“The Spook Who Sat By The Door” - TTG

Earlier today one of our fellow correspondents, longarch, offered a link to an article on theorganicprepper.com that contends the current unrest is unfolding, step by step, in accordance with a playbook… the US Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Manual. This article by the organic prepper herself, Daisy Luther, asks the question, “who is behind this?” That’s a question deserving a whole discussion by itself. I offer only one comment about that right now. If you think all that’s going on right now requires massive funding and coordination, you’re out of your freakin’ mind.     

That article did remind me of a long ago incident. Back when SWMBO and I were young college students, one of the first movies I took her to see was “The Spook Who Sat By the Door” in late 1973 at a theater in downtown Troy, NY. By that time I had my airborne wings, having attended jump school at Fort Benning the previous Summer, and I began developing a friendship with Master Sergeant Albert H. Rivers, a Green Beret with three tours in Viet Nam and Thailand newly assigned to our ROTC element. I chose this movie because of my growing interest in guerilla warfare. Obviously, I was and remain romantically challenged. SWMBO remembers it as the time we were the only two white people in the theater. 

This movie freaked out the FBI. Theater owners who showed the film were visited by local FBI agents. The film’s distributors were visited by the FBI. Copies of the film were confiscated. It was disappeared. Bootleg copies were still available, but it wasn’t until Tim Reid (yes, WKRP in Cincinnati’s own Venus Flytrap) discovered a negative copy of the film in 2004 that it became widely available again. The FBI missed that one. The film has the feel of those blaxploitation films of the 70s, but it’s much more than that. I implore everyone watch the trailer of “The Spook” and imagine if Spike Lee did a remake of this today. The full film is also available on YouTube if you’re interested. If nothing else, you can see what a failure I was as a suave romantic.

IMO Sam Greenlee, the film’s writer and co-producer, and Ivan Dixon, the director, created a thought provoking masterpiece. The very making of the film was an act of guerilla warfare. Scenes shot in Chicago were done surreptitiously over Mayor Daly's objections. In fact, Sam Greenlee, the film’s writer and co-producer, and Ivan Dixon, the director, used the veneer of blaxploitation to get their creation through the Hollywood studios. True guerilla warfare. The FBI certainly thought so. They collectively pissed their pants. Whites were collectively pissing their pants a lot during those years. A few years before the film’s premier, the NRA, Ronald Reagan and the California State Legislature were all for banning open carry of loaded weapons when members of the Black Panther Party showed up at the California state house carrying shotguns and carbines demanding their Second Amendment rights. The Oakland-based Black Panther Party included this point in their platform.

“We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States gives us the right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense.”

I guess that’s one solution. Imagine if all those witnesses with smart phones when George Floyd was being murdered also carried weapons. Maybe the cops would have backed down. Most likely there would have been a lot of dead cops and civilians and we would still be in the middle of a nationwide uprising. Americans have not demonstrated the self-discipline or fire discipline to have everyone packing a roscoe. It’s a bad idea, especially now that so many of our cops have their asses pumped up with the “warrior ethic.” We may need cops to be those rough men to allow us sleep at night, but if they can’t turn off that rough man, they should not be cop or we will end up in a widespread guerrilla war.

TTG  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw0TEAadKu0  (the trailer)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s59OaRxN_40  (a decent copy of the film preceded by a half hour of commentary)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-troubling-fate-of-a-1973-film-about-the-first-black-man-in-the-cia (a fairly recent commentary)

UPDATE: Here's a version of the film with a better audio track. Thanks to Enrico Malatesta for providing this version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkyX-Yx-8NM

Comments

[David Habakkuk]

jonst and TTG,

Re the suggestion:

‘I think this civil war is still with us. The Cavaliers or Royalists generally felt that all members of a society should know their place. That one tenet serves as a thread running through the English Civil War, our Revolutionary War, our Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow and segregation eras, the civil rights era and our current divided condition.’

This does make me think that a better sense of some of the complexities of the British seventeenth century might be of value to Americans.

A useful starting point might be the complex career of Sir Thomas Fairfax, who led the ‘New Model Army’ to victory over Charles I at the decisive battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645.

A decade and a half later, after the death of his key subordinate in that battle, Oliver Cromwell, who had in the meantime become ‘Lord Protector’, Fairfax would be instrumental in securing the (essentially peaceful) accession of the son of the man he had defeated.

As a young man, Fairfax had learnt his soldiering in the wars of religion on the Continent, under the tutelage of Horace Vere, a leading commander of English volunteers in these, and a highly capable soldier, whose daughter Anne he married.

