FBI plots kidnapping, then prosecutes its own accomplices
The government has documented at least 12 confidential informants who assisted the sprawling investigation. The trove of evidence they helped gather provides an unprecedented view into American extremism, laying out in often stunning detail the ways that anti-government groups network with each other and, in some cases, discuss violent actions.
An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.
A longtime government informant from Wisconsin, for example, helped organize a series of meetings around the country where many of the alleged plotters first met one another and the earliest notions of a plan took root, some of those people say. The Wisconsin informant even paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people to come.
The Iraq War vet, for his part, became so deeply enmeshed in a Michigan militant group that he rose to become its second-in-command, encouraging members to collaborate with other potential suspects and paying for their transportation to meetings. He prodded the alleged mastermind of the kidnapping plot to advance his plan, then baited the trap that led to the arrest.
Semi-related: I note the kids online are now commonly throwing around the term 'glowie' to refer to feds, especially peers posting in such a suspicious manner that they appear basically radioactive. Which makes me think, could glowie itself be a sort of psyop? A way of cultivating this image of spooks and pigs as universally bumbling, giving themselves away by trying to lead the crowd with public declarations of violent intent and so on? Maybe not, but lord knows glowie discourse has not helped the 4chan crowd to correctly identify people like cernovich.
And there's always a better term that already exists, because the only reason they come up with a new one is that they're so walled off from the world at large that they're not aware of the existing one
I find the intense push nowadays to disqualify and disparage OWS in its entirety and deny that it meant anything to anyone, based on the actions of celebrity-wannabes who hijacked it, to be much more likely as a pig operation than OWS itself. Really, OWS being any sort of secret spook operation at its outset is literally impossible. Was it infiltrated later? Yes, of course, like every nationally coordinated street action. Does that make it a secret cop plot? No, of course not.
The exact same stuff was aimed at the gigantic Iraq war protests in 2003, an attempt to smear them, then erase them from the public memory, partially successful to the extent that a bunch of people old enough to remember them are on Twitter right now saying that no one opposed that war in the West until 2005 at the earliest.
Every political action will be attacked and infiltrated. The Bolsheviks knew this too. They also knew that one of the reasons this happens is so that after the fact, any event can be painted as an enemy plot.
Note that Communist parties, whatever their bent, nearly always direct criticism only at certain aspects of all of these events (U.S.-forever-war protests, OWS, the 2020 street actions) instead of blanket condemning any of them as useless or cop-instigated because they didn't lead to revolution.
I am extremely suspicious of any theory that any of these events were somehow inherently illegitimate.
If anything Occupy helped a lot of people mature and realize how vitally important that is, and how hollow and useless the Adbusters squad was, so that's nice.
I also am far from confident that any important lessons were learned out of the action. The practice of occupying public or accessible spaces seems to keep popping up over and over - with roughly equal amounts of success (ie it does little to nothing and then the police decide to shut it down). The terribly inefficient and ineffectual horizontal organization centered on “working groups” seems to have been nearly completely adopted by dsa and most other mutual aid or similar groups since then. If there were some widely learned lessons I’ve overlooked, I’d certainly be interested to hear them articulated.
I don’t particularly think that it was compromised from the start (other than the fact that it’s base was amerikkkans). I feel little need to try to characterize it as “good or bad” as I can’t imagine there not being some form of protest following the crash and the Bush years, but also can’t imagine that ending in anything but failure - there being little actual base invested in the change that was hinted at with the ows slogans. The energy and fervor was sublimated into the false promise of the electoralism of ‘08 and then into the digitalization of public spaces in the 2010s
solidar posted:It sounds like you all saw a very different ows. The ows I saw was roughly 20-30% libertarian, ‘audit the fed’, ron paul right wing types. With maybe equal portions of gawking liberals and those that had utterly confused and inexplicable politics. I would really hesitate to characterize the politics of ows as “the left” however pathetic qualifying that with “western” makes it.
