Do You Remember the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) that Kidnapped the Uber-Rich Heiress Patty Hearst in 1974?

Like many other similar things that discredited people's egalitarian aspiration, it was a CIA operation. I discuss what we can do to make our movement immune to this kind of attack.

Today I watched the excellent and very informative live video—one of a series called Uncontrolled Opposition—(below) about how the CIA infiltrates organizations, that want a more egalitarian (read why I use that word in this footnote¹ ) society, for the purpose of making them ineffective by getting them to do things in the name of the egalitarian aim that are designed to anger or even horrify most people who have that egalitarian aim.

The video focuses on how the CIA even creates supposedly pro-egalitarian organizations from scratch (such as it did in Europe with Operation Gladio) and has them do horrifying things to make the general public oppose and even fear all pro-egalitarian efforts no matter how good they actually are. The video cites, as one example of this, the infamous Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) that kidnapped the rich heiress, Patty Hearst, in 1974 and coercively brainwashed her to join the SLA and carry out its wave of violent crimes.

Here’s a video about the SLA use of Patty Hearst:

From the Uncontrolled Opposition video I learned of this book that connects the SLA to the CIA:

The co-host of the Uncontrolled Opposition video, Gloria Guillo, near the end of the video discusses some “red flags” to beware of when one hears about some organization purporting to be for some kind of (supposedly) egalitarian revolution. For example, beware of a leader who is very charismatic and claims to be something like the messiah and who poses with guns and (in many cases) demands sex with most of the women in his cult. She’s right!

What I want to focus on here, however, is how an egalitarian revolutionary movement (by which I mean one trying to do what is discussed here and here) can make itself essentially immune to the kind of discrediting attacks the CIA carries out.

Let me start with recounting my personal experience of being under such an attack by a CIA operation of the kind discussed in the above video. Here’s the story.

In 1969 I had been, for several years as a Dartmouth student, a very active member of the national anti-Vietnam War organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In that capacity I helped organize the 1969 takeover of the Dartmouth College administration building demanding the abolition of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) on campus (as I wrote about here). This action gained the support of virtually the entire student body that went on strike in support of us, forcing the trustees of the college to fly in for an emergency meeting at which they did in fact abolish the ROTC program because that was the only way they could get the college up and running again.

The year before this happened a Dartmouth dean handed me a key to the ROTC headquarters on campus and, claiming to be secretly a revolutionary like myself (long story, but he was actually persuasive), urged me and my fellow SDSers to set the ROTC headquarters on fire. We SDSers discussed this “revolutionary dean’s” proposal and decided it would be a big mistake; we didn’t do it. If we had burned down the ROTC headquarters, it would have been a disaster for the anti-war movement on campus. We would have been viewed as arsonists, not champions of the morally right and widely held opposition to the Vietnam War. The CIA, of course, wanted the anti-war movement to be viewed as a threat to public safety. I suspect the dean was CIA.

Later in 1969 I attended the (now famous) 1969 SDS national convention at which event SDS was split into two competing organizations. Each claimed to be the ‘real’ SDS. One was the infamous “Weathermen” organization that set off bombs (killing one Weathermen person accidentally) and carried out armed robberies (during which it killed two policemen) and declared that the only good people in the United States were non-whites and revolutionary youths. The other SDS organization (the one I was part of) was the part of SDS that favored the Worker-Student-Alliance strategy advocated by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP, a Marxist-Leninist party that I later joined and was a member of for four years.)

The reason the Weathermen obtained enough support from the SDS delegates at the national convention to split SDS into two competing organizations is this. It used hyper-revolutionary-sounding rhetoric that appealed to many people who, to their credit, wanted a revolution to remove the warmongers from power.²

The reason the Progressive Labor Party failed to gain the support of enough delegates to prevent the SDS split is this. Its strategy—the Worker Student Alliance (WSA) strategy—was based implicitly on the notion that working class people only cared about their narrow self-interest (read here why this is what Marxists wrongly believe), such as their pay and conditions of work. PLP said that students should ally with the working class (a good idea) by supporting campus workers when they fought to improve their pay and working conditions (also not a bad idea). The problem with the PLP strategy is that SDS students wanted to build a REVOLUTIONARY movement; they did not want just to talk about the pay and working conditions of campus workers.

If PLP had had a true understanding of working class people—namely that the vast majority of working class people (as I prove here), not just some revolutionary students, want a revolution too, to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor—and if PLP had thus advocated that students talk to working class people (on campus and elsewhere) about this egalitarian revolutionary goal and how it is what most people want and why it is therefore possible (like this), then the Weathermen would not have seemed to be the “real revolutionaries” and would not have been able to split SDS the way they did.

An example of how the Weathermen were extremely useful to the ruling class is this edition of the SDS newspaper—New Left Notes—that they published:

The featured article is in praise of a child, Marion Delgado, who maliciously placed a 25 pound concrete slab on a railroad track to cause the railway car to crash and injure or kill passengers (who, according to the Weathermen were the enemy because they were mainly white Americans.)

