That’s me in Chicago giving the peace sign to cops at the NATO protests of May 2012.
I’m a guy with a working class accent who was born and raised in Boston. Writing, making images, and doing radio are ways I’m using to connect to you.
In Catholic grade school, talking and drawing got me in trouble with the nuns, but outside class I was publishing ‘zines, organizing neighborhood events, working at a museum, and doing other weird, age inappropriate things.
I became editor of “The Source” after college, then returned to Boston to work as a writer and photographer for “In Newsweekly” and other publications. I’ve photographed three presidents, met Roosevelts and Kennedys, and promise you all these people are made of the same weak stuff as you and me.
Along the way, I founded a non-profit that raises money for Fenway Health and other beneficiaries, worked as a researcher for New England Historical Genealogical Society, and coordinated a graduate program at Tufts University.
In 2011, I arrived at Occupy Boston on day one, lived there by sleeping in the Spirituality Tent, and published 40,000 words to help myself and the world figure out was happening in Dewey Square.
After our eviction, I joined with friends from Occupy Boston and we started making a political talk show on Occupy Boston Radio called “99% Boston.” In August 2012, we created a show called “Banned in Boston” on UNregular Radio.
Making content with friends and allies has been a great experience, and so is having thousands of people across the world read the moody ramblings I share on this site. Thanks for being here. – John Stephen Dwyer
99% Boston 
John, that’s an impressive resume. Right guy at just the right time. How often does THAT happen? I must be nearly twice your age and not so nearly accomplished – despite being just as apparently sincere.
Here’s my question to you:
In all your political activism, I’m wondering if you’ve ever actually met an American political dissident? You know – the sincere person with an honest cause who has been summarily COINTELPRO-ED out of mainstream society, including in political activist communities? A person who, like Anna Mae Aquash, was snitch-jacketed and pushed out of activist communities by the people Ronald Reagan legally authorized to infiltrate the LEADERSHIP of non-profits, churches, political action groups in order to control their agendas waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1981?
The reasons I ask are two: (1) there’s a lot of work not getting done by established groups allegedly concerned with things like civil and human rights. By way of example, if you read Michelle Alexander’s 2011 book, “The New Jim Crow,” you see how completely unresponsive were the responses of both the racial civil rights groups and civil rights groups such as the ACLU to the war on brown and black people (and poor whites, just to make it look good) which has created mass incarceration — not merely by over-penalizing these populations but also by, en masse, jailing them for non-criminal behaviors. We are so far down this path now we actually have children being arrested in kindergarten! (2) yesterday’s demonstration nearly caused me a heart attack because it was so uncharacteristically of MLK, Jr. pointless and so evocative of the quintessential COINTELPRO tactic of getting people to discredit themselves so others won’t accord them any respect, or listen to their message (assuming, of course, they have one, which it appears this latest, Boston version of BLM does not).
I know all too well what awaits the majority of the 29 arrested in their future lives: being blacklisted, being slandered in every single community which they try to join, and, yes, even bioslavery, once they have been completely isolated — all legal under our many Nazi-esque laws in our closed country now.
I know because that was my crime — being astute enough to understand what was being done to me by this government’s many bioslavers, who gave me one of the AIDS that plagued this country at the same time the HIV/AIDS epidemic erupted, but the existence of which this government still denies. I have not had many people help me, but the one who did inform me I was a target — as I was becoming more and more ill with non-HIV/AIDS (also known as Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome) — knew well what he was talking about: his church (the original Harvard church, the church of John Winthrop, Emerson and Thoreau), of which he was the senior minister for 35 years, had been fire-bombed after it agreed to host a civil rights meeting. Fire marshals concluded it was arson, but no one investigated it further. His sanctuary, once rebuilt, later secretly became sanctuary to Central Americans fleeing the American-instigated and -backed wars there. I’m guessing, by the time I joined the church in the mid-1980s and began teaching in its church school, he had seen every kind of mishegas this government’s covert warriors could devise — especially since Harvard, as one of the oldest defense contractors in the country, devised many, including COINTELPRO, and still had many trustees and members associated with that bastion of fascism. (Yes — COINTELPRO was used on me there to force me out of my job and membership, by which time I was too ill to hold anyway. And 20 years later, it was used on me when I tried to join local activists just in marches, when I was assaulted by a fellow ‘activist’ on a bus ride to Washington while I tried to sleep.)
Harvey “That’s a book for someone else to write” Silverglate of the ACLU Boston Board, several leaders of the AFSC, Amnesty International, Moveon.org, the Arlington Street Church — no one wants to hear the truth about bioslavery and the new American political dissident, and my experience has shown me that because they work assiduously to suppress people like me and the truth I have to tell, Reagan’s E.O. 12333 is seamlessly embedded into every so-called liberal political action group in the country, which is why we will continue to have things such as mass incarceration, the modern form of — not Jim Crow — but slavery.