I also am far from confident that any important lessons were learned out of the action. The practice of occupying public or accessible spaces seems to keep popping up over and over - with roughly equal amounts of success (ie it does little to nothing and then the police decide to shut it down). The terribly inefficient and ineffectual horizontal organization centered on “working groups” seems to have been nearly completely adopted by dsa and most other mutual aid or similar groups since then. If there were some widely learned lessons I’ve overlooked, I’d certainly be interested to hear them articulated.
sovnarkoman posted:vanguard of online third worldism jumping one hoop after another to call OWS whose main deal mostly was "i want superprofits to keep flowing but only into my pockets" legitimate lol
ok but all this is exactly what I mean. I'm not making any attempt here to say that the jumbled politics of OWS were good. I'm saying that gathering together the confused mess that called itself the western left and having them put those dysfunctional politics into practice highlighted those contradictions and gave lots of people a chance to learn that it was never going to work, was founded in naive settler chauvinism, and championed self aggrandizing posturing over accomplishing tangible goals.
I don't give a shit that a bunch of DSA types didn't learn anything, that doesn't surprise me. for many people OWS exposed them for the first time to new ideas of what a radical politics could be, and at the exact same time showed how the anarchist culture jammer crap that was very dominant at the time had absolutely nothing to offer. In my own city I witnessed that realization firsthand in many people who I'm glad to call comrades today.
fractious and alienated as we may be, I don't think anyone here would deny that actual communist politics are bigger now in the west than they have been in a long time, and if that's not a source of some meager hope for you then you're a fool. I think OWS was a part of that shift, because its stupid failures let a lot of people realize the futility of what up until that point had been assumed to be the default "radical" politics. and that's good.
shriekingviolet posted:fractious and alienated as we may be, I don't think anyone here would deny that actual communist politics are bigger now in the west than they have been in a long time, and if that's not a source of some meager hope for you then you're a fool. I think OWS was a part of that shift, because its stupid failures let a lot of people realize the futility of what up until that point had been assumed to be the default "radical" politics. and that's good.
social fascism under a more radical garb doesnt seem like "actual communist politics" to me. any kind of politics in the first world short of wealth repatriation back to third world is bound to be parasitism and your framing of the issue as "confused mess", "dysfunctional politics", "founded in naive settler chauvinism", "exposed them for the first time to new ideas of what a radical politics could be" etc, which is just framing the issue as a matter of knowing things, being conscious of limits of whatever shows that you actually didnt get the basic point of third worldism at all. the problem with first worlders or their politics isnt that they are ignorant or naive or dont know things or are disorganized or whatever, it s that their interests themselves are posited against the peoples of the third world, which results in the fact that only different kinds of parasitism are possible as politics among them
shriekingviolet posted:Don't condescend to me on this shit, I'm aware first world settlers have material interests aligned against the third world.
it's possible and a duty to mobilize political work in the first world against those interests.
this is contradictory and also as meaningful as saying that we shouldnt give up on propagandizing for communism during goldman sachs board meetings or like we shouldnt give up on the bourgeoisie because engels was a bougie as well (even tho almost no other class traitor came from their ranks). if the interests of first worlders are against genuine global communism, then any mass movement coming from them (for ex the OWS) is bound to be parasitical and illegitimate. your latest posts in this thread seem to be quite confused tbh, which is understandable as you found yourself comrades which sounds like a very nice thing but you are mixing it with some kind of weird defense for the OWS nonsense which is all over the place to be honest. i mean i still dont see anything valuable in a movement whose substance was "i want apple to be taxed and get healthcare out of it but the people who actually created that wealth to be taxed should get jack shit" and i definitely cant see how it can ever lead to anything genuinely communist.
sovnarkoman posted:mixing it with some kind of weird defense for the OWS nonsense which is all over the place to be honest. i mean i still dont see anything valuable in a movement whose substance was "i want apple to be taxed and get healthcare out of it but the people who actually created that wealth to be taxed should get jack shit" and i definitely cant see how it can ever lead to anything genuinely communist.
