Customer Reviews

Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Classics Edition) (South End Press Classics Series)

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This book maintains that the primary purpose of the FBI, from its inception and at least through to the late 1980s when Agents of Repression was first published, was to repress political groups and individuals who posed a threat to the status quo. The text is accompanied by heavy documentation and I was often reminded of the writing style of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. The focus here, however, is on the domestic crimes of the government. Churchell and Vander Wall show that the FBI was willing to use massive illegal force (including assasination) to repress political enemies and serve the interests of those in power. This is an excellent eye-opener to the true nature of the Bureau and the harsh crimes visited upon the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party and others such as the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. One is left wondering what activities the FBI has engaged in since the '80s and especially since 9/11. The best book I've read in some time.

The reissue of Agents of Repression is not only based on the historical significance of the book, but also the concerns expressed by co-author Ward Churchill in his lectures and writings about the direction of this nation with the advent of the Department of Homeland Security and legislative measures that have trampled over the Bill of Rights.

The book was published in 1988 based on the then ongoing litigation by some government officials against an author and publisher who had a work published concerning the illegal repression of AIM.

Agents of Repression is basically split into four sections; a history of the FBI, the government's war against the Black Panther Party, a lengthy exploration of AIM and the steps taken by a variety of government departments to destroy the grass-roots movement and how nothing has changed in the 1980s.

For readers who have explored these issues through other forums, it is an outstanding history. Readers who may be researching this era for the first time, I highly recommend the book since it takes larger topics and breaks them down into succinct chapters.

Churchill became the punching bag for the lightweight talking-heads on cable "news" shows more than a year ago due to comments he made in an academic setting concerning 9/11.

I urge a potential book-buyer to disregard that rhetoric and disinformation campaign waged against the co-author Churchill and consider that perhaps the payback for truly believing in civil rights means the attempt to silence him.

The FBI, as Ward Churchill carefully documents in this book, was established for the purpose of maintaining the status quo. To this end it has facilitated the deaths of many whose only crime was to seek justice, because the status quo, for a nation founded on genocide and broken treaties, is to perpetuate its policy of continuing genocide and broken treaties. There is no possibility of change until we acknowledge our history of repression and dismantle its agencies.

Product was received as promised. Product was in the condition as advertised, will purchase from this merchant in the future.

If you wanted to make a case that the FBI are often worse criminals than the actual criminals and serve more as a thuggish Orwellian political police than look no further than this book. Its more or less impossible to deny that the FBI time and time again has comitted and instigated sociopathic criminal behavior up to and including multiple murders. Most of Agents of Repression focuses on what was done in their campaign against the American Indian Movement in the 1970s and 1980s. There is also quite a bit about what the FBI pulled against the Black Panthers and a little bit dealing with labor unions, Puerto Rican secessionists and some general history of the FBI. Its a very well documented book, so even with the obvious bias that someone like Ward Churchill, who is/was a coordinator for AIM and is one of these weird white guys that pretends they are an Amerindian, the facts speak for themselves.