In January 1649, after Cromwell and his associates had decided to try the ‘Charles Stuart, that man of blood’, Fairfax was placed at the head of the list of judges. He stayed away, but his wife turned up in the gallery. From her ‘Wikipedia’ entry:

‘When the court called the name of Fairfax, it is said that his wife, Anne Fairfax, said “he had more wit than to be there”. Later when the court said that they were acting for “all the good people of England”, she shouted “No, nor the hundredth part of them!”’

(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Fairfax )

Doubtless she overstated her case on the numbers. But Anne Fairfax was not wrong in pointing to the fact that the kind of Puritan zealots who had risen to prominence in the ‘New Model’ combined an absolute conviction that they represented ‘the People’, with a belief that those of their fellow-countrymen who did not agree with them should ‘know their place.’

This meant recognising that their were utterly and totally wrong, and so could not really be considered as belonging to the ‘good people of England.’ (How can you be ‘people’ if you are not ‘good’?)

And then, of course, there was the question of the proper ‘place’ of Ireland, where the ‘Reformation’ had never taken hold.

Not long after the execution of Charles, Fairfax having, once again, decided he did not want to be involved, Cromwell took over the task of suppressing the rebellion in that country, and made quite clear his view of the proper ‘place’ of towns who did not accept his suggestion they surrender.

He justified his treatment of them, well remembered in Ireland to this day, as ‘a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches.’

(For an interesting recent discussion, presenting both sides of the argument, see
http://www.olivercromwell.org/wordpress/?page_id=1837 .)

Also of interest, I think, are reflections on the heritage of another civil war, even more cataclysmic than the English and the American, and how it should be handled. Prior to his return to the Presidency in 2012, Vladimir Putin published a series of articles, in one of which, actually entitled ‘The Ethnicity Issue’, his argument led him to the following conclusion:

‘So subtle cultural therapy is what is recommended for Russia, a country where, for many, the civil war never really ended and where the past is highly politicised and seen as a collection of ideological quotes (often interpreted by different people in opposite ways). We need a cultural policy – pursued at every level from school teaching to historical documentation – to shape an understanding of history in which representatives from each ethnic group, as well as the descendants of the “Red Commissars” and “White Officers”, can be seen to have a place. They must see where they belong in that process and see themselves as heirs to the great Russian history – tragic and controversial as it is, but still “one for all.”’

(See http://archive.premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/17831/ )

Both by inheritance, and also out observing the way politics have unfolded in my lifetime, I have come to think that, when people portray the conflicts which shaped the modern world as simple stories of struggles between the forces of ‘progress’ and those of ‘reaction’, the appropriate reaction is ‘caveat emptor.’

One of the central things animating the ‘revolt of the deplorables’, on both sides of the Atlantic, is in my view the quite correct perception that people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, or indeed Tony Blair, do not see them as having a ‘place.’

Precisely because of this, such people are actually making it more, rather than less, difficult to find ways of accommodating genuine, and inevitable, forms of ‘diversity’, without conflict.

And also, as people with this mentality have often done before, they have already radically miscalculated the relative strength of the rival forces in the conflicts they are helping precipitate.

And they show absolutely no sign of any willingness whatsoever to learn from their mistakes.

[Enrico Malatesta]

Your link to "The Spook who sat by the Door" has a lousy clipped audio track, this version seems to be better -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkyX-Yx-8NM

[james]

thanks enrico... you're right.. quality of the audio is much better.. herbie hancock did the soundtrack for this movie too for anyone who knows who that is..

[The Twisted Genius]

David Habakkuk,

Thanks for the info on the English Civil War. I share your view that reducing conflicts to a simplistic binary struggle between progress and reaction do not come close to telling the whole story. In that light, I would like to hear your thoughts on the Levellers, a short lived movement that I think still resonates today. They were Puritans who supported Cromwell to a point, but seemed to lack the worst aspects of the Puritans and Cromwell. They didn't support Cromwell's invasion of Ireland and sought reconciliation with the Royalists. In my experience, their ideas reappeared in the New England Congregationalists. In my hometown the Congregationalist, direct descendants of the Puritan town fathers, welcomed and happily assisted the arrival of us non-Anglo Saxon Catholics.

I'll cross post this comment in Colonel Lang's post on the Civil War as you have done. I think it fits well there.

