Meetings, seminars, conferences…who doesn’t love ‘em?  We do them at work, and we do them in campaigns.  And the end result of all of it is…?

We don’t need to go too far back in history to see actions that are memorable, had an impact, made a difference and changed our world, even if only in a small way.  For instance, in 1971 in Media, Pennsylvania USA, a group calling itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the local FBI office and stole over 1000 classified documents.  They then sent this information to mainstream media and antiwar publications, and information got out that would not have otherwise.  As Chomsky noted:

“According to [the Citizens’ Commission] analysis of the documents in this FBI office, 1 percent were devoted to organized crime, mostly gambling; 30 percent were ‘manuals, routine forms, and similar procedural matter’; 40 percent were devoted to political surveillance and the like, including two cases involving right-wing groups, ten concerning immigrants, and over 200 on left or liberal groups. Another 14 percent of the documents concerned draft resistance and ‘leaving the military without government permission.’ The remainder concerned bank robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft.” [link to Chomsky article]

While there is no record of any meetings, memos, mission statements, etc from the Citizens’ Commission, it is likely that there was some sort of planning involved in carrying out an operation like this.  But there is no doubt that the operation was carried out, and the effects were far-reaching: five years later, the Church Committee of the US Congress revealed the extent of domestic spying by the FBI and CIA, and it is unlikely that we would know of the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme otherwise.

There’s nothing wrong with planning – in fact, it’s hard to get anything done otherwise.  But we need to know what we are planning for, and sometimes, we just need to do things. 

COINTELPRO information: http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm

http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/coinwcar3.htm