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How to Beat Ass-KKKroft at His Own Game
By Jackson Thoreau
May 4, 2002 (Jackson Thoreau/APJP)
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
-- Benjamin Franklin
The Orwellian "UnPatriot" Act is being wielded, and it's not pretty.
There's the eerie knock on your door, then government agents snooping through your home, your computer, your underwear -- anything.
And it's only going to get worse, as the U.S. Citizen Corps -- the "Spy on Your Neighbors" program -- expands, and you have to worry about whether your mail carrier or your crime watch group will report you to the authorities for receiving copies of Mother Jones or The Nation.
While this situation is alarming, to say the least, it's not without historical precedent.
And if we study what the real American patriots -- not those Bu$h/Chenazey/Ass-KKKroft thieves and hypocrites -- have done to combat such intimidation and suppression, we can beat these suckers at their own game.
African-Americans have long faced the prospect of government agents and Ku Klux Klan invading their homes to terrorize and kill them in this very country. The old colonies enacted laws to publicly and cruelly dismember Blacks that fought back, starting in the 17th century.
But Black Americans kept fighting -- and many Anglos like John Brown joined their cause.
Yet even after African-Americans were freed from formal slavery in the 1860s, the government's jackboots remained upon them.
The FBI harassed key leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., tapping his phone, blackmailing him, sending him a fake letter urging him to commit suicide. Many believe certain government officials were involved in a plot to assassinate King that succeeded in 196. Partly in response to riots after King's murder, Congress passed the Orwellian "Civil Rights Act" in 196that strengthened police powers against civil rights organizers. The first to be prosecuted under this act was a young black leader, H. Rap Brown, after he issued a pointed speech in Maryland, according to historian Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States.
The FBI used informants inside the Black Panthers to murder such leaders as Fred Hampton, who was killed in 1969 by agents as he lay in bed inside his Chicago apartment. His body was riddled with rounds -- by some reports, as many as 200.
The FBI's COINTELPRO program took almost 300 such actions against African-American groups from 1956 through 1971, according to Zinn. Still, Black Americans kept fighting back, through non-violent and violent means.
Jeffersonian Republicans -- who bear little resemblance to the current bunch of GOPers -- squared off against this official suppression in the late 1790s. Federalists such as Adams and Hamilton wanted the Jeffersonians silenced -- and they wanted no more Shays' Rebellions, the armed 1786 farmers' revolt led by Daniel Shays against wealthy merchants and bankers who stole farmland -- so they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Government agents arrested numerous Jeffersonians, including journalists (among them the grandson of Benjamin Franklin), convicted them for supposed treason, and shut down their printing presses.
Jeffersonians fought back by organizing angry street protests and political campaigns that rode Jefferson to the White House in 1800. Jefferson pardoned those convicted under the acts, and Congress repealed them in 1802.
Socialists, Communists, labor activists, and others accused of the subversion and sedition have also long heard that knock of suppression at their doors. Many leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, such as Joe Hill, were harassed and even killed in the early 1900s. The Palmer Raids of 1920 rounded up and deported thousands of immigrants merely suspected of being Socialists. From 1947 -- when former President Harry Truman issued an executive order to crack down on "disloyal" citizens suspected of being Communists -- until 1952, government agencies monitored some 6.6 million people, according to Zinn. As many as 500 government employees lost their jobs during this period.
Former Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts later in the 1950s ruined the lives of many more Americans whose only "crime" was that they didn't think the way the government wanted. The Internal Security Act of this time set up concentration camps for suspected Communists, who were systematically denied their constitutional rights. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were even executed in 1953 after the government employed questionable methods and evidence that may have been doctored in their trial as accused spies. A son of the Rosenbergs, Robert Meeropol, believes to this day that his parents were framed and unjustly executed. He started the Rosenberg Fund for Children; more information can be obtained at www.rfc.org.
In "A Citizen's Dissent", attorney and author Mark Lane wrote of the official suppression he encountered while researching the lies behind the Warren Report, the government's version of who killed John F. Kennedy in 1963. Lane described an incident in which FBI agents accosted him outside his New York residence, and he shook them off by simply refusing their request to search his home, and demanding that they leave and send him a letter detailing exactly what they were seeking. Lane even pushed one agent who stood in his way slightly to walk past him. Lane also wrote about being on a government "watch list" as he departed an airplane.
In what should come as no shock, Lane wrote that people in Europe in the mid-1960s were more skeptical about the Warren Report than those in the U.S. That's not unlike the situation today, in that Europeans are generally more skeptical towards the "war on terrorism" than Americans (at least Kennedy assassination researchers have a Warren Report that enables them to sort through the official lies; when people including U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) ask for a Congressional investigation of what occurred on Sept. 11, they are accused of treason).
