The Provocateur (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist 

Away back in those Hungry Thirties there was a sub-committee of the United States Senate, headed by Senator Robert La Follette, that investigated what was popularly known as the labor spy racket. A great deal of evidence was gathered that proved conclusively the employment by industries in the United States of provocateurs to infiltrate labor unions for the purpose of stirring up policies that could lead to violence during proposed strike actions. The motive of some of these was, of course, the smashing of the fast-growing labor union movement through use of weapons of violence against striking workers; and industries such as steel, auto and rubber had stockpiled veritable arsenals of weaponry within their gates. The La Follette Committee also disclosed the fact that other industries, those that manufactured tear gas. barbed-wire fences and so forth, had their agents, too, hard at work to instigate the conditions that would lead to more sales of their commodities.

More recently, in the Fifties, there was a burst of activity on the part of the F.B.I. In the business of infiltrating radical political parties, such as the Communist Party, with its agents. It has been said that there were, at one time, at least as many F.B.I. agents as genuine members within the ranks of that organisation and if such an estimate was made in jest it must be remembered that many a true word is spoken in jest.

In fact, the interested researcher can find—with little effort—evidence of the employment of such tactics by law enforcement agencies from the federal level down to city police departments all through the years of American democracy. And one would have to be naive, indeed, to believe that the planting of agents provocateur by the capitalist state does not still exist, even more highly developed than ever before: right here in this land of liberty.

But we are trying to make an important point. Any organization that can make it possible for police spies to influence its policies is an organization that ought to be shunned by working people. When a political group, for example, advocates the abolition of capitalism; states that it would prefer that the socialist revolution be consummated peacefully; but argues that all evidence points to the so-called “fact" that the capitalists would not permit such an event to happen and that, therefore. the working class must prepare itself to meet capitalist violence with their own; such a group lays itself open for infiltration by police spies. And such a group should be avoided by workers as they would avoid the plague.

For it should be apparent that there are no weapons possible of accumulation by working people that cannot be outmatched a thousand fold by the capitalist class. And it should also be apparent, even from recent history, that the capitalists will not squirm at laying waste whole sections of cities—or whole cities—if necessary, when threatened by violent overthrow by rivals of whatever persuasion. If you think that sort of thing couldn’t happen in America, then think again!

The World Socialist Party is not afraid of infiltration by police spies. Our principles, around which we are organized, make such an eventuality implausible, if not impossible. The provocateur would be wasting his time. We are, and we have always been since our beginnings, organized on a basis of above-ground legality We address ourselves to fellow-workers, urging them to unite on the political field in order that a majority of socialists may be elected to control the central organs of power. Only in this way can a situation be brought about wherein the armed forces of the nation, the states, and the municipalities cannot be used against us, while a majority introduce a brand new way of life. A socialist majority has no need for violence. Let us undermine capitalism by spreading socialist information and using the legal machinery of capitalism, itself. If you think such a policy is a utopian dream, take another look at the scene and think again!

Rogue State (2000)

Book Review from the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rogue State – A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. By William Blum, Common Courage Press, 2000.

For over one hundred years, the United States has presented itself to the world as a bastion of freedom and democracy, a global defender of the weak and helpless against oppression and injustice. For much of this time it allegedly protected us from an International Communist Conspiracy, just as in recent years the US has fought a war against drugs on our behalf. Throughout this period, the US has always pointed out to us the “rogue states”, those countries that posed the international community and the peace they enjoyed the greatest threat, and has selflessly been at the forefront in every attempt to curb their evil ambitions, whether in Korea or Vietnam, the Middle East or Central America.

In reality, the United States has been and remains the United States a rogue state. In his newly-published Rogue State—A Guide to the World’s only Superpower, William Blum goes to great lengths to prove that rather than being “the greatest force for peace”, as one William Clinton would have us believe, the US has employed terrorist tactics throughout the world for decades. In over 300 well researched and well-argued pages, Blum helps put to death the myth that the US is the champion of liberty and human rights.

