Noam Chomsky on Race, Gender and Class with Kathleen Cleaver (1997)

you have both led intriguing lives as radical activists intellectuals tell us when you got started on this path was there a special incident that provoked your involvement or something in your family background they promoted that prompted your activism I gotta remember farther back well I was a child of the depression came from good part of my family was it was an immigrant family first-generation immigrants like other immigrant ethnic communities very bound the ethnic group Jewish in this case my immediate family a lot of them were working with most of them in fact we're working class people that meant mostly unemployed wide range of it was a very lively period and it was a very intellectually alive a lot of activism and you know I sort of grew up and in the middle of it I don't know what the point to I mean I have early childhood memories of people coming to the door hungry trying to sell rags of traveling on streetcars with my mother and passing by strikes textile strikes where women were outside being beaten up by police we have a very violent labor history in the United States and unusual that unique in the industrial world and till the late thirties workers we're still getting murdered by private and government security forces I don't mean while fascism was extending over Europe it was very frightening I could see it as a child we were the we happen to be the only Jewish family and a very anti-semitic neighborhood and the immediate certain surroundings were scary you know especially with those black clouds in the background there just was not ever much of a question by the time I was 11 or 12 I was hanging around the anarchist bookstores in New York and you know talking to guys would escape from Spain during the you know after the fascists took over and so it continued when did I get started my parents were activists radicals before I was born my father was working on something called the Texas white primary and it was a Democratic primary the South was all Democrat back then and they were activists both like a white in East Texas trying to put an end to the all-white primary my mother was active in school desegregation in Virginia at the time when blacks could go to black elementary school black high school and black colleges but if he wanted to go Pat's if you want to go to graduate school there was no place in Virginia so one of her friends was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the state of Virginia to allow blacks to attend the University of Virginia so they could go to graduate school and this unites the state of Virginia settled it and instead of allowing any black person to attend the University of Virginia what they said is that they were pay their tuition to go to any college any graduate school in the United States that would take them so my mother took advantage of this and went to study she was a mathematician she went to study at the University of Michigan which was much better deal actually yes Virginia and my parents met there so she has been an activist he was in activist he would come up from Texas and work on his PhD and rural social development rural sociology something that was called Community Development but that at that time at that era very few people knew about it so I was born into this family but I was also born around the time the McCarthy era was becoming very intense and so even though my parents were active and most of their friends were activists they never talked about it I never heard about these things I read about them much much later when I begin to remember as being a young child in Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in the 1940s and 50s where I lived Tuskegee Institute was 45 miles away from Montgomery and it was a place where people who started the Montgomery bus boycott in the 1950 civil rights work would come and have meetings and they plan to do things and they were boycotts and I remember going on boycotts and I remember hearing about voter registration campaigns and lawsuits I think the million versus Lightfoot is the suit about the gerrymander of Tuskegee so the world in which I came conscious was an activist world challenging segregation and then when I was nine years old my father stopped teaching at Tuskegee Institute he went to work in a program that at that time was called technical cooperation mission later came to be called agency for international development but he went to India in the 1950s at a time when the United States government was beginning to try in third world countries in non-white areas and on European areas to persuade the government not to be friendly with communists and one of the ways they decided to persuade the government of India which was very independent and had just gotten out of a colonial relationship with a European power with Britain was to persuade them that the United States was not like their former colonial power and how did they do this they found black technicians to send to India to work in villages my father was one he took me and I just looked and saw a beautiful impressive world in which the entire government an entire country was run by people of color and they seemed to be doing quite a good job and so it was no it never occurred to me that there was any validity or any sense or any reason for whites to run everybody's lives so I immediately became totally on incompatible improperly socialized to grow up in Alabama I mean I'm where I where I'm living you know the black people run the country the minister and the president and the prime minister but in Alabama where my friends are growing up their parents who may have graduate degrees who have a skin color simple they can't even vote they can't vote they can't do anything so immediately I know this is wrong now the incident that kind of triggered my involvement was later I was a high school student in 1961 - I believe 62 63 and I saw in the pages of the newspaper outside of the Philadelphia in the high school that I was attending I was a at a boarding school my parents were living in Africa I was there there was one black professor one black student from the town - black borders and a Japanese student and an African rest of the people were white everybody so I'm in this world that's very white and this first time in my life I'd lived in Africa and Asia and Macon County and you don't see too many white people in any of those places and these girls were in the back of a paddy wagon and they were smiling and they were singing and the story was about the Albany Georgia protest against the denial of the right to vote and the high school students who were getting arrested because they were protesting and they would go to jail and he would sing and what was so intriguing was that they were smiling and I said well they look so happy and a young woman put a sign outside the the dining hall and said we should fast and sympathy with the students from Albany who are fasting in jail I went on in the dining hall didn't think about it and the next day I came in and there was another sign up that said fasting is stupid we shouldn't do that we should find something more cooperative to do to resolve this problem and I became infuriated who is this student of course they're all white because everybody you know I know it wasn't one of the black students who put this note up so who is this white boy who's so protected who has a superior attitude that he can tell young black women in Georgia who are risking their lives to change the system what they should do so I just became infuriated decided I was going to find out everything about that struggle I went to Philadelphia I talked to activists who trained people to go down to Albany I wrote everything down I came back in a fury wrote out to two page speech and asked if I could speak at the Assembly our school had an assembly every every Tuesday and Thursday and I asked the art teacher who was my friend she said oh sure she didn't ask me what I wanted to talk about sure Kathleen you can see she did something and I got up and I read this speech and told them what this movement was about and what these students were doing and why they were doing it and why Martin Luther King was right and why non-violence was a good thing and why they should support them and literally I had no idea did you should upset people like it's a Quaker school I took take for nonviolent protest that's the event that sort of got me going and then in the same town tuskegee where I was from one of my classmates young man I grew up with when I was a college student here in New York was murdered shot in the back by a gas station attendant my friend's name was Samy young he was a student he was a snake worker he was an activist and he was murdered after receiving lots and lots and lots of death threats but he was murdered in an argument with a white gas station attendant over which bathroom he was going to use the one that used to be identified for white men or the one that used to be identified for colored males because the signs had been taken down he was shot in the back and left at the grace Greyhound bus station across the street and that that incident was very personal very painful and I'd say six months later I was no longer college student I was a civil rights worker I was a full-time civil rights worker and gradually just became very more and more and more revolutionary as the resistance against our efforts to change a society increased it's a good answer what has allowed you both to maintain your momentum for so many years and I should you know all of us know that many people our age have fallen by the wayside the politics change you get old are you thinking about all kind of things but both of you have continued on in doing the work that you do what what makes that possible the real reason to secret the reason no one will tell you is that it's joyful to the struggle you always feel pleased I feel happiest when I know I'm doing something that can in some way break through and break down the kind of barriers that restrict people's ability to be creative to be whole to be healthy and it makes me happy now it makes a lot of other people feel different things and sometimes I've wondered I mean as I walk into situations where people are trying to kill me or walk into situations where looks like oh this this might be it I don't really feel joy then but but I will say that joining the I talked to my father into letting me join the civil rights movement with