Fascism on the rise? Just attack anyone who dares to criticise the police or military. That’ll fix it, sure.
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A thread on Honduras:
I know nothing about local Honduran politics, so I can’t vouch for reliability.
Major theme of libTwitter today:
“How dare they insult the honour of those brave and honorable patriots at the FBI?”
FBI “honor”:
The FBI–King suicide letter or blackmail package was an anonymous 1964 letter and package by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) meant to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. The phrase "You Are Done" is a noted warning from the letter.
On November 21, 1964, a package that contained the letter and a tape recording allegedly of King's sexual indiscretions was delivered to Coretta Scott King, and later to Martin Luther King Jr. Although the letter was anonymously written, Martin Luther King Jr...
COINTELPRO (portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) (1956–1971) was a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. FBI records show that COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive, including the Communist Party USA, anti–Vietnam War organizers, activists The FBI has used ...
The Palmer Raids were a series of raids conducted in November 1919 and January 1920 during the First Red Scare by the United States Department of Justice under the administration of President Woodrow Wilson to capture and arrest suspected radical leftists, mostly Italian and Eastern European immigrants and especially anarchists and communists, and deport them from the United States. The raids particularly targeted Italian immigrants and Eastern European Jewish immigrants with suspected radical le...
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I hadn’t previously realised that Hoover began his career by organising the first Red Scare .
As Attorney General Palmer struggled with exhaustion and devoted all his energies to the United Mine Workers coal strike in November and December 1919,[12] Hoover organized the next raids. He successfully persuaded the Department of Labor to ease its insistence on promptly alerting those arrested of their right to an attorney. Instead Labor issued instructions that its representatives could wait until after the case against the defendant was established, “in order to protect government interests.”[13] Less openly, Hoover decided to interpret Labor’s agreement to act against the Communist Party to include a different organization, the Communist Labor Party. Finally, despite the fact that Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson insisted that more than membership in an organization was required for a warrant, Hoover worked with more compliant Labor officials and overwhelmed Labor staff to get the warrants he wanted. Justice Department officials, including Palmer and Hoover, later claimed ignorance of such details.[14]
The Justice Department launched a series of raids on January 2, 1920, with follow up operations over the next few days. Smaller raids extended over the next 6 weeks. At least 3000 were arrested, and many others were held for various lengths of time. The entire enterprise replicated the November action on a larger scale, including arrests and seizures without search warrants, as well as detention in overcrowded and unsanitary holding facilities. Hoover later admitted “clear cases of brutality.”[15] The raids covered more than 30 cities and towns in 23 states, but those west of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio were “publicity gestures” designed to make the effort appear nationwide in scope.[16] Because the raids targeted entire organizations, agents arrested everyone found in organization meeting halls, not only arresting non-radical organization members but also visitors who did not belong to a target organization, and sometimes American citizens not eligible for arrest and deportation.[17]
The Department of Justice at one point claimed to have taken possession of several bombs, but after a few iron balls were displayed to the press they were never mentioned again. All the raids netted a total of just four ordinary pistols.[18]
While most press coverage continued to be positive, with criticism only from leftist publications like The Nation and The New Republic, one attorney raised the first noteworthy protest. Francis Fisher Kane, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, resigned in protest. In his letter of resignation to the President and the Attorney General he wrote: “It seems to me that the policy of raids against large numbers of individuals is generally unwise and very apt to result in injustice. People not really guilty are likely to be arrested and railroaded through their hearings…We appear to be attempting to repress a political party…By such methods we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.” Palmer replied that he could not use individual arrests to treat an “epidemic” and asserted his own fidelity to constitutional principles. He added: “The Government should encourage free political thinking and political action, but it certainly has the right for its own preservation to discourage and prevent the use of force and violence to accomplish that which ought to be accomplished, if at all, by parliamentary or political methods.”[19] The Washington Post endorsed Palmer’s claim for urgency over legal process: “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties.”[20]
…and The Washington Post was as useless as always.
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Bankers realising that everyone hates them…
I doubt that they’ll find many dim enough to fall for that.
Fred Hampton’s bed after the FBI were done with him:
And why they killed him:
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It’s mostly baseless, most of the US involvement was spread around in 2016 where US inaction was twisted into actively supporting the military coup and subsequent government. Zelaya’s constitutional reform was to allow his re-election, and it was extremely partisan in reception. So the opposition party controlled Supreme Court ordered Zelaya to be removed by the military. By the time things were established as a military coup it was time for an election for the next president so the focus became trying to ensure the results were democratic - which by all indication they were.
The problem is that when the Conservative party overseeing the coup, the suspension of rights, etc get elected they never gave back those suspended rights. And now they have a laughibly corrupt conservative who is hypocritically seeking to secure his seat of power - the very action they used to exile the political left and then target the left in their country.
How this becomes the USes fault is mostly because we didn’t go to war against the overreach in political power by Zelaya’s ousting and didn’t immediately condemn it, the laws were not broken so much as stretched as the party did what the US GOP is mostly doing now. On top of that, it’s easy to say their constitution was only at risk because the US involvement in the 80s. If anything, it’s a very similar circumstance to the US government with more time and continued absolute party control across the government.
A dear friend of the family is likely going to be deported back there, because unlike the “youth” our right-wing party is targeting immigrants and minorities.
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Now Libya is a mess because the US removed a bad government and replaced it with nothing. Pretty much the polar opposite to Honduras.
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There’s a bit more to it than that.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Mark Fancher, I wanted to ask you about another key event in the history of Africa, the recent history of Africa, which was the U.S. participation in the overthrow of Gaddafi and the situation in Libya. To what degree did the total destabilization of Libya and the—Libya is now, in essence, a failed state—have an impact on the growth of extremism and terrorist groups in other parts of Africa?
MARK FANCHER: Oh, it had a huge impact. And if you look at the infamous emails of Hillary Clinton, which are available at the State Department’s website, you see an email exchange where State Department personnel are talking very frankly about their conversations with Sarkozy about his interest in overthrowing Gaddafi because he wanted two things. One, he wanted to eliminate the threat of a pan-African currency, gold-backed currency, that Gaddafi wanted to establish, because he was afraid that it would devalue the franc. And he also wanted access to Gaddafi and Libya’s oil fields. That was the bottom line for why they went after Gaddafi in the way that they did.
And in order to do it, AFRICOM stepped in and played a major role in recruiting local forces within Libya to attack Gaddafi. They chose to establish relationships with some of the worst elements in Libya. In fact, one of the groups that they established a relationship with was one which, by its very name, said that its mission was to eliminate black people from Libya. And so they gave guns, heavy artillery, to all kinds of people in Libya, with the hope and expectation that they would, you know, carry out this overthrow of the Libyan government and assassinate Gaddafi. That played itself out, but those weapons were still there.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/02/libya-intervention-nato-imperialism/
It appears that the Libyan uprising was substantially manufactured by the West (i.e. equipping local insurgents and assuring them of support if they attack the government) in order to provide an excuse to overthrow Qaddafi.
It also appears that the West (not just the USA; France was heavily involved as well) were severely non-selective in their choice of local proxies, and those armed proxies are now wreaking havoc across Africa. At least one of the Western-backed groups was already openly declaring their intention to ethnically cleanse Black Libyans, and is now involved in the revived Libyan slave trade.
