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Comment by frozenlettuce | Hacker News Reader

it's a honeypot. my father was involved with a left wing party in the 80's in Brazil - not guerrila, just regular election-oriented stuff. He used to tell me that whenever someone showed up in gatherings with very extremist views people would be suspicious because that person was probably an agent trying to identify people with subversive behavior (by seeing who would agree with him).

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On the book it's much more than a honeypot, the regime depended on such extremists to exist, so it created them.

Of course, the regime on the 60's to 80's in Brazil didn't have that problem, because they had no shame from practicing the violence themselves and claiming it was from the other side when extremists failed to appear. It looks much more reliable to me.

We still create extremist personas, that don’t exist in real life. I know in France this tactic is used very often to trigger a demonstration of “the good guys”. When you interview the opponents, they’re 1 for 10.000 (=insignificant).

For example with feminism, when asked precise questions, you notice they are afraid of people that don’t exist (meanwhile the actual rapists are still free to roam).

The social changes we're seeing in the West, apart from aligning with the unfolding decadent logic of liberalism, are also supported by powerful groups, some of them government backed.

> For example with feminism, when asked precise questions, you notice they are afraid of people that don’t exist

Well, you will always find a couple freaks of every stripe somewhere. The job of any government looking to create fear is to give them disproportionate attention. Some may even fund the promotion of said freakishness because it either generates more panic, because it functions as a wedge for producing desired social changes that also grant more power to the government, etc. Pick your favorite subversive ideology today or mass phenomenon weakening moral norms and rights and you will find powerful backers. Control over information flow permits the impression that everyone is behind this ideology which causes people to conform for fear of sticking out. This normalizes the ideology, at least in the performative sense.

Well, to put it in perspective, I'm talking about trying to explode a bomb in a full stadium just to claim communists planted it.

But sure, characterizing your enemy as something other than humane is a common thing in propaganda.

Like Italy in the '70s? (Piazza Fontana, Piazza della Loggia, Bologna Station bombing, Italicus train...)

He's probably talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riocentro_attack the bomb exploded on the lap of one of perpetrators before the attack could take place

In eastern germany, there were many anti-government meetings and plans, and sometimes, literally all of people there were different stasi members reporting on other stasi members.

At some point in the late 1950s, the FBI had so thoroughly infiltrated the Communist Party of the USA that it could have taken it over. J. Edgar Hoover considered doing so, but apparently thought it would be more trouble than it was worth.

That’s interesting! Although maybe not surprising. I’d like to know more… do you have a source?

So like that Spideman meme where there’s a dozen copies pointing at each other? Except in real life?

Do you have a source for that?

that's a great plot for a comedy sketch

See "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G. K. Chesterton.

One of my favorite books. I like the Fr. Brown stories but TMWWT has stuck with me. The vivid richness of the descriptions could only have come from an artist. In a way he reminds me of Leon Garfield (The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris especially).

In The Netherlands, the Communist Party was infiltrated by the security service up to the point they were writing the monthly magazine.

The party visited CCP and had a group photo opportunity with the leader du jour. A picture which includes one or more of the spooks.

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