this argument I'd say you're sending me to college you're paying now you could tell you how long ago this was you're paying $800 a semester I'm not getting a good education give me the money let me join the movement and I'll really get an education and he said okay I'll do it for one year and I took the money and I went to the civil rights movement because the movement was so collapsed it had not enough didn't have money to pay people salary so I lived in like a hundred dollars a month at the end of the year he told me your year is up you have to go back to college that was our deal and I said but I'm in the middle of a revolution I can't go back to school and he said well I can't send you any more money so I stayed in the revolution then I didn't ever have a lot of money but I learned more than I'd ever learned in my life I became an entirely different kind of very competent person with all the kinds of skills that I could potentially have developed each one was developed because I was forced to do things and I enjoy learning and I enjoy interacting with people and I enjoy the exhilaration of feeling somehow or other we can change this culture and make a difference that's what keeps me going well I guess you really are at opposite poles at Mother's Day I feel the same way you do with regard to the last sentence I think there are things we can do but today the honest truth if the world would go away I can think of a lot of things I'd much rather rather do than be involved in political activism I don't particularly enjoy it you know I don't like big groups I don't like talking to big groups I'm sorry but I certainly don't like to go to meetings I hate to go to jail I don't like to be amazed you know it's I mean demonstrations I can't stand and so on but I mean that's the honest truth but they're just you know these just things you have to do I mean they take a look at the you don't know it doesn't take any imagination you know all it takes is to have your eyes open you know to see that really awful things are going on in the world you can start at arm's length you don't go very far I just take a walk downtown that's enough actually take a walk to Kendall Square and look look at what's happening you know people begging for food and so on and then you can go far off to the rest of the world and find more in fact if you have a little imagination you can think about what kind of a world we will be leaving to future generations who don't have any voice it doesn't seem to me possible to pay attention to those things it to be a lie if you know and not to be aware of all of that and it doesn't seem possible to be aware of it and not to try to do something about it even if you don't enjoy and mostly I don't it's true although there are satisfactions plenty of satisfactions I mean most worthwhile causes I think I I assume are gonna fail because they're worthwhile because their struggles against power and authority and the way the world works is it runs unfortunately mostly by force there's people called intellectuals who try to explain that in their own country in their own institutions it isn't like that but it's just not true and that means that most things that are worth doing are going to involve a large measure of failure sometimes disastrous failure now because you're running up against powerful and brutal forces sometimes there's a degree of success I mean over a long period I think you can see general progress and some of the activities have you can see specific progress even particular people that are helped in groups that are helped and so on but it's small successes hard work I don't particularly find that you know wouldn't be my first choice if I was just thinking how to you know sort of be happy I'd much rather be in my study working tell you the truth but it there's no choice as far as I can see there's no choice if you want to be able to look yourself in the mirror at least variously defined as as the 60s the 70s are the revolution or the counterculture that thirty years that followed the end of World War two has taken on mythic proportions nowadays books films TV productions in popular culture have revived interest in that eras movements fashions music and politics what stands out to you as it as significant about that time yeah I think the most significant things about that period many of them were written by the people who were most outraged by it and organized a very significant counter-attack which we've been living with ever since to over to destroy everything that was achieved then and they're pretty articulate and reasonably intelligent and some of them published things you really ought to read everybody ought to read I was teaching undergraduate courses here for about 25 years on political topics on off on my own time a lot of fun but one thing we always had students read was after Atkinson he came out was a book called the crisis of democracy which was the first publication of the Trilateral Commission was published in 1975 Trilateral Commission was founded by David Rockefeller and it brought to get trilateral because it brought together elite elements from the three what's called the triad you know Japan the United States and Europe three rich areas these were mostly liberal elites incidentally it's a group of people who were around the Carter Administration in fact the Carter Administration was drawn entirely from that group including Carter's so it gives you roughly their political complexion they were scared to death by what happened in the sixties the crisis of democracy and they're very frank about it it was meant that was not meant to be read it was in fact as soon as people started reading I notice that went off the market but the it was meant to be sort of an internal discussion among sort of smart guys the American reporter was from big professor at Harvard the the what terrified them and they're very frank about it because it's a basically an internal document is is the fact that during the 1960's great masses of people who are ordinarily apathetic and obedient and you know do what they're told I'm getting by his hair and so on became organized and politicized and started to think for themselves and find their own ways of living a challenge Authority or put forth their demands in the political arena there really drove them up the wall that's the crisis of democracy and the institutions were no longer working anymore in fact what they call the institution's responsible for the indoctrination of the young you know meaning universities schools churches and so on the universities that were responsible for the indoctrination of the young we're not doing their job the young were getting out of control there were you know challenging Authority they were getting interested in crazy stuff like truth and justice freedom and all that kind of business and actually trying to do something about it and what's more that we're really changing the country I mean the country really changed it's a very different than much more civilized country than it used to be in the early nineteen sixties in may many respects and this was extremely frightening to elite groups including liberal elites and the their proposals were to try to find ways to beat back this challenge to try to as the American Harvard professor put it to restore the good old days as he described he described it with a little bit of exaggeration he said back in the days of the Truman years Truman was able to govern the country with the help of a few Wall Street lawyers and financiers sorry for the in those days few Wall Street lawyers and bankers or something like that could run the country but in the 60s this was all getting out of control I mean always rabble this is getting around this mass of people who aren't supposed to be doing anything they're just supposed to be following orders now we have to restore indoctrination and passivity and apathy and there's been in fact from that time a major doctrinal attack against against the UNASUR thon the universities and a very strong effort to narrow even further the rather narrow spectrum of kind of respectable discussion you know media and so on at the same time there's been a struggle against it but what they were pointing to is quite real I mean all of those things were happening they happen in a very exciting way they very today happen it was mostly young people the this there had been the same attack this was a reason this is a cycle that we keep going through in American history so the the the the 1920s were an extremely apathetic period in fact the labor movement was totally smashed mostly by violence at that during and the place looked like the end of history you know everybody was talking about wonderful it's all over everybody follows orders the rich guys get richer and so on the 1930s broke that up you know it was in that period of active activism on all fronts really changed things immediately afterwards in fact by the late 30s there was something like there was a major assault on it that's the McCarthyism he was kind of held off by the war for a couple of years but then it picked up steam right in the late 40s it's called in car theism but McCarthy was a late comer and in fact my opinion not all that important I mean the main things were going on again often led by liberal elites well before McCarthy and much more destructive and it the 50s became very quiet and apathetic not as bad as the twenties but pretty bad and again there were a lot of predictions it's all over everything's in order you know and the week's gonna bother us anymore then the 60s came along blew it out of the water terrified the same groups salt starts over again you know we beat back the crisis of democracy we're living in the middle of that reaction now those things that they were worried about were real and important and they made the country more free more just more honest they just they changed styles I mean like take say MIT you know back in 1960 nobody would be dressed like this you know I would be I was wearing a coat the jacket and a tie and you know students were respective respectful and those things are not just symbols first of all there were no women you know like this very few women no nope no people of color you know so nice it was it was like your image of the 1950's that's what it really was these changes from address style to personal relations to respect for other cultures you know to concern for rights to all of these things were perfectly real they made the country a lot more civilized