Recently, many of my fellow activists here in the Twin Cities were targeted by the FBI in what can only be called a witch hunt, in the most classically political sense of the term. Eight homes of antiwar, anti-capitalist, and human rights activists were invaded in Minneapolis and Chicago. Their houses and offices were ransacked, computers and all forms of information storage stolen, and several of them were subpoenaed to testify in a grand jury investigation in Chicago. The organizations that these people work on behalf of were, among others, the Anti-War Committee, SDS, the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Columbia Action Network, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
I'll invite you to guess which of those groups most interested the FBI. But that's beside the point. Add to this list the Weather Underground, the USA Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and a few others from history, and you have the exact same witch hunt that was exercised on the American people during the McCarthy era, when communism was the big threat to capitalism. Today, as was the case back then, the agents come to your home or your office, riffle through your personal belongings like pigs on a truffle hunt, and tell you it all has nothing to do with your personal ideologies and beliefs; that they are doing an investigation that involves "national security". At least back during the McCarthy era, they didn't lie about it; they just went right at you and tried to figure out if you were a "communist sympathizer". Today, they have the Department of Homeland Security, a nifty little term the George W. Bush Administration borrowed from the Nazi Party. And like the Nazi Party, they - and now the Barack Obama Administration - utilize it to conduct searches of people they think might pose some kind of challenge to the ruling elite, regardless of whether or not they can prove a single thing.
These people, and many others we have yet to hear about, are being targeted for one reason only: they represent a growing anti-establishment movement in the United States; one that is quickly becoming larger in number, bolder, and much more organized about which particular American government abuses they choose to go after. They are labeled terrorists, and are guilty until proven innocent. They are being charged with "material support of designated foreign terrorist organizations". It is important to note here that the grand jury has been used by the American government as a tool for political suppression since before the Civil War, so let's not get on our high horses and claim that is some outlandish overreach by our already criminal government. There is nothing new about this latest effort on behalf of the ruling fascists of America to suppress the public's right to dissent. What is new about this latest front in the fake war on terror, is that there is nowhere near the rate of political activation today as was present during the McCarthy era, or the uprisings of the 1960s, nor the Progressive Movement of the 1930s. In fact, the movement we are experiencing today is extremely small in comparison, and is only just starting to gather some steam, partially as a result of the FBI pigs snooping around.
Today, it actually takes FBI raids, illegal wars, illegal wire-tapping, censorship in the mainstream media, rampant chauvinism, the corporate take-over of the Internet, corporate thievery of our common natural resources, the slashing of all programs that work to lift the least among us out of disparity, and a long, long list of other anti-humanitarian measures to even get an anti-establishment movement worth its salt off the ground. We should all, collectively, as citizens of the American Empire, be disgusted, fed up, and violently radicalized by this point in the game. We are not, and yet here come the thought police.
While I have the utmost respect for all my fellow warriors in the Anti-War Committee, Socialist Alternative, Freedom Road, SDS, and all the other groups I try to work with, either as an individual, or with Junkyard Empire, I have to say something that they might not necessarily agree with: The FBI, or any of the other dozen plus major limitless budgeted programs of the United States government, can and will spy on us. They always have, and they always will. In fact, I would argue that the FBI just might be most benign of them all. Again, the Nazi's had nothing on what would become the America of today. The only difference between them and us is that we are not - as far as I know - systematically executing anyone based solely on race or ethnicity. Strike that. I'm pretty sure we are.
The point here is that they will spy on us, no matter what we do. Nothing we say here on the Internet, in private email, or on any kind of phone, will ever be safe from the snooping eyes and ears of the American secret police state. And frankly, we know that the mainstream media will go out of their way NOT to cover any of the actions of civil disobedience being done every day in this country, nor will they make any effort whatsoever to represent the radical, leftist, socialist, call it what you want view of the American social and political establishment. This became evident when such treasures of American dissidence as Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, and Colleen Rowley were all arrested, along with 120+ others, at a protest against the Afghanistan War in front of the White House on December 16th last year. Not one single story in the mainstream press. We are talking about some of the most radical whistle-blowing journalists and activists this country has ever known, all being arrested on the same day, and not a single story about these people protesting a currently escalating war that has already gone on longer than Vietnam.
I leave you with this thought: PLEASE SPY ON US. I personally welcome the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and all the other operations I don't even know the name of to spy away. Read every god damned thing all my radical compatriots and I write. Listen to our conversations too. Come to our teach-ins and our organizing meetings. Nothing we say on a phone, or write in a virtual context will ever be the full story. There will always be events, plans, and actions of civil disobedience that you and your fellow pigs will never know about. What you should really be afraid of is the reality that the American people are starting to wake up from the slumber you and your armies of capital have somehow lured us into.
We're coming to get you, and we're not gonna stop. Surrender while you still can. Your banks and your corporations cannot function without the willing slavery of the American people, and the cognitive dissonance that goes along with it. The revolution is coming, ready or not.
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