A Convergence of Facts and Coincidences

The front page of Vancouver’s Georgia Straight
after the Kent State massacre

Regular readers of this blog will know how much Curmie loves to take unrelated events and look at how they actually fit together into a single narrative.  Here’s another example. 

Today’s background: 1). When Netflix discontinued their DVD service to concentrate on streaming, they told their customers to just keep the last DVDs they’d been shipped.  2).  About that same time, Curmie and Beloved Spouse replaced the carpet in their living room.  3). There was a major storm in the area Friday, and we were without cable or internet all that evening and into Saturday.  4). Yesterday was May 4 (Curmie hoped to finish this piece then; it didn’t happen).  5). Curmie gestures, broadly and inclusively, at the current attempts by a wannabe dictator to subvert the Constitution and to benefit himself and his cronies at the expense of literally everyone else.  6). Curmie also notices that folks who don’t cower in fear from the tribble-topped bully generally do just fine: Harvard University, Maine governor Janet Mills, and international students who sued the ironically named Justice Department, to name a few.

So… replacing carpeting means getting everything off the floor so the installers can do their job.  During that process, one of the three HDMI cables literally broke off in the TV.  We couldn’t use it or remove it, meaning we lost a connection.  We did get a new TV, but it had only two outlets for HDMI, meaning we could get only two out of three of cable, Chromecast, and DVD.  We chose the former two. 

Yes, we could and did order a splitter, but by the time it arrived the hassle of trying to get everything set up seemed greater than the desire to play DVDs, especially since we were no longer getting any new shipments from Netflix.  Besides, if we really wanted to see something, we could watch it on the desktop computer, which has a pretty good-sized monitor.  But since we didn’t have the DVD player hooked up to the TV, those last three disks from Netflix didn’t get watched.

Our evening ritual generally includes watching something on the TV.  Between cable channels and a host of subscription services, we have a lot of options… or, rather, we do when there’s internet and cable.  But Friday evening our viewing choices were limited to what we had on DVD that we could play on the computer.  So we looked at those three Netflix DVDs.

Two of them were film versions of Shakespeare plays, but it was the third that caught our attention: Johanna Hamilton’s 2014 documentary, “1971.”  Here’s Netflix’s blurb: “In 1971, eight antiwar activists broke into a Pennsylvania FBI office and made off with a treasure trove of documents revealing a massive illegal surveillance program.  More than 40 years later, they’re finally talking about the burglary.”  Yeah, we’re going to watch that.

The burglars, young anti-war demonstrators calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI (hereafter, CCIF), found accounts of the COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program), which had attempted to infiltrate and discredit any movement J. Edgar Hoover and his goons decided was “subversive.”  That included, of course, any organizations dedicated to racial equality, women’s rights, or opposition to the Vietnam War.  COINTELPRO’s stated goal with respect to black nationalist organizations, for example, was “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” their activities.

The CCIF took “about a thousand” documents, many of which, of course, outlined legitimate operations by the FBI.  But, as CCIF member John Raines was to reveal over 40 years later,

Sixty percent of the files were clearly political in intent, and those were the ones we began to sort through. And we began to find—even on the morning, early morning, of the night, we began to find documents that were quite exciting….  Well, like the one that said, “Let’s increase the paranoia and have these folks be persuaded that there’s a FBI agent behind every mailbox.”  I mean, that is—that’s not surveillance; that’s obviously intimidation.  All right?  Intimidation is a political act; it’s not an act of an investigative organization like the FBI.

After sorting through the stacks of papers, the CCIF sent photocopies of to a number of leading newspapers.  The New York Times and Los Angeles Times capitulated to the demands of Attorney General John Mitchell not to publish the story.  The Washington Post did not, running a front-page exposé, thereby opening the flood-gates. 

Post reporter Betty Medsger, who was later to write The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI, the book on which “1971” was based, had written about something contained in a document marked “COINTELPRO-New Left.”  No one knew what that meant, but Hoover gleaned from Medsger’s article that the label had been seen… so he changed the name of the operation but didn’t end it.  Ultimately, dogged reporting by NBC’s Carl Stern—the first person to successfully sue the FBI for release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act—and subsequently by CBS’s Seymour Hirsch led to a massive Congressional investigation headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church, which in turn led to substantial changes in the FBI and CIA.

The list of abuses by the FBI, CIA, and NSA is too long and too chilling to enumerate here.  Suffice it to say that literally nothing—assassination, slander, perjury, extortion, intimidation, you name it, Gentle Reader—was out of bounds.  It was an awful period in American history, although only the victims really knew it.

Yes, “1971” has a little exaggeration for effect: the burglary was indeed on the evening of the “Fight of the Century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, but there was no live coverage on either television or radio, so whereas there was a distraction caused by that much-hyped event, there weren’t swells of cheering (or whatever) to cover the sound of breaking into the office, as the film presents.  It appears, however, that the film was generally accurate.  Unfortunately, there’s a coda which suggests portentously that reforms tend to be temporary.  Alas, that part is true, too.