While the US fought a Cold War to defend us from the Communist threat—”the greatest protection racket since men convinced women that they needed men to protect them”—they relentlessly supported dictators and tyrannical regimes on every continent, from Pol Pot and Suharto to Saddam Hussein and Papa Doc Duvalier. Between 1945 and 1999, this same defender of the global well-being toppled 40 governments and helped crush 30 populist movements, assassinated scores of prominent individuals and perverted elections in every corner of the globe. During this same period the US armed terrorists, trained right-wing guerilla movements in the art of torture and financed armies intent on overthrowing democratically elected governments.

Not content with with employing such tactis outside its frontiers in the interests of its own corporate elite—and many times Blum’s makes this connection—the US has also been ruthless in the treatment of its own citizens as they pursue their American dream. Whilst we’re all at least suspicious of the crimes of governments against their own people, the US, Blum reveals, is guilty here. Just as it could casually use 600,000 of its own military personnel in mustard gas and blister gas tests in the 1940s, so too could the Pentagon calmly announce that 100,000 of its servicemen were exposed to sarin gas during the Gulf War. Not content with experimenting with its cannon fodder, the US has shown the same disrespect for its own civilians in peace time, using them as guinea pigs. It has released zinc cadmium around cities, as well as whooping cough and smallpox bacteria and all manner of chemical concoctions to test the effectiveness of biological warfare. It has released millions of infected mosquitoes and infected oat crops with cereal rust spores. All of this in spite of the fact that the first tenet of the Nuremberg Code, polished up by the US itself in anger at Nazi medical experimentation, states: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”

This “land of the free” is where the CIA and FBI will intercept and open domestic and foreign correspondence, where private corporations videotape, bug the offices of and requests urine samples of its own employers, where children are encouraged and enticed with monetary incentives to inform on their parents and fellow pupils, where state troopers enlist hotel workers to spy on guests, where schools ban hundreds of “subversive” books (Huckleberry Finn and Oliver Twist for example) and the FBI urges librarians to report the books taken out by patrons. Blum reveals this and very much more to be the experience of tens of thousands of US citizens.

Blum asks why does the US get away with all this? How can it connive in a global drugs trade, have helped incarcerate Nelson Mandela, increase its global interventions at a time when we’re supposed to be enjoying the benefits of the peace dividend bequeathed by the demise of the Cold War? How are its leaders not brought before international tribunals and charged with human rights violations and its institutions asked to account for themselves?

A major reason, he suggests, is the ongoing love affair with the mystique of America, the world’s adoration of what it perceives to be the relentless devotion to the cause of freedom and human rights that is “America”. And this adoration itself stems from the US as the inventor and perfecter of modern advertising and public relations—its existence as the world’s only information superpower perpetuating that same illusion.. Questioning why so much cruelty is endemic to US foreign policy, Blum relates it to the ”Peter Principle” which states that in a hierarchy every employee rises to their level of incompetence: “in a foreign policy establishment committed to imperialist domination by any means necessary, employees tend to rise to the level of cruelty they can live with”. And being the US means never having to say you’re sorry. As President George Bush once famously commented: “I will never apologise for the USA. I don’t care what the facts are.”

Whatever we may think we know about US foreign and domestic policy, Blum’s work, in all its grotesque detail, shows us it is not folly to imagine the lengths to which capitalism’s executive will go to secure their own interests.

John Bissett

Film Review: J. Edgar (2012)

Film Review from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In J. Edgar, Leonardo Di Caprio, under Clint Eastwood’s direction, gives a thoroughly credible performance as FBI Chief, J. Edgar Hoover. Di Caprio portrays him as the paranoid, vindictive, delusional, hypocritical (he refers to Senator McCarthy as an opportunist) and egotistical man that he was; certainly not high on the list of guys you’d want your daughter to marry.

Arnie Hammer as Hoover’s paramour, Clyde Tolson, Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy, his long-serving secretary and Judi Dench as his overly attentive mother (“You will restore our family to greatness”) all turn in fine performances. Hoover is, in fact, shown as a mama’s boy who went in for crime-busting to please the law-and-order obsessed lady.

Too much is devoted to exploring Hoover’s sexuality, though screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is gay, probably felt it necessary. To quote Black, “it was a thing you couldn’t discuss even in the privacy of your own home and even with someone you might have feelings for, because it was still a love that did not speak its name.” Black, surprisingly, has Hoover enrage Tolson by confessing he once shared a romantic liaison with Dorothy Lamour.

