The more things change, the more they stay the same.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/FBI/Lessons_COINTELPRO.html

[quote]Surveillance and infiltration are weapons in the arsenal of the state machinery-from dictatorships like Egypt to Western democracies like the United States. How else could minority elites hope to monitor and stifle dissent among their exploited and oppressed majorities? Especially in times of war, when the façade of diplomacy is lifted and the true brutality of states is unleashed, a premium is placed on silencing or crushing any domestic discord that threatens national unity. War abroad, to put it bluntly, is always accompanied by intensified repression at home.[/quote]

Why did I think it had all changed?
The cops, judges, citizens, society, why did I think it had all changed? I mean when I first learnt about Cointelpro and McCarthyism I learnt that at some recent time in history, the authorities of our society, our judges, cops, media, politicians, and many in society had contributed to these horrible time periods, which destroyed many good people. I learned that this insanity had continued and gone on for years under J. Edgar Hoover and other men like him. So why did I think it had all changed?

A study of McCarthyism. -
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/mccarthy.htm

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schrecker-blacklist.html

[quote]The two-stage nature of McCarthyism, in which political undesirables were first identified by one agency and then fired by another, increased its effectiveness. By diffusing the responsibility, the separation of the two operations made it easier for the people who administered the economic sanctions to rationalize what they were doing and deny that they were involved in the business of McCarthyism. This was especially the case with the essentially moderate and liberal men (few women here) who ran the nation's major corporations, newspapers, universities, and other institutions that fired people for their politics. Many of these administrators sincerely deplored McCarthy and HUAC and tried to conceal the extent to which their own activities bolstered the witch-hunt. [/quote]

Because that was then and this is now. I assumed that it had all changed, but why would it? The media from that time did not get fired, the people of that time who helped ruin the lives of innocent people and black list them did not get fired, infact Ronald Reagan went on to become president.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6458/

If anything it was the victims who remained at large, hidden, still hardly able to find jobs. It's not the cream that has been rising to the top in society, it's the mean, and I guess it's always been like that. Also those people private citizens who remember Cointelpro, Red Squads, and McCarthyism, they remember what society can do, and they would have learned their lessons about complying with this system. That is why most don't speak up or say anything, or get out of line, they see what can happen, they are not under the painted reality that has been set before so many of us to believe.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/FBI/Lessons_COINTELPRO.html

[quote]The Espionage Act of 1917, and an amendment, the Sedition Act of 1918 made it a crime to "willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States," punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to twenty years in prison. During the Palmer Raids in the aftermath of the First World War, the Bureau of Investigation-forerunner of the FBI-rounded up 6,000 radicals and exiled 1,000 foreign-born socialists and anarchists, using these acts as justification. During the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s, a coalition of government bureaucrats, employers, and right-wing activists hounded and fired thousands of communists, leftists, trade unionists, and civil rights activists. These legal suspensions of democratic rights, often initiated by Democrats and almost always supported on both sides of the aisle, were promoted in the name of defending national security. Each time these activities expanded the scope of state repression. Radical historian Noam Chomsky describes how following the Second World War, Senate liberals including Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) and Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) proposed "the ultimate weapon of repression: concentration camps to intern potential troublemakers on the occasion of some loosely defined future 'Internal Security Emergency.

-2 Not much has changed since then. Don Goldwater, son of the late senator Barry Goldwater and GOP candidate for governor in Arizona, recently called for the creation of forced labor camps for undocumented immigrants.

3 The so-called liberal media, such as the New York Times, which sat on the NSA story for a year at the request of the Bush administration, applauded the expulsion of a socialist assemblyman following the Palmer Raids. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Washington Post editorialized against "hairsplitting over infringement of liberty.
"4 A new generation of antiwar and social justice activists needs to learn the lessons of the last wave of state repression, spying, and infiltration. There is far too much ground to cover on this broad issue than can be done justice in the scope of a single article, therefore I've chosen to focus on a few highlights [lowlights?] of the government's intervention in the Black liberation and socialist movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s.[/quote]

Why I thought it had changed is beyond me. The first thing that happened right after 9/11 is that people the the government had hounded and tried to destroy during Cointelpro were rounded up and they tried to use them once again to destroy each other. I mean this is like years they were allegedly left in peace, and then suddenly they were back on the charts. See nothing is ever forgotten by that side, nothing forgiven. We should be equally the same. By that I just mean it's good to be mindfull of who and what these people are.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/hellman-per-fbi.html

Lillian Hellman's FBI file
[quote]During her lifetime she was never put on trial and no violation of the law was ever noted, not even a misdemeanor. How can you withhold a document about her on grounds that it is in 'the interest of national defense or foreign policy - your official printed reason? Miss Hellman never threatened her country; she merely irritated officials in Washington who did not like her politics or her plays.

The FBI files reveal that surveillance of Miss Hellman began by [unnamed] informants before World War II - independently and also because of her relationship with Dashiell Hammett. Surveillance was maintained by FBI informants and also by a mail watch of her correspondents and what she read.

