I have been teaching about the history of inequalities in the United States for more than forty years. I started off using oral histories in my curriculum when it was against the grain to do so. I still use them today, though to do so now has become something of an acceptable convention. I’m interested in how an oral history can gain and lose power depending on the contexts in which it is produced and received.

In the 1970s at Berkeley I brought labor organizers, farm workers, ex-prisoners, and Black Panthers to my classes to tell their histories. In the 1990s, I brought their voices into the curriculum via the writings of Carlos Bulosan, Piri Thomas, Studs Terkel, and Fannie Lou Hamer (via the Mississippi Writers’ Project); and the films of Marlon Riggs and Anna Deavere Smith, who draw upon the oral history tradition. But as with everything, what was once radical and revolutionary can become stale and standardized. This is true of oral history. Context matters.

In the 1970s, oral history and autobiographical histories resonated in diverse social movement that incorporated voices from below and fought for their inclusion in the national narrative, media, and classroom. As a result, Maxine Hong Kingston’s “no-name people” and “history’s etceteras,” to use Studs Terkel’s term, emerged as flesh-and-blood people with all the quirks of humanity and a counter-narrative to tell.

Today, the personal story is welcomed, cultivated, and promoted in television, talk radio, the web. The personal that used to be political is now typically commercial. So it’s more of a challenge than it was in the 1970s to locate oral histories inside a critical, oppositional, cultural politics.

I find today that many oral histories tend to be read as testimony to a depoliticized human ingenuity, to personal resiliency and persistence, and even as evidence for the American Story of hardships overcome. (We can blame Oprah for this.) The narrative swallows up the counter-narrative, the personal trumps the political, stories of exclusion and degradation become examples of individual triumphalism.

I’m interested in how the present impacts oral histories. “The past,” as historian Karen Till notes, “is always constituted by the present.” Since some of my recent work focused on the World War II period, let me provide some examples from different parts of the world — the United States, Ukraine, and Germany — about how the politics of the present shape the way that oral histories of World War II are made and received.

On public television in the USA in 2007, Ken Burns’ epic, “The War,” was very popular. The documentary is built around extensive interviews with American war veterans who speak, often movingly, about the horrors and human cost of war. Burns’ focus on personal histories is underlined by the observable fact that the World War II veterans were close to the end of their lives.

About the same time in Ukraine, a French Roman Catholic priest, Father Desbois, was traveling the country, marking the mass graves of the close to 1.5 million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and collaborators during the war. Except for the slaughter at Babi Yar, memorialized in Yevtushenko’s poem, the Holocaust in Ukraine has been buried as deep as its corpses. The priest taped and interviewed Ukrainian witnesses who remembered what happened, sometimes as eyewitnesses. “One witness told how the [burial] pit moved for three days, how it breathed,” Desbois reports.

Ken Burns’ title, “The War” suggests that some wars are bigger than others, and more Americanized than others. It evokes old debates about whether it’s The Holocaust or a Nazi holocaust (and a more recent debate about whether what happened to the Armenians in Turkey in 1915 was genocide or “mass killings”). Burns tells the story of a world war as an American war, and locates the veterans’ stories in personal experience, at the expense of any effort to explain the causes of The War or locate them in global struggles for power. It is “history by emotion,” as one critic puts it. At the core of the story is the white GI experience, though Others (Japanese-American and Chicano veterans) fight their way into the margins of the story.

What makes these two uses of oral histories different is not only that they are examining World War II as it is experienced in two different countries, from two different local vantage points. What gives the Ukraine project its critical edge is not oral histories of the Holocaust (which are widely collected and available), but that they are being used to foment a discussion in the Ukraine about genocide and responsibility, an excavation that could have disturbing implications for the country today.

By contrast, in the United States, the Ken Burns’ story is not new: the American GI experience has been widely and sympathetically told in the US. And hearing about the “Good War” doesn’t have the same bite as it did in the early 1970s when Richard Nixon used George S. Scott’s Patton to try to make the case that the Commies in Vietnam were the descendants of the Nazis. (It didn’t work.) Here in the United States, Burns’ oral histories fit comfortably into a nationalist paradigm we know well. His history is reassuring to many, not disturbing. (Chicano protests against Burns were about being left out of the narrative, not challenging it.) In Ukraine, the stories collected by Desbois have the possible makings of a counter-narrative. The method is similar, but the cultural-political contexts make all the difference.

