THE JOHN DOE TIMES
Volume 5, No. 2
18 March 1997

In This Issue:


The John Doe Times is an on-line, electronic newsletter devoted to digging out the truth about the Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy and coverup. It is produced every now and then by the 1st Alabama Cavalry regiment and friends. We are proud and active members of the "Right Wing Media Cabal", Internet Division and we are working our way up the Clinton White House Enemies List as fast as possible. Our Motto: Sic Semper Rodentia.


JOHN DOE TIMES TRIVIA QUESTION:

Q: What is the greatest single difference between the East German "Stasi" Political Police of the 1980s and Louis Freeh's FBI during the Clinton Administration?

PICK ONE:

  1. A Stasi agent was generally smarter than the average "Freeh-man" of today.
  2. Stasi agents dressed better.
  3. Stasi agents were more competent at tradecraft and political thuggery. They also lied better.
  4. Stasi agents had no pretensions about being anything other than political bully boys for communist butchers and were proud of it, whereas Freehmen work for their American counterparts, the Clintons, and kid themselves every day that they still work for "the good guys". Thus they may eventually draw their retirement pay without confronting the ugly truth about "enemies foreign and domestic".
  5. Stasi agents swore allegiance to the Party and the State, whereas FBI agents swear an oath to defend the Constitution, then give their allegiance to an unconstitutional regime despite that oath. Stasi agents were thus refreshingly honest compared to today's Freehmen.
  6. All of the above.

The 1919 Red Scare-- The Past As Present and Future?

(John Doe Times Editorial Note: The following passages are excerpted from Eliot Asinof's book, 1919-- America's Loss of Innocence. (Donald Fine, Inc., New York, 1990.) Asinof, a leftist who somewhat glosses over the roots of American Bolshevism in the intelligence services of the new (in 1919) Russian Soviet state, nonetheless tells a compelling history with multiple parallels to our own period.)


Congress was quick to sense which way the winds were blowing. The result was a well-publicized Senate Judiciary Sub-Committee hearing to determine the extent of radical influence over American society, and particularly American labor.... What followed was a month of somewhat hair-raising anti-Bolshevik testimony: The Soviets were nationalizing women, establishing free love bureaus.... The Bolshevik government had slaughtered twice as many Russians as had been killed in the war.... The press thrived on the gore of the testimony.... When the final report was released, detailing 1,200 pages of atrocities, newspaper headlines could hardly contain their enthusiasm: "RED PERIL HERE," "PLAN BLOODY REVOLUTION," "WANT WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT OVERTURNED.".... (JDT Note: "Maddog Militia Terrorists To Run Amok, sez Morris Dees!")

... The bomb scares began. First, there was a small brown package mailed to the office of (prominent anti-Bolshevik) Ole Hanson. Unopened in his absence (he was away on a speaking tour) it leaked acid on his papers. Cautiously opened, it revealed a homemade bomb. Said Ole with customary defiance: "If they have the courage, why don't they attack me like men instead of playing the part of cowardly assassins?" With this came the picture of the "Bolshevik" with wide eyes and unkempt hair, always holding a bomb in his hand, the new symbol of force and violence. The Chicago Tribune headlined the uncovering of a radical plan for bombing the Loop, but no details were exposed. (JDT Note: Bob Starr plans to bomb Olympics, sez ATF?) The the Department of Justice discovered an anarchist conspiracy in Pittsburgh to capture a government arsenal, steal the explosives and "lay the city in ruins." (JDT Note: The Vipers?) To lend evidence to the discovery, eleven anarchists were arrested, but nothing specific was ever revealed.

As it turned out, however, seventeen more bombs were rescued from delivery by a perceptive New York postal clerk named Charles Kaplan, who remembered storing brown-paper packages that resembled the one delivered to Ole Hanson. The "Bomb Honor List" included an inexplicably clashing selection-- from the enlightened liberal Frederick Howe, commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island, to John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Then another eighteen packages, for a total of thirty-six, were found.

