People or Sheeple On JFK and 'The Whole Mess'

[Peter Lemkin]

Well, folks, I'm working through this stuff slowly, and it's delicious.

I want to thank Peter for that James Macgregor bit which is juicy, agreeable, and eminently useful when broken into chunks and dropped into discussion threads. Magda, I haven't even gotten to your stuff yet, but I promise I will. Right now, I'm still working through the "198", and I will have to do the listening at a time when audio playback conditions in my domestic arena are more suitable.

Here's a quick question for Bruce: Are all those Force More Powerful books, DVD's and PC games still available? Those tools look mighty intriguing, being an old game-player and game-designer myself. I sense what you were talking about in terms of their potential as group training tools, certainly in a face-to-face setting or a seminar/colloquium but perhaps even online.

I'd like to spend some time talking about this in depth: "Most of the people we will encounter have to learn that they are oppressed, or have to be made to understand that oppression is coming." How? Where? With what tools (written, videos, audio, podcasts, pre-packaged documentaries -- there's a good library here -- )? Some of this is obvious: I guess what I'm asking for is some better understanding of how to approach and enroll someone into that discussion when they clearly are disinterested, unmotivated, zoned out, comfortable amongst the herd, or -- egads! -- involved or complicit. Well, those last ones are hopeless. If we are the wolves, how do we identify those lambs who are open to learning more? How do and where do we drop hints, tags, leaflets, or whatever?

Okay, so moving on... What struck me from within the list of "the 198" that we could work on easily even in a displaced global asynchronous discussion is the development of slogans, caricatures and symbols. How and where they would be used in fairly obvious, but "coining" a powerful phrase can work. Some call it memetic engineering. I'd rather focus on giving someone a good transformative or eye-opening experience; perhaps that's what those Force More Powerful tools do.

Street and guerrilla theater (43 and 178) always appealed to me as being effective. The use of swarming, particularly for items 144, 1622 ff, 175-176 seem to be pretty powerful if well-aimed. Social non-cooperation, withdrawal, renunciation and withholding allegiance are where some are now, but we need to sell more of it.

We clearly have some people who can and like to write, so perhaps we ought to fashion some plays, scripts or videos of mock trials or reverse trials, something easily done in an asynchronous digital world.

I'd envisioned briefly a Post-It notes campaign since apparently the FBI has been ordering up surveillance of journalists with Post-It note requests; maybe we ought to devise a Post-It note campaign to ask for what we want.

The delivery of symbolic objects seems to offer up a lot of promise; someone has already envisioned a campaign involving children, diapers and the Pentagon; it'd probably be more legal if the diapers weren't pre-loaded.

On that note, I'll leave you with these two quotes that have been sitting on my desk, written down from a source at least momentarily forgotten, although my brain is telling me it's connected to a movie made in the Derrick Jensen milieu....

"We've been too busy pretending that the system will willingly undergo some kind of magical transformation....

The task of the activist is not to navigate the systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible; the task is to dismantle the system."

Or at least slow it down and make it think and feel and acknowledge humanity, soul, sanity et al.

More later...

I think the two persons who have guided me most in how to form a movement are Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Zinn. There have been others, but listen to the talks of these two men and you will soon see how it can be done. It doesn't take long.

No, you are correct, the 'system' will never correct itself.....in its own mind it is exactly where it wants to be and intends to stay there - and in control. Any changes it makes from here on out will only be to the right and with more control, less freedom, more serfdom, etc.

What is amazing to me is that all the information needed to make an informed and 'aha' picture of what has really been happening and is happening now is in books and on the internet. More than can be read - yet most don't find it or can't trust themselves to decide if it is worthy of consideration [of course there are also much propaganda for the system and just pain insane websites and books too]. People have lost the ability to IMO think 'naturally', along the lines of natural philosophy, the wisdom that has guided all good peoples for tens of thousands of years - no hundreds of thousands. They mostly have become sheep, trusting in those who guide them this way and that, or fearful to think or act for themselves. They don't want trouble and they don't want to make waves....while they are dealt more trouble than they can take and nearly drowning in other's 'waves'.

It takes some anger at the injustice and then funneling it in productive ways. I think that kind of righteous anger is infective and spreads naturally. It did in all the great movements the People have won. But the Oligarchy always kills the leaders, infiltrates the groups and tries to co-opt them to make them powerless, or gives some concessions - only to withdraw them over some fake emergency imperative (war, terrorism, drugs, criminality...etc.).

We BEAT them over Vietnam. The Civil Rights Movement WON a lot of turf. Once Unions had made some progress. And on and on...but now there is a period I feel they [THEY] are taking it all back....what few concessions they were forced into are all to disappear soon - most have already been. Yet the average sheeple doesn't notice...or do they?....I think they do!...yet they are misdirected as by a magician to blame the wrong source of their problems. Its the terrorists. Its the inner city drug addicts. NO! Its the bankers and the policy makers, the engines of war and hate, and the destruction built into the system and the big corporations! In America, people are even taught to blame themselves. (If you're not rich and happy - it is your own damn fault!)

We are, IMO, at a turning point in history. Not the first, but perhaps nearly the last if we don't make the correct choices.

As to Macgregor's article, I think it has much merit, but he oversimplifies a bit and leaves out some of the forces and players - but it is only a short piece and generally is good for a wake-up call. Read Zinn. Read Bill Blum. Look at that list of traits of fascist nations and tell me it doesn't start to look like things today. Read Klein's End of America. Read Jensen. Listen to MLK.