Kristallnacht and American Fascism

Next Monday is the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when Hitler Youth, the Gestapo, the SS and the SA waged an anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany and Austria. I'm a little apprehensive about the day since the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland, September 3rd, was celebrated in my neighborhood of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, with midnight drag racing up and down Mass. Ave. I knew about this celebration, as anyone in my neighborhood would, because the vehicles participating in it were clearly not "street legal" -- that is to say, they had been modified to make the loudest noise possible, as though they were competing in a monster truck rally at the Worcester Centrum. And the local police just let them have their fun, as they always have.

I know you don’t want to hear this about your community.
And I don’t want to be the one to tell you (just so you know) -- because it’s dangerous

to do so.

But if no one tells you now about what is happening to your neighbors,

to people like me,

soon it will be happening to you.

This is not a joke. I wish it were.

Your fellow Americans are being stalked by gangs sanctioned by the local police, the FBI and the Pentagon according to insiders who wish to remain anonymous. And your city's agents know about this terror and do nothing about it. So does the ACLU. Nine years ago -- long before the Iraq invasion and the passage of the so-called Patriot Act -- I was assaulted in the Cambridge Savings Bank, in front of a Cambridge police officer and bank security guard. The man who assaulted me leisurely conducted his bank business and when he was finished, I asked the teller who waited on him for his name and address. With this information, I sought the help of the police officer, a woman, who lied about having witnessed the very loud and long fracas. She asked me to step outside the bank and then told me there was nothing she could do; that I should call the Cambridge Women’s Commission the following week (this happened on a Saturday morning). When I called the Women’s Commission as she suggested, and asked to speak with the person she told me to speak with, I was told there was nothing the Women’s Commission could do for me since I hadn’t filed a police report. I hadn’t told her I hadn’t filed a police report on the incident, but somehow, she knew I hadn’t. I tried to get help from the ACLU for this and other things done to me by Cambridge police officers and others employed by the city of Cambridge, but the ACLU told me they couldn’t assist individuals, though their website is replete with case histories of individuals they’ve assisted.

Most disturbing of all was the fact that when I sought the help of the police officer in the bank that day, I overheard her telling the security guard, “It’s just not worth it to get involved; they only come after you.”

New York University Professor and Attorney Brian Glick uncovered these gangs’ practices when he represented American citizens and organizations such as The American Friends Service Committee, after they had been terrorized by the FBI for protesting our military’s involvement in the wars in Central America in the 1980s and were subsequently denied their civil rights to protection against unwarranted search and seizure, security of person, free speech and free association. Like Glick’s clients, I, too, am a law-abiding activist, trying to dispel myths about the type of AIDS I have been given and cured of. I am not an elder/child/animal abuser; a thief; a drug dealer or user; a prostitute; or any other type of antisocial person, including a terrorist or a “witch.” Whether you want to hear or learn about my activism or not, my right to speak freely has been taken away from me, and if you believe you live in a country where that doesn’t happen frequently, you are badly misinformed. Congress assured Americans that the secret surveillance and social extermination practices developed by the CIA in programs called COINTELPRO and MK-Utra, which the FBI has used against activists since the 1960s, had been decommissioned in the 1970s, but Glick found they had lied. Evidence of their widespread use of COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra on American citizens was in the FBI files he obtained through FOIA requests in the late 1980s.

Glick published his findings in the 1989 book, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It. In it are reproductions of the declassified FBI documents he received. Agents -- and their subcontractors, such as today’s Neighborhood Watch groups and those recruited in the FBI’s TIPS program -- used these tactics extensively to discredit and isolate legitimate activists, and to make them unemployable and ruin them.

Many of the “vigilantes” who conduct today’s terror campaigns were recruited by the FBI on their website, for three months, in their TIPS program. These “Special Surveillance Groups,” ordinary individuals from all walks of life who work together in teams, were profiled in a National Public Radio Weekend Edition report on July 5th, 2008. They work for the MBTA, the Post Office, your grocery store. They work in your schools and, yes, your local government agencies. They work with undercover agents long embedded in the community who pose as homeless people and peace activists disabled by mental illnesses because these profiles are the ones most accepted by members of the community as harmless. You would never suspect their true identities. This trust gives them maximum effectiveness to destroy legitimate activists. All of them are this country’s Stazzi, employed to create “wall-less prisons,” today’s concentration camps, around FBI targets.

Glick’s book is one every activist should read and use with his or her fellow activists in order to be certain we are all working together, but curiously, no Boston-area peace or justice group uses it. It is the first defense against government coopting of a group and the only tool available to liberate an activist community from these state-sponsored terrorists.

