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*Also, Dutch intelligence set up and led
communist organization to spy on Chinese and Albanians
There is a movie trailer that runs something like "you're not paranoid when they really are trying to get you," in reference to government agents. There are many movies and TV series that explain in mythological form how spying works and such movies spark the imagination and make one think that covert government repression could be real. Yet we do not want to decide this question based on Hollywood movies nor based on oft-repeated police accusations that "you are paranoid." These are after all only individual accusations. As MIM stresses over and over again, we need clear-headed people who are going to rise above the stories, and get the overall picture--based on probability.
The most crucial number that we have in this question is that the U.S. Government has admitted over 100,000 spies while spending more than the GNP of Libya on them each year. For us North Amerika-based communists that is also relevant because we know that is not counting local police "Red Squads" or FBI. It's also not a consideration of the fact that one in seven of all Amerikans are former military.(1)
At the same time, we communists know that there are fewer than 10,000 communists inside u.$. borders. Here we advise readers not to believe any bullshitters with a hidden motivation for boosting that number. At the height of the Depression there may have been briefly 100,000 communists, and even that is under some dispute now, but it was mostly just militant trade unionists who quickly fell away after a couple political struggles-- the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany being one excuse. As soon as we attach any conditions of action or political litmus tests, the number of communists falls away immediately.
Even if we count the social-democrats, the people of the "Democratic Socialists of America," that is only 10,000 people. For a country of 300 million that is very small, so outsiders need to understand that there is only a very small civilian dimension to u.$. politics. True, 120 million voted in 2004, but that's it. When it comes to day-to-day politics, that 120 million is not a factor out of line with imperialism, especially in international issues. Here I count active Republicans and Democrats who are civilians, because in truth, when it comes to sheer numbers of real activists, the communists or the Greens or the Republicans or the libertarians are about equal factions. That can be proved by all with access to Internet by looking at the participation in Yahoo! Groups. People thinking they are communist will often outnumber Republicans at the activist level in many locales. So our point is not that communists are inactive compared with the bourgeois parties. Quite the contrary, the battle is much more even at the activist level, but all political parties and their civilian activity pale in comparison to the military.
Some will tell bullshit stories about the number of communists to boost propaganda for the need for Red Squad budgets and spying. Others tell bullshit stories because of the same old basically Trotskyist pablum about us being in the era of strategic offensive based in the imperialist countries--that we have such a militant so-called working class producing so many communists. These are feel-goodists with no evidence for their positions. They are living in denial concerning the decline in strike rates for example. Yet the best they could ever argue is that maybe at some points in time our communists equal our number of spies-- and even that would have vast political implications.
So what I'm trying to say is that one has a more than 10 times better chance of meeting a U.$. international spy than a U.$.-based communist. That will be especially true abroad.
We can try to refine this question further, but it will be difficult to get beyond the initial 10 to 1 factor. Amerikan communists travel and are likely to seek out politically like-minded people too. On the other hand, the job of some spies is to travel and socialize. The spies have the GNP of Libya to do what they do as their budget. We communists do not.
We should not stereotype spies. There are young wimmin spies without much education and there are older men spies who are college professors. Professor Robert Scalapino at Berkeley was paid to spy on Zhou Enlai. The image of anyone coming from Berkeley can be a stereotype and in fact the spy agencies like to make use of such stereotypes. We need to get these stereotypes out of our minds.
MIM has already pointed out that in fact there are more U.$. spies with international duties than Ph.Ds in the social sciences minted since 1979 total, never mind interested in international issues. So it goes beyond just communists but in fact the likelihood of any intelligent civilian conversation on international issues. If you are involved in consistent discussion of international issues, your chances of bumping up against spies are 100%.
In the movie, "A Beautiful Mind," the directors try to say that the main character was just crazy. On the other hand, MIM has met an MIT persyn very similar to that, not recently but when such a cover would have been more believable. To say that an MIT researcher is "paranoid" or even worse when it comes to military research is ridiculous when it is public knowledge that MIT receives hundreds of millions in federal research money each year, mostly military-related. There is more than just a kernel of truth behind the "Beautiful Mind" story. The people who are crazy are the ones who think it is possible to be at MIT a long time and NOT bump up against classified military research.
True to stereotypes, yes, there were John Birch Society type crusty anti-communists who used to parachute into China to meet their deaths in battle against communism. Many spies are just polite and urbane conversation-makers.