The next examples come from contemporary Germany. The Jewish Museum opened in 2000 in Berlin. It is as celebrated for its Daniel Libeskind design as for its contents. (It was opened for two years before any contents were added, the architecture itself such an attraction that there was even discussion of leaving the building vacant.) The building and exhibitions are slashed by voids, a bolt of lightening, gashes in the facades to represent the interruption of a normal life. The oral histories appear in the depiction of the relative normality of Jewish life in Germany prior to Nazism. The Jews entered ancient Germania with Roman legions. “So begins the story of a people in a new land.” There are oral histories of life before and afterwards (it’s not a Holocaust museum). The emphasis is on showing the humanity and diversity of Jewish life before Nazism. Interestingly, the final section provides quotes from an extraordinary variety of Jewish immigrants, who disrupt monolithic notions of Jewishness.

But the storytelling is highly selective. Jewish stories appear in isolation from others stories, so it is impossible to make comparisons or to ask: In what ways was the Jewish experience similar to or different from other “peoples” who came to Germany? There are no stories of Jewish German leftists in a country where Jewish leftists figured prominently. And the oral histories focus on distinguished Jews, not the majority who lived in poverty. The museum is highly Americanized in its staffing, technology, and glitz. James Young, an American Jewish historian, was very influential in the selection of the final design. The director, Michael Blumenthal, is American; the architect is American; a major memorial in the basement is by American designer, Peter Eisenman. Is there a connection between selective storytelling and Americanization? Perhaps the oral histories are designed to reassure visitors, increasingly foreign, that Jews have a place in contemporary Germany and that the void will be filled. This is backed up by government policies that facilitated Jewish immigration from Russia and binational citizenship for Israeli Jews.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe opened in the government district of Berlin in 2005 after at least a decade of arguments and debates. The memorial itself is huge, somber, and monumental: 2,711 concrete stelae fill a huge plaza like a crowded abstract cemetery. An American architect, Peter Eisenman, designed it. The oral histories can be found under the stelae in an underground, bunker-like documentation center, reminiscent of a crypt in a medieval church. Here you can read or hear the stories and histories of Jews who were in the concentration camps. The overall effect is numbing, quieting, a privatization of grief.

The memorial itself focuses attention only on Jewish victims. The international propaganda value of the memorial trumps the stories; and its monumentalism trumps the everyday. It is more of an international than a national statement, aimed at American and Israeli audiences, and Jews from France and the UK.

The Topography of Terror Foundation opened in Berlin in 1992. It is located on the grounds of what used to be the headquarters of the Gestapo and Nazi state. Until recently, most of its exhibitions were outdoors under a temporary wooden roof, pending the construction of a building to house the collections. Here you can see a timeline of Nazism, read the words of Nazi officialdom, and hear the stories of those who survived to tell their tales of torture and terror. Topography documents the perpetrators. It was only possible to do this, in a political sense, after the victims had been fully recognized and humanized.

What makes the oral histories chilling is their location — the headquarters of Nazism — and the accessibility of the design. This used to be “the end of world” for millions. There is no entry fee, no formal entry point, no hovering guards or guides (but there’s information and a library in a nearby building). Like the Jewish Museum and the Memorial, Topography also stands at the heart of the new Berlin, but this is a message for German as well as international consumption.

In 2005 the newly reunified Germany opened the Sachsenhausen Memorial Museum on the site of the notorious Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, about an hour’s drive from Berlin. First opened in 1936, it was Himmler’s vision of “a thoroughly model concentration camp,” as well as a place to train elite SS troops. The local town was an important part of the prison and SS life. Built for 10,000, it started with political prisoners, Gypsies, homosexuals, and later the first 6,000 Jews to be forcibly removed from Berlin. It soon became used primarily for Jews and Soviet prisoners of war.

