The results of the 2013 elections in Italy were shocking to most international observers. Expectations in the media had been that the center-left coalition would win a majority and steer the country along a path of economic austerity and budget conservatism that Mario Monti’s technocratic government had initiated. Instead, Italians resuscitated the right-wing former president Silvio Berlusconi, according his party a surprising 30 percent share of vote. Yet Berlusconi’s rise from the ashes was not the headline-grabbing news, any more than was the half defeat of a center-left coalition that finally succumbed to the poverty of its own ideas and to the populist fantasies of the Right.

The true novelty was that 25 percent of Italian voters voiced their mounting dissatisfaction both with the austerity measures dictated by “the market” (and its European true believers) and the chronic corruption of Italian political parties by giving their vote to the “Five-Star Movement” (M5S), a new populist formation headed by a former standup comic. Some international media outlets offered the view that Italy is now in the hands oftwo clowns. Despite containing an element of truth, such editorializing does not do justice to the complexity of the political situation in Italy (and in Europe), and sheds little if any light on the emergence of M5S as a political phenomenon. Is M5S a party or something else? What is its program? What challenges does it pose to progressive agendas in Italy and beyond?

Comedian Beppe Grillo and millionaire Internet tycoon Gianroberto Casaleggio cofounded the M5S as a political organization in 2009. Their collaboration began in 2004. At the time, Grillo was touring Italian theaters with the kind of satiric shows that made him popular during the 1980s and 1990s. Casaleggio was an Internet marketing expert who in 2009 had founded Casaleggio & Associates. Among the corporate clients of this Internet consulting company are J.P. Morgan, PepsiCo, Marriott, the American Financial Group, BNP Paribas Bank, IBM, and Best Western. Casaleggio recognized great potential in Grillo’s histrionic style and provocative “anti-system” message. The pair opened a website and blog (www.beppegrillo.it), which Grillo runs by himself; but they are administered and funded by Casaleggio, who also became the main publisher of Grillo’s bestselling DVDs, pamphlets, and ebooks. Over the last decade, millions of followers have coalesced through this blog around Grillo’s campaigns, which range from traditionally leftist issues such as renewable energy, protection of the environment, public water systems, etc., to less partisan moral crusades against the privileges of a “caste” of “dead” professional politicians. In the leader’s rhetoric, the latter includes all traditional parties (left and right) and labor unions–which the movement seeks to get rid of. In 2007, Grillo’s mounting online success culminated in a “Fuck-Off Day” (Vaffanculo Day), which attracted hundreds of thousands of people into the squares of Italy’s main cities. The gathering (followed in 2008 by a “Fuck-off Day 2”) marked the political debut of Grillo’s organization. In the wake of the massive corruption scandals surrounding Berlusconi and his government, the goal of the 2007 mass gatherings was to collect 50,000 signatures for a ballot initiative that would ban people convicted of any crimes from running for office and establish a limit of two terms for elected officials. The organization collected more than 330,000 signatures. Since then, Grillo has embarked on other high-visibility campaigns to abolish public funding of political parties, to end state subsidies to private schools, and to block environmentally catastrophic infrastructure projects such as a bridge connecting Sicily to the peninsula and a high-speed rail between Turin and Lyon. M5S did not launch these campaigns, however; rather, it jumped into grassroots mobilizations often initiated by radical or anarchist movements, such as the anti-high-speed rail (no-TAV) movement in Northern Italy, to subsume them under its own political agenda and then retroactively claim exclusive paternity over them. The movement thus coopted collective struggles and capitalized on their electoral potential, pursuing a conscious strategy to depoliticize radical mobilizations by reframing them in the populist language of common citizens and pushing for commonsense (i.e., beyond left and right) solutions to the problems created by an inept class of corrupt politicians. In this vision, there is no room for ideological distinctions between progressive and reactionary politics, and issues of power, exploitation, and inequality are carefully expunged from a rhetoric obsessed with the mantra of the people.

