A Review: JFK vs. Allen Dulles by Greg Poulgrain
Before I digress slightly, let me state from the outset that the book by Greg Poulgrain that I am about to review is extraordinary by any measure. The story he tells is one you will read nowhere else, especially in the way he links the assassination of President Kennedy to former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the engineering by the latter of one of the 20th century’s most terrible mass murders. It will make your hair stand on end and should be read by anyone who cares about historical truth.
About twelve years ago I taught a graduate school course to Massachusetts State Troopers and police officers from various cities and towns. As part of the course material, I had created a segment on the history of the United States’ foreign policy, with particular emphasis on Indonesia.
No one in this class knew anything about Indonesia, not even where it was. These were intelligent, ambitious adults, eager to learn, all with college degrees. This was in the midst of the “war on terror” – i.e. war on Muslim countries – and the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. Almost all the class had voted for Obama and were aware they he had spent some part of his youth in this unknown country somewhere far away.
I mention this as a preface to this review of JFK vs. Dulles, because its subtitle is Battleground Indonesia, and my suspicion is that those students’ lack of knowledge about the intertwined history of Indonesia and the U.S. is as scanty today among the general public as it was for my students a dozen years ago.
This makes Greg Poulgrain’s remarkable book – JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia – even more important since it is a powerful antidote to such ignorance, and a reminder for those who have fallen, purposefully or not, into a state of historical amnesia that has erased the fact that the U.S. has committed systematic crimes that have resulted in the deaths of more than a million Indonesians and many more millions throughout the world over innumerable decades.
Such crimes against humanity have been hidden behind what the English playwright Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel Prize address called “a tapestry of lies.” Of such massive crimes, he said:
But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.
And when one examines the true history of such atrocities, again and again one comes up against familiar names of the guilty who have never been prosecuted. Criminals in high places whose crimes around the world from Vietnam to Chile to Cuba to Nicaragua to Argentina to Iraq to Libya to Syria, etc. have been – and continue to be – integral to American foreign policy as it serves the interests of its wealthy owners and their media mouthpieces.
In his brilliant new book on U.S./Indonesian history, Dr. Greg Poulgrain unweaves this tapestry of lies and sheds new light on the liars’ sordid deeds. He is an Australian expert on Indonesia whose work stretches back forty years, is a professor at University of the Sunshine Coast in Brisbane and has written four highly-researched book about Indonesia.
In JFK vs. Dulles, he exposes the intrigue behind the ruthless regime-change strategy in Indonesia of the longest-serving CIA director, Allen Dulles, and how it clashed with the policy of President John F. Kennedy, leading to JFK’s assassination, Indonesian regime change, and massive slaughter.
Poulgrain begins with this question:
Would Allen Dulles have resorted to assassinating the President of the United States to ensure that his ‘Indonesian strategy’ rather than Kennedy’s was achieved?
To which he answers: Yes.
But let me not get ahead of myself, for the long, intricate tale he tells is one a reviewer can only summarize, so filled is it with voluminous details. So I will touch on a few salient points and encourage people to buy and read this important book.
Indonesia’s Strategic Importance
The strategic and economic importance of Indonesia cannot be exaggerated. It is the world’s 4th most populous country (275+ million), is located in a vital shipping lane adjacent to the South China Sea, has the world’s largest Muslim population, has vast mineral and oil deposits, and is home in West Papua to Grasberg, the world’s largest gold mine and the second largest copper mine, primarily owned by Freeport McMoRan of Phoenix, Arizona, whose past board members have included Henry Kissinger, John Hay Whitney, and Godfrey Rockefeller.
Long a battleground in the Cold War, Indonesia remains vitally important in the New Cold War and the pivot to Asia launched by the Obama administration against China and Russia, the same antagonists Allen Dulles strove to defeat through guile and violence while he engineered coups at home and abroad. It is fundamentally important in the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific strategy for what it euphemistically calls a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” While not front-page news in the U.S., these facts make Indonesia of great importance today and add to the gravity of Poulgrain’s historical account.