Some 10,000 Soviet prisoners were murdered here, as well as tens of thousands of Jews. Ironically, it was not a mass extermination camp like Auschwitz, but a place where techniques for killing individuals were perfected. From 1945 to 1950, it was controlled by the USSR and housed 60,000 low-level Nazis, political opponents, and others. Some 12,000 died, mostly from malnutrition, but also neglect. At Sachsenhausen, you’ll find layers of memorials (East German and German), the ovens, burial grounds, as well as several exhibitions spread over its huge grounds. Oral histories can be found in the exhibitions on medical experimentation, on the role of bystanders/collaborators in nearby Oranienburg, and on the victims of the Soviet period.

What is unusual about this site is that the visitor must handle personal stories representing different vantage points, all presented sympathetically — first-class victims, second-class victims, bystanders. You have to work out what you think of these perspectives; you have to engage the contradictions. If you were a young woman living in Oranienberg and you were invited to a dance to meet upwardly mobile SS officers, what would you do? Does the Soviet neglect of postwar prisoners evoke the moral equivalency of Nazi murders?

All the sites of World War II that I have mentioned — American television, Ukrainian burial pits, German memorials and memory centers — employ techniques of oral history. My preference is for the ones that make memory an active process, require visitors to figure out what they make of the experience, and provoke controversies about the present. As Günter Grass puts it in his recent memoir, I want the “the present, this fleeting nownownow [to be] constantly overshadowed by a past now….”

* This is a revised version of a talk given at the Oral History Association Annual Meeting, Oakland, October 27, 2007. Tony Platt (amplatt27@gmail.com) is a Visiting Professor in Justice Studies at San Jose State University.

For years I anticipated my emotions and reaction to the day of Margaret Thatcher’s death. I remember being in Liverpool’s Royal Court at an Elvis Costello gig, knocked out by his Tramp the Dirt Down…, but this was at the height of the ferocious ideological and political activation of the “New Right” agenda: the relentless “clampdown” on welfare; the destruction of trade unionism; the gerrymandering of boundaries; the war crime that was the sinking of theBelgrano; the war on the poor; the privatization of social housing; the determination to use the police to put down the uprisings of those in our inner cities, particularly the criminalization of our Black communities fighting institutionalized racism; the engineered confrontation against the miners as a lesson to strong unions and the exploitation of apartheid’s coal to undermine the true price of working the seams; the callous shedding of responsibility for the deaths of 10 Republican prisoners in the H Blocks; the poll tax; the acceptance of the deceit that was Hillsborough; the courting of Rupert Murdoch, Ronald Reagan, and Chile’s Pinochet in equal measure; the attempted destruction of the National Health Service and public broadcasting; the reaffirmation of a class-based, tiered system of education; and the anti-gay section/clause 28 of 1988.

In an essay in the edited collection entitled Law, Order and the Authoritarian State, I discussed the transformation of reactionary “law ‘n’ order rhetoric” into regulatory reality, noting that the “many right-wing voluntary pressure groups and advisory organizations set up in the mid-1970s as the political and intellectual backbone of the New Right had found a champion in Margaret Thatcher.” In its emergence and consolidation, Thatcherism was the outcome of a longer-term political, economic, and ideological project derived in the bitter memory of the 1974 defeat of the Heath Government. As Stuart Hall eloquently argued in his 1980 pamphlet, Drifting into a Law and Order Society, it progressed a “deep and decisive movement towards a more disciplinary authoritarian kind of society.” “Authoritarian populism,” reflected a “regression towards stone-age morality,” initiating and sustaining a “blind spasm of control.”

In November 1984, at the height of the coal dispute, Thatcher set her sights on the “enemies within” with missionary zeal, locating the targets to be eliminated on a spectrum ranging from “the terrorist gangs within our borders and the terrorist states which arm them” to “the hard Left, operating inside our system, conspiring to use union power and the apparatus of local government to break, defy, and subvert the laws.” The “mantle,” she railed, had “fallen” to her party “to conserve the very principle of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law itself.” This unrelenting program reversed the great postwar socioeconomic advances and caused irreversible damage to the fabric of social democracy, at so many levels.