Now, if I had said there are 100,000 international spies in Grenada, that would be paranoia. There would be no economic evidence of their existence. I would be presenting a distorted picture of perhaps 100% of the working population or more being spies. On the other hand, I'm sure that the same basic story is true in England and I$rael. France would be a tougher story because there there is a larger portion of the society there that considers itself some kind of watery communist possibly. In France, Italy and Russia the watery communists outnumber the spies with international duties. So we have to analyze the situation in each country. Overall, the world's spies have no chance of outnumbering the world's communists. In select countries and situations, they do.
In actual fact, the 10 to 1 estimate is a vast underestimate for two main reasons. One is that spies work full-time. Most communists are not professional communists. Two, again, we are not counting FBI or local police infiltrators, since we are focussing on the international dimension.
To reduce the number of effective spies, our critics might say that some spies are doing background electronic work and you won't meet them. Then again, we have many communists doing infrastructural work or being active so rarely that it amounts to the same thing.
One can also say that the u.$. spies have duties spying on Russia, China etc. and so a direct comparison is not relevant. When it comes to spying on the People's Wars and buying them off, we have to deny that. U.$. spies are much more likely to be active in interfacing with the People's Wars than u.$. communists. Even when it comes to spies assigned to watch Russia, again, their influence will be felt at home and there will be intersections obviously when it comes to spying on communists and questions of Nepal, Korea, Russia, China etc.
Again, the Liberals will try to say the spies have other things to do, but "other" things are not really "other" things. The topics of interest are the same for all--wars in the Islamic countries, People's Wars, likelihood of communist resurgence in China, etc. So this is a little mental dodge by Liberals regarding the role of spies. It's also the reason that the CIA attempts to recruit communists, because the majority portion of the u.$. population just has no sustainable interest in international issues.
This is not to mention that history has already documented that, "no, spies do not have other things to do." It all depends on the budget and those who study Marxist economics with MIM know why there is a budget for spy activities, sometimes on serious communists, sometimes in farce situations. Don't just turn the other way because you are sick about hearing of Amerikan luxury consumption! This affects our international communist movement's security! If we look just at what FBI budgets existed for spying on communists, there is no denying that we are not "paranoid." They have the money to spend on every bizarre project one can think of.
One example is the millions spent on scuba diving classes since 9/11. The Coast Guard itself explained what was going on with its budget. In less than a year after 9/11, the Coast Guard:
With 95,000 miles of U.S. coastline to patrol, the Coast Guard has been taxed to the limit since Sept. 11. It has: conducted 35,000 port security patrols, boarded 10,000 vessels, escorted 6,000 ships, conducted 2,000 boardings, and flown 3,500 air patrols, in addition to handling 7,000 SAR cases.(2)Then in the year after 9/11, the budget went from $5.5 billion to over $7 billion. The summary of needlessly boarded boats will go to Congress to impress the holders of the purse, but the ability to concentrate on where $7 billion goes is limited for anyone, never mind politicians busy with staying elected. "Just in case" is the watchword of those with money to burn and no ideas about real accomplishments needed. It's almost better not to accomplish anything for these imperialists and their lackeys, because an accomplishment would generate "socialist" property.The problem is that with "communism dead," not everyone can have a job spying on it anymore. So mission expansion is inevitable:
"'One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.'"(3)In explaining why they spy on senior citizen Quakers, agents said senior citizens are dangerous because they have time on their hands. So this is something where we have to have the facts, know what we are talking about and not assume that spying and policing is like the glamor of a "James Bond" movie or "Robocop." The U.S. Government budget is disproportionately a hand-out for white people including people who think they are hard-working cops and spies who just do not have an effective way of improving the world. We can even say the ones spying on PETA are better than the ones covering for drug-dealers and taking a cut or the ones infiltrated by the mafia as in Massachusetts.
It's not that communists are "paranoid." The agents just need to come up with justifications to spend money.
The "spies have other things to do" line also fits well with our TV clicker culture. Get the remote in hand and change the channel. If you see something a spy did, then forget it, because that was just another image on the television. And we all know that James Bond is "just a movie."
The communist needs a decisiveness of judgment when it comes to things that we see directly. What we have now is people witnessing spy activities directly and talking themselves out of what they saw. "Nah, it can't be," is just Liberalism. If you know you are crazy, that's one thing, and MIM has stressed that psychology and psychiatry are useless ideological practices anyway, but chances are also good that people with an above-average grip on reality are going to see things that others paid no attention to. They're not crazy. The people who think a world with the economy the size of Libya's can pass by unnoticed are crazy. It's not some extreme situation of being in the movies. U.$. spying is a huge activity with a big economic footprint, not a rarity. Do not blame yourself if you saw something like spying. Blame the U.S. Government.