There are also moments of humor: a clip from the old “All in the Family” series in which Archie Bunker doesn’t want to bother the government with following the Constitution, and shots of a street fair with posters for sale of FBI agents whose attempts to infiltrate the anti-war movement were, shall we say, not entirely successful.  The tie-dyed t-shirts were nice, but the crew cuts and wing-tips didn’t really complete the ensemble.  It’s a really good film, Gentle Reader.  It may be hard to come by these days, but it’s worth a little effort.

Moving on: the reference to yesterday’s date is because May 4, 1970 was the date of the killings of four Kent State University students by the Ohio National Guard.  Curmie has commented on those events several times, most notably in this post, written in a dormitory room on that very campus.  

A couple of years ago, several years after that blog post, Curmie posted something on his personal Facebook page on the anniversary of those murders.  One of his friends, an ex-Marine who was probably born in the early to mid-‘70s, was astounded by the facts: that none of the students who were killed was within 80 yards of the Guardsmen; that at least three of the casualties, including one of the dead, were not even participating in the protest (one of them was actually in ROTC); that 11 of the 13 casualties were shot in the back; that the Guardsmen seemed to be retreating but then turned in unison to fire, apparently randomly, into the crowd.  These are facts, not speculation, but the narrative nonetheless remains that the victims were all protesters who precipitated their own demise by threatening the lives of those guys with the military-grade rifles.

Of course, the political leaders at the time didn’t wait for the facts to emerge before blaming the victims.  President Nixon called them “bums”; Ohio Governor Jim Rhodes described them as “the worst type of people that we harbor in America”; Ronald Reagan, Governor of California at the time, said that “if it takes bloodbath” to deal with campus demonstrators “let's get it over with.”

The names and faces have changed, but the stories have not.  In the early ‘70s, the protesters were primarily those who were most directly affected by an uncaring or even hostile government: blacks, women, and college students in particular.  That’s still true today, except that virtually everyone is directly affected: women, Hispanics, Muslims, scientists, educators, federal employees, union members, anyone LGBTQ+, people reliant on Medicaid or Social Security, anyone with a market-based pension fund, etc.

In those days, it was the FBI that orchestrated smear campaigns; that’s probably still true, especially given the fact that the so-called Justice Department has replaced competent veteran employees with folks whose literally only credential is adherence to Trumpian authoritarianism.  Back then, it was the National Guard at Kent State and local police at Jackson State a week and a half later who were the out of control “law enforcement” officials.  Now it’s ICE and DHS who seem to think the Constitution is at best a suggestion.  Either way, it’s who we used to call The Man. The FBI also engaged in illegal surveillance in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Now, that’s the function of (F)Elon Musk and his minions. 

Sites of higher education are always on the hit list for authoritarians.  In 1970, Kent and Jackson State were the big stories, but virtually every campus became a target in one way or another.  Now it’s Harvard and Columbia, and anyone else who thinks the Constitution applies to everyone, even if we disagree with them.  The same people who were chanting “Jews will not replace us” a few years ago are now so concerned with anti-Semitism that they insist that even criticism of the Israeli government is no longer protected speech under the First Amendment.  Translation: “We still hate Jews; we just hate Muslims more.”

Politicians lied about Kent State’s victims and sought to disparage their memories.  Now we have the Vice President claiming that Kilmar Abrego-Garcia is a “convicted MS-13 gang member” despite the fact that he’s never been convicted of literally anything.  The President purports to believe in the authenticity of one of the worst photoshopped images in history, making him either a liar or dumber than the proverbial sack of hammers.  (Yes, I know, Gentle Reader, ¿por qué no los dos?)

How a devout Christian celebrates the holiest day of the year.

Protesters in the days of Curmie’s youth were “bums” and “the worst kind of people.”  Now, those who take a radical position like “the government ought to obey the Constitution” or “SCOTUS rulings should be adhered to” are “Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country.”  (Say what you will about Nixon, at least he was sane… and understood capitalization.)

The parallels are striking.  But.  The nation emerged from the conflict in Southeast Asia without that elusive “peace with honor.”  The power of the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies to spy on innocent people was indeed reined in, even if not permanently; eight brave and ingenious people set that in motion.  We endured. 

It will be harder this time.  Whereas the likes of Howard Baker weren’t going to look the other way just because the corrupt President was from their party, today we can’t get a single Republican to say that we shouldn’t be deporting American citizens or that people raking in over a billion (yes, with a “b”) dollars a year don’t need a tax cut.  Occasionally, there will be a whimper of faux bravado from a Mitch McConnell or a Rand Paul, and Susan Collins will tut-tut before obeying, but generally speaking GOP legislators are treating Trump like a dominatrix, and there’s a lot of boot-kissing going on.

Still, turn-outs are good for rallies and protests.  The Bernie and AOC road show more than doubled Trump’s attendance in the same deep-red Michigan city a couple of weeks ago. GOP pols, even in safe districts, are avoiding town halls, apparently afraid they might have to defend their records.  The cracks in the façade are there.  We just need to have the courage and the resilience to resist.