they've resisted the attack the assault has been very significant but it's been resisted and but I think if you ask what were the 60s about you know I think exactly what scandalized respectable people that's what the 60s were about I grew up in the 60s I went to high school I think I started in 1959 I started college in 1963 I got married in 1967 I had children in 69 and 70 so this is like from 15 to 25 that's that period of time that decade and then so my sense of it is quite different in the sense that I didn't I was actually I thought I was in the baby boomer until I read some magazines and said oh no it has to be born in 46 so I guess I'm not quite a baby boomer but um there was a huge trust of people about the same age going into educational institutes at the same time in a level and at a pace that had never happened before and that's true of blacks and whites and so to me the thing that is significant is what I will refer to as the student movement but the student movement is a very powerful and very diffuse thing because the student population was the largest cohort that had ever in history been in college in the United States so you have movements of students in black colleges for example who are challenging the extraordinarily afar terian structure of that College you had students at white universities who are challenging the authoritarian structure of their college after having been participants let's say in a civil rights summer led by students who had joined the civil rights movement the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee core some other group the student movement was the base out of which the anti-war movement that was the mass movement not the there was anti-war movements and pacifist movements in this country from quite some time ago but the mass movement of anti-war protest came out of the student movement and the women's movement came out of the student movement although women who were involved in what became women's movement or women's liberation were women who were just as educated as these men who were in the same organizations they were in and the men were always taking leadership positions and the women were taking notes and some of the women began to say well why do I have to listen to you my education is just as good and the women's movement upset quite a bit of the emotional stability of men and in the radical movement I think it was Todd Gitlin who wrote that the era of the late 60s and early 70s was he said it was exhilarating for women and very horrible for men or something like that and I couldn't quite figure out what his problem was until I realized that he was at one of the men was in a position of leadership in an organization that was working along old rules even though it was supposed to be new left so the thing though to me that stands out as significant as the most significant as if this did not happen you would not have that era called the 60s or the 70s we would not have the explosion of imaginative music in literature and theater the thing that triggered it for me was the Vietnam War on the one hand that's a foreign event but it has so many profound internal consequences for the United States which I will start in 1954 I mean that's at the point in which the French are defeated in Indochina and the American began America begins to take on a military and political role of sustaining a different type of government in Vietnam and in supporting the anti-communist and the reason I picked that date 1954 because the other very significant thing was the brown decision by the United States Supreme Court that was also handed down in 1954 taking the position for the first time in 100 in five years I believe since Plessy the Plessy decision says separation a separate but equal facilities racial lines are constitutional the brown decision says segregation and education is unconstitutional and the way that was interpreted interpreted in black communities was with exuberance and exhilaration as a Supreme Court has said segregation is unconstitutional is it said in education but it was interpret and the civil rights movement the modern civil rights movement leaked I mean from that day from the may 19th or what date that decision was made the movement took off and so those two events interacting within the context of the United States gave it a dynamic gave it a sense of purpose a sense of possibility also a sense of horror I was in a movement that was very internationalist and looked at liberation struggles in Africa liberation struggles in Asia in China in Cuba and continually said if the Vietnamese can win their independence from the United States if they can fight against the most powerful military behemoth in the world so can we and so that kind of dynamic and that kind of willingness to risk your life and put everything on the line to change that the Vietnam War allowed I think significantly altered all the other possible struggles and it generated such internal dissension and protest among whites that the whole cultural hierarchy fell apart and I've been put back together but it's not the same thinking students often asked me what happened why did we why did the 60 stop that's sort of the question they asked what happened to the 60s now we say again and and also that I've been students have said to me why did you all give up and I've often said that i don't think the movement stopped voluntarily and so I want to ask the question about the government's counter-current help we call it COINTELPRO but it's counterintelligence program that was directed at that era and and and the individuals who were operating in that era and the groups that were most active in that era and ask each of you how did the COINTELPRO program and you can of course elaborate on it a little bit more and explain it a little bit more than I have right now how did how did that program affect both of you you got more dramatic stories well first of all the idea that this let me just start with the kind of presupposition the idea that the 60s came to an end is completely wrong I mean if you think of the movements if you think sorry I was saying that the idea that the sixties movements ended is completely false in fact that's propaganda it's part of the propaganda that it's trying and so far failing to get people back to passivity and obedience if you just think back I mean the you know some are you too young to remember but you know anyway if you think of the movements that have really had a major effect on America on the life and the culture and the society and the way we act with one another and so on and so forth their movements of the 70s not of the 60s the feminist movement as Kathleen said that's a movement of the 70s and that's probably had a that maybe a broader effect on the whole culture than anything else I can think of the environmental movements or movements of the 70s they barely nothing existed in the 60s the name and that's you know there's a kind of a deep moral thrust behind that it's saying we care about the world that's going to exist in the future you know not just for ourselves but what it means for other people you know people don't have a vote in the marketplace if you want to use that ridiculous idiom one of the many respects in which is grotesque system but the the Solidarity let's take even the anti the anti-war movement the Vietnam anti-war movement it was a very important thing I mean I spent a lot of time and effort and suffering and so on in it and was pretty close to going to jail for a long time in fact missed by a miracle but despite all that let me just tell you that the Vietnam War movement anti-war movement was very small as compared with the Solidarity movements of the 1980s so for example in the 1960s nobody dreamed of going to live in a Vietnamese village in the hope that a white face might limit the violence of the state terrorists that the US was organizing or US forces themselves could have had you know it might well have limited the violence but it's not an idea that even occurred to anyone well you know thousands of people did that in the 1980s not people from the left particularly a lot of them are coming from you know Midwestern and Christian fundamentalist groups but there was just a sense that the the United States was carrying out a violent terrorist war in the 1980s that mainly targeting the church in fact the church were popular organizations and so on that's part of the attack on the crisis of democracy had spread to Central America and there you do it a little more harshly than you do here you know and it was very brutal hundreds of thousands of people were killed it was monstrous and so on it would have been a lot worse if the opposition to it had been only at the level of the sixties they could never send b-52s they had to organize an international terror network instead of sending US military forces directly and it was because of the turmoil and the ferment and the literal participation I mean there were tens of thousands of people from here who went down to see what was going on and share the lives of the people maybe protect them help and so on nothing like that was even conceivable in the 1960s the difference is quite dramatic and the so these these movements lasted not only lasted but they grew and they expanded and they continued and still going on you know and then in the midnight at the peak of the anti-war movement say 1965 1966 you could not have conceivably have had a group not only like this you couldn't fill the class room at MIT with people interested in these things let me tell you from experience when we were trying to have meetings against the Vietnam War at the places like MIT and Harvard incidentally in the mid sixties we would put together a half a dozen issues you know the Vietnam War Vietnam and as well you know I ran the price of bread I mean maybe figure if you get ten issues you know you might be able to get 20 people to come out and maybe listen I mean when I started giving talks they were it was they were literally the I mean like give a talk in a church you know with four people there you know the guy who organized it some you know sometimes out in the streets and was cold and to people who want to kill you you know that's and in fact a Boston is a pretty liberal City you know but as late as mid-1966 that's when there were hundreds of thousands of American troops in Vietnam and the country was virtually devastated you know killed hundreds of thousands of people at night at that time we could not have a public