Politics were so different in 1968

[sunny]

Apparently, some anti-war activists are planning to re-create Chicago '68 in Denver.

[IanEye]

Apparently, some anti-war activists are planning to re-create Chicago '68 in Denver.

those "anti-war activists" would have to be pretty fucking ignorant then, seeing as how the Democrats were the incumbent Party in '68. To recreate the vibe of '68, one would need to create a ruckus in St. Paul.



btw, note the Blue Elephant...

[FourthBase]

What a horrible fucking idea.

[Avalon]

Terry Gross interviewed Brett Morgan, director of the film "Chicgo 10" last night on her NPR program Fresh Air. The film premierred at Sundance last year, and I think it may be having a general theatre release this week. Terry played an audio track from the original trial that has never been publicly heard before. It showed Morgen's dramatisation of that section to be pretty faithful (what a strange voice Judge Julius Hoffman has!). The film is titled "Chicgo Ten" as they wanted to include the two defense attorneys in the total.

You can listen online at http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/r ... =storyview

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

The American people, not just J. Edgar Hoover's targeted Communists and Negroes, were now officially an enemy population to be infiltrated, conquered and occupied so that "the sixties" would never happen again.

HMW would have been more accurate to write "The American people as a whole, not just the Communists and Blacks that J. Edgar Hoover targeted, became an enemy population to be infiltrated..."

Just what I meant. Sorry if that wasn't put as clearly as intended.
Thanks for highlighting it.

My point was that America's Social Control Gestapo had been only J. Edgar Hoover's personal FBI army since beginning soon after WWI but that changed in the mid-late 1960s when this function was taken over by the National inSecurity State military-intelligence networks.

There was a Pentagon sniper team in Memphis April 4, 1968 as a back-up for the MPD shooter who killed Martin Luther King.

The 111th Military Intelligence Group shadowed MLK in Memphis.
Civil Disorder Operation: LANTERN SPIKE, March 28-April 12 1968.

The tactics of Operation Phoenix were used in the US.

There's a perfect term I found in a book about the severely efficient militarized (and US-backed) police suppression system in Brazil, "violence workers."

[b]'Violence Workers:
Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities'[/b]
...by Martha K. Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9771.php

Chapter 1: Violent Lives
Chapter 2: Reconstructing Atrocity
Chapter 3: Locating Torturers and Murderers
Chapter 4: Deposing Atrocity and Managing Secrecy
Chapter 5: Biography Intersects History
Chapter 6: Personalistic Masculinity
Chapter 7: Bureaucratizing Masculinities
Chapter 8: Blended Masculinity
Chapter 9: Shaping Identities and Obedience: A Murderous Dynamic
Chapter 10: Secret and Insular Worlds of Serial Torturers and Executioners
Chapter 11: Moral Universe of Torturers and Murderers
Chapter 12: Hung Out to Dry

Conclusion: The Alchemy of Torture and Execution: Transforming Ordinary Men into Violence Perpetrators

The book analyzes what makes such a system work:
-secrecy
-occupational insularity
-organizational fragmentation
-personal isolation
-national and personal histories that fit into the above
= MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

And the US has the same system in place and has been installing it into other countries for decades.

God bless...

p.s. IanEye, I know more about jazz than Kenny G.
And Don Byron is my favorite clarinetist.

[chiggerbit]

IanEye, see nomo's post for what I really meant about the prison/industrial complex:

http://rigorousintuition.ca/board/viewtopic.php?t=16418


sunny, I hope no one's planning a 68-style Dem convention. Look at what it got us--->a losing candidate.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

"We have all been here before..."
More on the domestic social control plans of the military during the 1960 from a 'safe' academic source. What you see here leaves out the must-not-be-revealed worst abuses but you can get an idea of how 'we' became the enemy of 'our' Pentagon. Note that this falsely claims these abuses ended due to public exposure. right.-

http://www.history.army.mil/books/Lineage/mi/ch9.htm
.....
The U.S. Army Intelligence Command and the Home Front

