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.

A Brief History of COINTELPRO in America

Another week, another mass shooting in America.  (Actually, there were several, but only one managed to be selected as worthy of national news coverage.)  I overheard a couple of co-workers yesterday talking about what happened in Dallas on Thursday night.  They were eyeing me during their undertone conversation, so, having no TV and blissfully unaware of Thursday's events, I strolled over cheerfully and asked, "What's up?"  They proceeded to tell me, and to offer a number of opinions regarding how American society should view both Black lives and police lives.  My next words must have shocked them.  "Have you ever heard of a false flag operation?" I asked.

From the looks on their faces, I could tell that this was not a possibility they had considered, even though one of them acknowledged that he knew what the term means.  I consider this to be a shocking failure of our outlets of culture and media to inform adults who have the right to vote, who live in what is supposedly the "most powerful country on earth," and who therefore should be much better informed.  Consider this post to be my attempt to rectify this deficiency.

I want to begin by introducing a potentially unfamiliar term to you.  According to Wikipedia, COINTELPRO "was a series of covert, and at times, illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations."  The COINTELPRO operation was conceived under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.  Note the words, "discrediting" and "disrupting."  If you read the Wikipedia article, you can see the United States from the 1950's to the 1970's as a nation whose favored members enjoyed the greatest privilege the world had ever seen - yet that privilege was built on the backs of those peoples of the world who had been violently oppressed in order to build that privilege.  So the favored members of American society lived in a great deal of insecurity and felt horribly threatened by the presence of any voices challenging their privilege and the oppression on which that privilege had been built.  They were frightened by those voices which were asking for a more equitable life for all.  COINTELPRO was designed by the FBI and others as a way to discredit and neutralize the voices of those who protested the oppressive order set up by the United States and other First World nations.  Read how COINTELPRO especially targeted the leaders of the Black Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's.  One of the tactics of COINTELPRO was the use of agents provocateurs, paid police agents used to attempt to incite protest organizations to engage in illegal activity so that law enforcement would have a justification for arrests.

One thing to note: there is at least one case on record of undercover police being implicated in staging violence by protesters against police during a political rally.  I am sure there are many more cases that can may be discovered by an enterprising researcher.  I leave that as an exercise for the reader.  (You might start here, here, here, here, or here.  Goodness gracious, I think I've done a lot of the work for you!)

Now a funny thing happened in the 1970's.  In 1971, the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI managed to break into an FBI office, and stole several files which contained records of the COINTELPRO operation.  (See this also.)  They then dutifully leaked these records to the press.  Many press outlets refused to publish the leaked documents, but they eventually were widely circulated, and the FBI was forced to ostensibly "end" COINTELPRO.  But like many things that are evil (including sewage leaks), the basic mechanisms of COINTELPRO never really ended.  They just went underground.  (See what was done in the 1980's to environmental protest groups, for instance.)  Indeed, the Wikipedia article cited at the beginning of this post shows that from 1980 onward (and especially during the presidency of George W. Bush), there has been a sharp revival of COINTELPRO-like operations.

As far as the Dallas sniper incident, note the following details:

• Not only were police shot, but protesters as well.  (How very similar to what happened in Maidan in the Ukraine just before the Western backed coup that plunged that country into civil war.)  
• Initial reports stated that several snipers were involved, and a number of Black men were arrested.  However, the official police story against these men fell apart, and the official narrative was changed to implicate only one man, who, of course, "died in a gun battle with police" after managing to fire on police from several positions in a superhuman feat of mobility.
• Police responders and media were conveniently on scene to provide an instant high-drama "response" to the incident.
• The man who has been implicated as the lone sniper is conveniently very dead right now, and therefore cannot stand trial.
• The dead man was implicated in less than 24 hours after the incident, in contrast to the many unreported mass shootings (defined as shootings in which four or more people are hit), in which police don't find a perpetrator for days or weeks. 
• The dead man's race and supposed political ideology were used to attempt to implicate and scapegoat entire group of people in order to justify the ongoing oppression and violence practiced by a dominant majority against this group.

In the details of the list I have presented are similarities with a number of high-profile incidents over the last two years, including the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Paris Massacre, the San Bernardino shootings, and the Orlando nightclub shootings.   The official narrative of these incidents has been mercilessly picked apart by a growing spectrum of people who are tired of being oppressed and especially tired of a dominant society which seems bent on finding ongoing excuses to continue the oppression and scapegoating.  So it is not surprising that one of the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement is identifying the Dallas shooting (and similar incidents which have taken place in other parts of the United States in the last two days) as a false flag operation.

I agree with her.