meeting against the war in blossom you couldn't have a meeting at the Boston Common or at the Arlington Street Church even in a church because it would simply be attacked by counter demonstrators violently attacked by counter demonstrators many of them students incidentally you know marching over from the colleges to destroy it with the applause of the press including the liberal press know that that's what the world was like at the peak of the Vietnam War it changed dramatically and a lot of it change because of the movements of the 70s and the 80s you know these things remain they fought off the attempts at repression they've been growing the belief that it's collapsed is simply false anybody who's been to thinks about what's happened knows that's not true well that's kind of only on your first sentence which a thing is the coin tell prose welcome tell coming to Oprah is a very significant thing and you should again if you don't know about it you should learn about it it's a thousand times more significant than say Watergate I mentioned Watergate because the exposé of COINTELPRO and of Watergate was just about exactly at the same time in comparison to COINTELPRO Watergate was just it was a tea party the only reason why anybody pays attention to Watergate is the targets were rich powerful people and rich powerful people fight back you know like the the you know headed a Ford Foundation and the president the CEO of IBM and those guys or the Democratic Party which is after all half of the power in the country you fiddle around with them they get rid of you know they're powerful and rich and that's considered a scandal to go after to say - nothing incidentally happened that for example everybody was totally scandalized by Nixon's enemies list you know pages all of them and I was on Nixon's enemies list they never even ordered my income tax I mean you know it's meaningless totally meaningless thing but the point is rich powerful not me of course but you know rich powerful people were on Nixon's enemies list so it was a scandal I mean the break-in of the democratic party headquarters nobody even knows what it was for you know there was a couple of sort of you know crooks who were gathered together for some unknown purpose who did nothing you know I mean if you but it became a huge scandal because they were powerful people they were attacking let's turn to COINTELPRO COINTELPRO which was revealed at the same time it's very same time not and not very little impress or anywhere else it came out and in the courts you know Freedom of Information Act mostly courts just released documents well it turns out that for since the Eisenhower administration and right up till Nixon the government had been with the government it's not a you know it's not a little group of people put together by Nixon when he was drunk or something but the federal government through four administrations we're running a terrorist program against dissent literally a terrorist program major terrorist program I mean it started it's leaf began against the Communist Party back in the 50s under Kennedy it really took off the at the Puerto Rican nationalists other groups and so on what they called black nationalists quickly became a target Panthers in particular devastated by it the women's movement as a whole was attacked as soon as it began to come into existence the new left across the board in fact it was virtually nothing that was left out maybe the Panthers were the most you know the most viciously attacked at the time according we now know a lot from release documents at the time according to the FBI the Panthers had eight hundred members but they were devoting enormous efforts to destroy the party because it was doing things like running free breakfast programs and churches and things like that and it reached the level of outright political assassination the literal political Gestapo style political assassination the main the person was you know the most extreme case in the COINTELPRO records was the assassination of the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton who's an organizer in the Chicago ghettos they were not going after him because he was a criminal or anything else he was anything but he was a very effective organizer that's the kind of guy that went to kill they tried FBI tried to get a criminal gang in the ghetto Blackstone Rangers they tried to incite the Rangers to kill him by sending faked letters I mean you read the letters they're so idiotic I'm thinking oh I don't remember those letters did you know they got imagine that anybody would believe they were you know I've got some FBI agent putting on black dialect or something dear brother hadn't been so awful it would have been a comic strip but the idea was to try to get the Rangers to believe that the Panthers had a contract out to kill their leaders and then they'd go kill him well that didn't work so the they just took it over directly the combined operation of the FBI and the Chicago Police which simply went in murder him four o'clock in the morning you know probably drugged killed a couple other people there was an attempt to cover it up but couldn't keep you know came out in the courts I mean there's no doubt about what happened you know in comparison with this what's Watergate you know in fact one of the most one of the minor elements of COINTELPRO really minor was an attack on a political party a political party which is every bit as legitimate as the Democratic Party Socialist Workers Party all the rights of the Democratic Party right only one difference between the Socialist Party and the Democratic Democratic Socialist Workers Party in the Democratic Party Socialist Workers Party's a few powerless people the Democratic Party is half the wealth in the country well in the case of the Socialist Workers Party they didn't send in some you know Keystone Cops to steal some documents for no known reason they went the FBI which is the national political police went after them and tried to destroy them they robbed their offices they stole their records they black tried to blacklist get employers the blacklist their members they tried to destroy the party I mean infinitely worse than anything that happened to the Democrats anybody care I mean there's anybody know about COINTELPRO and that's compared with Watergate no and then tells you something about the elite culture that we're all trained in and brought up in when we get our degrees at Harvard and so on what matters is if you do things to people with power that's bad if you do infinitely worse things to powerless people doesn't even merit a footnote in history and you just look at the coverage of these two events which came out at the same time and it makes it very clear incidentally MIT was also targeted by COINTELPRO this is pretty minor I should say as compared with the things that Kathleen can tell you about or that I just mentioned it's nothing but the FBI did try to disrupt courses at MIT mine the instantly whether any of this stuff ever happened I don't know but it's in the FBI records they were the government was required under court order around 1980 I guess to release documents to people who were targeted by illegal COINTELPRO COINTELPRO activities are not that illegal because they're all radically illegal so in the course of that we got some documents my Lois Kemp many you know and I were teaching courses I think I mentioned for many years here and they tried to disrupt them we had a lot of students and there were assistants and some of the assistants where people have been active in civil rights movement and the student movement and so on and the first document you know got a set of documents first one comes from the Boston FBI office to J Edgar Hoover in Washington saying our source within MIT and then comes a black line we spent a lot of time trying to decide but our source with if you've ever looked at these documents they're half black doubt our source within MIT tells us that you know these student assistants these bad guys are teaching in this course this is a good opportunity for this information effort and to try to undermine it and get rid of them and so on and so forth and disrupt the course and so on they need authorization from Washington they get authorization from Washington and then you know goes up and back for a lot of boring communications and the last one says our source within MIT you know Blanc tells us that our operation was a terrific success I mean we got rid of these guys you know all things wrecked and so on and so forth well you know that is such a tiny footnote to COINTELPRO I embarrassed even to mention it I do because it's close to home but this was it you know it's a major project theoretically it was ended when it was exposed I don't see any reason to believe that it was in the but it's because you know that it's just not maybe they going on under some other name or something well that's COINTELPRO it was no joke the you know I think the things that people were killed or the worst case was the Hampton assassination lives were destroyed and it was a major attack on political on dissent any kind of dissent across the board by the end and it had its effect it certainly disrupted and harmed plenty of people killed some I think in the case of the Panthers it probably destroyed you know the it's you know it's one thing for rich white folks like us to you know don't say okay you laugh at it when they do this stuff to us it's quite different if you're a poor defenseless person and the ghetto very different and it had its effects but to say that it ruined the movement is just not it did ruin a lot of things it probably may have very seriously harmed the black movement but other things continued and in fact grew and and they can continue to well talk a little bit about what COINTELPRO was only in terms of the FBI but the concept of counterintelligence was much broader than the FBI we focused in on the FBI because they were the most visible and the things they did were the closest to us but for example let's take a city like Los Angeles there's the FBI racial squad that's operating to get rid of black radicals and revolutionaries and they focus in on the Black Panthers in the Los Angeles Police Department there is the criminal conspiracy squad and their focus is to get rid of black radicals in particular Black Panthers so they work together and then the Central Intelligence Agency they have their own particular units doing the same thing in the Department of Defense