Right now we have a spying situation where the public does not know all the facts. Some people are not paying attention and others have no decisiveness in regard to what they have seen directly. Many are understandably afraid of counter-intelligence. Others are throwing up obstacles to the obvious, because they are spies themselves. Nonetheless, the international proletariat's strength is political. Stalin and Mao abolished the Comintern. Then someone claiming to be Maoist runs a new Comintern, run principally out of the united $tates. There is no ideological or historical reason for that in Maoism as opposed to Trotskyism, so what is the reason?
Strangely enough, this same new Comintern was implicated in the peace plots in Peru and had many endorsers from that camp that infiltrated the party while being denounced by those who opposed the peace plots. For some reason, again totally unconnected to Maoism, this Comintern is on board with Bush's plans for International Wimmin's Day bashing of Iran, distributes articles against Iran's nuclear energy program, distributes very obviously factually untrue slanders against the Iranian regime based on the New York Times no less, promises to side with imperialist troops in Iran, distributes the written works of Gerald Ford's top daily intelligence briefer Ray McGovern and now heats up the abortion struggle, in particular against NOW as punishment for holding the line on Iran, and just when we need to find allies in the struggle to stop war on Iran.
Meanwhile, those without discernment allow an evisceration of Mao's concept of "principal contradiction." It is possible through twisting of rhetoric in front of the inexperienced and in fact it is occurring that there are those saying the "principal contradiction" is between "the people and Islamic terrorism." There are no limits when the international communists do not hold the line politically. And these same people all know very well going back 20 years that this new 4th International always skewed its critiques of Stalin and Mao in Trotsky's direction, the same way neo-conservatism today justifies imperialist invasions with reference to backwardness in the Third World.
This same Comintern now has strategic control in Nepal, meaning that if there is an urban uprising instead of negotiations, it has to have permission from the Comintern. Then politically, to top it all off, and the single largest piece of the Nepal struggle puzzle, this Comintern going back many years adopts the position of the U.$. imperialists on the need for Maoists to take up multi-party democracy--a long-standing pet project of the State Department aimed at China.
When armed struggle in southern Lebanon arises, the call from the top is against the "obsolete." OK, people do not want to engage in the counter-intelligence struggle: they can't follow it. Then what about what they know politically. What is the likelihood of this shit all being a bad coincidence that you got wrong? And there is more, much more.
So now think about it. If you think you have met some real communists from the u$A, good for you, but also ask how many spies one has met. If you have met two in- the-flesh communists what are the chances you have not rubbed shoulders with 20 U.$. spies? Probably your chances are best in your teen years, but now with Internet, even teenagers may be rubbing shoulders with spies.
As I said, we can try to make up stories to get around the basic numbers. One can say communists are more outgoing than spies. After all, communists stand up on soap boxes one might think. Sadly the truth is that some of us communists are painfully anti-social as well and would never stand on a soapbox. We should not stereotype communists too much either. When a spy carries out his political duties he generally has much more money at his disposal and may use the radio, TV or Internet instead of a soapbox. When it comes to the TV, of course spies have more like a 1000 to 1 advantage.
The main reason paid state agents and their cling-ons tell communists they are "paranoid" is that they wish to promote an atmosphere of non-struggle, Liberalism. The Liberals usually succeed with this because of an underlying petty-bourgeois class structure. The people who are crazy are the people in denial of activity with a budget the size of Libya's GNP. Those are psychotic Liberals and liberal-radicals.
MIM is going to make Liberalism on u.$. spies politically impossible. We're not saying we know the situation in Madagascar, except that if one meets an Amerikan there, again chances are better that one is talking to a spy and not a communist. If people wish directly to promote Liberalism and benevolent views of the u.$. state, they can go right ahead, but we are going to force an awareness of the probabilities involved. It's not like this in every country, but 100,000 spies for u.$. imperialism paid for from the exploitation of billions is nothing. In the united $tates, it's not paranoia: it's the facts.
Notes:
1. http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/cst-nws- kerry05.html
2. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BQK/is_4_7/ai_89513881/pg_2
3. http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/12/dangerous_quake.html ; One purseholder did get angry, see Congressman Serrano:
http://www.house.gov/list/press/ny16_serrano/051220domesticspying.html for a direct government source on the question