Not convinced yet your society is a closed one?

Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America (2007), claims everything is in place for the closing of American society, which can happen in any federal emergency where Blackwater is called in, though Blackwater is clearly unnecessary. Did you know that President Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno, gave advanced technology developed by the CIA, FBI and Pentagon to local law enforcement agencies in 1993 for “crowd control,” including handheld microwave guns such as the dazzler, currently in use in Iraq? Deaths of innocent civilians through excessive force by police and FBI have increased in the last 16 years and include the death of Emerson College student Victoria Snelgrove, who was shot in the eye with a pepper spray bullet by a Boston police officer after the Red Sox 2004 pennant victory. Brattleboro, VT, police were exonerated in 2002 by then Gov. Howard Dean’s attorney general of the cold-blooded murder of peace activist Robert "Woody" Woodward, shot in the back 5 times – once, as he lay unarmed, face down on the floor of a church -- Sunday, 12/02/02, after seeking sanctuary there from the FBI. Ronald Reagan gave all of the branches of the military the power to conduct intelligence work and now that the military controls local law enforcement, it is easy to see how COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra have become widespread in all our communities. Woodward claimed to have been a target of the FBI, yet, the local police in their control used deadly force on this unarmed man instead of the less-than-lethal weapons they had at their disposal.

On 10/18/07 at a book signing at the Harvard Coop Ms. Wolf suggested the idea of the FBI using tradesmen as informants was ludicrous. Could it be that Ms. Wolf was just unaware of the FBI’s use of COINTELPRO and MKULTRA to suppress activists? She’s a Yale graduate and an award-winning journalist. You’d think she’d be able to do a little better research. Anne Frank and millions like her are dead because of government informants. Governments always use informants to oppress their opponents -- even the American government. Ever heard of Watergate? Informants, spies and state-sponsored terrorism are real and they’re here. But Ms. Wolf’s job with this opus is to give you the most irrelevant bit of truth embedded into an entire fiction that's designed to make you merely suspicious something might happen in America in the future to its citizens' freedoms, when, in fact, those freedoms quite literally don't exist today -- because she's a disinformation specialist.  Her mission is to make you believe that if you question whether your society is open or closed now, it’s really still open though “everything is in place” for the government to close it.  It’s also the job of those of your leaders who deny these things, those who make you think that because you can talk about what’s troubling you about your country by walking into a carefully planned, sporadic meeting sponsored by a very insulated, closely monitored and tightly controlled group, or blogging in an online community like facebook, that you’re free. DO NOT ASSIGN your responsibility to be diligent about your freedom to Naomi Wolf, or others like her -- especially those of your leaders who limit the scope of topics that are permissible to discuss and who refuse to talk about this fascist government in which we all now live. 

Howard Zinn is right when he says this government, like every other government, is not on your side.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Disinformation works. When the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq, many liberals called for impeachment -- not of the Congresspersons who voted for it, the actual ones that put us in Iraq, but of Dick Cheney, whom liberals were told had to be removed first before anyone would consider removing Bush since to remove Bust would have made Cheney the actual leader of the “free world” and not just the titular one. The campaign was doomed from the start as ineffectual and unrealistic. Massive recalls of Congress should have taken place instead. Security advisors and others were publishing in The New York Times and elsewhere their findings that Iraq was not a threat and Bush was merely beating the war drums because his father, sitting in the Oval Office for only one term, hadn’t finished colonizing that country. Congress had access to the same information as these advisers and we, their readers, did, but they voted for invasion anyway. Recalls didn’t happen. No one has stood up to these tools, toadies and functionaries before. That’s why we live in Stazzi-controlled communities today.