intelligence they have their units doing thing in the National Security Agency they have their units doing the same thing and so what we didn't know we've said yes it was a police state and they were out to get us but what we had no idea was the amount of agencies and the amount of Monday money and the amount of technology that was used to destroy us but just look at one particular individual a young man named Elmer Geronimo Pratt who was discharged from the United States Army and I think about 1968 took his GI Bill went to UCLA as in a program called high potential to get a college degree he met another black panther named al Prentiss bunchy Carter in that program Carter recruited him into the Black Panther Party and within within seven months al Prentiss Carter was murdered on the UCLA campus after a black student meeting by Carter and John Huggins were murdered on the UCLA campus after a black student meeting to discuss who was going to run the african-american I think at that time they call it Black Studies program the university had picked someone named Ron Karenga this students felt that they should be included in the decision make it an invited if couple of Panthers to this meeting bunchy Carter told all the Panthers before they came to the meeting look we're not in any kind of conflict with Karenga we don't have anything against them we're only going there because the students asked us and no one should bring any weapons so this is a very calm on exciting student meeting at the end of which an incident is provoked by someone in us saying something to a woman named Elaine Brown who had ties with the Black Panther Party she says something to John Huggins gunfire ensues two Panthers are dead the FBI agent who wrote about it a man named West Marion who has subsequently revealed a lot of his information in the book called FBI secrets says the agents came back the two FBI agents plus the two blacks in the US organization who were their infiltrators came back upset saying that wasn't supposed to happen there wasn't supposed to be any shooting on the campus and the reason why they weren't supposed to be killed on the campus because some white students might have been killed in the gunfire they were supposed to been killed but somewhere else so that's just one little January 1969 incident an example of counterintelligence work within the Black Panther Party against the Black Panther Party and the purpose was not only to kill the leadership of a particular branch it was very powerful but to also instigate conflict and warfare between two different oh and or you might say rival black activists nationalist groups now that's a microcosm what was going on across the country was equally if not more vicious that happened seven months I believe before they know a year before Fred Hampton was murdered in djenne in December of 69 and Carter was murdered in January some of the groups for example that the FBI was spying on infiltrating and collecting information on for its so-called agitator Intex and if you're on the agitator index certain things would happen to you under different circumstances but these are the organization's they looked at American Nazi Party anti Vietnam activists black nationalists Black Panther Party communist Congress of racial equality Ku Klux Klan Latin American that's there this is out of the Select Committee report on the intelligence activities otherwise known as the church committee Minuteman Nation of Islam National States right party progressive Labor Party nationalist groups advocating independence for Puerto Rico revolutionary action movement Southern Christian Leadership Conference students for a Democratic Society Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee socialist workers party workers world party and then there's another one called miscellaneous now those are just some of the groups they're looking at they had programs involving the CIA operating domestically they had programs involving the CIA operating internationally I remember reading in the New York Times while I was doing some research as a student about a particular program under when all the reporting about Watergate was going on that the same little crew that initiated the Watergate break-in had initiated break-ins into the Guinea embassy the purpose of breaking into the Gimbel the embassy of Guinea was because that country represented Algeria in the United States Algeria in the United States did not have diplomatic relations the Black Panther Party had an international section in Algeria the Nixon White House was convinced that the Algerian government was financing not only the Black Panther Party but other movements and wanted proof of this finance and the CIA had informed him no they are not being financed and he wouldn't believe it so they had three break-ins into the Guinea embassy to get proof of this financed and there were over and over people would visit you people would interact with you they would send letters to you I got letters all the time and I'm so busy I didn't most of them but they tried to disrupt your relationships with other people for example I got a letter that said dear Kathleen you are such a nice person I hate to be the one to break this bad news but I just want you to know your husband is having an affair with a white woman who lives at such-and-such - such a street and they had an address and then it was signed a soul sister i mentioned to william kunstler very very dynamic lawyer of that incident there just in passing and he said yeah my wife got those kind of letters too but she believed them all and so they did all sorts of little insidious petty things to make you not trust the people you lived with to break up marriages to destroy people by killing them to destroy people by having them arrested to destroy people by making you think that they were a police agent when they weren't there was a vast array of techniques done climates created harassment use and this is on top of just everyday regular arrests and trials and poverty so what happened people were beaten down and I always say we did not disappear we did not go out of existence we were destroyed and it doesn't matter if the individuals all the individuals were not destroyed what was destroyed was their link their organizational structure their newspapers and even more importantly the links with other organizations for example in Chicago the Fred Hampton had created something called the rainbow coalition and it brought together a white organization radical group called the young Patriots Chicano I'm sorry put a Rican group called the young Lords an Asian group to eat war or the Red Guards The Blackstone Rangers and the Black Panthers and we had other similar coalition's in the Bay Area we had coalition's with the Peace and Freedom Party which is an electoral organization predominantly white and the Brown Berets Whichard Chicano group and a war an Asian group so when you have radical revolutionary groups pulling together challenging racism working together and you destroyed those organizational links even if the people are still in the same place their movements aren't and even if the people are physically there they don't trust people anymore so you destroy the motion even though you don'ts Troy the people who then brought me back in time for myself what have each of you learned from the other's work very simple question I always believed in the personalizing questions if you don't mind the important thing is not what one person learned from another person but what you learn from the kinds of activities and organizations that other people are involved in so can I change question okay yeah because you know otherwise it's just like individual accident you know it's not doesn't have any general meaning well I mean I so let's take the Panthers say or I was in that time that the Panthers became visible which what was that 66 or so around 67 around this 66 67 at that time I was extensively involved with a group that I'd helped organize it was and still exists and actually has its offices here in Boston it's it's called resist which was a it was the first and major resistance a group of people involved in resistance or supporting resistance we were a bit older like we were in our forties say so a lot of it was resistant supportive you know and some of it was direct resistance like organizing tax resistance and the kinds of things we can do directly and all sorts of other activities but it was a resistance resistance group and a resistance support group actually was brought to trial and the Spock Spock case if you remember then the by the time by 66 and 67 by the time the Panthers you know we're sort of visible on the scene the group had extended its interests it had a large number of the participants were activists of all kinds from around the country and a number of them were people who did who work mostly in the urban ghettos so we were sort of hearing things from the inside about what was going on at our annual monthly meetings the people from the group have gone all sorts of ways one I regret to say a good friend there's been in jail for 20 years a wonderful person and other various things happen too but we did know what was going on from direct participation then of course we could follow and we decided that as our interests were spreading to many other activities beyond specifically resistance to the war in Vietnam which is what it started with that we ought to do something you know this was something we ought to become involved in and I myself and others started trying to become involved at that time now I don't want to exaggerate you know I'm not gonna organize workers and the G a GE Factory in Linn and I'm not gonna organize people in Roxbury I mean it's not me you know but we were a solidarity group you know we figured they're things that we can do that would be helpful and supportive using our own privilege I mean we're very privileged most of us certainly me extremely privileged way more than we ought to be and we can use it you know you can use it a lot of ways you can use it to give material support you can use it to give you have intellectual resources that aren't available to people who are less privileged you can just be there that makes a difference you can participate in ways which can for example reduce violence or can you know help activities go on and so on so we became involved as a kind of a solidarity group kind of like third world solidarity groups you know in Central America or Africa or whatever except