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Not to accuse you of this, Dan, although you are in the eye of the storm, but I think we should warn against being too suspicious of others due to these chilling attacks. We will have informants and spies in our movements and organizations, I don't think there is much we can do about it other than make sure that we bring as many people into them as possible rather than buy into arguments that would lead toward isolation and impotence. It is much easier to make us afraid of each other - to destroy ourselves - than to have to smash us physically. The solidarity shown so far, at least amongst the left, has been hopeful and impressive. Hopefully this bodes well for a future, larger left that has learned from the past. A great article and a few excerpts: http://www.isreview.org/issues/49/cointelpro.shtml "COINTELPRO operations began against the SWP in 1961, when court records show they had around 600 members-10 percent were FBI informants who were paid in excess of $1.6 million over the years for their efforts.22Infiltration began in response to the SWP's electoral campaigns and desegregation activities-perfectly legal undertakings. Over the years, member informants supplied the government with membership lists, financial records, budgets, minutes of meetings, mailing lists, and correspondence. >From 1961-1976, fifty-five informants held offices or committee positions and fifty-one served on executive committees of the party." "For while state surveillance and repression are inevitable, they are clearly not insurmountable. FBI harassment, surveillance and disruption of civil rights groups failed to prevent this movement from achieving historic successes in the 1960s, for example. The Vietnam antiwar movement also played an important role, notwithstanding repression directed against it, in forcing the U.S. to pull out of Vietnam. Police repression and surveillance neither destroyed the Bolshevik Party in Russia nor prevented the Russian Revolution from defeating Tsarism or creating a workers' state in October 1917. On the eve of taking power, the Bolshevik Party's leading delegate to the Russian parliament, Malinovsky, was a police operative; the secretary of the main Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, between 1913 and 1914 was also a police agent. In Moscow alone in 1912, there were fifty-five police agents operating in left-wing organizations-twenty inside the social-democratic organizations. The agent provocateurs were able to do damage, particularly in helping the secret police identify and arrest activists. But in order to maintain their position above suspicion, they were also forced to engage in a great deal of useful work that helped the cause. Moreover, because the revolutionaries organized on the basis of a shared conviction, learned from their mistakes, and continually sought to widen the struggle, they were able to operate more or less effectively even in conditions of extreme illegality that the Russian police state inflicted on them. As Victor Serge, responsible in revolutionary Russia for unearthing and interpreting the millions of detailed files of the defunct secret police, wrote in 1925, “There is no force in the world which can hold back the revolutionary tide when it rises, and that all police forces, however Machiavellian, scientific or criminal, are virtually impotent against it.”" ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
