Court decisions. Talk about predictability
in a system-you can't predict what will happen to you when you
get up on the street corner and speak. See if you can tell the
difference between the Terminiello case and the Feiner case, and
see if you can figure out what is going to happen. By the way,
there is one part of the law that is not very vague, and that
involves the right to distribute leaflets on the street. The Supreme
Court has been very clear on that. In decision after decision
we are affirmed an absolute right to distribute leaflets on the
street. Try it. Just go out on the street and start distributing
leaflets. And a policeman comes up to you and he says, "Get
out of here." And you say, "Aha! Do you know Marsh v.
Alabama, 1946?" That is the reality of the Bill of Rights.
That's the reality of the Constitution, that part of the law which
is portrayed to us as a beautiful and marvelous thing. And seven
years after the Bill of Rights was passed, which said that "Congress
shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech," Congress
made a law abridging the freedom of speech. Remember? The Sedition
Act of 1798.
So the Bill of Rights was not enforced.
Hamilton's program was enforced, because when the whisky farmers
went out and rebelled you remember, in 1794 in Pennsylvania, Hamilton
himself got on his horse and went out there to suppress the rebellion
to make sure that the revenue tax was enforced. And you can trace
the story right down to the present day, what laws are enforced,
what laws are not enforced. So you have to be careful when you
say, "I'm for the law, I revere the law." What part
of the law are you talking about? I'm not against all law. But
I think we ought to begin to make very important distinctions
about what laws do what things to what people.
And there are other problems with the
law. It's a strange thing, we think that law brings order. Law
doesn't. How do we know that law does not bring order? Look around
us. We live under the rules of law. Notice how much order we have?
People say we have to worry about civil disobedience because it
will lead to anarchy. Take a look at the present world in which
the rule of law obtains. This is the closest to what is called
anarchy in the popular mind-confusion, chaos, international banditry.
The only order that is really worth anything does not come through
the enforcement ... of law, it comes through the establishment
of a society which is just and in which harmonious relationships
are established and in which you need a minimum of regulation
to create decent sets of arrangements among people. But the order
based on law and on the force of law is the order of the totalitarian
state, and it inevitably leads either to total injustice or to
rebel lion-eventually, in other words, to very great disorder.
We all grow up with the notion that the
law is holy. They asked Daniel Berrigan's mother what she thought
of her son's breaking the law. He burned draft records-one of
the most violent acts of this century- to protest the war, for
which he was sentenced to prison, as criminals should be. They
asked his mother who is in her eighties, what she thought of her
son's breaking the law. And she looked straight into the interviewer's
face, and she said, "It's not God's law." Now we forget
that. There is nothing sacred about the law. Think of who makes
laws. The law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond.
If you nave any notion about the sanctity and loveliness and reverence
for the law, look at the legislators around the country who make
the laws. Sit in on the sessions of the state legislatures. Sit
in on Congress, for these are the people who make the laws which
we are then supposed to revere.
All of this is done with such propriety
as to fool us. This is the problem. In the old days, things were
confused; you didn't know. Now you know. It is all down there
in the books. Now we go through due process. Now the same things
happen as happened before, except that we've gone through the
right procedures. In Boston a policeman walked into a hospital
ward and fired five times at a black man who had snapped a towel
at his arm-and killed him. A hearing was held. The judge decided
that the policeman was justified because if he didn't do it, he
would lose the respect of his fellow officers. Well, that is what
is known as due process-that is, the guy didn't get away with
it. We went through the proper procedures, and everything was
set up. The decorum, the propriety of the law fools us.
The nation then, was founded on disrespect
for the law, and then came the Constitution and the notion of
stability which Madison and Hamilton liked. But then we found
in certain crucial times in our history that the legal framework
did not suffice, and in order to end slavery we had to go outside
the legal framework, as we had to do at the time of the American
Revolution or the Civil War. The union had to go outside the legal
framework in order to establish certain rights in the 1930s. And
in this time, which may be more critical than the Revolution or
the Civil War, the problems are so horrendous as to require us
to go outside the legal framework in order to make a statement,
to resist, to begin to establish the kind of institutions and
relationships which a decent society should have. No, not just
tearing things down; building things up. But even if you build
things up that you are not supposed to build up-you try to build
up a people's park, that's not tearing down a system; you are
building something up, but you are doing it illegally-the militia
comes in and drives you out. That is the form that civil disobedience
is going to take more and more, people trying to build a new society
in the midst of the old.
