COINTELPRO Operations Helped Create Today’s Dystopian Political Environment

 

Saboteurs working for U.S. intelligence agencies created violent cult-like groups in the 1970s, such as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which helped marginalize the political left

Today’s bleak political landscape, with two essentially right-wing parties and no effective political opposition, has its roots in the McCarthy-era and Cold War FBI counter-intelligence operations (COINTELPRO) whose purpose was to infiltrate and destroy the political left.

One of the tactics adopted under COINTELPRO was to infiltrate left-wing parties and groups—like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Black Panther Party, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—in order to foment divisions within them and internecine conflict.

Agent provocateurs were planted who would adopt extremist positions and promote violent and counter-productive protest activities or initiatives that would alienate the public and destroy the credibility of legitimate protest movements.

Further, U.S. intelligence agencies created violent cult-like groups that adopted leftist rhetoric while carrying out criminal activities in order to further provide the state with a pretext to expand police powers.

Brad Schreiber’s book, Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA offers important insights into the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a radical California-based group in the 1970s which kidnapped Patty Hearst, heiress of the wealthy Hearst family, and went on a crime spree that helped to turn off the public from left-wing causes.  (more...)

COINTELPRO Operations Helped Create Today’s Dystopian Political Environment