The result of this “depoliticization of politics” can be seen in M5S’s schizophrenic electoral platform. It is an unsavory mélange of neoliberal measures (privatizations, liberalizations, anti-unionism, and free-market policies), traditional social-democratic themes (public schools, health care, public transportation), and a hint of radical slogans (basic income guarantee and economic degrowth). Absent from the program are references to any issue not conforming to the oversimplified narrative of honest citizens rising against power-hungry politicians, which Grillo dispenses to his followers. Thus, there is no mention of politically contentious issues such as unemployment, wage labor, prisons, drug laws, immigration and asylum, reproductive rights, or gay rights; even controversial concepts such as justice, equality, or rights are absent from the M5S vocabulary.

The true nature of this “movement” is revealed in the organization’s statute. This document, which consists of six articles, states that the organization has no physical offices, with the leader’s blog being its only headquarters; the M5S name and logo are trademarksregistered under Mr. Grillo’s name (he retains the exclusive right to their use); and the main object of the organization is “the selection and choice of those candidates who will advance the social, cultural, and political campaigns promoted by Beppe Grillo, as well as the proposals shared within the blog” (art. 4). There is no mention of how new members are accepted or rejected, who has the power to expel them and under what circumstances, how political decisions are taken inside the organization, and so on. Indeed, the statute is silent on procedures because the exclusive power to expel members rests with the leader himself, who has liberally exercised his power to purge (reinforced by systematic character assassination through his blog) members of M5S who have raised concerns about the lack of internal democracy–or have even spoken with journalists and other “mercenaries of the regime.”

As of March 2013, Grillo, an unelected leader, and his silent partner, Casaleggio, have stymied all negotiations aimed at forming a new government. They proclaim that “the movement” is not willing to give a vote of confidence to traditional political parties. Needless to say, whoever objects to this edict, even if democratically elected, is “out” and can no longer use Grillo’s trademark. In the end, the M5S is a deeply hierarchical organization that is kept together (not unlike Berlusconi’s party) by the cult of personality surrounding its leader. The much-celebrated “internet democracy,” another mantra of Grillo, Casaleggio, and their followers, comes down to a perversely authoritarian use of the digital realm that differs little from Berlusconi’s use of his own commercial TVs to build political consensus.

Regrettably, Grillo is correct when he proclaims that his “movement” saved Italy from (what he calls) political violence. Italy did not experience Occupy or Acampadas movements. With Grillo, people took over the squares, but only to listen to a fiery monologue from the central stage. Yet, many Italian progressives either have voted for Grillo or are looking with interest at this “civil revolution.” For better or worse, the M5S has brought into the Italian Parliament an unprecedented number of young, law-abiding people (not to mention women), and various intellectuals are signing petitions and pleas to Grillo not to “waste this opportunity.” Is this really an opportunity for the Left?

Some from the radical/autonomist Left voted for Grillo to “help make the country ungovernable”–i.e., to precipitate a crisis of representative democracy and European financial capitalism. Others hope to exploit the movement’s rising internal contradictions to capture the grillini’s [little crickets] misplaced political passions and channel them toward radical political struggles. This might be the only happy ending in this rapidly evolving story. But it must happen quickly–before Grillo realizes his goal of “controlling 100% of the Parliament,” after which “the movement will become the state.” Déjà vu, anyone?

In 2012 and 2013 there have been important developments in the case of Víctor Jara, the beloved Chilean folk singer and songwriter who was tortured and killed in the Stadium of Chile after the 1973 military coup in that country. The murder of Jara was one of the earliest and most infamous crimes committed by the military junta. Jara was detained at the Universidad Técnica del Estado in Santiago along with hundreds of other professors and students and taken to the stadium, which held thousands of supporters of the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende. There Víctor was viciously tortured. He was subjected to electric shocks and beatings with blunt instruments, and his hands were broken. According to recent testimony, he was finally shot in the head and then his body machine-gunned. The autopsy showed 44 bullet wounds. According to official government investigations carried out in the years since the dictatorship, some 3,000 Chileans disappeared and some 28,000 people were tortured under the bloody regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973 to 1990).