this one was right at home including Boston and that continued until at least in my personal for me personally until the Hamptons a summation my own last direct participation was to fly out to Chicago at the request of friends and the family of his to be at the funeral and it was not a happy occasion the when I came back here I gave a talk in Kresge in fact and there were fair number of people about it and we tried to do some more things but by then I at that time I think the attack on the Panthers had been sufficiently successful so they really couldn't recover and that's when my connections essentially you know dropped aside from continuing to write about it and speak about it and I was involved with the family during the trial that kind of thing but that's just my personal I was in parents my former husband had left Algeria the international section was asked was disbanded and we were living in France I'm not sure whether we were there legally illegally at the time and a book was published in France that Chomsky wrote that had been banned or not allowed to be released in the United States and in France that title was banned as song just bloodbath and it was a protest against an condemnation of the kind of war activities that we ourselves protested and I just always remember that this is very gory title and his name as someone who was singular and they're concentrated attack on the same things that we were up against but he attacked him in a way that was a little probably more respectable and more researched than we did but I like the name and I liked it I always I was going to tell you I've moved I don't know how many times let's say fifty five times since then I just pack up and move pack for various reasons go to school change jobs whatever get away from this person or that person but one of your books always but I've actually stolen books of his or borrowed books appears from other people so I could read them never return them so what I would if I had to describe the influence I would use the language that he stand other people would agree with me he stands like a beacon or like a lighthouse out over a sea of hogwash that you've been told [Applause] okay a beacon over a sea of hogwash remember that actually there there are two I'll combine two last questions and then we need to open up so that people can ask questions from the audience I'll kind of I think no no I'm trying to make well I think that we only have we're about now at the one hour mark so we longer the we're not we're not quite a questions yet well we'll be there in just a second we're just gonna ask I'll ask one more question then okay okay what do you see as the major challenges facing young people now young people today when they attempt to bring about social change and try to you know elaborate on that in whatever way that would be helpful for the people in the audience I mean the challenge is I think you know you don't want me to tell you about them if you look around near you far away the future and so on you're going to find if you're honest lots of needless suffering and oppression while we're having this meeting if you believe UNICEF statistics a couple of thousand children will die of malnutrition and disease who could be saved for probably a few cents a day I mean not serious things and maybe twice that many women will die or be seriously maimed from pregnancy-related or childbirth related injuries all because they don't have facilities that could easily be made available that's just while we're meeting you know thousands and thousands of people you don't have to go very far from here to see it I mean I've walked through the streets and Harlem which where as horrifying as anything I've seen in the third world and I've been to some of the poorest and most depressed parts of the third world you look elsewhere you find more there is endless misery and suffering and it's needless it's there because our our institutional structures are catastrophic failures that's why it's there you see it you ask yourself you recognize it you ask yourself why it's there there takes analysis you know you understand what's going on and why and then you simply ask what you can do about it and the range of things you can do is endless you know I mean if you don't feel like doing anything yourself you can help other people who are doing things where you can become involved in infant in definitely many ways I mean I won't insult your intelligence by trying to describe it and it's a very individual matter it depends you know I know people have taken very different tracks very honorable tracks and my own children for that matter and elsewhere but very different ones and it's a matter of you have to work it out for yourself you know there's no right answer at least that I know nor are there any techniques I mean fifths you know throughout all of human history these struggles have been going on and they've been successful you know world is not very pleasant but you don't have to go back very far when it was a lot more unpleasant it's like we don't have slavery literal slavery jails are bad you know but not very long ago civilized countries like Norway didn't have a lot of people in prison the reason was that if a person robbed the store or something you'd drive a stake through his hand you know they didn't need prisons and we feel very far back to see these things a century ago and maybe the worst human being that human history has ever created at least I can't think of anyone worse was Josef Mengele his monstrous experiments under the Nazi period you get back a hundred years right here in Boston highly respected doctors were carrying out Mangala type experiments their pictures are on the walls and Harvard med school Mengele type experiments on Irish indigent women and black women devising the techniques that are now used in gynecological surgery take a woman you keep doing experiment after experiment and so on and nothing was considered wrong about that you know it was just like part of the culture they go back 40 years and elementary things like you know just ordinary respect for women's rights didn't exist it's just in like our lifetimes you know and you can make progress there are a lot of things you can do but it's never going to be easy as I said you have to expect that most worthwhile efforts are going to mostly fail if they're worthwhile they are confronting powerful power and authority and hence could very well fail and probably will but there's a measure of success if you ask what the challenges are well you know they're endless if last comment it's not easy I mean you there there's a cost there's gains and there's costs you know and you just have to make your own decisions some of the costs are more severe now than they were in the sixties so in the nineteen sixties it was people your age in the 1960s could realistically believe you know students at MIT they could realistically believe that they could take a couple of years off and become involved in you know some sort of devote themselves to activism and then come back and go off and end up with a you know a nice rich career somewhere that's not true anymore there's a lot of discipline has come about by simply the economic constraints which are not matters of economic law there are matters of sort of decision you know decisions within institutions which have very sharply restricted opportunity and imposed discipline because there are ways of ensuring that people who step out of line will not be able to step back into line and there's no point denying that it true it's real and you're going to people face it and that has a disciplinary effect on the other hand you know if you consider the problems that most of it you know 99% of the people in the world face the problems that people like most of us face are you know kind of you can't even mention them I mean yeah there's a little repression I mean maybe you don't get the job you wanted you know maybe somebody yells at you or something like that but it's nothing like what most of the people in the world have to live with so to think that these are obstacles that can't be overcome as just doesn't make any sense there are endless possibilities and the world is what you make of it well having become very active at a time when I could be a married woman my husband had a job at a magazine that covered the rent the car payments and everything else you could imagine and not me even having to question I never knew what he may or I knew what the rent was but I really didn't know what the cost of our living was and I spent all my time full fledge 100% all day working in political movements organizing demonstrations working on newspapers sending out press releases this was my full-time employment from 1967 till I think probably about 1979 in 1979 I tried to go get a job I did I had to make up things I didn't really have any job history but this is inconceivable now that the financial demands of having a home I don't care how we lived in a studio apartment and then rented bigger things but to rent an apartment or rent a house to buy a home or buy a house to own a car to lease a car to drive a car puts a financial burden on a person that does not allow them to spend their full energy and full time in any kind of activism there's other obstacles that seem to me very very effective but quite subtle and that is the conceptual inability the inability to conceive of the kind of collective action and enthusiastic collective action that existed under the pressure of mass mobilization and the Vietnam War and the threat of we thought we were about to get killed as a people we thought genocide was around the corner and we had a sense of urgency and intensity about our organizing but the as an illustration I was interviewed in Atlanta by a young reporter pictures about 25 23 and she was ask me about my career she couldn't get over the fact that there was a former Black Panther at Emory teaching and a lot of people couldn't get over that and so she kept asking me questions and things and I said well let you see this article I wrote and would tell you something about you know about my life at that time and it was an article I had written that was published in ramparts about Eldridge and me and the movement and at the end it said you know please send contributions to repay the bail he had left the country I think his bail was 50,000 and people were gonna send in contributions to pay this amount and I said and people did and we got all the money and she said you did this was