Even while the fighting went on in Vietnam, Army Intelligence was actively engaged in operations in another area, the American home front. The principal Army player here was the U.S. Army Intelligence Command (USAINTC), the Army counterintelligence element formed in 1965 to conduct operations in the continental United States. The command had been allotted substantial personnel to carry out its mission. Its seven Military Intelligence groups controlled a network of 300 field and resident offices across the nation. The merger of Army counterintelligence and criminal investigative records into the investigative Records Repository (IRR) gave the command a massive data base, which was supplemented in 1966 when USAINTC became the DOD agent administering the newly created Defense Central Index of Investigations, a master file of all counterintelligence and criminal investigations performed by the armed services, and the National Agency Check Center, which performed records searches on files maintained by non-DOD agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local police departments. By 1967 the command had extended its responsibilities beyond its original jurisdiction, assuming the case control function for routine background investigations requested by the major commands overseas.

Centralizing counterintelligence operations in the United States under a single Army command produced the desired effects in terms of speed and efficiency The new organization not only had a greater capacity to coordinate and conduct counterespionage investigations against military suspects but also was bet-
ter able to conduct background investigations. Under the old decentralized system, it had taken an average of ninety-seven days to process a standard background investigation. By 1967 USAINTC completed these investigations in an average time of thirty-one days. However, centralization would prove to have less desirable effects. It gave Army counterintelligence a high profile, and gave civilian policy makers an organization to task for domestic intelligence collection in what was rapidly becoming a time of trouble. The end result for Army Intelligence was less than satisfactory.

Under delimitations agreements dating back to the 1940s, the FBI had primary responsibility for counterintelligence investigations of civilians in the continental United States. Army counterintelligence confined its attention to the military and to those civilians who applied for security-sensitive civilian and military positions with the Army. Most of the Army's counterintelligence effort and resources were devoted to background investigations of the latter. However, the events of the 1960s conspired to break down the neat demarcation line between military and civilian counterintelligence jurisdiction in the United States and to draw Army Intelligence deeply into civilian affairs. Federal troops were frequently alerted and occasionally deployed to restore order when local authorities were unable to maintain control in the numerous crises of the period. Commanders needed intelligence support, and it quickly became apparent that it was too late to attempt to gather intelligence once an actual troop deployment had begun. It also became apparent that the existing civilian intelligence agencies were fragmented and often ineffectual.

The FBI may have had theoretical responsibility for civilian counterintelligence, but its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was aging and increasingly uncooperative. The bureau itself, although having a good track record in apprehending interstate car thieves, kidnappers, and the occasional spy, was primarily a crimefighting agency with neither the capacity nor the inclination to produce finished domestic intelligence. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of FBI agents were middle-aged white males, limiting the bureau's capability to conduct effective undercover work against the radical black and student groups that seemed to pose the greatest threat to national security. As conditions of disorder became progressively worse, the Army moved to fill an intelligence void.

Local commanders had first begun to request counterintelligence support from the assets they controlled during the civil rights disturbances in the South in the first part of the decade. USAINTC became involved in giving crisis support soon after it had been set up, as a result of Army involvement in the Watts rioting in August 1965. The command formulated its first contingency plan for collecting domestic intelligence in early 1966. STEEP HILL, as the plan was code named, was designed to be implemented only after there had been an actual deployment of federal troops.

The command soon realized that STEEP HILL, redesignated GARDEN PLOT in 1967, was inadequate. For USAINTC to be of any help to Army commanders in
a civil disturbance situation, it would have to begin collection as soon as there was any likelihood of a deployment of federal troops. To meet the requirement, the command devised a new collection plan, Rose HILL, later redesignated PUNCH BLOCK and LANTERN SPIKE, successively. Unrest in America's cities caused PUNCH BLOCK to go into effect eight times during the summer of 1966. By this time, in the words of the USAINTC official history, civil disturbance collection had become a "minimal, but increasing" part of the command's workload .23

The troubled summer of 1967 brought matters to a head. The LANTERN SPIKE civil disturbance collection plan was implemented four times, and federal troops were actually committed to deal with a major riot in Detroit. As a result of the Detroit disturbances, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, who had served as the agent of the Executive Branch in handling the federal intervention, tasked the Army with "reconnoitering the major cities" to gain information on critical elements of topography and vulnerability before troops were sent in again. He also suggested that "the assembly and analysis of data with respect to activity patterns is also needed." 24 This put the Army into the domestic intelligence business on a greatly enlarged scale.

