The focus
here is to help guide the actions of people who may not understand the
legacy of non-violent actions, their intended goals, successes and
failures, and their mechanics. Firstly, we’ll provide a brief list of
key organizations that our movement follows in the spirit of. The
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), The Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Students for a Democratic
Society [SDS], The Radical Queers, The Mississippi Democratic Freedom
Party (MFDP), American Indian Movement (AIM), Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE), The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, ACT-UP,
National Organization for Women (NOW), National Congress of American
Indians (NCAI), The Young Lords, Redstockings, and the Asian American
Political Alliance (AAPA).
Almost
all of these groups studied the tactics of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. A
pioneer of “satyagraha,” or resistance to tyranny through mass civil
disobedience — a philosophy firmly founded upon “ahimsa,” or total
nonviolence. Gandhi first employed non-violent civil disobedience as an
expatriate lawyer in South Africa, in the resident Indian community's
struggle for civil rights. After his return to India in 1915, he set
about organizing peasants, farmers, and urban laborers in protesting
excessive land-tax and discrimination. Assuming leadership of the Indian
National Congress in 1921, Gandhi led nationwide campaigns for easing
poverty, expanding women's rights, building religious and ethnic amity,
ending untouchability, increasing economic self-reliance, but above all
for achieving “Swaraj” — the independence of India from foreign
domination.
The aforementioned groups all created great change in the United States
and we are direct social and strategic beneficiaries of their efforts.
We ask that you research their actions and original missions to get a
clear vision of the tactics they deployed and their results, good and
bad.
Another thing to be understood are the tactics used to disturb and disrupt unity between groups and/or destroy groups and/or individual citizens that were deemed “un-American” or are doing actions that were/are deemed “un-American.” The primary tactics came from the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program. In early 1971, the FBI's domestic Counterintelligence Program (code named: COINTELPRO) was discovered in Pennsylvania by a group of activists attempting to burn draft cards in a resident agency building of the FBI and stumbled upon documents that proved the existence of a domestic counterintelligence program that targeted civil rights and social activists across the nation. That same year, publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Pentagon's top-secret history of the Vietnam War, exposed years of systematic official lies about the war.
Soon after, it was discovered that a clandestine squad of White House
"plumbers" broke into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office in an
effort to smear the former Pentagon staffer who leaked the top-secret
papers to the press. The same "plumbers" were later caught burglarizing
the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. By the
mid-1970's, prompted mostly by Senator Frank Church, Senate and House
committees launched formal and lengthy inquiries into government
intelligence and covert activities. These investigations revealed
extensive covert and illegal counterintelligence programs involving the
FBI, CIA, U.S. Army intelligence, the White House, the Attorney General,
and even local and state law enforcement, directed against opponents of
government domestic and foreign policy. Since then, many more instances
of these "dirty tricks" have been revealed.
Make no mistake, these tactics are still being used within elements of
the United States Department for Homeland Security as well as other
agencies. It’s also important to note, whether people are part of an
intentional disruptive program or are just overeager activists with a
gripe, both have the same function; they will be a tool for discrediting
and/or the destruction of the movement.