I've said that all that shit was worthless and that what good came of OWS was that it helped some people to realize it was worthless. Show me where I've said any of the words you're putting in my mouth here or stop making shit up.
shriekingviolet posted:I've said that all that shit was worthless and that what good came of OWS was that it helped some people to realize it was worthless. Show me where I've said any of the words you're putting in my mouth here or stop making shit up.
shriekingviolet posted:Occupy was doomed to fizzle out from its conception due to the composition of its leadership and some deep strategic and structural problems, but that doesn't mean it was illegitimate. I think we're kind of all in agreement there. So many years later I don't feel as negative about it as I used to. It is sad that a mass movement of popular anticapitalist action was squandered, but there just wasn't any political body there at the time that could have organized it into a better outcome, so what's the use of getting mad. Our task and hope for the future remains to prepare the way for... idk some kind of... "revolutionary party."
If anything Occupy helped a lot of people mature and realize how vitally important that is, and how hollow and useless the Adbusters squad was, so that's nice.
you are saying right here that the real problem was the lack of a revolutionary party and that the whole thing was a popular anticapitalist action that was squandered because of such a lack, meaning that it was actually something genuine that could have been directed towards something good. come the fuck on lmao
sovnarkoman posted:you are saying right here that the real problem was the lack of a revolutionary party and that the whole thing was a popular anticapitalist action that was squandered because of such a lack, meaning that it was actually something genuine that could have been directed towards something good. come the fuck on lmao
Ok I get you now, that's fair for me to need some clarifying and retreating on. We started from a conversation about whether Occupy was a psyop, which, nah. That's what I mean by genuine vs illegitimate, not an evaluation of whether it had a proletarian character because it didn't.
I don't think there was any possible future in which Occupy could/would have led to something grandiose like the defeat of imperialism, vanguard party or no. The fundamental political character was bourgeois and attempting to bend it towards revolution would have been an exercise in overeager opportunism doomed to a tragic car wreck for any communist organization involved.
By "organized into a better outcome," I was vague and unclear. Again, I'm not imagining a genuine revolutionary movement springing out of it. I agree that on the whole most showed up with their settler anxieties about wanting to ensure they kept their portion of superprofits, and they left unchanged. I don't care about them.
I'm thinking about those who did learn positive lessons from the whole thing, mostly by accident, witnessing firsthand the ineffectiveness and contradictions of what passes for so-called anticapitalist resistance in the west. And looking back on that period I'm thinking it would have been nice to have a more organized effort to propagandize and amplify that effect. It would be, I think, good to improve strategies for responding to these kinds of moments when the contradictions are most visible.
That's what I mean by organizing towards a better outcome. Against all odds there were some people who were shaken out of the first world daydream by their participation in OWS, and the rotten politics behind it were discredited. I'd love it if in similar moments in the future there would be a directed effort to ensure even more of that.
sovnarkoman posted:vanguard of online third worldism jumping one hoop after another to call OWS whose main deal mostly was "i want superprofits to keep flowing but only into my pockets" legitimate lol
sovnarkoman posted:i think you should send that video to crackers who got owned after buying a 5 bedroom house at the suburbs with a mortgage instead of me
oh
cars posted:you're just gonna keep getting yourself upset and that's a bad hobby to have imo.
i d gladly take it over getting upset over small time parasites getting swindled by big time parasites
cars posted:You can just say you weren't there and don't know anything about it instead of openly fantasizing that most of the people in OWS camps owned houses. No one's gonna get mad at you here.
i d say the only one fantasizing here is you, thinking the social base of OWS is mostly exploited proletarians with a revolutionary potential waiting to be tapped into by a revolutionary party
sovnarkoman posted:i d say the only one fantasizing here is you, thinking the social base of OWS is mostly exploited proletarians with a revolutionary potential waiting to be tapped into by a revolutionary party
If that's the position you want someone to take, I'm sure someone could pretend to take it for the sake of arguing with you. I'm just telling you that I was there, and you clearly weren't, and your assumptions are wrong on the facts.