JFK
Two days before President John Kennedy was publicly executed by the US national security state led by the CIA on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring. The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military. It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.
He had forecast his position in a dramatic speech in 1957 when, as a Massachusetts Senator, he told the Senate that he supported the Algerian liberation movement and opposed colonial imperialism worldwide. The speech caused an international uproar and Kennedy was harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson. But he was praised throughout the third world.
Poulgrain writes:
Kennedy was aiming for a seismic shift of Cold War alignment in Southeast Asia by bringing Indonesia ‘on side.’ As Bradley Simpson stated (in 2008), ‘One would never know from reading the voluminous recent literature on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Southeast Asia, for example, that until the mid-1960s most officials [in the US] still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam or Laos.
Of course JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles. And Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder on November 22, 1963. Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. Millions would die.
While the Indonesian mass slaughter of mainly poor rice farmers (members of the Communist Party – PKI) instigated by Allen Dulles began in October 1965, ten years later, starting in December 1975, the American installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965 when the CIA engineered the coup d’état that toppled President Sukarno. The American installed dictator Suharto would rule for thirty years of terror. The CIA considers this operation one of its finest accomplishments. It became known as “the Jakarta Method,” a model for future violent coups throughout Latin America and the world.
And in-between these U.S. engineered mass atrocities, came the bloody coup in Chile on September 11, 1973 and the ongoing colossal U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
Dulles’s Secret
What JFK didn’t know was that his plans for a peaceful resolution of the Indonesia situation and an easing of the Cold War were threatening a covert long-standing conspiracy engineered by Allen Dulles to effect regime change in Indonesia through bloody means and to exacerbate the Cold War by concealing from Kennedy the truth that there was a Sino-Soviet split. Another primary goal behind this plan was to gain unimpeded access to the vast load of natural resources that Dulles had kept secret from Kennedy, who thought Indonesia was lacking in natural resources. But Dulles knew that if Kennedy, who was very popular in Indonesia, visited Sukarno, it would deal a death blow to his plan to oust Sukarno, install a CIA replacement (Suharto), exterminate alleged communists, and secure the archipelago for Rockefeller controlled oil and mining interests, for whom he had fronted since the 1920s.
Reading Poulgrain’s masterful analysis, one can clearly see how much of modern history is a struggle for control of the underworld where lies the fuel that runs the megamachine – oil, minerals, gold, copper, etc. Manifest ideological conflicts, while garnering headlines, often bury the secret of this subterranean devil’s game.
The Discovery of Gold
His murder mystery/detective story begins with a discovery that is then kept secret for many decades. He writes:
In the alpine region of Netherlands New Guinea (so named under Dutch colonial rule – today, West Papua) in 1936, three Dutchmen discovered a mountainous outcrop of ore with high copper content and very high concentrations of gold. When later analyzed in the Netherlands, the gold (in gram/ton) proved to be twice that of Witwatersrand in South Africa, then the world’s richest gold mine, but this information was not made public.
The geologist among the trio, Jean Jacques Dozy, worked for the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company (NNGPM), ostensibly a Dutch-controlled company based in The Hague, but whose controlling interest actually lay in the hands of the Rockefeller family, as did the mining company, Freeport Sulphur (now Freeport McMoRan, one of whose Directors from 1988-95 was Henry Kissinger, Dulles’ and the Rockefeller’s close associate) that began mining operations there in 1966.
It was Allen Dulles, Paris-based lawyer in the employ of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, who in 1935 arranged the controlling interest in NNGPN for the Rockefellers. And it was Dulles, among a select few others, who, because of various intervening events, including WW II, that made its exploitation impossible, kept the secret of the gold mine for almost three decades, even from President Kennedy, who had worked to return the island to Indonesian control. JFK “remained uninformed of the El Dorado, and once the remaining political hurdles were overcome, Freeport would have unimpeded access.” Those “political hurdles” – i.e. regime change – would take a while to effect.