After the Detroit riots, the priorities of the U.S. Army Intelligence Command changed perceptibly. The Army now began to collect intelligence data that would not only allow it to intervene effectively in urban riots, but would also help it to cope with the threat of the increasingly violent antiwar movement. By 1967 the popular consensus in support of American commitment to Vietnam was beginning to waver. An uncensored media had brought the horrors of war to American living rooms, and the Johnson strategy of fighting a painless war by allowing generous exemptions for college students while tripling the draft call had made a time bomb out of the nation's campuses. Radical students and others had started to challenge not only the war, but the whole American system allegedly responsible for it. The Army now felt it had to defend its personnel and installations from possible subversion, sabotage, and even guerrilla warfare. In response to these perceived menaces, USAINTC steadily widened its collection activities, and the files of the Intelligence Records Repository began to bulge with the names of individuals and groups with no connection to the Department of Defense except their reputed opposition to it.

The rioting that devastated the nation's capital following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was the final straw. In response, OACSI set up civil disturbance units in its Counterintelligence and Counterintelligence Analysis Branches in 1968, and the Department of the Army issued a classified Civil Disturbance Collection Plan levying intelligence requirements upon USAINTC that were so sweeping that they could not be filled by the traditional methods of overt collection or liaison with FBI and local law enforcement officials.

To accomplish the tasking, the command had to initiate an extensive collection program against domestic targets. And by now, Army Intelligence elements other than USAINTC were also involved in the domestic intelligence field. In an independent effort, CONARC and several Zone of the interior armies had deployed counterintelligence personnel from their tactical units to engage in domestic collection operations and had compiled computer data bases on suspected potential troublemakers. The Army Security Agency had used its own assets on several occasions in 1967 and 1968 to monitor the demonstrators' citizen-band radios.

Even at the height of this type of activity, the bulk of USAINTC's resources remained committed to the traditional role of conducting background investigations. But the amount of activity devoted to domestic intelligence had a significance beyond its limited size. The perceived domestic crisis, coupled with Johnson administration demands for more and more information, led Army Intelligence into dangerous waters. Its activities crossed the traditional dividing line between the civilian and military in American life and overstepped the law, since neither the collection activities nor the civilian intelligence data bank of USAINTC had been authorized by statute.25

As early as 1969, after a change of administrations, Robert F Froehlke, assistant secretary of defense for administration, expressed doubts about the wisdom of the whole operation. The Army went beyond its own requirements to involve itself in civilian concerns to such a degree, and the assistant secretary was concerned that the Army might be diffusing its limited intelligence assets, trying to collect intelligence on too large a portion of American society. As Froehlke ruefully admitted, the demands made upon USAINTC for domestic intelligence had gone "substantially beyond the capability for Military Intelligence units to collect. They reflected the all encompassing and uninhibited demand for information directed at the Department of the Army." 26

What ended the Army's domestic intelligence program, however, was not doubts, but public exposure. In early 1970 the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Army and the U.S. Army Intelligence Command for "spying on civil-
ians."27 The subsequent publicity, accompanied by recriminations from politicians and journalists, led not only to the end of this particular program, but ultimately to the end of USAINTC itself. The whole Army Intelligence community had suffered a major setback.

[yathrib]

Thanks for that eloquent and insightful list, judasdisney.

I was a post-toddler in 1968, growing up in a very conservative area where the sixties really didn't reach until about the Bicentennial... But even so, the most conservative people I grew up among and was raised by had core values that would have branded them as absolute, disgusting, bleeding heart liberals in 2008 America.

Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell said in 1972: "This country is going [to move] so far to the right, you won't recognize it."

American citizens in 2008 would not recognize America in 1968:

In 1968, hospitals were non-profit.

