Maoist Internationalist Movement

Security update

September 3, 2007

MIM has already talked at length about a triangle that looks like a classic COINTELPRO set-up that involved Ward Churchill and MIM as two sides going back to 2005.

Going back to 2004, there was another triangle which several people were involved in in provoking MIM on. The two triangles intersected in 2005 and took concrete form in two totally geographically separated agents who linked them together.

The significance of these conflicts is still playing out. It brings to mind again for MIM that there is no proletarian counterintelligence worth anything that is not structural. I will try to explain this in general form here.

Part of what happened is that MIM did not hunt down a crucial actor to attempt a "who is doing what" approach. Hey, but MIM does not have the time and bucks to be a government agency. Partly for this reason we got to get a glimpse of two separate triangles in action. For people expecting MIM to behave in a who-oriented way, this may have been frustrating and it put something of a damper on the expectation of many who were really expecting MIM to kick some repressor ass in 2004.

Probably most people can think of the consequences of a who-oriented approach in a direct way. One side says, "that one is oppressing you." The other says, "no, it was that one." So most people think in who terms of getting down to who is doing what.

Yet when enough power is involved, we have to look at a bigger potential goal. In the Woody Allen movie "Bananas," the CIA supports both sides of a civil war in order to be assured an in with the victor. It sounds funny, but it can work in connection to movements, with a different goal in mind.

Send in one team to say "X is oppressing you." Then send in another team to say "Y is oppressing you." If the movement is composed of the passive sort who is not used to doing its own investigation, it will rely on government sources of information. If those two sources lie, contradict each other or are both true and emphasize different things, the result can be that a movement fed government information can spend its time fighting over which government team sent out is correct, and both could have been sent out by the same persyn with sufficient power. In such a situation, there will be many in the movement looking for easy answers, such as split the difference and aid the Democrats. The Democrats become the easily available potential lowest common denominator. In contrast, MIM would say science and leadership enable us to focus on the principal contradiction. It would be wrong to let the fear of being suckered force us into the hands of the Democrats.

We of the anti-imperialist movement should already know the faults of CNN, Associated Press and Reuters. They report government information as mouthpieces. In actual fact, about 10% of the time they do report government sources from the Third World, not just the imperialists in DC.

That 10% can be more than the anti-imperialist movement uses. This is also connected to what has to be called document-whoring--not knowing anything until the government says it is true. We need to get in the habit of doing our own work on questions, looking at the social logic of situations and studying political history so as to know of various patterns to predict.

The anti-imperialist movement should also learn what journalists already know-- the pitfalls of cultivating sources. If the Establishment sends out one team for people to cultivate for knowledge and then another team saying different things emphasizing other points, the anti-imperialist movement can divide strictly on the basis of cultivation of sources. With spies outnumbering communists, we should almost expect that there is a greater diversity of views about us outside the movement than inside it.

Despite the fact that spies outnumber us inside imperialist countries, that is not true in the world as a whole. As we pointed out in our 9/11 analyses, the enemy has no prospect of winning. Who-oriented intelligence is hopeless against a military strategy with sufficiently cheap offensive and defensive decoys, as anyone studying missile shields should know. Even within the spying industry, the collection of magic bullet information does not assure its digestion and use. Proletarian intelligence is superior, because it has no interests in the use of incorrect information or its goal. The capitalists by contrast have property interests that clash with effective use of intelligence.

What we said in June, 2003 is still true:

"Those struggling as the underdog for justice should take note: even if the ruler has all the means of information in his or her hands, there is no guarantee that s/he can use it. In fact, capitalism corrupts all knowledge production ranging from medicines sold for profit to analyses of the effectiveness of weapons systems that the Pentagon buys. As we pointed out in our website FAQ on security: 'U.$. imperialism has no chance of being able to afford all the work of sorting out true information from false.' For that matter, MIM has also pointed out that collecting information from a source is no guarantee that that source is not emitting information that amounts to a decoy.

"The imperialists pursue knowledge that helps them profit individually. As a consequence, the imperialists will never match the proletariat in its abilities in finding the truth. Although the imperialists spend much more money on intelligence than the proletariat does, the imperialists are not able to use what they collect and when they do use what they collect they come into conflict with other imperialists with other property interests and government agendas."