[The Twisted Genius]

Jonst,

Thanks for the tip on "The Cousins' War." I have not read it, but will when our library opens. I see Phillips drew on David Fisher's Albion's seed which made some of the same points. I think that's the book mentioned by Colonel Lang. I did find a lecture given by Kevin Phillips which I intend on watching tonight.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?122380-1/the-cousins-wars-speech

[Fred]

TTG,

"The current nationwide protests require only local coordination, " Locally coordinated, in more than 100 cities simultaneously? Clap on, clap off was the old ad to help out granny in the dark. It works on riots too. What happened to that trade deal with China? A viral attack and economy destroying lockdown orders worked wonders, eh. A city that has been a democratic stronghold for decades has a police officer kill a black man and planetary wide protests and riots ensue? Let's community organize and fire the mayor and reign in the police?Oh no!, not that. "Systemic violence" did it. That system is the constitutional Republic. That is what has to go in order to get the Change you can believe in that has been pushed from the left for generations.

"big finance and big business being the root of our problems. " Who is the "our" that you refer too? Trump's economic policies were damaging China's rise, they were also damaging the Democratic Pary's stranglehold on the black vote. Financial independence, however tenuous, eliminates the hold government has over people. That is the last thing the left wants.

Does anyone think that 400,000 Chinese nationals here on student visas are loyal to the US or were not having a disparate impact on opportunites for American students? Who is getting the job after graduation, the visa holder with the stem degree or the graduate with the gender/race studies/poli-sci degree? How many of those foreign students will be getting visas next year if Trump is re-elected? Russian collusion, remember that? Larry wrote up a post on yet another Constitution strangling judge(Sullivan) dragging out a case because letting that truth come to light will destroy many a politician’s career, on the left and right.

As to big business, judging by the rainbow flag banners, black banners and $1 billion plus pledged to BLM by corporations the left has won over a great deal of the leadership of those companies. Given "diversity is our strength" the HR departments have been intellectually cleansed cleaner than a university faculty lounge.

Violence from the left works, their demands are met, they control the narrative. If you are a protected class individual you are above reproach, if you are not you are a target. The social media stasi are going to keep you in line. The mask police will have you put on your little yellow star, now, or else.

I believe jonst is right when he says "We are dealing with an incipient French Revolution like uprising." We don't hear much about the thousands killed in the Vendée, it's bad for the tourist industry and the consciences of our alleged intellectual elites.

These are not locally organized protests, this is a well planned and coordinated left-wing insurgency. What we are seeing is covert and overt pressure against the government, strikes, riots and the initial phases of sabotage being used to demonstrate the weakness of government. This is after 3 years of "resistance" that sabotaged the Trump administration, a special proscecutor's investigation and a congressional investigation and impeachment trial - one in which the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court refused to allow a US Senator to question or even mention the name of the "whistle blower". Stand by for more social justice activism from the 3-4% of the population driving this; To borrow a phrase from Naseem Taleb : The Most Intolerant Win. Looks like that is exactly what is happening now. The most intolerant are winning.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15

[English Outsider]

David Habbakuk - a great essay on the crucible period of English Constitutional development. Wish you were still putting out programmes.

Relates to American constitutional development also - AG Barr reaches back to those times when discussing the attempts we have seen in the States recently to impede Trump's use of Executive power, attempts that mirror the constitutional anomalies we saw in the UK Parliament after the Brexit vote.

Those seventeenth century disputants themselves reached back further in time. Some took their stand on custom and prescription they asserted had been established from before the Norman Conquest, seeing that Conquest as a disruptive break with traditional English governance.

Which perhaps illustrates how risky the use of constitutional history is. There's always something in the past we can appeal to in order to back up our assertions of today. Just so did we see Burke, that constitutional scamp, being quoted recently by MP's wanting to claim that they were not acting improperly in ignoring the mandate they were sent to Parliament with.

I think therefore we can take past constitutional disputes as giving us a framework, a framework that is familiar to all, in which to discuss today's disputes. I'd be very reluctant to go further and see them used as in some sense guiding precedent. The historian may investigate those now distant times, as do you most interestingly above, but the politician would do better to cast today's disputes in today's terms and not seek to lock us into his own necessarily partisan interpretation of history.

We must learn from history, take it as a guide and as a means of establishing a common understanding, but we should not lock ourselves into it. If we do that, if we seek to lock ourselves into the past, then we are seeking to lock all into rooms of our own choosing.

Posted by: English Outsider |

[Barbara Ann]

David Habakkuk has, as so often, hit the nail on the head. For those who view history as a series of struggles between progressive and reactionary forces, there can be only one significant categorization of its participants: Progressives are the good guys and reactionaries bad guys who impede Mankind's journey of emancipation towards our ultimate enlightened destiny.