In 1968, public space and public facilities were widespread.

In 1968, four times as many American citizens belonged to a labor union.

In 1968, the idea that the word "liberal" was bad would have been ludicrous.

In 1968, broadcast TV and radio airwaves were subject to the Fairness Doctrine: equal time for different points of view on public affairs.

In 1968, high school civics was a required class.

In 1968, two-income families were not necessary.

In 1968, trade unionists made yearly wages that were better than most white collar workers. I don't need to remind you what CEOs made in 1968 compared with 2008.

In 1968, the minimum wage was at its highest, around $1.70 in 1968 dollars ($9.50 in 2007 dollars). This was 90% of the poverty line in 1968. That's the highest the U.S. minimum wage ever achieved. However, minimum wage jobs were not as high a percentage of the U.S. workforce in 1968.

In 1968, paperback books were a growth industry, because Americans read for leisure.

In 1968, the United States had a middle class, artificially constructed by the policies of FDR, before those policies were dismantled by Reagan and Clinton. Where there is a middle class, there is leisure time. Where there is leisure time, there is participatory democracy and civic involvement.

I fear the 1970s more than I fear 1968. The next Democratic president will almost certainly be destabilized with Iran hostage-crisis-style false flags, both to make Bush look good in retrospect, and to weaken the Democratic president. The next Democratic administration will not have 1990s OPEC offering cheap oil, nor 1990s Alan Greenspan setting up the chessboard with low interest rates. There will be no interest rates left to cut. The next Democratic administration will have Cheney sleeper cells and false intelligence feeds. The next Democratic administration cannot be permitted to succeed under any circumstances. The failure is already pre-designed: taxes must be raised, there is nothing left to deregulate, there is not much left to privatize, the military is destroyed, diplomatic credibility is in shreds, and neither a black man nor a white woman could afford politically to investigate and prosecute the crimes of the Bush Administration.

When the foreshadowings and implications of 1968 are fulfilled in the U.S., they will likely look more like Chile 1973 and Argentina 1976.

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell said in 1972: "This country is going [to move] so far to the right, you won't recognize it."

Jack Ruby said the same thing to the press. On camera.

Great list below. I'd add-

In 1968, there were only 3 and a half television networks and many many more newspapers. The CIA had a looser grip on media than today.

In 1968 Americans were taller. Chronic poverty has affected the average physical development of Americans.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/uop-ur2071703.php

U.S. ranks 27th in world social progress; Africa in dire straits

FRANKFURT -- Denmark and Sweden lead the world in social progress, Afghanistan is at the bottom of the list and the United States ranks 27th among 163 nations, according to the latest Index of Social Progress.
.....
In the U.S., Estes, who has researched world social development for 30 years, found the pace of social development to be "on hold" since 1980, putting the U.S. on the same level as Poland and Slovenia in the current "report card."

"Chronic poverty is the greatest threat to social progress in the United States," Estes said. "More than 33 million Americans -- almost 12 million of them children -- are poor." "Contrary to public perception," Estes said, "the majority of poor in the United States are members of established family households who work full-time and are white. No other economically advanced country tolerates such a level of poverty."

Other challenges impeding American social progress include slow economic growth, increasing unemployment, insecure access for many people to adequate health care and deteriorating schools in many urban areas.

American citizens in 2008 would not recognize America in 1968:

In 1968, hospitals were non-profit.

In 1968, public space and public facilities were widespread.

In 1968, four times as many American citizens belonged to a labor union.

In 1968, the idea that the word "liberal" was bad would have been ludicrous.

In 1968, broadcast TV and radio airwaves were subject to the Fairness Doctrine: equal time for different points of view on public affairs.

In 1968, high school civics was a required class.

In 1968, two-income families were not necessary.

In 1968, trade unionists made yearly wages that were better than most white collar workers. I don't need to remind you what CEOs made in 1968 compared with 2008.

In 1968, the minimum wage was at its highest, around $1.70 in 1968 dollars ($9.50 in 2007 dollars). This was 90% of the poverty line in 1968. That's the highest the U.S. minimum wage ever achieved. However, minimum wage jobs were not as high a percentage of the U.S. workforce in 1968.

