>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 06/10/99 12:18PM >
I entirely agree that secret police have no place in my utopia, and that
the brutal idiocies of Stalinism are a betrayal of Marxism. But Kerensky or
any other democrat you want to name would have faced the implacable
hosility of the domestic foreign bourgeoisie. For a more recent example,
look what happened to Allende. How do you keep the CIA at bay without jails
and firing squads? I really don't know the answer to that, but it's not
just a matter of making good or bad choices.
Insane seems an odd word to apply to Lenin.
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Charles: Interesting your mention of the concept of "secret police" . I was thinking recently about this standard concept from the Cold War era. Communist countries have secret police and capitalist countries don't , is the notion one gets from U.S. big brother. Here are two common sense criticisms of that mindset.
Do people really think the plainclothes police in the socialist countries are unknown or SECRET to the people in those countries ? Couldn't the average person with common sense in a socialist country "spot" a cop ? (Wojtek ?) What exactly was perniciously _secret_ about the police forces in those countries ? It seems that a contrary caricature would be that the force of the police was open and intimidating, the opposite of secret.
This "pernicious secretness" seems part of the fictional stereotype from the novel Big Brother, "Big Brother is watching" (when you don't know it). Yet, open threat of police force is just as pernicious; and the U.S. has as much Big Brother watching people in secret and in the open as anybody.
Secondly, aren't the FBI and local "detectives" or plainclothes police, American secret police ? Doesn't America have as many secret police as anybody , undercover cops and all of that ? The Black Panthers, Communist Parties, Labor movement , Peace movement have been overrun almost with police spies, provocateurs and disruptors for decades. J Edgar Hoover was an unelected , vicious Secret Police Czar for over 50 years, longer than Beria in the Soviet Union. What could be more dictatorial and secret police controlling than that ? So much of Hoover and the FBI's political work was probably secret , that we probably don't know it all, and we know of a whole lot, in for example, COINTELPRO. What about secret paramilitary organizations such as the KKK ? The KKK are a secret, terrorist police force.
Furthermore, the U.S. has numerous private police spies in the pay of the corporations. Henry Ford , the father, had an infamous internal , open and secret police force. The Biggest Brother is really watching you at work, openly and secretly, with hidden cameras and private detectives.
Charles Brown