inconceivable that you could publish one article in one magazine and get thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars because people believed in what you were doing and supported you I have people telling me it's inconceivable that four or five people can get together because they care enough about a project rotate who works to pay their bills the inability that they seem to have young people seem to have in departing from this individualistic notion of everybody having to have their own things and do their own thing which is supported by the whole ideologically driven media and education is that you can't think of yourself as part of a socially supportive collective group that enjoys being together and doing things together and that this is valuable I think that's a big obstacle it can be done I assure you it is not hard it's a lot of fun but the obstacles the financial and ideological obstacles that are put in place by the same people who brought you the Vietnam War or what's holding you back in my opinion thank you we only have time for maybe one or two questions from the floor I think velu because I think we'd said something about nine o'clock or so so I boy there's a whole line so if you can keep your questions yes okay well all right two people at the mic there's another mic over here somebody wants to okay and we'll just kind of alternate please ask your questions fairly make them brief and then at this point testimonials are not as much fun as asking questions and getting the answer okay I am a Tamala I'm just a visitor here in this university and both of you you have a very an enormous man enormous experience about working in political movements and juicing know participating not in our made popular struggle and questioning Authority and power my question is landscape in the perspective that you have what kind of political future you see and what kind of challenge do convention for the political future between black people and Latino people in this country I think what I think but tell me if I'm wrong that you're asking what is the political future between black people and Latino people in the United States is that what you said the political future what kind of challenge what color what kind of challenge you are seeing according with your experience what kind of challenge for the possibility to build a common agenda okay well that's a good question I heard from some people who had visited the Zapatistas in Mexico that the question that they kept asking where are the black liberation fighters why don't they support us where are they why don't they come down here and I remember reading when I first read about the the demands they we want land peace justice bread housing and freedom I said but that's the same thing the Black Panther Party said the there's a sort of an intrinsic identification with the same issues however there's a seem to be an enormous amount of social barriers particularly not not necessarily in Central Mary in the United States where when you talk about Latino people to many instances of people who have been mistreated and abused and exploited but their identification is white they identify themselves as white even though a lot of Latinos are obviously black but they're still identification is white and the conflict in the dynamics in the United States are very antagonistic on a black-white axis the closer you are to white the view is the more privileges you have the further away from white the less privileges you have so there's an antagonism that is benefiting the same power structure and there have been efforts particularly in California in the southwest where you have large black and spanish-speaking communities to collaborate on certain political tasks but on certain issues as always a falling out particularly if the issue evolves around immigration policy so in my own view the future depends on enlightened committed leadership that's not self-serving and not corrupt that means they probably not running for office but I think there's a lot of possibilities and I think people have to start in organized activities working together and building a sense of trust and then when people trust each other they'll work together and be able to get past some of these barriers but the barriers were in place before we were born so it takes an effort it takes a commitment but that doesn't mean it can't be done that was willing this was a quick question but I was one of you aware of anybody who specifically any scholars or any group that is specifically tracking the reactionary right-wing propaganda in the press I know professor Chomsky follows the media very closely this is something that fascinates me The Wall Street Journal for example has a has a racist diatribe on the editorial page almost every day and it's amazing to me that nobody seems to notice this please comment on it well there are groups that are including in Boston that are targeted that are concerned is what they call the radical right but unfortunately what you're describing is the racist Center you know and that's you know to target that is to turn mirrors pretty close to home you know and the only people who are really doing it as far as they never like on the media our groups who do do media critique like say fair you know which does a group in New York based group which does do this kind of thing fairly regularly but they're talking about you know like the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and so on and so forth the radical right is you know the there are efforts to monitor them but I agree with you I think that's not the main problem it's not the radical right it's things like The Wall Street Journal which are not very far away you know it's most of the media that most of us live in which is imbued with racism and it's very deep hmm I mean none of us have failed to see plenty of it in our lives along this street there have to be about almost 3,000 black people with the black students within this area something that hits very close very close to homes I look at the audience and I see very few in the audience I'm a question that I have is that you know how do you provoke people to realize that uh there's still a lot of issues on the table that regard us especially in a time when something like proposition 209 as such a psychological effect on blacks amiss at the number of people who haven't applied to to UCLA has dropped how do you do it as I said before the if there's any techniques they've been kept a secret for a couple of thousand years the only technique the only things you can try to do or to educate yourself and others and to organize together with others and to undertake actions to combat these things and that can be done in all sorts of ways but there is no magic key you know it's simply a matter of continual engagement and struggle and it's got to go on all the time you know you can't do it for two weeks and say okay it'll be over these were indeed some of the illusions of the 60s in the 1960s it was largely a youth movement it because of the effect of the you know the real repression of the 50s and wasn't wasn't repression like Guatemala you know were you murder a couple hundred thousand people's but it was repression which got people quiet by the time the student movement took off it was mostly dissociated from rich traditions in American society which had been broken and young people have you know did a lot of marvelous things but often with a very weird perspective so for example there were like you take say the Columbia strike which was a big event I mean a lot of the students involved in the Columbia strike I know this from just personal context literally believed that if they shut down Columbia for a couple of weeks that would then the whole system would collapse and after that it would be you know freedom and love and peace and all kinds of wonderful things well you know the world is maybe that's what it looks like when you're 17 years old I don't remember frankly but it doesn't work like that you know it is going to be constant struggle on every one of these things they're gonna be attempts to you know beat people back to separate them from one another to make I mean say take affirmative action I mean you know it's it's it's an issue on which you can get people to feel privileged people to feel look I'm getting stuff done okay yeah and it's possible to extend those feelings to make people hate each other instead of looking at the ones who are really oppressing them and that just has to be overcome it often is like for example during the CIA Oh organizing drives in the 30s very intense black/white tension hatreds were overcome because people were working together on something else and that's happened over and over again well it's the way to do it I think that there was something you were asking specifically targeted to the black students is that well one of the things I think we are seeing that did not exist in such obvious fashion when I was a student is the success of this ideology or program that was called integration I mean at the time of the beginning of the civil rights movement blacks was very largely excluded either by official everyday legal segregation or just by casual customary segregation so the black community in the community which sustains the activists was separate from the mainstream and as a consequence of legal changes social changes some level of integration which has been fairly low but a lot of propaganda about integration you have changed the dynamic within the black community so that people who formerly had to work collectively together had to live in the same place had to do the same things had to go to the same schools now have a lot of choices and are fragmented and not only are they fragmented but fragmented in a class structure that didn't exist for example the numbers of people who see themselves as middle class are much larger now than when I was starting college in 1963 and furthermore the number of people who have lost a sense of being committed to something we call the community committed to the community black students in said we don't want to come here and just join the elite we want to go and work in the community and so that spirit seems to have been integrated out of them in a certain sense and this notion that you could be liberated from something that people have been included in has been a victim of the ideological control right that's what I think so I think people are not able to think in the same way about those issues