But what about voting and elections? Civil
disobedience-we don't need that much of it, we are told, because
we can go through the electoral system. And by now we should have
learned, but maybe we haven't, for we grew up with the notion
that the voting booth is a sacred place, almost like a confessional.
You walk into the voting booth and you come out and they snap
your picture and then put it in the papers with a beatific smile
on your face. You've just voted; that is democracy. But if you
even read what the political scientists say-although who can?-about
the voting process, you find that the voting process is a sham.
Totalitarian states love voting. You get people to the polls and
they register their approval. I know there is a difference-they
have one party and we have two parties. We have one more party
than they have, you see.
What we are trying to do, I assume, is
really to get back to the principles and aims and spirit of the
Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate
authority and to forces that deprive people of their life and
liberty and right to pursue happiness, and therefore under these
conditions, it urges the right to alter or abolish their current
form of government-and the stress had been on abolish. But to
establish the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we
are going to need to go outside the law, to stop obeying the laws
that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has been
done, or that put people in jail for petty technical offenses
and keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes. My hope
is that this kind of spirit will take place not just in this country
but in other countries because they all need it. People in all
countries need the spirit of disobedience to the state, which
is not a metaphysical thing but a thing of force and wealth. And
we need a kind of declaration of interdependence among people
in all countries of the world who are striving for the same thing.
p494
Angela Davis, "Political Prisoners,
Prisons, and Black Liberation" (1970)
In the heat of our pursuit of fundamental
human rights, Black people have been continually cautioned to
be patient. We are advised that as long as we remain faithful
to the existing democratic order, the glorious moment will eventually
arrive when we will come into our own as full-fledged human beings.
But having been taught by bitter experience,
we know that there is a glaring incongruity between democracy
and the capitalist economy which is the source of our ills. Regardless
of all rhetoric to the contrary, the people are not the ultimate
matrix of the laws and the system which govern them-certainly
not Black people and other nationally oppressed people, but not
even the mass of whites. The people do not exercise decisive control
over the determining factors of their lives.
Officials' assertions that meaningful
dissent is always welcome, provided it falls within the boundaries
of legality, are frequently a smokescreen obscuring the invitation
to acquiesce in oppression. Slavery may have been un-righteous,
the constitutional precision for the enslavement of Blacks may
have been unjust, but conditions were not to be considered so
bearable (especially since they were profitable to a small circle)
as to justify escape and other acts proscribed by law. This was
the import of the fugitive slave laws.
Needless to say, the history of the Unites
States has been marred from its inception by an enormous quantity
of unjust laws, far too many expressly bolstering the oppression
of Black people. Particularized reflections of existing social
inequities, these laws have repeatedly born witness to the exploitative
and racist core of the society itself. For Blacks, Chicanos, for
all nationally oppressed people, the problem of opposing unjust
laws and the social conditions which nourish their growth, has
always had immediate practical implications. Our very survival
has frequently been a direct function of our skill in forging
effective channels of resistance. In resisting we have been compelled
to openly violate those laws which directly or indirectly buttress
our oppression. But even containing our resistance within the
orbit of legality, we have been labeled criminals and have been
methodically persecuted by a racist legal apparatus ....
The prison is a key component of state's
coercive apparatus, the overriding function of which is to ensure
social control. The etymology of the term "penitentiary"
furnishes a clue to the controlling idea behind the "prison
system" at its inception. The penitentiary was projected
as the locale for doing penitence for an offense against society,
the physical and spiritual purging of proclivities to challenge
rules and regulations which command total obedience. While cloaking
itself with the bourgeois aura of universality-imprisonment was
supposed to cut across all class lines, as crimes were to be defined
by the act, not the perpetrator-the prison has actually operated
as an instrument of class domination, a means of prohibiting the
have-nots from encroaching upon the haves.
The occurrence of crime is inevitable
in a society in which wealth is unequally distributed, as one
of the constant reminders that society's productive forces are
being channeled in the wrong direction. The majority of criminal
offenses bear a direct relationship to property. Contained in
the very concept of property, crimes are profound but suppressed
social needs which express themselves in anti-social modes of
action. Spontaneously produced by a capitalist organization of
society, this type of crime is at once a protest against society
and a desire to partake of its exploitative content. It challenges
the symptoms of capitalism, but not its essence ....