But how can I point out these blatant facts without sounding exactly like the government agent whose job it is to discredit your groups? Because I (1) am not now nor have I ever been part of any group’s leadership, which is what E.O 12333 was designed to infiltrate; and (2) I seem to be the only person genuinely concerned about the rank-and-file protesters (if there be any of them — pleading ‘not guilty’ in a situation where they ought to have stood mute??????!!!!!! I never!) and what will happen to them, where no one even talks about how their own discrediting of their ‘movement’ by their pointless yet violently confrontational behavior is government-created COINTELPRO — or questions the leaders who put them up to it, which is what ought to have been happening in EVERY activist community, everywhere since 1981 (as Prof. Brian Glick, author of “War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It advised), but hasn’t.
So — what’s been your experience following Glick’s advice, and coaching the rank-and-file to think for themselves before their led to discredit themselves and their ‘movement?’
John, am I being too impatient? I sort of expected my comment about Thursday’s BLM highway protesters to be posted with your thoughtful response by now.
My father, BTW, was IBEW nearly his entire working life. I don’t think he climbed all those high-tension towers in the blistering heat of the desert to make a living for this:
“Gene Branham, a union representative and longtime worker at a uranium production facility outside Cincinnati, talked about the network set up by the government [at the 10/21/94 Atomic Advisory Committee meeting in Cincinnati) to snatch the body parts of deceased workers before they were embalmed. The body snatching got so bad, he said, union members often set up vigils to make sure that the DOE didn’t grab the corpse before it was buried.”
Welsome, Eileen: The Plutonium Files – America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War [and beyond], “Harvest of Sorrow,” (Delta, 1999), p. 454.
“The physicians, all considered leaders in their field, were drawn from a variety of disciplines, including radiology, infectious diseases, pharmacology, and hematology. . . . many of the researchers spoke with startling frankness about past practices. . . . Doctors who were doing research wanted to be professors, and in order to be a professor, you have to have lots of publications, so your highest priority is to conduct research and publish it. Here’s a patient that you want to experiment on. . . . Is it going to contribute to your research if you inform that patient?”
Ibid, “Wrapped in the Flag,” p. 212
“As the oral histories conducted by the Advisory Committee show, the radiation experiments were not an anomaly. Unethical human experimentation occurred in many medical fields in the decades following World War II.”
Ibid., “Epilogue,” p. 486
“Thousands [! more like hundreds of thousands] of Americans were used as laboratory animals in radiation experiments funded by the federal government. Many of the subjects were not asked for their consent or given accurate information about the nature of these experiments. Some didn’t learn they or their loved ones had been used as guinea pigs until 1994 or 1995. Some still don’t know. [Meaning, they’re still bioslaves.]”
Ibid., p. 482
“Beyond the question of harm, beyond the evil of duplicity, the most unfortunate casualty of the Cold War radiation agenda was the simple capacity of individuals to make informed decisions about their own bodies. Unfortunately, the committee does not seem to lend the principle of self-determination the same value it accords some of the others in its list of moral precepts.”
Ibid, “Closing the Books,” p. 465
“Paul Beeson, a renowned physician who specialized in infectious diseases and immunology, said that attitude also prevailed among his colleagues. . . . ‘We were taking care of them and we felt that we had a right to get some return from them, since it wouldn’t be in professional fees and since our taxes were paying for their hospital bills.'”
Ibid., “Wrapped in the Flag,” p. 215
I don’t think this is what my father served two terms in the armed forces for, either.
Stephen Lynch perhaps never received the information about my blog that I gave to one of his campaign aides during his election campaign, and so I don’t know what he thinks of the many political dissidents who are not terrorists our government is terrorizing and will continue to do so.
But I sure would like to – especially since untold numbers of them are likely to be union workers’ families, like me.
Thank you for having the courage to post my comments, John. Perhaps one day, if ever I can find an advocate, we can meet and you can give me your thoughts on America’s new political dissident. Don’t hold your breath, though; I’ve been looking for 25 years, and the latest disease these government technocrat reprobates have turned my T cells into is cutaneous T cell lymphoma (you should see my skin!). So I’m not very well at the moment. So much for the free and open society!
John, one more thing (actually, two).
The reason I am in somewhat of a panic for young activists to be educated about what their political action means today is because no Commander-in-Chief has deemed the “covert war” that George W. Bush declared in February, 2002, “mission accomplished.” Not that ourmilitary dictatorship ever needed the cover of war to conduct covert war against its citizens; as you can see if you’re reading Glick’s book, he was successful in prosecuting his case against the CIA because the agency had previously promised Congress to stop using COINTELPRO against us – but never did. Now, of course, covert war is the order of the day thanks to the Patriot Act and millions of misguided Americans who’ve been deluded or extorted through their poverty to wage war on their fellow law-abiding citizens, proving what industrialist Jay Gould (one of the collaborators of The Business Plot against FDR) said, “I can always get one-half of the poor to kill the other half.”
Finally, I don’t want to exploit the recent tragic murder of Dr. Michael J. Davidson (may he rest in peace), but I do want to suggest that, as more and more people feel aggrieved by the medicoresearch industry, we may likely see more sad episodes such as this, especially in a society where the aggrieved feel they have nowhere else to turn for help in resolving their grievances (to say nothing of the society that values war and violence and gun culture above all else ). While violence is NEVER the answer, people who feel themselves abused by the system will find ways to vent their frustrations – not all of us, unfortunately, with our words.