What you can do

Since COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra programs have never been decommissioned, and since much of what Glick writes about is happening to scores of citizens across the country today, thanks to laws passed by every administration since Reagan’s, it is past the time we talk about them. Those laws need to be repealed. Since our City’s government allows COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra programs to be conducted here, and since some of its agents even participate in them, it is past the time we do something about them here. Any rhetoric about change is not going to do anything because it’s just that – rhetoric – so long as you have no place to turn for help when you need it, no Congress, no city council, no state rep. If your “progressive” or peace organization is not equipping its members with information on and tactics to oppose these fascists and the terrorists they create, they’ve been co-opted. If you’re terrorized in your own community, your own home, because you speak out and you look around and find the only people talking about what’s happening are those that have been marginalized in similar fashion, you know your marginalization, your inability to operate freely as a “partner” with any government administration, is not a myth, or a coincidence. www.thehiddenevil.com. www.multistalkervictims.org. www.stopspying.us. www.mobbing-usa.com. If your peace/justice organization, or Barack Obama group, or church’s social concerns committee, or temple’s outreach program, or school’s community service initiatives are not talking and learning about and planning ways to de-institutionalize gangstalking, and decommission the FBI, the NSA, the new secret surveillance organizations, and defund these Pentagon programs, they are not serving your best interests because you are not fighting the true terrorists -- the fascists among us. I don’t care if you belong to the AFSC; they probably feel exactly the way that Cambridge police officer who refused to help me in the Cambridge Savings Bank felt, having once been targets themselves. They do nothing to help targets, and if they’re not working on this issue -- the issue of “informants” among us and a government that subsidizes them -- they are part of the problem, not the solution. You need to create your own groups and do whatever it takes to make sure they remain free of government interference and free to associate so we can protect each other. And then you need to pressure your local, state and federal representatives to defund secret agency work in our community and to criminalize gangstalking, COINTELPRO and MKULTRA, OR GET RID OF THE REPRESENTATIVES THAT ACT LIKE OBSTACLES TO YOUR FREEDOM. And you need to offer sanctuary to targets. Even though demanding your liberty may come with a price -- your temporary civil and human rights -- your silence is complicity, and those will be taken away from you soon anyway. No one else is going to do this work for you, and while you may not regret ignoring this warning today, when they come after you -- and they will come after you eventually -- you may find yourself saying,

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” (Attributed to Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, imprisoned in Moabit prison during the Holocaust for opposing the policies of the Third Reich.)

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NPR: America’s TASS

On Friday, September 4^th, 2009, Morning Edition aired a report by Jon Hamilton (“In Future, Science Could Erase Traumatic Memories”) about scientific research into the role played by the protective molecular sheath around the brain cells of the amygdala in the creation of traumatic memory. Scientists have developed a drug they can use to dissolve this sheath and erase painful memories thereby. Hamilton notes this research promises a pharmaceutical cure for people who suffer from psychological disorders involving traumatic memories, such as those with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. What Hamilton doesn’t say is that without traumatic memories human culture would be a wasteland and humanity, itself, a thing of the past.

Forget Che T-shirts showing up on the backs of foreign youths in YouTube vids from the Czech Republic. Forget long hours at the library reading and studying The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet or The Tragedie of King Lear. Strike the works of Marcel Proust from all your library catalogues, your college curricula, your book stores, book club offerings and your amazon.com wish lists; you’ll have no need to understand the relationship between thought and memory and its importance to identity because you’ll have no identity, once your memories – traumatic, or other – are wiped. You’ll be a clean, empty consuming machine, thanks to the scientists manipulating your amygdala, the last step – not the first – in the state control of mass and individual consciousness.


Ernesto Che Guevara’s grand vision to unite the countries of South America to fight 20^th century colonization by industrialists came from genuine pain he experienced when he toured the continent and saw the needless, grinding poverty in which people lived, the exploitation of miners and valuable land, the preventable or treatable diseases – not just leprosy – from which he saw children dying. His pain was deep and it was real and it was transformative – just not in the way the powers that be approved. Guevara possessed that ability which is the basis of morality; he was empathic, and that ability to feel the pain others feel is the one that enables us to create ethical relationships and societies based on them – to create just laws, not merely indiscriminately applied law-and-order. It is this legacy of morality that is the thing that makes us human. Without it, we’re merely Homo sapiens. In the painful memory-free future Hamilton giddily introduces to us, there will be no need for revolutionary, or counter-, culture because there will be no revolutionaries, and no voices to counter the messages which the state sanctions, such as those we hear on NPR about how great it is for technocrats to erase parts of our brains. No more Che T-shirts – because there will be no more Ches. No civil society either. Forget the freedom of the individual, which once upon a time included the right to informed consent. New York University’s Joseph LeDoux, whom Hamilton features in his report, claims the potential human subjects with whom he’s discussed his treatment for PTSD are perfectly willing to get rid of a few normal brain cells to be rid of their traumatic memories. To him, this equates with “consent.” But is it?