The press and public immediately clamored for reprisals. "Dynamitards," "human vermin," (the latter word would appear frequently in this context). (JDT Note: "Anti-government extremists?") Every anarchist ought to be deported, all bomb-makers hung. The vituperous Ole went into deep right field to blame the administration as "weak, vacillating and chargeable... If government doesn't clean them up, I will." Unless some action was taken, others said that "we may as well invite Lenin and Trotsky to come here and set up business at once." And forever there was the evangelist Billy Sunday: "If I had my way, I'd fill the jails so full of them that their feet would stick out the windows."

But what action was possible? Against exactly whom? The New York City police worked around the clock, bomb experts from all over the East congregated over those brown-paper parcels amassing clues, promising to "run down the persons responsible," but no one was ever arrested. Even the staid New York Times was frustrated: "Has the gift of skill and genius in ferreting out criminals been denied to our present-day detectives?" The radical journal Liberator has a different explanation for the failure. "Some important person does not want to discover them.".... (JDT Note: My, the more things change, the more they stay the same....)

(Asinof then describes several anti-Red riots, attacks on newspapers by vigilantes, etc.)... The outcry, however, was against the victims. Newspapers approved of the vigilante action, made no comment that the police had done nothing to prevent it and endorsed the arrest of the radicals. It was like blaming an automobile for its drunken driver. The menace became free speech itself. "An unrestrained menace," the St. Louis Tribune called it in a headline. "Silence the incendiary advocates of force," advised the Washington Post. (JDT Note: "Police the Internet!"?) "Bring the law's hand down upon the... inciter of violence. Do it now!" The American war against the Huns had turned into the war against the Reds....

In June the bombs exploded, the most celebrated of which hit the Washington home of the new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. Only the perpetrator was killed, apparently stumbling as he left the scene and blowing himself to bits. (JDT Note: The extra leg?) It was determined from the fragments of his clothing and a pamphlet found near the scene that he was an Italian anarchist from Philadelphia.... (JDT Note: Named Brescia perhaps?)

America was thoroughly alarmed and prepared to believe only the worst-case scenario. Palmer, once a liberal, insisted that the bombs were but the first demonstrations of Bolshevik revolution in America. No matter that all such bombings had the opposite effect, that they served only to strengthen the repression.... Again, for all the fragments, not one bomber was arrested. (JDT Note: Weldon Kennedy on the case, no doubt.)

Nonetheless, the bombs and the shouting were grist for a rejuvenated patriotic mill. Organization created to stir loyalty for the war effort now multiplied for the war against Bolshevism.... (JDT Note: Southern Poverty Law Center?) Anything critical of the government was labeled subversive.... (JDT Note: G. Gordon Liddy and Newt Gingrich responsible for Oklahoma City?) All these organizations were backed and financed by big money.... The National Security League spent over $100,000 in 1919, the first known political action committee intent on defeating congressmen who opposed its position. With such funds-- and power-- behind it, the political connections led into the White House itself. The Department of Justice allowed access to those confidential files as devised by J. Edgar Hoover.

The Army and the Navy, its highest officers in the War Department, endorsed the Red Scare, linking radicals with pacifism since the most hated enemy of armament appropriations were "those paid agitators and sentimental sob sisters, Reds seeking to undermine our form of government...." (JDT Note: Special Operations Command?)

The impact of all this was a plunge into the grotesque, an orgy of self-deception built on the proliferation of preposterous lies. The end result was an endlessly unstoppable spiraling of fantasy so far removed from reality as to seem inexplicable. With hindsight, it became clear that America loved it, loving the same wartime zealotry, the joys of sharing a continuing patriotic hatred for an enemy.... No country in the world took to patriotism so naively. Not even in Prussian Germany had the individual German been so enchanted with his alleged traditions.

Since there were only a few radicals in America, and no revolutionary activities or acts, the Red Scare was forced to concentrate on using the radicals' words. To quote the words was enough to support the scare. The sporadic use of bombs could justify the exploitation of words. So the words made news....