So, what were my reactions upon hearing that Thatcher had died? Joy? Satisfaction? No. Celebrating her death demeans us as the flip side of celebrating her life. This is precisely the polarization she sought to achieve, one that succeeded in mobilizing support for her neoconservatism, the free-market dogma of Hayek. It succeeded in gaining middle- and working-class support for policies across the board that reinforced the privilege of a two-thirds society — marginal inclusivity through marginalizing the claimant, the migrant, the foreign national, the “single mother,” the “terrorist,” the trade unionist, the feminist, the antiracist. In naming and targeting the “enemies within,” she set “us,” the insiders, against “them,” the outsiders.

Thatcher, however, did not achieve her objectives, and over-personalizing Thatcherism grants all involved — in her governments, the state, its institutions, in private corporations (including the banks), in the media, in local politics, in divided communities, all who supported and reproduced the political, economic, and ideological programs associated with New Right dogma, and what came after, including New Labour — a form of amnesty for their complicity and their personal advantage.

Having observed the slow, personal suffering of this aged woman, her diminishing mind and frail body, I neither want to accommodate the vengefulness she sowed, nor give her followers the opportunity to point judgmental fingers as I tramp the dirt down and dance on her grave. Nothing would have given her and her ideologues greater pleasure. While detesting her legacy with an anger that will burn in me forever, as a “moment” in time I am indifferent to her passing. Yes, the painful memories have been revitalized, not by her death, but by the spiteful agenda of a government of class privilege whose neoconservative objectives are taking Thatcherism’s legacy to a new level. We must address the present.

* Phil Scraton is professor, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, School of Law, Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland (email: p.scraton@qub.ac.uk).

Since Nobel Peace Prize laureate and US president Barack Obama began targeted killings of supposed Islamic terrorists using Special Forces and the CIA in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia,(1) an envious German government has sought to catch up with its Atlantic partner in the adoption of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAVs), or drones.

Whereas President Obama signs killing lists on “Terror Tuesdays” against “adversaries” — either with or without American passports, and in any event without normal procedural guarantees such as an indictment, trial, or verdict (2) — to date the German army has not had the armed drones at its disposal (3) needed to carry out what US-based “combat commuters”(4) call “bug splats.”(5)

The number of armed Predator drones and the larger Reapers in the US arsenal grew from roughly 170 in 2002 to over 7,000 in 2012.(6) For its part, the German air force currently employs only 335 unarmed drones and frequently relies on the US army for support in killing “enemies” in Afghanistan. The latter relationship is revealed in a recent report by Der Spiegel,a German news magazine, which draws upon government documents.(7)

The use of armed drones in Pakistan and beyond is detailed in two recent studies. The first,Living under Drones,(8) was published jointly by the Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law in September 2012, and the second, Losing Humanity,(9) was issued by Human Rights Watch in November 2012. Together, they highlight recent developments in the deployment of automatic “killing robots.” According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism,(10) the number of people reportedly killed between 2004 and 2012 in Pakistan alone ranges from 2,537 to 3,581. Among them are 411 to 884 civilians, including 168 to 197 children.(11) The latest report, published in March 2013 by Reprieve, a London-based nongovernmental organization, called the drone program — which uses robotic aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles outside declared war zones — a violation of “a range of rights enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,” including the rights to life, health, and education.(12)

Almost ten years after the first strikes took place, Ben Emmerson, the UN terrorism and human rights envoy, issued his March 2013 statement in which he characterized US drone strikes in Pakistan as violations of international law.(13) The German attorney general required over 20 months simply to decide whether his office had jurisdiction to investigate(14) the killing of a German citizen by US drones in Pakistan in 2010.(15)

Such targeted killings, including “signature strikes,”(16) are contested, but they will not end soon. Instead, the German government announced plans for Germany to become an ally of the armed high-tech “coalition of the willing,” which includes Israel, the UK, and the USA, the only three countries currently known to deploy armed drones.

