What Will Posterity Think of Us?

Some years ago – 1988, matter of fact – I wrote a series of chapbooks entitled The Citizen’s Powers. In the foreword, I addressed our nation’s young people, those being raped by our government and society’s profligate abuse of what was been given the latter by the founding fathers. I quoted Benjamin Franklin comment concerning how posterity would piss on our graves, should we lose what was being given us, and said I hoped my relentless efforts to prevent what was – and still is – being done would be remembered. And that my grave would be one our children and grandchildren wouldn’t piss on.

A couple of days ago, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts likewise worried in his column the same way. “Was the whole country napping when Joseph McCarthy’ bullying innuendoes and lies cast a pall on this nation and made a mockery of the Constitution? Didn’t anybody speak out when Franklin Roosevelt sent Americans to concentration camps? Where were the good people when Americans of African descent were being lynched? … What will tomorrow say about today?

Searching for an answer to the gentleman’s questions, I’m reminded of a quote from another writer, H.L. Mencken, about another time.

“The most popular man under a democracy,” Mencken wrote, “is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose-step.”

If you recognize in that people like the far right wing of the Sean Hannity’s, or the far left of the Al Franken, you must be among those who are paying attention. But you probably don’t. Rendered effectively brain-dead by stultifying and stupefying media propaganda, you are already reciting one mindless parrot mantra or the other. Mencken, of course wrote about the Prohibition era of the Twenties. That was long ago.

Yeah? Well, does anybody remember COINTELPRO? The acronym stood for “Counter-Intelligence Program” (sound familiar; no, I don’t suppose so), and was supposedly aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States during 1956 to 1971.
Caught in the act – and I had more than a little to do with that – the FBI trotted out what have come to be “damage control” recitations so standard that they may well become part of the National Anthem one day. National security (sound familiar) demanded that the FBI violate the Constitutional rights of the citizenry. Only persons suspected of attempting violent overthrow of the US government were targeted. Only a relative few were under surveillance. Sound familiar?

When it turned out that non-violent groups like Dr. Marint Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, churches, and commoners like myself were also being surveilled and burglarized, the federal “damage control” machine’s choirmasters moved quickly to mobilize the Sean Hannitys, Bill O’Reillys, and late night talk show hosts of the nation. Up went the cry of “Patriotism.”

Sound familiar?

COINTELPRO was secret until 1971, when I caught FBI agents in my clients house in the act of burglary. When I sought legal advice on how to deal with these kinds of intrusion, several attoeney’s could only offer advice like one who suggested I confront the feds with a tape recorder in hand, ask what they were doing in my client’s house. Anything else would be illegal. Still, I began writing letters, and making threats. I made a lot of noise.

Finally, when a local FBI field office was burglarized by SOMEONE (tit for tat is fair play, you know), several dossiers and files somehow made their way to news agencies (matter of fact, it took literally dozens of copies to each of several of the nation’s “watchdogs” before the was any result). After more than two years, FBI Director j. Edgar Hoover declared that COINTELPRO – whose existence had for years been heatedly denied – was over. Future counterintelligence operations, the great man said, would be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Documentation beyond mine was subsequently revealed in the course of separate lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC, the SWP, and a number of other groups. Finally, an investigation was launched in 1976 by the a U.S. Senate committee headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The committee was the typical Washington, D.C. whitewash, enormously publicized with its media Greek Chorus chanting its “the system works’ mantra. COINTELPRO was damned, its perpetrators castigated and excorriated in august and stentorian terms:

"Many of the techniques used, the horse manure barrage pontificated, “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propogation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence."

Sound familiar? I direct you to those wondrous pronouncements from the committees who investigated the federal 9-11 debacle, the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror,” and just about anything having to do with the colossal theft of public money perpetrated by Halliburton and their ilk on that account. In the instance of the Church Committee’s findings, millions of pages of documents remain unreleased, and many released documents are still entirely censored.

Does THAT sound familiar? How about "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these dissident movements and their leaders?” That’s from the founding document of COINTELPRO.
So Leonard, what the future say about us? Try this – it’s the rest of what Mencken had to say all those years ago:

“Every time the papers print another account of a Prohibitionist agent murdering a man who resists him, or searching some woman's underwear, or raiding a … yacht, or blackmailing a Legislature, or committing some other such inordinate and anti-social act, they simply make a thousand more votes for Prohibition. It is precisely that sort of enter-tainmanet (we call it ‘info-tainment’ now, don’t we?) that makes Prohibition popular with the boobery. It is precisely because it is unjust, imbecile, arbitrary and tyrannical that they are so hot for it. The incidental violation of even the inferior man's liberty is not sufficient to empty him of delight in the chase. The victims reported in the newspapers are commonly his superiors; he thus gets the immemorial democratic satisfaction out of their discomfiture. Besides, he has no great rage for liberty himself. He is always willing to surrender it at demand.”

Government, of course, knows that. Federal think-tanks like the RAND (“Research and Development,” back in 1946 when that had to do with Cold War technology – and some people think that meant assuring that a Cold War would occur) study ways to make that happen. You don’t think a public stupid enough to be hornswoggled by a marginal mentality like George Bush and his eminence gris Carl Rove got that way by accident, do you?

The future will say that our second president was right. “Democracy never lasts long; it soon exhausts, wastes, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

And the future, our children and grandchildren, will piss on our graves.