>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 06/10/99 03:08PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>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.
Oh come now Charles. I'm not likely to get arrested for publishing LBO, and you're not likely to get arrested for anything you post to this list.
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Charles: You don't seem to be addressing the issue of secrecy, but even on what you say, Charles Schenck was jailed in 1919 for publishing leaflets opposing U.S. involvement in WWI . This was the first case ever of the U.S. Supreme Court on the First Amendment. Eugene Debs , the famous Socialist, was jailed for the same thing. Ms. Whitney of the Communist Party in California was jailed for her political beliefs in the 1920's. The leaders of the Communist Party were JAILED for their publications in the 1920's and the 1950's.
You are whitewashing the history of U.S. free speech repression with that one. You seem to be buying the myth of the Constitutional First Amendment.
So you don't think the assasinations and jailings of the Black Panthers had anything to do with what they published ? Oh come on. If you don't think COINTELPRO was secret police repression of speech ...?????
I'd say Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated by secret police for what they published and said. Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers was assasinated for his political speech.
In fact, it seems pretty clear that JFK and RFK were assassinated by government agency plots for their politics.
I'm astonished that you would claim that the U.S. does not repress publication in derogation of its declaration of "free speech for all".
Some one can publish or say what they want , but a private employer can fire you for it and you have no freedom of speech defense.
But how is being jailed for publishing something SECRET ? What is the secrecy of it ?
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We may get ignored, harassed, whatever, but we do have considerable freedom of speech. That was not true of the USSR. I know there are all kinds of constraints on our media, lots of subtle forms of censorship, but our formal guarantees of freedom of speech are still worth something.
Charles: I still can't see how what you are talking about -repression of speech- would be accurately described as a SECRET. How is this _secret_ police rather than just "police" ? The censorship you describe was open and wellknown. How is that secret ?
Charles Brown