Especially today when so many Black, Chicano,
and Puerto Rican men and women are jobless as a consequence of
the internal dynamic of the capitalist system, the role of the
unemployed, which includes the lumpen proletariat in revolutionary
struggle, must be given serious thought. Increased unemployment,
particularly for the nationally oppressed, will continue to be
an inevitable byproduct of technological development. At least
30 percent of Black youth are presently without jobs. In the context
of class exploitation and national oppression it should be clear
that numerous individuals are compelled to resort to criminal
acts, not as a result of conscious choice-implying other alternatives-but
because society has objectively reduced their possibilities of
subsistence and survival to this level. This recognition should
signal the urgent need to organize the unemployed and lumpen proletariat,
as indeed the Black Panther Party as well as activists in prison
have already begun to do.
In evaluating the susceptibility of the
Black and Brown unemployed to organizing efforts, the peculiar
historical features of the U.S., specifically racism and national
oppression, must be taken into account. There already exists in
the Black and Brown communities, the lumpen proletariat included,
a long tradition of collective resistance to national oppression.
Moreover, in assessing the revolutionary
potential of prisoners in America as a group, it should be borne
in mind that not all prisoners have actually committed crimes.
The built-in racism of the judicial system expresses itself, as
[W. E. B. Du Bois has suggested, in the railroading of countless
innocent Blacks and other national minorities into the country's
coercive institutions.
One must also appreciate the effects of
disproportionately long prison terms on Black and Brown inmates.
The typical criminal mentality sees imprisonment as a calculated
risk for a particular criminal act. One's prison term is more
or less rationally predictable. The function of racism in the
judicial-penal complex is to shatter that predictability. The
Black burglar, anticipating a two-to four-year term, may end up
doing ten to fifteen years, while the white burglar leaves after
two years.
Within the contained, coercive universe
of the prison, the captive is confronted with the realities of
racism, not simply as individual acts dictated by attitudinal
bias; rather he is compelled to come to grips with racism as an
institutional phenomenon collectively experienced by the victims.
The disproportionate representation of the Black and Brown communities,
the manifest racism of parole boards, the intense brutality inherent
in the relationship between prison guards and Black and Brown
inmates-all this and more causes the prisoner to be confronted
daily, hourly, with the concentrated systematic existence of racism.
For the innocent prisoner, the process
of radicalization should come easy; for the "guilty"
victim, the insight into the nature of racism as it manifests
itself in the judicial-penal complex can lead to a questioning
of his own past criminal activity and a re-evaluation of the methods
he has used to survive in a racist and exploitative society. Needless
to say, this process is not automatic, it does not occur spontaneously.
The persistent educational work carried out by the prison's political
activists plays a key role in developing the political potential
of captive men and women.
Prisoners-especially Blacks, Chicanos
and Puerto Ricans-are increasingly advancing the proposition that
they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political
prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an
oppressive politico-economic order, swiftly becoming conscious
of the causes underlying their victimization.
Racist oppression invades the lives of
Black people on an infinite variety of levels. Blacks are imprisoned
in a world where our labor and toil hardly allow us to eke out
a decent existence, if we are able to find jobs at all. When the
economy begins to falter, we are forever the first victims, always
the most deeply wounded. When the economy is on its feet, we continue
to live in a depressed state. Unemployment is generally twice
as high in the ghettos as it is in the country as a whole and
even higher among Black women and youth. The unemployment rate
among Black youth has presently skyrocketed to 30 percent. If
one-third of America's white youths were without a means of livelihood,
we would either be in the thick of revolution or else under the
iron rule of fascism. Substandard schools, medical care hardly
fit for animals, over-priced, dilapidated housing, a welfare system
based on a policy of skimpy concessions, designed to degrade and
divide (and even this may soon be canceled)-this is only the beginning
of the list of props in the overall scenery of oppression which,
for the mass of Blacks, is the universe.
In Black communities, wherever they are
located, there exists an ever-present reminder that our universe
must remain stable in its drabness, its poverty, its brutality.
From Birmingham to Harlem to Watts, Black ghettos are occupied,
patrolled and often attacked by massive deployments of police.
