[TheLandIsOurs] How to Spot Frauds and Informants in Political Resistance Movements

[david bangs]

Good and interesting...but could be added to.

There will be genuine long-term activists who are turned by blackmail or inducements...They may display none of the signs referred to.

I think of the leader of the Bolshevik faction in the Tsarist Duma in the years before the 1917 Revolution...When the revolutionaries opened the police files after October, he turned out to be a police agent, despite his effective work.

If I remember rightly, Lenin said summat like..."give him a medal for his good work and then shoot him"...

I think also that paranoia-of-infiltration is a real threat inside left organisations.

When I was in a large Kings Cross squat in 1978 we had a couple of full-time police agents with us in the final anti-eviction campaign. Piers Corbyn (Jeremy Corbyn's brother) who was our leader, advised us that the best tactic (as we suspected them from the start) was NOT to confront them, but to make them work for us...and they did...hard...driving back and forth across London over weeks for supplies to barricade the buildings.

...and when the eviction finally took place they were (predictably) on watch duty on the roof...and sounded the warning alarm for us far longer than expected...they just sat on it...thus giving us ample time to rouse ourselves and dispose of any unwanted substances or materials before the police bulldozers finally bashed in the doors...

...a small instance of police agents showing sympathy for those they were there to betray...

Dave Bangs


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Alison Banville 
  To: Politicsand Spirit Network ; project2012 at googlegroups.com ; diggers350 at yahoogroups.com ; thelandisours at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2013 2:15 PM
  Subject: [TheLandIsOurs] How to Spot Frauds and Informants in Political Resistance Movements


    

  A group of people who have been directly harmed by informant provocateurs have put together this checklist, drawing on personal experiences as well as those of other activists and information from informant provocateurs who have gone public. We hope you can learn from the damage that has already been done, so these people can be stopped before they are able to harm you.
  Here are ten warning signs:
   
  http://drstevebest.wordpress.com/category/repression/

  
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