This gives one some idea how petty he was. Hoover’s ambitions knew no bounds; when shut out of the Lindberg kidnapping investigation by the New Jersey State Police, he had Congress pass a law making kidnapping a federal instead of a state crime so the FBI, could horn in.

Surprisingly, Black makes no mention of Hoover’s greatest ambition to make the FBI a world-wide intelligence organization, which the CIA eventually became. Hoover had his vast army of agents pursue whatever grudges: criminal, political, sexual or personal, that he held – and he held plenty of them. He kept tabs on the extra-curricular activities of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Eleanor Roosevelt.  In Eleanor Roosevelt’s case that included spying on her trysts with lovers of both sexes. No-one in the FBI was allowed to be more popular than Eddie baby. That meant destroying the career of agent, Melvin Purvis who had gunned down John Dillinger.

Too much attention is devoted to his relationships with Tolson, Miss Gandy and his mother in this 135-minute movie, which fails to pursue more intriguing matters – such as, Hoover’s refusal to pursue organized crime as opposed to nickel-and-dime bank robbers. Rumour has it the mob had photographs of Hoover in drag and in a compromising position with Clyde Tolson who he made his number two man in the FBI.

Nor did the movie show his relentless persecution of homosexuals, eventually forcing them out of the closet as an act of retaliation. One psychiatrist would later say, “They should call that the J. Edgar Hoover Syndrome – persecuting the very thing he was.”

When Richard Nixon was elected it was the proverbial and possibly the literal death knell for Hoover. Nixon, though heterosexual, was very similar; mean, ambitious and unscrupulous (no kidding). Nixon wanted possession of Hoover’s files and the only way to get them would be to kill him. It isn’t mentioned that Hoover wanted to be Director for life, a life many would like to see end ASAP. It is only slightly implied that his doctor injected him with chemicals that wouldn’t exactly prolong it. Rumour has it that a life shortening pill, which looked like an aspirin tablet, was put in amongst them.

The most significant aspect of Hoover’s career wasn’t mentioned. He became head of the FBI in 1924, a year after the Teapot Dome Scandal in which some senior members of the Harding administration were implicated. In 1973, a year after his death, the Watergate Scandal broke out, but in the intermediate 48 years in which he reigned as the Bureau’s boss, there were no major scandals affecting the presidency.

One may wonder if the seven presidents he served under and their administrative staffs were not like Nixon’s thugs at all; that they were all goody-goodies who wouldn’t stoop to an illegal act.  Or, perhaps – just perhaps – once or twice they did and J. Edgar was on hand to contain the mess, conditional on getting the laws passed and the budgets he wanted – take your pick.

One comforting thought is that it’s highly unlikely in a sane society that anyone would be as sick as J. Edgar Hoover, but if there was such a person, he would receive help, and as the movie makes clear, he surely needed it.

Steve Shannon

Leonard Peltier and the primal needs of Capital* (2004)

From Issue 19 of the World Socialist Review

In a remote section of South Dakota just north of Nebraska lies an Indian reservation known as Pine Ridge. At one time largely agricultural, it became hugely attractive to the U.S. government when it was discovered that beneath the Indian lands lay one of the largest uranium reserves in the United States. All through the years, treaties with the Indians had been consistently violated because of the major mineral reserves beneath the Indian territories.

When Pine Ridge became the focus of the United States government, the Indian residents were strongly opposed to uranium development on their turf. Bitterness grew as problems were exacerbated with the increasing threat of U.S. intervention. Turning to the American Indian Movement (AIM) for assistance led to military conflict with the FBI, which refused to listen to the complaints of the Indians. The struggle lasted 71 days, resulting in the deaths of two Pine Ridge natives and the outlawing of all activities at Pine Ridge.