cars posted:Socialists should probably try to avoid seeing other people as somehow invincibly ignorant of how economic forces impact their material existence e.g. when the entire world economy slides into a ditch thanks to Wall Street and mortgage lending, even though the people in question do not personally work on Wall Street or have a mortgage themselves. It's probably a good policy for a socialist to assume that workers can come to understand that stuff. If you think someone had to have a mortgage to get angry over things like that, then you may not want to be a socialist, Communist, Marxist, etc. anymore. Like... you kind of have to start with the idea of consciousness as a possibility even to arrive at third-worldism later.
they dont have to have a mortgage, that s not the problem. the whole livelihood of american masses is built on imperial privileges, who cares if wall street financial swindling rocked the boat? would any of the people you deem to be full of revolutionary potential accept the slightest bit of giving back the wealth stolen from the third world? there was absolutely no sign re: the OWS that they would accept global economic equality as everyone here knows that would be against their material interests
cars posted:sovnarkoman posted:i d say the only one fantasizing here is you, thinking the social base of OWS is mostly exploited proletarians with a revolutionary potential waiting to be tapped into by a revolutionary party
If that's the position you want someone to take, I'm sure someone could pretend to take it for the sake of arguing with you. I'm just telling you that I was there, and you clearly weren't, and your assumptions are wrong on the facts.
what facts? you arent presenting anything at all, meanwhile the history of american labor is devoid of facts that would support your position, it s instead full of facts pointing the other way around
sovnarkoman posted:they dont have to have a mortgage, that s not the problem. the whole livelihood of american masses is built on imperial privileges, who cares if wall street financial swindling rocked the boat? would any of the people you deem to be full of revolutionary potential accept the slightest bit of giving back the wealth stolen from the third world? there was absolutely no sign re: the OWS that they would accept global economic equality as everyone here knows that would be against their material interests
I don't even know where you're getting the idea that OWS was a monolithic bloc that could take positions like that. It's like reading some Fox News junkie's post on the Black Lives Matter national agenda of race-mixing or whatever. The entire problem with OWS was that it was not a body capable of "accept[ing] global economic equality" or anything else for that matter.
sovnarkoman posted:what facts?
If you want to withdraw what you said about 5 bedroom mortgages as somehow characteristic of OWS, I agree that you were wrong about that.
cars posted:I don't even know where you're getting the idea that OWS was a monolithic bloc that could take positions like that. It's like reading some Fox News junkie's post on the Black Lives Matter national agenda of race-mixing or whatever. The entire problem with OWS was that it was not a body capable of "accept[ing] global economic equality" or anything else for that matter.
it s quite clear that my argument is that the problem doesnt have anything to do with being organized enough to make decisions and everything to do with the material interests of the vast majority of the american people but if you want to go for this kind of disingenuous horseshit you are trying to push here by all means go ahead
cars posted:sovnarkoman posted:what facts?
If you want to withdraw what you said about 5 bedroom mortgages as somehow characteristic of OWS, I agree that you were wrong about that.
the only thing i d like to withdraw here is the time i lost engaging an american, which is unfortunately impossible now. what i can do instead is to stop wasting more time with this nonsense tho
Note that this is not restricted to parties and organizations in the United States, either. Some of the best analysis on OWS came from the Communist Party of Cuba as a nearby observer. Their analysis was certainly not "OWS is all wealthy United States homeowners and a CIA plot."
But any of that sort of analysis requires a complex and thorough examination that does not conform well to Twitter-level discourse and its gotcha game of blanket condemnation and finger-pointing purism. That sort of sophistry is not what third-worldism is anyway, if that's the aim here. It's the online-Strasserist caricature of third-worldism that's a lot more popular in English-speaking discourse than the real thing. Popular in the relative sense, since neither one is exactly popular in the general sense in that discourse. And I don't think I have to tell anyone here how easy it is to ride on the shoulders of that stuff if you're not within the imperial core yourself, and I do appreciate the grift, but it's not productive when discussing politics in good faith.
