February 7, 2004
WHY'D THEY STOP WATCHING A TRAITOR?:
GRAPHIC RESISTANCE (Mick Farren, 2/05/04, LA City Beat)
When painter and political activist Arnold Mesches applied for his FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act -- incidentally, something you can no longer do, thanks to John Ashcroft and the Patriot Act ñ he received 800 pages of documents that showed, commencing October 5, 1945, he had been under intense FBI observation for 27 years.The surveillance didn't surprise him. He had been a war resister and an anti-nuclear protester, and he had walked picket lines during the 1940s Hollywood studio strikes. What came as a shock was that friends, former lovers, neighbors, and even the mailman had made the reports. A fellow artist had sent sketches of Mesches to the feds, and a student had taken pictures with a specially provided miniature camera hidden in a necktie.
In 1956, Meschesís studio was burgled and most of his work stolen, including a series of paintings of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. [...]
Arnold Mesches can teach salutary lessons to young rebels without a clue. He certainly taught me something when, as he led a walk-through during the Skirball press preview last week, he was asked how much bitterness he still harbored. His smile was both weary and wistful: It was a very long time ago. He had forgiven those involved. Yet, minutes later, he made it clear that forgiveness was one thing, but stupidity another, and warned that we must constantly be on our guard against Ashcroft and his ilk, again turning us into a nation of spies, snitches, and informers.
He sided with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, aren't we the ones entitled to be bitter, not he? Posted by Orrin Judd at February 7, 2004 1:09 PM
Who needs "Ashcroft and his ilk" when we've already got the IRS in place? All the caterwauling about the Patriot Act is by people who have no problem with government invasion of privacy as long as they and their ~progressive~ friends are doing it to achieve their goals.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at February 7, 2004 1:50 PMThis writer seems shocked -- SHOCKED -- that if you act like an anti-American, anti-patriotic, enemy-sympathizing screwball, people who live around you might actually notice your loud proclamations! One would think that, in so many of these case, these screwballs are actually motivated by getting attention. Why so surprised that it works?
Posted by: kevin whited at February 7, 2004 3:15 PMFYI, the writer is a rocker and science fiction novelist:
http://www.thanatosoft.freeserve.co.uk/
Posted by: PapayaSF at February 7, 2004 4:00 PMThis kind of thing just boils my blood. This vile scumbag traitor spent years boosting a murderous foreign tyranny against his own country and he's found it in HIS heart to forgive us??
I wish he had found the useful idiot's just reward, a bullet in the head and a shallow grave at the hand of his stalinist masters.
F**KING SCUM.
Posted by: Amos at February 7, 2004 8:31 PMAm I the only only one that notices that the
vast preponderence of ant-american agitators
(of the marxist atheist variety) are
Ashkinazim?
Orrin, sometimes you act like every character
like this is just some isolated case of a
miswired ideology. Does the fact that there could be a ethnic proclivity to destroy the America of the founding fathers ever occur.