In 1968, paperback books were a growth industry, because Americans read for leisure.

In 1968, the United States had a middle class, artificially constructed by the policies of FDR, before those policies were dismantled by Reagan and Clinton. Where there is a middle class, there is leisure time. Where there is leisure time, there is participatory democracy and civic involvement.

....
[/quote]

[8bitagent]

And how back then, the Democrats were the evil bad guy party of whom RFK was trying to change

When 1960s Democrats had an out-of-control President from their own party destroying his country and his party with an illegal war based on lies, those 1960s Democrats marched in the streets and pressured LBJ into withdrawing from a second term.

When Republicans were faced with the same situation, zero Republicans marched in the streets. They're still not marching in the streets, and they did not demand Bush abstain from a second term. Much of Bush's 19% approval rating comes from Republicans who feel that Bush is not Right-Wing or authoritarian enough.

Most liberals are not near as fired up back then

That's by design and many years of non-stop assault on the very word "liberal" and all of its giant legacy of greatness. From the False Flag destabilizations of the Carter administration through the greed-legitimizing, union-busting Reagan administration through the move-the-goalposts Clinton administration, there has been no liberal standard-bearer for 40 years in the U.S. It's amazing that there are any liberals left whatsoever. The campaign to eradicate liberals has been impaired by the radical Bush Era. But the campaign to eradicate liberals is about to be revitalized and put on steroids.

Well, I really shouldnt make generalizations to say all of the left in America isnt as "fired up as they were in 1968"...

its just the anti war protests seem hollow these days, and it seems there's a general "whatever" attitude in this era some refer to as the "Zeroes"

Back in 1968, if you were to be at the Chicago convention with a megaphone, and said "the CIA took out JFK, MLK and now RFK...and now this shadow government is trying to snooker us again with more war and more puppet leaders!"
...chances are the crowd would say "fuck yeah!"

Now, if in 2008 you did the same thing, cept talked about 9/11, intentionally creating chaos in Iraq by design to appear like theyre losing,
using Jundullah in Pakistan to stage terrorism in Iran, or how the US shouldnt be in Afghanistan...
most the liberal crowd would yell "get the hell off the stage looney!"

I remember clearly the fired up left after the Seattle WTO protest in 1999, and how angry and organized the left was during the 2000 convention and especially after the stolen election.

Then 9/11 hits. And pretty much, in my view the spine and activism of the American political left was destroyed never to be seen from again

And PERFECT point about how PISSED the democrats were about LBJ
by 1968, viewing him as some would view Bush by now. Only NOW do the liberals forget and think of LBJ in rosey colored glasses.

But I wouldnt blame the Republicans for being mum on Bush...look how many democrats still worship the legacy of Slick Willy, despite the evil he committed in Iraq, Kosovo and other shenanigans


The tactics of Operation Phoenix were used in the US.

There's a perfect term I found in a book about the severely efficient militarized (and US-backed) police suppression system in Brazil, "violence workers."

[b]'Violence Workers:
Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities'[/b]
...by Martha K. Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9771.php

Chapter 1: Violent Lives
Chapter 2: Reconstructing Atrocity
Chapter 3: Locating Torturers and Murderers
Chapter 4: Deposing Atrocity and Managing Secrecy
Chapter 5: Biography Intersects History
Chapter 6: Personalistic Masculinity
Chapter 7: Bureaucratizing Masculinities
Chapter 8: Blended Masculinity
Chapter 9: Shaping Identities and Obedience: A Murderous Dynamic
Chapter 10: Secret and Insular Worlds of Serial Torturers and Executioners
Chapter 11: Moral Universe of Torturers and Murderers
Chapter 12: Hung Out to Dry

Conclusion: The Alchemy of Torture and Execution: Transforming Ordinary Men into Violence Perpetrators

The book analyzes what makes such a system work:
-secrecy
-occupational insularity
-organizational fragmentation
-personal isolation
-national and personal histories that fit into the above
= MORAL DISENGAGEMENT

And the US has the same system in place and has been installing it into other countries for decades.