The Weathermen were telling people that the revolution—"Bring the War Home!”—was about killing random ordinary Americans. An egalitarian revolutionary movement can make itself immune to this kind of discrediting CIA propaganda only by making it crystal clear to the general public what egalitarian revolution REALLY is all about.

Here is how to make our egalitarian revolutionary movement immune to CIA efforts to discredit egalitarian revolution.

The egalitarian revolutionary movement needs to boldly talk about what it is for and what it believes is the morally right way to win it, and what it denounces as morally wrong.

We need to do more than just talk about what an egalitarian society can be and why it is desirable and important to win, all of which is true and indeed very important.

We also need to talk about why terrorism is wrong—very wrong! Thus we need to talk about why Hamas—a terrorist organization—is the enemy of working class Palestinians as well as of working class Israeli Jews. I write about this here and here. We need to explain that we advocate class war (as I do in my “Class War Yes! Terrorism No!”), which uses violence in collective self-defense, not terrorism, which only helps the oppressor because most people rightly know it is immoral to deliberately kill non-combatant civilians (which is what terrorism is.)

We need to talk about when violence is right and when it is wrong. For example, we need to talk about the Tit-for-Tat guideline that I write about here. This guideline aims at making sure that the general public is on the side of the egalitarian revolution and not persuaded by CIA propaganda to the contrary.

We need to talk about the fact that we view the great majority of ordinary people as the good people whose values should shape all of society. Doing this means refuting those, such as leftists, who, to the contrary, declare most ordinary people to be the problem because they supposedly have bad values (racism and homophobia and transphobia, and no “class consciousness,” etc.) and are brainwashed into supporting the unjust status quo. I discuss doing this here.

We need to avoid the ruling class “social issues” trap that frames such issues deceptively to offer people two opposing views to choose from, with both views being bad and designed to make people who choose either one to view those who chose the other as their enemy. We need to expose how this trap operates and advocate for the view that the great majority of people would (if it were not censored) agree with or at least consider a reasonable position whose adherents are reasonable people and not their enemy. I discuss doing this, with respect to many social issues, here. The left typically plays right into the hands of the ruling class by vehemently supporting one of the bad views offered by the ruling class and declaring those who opt for the other bad view to be the enemy.

Thus the egalitarian revolutionary movement must not fall into the “Pro-Palestine versus Pro-Israel” trap. This trap asserts that one can be either on the side of the Palestinians, which means being on the side of Hamas terrorism, or on the side of Israeli Jews, which means being on the side that is engaging in genocide: take you pick. People on each side view those on the other side as their enemy. We need to refute this divisive framework by proving (as I do here and here) that the conflict is actually between working class people—both Palestinians and Israeli Jews—on one side versus the billionaires (both Palestinians and Jews) who oppress working class people on the other side. We need to declare that we support working class people by opposing Zionist violence that is for the purpose of enabling billionaires to dominate and oppress and get rich off of BOTH Jewish and non-Jewish working class people.

Likewise, the egalitarian revolutionary movement must not fall into the “pro-deportations versus anti-deportations” trap that works like this. It CENSORS the fact that most of the illegal immigrants are people whom the U.S. ruling billionaire plutocracy have forced to illegally immigrate to the United States just in order to survive, as I prove here. By censoring this fact it is able to persuade many people that the morally right thing to do is to deport the illegal immigrants despite the fact that that often entails cruelty, as I explain in some detail here. In this way those who oppose the cruel deportations and those who support them view each other as the enemy. If the egalitarian revolutionary movement does what the left does, which is simply to denounce the deportations as cruel and wrong but never break the censorship about how the billionaire class forced the illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. just to survive, then all of the many people who support the deportations will view the egalitarian revolutionary movement as morally wrong.

The point I am making is that the left in the United States today is a sitting duck for CIA discrediting propaganda. We need not only to be aware of this propaganda when it occurs (i.e., to know the red flags that betray its existence), but we also need to engage in revolutionary activity that makes us immune to this propaganda.

1. While many people don’t use the word “egalitarian” to describe themselves or their aims, and while some people use the word “left” for that purpose, I use the word “egalitarian” to refer to the egalitarian values of no-rich-and-no-poor equality, mutual aid, real democracy (not the fake kind), freedom, justice, fairness and truth (discussed here.) To read why I don’t use the word “left” go here.

2. At the SDS convention there were members of the Black Panther Party who vehemently supported the Weathermen faction with all of their hyper-revolutionary-sounding rhetoric (including this awful assertion that I recall: “The only position for women in the revolutionary movement is prone.”) I suspect that these Black Panther individuals were CIA. Besides the terrible role they played, here’s why. By the end of the same year, in December of 1969, the FBI murdered the Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton (as I write about here) who was truly organizing an alliance of black and Hispanic and white working class people, exactly the opposite of what the Black Panthers at the SDS convention were advocating.