The Need to Assassinate President Kennedy
But first JFK would have to be eliminated, for he had brokered Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua/West Irian for Sukarno from the Dutch who had ties to Freeport Sulphur. Freeport was aghast at the potential loss of “El Dorado,” especially since they had recently had their world’s most advanced nickel refinery expropriated by Fidel Castro, who had named Che Guevara its new manager. Freeport’s losses in Cuba made access to Indonesia even more important. Cuba and Indonesia thus were joined in the deadly game of chess between Dulles and Kennedy, and someone would have to lose.
While much has been written about Cuba, Kennedy, and Dulles, the Indonesian side of the story has been slighted. Poulgrain remedies this with an exhaustive and deeply researched exploration of these matters. He details the deviousness of the covert operations Dulles ran in Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s. He makes it clear that Kennedy was shocked by Dulles’s actions, yet never fully grasped the treacherous genius of it all, for Dulles was always “working two or three stages ahead of the present.” Having armed and promoted a rebellion against Sukarno’s central government in 1958, Dulles made sure it would fail (shades of the Bay of Pigs to come) since a perceived failure served his long-term strategy. To this very day, this faux 1958 Rebellion is depicted as a CIA failure by the media. Yet from Dulles standpoint, it was a successful failure that served his long-term goals.
“This holds true,” Poulgrain has previously written, “only if the stated goal of the CIA was the same as the actual goal. Even more than five decades later, media analysis of the goal of The Outer Island rebels is still portrayed as a secession, as covert US support for ‘rebels in the Outer Islands that wished to secede from the central government in Jakarta’. The actual goal of Allen Dulles had more to do with achieving a centralized army command in such a way as to appear that the CIA backing for the rebels failed.”
Dulles’ the Devil
Dulles betrayed the rebels he armed and encouraged, just as he betrayed friend and foe alike during his long career. The rebellion that he instigated and planned to fail was the first stage of a larger intelligence strategy that would come to fruition in 1965-6 with the ouster of Sukarno (after multiple unsuccessful assassination attempts) and the institution of a reign of terror that followed. It was also when – 1966 – Freeport McMoRan began their massive mining in West Papua at Grasberg at an elevation of 14,000 feet in the Alpine region. Dulles was nothing if not patient; he had been at this game since WW I. Even after Kennedy fired him following the Bay of Pigs, his plans were executed, just as those who got in his way were. Poulgrain makes a powerful case that Dulles was the mastermind of the murders of JFK, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold (working with Kennedy for a peaceful solution in Indonesia and other places), and Congolese President Patrice Lumumba, the first president of a newly liberated Congo.
His focus is on why they needed to be assassinated (similar in this regard to James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable), though with the exception of Kennedy (since the how is well-known and obvious), he also presents compelling evidence as to the how. Hammarskjold, in many ways Kennedy’s spiritual brother, was a particularly powerful obstacle to Dulles’s plans for Indonesia and colonial countries throughout the Third World. Like JFK, he was committed to independence for indigenous and colonial peoples everywhere and was trying to implement his Swedish-style ‘third way,’ proposing a form of ‘muscular pacifism’.
Poulgrain argues correctly that if the UN Secretary General succeeded in bringing even half these colonial countries to independence, he would have transformed the UN into a significant world power and created a body of nations so large as to be a counter-weight to those embroiled in the Cold War.
He draws on documents from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu to show the connection between South Africa’s “Operation Celeste” and Dulles’s involvement in Hammarskjold’s murder in September 1961. While it was reported at the time as an accidental plane crash, he quotes former President Harry Truman saying, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him’.” Hammarskjold, like Kennedy, was intent on returning colonized countries to their indigenous inhabitants and making sure Papua was for Papuans, not Freeport McMoRan and imperial forces.