and you see a level of passivity that wasn't there because people aren't really correctly analyzing their position that's my view are you started to talk about Elmo Elmer Geronimo Pratt as an example of the corn calpro in the state could you briefly if that's actually possible just discuss what's happened to him since that is that the assassination in 69 up through this year well let me start with this year in 1997 I think it was on June 10th after 27 years in prison after five attempts at habeas petition all of which were turned down except two less and after two months of hearings the evidence that was used to convict Toronto Pratt in a frame-up an FBI induced murder indictment against him an unsolved murder case they claimed that he did it they worked together with the criminal conspiracy section of the of the Los Angeles Police Department and on the testimony of an FBI informant within the Black Panther Party named Julia Butler Pratt was convicted in 1972 of murder murdering a schoolteacher and given a life sentence and his attorney at that time was Johnnie Cochran he was a young attorney he's gotten a lot better lately and in the last case the last time around on a habeas petition filed in February of 1996 I believe I can't keep trapped in on so many of these cases when he first initially tried I was a witness I was an alibi witness and I said no he didn't do this murder he was a Black Panther Party Central Committee staff meetings in Oakland for a whole week well my testimony was repudiated because of the FBI guy and he said that he did it and he confessed to him and all these other things well meanwhile I grew up and went to law school became a lawyer worked on a lot of cases worked on the habeas petition finally we had a judge that had enough integrity to actually examine what had been done not a liberal judge but a conservative judge not a judge in Los Angeles but a judge in Orange County and he looked at the record he looked at the whole thing and he said this is a case that cries out for resolution and he put this informant on my stand and he looked at all the evidence and he came to the conclusion that under the law that existed at that time this man's conviction had to be invalidated it should never have even happened but that's what happened and that's one example of COINTELPRO and that yes it is a victory it is a victory but what happened over those 27 years that he was locked down so how do you replace that and how do you see that who's whose victory is this really what's gonna happen forgive the good no it says the people who tell him about all these people are running around going like this to me I don't know we'll try them let's try the questioning with him hi Roger why Stern Radio Free main next month howard zinn will travel to Berkeley California to deliver the first annual Mario Savio lecture now for those who don't know Mario Savio was one of the leaders founders of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California back in the 60s and I've noted that civil rights the anti-war free speech also seems to be one of those big issues that you know students gather around on campuses what do you to see as some of the free speech issues of today for instance I know that some of the black college radio stations in the south band rap music from being played there's also this whole issue of the v-chip and censorship in the internet and so on but are there any particular free speech cases that stand out to you well by comparative standards the United States has a very good record on freedom of speech maybe the best in the world and it's not it's it's new it's not our history people who tell you it's in the First Amendment don't know American history it's not in the First Amendment in fact the US Supreme Court actually you know passed the minimal test on freedom of speech in 1964 in the context of the civil rights movement when it finally invalidated the law against what's called seditious libel you know meaning you can harm the state criminally by speech and there's speech free speech act you know lawyers and special events always said that's the hallmark of a free society when you knock that down very few societies have knocked that down it was done here it was done as part of the civil rights struggle which shows you how these things happen it but since that time and in fact you know the US has a good record on freedom of speech there our cases I mean there are cases of censorship which are you know really bad and so on but the really serious ones are not what are called censorship in my opinion they are the control over the arena of public discussion and information by private tyrannies the country is after all run by what amount to totalitarian organizations they're called corporations if you look at a corporation its internal structure mimics it's a it's a it virtually mimics in the social and economic sphere what we call totalitarianism in the political sphere and they are it's true that you you know they don't have the coercive power of the state so you can choose not to be in to rent yourself to them and to die from starvation you're allowed that free choice and they can't force you to do it so it's different than state power but the extent of their control over the decisions that matter in life is enormous and growing and part of the general attack on democracy is the attempt to make it grow even further the things that are very misleadingly called free trade acts very little to do with free trade most of them you take a look at the way they're designed their basic design is to try to shift power even more into the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies and out of the public arena now one part of that is control of the media concentration of concentration of control over the ability to find a place to express yourself in the reach and communicate with others now you know that's not what's called censorship so the American Civil Liberties Union doesn't make a fuss about that I mean take say the example that Kathleen mentioned this book of it wasn't just mine mine and it Edward Herrmann and I who I he's an economist at University of Pennsylvania we've written a lot of things together in this book was first book we wrote together well it wasn't technically censored what happened is that the corporate the corporation that owned the publisher the corporation has Warner Communications you know this big monster Warner Communications and weren't communications executive saw the ads for the book the book was being published by a subsidiary there's and they no no they'd printed 20,000 copies or something he saw the ads for the book you didn't like it he took a look at the book he was totally scandalized without going through the details he ended up closing down the publisher okay that not only eliminated our book incidentally it eliminated their entire stock okay in order to prevent this book from being distributed I felt pretty powerful and less today but the point is that that was not considered a violation of freedom of speech like Nat Hentoff wasn't interested you know and the First Amendment absolute this didn't care and the ACLU didn't care because this is private power this is private tyranny exercising its power which is enormous and that's what's happening say on the Internet I'm the internet after all what's the internet you know it's publicly funded it's a pub like every like virtually every part of modern technology you know computers you know airplanes you name it public pays for it and part of the reason why people like me get a salary is because MIT is part of the funnel whereby the public pays the costs of high technology industry and then it ultimately gets into the pockets of the guys who own the place well the Internet is such an example a dramatic example it was came comes right out of the the ideas the technology the software the hardware everything comes out of the public sector here it came out of originally dark you know defense the military funding agency which is largely a method of you know stimulating advanced technology in Europe it came out of CERN it's where the basic ideas of the world wide web came from also a public agency okay after I don't know how many years like 20 20 30 probably years of public funding design you know innovation and everything else you get this huge free system around your to goes handed over to private corporations was commercialized and they're happy to tell you what they're going to do with it you know read Bill Gates's new book he tells you what the problem is with the Internet the problem is access is too easy and there isn't enough advertising yeah okay so they'll take care of that you know they'll arrange it try to arrange it so that access will be hard unless you want to go through the routines they want you to go through you know which means like turning on a television set and listening to 20 minutes of ads before you can see the news there's nothing so they'll try to make it like that and then if you really know what you want you know like you're really hyper driven and you want to find out something about a letter that appeared in Physical Review last month yeah you'll be able to do that because people like us have to maintain our privilege we but for most people you will be so the ideas you'll be so you know inundated by something modeled on commercial TV which is the propaganda institution that essentially the system will be lost and will be used for you know again for making people passive and separating them from one another and turning them into kind of consumerist atoms and making them hate each other and so on and so forth now that's these things don't that's these are the problems of freedom of speech in my opinion those are overwhelming problems much more than the serious cases of the kind that you mention of literal censorship they're real but in our society they're they're not enormous you should fight them because they shouldn't exist but there's a much bigger monster out there that is not regarded as a an attack on freedom of speech and it should be it's an attack on freedom of speech because it it takes over the arena of public interchange and information and leaves only small margins on the outside for people to become involved in that's a very serious attack on freedom of speech okay well that's it

Channel: Manufacturing Intellect

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Id: FUTu09Zf5B4

Length: 96min 38sec (5798 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2017