In the 1970s and 1980s, activists of various stripes were under the gun. In Texas, a group that harbored Central American refugees, which included a priest and nuns, was infiltrated by government agents. I was among the peace, justice, and environmental activists during that time who were monitored by government agents. I simply refused to let such repression stop what I was doing; rather the suppression spurred me on to keep fighting, perhaps longer than I might have otherwise. That's what a lot of right-wing government officials don't understand: their Gestapo tactics only make their opponents stronger.
In the past few months, as more than 150 college campuses across the country have hosted rallies protesting Bu$h policies, there have been numerous instances of FBI and Secret Service agents questioning students and others who are critical of the "UnPatriot Act" and other administration policies.
Among those receiving such visits were students at Chicago's Northwestern University and North Carolina's Durham Tech, according to a recent article in the Toronto Star.
Barry Reingold, a 60-year-old retired telephone company worker in San Francisco, was visited by FBI agents -- simply for voicing criticism of the "War on Terrorism" at his local private health club, according to the Star report.
FBI and Secret Service agents even visited the Houston Art Car Museum because it showed an educational exhibit about the government's "secret wars." The exhibit began before Sept. 11.
The FBI also has a "no-fly" list of people who can be kept off airplanes for speaking out against administration policies. A group from Wisconsin missed some of the recent weekend protests in Washington, D.C., around Earth Day after being detained by officials, according to The Progressive. Among those members of the Peace Action Milwaukee group were a priest and a nun. But such tactics did not stop an estimated crowd of 75,000 from protesting Bu$h policies on Earth Day in Washington, believed to be the largest anti-war demonstration in the nation's capital since the Persian Gulf War.
The suppression campaign has extended beyond the FBI.
Several journalists and at least one college professor have been fired for writing columns, or stating views, critical of the war effort. Right-wingers including William Bennett and Lynne Cheney are pressuring college professors and others into silence, utilizing intimidation tactics that include mailings to alumni of universities where professors take unpopular stands to urge they not donate to that school. At the University of Texas at Austin -- considered to be progressive for a Texas college -- university president Larry Faulkner publicly called professor Robert Jensen a "fool" for opposing the U.S. terrorism response. If Jensen did not have tenure, he no doubt would have been fired.
Some professors and students are even being used by the CIA, FBI, and other government officials to further suppressive American campaigns around the world. That practice has occurred for a long time; I interviewed a Texas college professor in 1981 who, according to another source I had spoken with, worked for the CIA. He denied such an affiliation. However, a few years later, the professor met a mysterious death; he was run over by a train early one morning in the middle of nowhere.
Expect even more professors, postal workers, phone company workers, neighborhood crime-watch members, and others to be used as government spies through the Citizen Corps program, which is organized under the USA Freedom Corps. Even professional huckster Ed McMahon has been signed to promote this undemocratic campaign posing as a community volunteer effort against terrorism.
More information on this program can be viewed at www.citizencorps.gov and www.usaonwatch.org.
In the 1990s, conservatives could say whatever the hell they wanted about the Clinton Administration without being visited by the FBI. They could oppose Clinton's programs to the point of working to impeach him -- for "lying" about a private extramarital affair that was none of the American people's business in the first place -- without being accused of aiding U.S. enemies or terrorists or committing treason.
You can argue that the difference lies in what happened on Sept. 11, but that still doesn't mean we have to sacrifice our basic rights for which Americans before us have fought and died.
Okay, you may be saying, many Americans who stood up for what they thought was right in the past have faced various forms of government and corporate suppression. And they dealt with the repression in various ways. So how does that help our present situation against the Bu$h forces?
Much of the intimidation these days seems to be coming from Ass-KKKroft's FBI. The FBI is an agency I'm well acquainted with, as my father worked there for 25 years, including seven years as an agent. While he has not talked much about what exactly he did there, saying he swore to keep silent about certain aspects when he left, I have learned a few things about FBI agents' jobs and how they operate. I used some of this knowledge to my benefit in dealing with government officials and agents as a peace-justice-environmental activist in the 1980s. And it's obviously time to bring back the tactics.
The following are some tips on how to deal with FBI agents if they knock on your door:
It's a difficult environment we are entering -- one that will take cunning, courage, and persistence. But if we approach this calmly and rationally and are armed with the proper knowledge, we can and will prevail.
We have beaten these suckers in the past, and we can do it again.
Jackson Thoreau is co-author of We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House.
The 110,000-word electronic book can be downloaded at http://www.legitgov.org/we_will_not_get_over_it.html, http://www.cyberread.com/search_result.asp?PRODUCT_ID=CRIN:1881365514 or http://www.booklocker.com/bookpages/whitehouse.html. Thoreau can be emailed at jacksonthor@justice.com
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, 199, 1997, 1996, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc.