All these deaths are always ruled suicides. Even when there’s two gunshots (which didn’t necessarily happen with Abbie). Somebody spends their entire life pissing off our equivalent of the KGB, and the most logical death for them is suicide, and it’s completely ridiculous to suggest that the people who assassinated Black Panthers might’ve not stopped there.

Suggest a few folks “here” track down some of Hoffman’s Jewish connections, which are many. He did not shy away from acknowledging his Jewishness, I seem to recollect. I’m sure that a google whirl with ` “Abbie Hoffman” and Jewish’ would produce a few `hits.

I disagreed with Abbie Hoffman’s position on Zionism (he bought into the colonial/imperialism dreck), but his overall approach to political dissent is a legacy worth preserving if quite difficult to live up to. The man had an ingenious sense of theater. And fun. He truly lived the Emma Goldman nugget, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.”

Ha, J to the rescue. This post was starting to sound a little too Indymedia.

Abbie Hoffman FBI files

DiGiTaL–there’s supposed to be a CIA old hand’s story about essentially subsidizing the Reds’ black market by leaving thousands in subway bathrooms, sending tremors through the legitimate Commie economy.
J– When a swastika shows up on some Jewish property, where’s the “evidence” it was put there by some neo-Nazi? Until after you decide neo-Nazis are the most reasonable guess, investigate local individuals and/or groups and prove a particular party beyond shadow of a doubt, clearly you have no right to speculate on trhe existence of hate in a community.
There are people who accept that “our side” is not composed of angels and people who insist on believing that it does. Probably this is not an intellectual problem, but one related to comfort and childhood experiences. We have already successfully “called” several fantastic incidents (some, false incidents of anti-Semitism, as with the crazy woman with the pram) as bullshit based not on psychic powers or infinite faith in secret cabals but understanding of human nature, and the long list of suicides stinks to high heaven. Conspiracy nothing–conspiracy comes into it when we claim to know exactly everything, which we don’t. You don’t need video of the death to see that this is crap, and part of a larger pattern that, far from the comforting closure of a conspiracy theory, is quite messy.
When confronted with someone who will not listen to the possibility that budget-free secret government organizations might be something other than scrupulously honest agents out of movies, it it must asked: who is it that has such irrational faith in conspiracies?

k&y:
You say “When a swastika shows up on some Jewish property, where’s the “evidence” it was put there by some neo-Nazi? ”
There isn’t. That’s why I don’t assume it was done by a Neo-Nazi. In fact, I believe that most such vandalism is done by anti-semites who are not Neo-Nazis and/or bored, stupid kids.
“Until after you decide neo-Nazis are the most reasonable guess, investigate local individuals and/or groups and prove a particular party beyond shadow of a doubt, clearly you have no right to speculate on trhe existence of hate in a community. ”
Excuse me? Which is it – can I make a reasonable guess, or must I investigate and prove? Try to stay consistent, if only for the duration of one sentence.
“There are people who accept that “our side” is not composed of angels and people who insist on believing that it does.”
Talk about false choice. Apparently you believe that there’s (a) you and (b) horribly naive people who think everything their government does is wonderful. Any room for “my government does some things of which I don’t approve, out of ineptitude or bad behavior on the part of some officials, but is generally on the right side, and given that no government has ever been perfect, and that it is responsible for protecting us from real enemies, I support its efforts in general while reserving the right to criticize or condemn any specific action”? I guess not. That would impede your ability to say…
“Probably this is not an intellectual problem, but one related to comfort and childhood experiences.”
Thanks for the psychoanalysis. Yes, all your opponents are just looking for comfort. We look to you as the repository of truth.
Possibly when you’re done aping your professor whose life peaked when he got laid at an anti-Vietnam War rally or when you move beyond your prolonged adolescent rebellion (“nobody understands…besides me”) you’ll better evaluate other points of view.
“We have already successfully “called” several fantastic incidents (some, false incidents of anti-Semitism, as with the crazy woman with the pram) as bullshit based not on psychic powers or infinite faith in secret cabals but understanding of human nature,”
“Several”? What are they?
“and the long list of suicides stinks to high heaven. ”
Long list? Who?
“Conspiracy nothing–conspiracy comes into it when we claim to know exactly everything, which we don’t. ”
Novel definition of “conspiracy”. So as long as you don’t claim to know every detail, it’s not a conspiracy theory? Did anyone ever claim to know the names of each of the Elders of Zion? Well, then.
“When confronted with someone who will not listen to the possibility that budget-free secret government organizations might be something other than scrupulously honest agents out of movies, it it must asked: who is it that has such irrational faith in conspiracies?”
Apparently you haven’t seen too many movies. But regarding the original topic: It’s not that I “will not listen” to the possibility that Hoffman was killed by the CIA or whoever. Rather, I look at a pathetic character who in his his heyday was little more than an annoyance to the government, and by the time of his death was an obscure burned-out mess. Even in your world, where the CIA runs around killing whoever they want to, why would anyone bother to kill him? Large risk, little reward. (And frankly, anyone out to harm Hoffman would have forced him to live.) And why wait until 1989? Then, I consider that Hoffman was not the most stable person. Although I can’t prove that Hoffman wasn’t assassinated, I have to go with the strong odds. And going with the strong odds is what rational people do.
Now, how about you? Why won’t you listen to the possibility I proposed before? There’s supposed to be an Elders of Zion old hand’s story (possibly my great-aunt’s third cousin’s brother-in-law, but don’t tell them I said anything) about the Elder of Upper Scarsdale whispering that Hoffman was an “embarrassment”. Who else to assign to do the deed but that tool of International Jewry, the CIA, and the Justice League (surely you don’t think it’s a coincidence that nearly all the superheroes were created by Jews, do you? Hah! (except that pagan shiksa…) They just want you to think the heroes aren’t real, but let me tell you, right after Yonatan and Miriam Kentowitz found that rocket ship, you should have seen the price of Kryptonite futures rise at the secret room at the Chicago Board of Trade, what with the Elders bidding against the Freemasons and KAOS for a monopoly on theworld’s supply…
Hey! Conspiracy theories are fun!

Brown:
Whether or not the FBI or other agencies overreacted in the sixties based on what they knew then, I wrote that Hoffman was “little more than an annoyance” in his heyday from the perspective of the late 80’s, which is when the decision to kill him would have been made. I don’t see how in 1989 Hoffman could be seen as someone worth all that trouble.

Oh man J, if there was an award for best posts…
k&y,
You’ve been schooled son.

The “schooling” is an exemplary lesson in the worst Victorian sense of the adjective “womanish;” we’ll deconstruct it if you like, but as with too many responses to challenges, the only trick some people know is to scoff. When all you can do is scoff, you vary the dressing and you use sheer verbiage. The more important things are what gets excluded in scoffing: Governments obsess over minute challenges to their power, but we’re supposed to believe our perfect angels of Bond-ness kill only those worth killing (hey, holy cow, J’s logic dovetails with stock defenses of the IDF! Who’da thunk?). What we know of the record of the CIA (and all comparable government agencies) is that they are creepiness– as in frustrated shoe salesman harboring thirty year old grudges creepiness, not the camera in the sunglasses bullshit– enthroned. They arrest people for using the wrong colors in paintings, they demand to talk to schoolchildren about incorrect art. The idea that once you become their enemy your hostility can just sort of expire is insane. It doesn’t process, and it shouldn’t, because this is actually another idea. What J didn’t say was that the CIA are after all, reasonable guys, out to protect us, and if they have an enemy well, nice boys they are, they must have some reason to suspect this guy, and they certainly would never think of abusing their powers for some personal grudge, and the reason just kind of went away.
In other words, we are supposed to be schooled by a party line from the US State Department– or for that matter the Syrian secret service!
Homo sapiens are scum, and invariably fuck or kill you when you give them inordinate power. And just as invariably for the best of reasons, for your protection.

Shtreimel what dont dont you understand. Isnt it obvious that the Elders of Zions working in tandem with the Illuminati, reverse vampires and the saucer people are plotting a devious plan to make sure that none of K&ys comments pass Jewschool’s anti spam blocker.

here, we must go re-foil our ceiling, we’ll leave you with this:
1 – a concession, but on emotional grounds that mean nothing, say, the next time “we need to start
worrying about Iowa.”
2 – there is no contradiction since a reasonable guess is a necessary precursor to further investigation; nevertheless the important thing is to keep screaming. We must not only be wrong, we must be the worst kind of wrong, which is anti-Semitic, just like Andrew Lloyd Webber.
3 – no, we know that there are horribly naive people, say Aaron Brown, who can look at some ungrateful wog and ask why he’s not happy about being liberated. Gee, that took seconds, and landed us in the obscure anti-Semitic catacombs of CNN. But don’t worry about our supporting examples (a few more points and you’ll just be ignoring them anyway)–keep up with the cheap ones and maybe we’ll cry over the stupidity accusations. Supporting say Vietnam in general while condeming what specific actions that same culprit instructs you to condemn is not real morality.
4 – the psychoanalysis bit was irresistable, because this is as stock and as old a line of jokes/arguments in Jewish culture as schtick about the old country. Cf a piece in a recent Harper’s in which “gun control nuts” are dismissed by Friendly Uncle Boris the Head Shrinker as crazy.
5 – the several incidents: the French pram bit
mentioned, and later a bit with a soup kitchen. They were only in the infamously National Socialist BBC so you might not have heard of them. There were others before, largely going back to what you said about the vast majority of swastikas being some adolescent proving his manhood with what has become an ultimate “f-you.”
6 – list of suicides: well, no kidding, it really is a long list. We leave it to you to dismiss us as crazy: a large number of experts on bioterrorism and weaponized organisms died in bizarre circumstances, roughly a dozen of them within the same time frame, but that group extends well past a dozen; “threatening” journalists have been commiting suicide, often miraculously coming back to life to shoot themselves a second time. The point here is not that we suspect NSA, or CIA, or the MMC, or anyone. If we suspected a conspiracy, we’d be conspiracy theorizing. If this were happening in Saudi Arabia or Chad or El Salvador or Russia, there’d be nothing unreasonable about saying, well no kidding a journalist who went after the government was found dead! Thus the angel metaphor earlier.
7 – well, yes. The British Government was convinced that Jews ran the German (!), Russian(!!) and Ottoman (!!!) Empires, and later the Soviet Union, and they convinced themselves of this by literally looking at the last names of key figures, eg, Marx (relying on racial rather than religious definitions of Judaism).
8 a- In dismising the possibility that the government might be generally bad, and going so far as to replace it with a generally good hypothetical government (with specific actions, hey, we don’t want to forget the specific actions, that’s what committees are for! Free Ollie North!!), how could anyone accuse you of not being willing to listen to what you’re dismissing? We must be ani-Semites and conspiracy theorists.
8 b- Abby Hoffman pissed them off royally. That’s all you have to do. It has no expiration date, it has no logical or legal rationale. And it has plenty of precedents. But of course the more reasonable thing to believe is that all serious threats to the government (as perceived by them, not j) happen to take their own lives (sometimes twice).
It’s just like the Florida mess: if it happened in Africa, the voices of reason would be jumping on anyone who doubted its illicit nature. But it happened here, in the land of the good people who are reasonable, so it’s insane to think like that.
see, none of that made any sense. It’s just like the irrational Arabs who never have to be answered because they’re crazy.

Zionista – wow!
well I guess someone had to say it
The man was a true freedom fighter, and spent much of his life fighting (and spilling his own blood, sweat and tears) for the freedom of people who were not him or his family (southern blacks, vietnamese etc)

Please excuse, some of the incoherentness of my statements, its almost the end of the semester, and my research article is sapping all of my writing strength….THis time of year is always crunch time

J to the B: why, of course he refers to the dybbuk weed Marihuana.