In such a world view, words like 'diversity', 'inclusion' and 'tolerance' are redefined. A diversity of viewpoints is permitted, but only inasmuch as they can be considered 'progressive'. All must be included, except reactionaries - those evolutionary dead ends; throwbacks who have no place in the brave new world of tomorrow. And 'tolerance' of course simply becomes its antithesis. Re-education or much worse is the usual fate of reactionaries when progressive extremists come to power. And the American Left right now is chock full of extremists of this kind.

The Putin quote is right on point, "subtle cultural therapy" is the route towards reconciliation and cultural harmony. Real inclusion - and toleration - of all viewpoints is what is needed, including those who venerate the culture of the South and its war heroes. The cultural revolution sweeping America will lead to the opposite.

What is the cure for this intellectual infantilism; the progressive disease? It seems to me the most pressing question of our time.

[Terence Gore]

Dan

I have noticed that also.

James

I was thinking of buying a battery assisted bike but now having 2nd thoughts. I will probably wind up buying a used bike that I can afford to lose. Our Pharmacy business has had three Prius catalytic thefts in the past 6 months plus a break in and theft during the protests. Our clients are mostly low income and many in care homes. At some point there are secondary ramifications from theft. It may be easier to look the other way but harder on the most in need in the long run

[optimax]

Terence Gore

On my walk I frequently go past one of Portland's many homeless camps and see dozens of bikes next to the tent. The frames are painted over, usually black, dismantled and it doesn't take a detective to know the pieces are parted out for cash. I've seen the transactions and not on tv. Stolen bicycles are are a common complaint on the local social media site Next Door, which I quit due to the high number of White women confessing their White privilege and White fragility-- initially misread as White frigidity.I've seen many at the camp shoot up or nod off or passed out next to their needles. A local samaritan every day picks up the carelessly and dangerously discarded used needles. A nonprofit hands out free clean needles but won't Sharps Containers because they say it would be humiliating for the junkies to carry the containers in public. We must think of their pride. It's estimated a junky needs $1800 a month to support his habit. Since they don't have jobs, you can guess how they earn their living.

[Kilo 4/11]

The Spook Who Sat By The Door is a “thought provoking masterpiece”.

Only to those who believe in the big lie pushed by the black grievance industry. Like the Panthers’ false raison d'etre, to combat “police brutality against blacks and the suppression of the black community”, the film starts from the false premise that blacks have it so bad in America that they are justified in going on a murderous rampage against Whites. By 1973, I didn’t need a film to tell me about the already ongoing black guerilla war against Whites, I’d been seeing it on my Chicago streets since the early ‘60s.

Since the great war hero Eisenhower sicced the 101st Airborne on the terrified White parents of the South in 1957, who only wanted to protect their precious children from what they knew all too well would result from race-mixing, blacks had sensed they had been given the license they had always craved, and the first people they tried it out on were people like my family and friends in inner cities across the land. They invaded our White neighborhoods, shooting at and threatening us from the beginning.

Discussion of past Civil Wars, Revolutions, Constitutional crises, the Progressive versus Reactionary tension, etc. is a waste of time. It is wasted on the typical black, who can’t follow a sentence of more than five words, and anyway has contempt for reading and those who read.

No, what we have now is a race war. Blacks hate Whites, want to kill Whites and take their property, and they’re doing it with impunity everywhere. They sense White weakness and it is exciting a blood lust in them. They are casting off - have almost finished casting off - the “American” part of “African-American”. The African is coming out from under his veneer of White civilization before our eyes, and he sees his chance to turn America into South Africa. And we have the same kind of elites in charge of us now as those who handed South Africa over to black destruction.

I think of those bold armed White protesters, screaming in the faces of those nearing retirement-aged Michigan Capitol police about the unfairness of the Covid lockdown. So brave of them, and so misplaced. That rage needs to be turned against the black guerilla. For the remaining Whites on our police forces are leaving. And the hooded one who said to the network reporter during the height of the American Kristallnacht “We coming to get y’all! We coming out to the suburbs!” wasn’t making an idle threat.

“Americans have not demonstrated the self-discipline or fire discipline to have everyone packing a roscoe.” worries TTG. This is the opposite of the problem Whites face. What Whites need desperately now is to lose some of that “self-discipline”. I want to see blacks running from us, from my kind of people, the Chicagoans of 1919, the last Chicagoans I am proud of.