In 1938 she was one of the speakers at a rally to support the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. The same year she joined thirty six other authors in a petition to President Roosevelt to bar [/quote]

You can be targeted for such simple things, and this targeting is nothing new, and what I failed to realise is that societies willingness or abilty to go along with such times is also nothing new. How I could have missed this before is beyond me, but I see it now a lot more clearly. It was there in the research, and in so many others ways. I just did not wish to see it for whatever reason.

http://apollo.demigod.org/~zak/documents/high-school/paper-mccarthyism/html

[quote]It is important to realize that the McCarthyesque idea of ignorant persecution did not come into being in 50 s, but had already existed for hundreds of years, with such historical examples such as the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Hunts. A more modern manifestation of the McCarthy mindset would be that once someone has been accused of sexual harassment, they are shunned socially, whether they are finally found guilty or not. It can be applied even in a broader sense as a tendency to not discuss things openly; a local example would be that many people in Hartland did not want the book Daddy's Roommate in the Pauline Haass Public Library. Another example would be the war over Outcome Based Education that erupted several years ago and is still going on in this district. Everyone has a different idea, and they all want to point fingers and blame, without getting the facts out in the open and discussing them coolly and rationally. Yet another example of ignorance and hate would be that many people in Hartland are against Satanism, while there are very few who actually know what it is about. It is important to realize that the repercussions of even a relatively short period of McCarthyism have long-lasting effects; during the short time he had power, Joseph McCarthy left his mark on history, which is still influencing leaders today.[/quote]

So once more society has gone into Trippin mode, and we the targets are caught up in it's spin cycle of repression and stupidity, once again. So again nothing new. What is new and that has been throwing off targets is the electronic harassment. The State has found a new weapon to play with. I guess it's like shock treatment to keep targets in line. Just like the Milgram experiments where you get a complete stranger to shock another stranger and do it more and more. Nothing new there eiteher, you have just found a way to do this remotely. Cleaver, cleaver, little State.

When you love your country you wear these little blinders that you are not aware of. You don't tend to realise that your country can be just a bad, and repressive as any other state, or country. We also have such a good reputation in the world, that is just one more reason it took me longer to see this. I thought surly if my country was repressing it's citizens in such a way, it would be discussed, but then look who owns the United Nations, and who runs it. It's like being on the highschool league of justice commity. Your friends can do no wrong and they don't get reported when they pull the same crap that other people do.

I guess I had this naive sense of pride in who my country and society were, and refused or could not see it as being as corrupt, flawed and bad as any other nation. It's so horrible to have this truth wash over me, and yet it's so free. The truth will make you free, but first it will make ya miserable. So true in so many ways.

So where does that leave targets? I mean we are in a slightly different age with the internet and the abiltiy to get information out to society and allegidly the world, but this has not changed much. That is because there are no true agencies or organisations that can change this. Unless you can bring the eyes of the world to your door steps like they did with South Africa, then this is not going to change.

For example it's not unlike the pedophile down the street who is like a cop, or firefighter, and no one wants to see that they are bad. They have a good reputation and no one wants to see the truth. Or like Paul and Karla Homolka, I mean no one wants to see that shiny pretty couple answer the door and believe that they have some drugged teenager locked up in the basement and so they just walk away. No one wants to beleive our democratic countries, the judges of the world, the good guys of the world are doing these horrible things to thier citizens. It's like trying to get people to believe that Priest are commiting derading acts on very young children. The people that don't know, don't want to believe, and the people that do know, don't say anything, or didn't for years. It's so horrible that such shamefull things can happen in society, allegidly under the cover of darkness, but it's not. It's more like a big dirty open secret that everyone knows about and no one does anything about. They just accept that that's the way it is.

So what can we learn from this boys and girls? The State is corrupt, murdering and dangerous, it's always been like this, and I guess it probably always will be unless someone is interested in changing it. And the biggest lesson or surprise for me is still society and the individual will or lack there of, and people's willingness to just go along with it. I am not trying to blame or judge anyone, I mean now that I have some idea of what you have been up against, and what that would mean I am less angry, but so disappointed. I mean what happened to standing up to peer-pressure? That's right our society practically hazes children to fall in line with peer pressure, be it drugs, sex, alchol, or whatever, they learn to do whatever one else is doing, because that is how you fit in to society, that is how you will be liked, and admired, and so they are conditioned from an early age, that this is the price of acceptance, and for the most part it is. There there are those few, who somehow managed to come up in society and miss that lesson. Who resisted the peer pressures, and the world, and so here you are, here we are, here they are.

It's all very fascinating that aspect of it, but the rest, is as it ever was. Targets have to find a way to survive, document this time period, just like the others that have gone before, and also try to help other real targets as best as we can, by sharing our experiences. As far as agencies and the law, I still think we have to try to make people aware of what is happening from a target stand point of view. The same targeting that has been going on in society, that we have these laws against, is being commited by our own governments. The same drugs that people are going to jail for, are being imported by the CIA a branch of the government. As long as the corruption abounds, then so must awareness abound, and a few voices saying that this is wrong and this is not the way things should be.

Hum seems like this other person had the same issues with their state like over 2000 years ago, and spoke out against the corruption of that time period, and tried to help the poor, downtrodden and oppressed. He too woul become a target of the State. See the more things change, the more they stay the same.

http://www.antelope-ebooks.com/RELIGIOUS/Jesus/Jesus46.html

[quote]"Woe and misery to you scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, you sanctimonious swindlers! You are like tombs that are kept beautifully painted white on the outside but inside are full of dead men's bones and everything rotten and corrupt. You appear outwardly to others to be good and righteous, but inside you are full of filth and corruption, hypocrisy and lawlessness[/quote]