The police, domestic caretakers of violence, are the oppressor's
emissaries, charged with the task of containing us within the
boundaries of our oppression.
The announced function of the police,
"to protect and serve the people," becomes the grotesque
caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors
and serving us nothing but injustice. They are there to intimidate
Blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless
to alter the conditions of our lives. Arrests are frequently based
on whims. Bullets from their guns murder human beings with little
or no pretext, aside from the universal intimidation they are
charged with carrying out. Protection for drug-pushers, and Mafia-style
exploiters, support for the most reactionary ideological elements
of the Black community (especially those who cry out for more
police), are among the many functions of forces of law and order.
They encircle the community with a shield of violence, too often
forcing the natural aggression of the Black community inwards.
[Frantzl Fanon's analysis of the role of colonial police is an
appropriate description of the function of the police in America's
ghettos.
It goes without saying that the police
would be unable to set into motion their racist machinery were
they not sanctioned and supported by the judicial system. The
courts not only consistently abstain from prosecuting criminal
behavior on the part of the police, but they convict, on the basis
of biased police testimony, countless Black men and women. Court-appointed
attorneys, acting in the twisted interests of overcrowded courts,
convince 85 percent of the defendants to plead guilty. Even the
manifestly innocent are advised to cop a plea so that the lengthy
and expensive process of jury trials is avoided. This is the structure
of the apparatus which summarily railroads Black people into jails
and prisons. (During my imprisonment in the New York Women's House
of Detention, I encountered numerous cases involving innocent
Black women who had been advised to plead guilty. One sister had
entered her white landlord's apartment for the purpose of paying
rent. He attempted to rape her and in the course of the ensuing
struggle, a lit candle toppled over, burning a tablecloth. The
landlord ordered her arrested for arson. Following the advice
of her court-appointed attorney, she entered a guilty plea, having
been deceived by the attorney's insistence that the court would
be more lenient. The sister was sentenced to three years.)
The vicious circle linking poverty, police
courts, and prison is an integral element of ghetto existence.
Unlike the mass of whites, the path which leads to jails and prisons
is deeply rooted in the imposed patterns of Black existence. For
this very reason, an almost instinctive affinity binds the mass
of Black people to the political prisoners. The vast majority
of Blacks harbor a deep hatred of the police and are not deluded
by official proclamations of justice through the courts.
p507
Noam Chomsky, "COINTELPRO: What the
(Deleted) Was It?" (March 12, 1978)
It has often been observed that the United
States is unusual, among the industrial democracies, in the narrowness
of the spectrum of thought and political action, sharply skewed
to the right as compared with other societies of comparable social
and economic structure. Complex theories have been advanced to
explain this intriguing phenomenon. No doubt subtle issues are
involved, but it is important not to disregard some quite simple
factors. For one thing, American business has been engaged for
many years in massive organizing propaganda campaigns directed
to what leading practitioners call "the engineering of consent."
The scale is vast and the impact-on the media and school texts
for example-quite substantial, far beyond anything to be found
in the other industrial democracies. Mother central element in
the picture is the role of the national political police, the
FBI, which for over half a century has been devoting major efforts
to engineering of consent in a more direct way: by force. The
character and scale of this enterprise is only now beginning to
come to light, and the story that is being pieced together is
quite a remarkable one.
J. Edgar Hoover rose to national prominence
when he was appointed chief of the General Intelligence (anti-radical)
division of the Justice Department in 1919, shortly before the
notorious "Palmer raids," in which some 4,000 alleged
radicals were rounded up in 33 cities in 23 states, while the
Washington Post editorialized that "there is not time to
waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty" in the
face of the Bolshevik menace. Over 200 aliens were subsequently
deported. The liberal Attorney General [A. Mitchell] Palmer proclaimed
that "the government is flow sweeping the nation clean of
such alien filth," with the over-whelming support of the
press, until they perceived their own interests were threatened.
The "Red Scare" served to control labor militancy, dismantle
radical parties, frighten liberals, and buttress an interventionist
foreign policy. Hoover's FBI undertook the very same tasks, and
has conducted them with considerable success.
