yes, but who will investigate them?

while the fbi is investigating chuck turner, who will investigate them? chuck turner never murdered a promising young leader as he lay sleeping, something the fbi did to fred hampton. chuck turner never sent a letter to martin luther king threatening to kill him, something the fbi did. chuck turner never instituted conintelpro programs to disrupt, distract, and sometimes kill progressive leaders, something the fbi did. how is it that americans don't laugh out loud when the fbi says it is going to investigate someone else for the crimes they commit? amazingly, most americans (ie, white americans) still believe. they still trust the institutions of the powerful. they still have faith in the system. i suppose that is because, more often than not, it is someone else's head that's getting split open, someone else who is being targeted, someone else who is being framed, someone else who is being killed. however, for how long can ignorance of the facts act as an excuse? i don't believe it is ignorance so much as it is willed ignorance, meaning many americans will, or force themselves, to see things in certain ways. often, it is the willed ignorance known as tradition, or environment, or religion, or patriotism, or party affiliation. for it is not as if the facts aren't out there. the truth isn't too hard to find. it is not as if we all lived in caves, thousands of miles from the nearest library or computer. what the fbi did to king, malcolm, the panthers, the new left, and others, is no secret. for that matter, neither are the palmer raids, the internment of the japanese, racial segregation, and the murder of civil rights leaders and workers. likewise, the brutal destruction caused by the u.s. military isn't much of a secret. haven't they seen that vietnamese girl running down a road, on fire with napalm? do they really believe that by bombing her that we were striking a blow against the "international communist conspiracy?" the fact is, in many ways, the average american is no better than the average german, or the average italian, or the average russian, or the average anybody. both democrat and republican, conservative and liberal, would rather parrot a mythology about american values and the fundamental decency and goodness of our institutions than to critically examine their fundamental purposes. in essence, we prefer to be the good german who didn't know what was going on in the camps. how else to explain the shock that many whites feel when they see pictures of lynched blacks, as if they didn't know it had occurred. how else to explain the ongoing indifference on the part of most americans to the violence our military has perpetrated against the people of iraq and afghanistan. do they not know that such violence is occurring? many of these same people have probably read night, or visited the holocaust memorial in washington, with no sense of irony. fullbright spoke of the "arrogance of power." willful ignorance is also arrogance. it is arrogant to lecture people on human rights as you bomb them. it is arrogant to imprison more people on earth than any other country, and then to mouth platitudes about freedom. and it is an arrogant and ignorant public that largely accepts such nonsense as if it were truth. but instead of fighting this, many progressives would rather attack others on the left. well, i suppose that's one way to keep the fbi off your case. so, we have zinn telling us that obama will do this and that, and we have wise blaming the entire left for the fact that he met one communist who only listened to albanian folk music, and we have norman solomon wasting his time by being an obama delegate, and worse, we have people like horowitz and hitchens, who decided to go all the way with their selling out.

so yes, who will investigate the investigators? while the jails are filled with petty criminals, where will we put the war criminals? while the street criminals languish behind bars, who will convict the corporate crooks?

who, my friend, who?