Víctor Jara was a founder of and major figure in the cultural phenomenon of Chilean New Song (la Nueva Canción chilena), a musical movement that was an organic part of the larger social and political struggles of the 1960s in Chile. These combined movements transformed the political and cultural fabric of Chilean society. The New Song musicians incorporated ancient Latin American instruments (especially indigenous flutes, pipes, and stringed instruments such as el charango). They blended traditional Latin American folk songs and rhythms with modern forms of harmony and poetic lyrics that spoke movingly of the burning social and political issues of the day. Víctor was a mentor and an inspiration for younger members of the New Song movement, including the well-known groups Quilapayún and Inti-Illimani. The New Song music was part of a rediscovery of the indigenous and popular cultures of the region, contributing to a new sense of Latin American identity and a new set of values of popular power, solidarity, and social justice. Víctor Jara was also a renowned theater director, poet, and Communist Party militant. His songs spoke stirringly of the lives of the poor, denounced injustices and massacres, and communicated the vision of a new, socially just future. Many of his emblematic songs (such as “Plegaria a un labrador” and “Te recuerdo Amanda”) are known worldwide and continue to be sung today.

Chile’s popular movements succeeded in electing Salvador Allende of Unidad Popular (amultiparty coalition) to the presidency in 1970. Allende served for 1,000 days, attempting to reduce social inequalities and create “a Chilean path to socialism” through constitutional processes. Despite enormous popular support from Chile’s poor and working classes, Allende faced protracted opposition from conservative political parties, the upper classes, and large sectors of the armed forces. Moreover, the Nixon administration, fearing the example of a democratically elected socialist, had been deeply involved in covert attempts to prevent Allende from taking office. After those attempts failed, Washington imposed an economic embargo on Chile (Nixon famously told his aides to “make the economy scream”) and the CIA maintained a secret program known as Track II to undermine Allende and stimulate the armed forces to carry out a coup.

The Jara case dragged on for many years without progress. The recent advances are the result of decades of tireless work by Joan Jara and by the Víctor Jara Foundation, supported by many Chileans and foreign nationals. Víctor’s body was exhumed in 2009 after the family presented new evidence. A former conscript was arrested and charged. Several months later, the family and the Víctor Jara Foundation organized a massive three-day wake and “funeral” ceremony for the singer, to celebrate his life and work. Thousands of people of all ages and all walks of life, students, workers, and political leaders, attended to celebrate his legacy. Led by Joan Jara, thousands walked along with the funeral procession to the cemetery for his reburial. Víctor Jara’s memory lives on in Chile, within the artistic and musical communities, among young people, and in the broad public, as a symbol of struggle and resistance. There are regular events and concerts dedicated to Víctor in Santiago, from working-class barrios to elegant theaters, and his face appears in murals and on posters throughout the city.

Judge Miguel Vasquez took over the case in January 2012. In December 2012, the court issued an order for the arrest of eight former military men. Two, retired lieutenant Pedro Barrientos Núñez and retired colonel Hugo Sánchez Marmonti, were charged with suspected homicide. Barrientos had moved to Florida in 1990, after the transition from military rule, and had become a U.S. citizen. He has denied involvement. Both of these officers were graduates of the School of the Americas and held high-ranking positions in the stadium. Six other military officers–Raúl Jofré González, Edwin Dimter Bianchi, Nelson Hasse Mazzei, Luis Bethke Wulf, Roberto Souper Onfray, and Jorge Smith Gumucio–were charged with complicity and arrested in Chile. The judge called for the extradition of Barrientos and in January 2013 the Chilean Supreme Court authorized the extradition request, which was sent to Washington, D.C.

“There has been a slight window of hope since the exhumation,” Joan Jara told me in January 2013:

There is concrete evidence now: Víctor’s identity was legally confirmed and it was established that his death was a homicide. There is ballistic evidence. There have been a number of judges in the last 40 years. The interesting thing is that the new judge is not from a human rights background; he is a criminal judge. This has produced different results. The investigative work of the police has produced enormous results recently. Former conscripts are beginning to talk about what they witnessed. They had been seriously threatened over the years and they had been living in fear. The investigation has produced witnesses who saw these officers in the stadium, even though they deny it.

Joan Jara explained that part of the recent progress in the case is also thanks to journalistic efforts. There was an important breakthrough when journalists from Chilevisión tracked down Barrientos in Florida for a television documentary, which aired in 2012. The documentary, “Quién mató a Victor Jara,” included testimony from a former conscript, José Paredes, who for the first time on camera accused Barrientos of being the one who shot the brutally tortured Jara at point-blank range in a “game” of Russian roulette with another officer. The documentary inspired the judge to take his investigation deeper. He asked the FBI to interview Barrientos, and the FBI subsequently took a legal declaration from the Chilean.