(What is a lot more popular than any version of third-worldism alone—and I am explicitly NOT directing this toward anyone here, just warning about the cheap good feelings you can get from being as steeped in the sort of language we use on this forum—is coming up with reasons why people are superior for avoiding politics in action at all. Not justified or allowed, but superior. This is the biggest reason that the cheapo, ersatz version of MTW still bounces around English-language Twitter, because a lot of people who argue socialist politics online are hungry to feel they're better than their peers when they don't act on those politics. And "online" is really just the latest manifestation of salon politics: there has always been a tendency on the global left, not just the Western "left", that says, "If any political group were worth my time, I'd already be leading the charge, clever person that I am." This attitude is literally worse than useless, and tends to lead to a host of miniature George Orwells, that is, a brood of wannabe cops waiting to be tapped by the state.)
We don't have to imagine the end result of OWS or its importance. It happened again and was called CHAZ/CHOP. It was a "left" white supremacist hijacking/fed provocation of the black national uprising and neither it nor OWS had any influence on the real rebellion occuring nationally. This is like when people said "oh well Bernie was bad but he got more people interested in the left, we have to engage with his movement and not dismiss it." Not only did it repeat 4 years later in an even more bankrupt, farcical manner, but immediately after the second time black rebellion made the whole thing irrelevant. All the parties that focused their energy on harvesting disillusioned liberals from these movements were totally unprepared for "BLM" and missed any real chance at revolutionary leadership of a real revolutionary potentiality because they had been too busy thinking about their new friends without ever stopping to think about their own positioniality. And despite fantasy that can do everything at all times, in reality parties always choose where to focus their efforts and that's what we're really talking about, not a strawman of third worldism that does nothing but condemn actually existing politics. That may exist online but has no organized presence, socialist parties irl are still "do something, think later." Third worldism still remains a great threat to the refuse of the new left and even the Maoist parties that should be sympathetic were so easily neutered by anarchist "mutual aid" ideology it's laughable, probably the same people who came out of OWS looking for leadership without ever having bothered to think about why it is needed in the first place.
The Cuban communist party unfortunately has a debilitating relationship with the CPUSA which leads to flawed, utopian analysis of American politics, not to get into the (understandable) opportunism of the CPC vis-a-vis American politics (see granma's coverage of Sanders)
We have to think bigger than repeating the 60s. We already had a bunch of liberals become interested in socialism and a bunch of socialist parties experience rapid growth. It all was for nothing, turned out liberals knew their class interests better than the socialists selling them a slick deal. This is one of the only places willing to rethink the new left and the myth that the Black Panthers and SDS were part of the same movement or that the latter mattered at all to the former, dunno why we have to make the same mistakes with today's shittier copies. The SDS was much more radical than the DSA/OWS/Bernie and it couldn't even motivate left-liberals to oppose sanctions against Vietnam or Cuba, something we are still paying for in trying to organize around "humanitarian" imperialism.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
cars posted:As far as the core of third-worldism goes, eventually its serious proponents today will have to try and match the research on which the concept is originally founded, because by now, most of those data are decades out of date. This is what most of those ersatz "third-worldists" online don't understand, that as a Marxist theory, it's founded on data. It's not an ideology of inherent difference. And those data are going to look drastically today, given not only the latest crisis of homelessness in the United States, but the latest crisis of homelessness among workers in the United States, as well as data-collecting that was in its infancy at the time third-worldism emerged, such as homelessness among particular oppressed groups now more in the public eye whose material conditions make them more receptive to revolutionary politics. Sakai's work on defining the contemporary lumpenproletariat is a good start to a fuller understanding of the issue, but that book's also five years old at this point and hasn't gotten the follow-up it deserved. Any scientific understanding of resource extraction and exploitation as a regional phenomenon has to build on statistical data about workers and other people, not just journalistic analysis of capital flows, to be worth anything at all.
All such data driven analysis has come to the conclusion that the labor aristocracy remains unchanged or has even expanded into a consumer aristocracy based on globalized production which now impacts every economic transaction in the core. That third worldism was true at one time but is no longer true is a common complaint, it was brought up just as often in Sakai's time or against MIM and dependency theory's often vulger generalizations about wages and value transfers. Nevertheless, as John Smith points out, these theories were in essence correct whereas the nitpickers were reactionaries. The base conclusions of third worldism are still rock solid whereas this objection always leads to the same labor aristocracy apologia.