In the spring of 2013, the German administration, while failing to give a meaningful justification for deploying armed UAVs, announced that it would buy armed MALE drones (medium-altitude, long-endurance) in early 2015 at the latest.(17) It also revealed that the first flight of a HALE drone system (EuroHawk) over Germany had been successful and will be ready for deployment by September 2013.(18) The German administration is still deciding whether to develop a combined drone system at the level of the European Union (with the UK and France) or to buy them from the US or Israel (from which it leases the Heron drones it uses in Afghanistan). Regardless, it is clear that the German government wishes to employ armed drones.

In Germany, the response of an alliance of antiwar, peace, and human rights groups has been to launch a “No combat drones!” initiative and to demand that the government neither develop nor buy UAVs. They seek a ban on “killing drones,” while opposing any drone technology that might be used for surveillance and repressive purposes.(19) The alliance’s website is under construction and information is available only in German.(20) However, it is extremely important that the issues of “surveillance” and “repression” are being raised in relation to drone technology and its deployment, not the least because the US administration has been reluctant to clarify whether the assassination option also extends to homeland soil(21) and because police departments are preparing to install less-lethal weapons on drones to carry out surveillance and crowd-control.(22a) (22b) (22c) This is true in the US and is also on the agenda in Europe.

Such “civil” uses of drones in Western Europe and Germany transfer technology to the home front that was originally developed for military purposes abroad. Police deployment of drones encompasses the following functions: surveillance and intelligence gathering (at events, inside and outside buildings, during raids, for border and water control), gathering evidence (prosecuting crimes, documenting crime scenes), keeping tabs on troublemakers, carrying out searches (in threat scenarios or for missing persons), observations (of objects and persons), surveillance of VIPs and buildings, traffic-control measures, as well as transport missions and technical support.(23)

The UAV CannaChopper is deployed to police cannabis smokers and their outdoor plantations in The Netherlands and in Switzerland. Since November 2007, and especially during the European football championship in June 2008, a military drone has controlled football fans (this was also the case during the 2012 Olympics in London).(24) At the NATO summit in April 2009, the machine was used to intercept “troublemakers” at the French border. In the United Kingdom, the police have employed drones since mid-2007, targeting, among others, rock fans, as well as enforcing Anti-Social Behaviour Orders.(25) In The Netherlands, a UAV supported the police during evictions at a squatted building in February 2008. Belgium, France, Italy, and the UK have used drones to target undocumented workers, demonstrations (“crowd control”), waste collection, illegalized migrants,(26) and other marginalized groups and their habitats. Austria controls its eastern borders with drones.

The German police have acquired Aladin and FanCopter UAVs for the surveillance of urban areas, and the regional police forces of Saxony and North-Rhine Westphalia deploy the AirRobot. Since early 2008 in Saxony, UAVs have carried out surveillance on alleged hooligans, while Lower-Saxony has used them to control protesters rallying against atomic waste transports. In other words, hardly any marginalized and/or criminalized group has escaped the attention of UAVs. And more groups (and drones) are to come.

To legitimize the use of drones in Germany, the government has claimed that drones are “ethically unproblematic” and will be “first utilized in the coastal areas…for example, to search for castaways.” That justification stretches credulity, since in the last twenty years fewer castaways have died in German waters than perished during the twenty minutes it took Colonel Georg Klein to massacre some 91 Afghans during a 2009 air strike in Kunduz.(27)

To date, shipwrecked al Qaeda members are unknown in the Baltic Sea and it therefore makes more sense to focus on the administration’s second argument for procuring drones, that is, to “control the coast,” or as Die Welt, the conservative daily newspaper, correctly frames the official standpoint, “to watch refugee streams.”(28) Thus, the impression is created that without the deployment of drones Germany will sooner or later be overrun by a migrant tsunami.

The “3-D missions,” described by former Air Force Inspector Lieutenant General Klaus-Peter Stieglitz in 2007 as the “dull, dirty, and dangerous ones,”(29) began to intensify with the advent of the hunter-killer UAVs. Now they are coming home — unmanned, but not uncontested.

* Volker Eick, Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, was guest editor with Kendra Briken of a recent issue of Social Justice entitled Policing the Crisis: Policing in Crisis (Vol. 38: 1-2).

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.