During the following three years, now referred to as the “Reign of Terror,” violent assaults continued to take place in which vast numbers of Indians were murdered or maimed. With the government intent on destroying the AIM and thereby removing a major obstacle in their plans to exploit the uranium booty, homes were burned, shootings and beatings became rampant. So many native Americans were killed that Pine Ridge had the highest annual murder rate in the U.S. Again the AIM came to their assistance, and among those who responded was Leonard Peltier. The conflict led to three murder indictments including that of Leonard Peltier, accused of shooting two FBI agents. No evidence was ever introduced to support the accusation. Subsequently, Peltier escaped to Canada, convinced that he would never receive a fair trial in the U.S. Less than a year later, he was apprehended.

Myrtle Poor Bear was an Indian woman who had never met Leonard Peltier. Terrified under interrogation by the FBI, she testified against him. This terror-induced accusation led to the extradition of Peltier to the U.S. All of her incriminating statements were later withdrawn, and Myrtle Poor Bear confessed that her fear of the FBI had led her to make false statements. With the government determined to pin the guilt on Peltier and thus remove the bête noire from their uranium quest, her confessions were thrown aside and ignored.

Despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence, the trial was rigged against him with perjury and manufactured evidence. No witness was ever found who could identify Leonard as the man who shot and killed two FBI agents. Hundreds of thousands of pages of critical evidence pinpointing the unprovoked attack on Pine Ridge were withheld from the trial.

The events here described and the part played by Peltier were detailed in a book by Peter Matthieson, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. This revealing report was kept out of print for eight years, while the FBI sued the author and publisher for libel. Although the Supreme Court eventually denied the suit, the stunning evidence produced by the book was unavailable at the time of Leonard Peltier’s trial.

Today Pine Ridge has an 86 percent unemployment rate, the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate in the nation. The government’s vindictiveness toward the Lakota people led to the ruin of innumerable lives. The ongoing penal servitude of Leonard Peltier at Leavenworth Prison is the direct consequence of the FBI’s unabated pressure to keep him confined.

Despite worldwide appeals from human-rights organizations, and the publicity given to the merits of his case, 500 FBI agents marched in Washington to oppose clemency for him. They continue to use their authority to thwart all efforts to obtain his freedom, now denied him for 28 years.

Leonard Peltier is not in prison for the murder of two FBI agents. Of that he is demonstrably not guilty. Leonard Peltier is in prison because he is a potential threat to governmental forces intent on exploiting the mineral resources that lie buried beneath In- dian territory. The facts of Leonard’s conviction are well known. Well known also is the bitter massacre of the Indians at Wounded Knee, which left an entire community devastated.** Terror-stricken families and ruined lives draw little compassion from those whose motives are purely profit-driven. They are “collateral damage.” The drive for profit under capitalism overrides all human considerations. Like the conflict in Iraq, the huge loss of lives and the obliteration of the infrastructures are a price worth paying for the control of huge oil reserves needed for the operation of the capitalist machine.

Such reports are not unique to America. All over the world human values are subordinated to the primal needs of capital.

Indeed, they scream out for a change from this power-driven, cash-oriented social system to one that emphasizes cooperation, and in which human values are the measure of all human action. They send a message to all who will listen that the world hungers for a society that will eliminate needless suffering and re- place it with opportunities for all human beings to lead fulfilling lives.

Mardon Cooper

* Sources: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Anthony Rayson (Prison Abolition), Matt Sherman (AIM) and Leonard Peltier (“Prison Writings”).

** The massacre at Wounded Knee took place on December 29, 1890. See, for example, http:// www.lastoftheindependents.com/wounded.htm. The siege at Wounded Knee, referred to above, began on February 27, 1973 and lasted 71 days.

Leonard Peltier has provided us with words that should resonate with those who share this vision:

The Message 

Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity.
But silence is impossible.
Silence screams.
Silence is a message,
Just as doing nothing is an act. 

Let who you are ring out and resonate
in every word and every deed.
Yes, become who you are.
There’s no sidestepping your own being
or your own responsibility. 

What you do is who you are.
You are your own comeuppance.
You become your own message. 

You are the message.

