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reading challenge fever

“Blind faith and trust in the integrity of the agency,” said Keller, “tended to reinforce general ignorance of internal security operations.”

"J. EDGAR HOOVER became director of the FBI the same way he continued being director of the bureau for forty-eight years—by not being asked questions.
Questions were not asked before he was appointed despite the fact that danger signs already were present. There was evidence then that he was willing to use government power to trample rights and damage people."

“When the bureau’s secret COINTELPRO programs were first revealed, it was clear why Hoover and his successors feared the bureau’s reputation would be seriously damaged if those operations became known.”

“The overall impression in directives written by Hoover, other headquarters officials, and local FBI officials was that the FBI thought of black Americans as falling into two categories—black people who should be spied on by the FBI and black people who should spy on other black people for the FBI.”

“It had never occurred to the director that some people cared so much about the Constitution and the right to dissent it guaranteed that they would be willing to risk their freedom in order to get access to his secret files to determine if he and the FBI were destroying that right”

“It was advice to FBI agents, the outcome of a meeting at FBI headquarters a few months earlier of agents who specialized in investigating activists. Agents were advised, in a newsletter prepared for such agents, to “enhance the paranoia … and … get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

- or "email" box.

“If it turned out that the U.S. government was suppressing Americans’ right to express dissent—including and especially dissent about the most crucial issues: the war, the use of apocalyptic weapons in the war, and racial equality—then much was at stake. Without the freedom to dissent without being spied on, Davidon thought, dissent was empty, erased, useless.”

“In November 1969, the world was horrified to learn that American soldiers had massacred 504 unarmed Vietnamese children, women, and elderly people in March 1968 in My Lai....old men were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the backs of their heads, some young girls were raped and then killed...President Nixon accused the press of inflating the case in order to “chip away” at support for the war.”

“When madness is the acceptable public state of mind, we’re all in danger, all in danger; for madness is an infection in the air. And I submit that we all breathe the infection and that the movement has at times been sickened by it too."

“The Media files revealed that there were two FBIs—the public FBI Americans revered as their protector from crime, arbiter of values, and defender of citizens’ liberties, and the secret FBI.”- Ya don't say!

Every society has its dissidents, not just dictatorships. They speak for the disenfranchised, the ignored, and the persecuted. Listen to them now, because they speak of what is to come.

my last policy recommendation is to listen to the dissidents, even if you do not like what they have to say. They are the ones who reveal to us the dark realities of our societies, the realities that most of us have the luxury to turn away from. Listen to the dissidents because they warn us of the threats that target minorities first and inevitably spread to the majority.

Putin’s early themes of restoring the national pride and structure that were lost with the fall of the USSR have slowly run out of steam and been replaced with a toxic mixture of nationalism, belligerence, and hatred.

Vladimir Putin wants Russia to exist in the great power era of tsars and monarchs, dominating its neighbors by force and undisturbed by elections and rights complaints.

But enemies do exist, whether we admit it or not. They are the enemies of what America and the rest of the free world stand for. Whether it is Putin or ISIS, these forces cannot be defeated with engagement.

evil no longer had a familiar form. As 9/11 taught us, the dangers are real even though the battle lines are unclear. Allies of convenience have replaced alliances based on history and values. This is the natural result of over twenty years of treating everyone like a potential friend, a practice that emboldens enemies and confuses true allies.

By 1936, Hitler’s government had already spent years persecuting Germany’s Jews. The Nazis also attacked homosexuals, the handicapped, gypsies, and political opponents, a model of oppressing the most vulnerable that Putin is following by going after immigrants, gays, and the opposition. It’s a tragedy that the free world always refuses to learn from past mistakes where dictators and would-be dictators are concerned.

We lived in fear because we knew what would happen to us if we gave any hint of dissent against the regime...to take on the next argument I often hear, brutal totalitarianism does not begin with surveillance by a liberal democratic state. It begins with terror, it begins with violence, and it begins with the knowledge that your thoughts and words can end your career or your life.

the word “mafia”...is simply a more accurate way of defining the Putin regime than traditional political terms. The boss is the man who can provide protection, who can make deals with the authorities and keep the money flowing in. Europe and America are the authorities... But the boss, Putin, has them in his pocket and as long as he keeps the money coming in he will stay right where he is.

I call it “The Myths of Putin’s Russia,” and at the top of the list is “Putin Is Popular.” Now that Putin has been in power for fifteen years, has invaded his second European country in six years, and goes on TV to snarl about Russia’s nuclear weapons, it may be difficult for some to recall how differently he was seen not so long ago.

Putin had become a dictator, full stop, and it was time to say it. He wasn’t a president or a prime minister or anything else that connoted legitimacy or democracy. We knew this wouldn’t be reported by Russian media or pointed out by Russian politicians.

The common thread throughout his domestic and foreign policies was his effort to trade on fear—the fears of Russians that their country was under attack from hostile external forces (Chechens, NATO, or free marketeers; usually all of the above) and the fears of Westerners that if not for a strong, pragmatic leader, Russia would again become unruly, unstable, and potentially aggressive.

“Putinism” was an uneasy package that honestly we didn’t know how to handle. On one side there was the reformist talk of his campaign platform, and his blunt statements about how far Russia had fallen behind the West. All that seemed encouraging. But there was also the relentless shutting-down of independent media—and the scorched earth campaign in Chechnya. That was disturbing. Who was this guy?

For at least a decade now, those who defend Putin either have something to gain from it or they are dangerously ignorant.

We must decide what we value and decide what is worth fighting for and then—the most important part—we must fight for it. If we fail to do this we will lose to those who believe in other things, in worse things. We will lose to those who don’t believe in the value of human life or liberty, and who are willing to fight to impose their dark vision for humanity on others.

In 1987, Gorbachev said he wanted to build Alexander Dubček’s “socialism with a human face,” to which I responded that Frankenstein’s monster also had a human face. Communism goes against human nature and can only be sustained by totalitarian repression.

The Kremlin’s rapid subjugation of the Russian press was, along with a rise in oil prices of over 700 percent by 2008, the biggest reason behind the perceived success of the regime of Vladimir Putin.

The fundamental lesson of Chamberlain and Daladier going to see Hitler in Munich in 1938 is valid today: giving a dictator what he wants never stops him from wanting more; it convinces him you aren’t strong enough to stop him from taking what he wants. Otherwise, goes the dictator’s thought process, you would stand up to him from the start.

Many people adopt an alternative family who they feel to be more suitable than their own and DeQuincy adopted the Wordsworths.