In 1974 – the same year Sen. Ted Kennedy called for an investigation into the CIA’s programs to destroy people’s minds in order to replace their personalities with psychically-driven messaging – the social engineering work of Dr. José Delgado of Yale University was presented to Congress (U.S. Doc. 506: "Congressional Record Vol. 118, Part 5," 92nd Congress 2nd Session, February 23, 1972 to March 1, 1972, pp. 5567-5577), with his advice for billion-dollar funding of corporations and institutions to produce mass broadcast media aimed at virtual brainwashing. He recommended that children be normalized to this brainwashing beginning in elementary school. His work grew out of the CIA’s program in actual shock treatment and brainwashing techniques, of “shock therapy” -- principally, the program created by Canada’s Dr. Ewen Cameron, who had been under contract to the CIA and was one of the subjects of Sen. Kennedy’s investigation.

Delgado offered Congress some nifty tips on how to get the public to go along with the ‘cultural revolution’ he had designed to erase independent thinking by erasing the self, which he said was a phenomenon that has no basis in either ancient history, or in neurophysiology. He seems to have forgotten, or have been ignorant of the facts, that ancient Rome first conceptualized the ideal of the citizen as a thinking, free individual and that millennia of moral evolution has more or less always come down on the side of individual freedom, which is why so many people around the world have waged revolutions in order to attain it (including, once upon a time, even Americans), giving people such as he the opportunity to make careers out of undermining it.

Now, we see the fruition of Delgado’s recommendation that “mass media” be engaged in producing “informative and entertaining programs” to indoctrinate the masses to the benefits of mind control in TV programs such as Survivor, which reinforces the anti-humanistic notion that we are all nothing more than animals, capable only of following the most wily of leaders who entreat us to dispose of others in order to ensure our survival; and the Sci-Fi Channel’s Mind Control with Derren Brown, which shows how fun it is to ‘play’ people by turning their minds against them – making a person bend over five times in a row by dropping five, dollar coins on the sidewalk ahead of them, for example. The proliferation of “reality” TV, which depicts only the most base behavior of H. sapiens.


To this very incomplete list we may now also add Morning Edition’s report about the purported advancement of science in the treatment of wholly man-made psychic problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, not by doing away with the actual events that create the psychic trauma (war) but by erasing the memory of the traumatic event in the mind of its victim – by a new form of “brain” washing – by disabling the amygdala.  In LeDoux’s “advanced,” pain-free future, you’ll have only that identity which the state has given you – the one the state wants you to have so you can go around the world, or perhaps just next door, and oppress and kill other human beings (because you’ve been messaged persistently through mass media culture to believe we’re all animals anyway and this is what animals do; they kill each other) without the messy side-effect of a troubled conscience. You won’t need to know how emotions and the memories they provoke humanize and inform socially-supportive decision-making and behavior because all your behavioral decisions will be made for you (‘Be all you can be -- join the Army!’), and, as is the goal of all brainwashing, you will be told what your perceptions mean to you (‘This isn’t a flour-paste wafer and wine; it’s flesh and blood!’ And, ‘These two planes we inadvertently and coincidentally failed to acknowledge as threats knocked over the impact-resistant twin towers!’). You won’t have to understand proverbs such as, “Pride goeth before a fall” because character, too, will be superfluous, and you won’t have any need for the succor scripture offers when facing moral dilemmas – because you’ll have none. By then, morality and the wisdom about it contained in all cultures’ religious texts will be anachronistic, “Let my people go” replaced with chants of “Let my people go . . . to the mall.”

I bet if Hamilton could track down LeDoux’s alleged group of compliant patients and tell them the actual history of our government’s hand in the programming of our minds on both individual and mass levels they’d be a whole lot more reluctant to hand over their brain cells to people like LeDoux. But that would be informed consent – once, the international standard for participation in medical experiments according to the Common Rule, which has never been adopted by the U.S. Another principle I am sure Dr. LeDoux is aware does not constrain his inhumane research is one also developed at Nuremberg but never adopted here in the United States – the one that dictates a researcher be willing to be his own guinea pig, or refrain from conducting any research in which he is not.