God bless...

p.s. IanEye, I know more about jazz than Kenny G.
And Don Byron is my favorite clarinetist.

The American people, not just J. Edgar Hoover's targeted Communists and Negroes, were now officially an enemy population to be infiltrated, conquered and occupied so that "the sixties" would never happen again.

HMW would have been more accurate to write "The American people as a whole, not just the Communists and Blacks that J. Edgar Hoover targeted, became an enemy population to be infiltrated..."

Just what I meant. Sorry if that wasn't put as clearly as intended.
Thanks for highlighting it.

My point was that America's Social Control Gestapo had been only J. Edgar Hoover's personal FBI army since beginning soon after WWI but that changed in the mid-late 1960s when this function was taken over by the National inSecurity State military-intelligence networks.

There was a Pentagon sniper team in Memphis April 4, 1968 as a back-up for the MPD shooter who killed Martin Luther King.

The 111th Military Intelligence Group shadowed MLK in Memphis.
Civil Disorder Operation: LANTERN SPIKE, March 28-April 12 1968.

Lets not forget the FBI used Gary Rowe and other FBI provocatuer informants and agents to stage many of the famous civil rights
assassinations(Viola Luizzo for instance) and violence

[Seamus OBlimey]

I was only a toddler in 1968, but somehow I have always felt a great affinity for those times.

Judasdisney, your list there is very informative, but sadly also rather depressing.

My only real point is that in the last few years I have heard the word "liberal" being used here in the UK in precisely the same derogatory, mealy-mouthed fashion that I had become accustomed to hearing it used from US commentators. I found it quite striking and revealing. The word liberal before then had only positive connotations of tolerance and fair-mindedness. Strangely though, when I mention these things to other people, they look at me as if they don't quite understand what I am saying. The shift to much greater intolerance, "toughness," narrow-mindedness, bigotry and dogmatism has happened slowly and without the populace even being aware of it. I believe it has occurred not so much as a result of general, "organic," bottom-up shifts in cultural values, but more due to a media agenda set at the highest (and most secretive) level, using the lever of fear. Terrifying stories of crime and "terrorism," and of the dangerous and threatening "other" have come to be the common staple of the mainstream media.

Just to illustrate my point, here are some definitions. Just ask yourself, which of these is a positive trait, and which negative;

Liberal adj.

1.
a. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
b. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.
c. Of, relating to, or characteristic of liberalism.
d. Liberal Of, designating, or characteristic of a political party founded on or associated with principles of social and political liberalism, especially in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.

2.
a. Tending to give freely; generous: a liberal benefactor.
b. Generous in amount; ample: a liberal serving of potatoes.
c. Not strict or literal; loose or approximate: a liberal translation.
d. Of, relating to, or based on the traditional arts and sciences of a college or university curriculum: a liberal education.


Illiberal adj.

1. Narrow-minded; bigoted.
2. Archaic. Ungenerous, mean, or stingy.
3. Archaic.
a. Lacking liberal culture.
b. Ill-bred; vulgar.

Goddamn that tolerant, broad-minded, generous, progressive liberalism! What we really need is more narrow-minded, bigoted, mean, vulgar and authoritarian illiberalism, yeah!



God help us all.

Well said HoL, and well worth saying again. I first heard this crap from the far right.. "You liberals this.. this liberal govt that.. etc.." Long before the MSM got in on the act the bnp were targeting and redefining "liberals", seems it's caught on.

ANTI-RACISM EVENT IN APRIL - Rock Against Racism are to hold a thirty year anniversary celebration of the legendary Carnival Against The Nazis 1978. The event is set to take place in London's Victoria Park on 27th April. Babyshambles are expected to headline - 'expected' being a well chosen word, surely he’ll be locked up by then? Other performers include Tom Robinson, whose band headlined the event back in 1978. Derek Simpson, joint General Secretary of Unite says: "Events like these that bring people together are vital to helping suppress the threat we face from racist organisations. These organisations are attempting to gain votes by playing off people's disenchantment with politics and their insecurities".