I have seen Public Enemy and it is a good film. I also agree that the
complete stories are never told, and that personal and political
conflicts would have existed and festered without COINTELPRO, which used
and exacerbated those conflicts, as other government agencies both in
the US and elsewhere have done in the past to destroy organizations that
threatened them. There is no revolutionary struggle which has not had
its ugly side, but it would be a mistake to simply consider COINTELPRO
merely one factor, and not a major factor in the self-destruction of the
Panthers. I don't know, of course, what Panthers you have interviewed,
and what is in those 350,000 FBI documents you have read, many of which,
no doubt were heavily censored, as well as "created" for the eyes of
future researchers. This last point is important, because the creation
of false documents to distort the past is also something that has
happened before.
Jeff Blankfort
Roz Payne wrote:
> I was a consultant on the new Black Panther film Public Enemy. Newsreel
> footage and stills photographs that I took were also part of the film. I
> think that it is a good film.
> What I want to remind folks is that when stories are told parts are always
> left out. We have to stop blaming Cointelpro for everything that destroyed
> the Panthers. Cointelpro was a part, a big part but every Panther Ive
> interviewed, my research of reading discovery material from legal cases , and
> reading more than 350,000 FBI documents I know that personal and political
> conflicts had a large degeee of responsibility that led to the
> factionalization and downfall of the Black Panther Party. No one will ever
> tell you the total truth of that period. Folks don't want to tell stories
> that are not nice, talk about crimes, talk about foolishness, about mistakes
> , etc. Folks don't want their families know what really happened. What
> events they participated in that are now an embarassment , politically
> incorrect or were wrong and bad or silly. I've been video interviewing
> panthers, and folks who supported panthers for about 10 years creating video
> histories. You would be surprised what is told to me off camera . We can
> not blame the total downfall of the Black Panther Party on "Conintelpro.
> roz payne
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Aug 15 2000 - 03:57:50 CUT