
Remembering the burglary that broke Cointelpro - danso
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/mar/08/fbi-media-anniversary/
======
honkycat
If you have never read a book about the abuses by the FBI revealed by the
COINTELPRO papers, I highly recommend you pick one up as soon as you can.

CONTELPRO is the perfect example of why saying "I have nothing to fear from
the police because I have nothing to hide" is foolish. What if you are an
anti-war or civil rights activist?

The book I read recently is titled: "Cointelpro: The FBI's Secret War on
Political Freedom" \- Nelson Blackstock. Would love recommendations for more
recent books, since this one was released in the 80s.

~~~
dleslie
I rather enjoyed the documentary "1971".

[https://thoughtmaybe.com/1971-fbi/](https://thoughtmaybe.com/1971-fbi/)

------
pjc50
If this was done today, would it move the needle on the discourse at all? How
long would those who did it remain in prison?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
In modern life it seems like the choice is between nearly constant, unyielding
outrage at abuses of power and corruption among government agencies, law
enforcement, corporations, and so on... vs willful ignorance to empower a
distracted existence focused more narrowly on just trying to manage or enjoy
one’s own life.

I don’t mean this to sound dismissive at all. It is seriously an incredibly
difficult moral and philosophical question as I see it.

Burning yourself out with constant (justified) rage obviously seems foolish:
you’re not likely to accomplish anything except frittering away your life and
youth and ending up bitter with nothing to show for it.

Meanwhile, it genuinely does not seem possible to make any incremental
improvement to the world in terms of corruption and abuse of power without
being pedantically hypervigilant and extreme to an alienating degree that
rejects many comforts of basic life and ignores things like career or family
development in favor of nearly constant activism.

The problems are so sprawling and complex that average, even above average,
people have no hope at all of sustaining justified outrage and channeling it
into productive action. So naturally it’s much easier for most people to slide
into narrowly focusing on their own life / family / career / hobbies /
community, and rationalizing away any feeling that they might have had an
intrinsic moral duty to engage sustained, unyielding outrage even at their own
expense until massive scale changes are effected or they literally die trying
to bring about such changes.

I’m neither excusing anyone nor judging anyone in this observation. Just
pointing out what feels like a deep, philosphically intractable trade-off at
the heart of it.

~~~
scottmcf
I've wrestled with this. The only solution I've found to balance out these two
conflicting ideas (justifiable outrage vs living my life) is to run for office
myself.