And Dulles sold his overt Indonesian strategy as being necessary to thwart a communist takeover in Indonesia. Cold War rhetoric, like “the war on terrorism” today, served as his cover. In this he had the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his side; they considered Kennedy soft on communism, in Indonesia and Cuba and everywhere else. Dulles’s covert agenda was to serve the interests of his power elite patrons.
While contextually different from David Talbot’s portrayal of Dulles in The Devil’s Chessboard, Poulgrain’s portrait of Dulles within the frame of Indonesian history is equally condemnatory and nightmarish. Both describe an evil genius ready to do anything to advance his agenda.
Dulles and George de Mohrenschildt
Poulgrain adds significantly to our understanding of JFK’s assassination and its aftermath by presenting new information about George de Mohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler in Dallas. Dulles had a long association with the de Mohrenschildt family, going back to 1920-21 when in Constantinople he negotiated with Baron Sergius Alexander von Mohrenschildt on behalf of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The Baron’s brother and business partner was George’s father. Dulles’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, was Standard Oil’s primary law firm. These negotiations on behalf of elite capitalist interests, in the shadow of the Russian Revolution, became the template for Dulles’s career: economic exploitation was inseparable from military concerns, the former concealed behind the anti-communist rhetoric of the latter. An anti-red thread ran through Dulles’s career, except when the red was the blood of all those whom he considered expendable. And the numbers are legion. Their blood didn’t matter.
Standard Oil is the link that joins Dulles [who controlled the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of JFK] and de Mohrenschildt. This connection was kept from the Warren Commission despite Dulles’ prominent role and the importance of the testimony of de Mohrenschildt. Poulgrain argues convincingly that de Mohrenschildt worked in “oil intelligence” before his CIA involvement, and that oil intelligence was not only Dulles’s work when he first met George’s father, Sergius, in Baku, but that that “oil intelligence” is a redundancy. The CIA, after all, is a creation of Wall Street and their interests have always been joined. The Agency was not formed to provide intelligence to US Presidents; that was a convenient myth used to cover its real purpose which was to serve the interests of investment bankers and the power elite, or those I call The Umbrella People who control the U.S.
While working in 1941 for Humble Oil (Prescott Bush was a major shareholder, Dulles was his lawyer, and Standard Oil had secretly bought Humble Oil sixteen years before), de Mohrenschildt was caught up in a scandal that involved Vichy (pro-Nazi) French intelligence in selling oil to Germany. This was similar to the Dulles’s brothers and Standard Oil’s notorious business dealings with Germany.
It was an intricate web of the high cabal with Allen Dulles at the center.
In the midst of the scandal, de Mohrenschildt, suspected of being a Vichy French intelligence agent, “disappeared” for a while. He later told the Warren Commission that he decided to take up oil drilling, without mentioning the name of Humble Oil that employed him again, this time as a roustabout.
“Just when George needed to ‘disappear’, Humble Oil was providing an oil exploration team to be subcontracted to NNGPM – the company Allen Dulles had set up five years earlier to work in Netherlands New Guinea.” Poulgrain makes a powerful circumstantial evidence case (certain documents are still unavailable) that de Mohrenschildt, in order to avoid appearing in court, went incommunicado in Netherlands New Guinea in mid-1941 where he made a record oil discovery and received a $10,000 bonus from Humble Oil.
“Avoiding adverse publicity about his role in selling oil to Vichy France was the main priority; for George, a brief drilling adventure in remote Netherlands New Guinea would have been a timely and strategic exit.” And who best to help him in this escape than Allen Dulles – indirectly, of course; for Dulles’s modus operandi was to maintain his “distance” from his contacts, often over many decades.
In other words, Dulles and de Mohrenschildt were intimately involved for a long time prior to JFK’s assassination. Poulgrain rightly claims that “the entire focus of the Kennedy investigation would have shifted had the [Warren] Commission become aware of the 40-year link between Allen Dulles and de Mohrenschildt.” Their relationship involved oil, spying, Indonesia, Nazi Germany, the Rockefellers, Cuba, Haiti, etc. It was an international web of intrigue that involved a cast of characters stranger than fiction, a high cabal of the usual and unusual operatives.