All the suspected officers served at the Tejas Verdes army base, a notorious center of military plotting and subversion against the constitutional government of Allende. The base was directed by Manuel Contreras, a colonel who later became chief of the fearsome Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (National Intelligence Directorate) or DINA. DINA was the Gestapo-like secret intelligence organization created after the coup, with assistance from the CIA, that carried out the vast majority of disappearances and specialized in torture. Tejas Verdes was converted into a clandestine concentration camp–one of many created by DINA and the regime–where political prisoners were held in secret and brutally tortured. Manuel Contreras soon became a key commander of the multinational, covert intelligence network known as Operation Condor. Condor was a cross-border system to “disappear,” torture, and assassinate political opponents. It was set up in the 1970s by the military intelligence apparatuses of six military states–Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil–also supported by the CIA.

The case of Víctor Jara is a crucial one in Chile’s long battle against impunity. Chileans have not forgotten their national artists, heroes, and martyrs. Despite years of repression, the dictatorship could not erase Víctor Jara from the historical memory of the country. But Chile’s political system, despite important steps toward redemocratization, is still impaired by a lack of justice and accountability, and by political institutions implanted by the Pinochet regime to prevent full democracy. International attention is important in this case, which continues to test the limits of the Chilean judicial system and challenge the structural legacies of the dictatorship.

For further information see the Foundation’s site (in Spanish): http: //www.facebook.com/pages/Justicia-para-Víctor/136598893151849.

Look for an upcoming article on the Jara case in the print version of Social Justice.

Seth Rosenfeld’s case documenting Richard Aoki’s role as an FBI informant understandably provoked a strong reaction from those who knew him or had extensively researched his life. In his 70 years, Aoki had developed deep networks among veterans of Asian American and African American struggles, as well as the broader progressive movement and educational community. He projected an image of cool toughness, combining the bushido code with an articulate defense of oppressed peoples. He was a founder and chair of the Asian American Political Alliance (May 1968), a central committee member of the Third World Liberation Front (and leader of the strike lasting from January to March 1969), and consequently a founder of Ethnic and Asian American Studies at U.C. Berkeley. He was intimate with Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, among others, well before becoming a high-level Black Panther Party functionary. The sense of betrayal is thus profound. Snitches are universally detested, and in prison are dealt with forcefully. Disbelief was even more pronounced: How could someone be so contradictory as to be committed to these social justice movements while informing to the FBI on their activities? If the allegations were true, was Aoki arming the Black Panthers in self-defense or acting as an agent provocateur who was setting them up for police repression? The latter was not the case with respect to providing guns, but the release by Rosenfeld of another 221 pages of FBI files on Aoki’s activities gave some skeptics pause. Perhaps there was something substantive there after all. In that case, the inflammatory attacks on Rosenfeld’s motives appeared regrettable. Yet, they were likely correct to insist that there be no rush to judgment against this Native Son, that it is troublesome to base conclusions solely on evidence provided by FBI sources, and that the government should make unredacted versions of the documents available.

With Rosenfeld’s claims gaining momentum, associated concerns, such as historical context and Aoki’s motives, came to the fore. Some have mentioned his childhood experience of incarceration in a World War II-era concentration camp for Japanese living on the West Coast. Aoki, his parents, and extended family were uprooted from their Bay Area homes and taken first to the stables at Tanforan Racetrack south of San Francisco, and then were sent to the Topaz concentration camp, on the edge of the desert 140 miles south of Salt Lake City. He was four years old when he arrived in 1942, and was only released in 1945. And he was old enough to remember the conflict and violence of Topaz. In high school, Aoki’s American-born father joined the ROTC, suggesting a patriotic position as early as 1931. While incarcerated, he was probably sympathetic to the politically dominant Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), a civil rights organization that emphasized assimilation and Americanization. It gained notoriety during the war years for collaborating with the FBI. As Takagi and Shank (2012: 29–30) observe:

Two points about the JACL are now incontestable: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI recruited its leadership as confidential informants (as did naval and military intelligence), and the JACL’s strategy of going quietly into the dark night of concentration camp life stripped the Japanese community of any option of mobilizing in defense of its civil and constitutional rights. The organization’s exclusionary membership policy split the camp communities along generational lines, aggravating the problem of the FBI’s virtual decapitation of its cultural, financial, and intellectual leadership in the initial arrests after Pearl Harbor.*