Rear View: Poor People’s (ongoing) Campaign (2018)

The Rear View Column from the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poor People’s (ongoing) Campaign

The 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination was covered widely in mainstream media last month. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for combating racial equality through non-violent resistance. For the last five years of his life, King was subject to scrutiny by the FBI. J Edgar Hoover was concerned about ‘communist’ infiltration of civil rights groups and unions but proof proved elusive. Baptist minister King had apparently read some of Marx’s writings and did not like his materialism, but such influences can be seen here: ‘the profit motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic system, encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspires men to be making a living than making a life.’ He even stated ‘the fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad,’ yet rather than seeking to replace capitalism with socialism he campaigned for reforms to restructure it – e.g. he strived for a universal basic income as well as end to ‘overpopulation’. Days after his death Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in housing basis of race, religion, or national origin. Decades later, Obama’s ‘change’ meant business as usual. Today, racism is waxing not waning, 40 million Americans live in poverty, the top 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, and ‘just 1 in 10 black Americans believe civil rights movement’s goals have been achieved in the 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr was killed’ (theindependent.co.uk, 31 March). And this, from Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer winning historian, says it all (probably unwittingly) : ‘all the issues that he raised toward the end of his life are as contemporary now as they were then’ (nytimes.com, 4 April). Dr. King focused famously on the ‘Triple Evils’ of poverty, racism and militarism, i.e., symptoms rather than the underlying disease.


Poverty without end

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela died the same week as the anniversary of King’s death. Media reaction was, unlike to that of Dr. King, very mixed. ‘Winnie was working as a hospital social worker when she realized the abject poverty under which most people were forced to live in, created by the inequalities of the system. It is from this point that she strived to bring change and equality’ (standardmedia.co.ke, 3 April). She married Nelson Mandela several years prior to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 (289 murdered). Established in 1912, the African National Congress had employed largely non-violent means in its campaign to secure voting rights for non-white Africans, but this changed in 1961 with the formation of an armed wing. When Nelson was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964, the South African state punished Winnie too. She was beaten, tortured and held in solitary confinement. Andrew Malone writes as if she deserved such treatment, describing her as ‘an odious, toxic individual who continued to preach hatred rather than reconciliation right up to the end of her life’ (dailymail.co.uk, 3 April). Yet for a woman accused of murder, fraud, kidnapping and theft, comments from the South African Human Rights Commission in an article titled A tribute to Madikizela-Mandela: ‘A true revolutionary is guided by great love’ (thetimeslive.co.za, 3 April) seem equally over the top. No, the most apposite remarks were made earlier by another and anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu: ‘They stopped the gravy train just long enough to get on themselves.’ He went on to say that Zuma’s administration is ‘worse than the apartheid government’ and that he would ‘pray for the downfall of the ANC.’ ‘More than two decades after South Africa ousted a racist apartheid system that trapped the vast majority of South Africans in poverty, more than half the country still lives below the national poverty line and most of the nation’s wealth remains in the hands of a small elite’ (npr.org, 2 April).


One world, one people

'Nothing should be allowed to obscure working class unity nor to hamper its struggle to set up the new social order. We know enough of racism, and of what it does to human beings, to reject it as a destructive, anti-social force. There is a better way; we have a world to win and little time to lose’ (Racist myths, Socialist Standard, June 1988).

So They Say: Rouble Backhanders (1974)

The So They Say Column from the January 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rouble Backhanders

A "Housing Scandal" was reported in The Times on 6th November. A Trade Minister, a Mayor, a chief city architect and various senior officials were sacked for corrupt practices and "numerous instances of gross violations of legality".

Those involved are charged with abusing their official positions by allotting housing space through favouritism, and flagrant contravention of the laws and regulations.  . . . (The Mayor) was removed for abetting various people in the illegal possession of flats and by his general acquiescence. The chief architect was dismissed for neglecting long-range plans for the city's future development, for falling to improve the quality of construction work and the unauthorized occupancy of a flat in the same board of trade housing development.

This sounds like an extract from the Poulson proceedings, but it is not. The report comes from the Times' Moscow correspondent, and refers to Tbilisi, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Georgia. We used to hear that this sort of thing happened only in the "decadent" west' but capitalism has the same effects everywhere.