Two unusual ones are worth mentioning: Michael Fomenko and Michael Rockefeller. The eccentric Fomenko – aka “Tarzan” – is the Russian-Australian nephew of de Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jean Fomenko. His arrest and deportation from Netherlands New Guinea in 1959, where he had travelled from Australia in a canoe, and his subsequent life, are fascinating and sad. It’s the stuff of a bizarre film. It seems he was one of those victims who had to be silenced because he knew a secret about George’s 1941 oil discovery that was not his to share. “In April 1964, at the same time George de Mohrenschildt was facing the Warren Commission – a time when any publicity regarding Sele 40 [George’s record oil discovery] could have changed history – it was decided that electro-convulsive therapy would be used on Michael Fomenko.” He was then imprisoned at the Ipswich Special Mental Hospital.
Equally interesting is the media myth surrounding the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, Nelson’s son and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who was allegedly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea in 1961. His tale became front-page news, “a media event closed off to any other explanation and the political implications of his disappearance became an ongoing tragedy for the Papuan people.” To this very day, the West Papuan people, whose land was described by Standard Oil official Richard Archbold in 1938 as “Shangri-la,” are fighting for their independence.
The Sino-Soviet Split
While the gold in West Papua was very important to Allen Dulles, his larger goal was to keep the Cold War blazing by concealing the dispute between China and the Soviet Union from Kennedy while instigating the mass slaughter of “communists” that would lead to regime change in Indonesia, with Major-General Suharto, his ally, replacing President Sukarno. In this he was successful. Poulgrain says:
Not only did Dulles fail to brief Kennedy on the Sino-Soviet dispute early in the presidency, but he also remained silent about the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing to wield influence over the PKI or win its support. In geographical terms, Beijing regarded Indonesia as its own backyard, and winning the support of the PKI would give Beijing an advantage in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The numerical growth of the PKI was seen by Moscow and Beijing for its obvious political potential. Dulles was also focused on the PKI, but his peculiar skill in political intelligence turned what seemed inevitable on its head. The size of the party [the Indonesian Communist Party was the largest outside the Sino-Soviet bloc] became a factor he used to his advantage when formulating his wedge strategy – the greater the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing over the PKI, the more intense would be the recrimination once the PKI was eliminated.
The slaughter of more than a million poor farmers was a trifle to Dulles.
The September 30, 1965 Movement
In the early hours of October 1, 1965, a fake coup d’état was staged by the CIA’s man, Major-General Suharto. It was announced that seven generals had been arrested and would be taken to President Sukarno “to explain the rumor that they were planning a military coup on October 5.” Suharto declared himself the head of the army. Someone was said to have killed the generals. In the afternoon, a radio announcement was made calling for the Sukarno government to be dismissed. This became Suharto’s basis for blaming it on the communists and the so-called September 30 Movement, and he gave the order to kill the PKI leaders. This started the massive bloodshed that would follow.
With one hand, Suharto crushed the Movement, accusing the PKI of being the ultimate instigator of an attempt to oust Sukarno, and with the other hand he feigned to protect the “father of the Indonesian revolution,” while actually stripping Sukarno of every vestige of political support.
When the generals’ bodies were recovered a few days after Oct 1, Suharto falsely claimed the PKI women had tortured and sexually mutilated them as part of some primitive sexual orgy. This heinous perversion of power was the start of the Suharto era. In total control of the media, he manipulated popular wrath to call for revenge.
If this confuses you, it should, because the twisted nature of this fabricated coup was actually part of a real coup in slow motion aimed at ousting Sukarno and replacing him with the CIA’s man Suharto. This occurred in early 1967 after the mass slaughter of communists. It was a regime change cheered on by the American mass media as a triumph over communist aggression.