Every time a government – any government -- develops a new, more inhumane, more surreptitious technology to control groups of people or to kill them (incrementally or outright), it does so to use it. Why do you think the world is on pins and needles over every contract North Korea has with a manufacturer whose products have the potential to be used as nuclear components? Everyone tacitly acknowledges this universal truth. Our government didn’t make the atom bomb to not use it. It didn’t develop mind control techniques and technologies to not use them to oppress its citizens, as a review of attorney Brian Glick’s 1989 War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It demonstrates. It hasn’t spent billions of dollars to create the behavior-modifying mass media tools it so clearly has developed to not use them. Hamilton adds a perfunctory note that the brain dissolving technology has detractors who fear misuse by governments and others, as if that fear isn’t more than adequately justified, and to him, perhaps they’re not. Perhaps he’s too young to know the U.S.’s history of persecution of its activists, of its development of biological weapons that include those which destroy the human mind as well as brain. It’s a little difficult to believe, though, that mere age has blinded him so that he cannot even do a little critical thinking and investigating. NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling said in a recent AIR program regarding his story about an immigrant who died in administrative custody in New Jersey that the truth isn’t objective (something I.F. Stone said repeatedly throughout his career). Consequently, it also is not innocuous – something else of which Mr. Hamilton seems to be blissfully unaware. The truth about the ways in which American government scientists have been socially engineering American society is that they’ve been doing it on both individual and mass scales, and for quite some time, to weed out revolutionary voices, facts about which there is more than ample evidence – much of it, as attorney Glick shows us, in the government’s very own words. Perhaps Mr. Hamilton needs to spend some time as Mr. Zwerdling’s protégé and learn how to recognize the truth – or at least learn how to investigate a subject to uncover it. A little education in the humanities couldn’t hurt him, either. I’m not talking about science fiction; I’m talking about a survey of literature, history and philosophy: Lord of the Flies and War and Peace, the Federalist Papers and A People’s History of the United States, Kant and Buber. And don’t, for heaven’s sake, forget the Proust. Advocates of any technology should understand the consequences of their advocacy given the fact such technology is always misapplied by governments. At the very least, Hamilton needs to visit a federal depository for congressional records and start reading up on the truly heinous “science” our government has funded over the last 60 years, if he’s going to report on science issues truthfully.  As for LeDoux, if an amoral person such as the one LeDoux proposes scientists create were writing this rebuttal, this would be the point at which the author would suggest that a brain such as his be the first to be destroyed. Since such a person is not writing this rebuttal, I can only pray LeDoux’s paymasters have no more monstrous projects in which to engage his vapid intellect -- not for the sake of his own immortal soul, but for the sake of his children’s and grandchildren’s imperiled future. More amoral people the world does not need; no one remains untouched by them.

I’ve suspected for a while now that National Public Radio is truly just the mouthpiece of our fascist government ever since it began airing sympathetic coverage of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which it persistently and inaccurately labels a “war,” thereby obscuring the true empire-building raison d’étre of our military missions and the designs for world domination of our government leaders who promote those missions, two facts more than well established through decades of research by academics, activists and former insiders such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and John Perkins, respectively. I dismissed NPR as utterly irrelevant when it aired a story by a talk radio host and southern college professor who claimed some virtue to the demands she made on her husband for remuneration with expensive jewelry after she’d had his baby. Diane Rehme, with her “push presents!” Once upon a time, a crude sector of middle-class white America routinely charged poor African-American women with creating children solely to procure welfare “benefits,” which justified Congress’s whittling of those benefits until Bill Clinton did away with them entirely. From a moral standpoint, in what way is Ms. Rehme’s behavior any different? A caller from Virginia on a mid-morning talk show has prominent airtime to voice his opinion that the aid about which Congress was then voting to send to Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded Iraq was unjustified because, according to him, all the Afghans knew how to do was to have children they couldn’t afford, and the host neither countered that Afghanistan has one of the most persistently high infant mortality rates of any country, nor challenged the man to confine his opinions to the topic under discussion (which was whether the U.S. should essentially offer the Afghans this bribe for the use of their country to wage overt war in Iraq and covert war there). I think now, though, it would be a mistake to write off NPR as either irrelevant, or harmless, or inept because with its airing of its “science” report September 4^th it’s clear “National Public” radio is neither of national benefit, nor public, but merely a state tool run by mindless, uncritical bureaucrats in the employ of the fascists that run our country; bureaucrats paid to prosecute inhumane and anti-American mind-control programs such as those proposed by Dr. Delgado. It is as reliable a source of truthful reporting as was TASS and exists only to validate whatever propaganda the U.S. government wishes to inculcate in the minds of Americans.

Freedom cannot exist if it doesn't exist at least in the human mind as an ideal to which humans may aspire.  When all the revolutionary voices have been chemically altered not to respond to genuine tragedy appropriately by questing towards ideals such as freedom, the revolutionaries will be gone for good, and so, too, will all freedom.  Our society will be a mawkish morass of culture perpetuated by tragicomic innocents such as those depicted in David Byrne's True Stories.  Nice people -- but not the folks you want fighting dictators that chemically alter human minds. The bureaucrats who run NPR should be ashamed of themselves, but perhaps they can’t be. Perhaps they’ve already had fatal exposure to the LeDouxs of this world.

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