From D to D, Chapter 5 (Continued): On The Trail of Tommy The Traveler

Kala ku pandang kerlip bintang nun jauh di sana

Sayup kudengar melodi cinta yang menggema

Terasa kembali gelora jiwa mudaku

Karena tersentuh alunan lagu semerdu kopi dangdut

Api asmara yang dahulu pernah membara

Semakin hangat bagai ciuman yang pertama

Detak jantungku seakan ikut irama

Karena terlena oleh pesona alunan kopi dangdut

Irama kopi dangdut yang ceria

Menyengat hati menjadi gairah

Membuat aku lupa akan cintaku yang telah lalu

Api asmara yang dahulu pernah membara

Semakin hangat bagai ciuman yang pertama

Detak jantungku seakan ikut irama

Karena terlena oleh pesona alunan kopi dangdut...

- from Kopi Dangdut.  Lyrics by Fahmi Shahab.

As I said in a previous post, if you are from outside Europe or Russia or the United States, please keep making good music!  For those of you who, like myself, are native English speakers, try Google Translate if you dare.  And now...

This post is a continuation of my "study guide" and commentary on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. In this series of posts, I have shortened the title of the book to From D to D. As I have said in previous posts, the consideration of this book is highly relevant for these times, in which those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else.  Therefore, it is up to us who are not counted among the "chosen few" to learn to organize ourselves in order to thwart the power of the few and to ensure the emergence of a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples. 

The previous post in this series introduced us to Chapter 5 of From D to D, which is titled, "Exercising Power."  In that post we discussed the fact that a group of oppressed people who organize to nonviolently liberate themselves from oppression can exercise great power if they organize themselves and their struggle according to high moral and ethical principles combined with wise strategy.  For these principles and this strategy can amplify the contrast between the oppressed struggle group and the members of the corrupt oppressor group.  This combination of high principles and wise strategy is also the most effective means of shifting the balance of social power away from the oppressors.  For this reason, oppressors who understand the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance are very interested in doing all they can to render that resistance ineffective.    To repeat a bit of the previous post, the strategy used by the oppressor consists of things such as these:

1. To try to make the practitioners of nonviolent struggle resemble the oppressor as much as possible by adopting the oppressor's means of fighting to the greatest extent possible. This shifts the struggle onto a ground in which the means of fighting are chosen by the dictator, and thus the struggle is easy for the oppressor's regime to combat.
2. To redefine the concept of strategic nonviolent resistance in such a way that the moral and ethical advantages of would-be resisters are erased.
3. To reduce the popular conception of nonviolent resistance into a small set of activities that can be easily controlled, outlawed or hijacked - for instance, by defining resistance solely as mass protest rallies and marches.

Today we will consider the first two strategies in this list, and we will consider a method of choice used by oppressors throughout history to accomplish the goals of these strategies.  Note that all three of these strategies fit within a larger political strategy which has been used by worthless and evil power-holders throughout history: namely, to prevail in a political contest by tarnishing one's opponent rather than by conducting oneself in a way that is clearly morally superior to the way of one's opponent.  In other contexts, this larger strategy goes by the very familiar term of mudslinging.  

But what if the organized opponents of an evil power-holder can't be tarnished by garden-variety mudslinging because they insist on conducting themselves wisely and righteously in the sight of all?  Then the evil power-holder is forced to attempt to seduce the struggle group to abandon right moral and ethical principles, or to adopt unwise strategies, or both.  In this attempt, the oppressor's tool of choice is the agent provocateur.  

An agent provocateur (literally, an "inciting agent") is a person sent by a power-holder (whether a government or other holder of concentrated wealth and power) who infiltrates a social organization in order to perform a certain job.  The infiltrator's job is to try to tempt the members of that organization to commit violent or otherwise illegal activities (in order to discredit the organization and legitimize the use of State violence against its members), or to cause the organization to fall apart by making false accusations about certain of its members to the rest of the membership.  The discussion of agents provocateurs tends at times to produce disbelief, especially in the United States, where a significant number of people believe that the government is always an agent for good (that is, when it is controlled by the Republican Party), that the rich are good people, and that "our men in uniform" are engaged in a righteous mission at all times - especially when they are police, and especially when they are killing people of color.  When one suggests to such believers that perhaps the heroes whom they worship are actually up to dirty tricks, they respond by accusing the suggester of believing baseless conspiracy theories.

However, the history of the use of agents provocateurs is long and deep and extremely well-documented.  In pages 592 and 593 of his three-volume work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp documents the ways in which agents provocateurs have been used by both governments and big business, such as the use of such agents in an attempt to sabotage the Indian struggle for independence from Britain, the use of British Army agents during the 1926 British general strike, and the Russian Tsar's use of such agents during the latter half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century.  (Ever heard of the Okhrana?  See this also.  And note that Vladimir Putin seems to be styling himself as a tsar rising from the ashes...)  As for the use of these agents in American labor struggles, John Steuben's excellent book Strike Strategy provides excellent documentation.  

And the use of such agents is not confined to the somewhat distant past.  In a previous post I described how members of various white supremacist groups infiltrated the Black Lives Matter protests which took place in 2020 because of the police murders (yes, I said murders) of George Floyd, Ahmed Aubury, and Breonna Taylor.  However, the 1960's provide some of the richest, most fascinating, most narratively and cinematically pregnant history of the use of agents provocateurs in the history of the United States.  For that decade was the decade in which a number of movements for social justice - patiently nurtured during the previous decades - burst into highly visible fruition.  It was therefore the decade in which the established holders of concentrated wealth and power reacted most colorfully, being terrified by the flowering of movements whose strength they had underestimated.

This was the decade of COINTELPRO, the program created by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on American citizens who were deemed to be a "threat to the established social order" including many members and leaders of the African -American Civil Rights struggles.  Note that in 1976, U.S. Senator Frank Church led a Congressional investigation of domestic spying performed by agencies of the Executive Branch, and discovered that the rights of U.S. citizens had been systematically violated by these agencies.  (You can read about it here.  Just scroll down to the text that reads, "Final Report, S. Rep. No. 94-755 (1976)".)  And this was the decade in which a particularly weird agent provocateur first made his appearance at a number of college campuses in the United States.  His birth name was Momluang Singkata Thomas Tongyai N’Ayudhya, but he soon became known as "Tommy the Traveler."  His fanatical focus was on finding students whom he deemed to be likely to be involved in subversive organizations in order to incite them to commit crimes.  And he stuck out like a sore thumb, not only because he was too old to be a college student (hey, this was way back in the day, ya know!), but because he dressed like a cop and acted like someone who was mildly deranged.  After much effort, he did eventually get some students to firebomb an ROTC office (with the firebomb materials provided graciously by himself), and that led to a raid on the college campus.  During the raid, his identity as a police agent was revealed.  Needless to say, those attending that college in those days were taught a lesson they had perhaps not signed up for.  You can read more about him here.

How then should a nonviolent struggle group structure and position itself to deal with the threat of agents provocateurs, and with the problem of infiltration in general?  I will provide my answer to that question in the next post in this series, God willing.  Hint: the answer is not what you might think.