New Evidence of U.S. Direct Involvement in the Slaughter
Poulgrain has spent forty years interviewing participants and researching this horrendous history. His detailed research is quite amazing. And it does take concentration to follow it all, as with the machinations of Dulles, Suharto, et al.
Some things, however, are straightforward. For example, he documents how, during the height of the slaughter, two Americans – one man and one woman – were in Klaten (PKI headquarters in central Java) supervising the Indonesian army as they killed the PKI. These two would travel back and forth by helicopter from a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet that was off the coast of Java. The plan was that the more communists killed, the greater would be the dispute between Moscow and Beijing, since they would accuse each other for the tragedy, which is exactly what they did. This was the wedge that was mentioned in the Rockefeller Brothers Panel Report from the late 1950s in which Dulles and Henry Kissinger both participated.
The hatred drummed up against these poor members of the Communist Party was extraordinary in its depravity. In addition to Suharto’s lies about communist women mutilating the generals’ bodies, a massive campaign of hatred was directed against these landless peasants who made up the bulk of the PKI. False Cold War radio broadcasts from Singapore stirred up hostility toward them, declaring them atheists, etc. Wealthy Muslim landowners – the 1 per cent – made outrageous charges to assist the army’s slaughter. Poulgrain tells us:
Muhammadiyah preachers were broadcasting from mosques that all who joined the communist party must be killed, saying they are the ‘lowest order of infidel, the shedding of whose blood is comparable to killing a chicken.’
For those Americans especially, who think this history of long ago and far away does not touch them, its compelling analysis of how and why Allen Dulles and his military allies would want JFK dead since he was a threat to national security as they defined it in their paranoid anti-communist ideology might be an added impetus to read this very important book. Indonesia may be far away geographically, but it’s a small world. Dulles and Kennedy had irreconcilable differences, and when Dulles was once asked in a radio interview what he would do to someone who threatened national security, he matter-of-factually said, “I’d kill him.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed.
I would be remiss if I didn’t say that the introduction to JFK vs. Dulles by Oliver Stone and the afterward by James DiEugenio are outstanding. They add excellent context and clarity to a really great and important book.
February 27, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | CIA, Human rights, Indonesia, JFK Assassination, United States |
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R. James Woolsey, who served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995 under President Clinton, has just come out with a new book about the Kennedy assassination that is straight out of a 1964 time warp. Co-authored by the late Ion Mihai Pacepa, a two-star general of the secret police in communist Romani who later defected to the United States, the book, entitled Operation Dragon, posits an old 1964 conspiracy theory that some people in the U.S. national-security establishment were peddling back in 1964 — that the communists conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK.
In the process, Woolsey does what the mainstream press has done for 60 years — he simply ignores the mountain of circumstantial evidence that assassination researchers have uncovered since the 1960s that inexorably points the finger of guilt at the U.S. national-security establishment, which was conducting all sorts of Cold War national-security regime-change operations in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.
That was perhaps the biggest benefit of the shroud of national-security state secrecy that was imposed on the Kennedy assassination. The malefactors knew that if they could just keep a secrecy cap on the assassination and its aftermath, there was a good chance that their assassination and cover-up could succeed.
There is no better evidence of this phenomenon than the autopsy that the U.S. national-security establishment performed on the body of President Kennedy just a few hours after his death.
What does Woolsey say about the autopsy? He says nothing. He doesn’t mention it at all, just as the mainstream press never mentions it. Total, absolute silence. Instead, Woolsey keeps his mind firmly embedded in an old 1964 assassination conspiracy theory — that those evil communists conspired to kill President Kennedy because they hated him so much.
Why is the JFK autopsy so important? Because it provides a key to understanding the who of the assassination. The U.S. national-security establishment knew that. That’s why military officials encased the autopsy in strict national-security state secrecy from the very beginning.
As Woolsey knows, there is one irrefutable fact in the Kennedy assassination: the autopsy on Kennedy’s body was carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment. That is, not by the Soviets. Not by Nikita Khrushchev. Not by the communists. Not by Fidel Castro. Not by the Mafia. Not by the Mossad. It was conducted solely by the U.S. national-security establishment.