[CK]

"One of the central things animating the ‘revolt of the deplorables’, on both sides of the Atlantic, is in my view the quite correct perception that people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, or indeed Tony Blair, do not see them as having a ‘place.’"
How insulting is it to be deemed non-essential? To whom? Not to my family nor my friend nor my neighbours. Yet for the last 6 months it seems that I am deemed non-essential by the newsmakers and the newstalkers and the newsfakers. I suppose I could apply for a job as a bed pan washer or a shelf stocker at one of the local food emporia then I would no longer be non-essential.
Mr. Habakkuk you are so very correct. And there are now so many more who have discovered just how non-essential they are.

[Eric Newhill]

"There seems to be some kind of generalized fear of blacks among our majority white population. Maybe it stems from a vestigial fear of slave rebellions"

13% of the population and 50%+ of the violent crime is a consistent FBI statistic that cannot be ignored.

Actually, since it's younger males that commit most of the violent crime, it's more like 5% of the 330 million population committing the majority of the violent crime in the country. Anyone who doesn't apply a special focus to that 5% is not smart. Pattern recognition is a basic intelligence and species survival mechanism.

[Fred]

Eric,

Most of the crime is also occurring in metropolitan areas led by the left and many if not most of the victims are also black.

[doug]

TTG,
>> "When I would stop at a store or gas station, I would scout the terrain for possible sniper hides, use the gas pump and pillars as cover and keep moving while filling up. Yes, that only two people and it paralyzed the region."

After 9/11 that captured my attention. My concern was that there were significant numbers of jihadists willing to sacrifice themselves for asymmetric effect like the hijackers. I'm an EE with a strong signal processing background and was somewhat familiar with the interesting acoustics of faster than sound bullet wavefronts. So I kicked around designing a distributed acoustic data collection device that could use GPS for time stamping. The little devices could be rapidly deployed in cities. They would then allow near realtime identification of such activity including rough trajectory and origin. Something specific for this sort of urban terrorism. A bit of research indicated this was likely already being pursued. Since I have never worked in the govt. sector or for their contractors I went on to other things.

After the shooters were identified and their technique disclosed I was concerned about copycats. But that didn't materialize. I considered that great news as it indicated insufficient density and number of radicalized Muslims resident here.

[JJackson]

TTG thanks for the film link, it was new to me. As I watched I was strongly reminded of a post a while back in which there was an account of a US SF trainer tasked with training Division 30, or similar, 'moderates' for insertion into Idlib. While they could not refuse to train them they were not overly zealous about it as they expected everything learnt would soon be used against them.

[turcopolier]

All

During the Washington sniper epic I carried a mouse gun in a pocket holster, a .32 automatic (Keltec P-32). I can hit you at 50 yards with that. I have had a permit to carry a concealed handgun for many years. I am an excellent shot. I have been asked to teach police pistol shooting several times based on my range scores with everything from that to .45 ACP. I remember the media hysteria about "two angry white men in white van." All BS. Two angry white men in a white van. Amazing.

[The Twisted Genius]

doug,

Washington DC has a shot spotter system in use like you described. I'm sure they're in a lot of other cities as well. Too bad you weren't a little faster with your technology.

Once those two were captured, I was impressed with the ingenuity of using a car as a mobile sniper hide. Too bad that good idea occurred to those sorry two sad sacks. Usually these sniper incidents involve shooting at random cars on a highway from a spot overlooking the highway. I went through a USMC sniper course in Hawaii so I used that knowledge to search for sniper hides during that time.

[Richard Ong]

“Warrior ethic”?

GMAB.

[The Twisted Genius]

Richard Ong,

When police see themselves as warriors, they set themselves apart from the community as a privileged class whose primary duty is to each other rather than those who they should "serve and protect." I don't like the military's reliance on warrior ethos, either. I am a soldier, not a mere warrior. Being a soldier encompasses far more than shooting the bad guys.

[Fred]

TTG,

"They set themselves apart from the community as a priveliged class whose primary duty is to each other "

A very apt description of the Social Justice Warrior ethos.

[D.J. Fuller Jr.]

This is in response to...The Twisted Genius | 15 June 2020 at 11:35 PM..."There seems to be some kind of generalized fear of blacks among our majority white population. Maybe it stems from a vestigial fear of slave rebellions. That was a genuine fear at one time."
Or maybe from the fear of the legal consequences of having your fate determined by 12 africans in america that make up the jury "of your peers" and the same sitting on the bench, while the jew lawyer that the court appointed you, gives you the "best defense possible".
that is the way it is in atlanta, ga, or even 50 miles in any direction from atlanta, ga.