The latter technique was honed from the counterinsurgency campaign waged by the United States in the Philippines after the defeat of Spanish imperial forces in 1898 and was systematically applied to political policing in the United States thereafter. At the Manzanar and Topaz concentration camps, Hoover sent in FBI agents to develop confidential informants among the interned and JACL members were receptive. This intervention into camp governance was a major contributing factor to the Manzanar Riot. Richard Aoki followed in his father’s footsteps by joining the military directly out of high school. He encountered trouble with the police as a petty criminal, and by the 1960s held politically conservative beliefs, telling Diane Fujino that he had voted for Richard Nixon.

At the University of California, Berkeley, where Aoki became a graduate student and public radical, the FBI had maintained a long, shadowy presence. Under the guise of protecting nuclear secrets, it hounded Robert Oppenheimer. It manipulated the professorial ranks through loyalty oaths and pliant faculty willing to do the bidding of state and federal un-American activities committees. Hoover’s FBI tracked participants in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer and its connection to the Free Speech Movement (FSM), all the while engaging in an extralegal program of character assassination and manufactured public pressure that sought to remove President Clark Kerr. Aligned with Hoover were CIA Director John McCone, a Berkeley alumnus, McCone’s close friend, senior regent Edwin Pauley, and right-wing forces on campus. Journalist Seth Rosenfeld has done an admirable job of exposing the contours of these infringements of free academic and political expression.

Rosenfeld may even have contributed to unveiling one agenda behind the closure of Berkeley’s School of Criminology. J. Edgar Hoover gave Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign a boost when he endorsed the candidate’s proposal to set up a new police-training academy. In autumn of 1966, Reagan announced his plan for a new anticrime academy that would teach “police, sheriff’s deputies and other law officers the newest methods in crime prevention and solution.” The academy would be located in Berkeley. And “with Mr. Hoover’s help,” Reagan said, “such a school could become a sort of FBI academy of California.” That brought notions of an ideal academic institution full circle to the original “West Point” model to replace the emergence in 1968 of a radical presence within the School. Ed Meese III, who prosecuted the FSM defendants and had a background in military intelligence, was Governor Reagan’s Legal Affairs Secretary while a member of the Advisory Council of the School of Criminology, 1971 to 1972. Berkeley’s Chief of Police, Bruce B. Baker, also belonged to the Advisory Council.

So Richard Aoki may have been a minor eddy in this larger torrent of government intrusion, a young man with untested allegiances who became enmeshed in a web from which it was difficult to extricate himself. There has been conjecture that Aoki believed that he could manipulate the situation. That seems unlikely, but crazier things happened at the time. After all, FBI Deputy Director W. Mark Felt, immortalized as Deep Throat, helped to bring down the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.

* See Paul T. Takagi and Gregory Shank, Paul T. Takagi: Reflections and Writings (2012); Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment(2010: 150).

Citation: Shank, Gregory. (September 17, 2012). “Richard Aoki’s Troubled World: A Response.” Social Justice Debates. Copyright © 2012 Social Justice, ISSN 1043-1578. Social Justice, P.O. Box 40601, San Francisco, CA 94140. SocialJust@aol.com

The blogs are full of charges and countercharges about journalist Seth Rosenfeld’s claim (in his recent book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan‘s Rise to Power and published articles) that Black Panther Party cadre Richard Aoki was a “paid FBI informer.”

Here are a few thoughts about the debate:

Rosenfeld’s claim that Aoki was an FBI informant takes up only a few pages in his 734-page book and is not central to his argument. Rosenfeld, however, chose to publish an article about Aoki on the release date of his book, thus making the topic appear central to his book.

Rosenfeld’s piece about Aoki, published in the San Francisco Chronicle on August 20th, summarizes what appears in Subversives, namely that Aoki was “an undercover FBI informer.” His evidence is based on an interview with Aoki’s FBI handler, internal FBI records, the expertise of an ex-FBI agent, and an interview with Aoki. Rosenfeld’s book thoroughly documents his evidence and is persuasive.