A shroud of national-security state secrecy was immediately over the autopsy, which was conducted just a few hours after the assassination. Participants were told never to reveal what they had seen. They were forced to sign secret written secrecy oaths. They were threatened with severe action if they ever talked.
The secrecy worked for years and even decades. But assassination researchers, seeing mysteries and anomalies arise in the circumstances surrounding the autopsy, kept pressing, Finally, in the 1990s — thirty years after the assassination — the Assassination Records Review Board partially broken through the dam of autopsy secrecy.
The result? As I detail in my two books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 and as Douglas Horne, who served on the ARRB, details in his five-volume work Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, the circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly establishes a fraudulent autopsy conducted by the U.S. national-security establishment.
Why would the national-security establishment conduct a fraudulent autopsy? There can be only one reason — cover-up. What other purpose would a fraudulent autopsy serve?
‘The natural question arises: Who would the Pentagon and the CIA be covering up for? Certainly not for the communists or the Soviets. As Woolsey documents so well, the Pentagon and the CIA hated the communists and the Soviets. As Woolsey himself would readily acknowledge, there is no reasonable possibility at all that the Pentagon and the CIA would have wanted to cover up an assassination of a U.S. president by the Reds, who, the Pentagon and the CIA steadfastly maintained throughout the Cold War, were coming to get us as part of a supposed international communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow.
Keep in mind, after all, that the plan to conduct a fraudulent autopsy would have had to originate prior to the assassination itself, especially since it was launched immediately on the death of President Kennedy. That was when a team of Secret Service agents, brandishing guns and implicitly threatening the use of deadly force on Parkland Hospital medical personnel, forced their way out of Parkland with Kennedy’s body. Saying that they were operating on orders, they refused to permit the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, to conduct the autopsy, as Texas law required. They took the body to Dallas Love Field, where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. Johnson then took the body and placed it in the hands of the military in Maryland.
How could they have launched their autopsy scheme without knowing who had conducted the assassination? That’s how we know they did it. The fraudulent autopsy had to have been built into the assassination plan itself.
Of course the national-security establishment’s fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body is the last thing that James Woolsey is going to discuss in his new book on the Kennedy assassination. He’s still stuck back in 1964, when some in the U.S. national-security establishment were peddling the false conspiracy theory blaming the Kennedy assassination on the Reds.
February 25, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Timeless or most popular | CIA, JFK Assassination, United States |
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“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.
This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience. We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.
Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.
For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket. All this is documented and not disputed. It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.
With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive. It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves. Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.
Just today The New York Times had this headline: Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims. Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.” This is guilt by headline. It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook that owns Instagram. That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.
This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.
Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.
First, the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the “allegedly” liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read” the “allegedly” conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc. They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It’s business driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people’s ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically. Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.
Secondly, the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times, who now employ “tattletales and censors,” people who are power hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned. Greenwald says, ‘’They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous ‘disinformation.’” Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.
In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.
I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so. If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core. For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many. The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.
To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense. These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.
In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations. Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.
Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc. The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.
That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.
But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.
They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell. It is a symbiotic relationship. As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the “financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc. They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.
As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in “The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,” says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell, “There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director.” It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA. He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his “Mighty Wurlitzer” was “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.” This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA’s messages.
Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short. Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey. Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.
The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case. His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.
To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues. To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.
This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassinations of his father and uncle, JFK. It is why his wonderful recent book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces. These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be. They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father’s ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.
There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi. He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual. The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.
To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now they need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – “This far and no further” – and jump over it. That’s where the true stories lie. That’s when they’ll see the worms squirm.
February 13, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | CIA, COVID-19 Vaccine, Gates Foundation, New York Times, United States, WHO |
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Back in 1982, in a column I was writing in a medical journal, I raised the question of whether or not public drinking water supplies could be polluted with female hormone residues which might affect the development of male babies. I also said that our drinking water could be contaminated with tranquillisers and other drugs.
