In a recent post, I wrote that there is no longer a radical left in the US. My opinion is that the Green Scare signaled the end of the radical wing of the blue team, which had been on the decline since the 1970s. Historically, blue team activists were much more dangerous than anything we're seeing today. The contemporary Antifa looks like a kids' Scout troop compared with historical groups like the Weather Underground.
Along with carrying out dozens of bombings, the Weather Underground broke counterculture icon Timothy Leary out of prison. Here's a quote from a thorough paper on the subject:
On January 21, 1970, psychologist and researcher Timothy Francis Leary was sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of marijuana, along with an additional ten years he had been given for a separate arrest in 1965. Leary, who was known as a pioneer in the study of psychedelics, a rapidly spreading cultural drug craze, was jailed at the Men’s Colony West Minimum Security Prison in California, though he alleged in court that the police officer who had arrested him planted the marijuana. While serving his sentence, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a group of proponents and users of the drug lysergic acid-diethylamide (LSD), who followed various paths based on Leary’s research, paid the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) $25,000 to break him out.
Another example of radical leftists at work can be found in the exposure of the FBI's COINTELPRO program by activists. This program used illegal surveillance and harassment to target civil rights and antiwar activists. According to Wikipedia, "The program was secret until March 8, 1971, when the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI burgled an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, took several dossiers, and exposed the program by passing this material to news agencies." This activist burglary is the only reason we know about COINTELPRO today.
Red team activists, too, seem to have become markedly less dangerous in recent years. Even though many blue team commentators characterize the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot as a violent insurrection, the very low number of casualties associated with the incident (5 dead) tell a different story. Compared with events like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (168 dead), our contemporary red activists seem much more peaceful and much less radical.
A Less Violent Society
The idea that activists across the board are becoming less violent and radical stands in contrast to the widespread perception that everything is getting more dangerous. This perception is largely driven by media fear mongering and political blustering. In general, our modern era is much less dangerous than human societies have been throughout history, though modern warfare is more deadly. It may well be that activists are more peaceful now than ever before, in part because society has become far less accepting of violence in general.
This is not to suggest that there aren't still radical ideas within both the red and blue teams. Some reds want to end all government entitlement programs, including food assistance for tens of millions of poor people. Some blues think kids should be able to choose their own genders. As insane as these and other ideas might be, the people harboring them aren't bombing their perceived enemies. They're mostly just talking smack on Twitter.
The government, for its part, tries to elevate as much activism as possible to the level of punishable crime. To law enforcement agencies, everything is terrorism, even having mud on your shoes near a protest. Between government trends like this and the media spin machine, much of the messaging we're exposed to appears designed to keep us divided and afraid. But compared with relatively recent history, activists in both the red and blue camps today are quite tame.
Read my novels:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is available as a web book on IPFS and as a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt.
- The Paradise Anomaly is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Psychic Avalanche is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- One Man Embassy is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Flying Saucer Shenanigans is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Rainbow Lullaby is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- The Ostermann Method is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
- Blue Dragon Mississippi is available in print via Blurb and for Kindle on Amazon.
See my NFTs:
- Small Gods of Time Travel is a 41 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt that goes with my book by the same name.
- History and the Machine is a 20 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on my series of oil paintings of interesting people from history.
- Artifacts of Mind Control is a 15 piece Tezos NFT collection on Objkt based on declassified CIA documents from the MKULTRA program.