The FBI casts a wide net. For example,
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was infiltrated from
1920 to 1943 ... and in the 1950s was secretly cooperating with
the FBI in its programs of political and doctrinal control. Even
the slightest departures from orthodoxy are not likely to escape
the vigilant eye of the Bureau, as political activists have had
many opportunities to discover. To cite one minor case of which
I have personal knowledge, in 1969 I had two teaching assistants
who were active in the civil rights and peace movements in an
undergraduate humanities course at MIT. The Boston office of the
FBI undertook to block their re-appointment, making sure to keep
its activities confidential so that "the bureau's interest
in this matter will be fully protected." An internal memorandum
to the Director states that "an established source of the
Boston office" at MIT (name blacked out) advised the Bureau
that as a result of its efforts, "he was able to have their
re-appointments to the staff of MIT canceled." In fact, the
Bureau's efforts were irrelevant in this case, but the example
illustrates very well the nature of its concerns, while raising
interesting questions about our academic institutions.
In other cases the FBI went a few steps
further. A former student of mine, also active in the peace movement,
was teaching at San Diego State College in 1971. According to
a report submitted to the Church Committee by the ACLU, the FBI
provided defamatory information about him to the college administration
(and also gained access to confidential college records). Three
public hearings were held under college auspices. He was exonerated
each time, then summarily dismissed by the chancellor of the California
state college system, Glenn Dumke, one of the numerous examples
of the treachery of the universities in those years. During this
period the same student was the target of an assassination attempt
by a secret terrorist army organized, funded, armed and directed
by the FBI, which concealed evidence of the crime and prevented
prosecution of the FBI agent in charge and the FBI infiltrator
who led this organization in its rampage of fire-bombing, shooting,
and general violence and terror aimed at the left, all with the
full knowledge and cooperation of the Bureau.
In this case, the intended victim of the
FBI assassination attempt escaped injury, though a young woman
was seriously injured. Others were not so lucky. The most notorious
case is that of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who, along
with Mark Clark, was murdered in a pre-dawn Gestapo-style police
raid the phrase is accurate-in December 1969, with the complicity
of the FBI, which had turned over to the police a floor plan of
his apartment supplied by an FBI provocateur who was chief of
Panther security. The floor plan no doubt explains the remarkable
accuracy of police gunfire, noted by reporters. Hampton was killed
in bed, possibly drugged; according to eyewitnesses, murdered
in cold blood.
The FBI prank followed an earlier effort
to have Hampton murdered by a criminal gang in the Chicago ghetto,
the Blackstone Rangers. The Rangers were sent an anonymous letter
by the local FBI office informing them that the Panthers were
intending to murder their leader, but this effort to incite violence
and murder failed. In other cases, the Bureau was more successful.
Internal memoranda gloat over the success of the Bureau in fomenting
gang warfare and violence in the ghetto, and disrupting such subversive
activities as free breakfast programs for poor children in churches.
The record, which is by now extensive,
demonstrates that the FBI was committed to attacking the civil
rights movement, blocking legal electoral politics, undermining
the universities and cultural groups (e.g., the largest black
cultural center in the West, in the Watts ghetto), and disrupting
political activities of which it disapproved by any means required,
including the extensive use of provocateurs, arson, bombings,
robbery and murder. Under COINTELPRO alone, its targets included
the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Puerto Rican
Independence Movement, the various Black movements of the 1960's,
and the entire "New Left." Though the left was not the
sole target of the national political police, it was by a large
measure the primary target. In scope of activities and level of
violence, the criminal programs of the FBI far exceed anything
known in other industrial democracies, and surely merit a prominent
place in any investigation of "American exceptionalism"
that deserves to be taken at all seriously.
There have been a few studies of these
activities of the FBI .... But these studies have received little
attention, and in fact the documentary record itself, despite
its quite appalling nature, has barely created a ripple.
It is striking that the major revelations
concerning FBI criminal activities appear precisely at the time
of the exposure of the Watergate episodes, frivolous in comparison.
It is interesting to contrast the concern accorded to Watergate
and to the crimes of the national political police-which I stress
again were incomparably more violent, far-ranging and significant
in their effect on the cultural and political climate of American
life. History has provided us with a controlled experiment to
determine whether Nixon's critics were motivated by a concern
for civil and human rights, or by the fact that Nixon, like Joseph
McCarthy before him, was directing his weapons at the powerful,
always an illegitimate target. The results of this experiment
are quite clear-cut and leave little doubt that the furor over
Watergate was largely an exercise in hypocrisy.
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