Rosenfeld’s book and August 20th piece do not provide many details about what Aoki actually did for the FBI or how long he was an informant. Recently, the FBI released another 221 pages about Aoki in response to a FOIA claim. In an article published on September 7th in the San Francisco Chronicle, Rosenfeld sums up his new evidence: Aoki was an FBI informant from 1961 to 1977; Aoki was a paid informant; and Aoki and the FBI terminated their relationship in 1977.

There have been several attacks on Rosenfeld’s motivation and character: (a) that he is an “opportunist” for linking his attack on Aoki with publication of his book; (b) that Rosenfeld’s claim is made on “inconclusive evidence”; (c) that Rosenfeld is unfamiliar with recent scholarship on the history of the Black Panther Party; (d) that Rosenfeld implies that the FBI via Aoki encouraged the BPP’s use of guns; and (e) that Rosenfeld had “snitch-jacketed” Aoki in order to politically discredit the Black Panther Party.

I don’t think these attacks on Rosenfeld are warranted. (a) He has a right to publicize his book, though in retrospect he could have chosen a less sensational topic for his August 20th article. (b) His claim in Subversives that Aoki was an informant is backed up by well-documented evidence; and the release of new FBI files in September confirms Rosenfeld’s charges against Aoki. (c) It is not fair to attack Rosenfeld for a book that he didn’t set out to write. His focus is not on the Black Panther Party, but on the role of the FBI on the Berkeley campus from the Cold War through the early 1970s. Rosenfeld is a journalist, not a historian. I would have liked to see more interpretation and analysis in the book, but Rosenfeld’s exhaustive and revealing research now makes it possible for historians to do the work of interpretation. (On a personal note, it is a pity that Rosenfeld did not explore the role of the FBI in the demise of the School of Criminology in Berkeley, where I taught from 1968 to 1975. The first report in my FBI file is dated 1969.) (d) There is a big difference between an informant and an agent. Aoki was an informant, not an agent. He was supposedly reporting on what he knew and witnessed, not trying to get the BPP to engage in adventurism. Moreover, the BPP didn’t need any help from the FBI in developing its politics of self-defense. (e) Associating Rosenfeld with snitch-like behavior is an unprincipled way to attack the messenger rather than confront the disturbing message he is delivering.

We still don’t know the details of Aoki’s role in the FBI or how he justified to himself what he did. But, as I and my fellow authors documented in The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove(1975), we know that the FBI had thousands of informers inside progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s. According to federal court records, for example, the agency placed 1,300 informers in the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance between 1960 and 1976, paying them $1.7 million. The Black Panther Party was designated by J. Edgar Hoover “as the greatest single threat to the security of the country.” Between May 1967 and December 1969, an average of one Black Panther was arrested every day. There is no doubt that the FBI had informants, agents, and provocateurs operating inside the BPP.

As for Richard Aoki’s motivation for working as an FBI informant and how he justified his behavior, we will probably never know. But we do know that many people like Aoki, with a record of arrests for crimes are vulnerable to recruitment because they are at risk of being targeted for further prosecution. And once recruited and paid by the FBI, it is very difficult to quit for fear of being publicly identified.

The debate today about Rosenfeld’s revelations has become far too simplistic and one-dimensional, positing either that Aoki was an agent posing as a leftist or that Aoki is being smeared in order to discredit the legacies of the Black Panther Party. I think we also need to consider the possibility that Aoki was both an informant and a leftist, and that he both reported to and fought against the FBI. When he committed suicide in 2009, he left near his body a clue to his contradictory life: his Black Panther Party and military uniforms.

Rather than spend our energy on ad hominem attacks on the messenger, we need to ponder the implications of the message: Why were so many progressive organizations of the 1960s and 1970s vulnerable to infiltration by the state? How did that infiltration shape and disrupt our movement? Why is it so difficult for us to honestly explore the contradictions within the progressive movement of the 1970s and the human frailties of its leaders?

Citation: Platt, Tony. (September 17, 2012). “The Case for and against Richard Aoki.” Social Justice Debates. Copyright © 2012 Social Justice, ISSN 1043-1578. Social Justice, P.O. Box 40601, San Francisco, CA 94140. SocialJust@aol.com.

See also Gregory Shank, Richard Aoki’s Troubled World: A Response.