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Notes -
On the weaponisation of the FBI.
I was reading an old article about the bureau's track record of abuses and the part about COINTELPRO interests me the most; the Hoover-era FBI is seen as mainly targeting leftist subversives because they were identified with (legitimately or not) communism and of course the flagship communist state, the USSR. COINTELPRO in particular was explicitly created to address the Communist Party of the USA and got turned against a broad range of leftist groups from the Black Panthers to Socialist Workers Party to anti-Vietnam protests groups to feminists to the civil rights movement, MLK, etc. IMO the 20th century of American politics wasn't exactly a left vs right thing as much as it was an establishment vs dissident thing. Ivy League Progressives looking out for their own, and doing their part to keep the proles and kulaks in line. Waco, Ruby Ridge and the other big examples of anti-right FBI thuggery that I can think of are mostly 90s onward. And of course the Ryan Kelley debacle early this year.
But why such a shift now, and the promotion of wokeism? The obvious answer perhaps is that with the death of communism in 1989, the ideological threat from the left was no more. But despite the emphasis of woke ideology on oppression/exploitation as a fundamental political relation, collective interests of different groups, the role of struggle, resistance, and solidarity, etc., wokeism has found enthusiastic purchase among American cultural elites. Maybe its partly organic but if so, when did the CIA's New Left ascend to cultural hegemony and how? Were groups belonging to this tribe never sympathetic to the Soviets, or at least suspected of such? Moreover, what do the elites stand to gain here? I'd heard the notion "they want a race war to prevent a class war" before, but are there any worrying signs that there'd be a class war anytime soon? Do elites in, say, Japan and SK not have to worry about a similar conundrum despite their work culture?
There were vast groups of elites in favor of the Soviets. The Rosenbergs were the tip of the iceberg. Many people defended them for decades until the Venona telegrams came out and then they all went silent and tried to pretend they weren't Rosenberg tankies all along.
Domestic threats to them vastly outweigh international threats now. China is ostensibly on their side as they have shifted to a sort of international corporatism (aka control of corporations) as a governing philosophy. When you say "death of the USSR" what you are ignoring is the more important thing: death of people. The same thing happened in the south with regards to Jim Crowe. The Jim Crowers rarely switched anything, from political party to being racists, etc. Instead, they died out. Same happened with the USSR hawks who were wary of the left. They have aged out of the intelligence agencies, and were bad stewards at replacing themselves. They relied on credentials (for legal or other reasons) instead of attempting to measure in any meaningful way the alignment of their new hires' interest with the American public, and as such it now has significantly deviated from that.
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