Radical words and superpatriotic words were, in a crazy way, mutually supportive. Each fortified the self-fulfilling prophecies of the other. If superpatriots argued that a revolutionary plot was stirring, radicals would agree and call for that very thing to happen. The superpatriots would then cite radical words as proof of the conspiracy, and radicals would then cite such rhetoric as the onset of repression. If the national patriotic press claimed a strike was "Red-led", the radical press would then boast of how powerful they were. The patriotic press would then quote the radical press as proof of their claims. And when the radicals denied involvement in an alleged plot, the Justice Department would argue that secrecy and denial were typical tactics of radical conspirators.

To the Red Scarer, radical words became deeds, criminal deeds. Since there were no deeds, radicals were arrested solely for words. Radical words, then, had to be censored and suppressed-- even as they were fabricated and repeated by the patriots to illustrate the menace.

Hysteria was encouraged, as more and more groups came to see the benefits.

With it, a new bureaucracy formed, setting in motion numerous subbureaucracies representing one special interest or another. Each had a life of its own. They began to exchange information, personnel, membership lists, names. They financed each other's operations, anything to keep the action going. They testified in behalf of each other's groups, quoted each others spokesmen, cited each other in pamphlets to spread the word. They maintained the status of each other's secrets. It escalated into an ever-growing bureaucracy that created what it predicted. A big business came out of it involving major moneyed interests, and then it became part of the government itself. Federal officials endorsed it, sanctified it, thus reflecting the groundswell and fortifying it. Assisting the private effort was the government bureaucracy: The General Intelligence Division of the Department of Justice, the Immigration Bureau, Army Intelligence, the Attorney General's Office, congressional committees and their staffs. Then there were detective agencies concentrating on radicals, private armies of Pinkertons, employers associations, special cadres of police, agents provocateurs, publishers of large newspapers, the American Legion, the Ku Klux Klan. The greater the hysteria, the more people joined up. To the inner circle, the name of the game was to sell the product. (JDT Note: "Militia Terrorist Update" sez Morris Dees. "Send Me More Money!") Labor spies, hired to infiltrate and report on radical activities, would just as readily lie about them. Or if there was no action to report, they'd provoke it, then report it, submitting new names in each report, even if they were created out of thin air. The American Legion thrived on the business of new members. The KKK had salesmen on a commission basis. Detective agencies created the very havoc at strikes that got them hired to suppress them.

Exploitable events were staged, carefully orchestrated for maximum propaganda. The creation of such pseudo-events was a major enterprise of the Justice Department for the purpose of glorifying itself. As for the press, no reporter dared to check the evidence, certainly not when the Justice Department was involved. If the goal of all this was allegedly a last ditch patriotic stand against the coming revolution, there was a lot of easy money to be made in the process.

Meanwhile the mind of America was being warped. Education was turned into propaganda.... Politicians loved it for the simplicity of appealing to bigotry. Churchmen could excoriate the Antichrist. Liberals joined in to gain their respectability. The press thrived on it, selling ads, multiplying circulation with scare headlines.... It made J. Edgar Hoover one of the most powerful men in America. It made Calvin Coolidge president. It made Ole Hanson rich and heroic. It almost put A. Mitchell Palmer in the White House....

It was a year of the continuing nightmare.... At a Victory Loan pageant in Washington, D.C., a man refused to stand for "The Star Spangled Banner." At its end, a sailor standing behind him fired three shots into his back. The man slumped over, dead--- and the crowd cheered.

An alien in Hammond, Indiana, shouted "To hell with the United States!" and was killed in the streets. The murderers were acquitted by a jury after two minutes of deliberation.

A clothing-store clerk in Waterbury, Connecticut, was sentenced to six months in jail for remarking to a customer that Lenin was an extremely smart man.

... In Guthrie, Oklahoma, a man heard reading the Declaration of Independence aloud was arrested by two policemen. The man protested, insisting that Thomas Jefferson had written it. At this, one of the policemen wrenched him around, his nightstick menacing the man's face:

"Okay, where is this Jefferson? We want him too!"....

Past or future? You decide.


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