Moves in a Mysterious Way

Some time ago and American sued thirty churches for redress after an injury to him was attributed to an "Act of God". heath and Wilson may both be thinking on similar lines. Under the headline HEATH WARNING ON UNCONTROLLABLE ECONOMIC FORCES, the Prime Minister was recently reported speaking of things beyond him: 

. . . we are faced by economic forces outside the nation's control which affect the livelihood of every man, woman and child in this country. (Times, 6th December 1973)

The same night, Wilson expressed the same sentiment in a party political broadcast:

But the leader of the Opposition said he would not blame everything that was happening on the Government. "For example, I've made it clear I do not think they are responsible for the present oil crisis . . . Some aspects of world prices, foodstuffs, are not their responsibility."

So these Men of Destiny, casting masterful eyes on the turbulence round them, say — what? That they are stumped.

Ask Them Another

However, it must not be thought that the current economic troubles are due to the ineptitude of fatheads like Heath and Wilson. Similar admissions are now being made by heads of state and erstwhile whizz-kids all over the world. On 2nd December the Sunday Times Business News had JAPAN: BRAKES ON THE BULLET ECONOMY. The Tokyo correspondent wrote:

The oil crisis, commodity shortages, a Cabinet re-shuffle including a change of Finance Minister, not to mention he usual uncertainties of economic forecasting, all these have thrown Japan's exports into a state of nearly total confusion.
The Economic Planning Agency admits: "It is impossible to give a responsible answer." A more assured member of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry says: "Nobody really knows, but . . ."

There was a symmetry between this and the item below it, headed THE US: NO ONE REALLY KNOWS. It spoke of forecasts of "unemployment nearly doubling to 7.5 per cent. or 8 per cent", and went on:

Most professional economists now admit that they have only the vaguest notions of what will happen in the next 12 months . . . no one knows how US export trade—considered to be one of the strong factors of the American economy—will be affected by economic slowdowns in Europe and Japan.

All now agree unanimously — but, being "experts" only temporarily — with the Socialist Party's case that capitalism cannot be controlled.

Alone I Did It

An example of the absurdity and anarchy of capitalism is shown in a report from Brazil. Like every other country, Brazil has sought "growth". As elsewhere, this is supposed to promise higher living standards for the workers — but, of course, not in the foreseeable future. Antonio Delfim Netto, "the Erhardt of Brazil's economic miracle" is quoted six months ago explaining what would happen of wages rose: "Easy, there would be runaway inflation." 

But labour shortages have enabled Brazilian workers to demand, and get, higher wages. And this has enabled the pragmatic Delfim (a) to admit that growth has nothing for the working class, and (b) to pretend he arranged for a labour shortage instead.

Last week Professor Delfim admitted that Brazil's chosen vehicle of expansion (the market economy) did not provide any mechanism for reducing the level of inequality, but professed himself happy with the effect which the emerging shortages of labour have produced. "This," he said, "is what we have worked for all the time." (Guardian, 4th December 1973)

Obviously this "miracle-worker' hasn't a clue, except to making up ingenuous answers. What will he say when labour shortage gives way to redundancies?

Beware of Them — They're Like Us

We have from America a leaflet headed WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT COMMUNISM, apparently issued by the FBI. It urges every citizen to look out for "espionage, sabotage, and subversion activities". What it refers to, of course, is state capitalism: the first thing people should know about Communism is that it does not exist in the places implied, Russia, Cuba, China, etc.

But even taking the leaflet at its face value, it contains a curious self-contradiction. One side says, quoting J. Edgar Hoover:

Why is Communism a threat to you? Communists want to control everything: where you live, where you work, what you are paid, what streetcars you ride (or whether you walk), how your children are educated, what you may not and must read and write . . . 

On the other side people are told they can combat Communism by:

1. Being good students (doing a good job at school)
2. Being good citizens at home and in the community
3. Learning more about the history of America
4. Being willing to do their share for our country.

Thus, the way to prevent being told what to do, what to read, etc. is to let yourself be told what to do, what to read, etc. Which highlights the fact that there is no difference worth troubling about.

Putting it Simply

We are often told that the language of Socialist economics is too weighty for the man in the street who reads football reports. The report of Queens Park Rangers v. Sheffield United in The Observer on 9th December began:

The leather spheroid never looked like evading the custodian.

It means nobody could get the ball past the goalkeeper.

Robert Barltrop