David’s Reviews > Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America > Status Update

Long before Wikileaks, in 1971, there was the Media (Pennsylvania) break in: FBI files stolen and gradually released over a long period.

This is amazing. There was no limit to the FBI's methods, including provoking a deadly clash between two black power groups. Forget about crazy conspiracy theories: there's plenty of REAL conspiracies to justify skepticism (at best) toward law enforcement at all levels.

The mysterious paradox of J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI: an "obsession with the unimportant" (e.g., a scoutmaster whose wife belonged to the Socialist Workers Party) while city crime rates rose, organized crime expanded and a few actual, real spies flourished (spies in the FBI itself!).

In 1956, there were fewer than 5,000 members of the American Communist Party -- 1,500 of them FBI agents and informers!

"It was those ideas -- that is, a powerful critique of the social inequities of the capitalist system -- rather than any tangible political power, that made the Communist Party so threatening to the established order."

Wow. Eisenhower instituted a program called "Operation Wetback" that deported more than half a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in less than SIX months. That's even more than Obama!

The real conspiracies (revealed eventually by history) are much more predictable than the "conspiracy theories." One bad thing about the paranoid, implausible conspiracies is that they distract attention from the actual behind-the-scenes machinations of government, business, etc. One lesson: always be skeptical when someone tries to make you afraid or angry.

The very fact that there is no evidence of sabotage or conspiracy yet proves that it will happen eventually.

As prejudicial as were the US government's actions toward Muslims and people from the middle east after 9/11, they were more restrained than what happened around WWI and WWII. It's _some_ comfort to know that at least we didn't have widespread vigilantism on the part of the public. Man, you can't look into history without getting dirty.

What an utter fraud the Palmer raids were -- which leaves me always skeptical of war-on-terror "successes."