I have now discovered evidence suggesting that our drinking water might be contaminated with vaccines.
But, first, let me explain about the drugs. Back nearly 40 years ago I tried to get television and radio journalists to take up the problem. And I tried to interest politicians in the topic too. The BBC’s Panorama programme was interested but too frightened by the idea and quickly decided that it was far too controversial a subject. Maybe they were worried it would upset the Government.
However, it wasn’t just the possibility of female hormones – residues from the contraceptive pill – which might be causing problems which worried me.
My fear was built on several pieces of information.
* Fact one: More and more people are taking increasingly powerful medicinal drugs such as antibiotics, painkillers, tranquillisers, sleeping tablets, hormones (particularly those in the contraceptive pill) and steroids. Huge numbers of people take drugs every day. Not many people go through a whole year without taking at least one course of tablets. Half of the population will take a prescribed medicine today (and tomorrow and the day after that). And on top of the prescribed drugs there are all the non-prescription drugs that are taken – pills bought over the chemists counter.
* Fact two: Many drugs are excreted in the urine when the body has finished with them. For example, up to 75% of a dose of a tranquilliser may be excreted in the urine. With other drugs the figure may be as high as 90%. Some drugs which are degraded can chemically react with the environment and become active again.
* Fact three: After going through standard purification procedures, waste water is often discharged into fresh water rivers.
* Fact four: Drinking water supplies are often taken from fresh water rivers – the same rivers into which the waste water has been discharged.
* Fact five: Water purification programmes were designed many years ago – before doctors started prescribing vast quantities of drugs for millions of patients and before the problem of removing drug residues had been thought of.
It seemed clear to me that anyone who turned on a tap and made a cup of tea could be getting a cocktail containing leftover chemicals from other people’s tranquillisers, sleeping pills, antibiotics, contraceptive pills, heart drugs, anti-arthritis pills and so on.
Back in 1982 I wrote that: ‘with an increasing number of people taking drugs there must be a risk that the drinking water supplies will eventually become contaminated so heavily that people using ordinary drinking water will effectively be taking drugs. Or have we already reached that point: and are people who drink water in certain areas of the country already passively involved in daily drug taking?’
Back in 1982 no one seemed to know the answer to that frightening question.
And today I still don’t know the answer. Does anyone?
Are you an involuntary drug taker? Could you be addicted to any of the drug residues which might be in your drinking water? Could you be taking regular supplies of bits and pieces of other people’s antibiotics? Are you taking contraceptive hormone leftovers? Could these drug residues be affecting your fertility? Could drug residues affect the health of any unborn children?
No one in the Government seems concerned by these questions.
I think they should be.
It may soon be too late, for evidence is already appearing to suggest that my original fears were accurate.
A publication produced by the Environmental Agency in the UK, reported that 57% of the roach in one river had changed sex. Chemicals in treated sewage and factory waste were blamed for upsetting natural fish hormones. The researchers found that the fish were more likely to be affected when they spent time close to a sewage outlet. They also found that fish who lived upstream (away from the sewage outlet) were much less likely to be affected. Apparently, the chemicals in sewage which are most likely to affect fish are female hormones such as oestrogens.
While they were studying lake water for pesticide contamination, Swiss chemists were surprised to find that the lake was polluted with clofibric acid – a drug which is used to lower blood cholesterol levels. The possibility that this could have been caused by industrial spillage was ruled out when it was established that clofibric acid is not manufactured in Switzerland. When the chemists checked other lakes and rivers they found low concentrates of the drug everywhere.
When researchers in Germany started looking for clofibric acid they found the drug in all sorts of water supplies – including tap water.
Intrigued, the researchers looked harder.
And they found lipid-lowering drugs, analgesics (including diclofenac and ibuprofen), beta blocker heart drugs, antibiotics, chemotherapy drugs and hormones. They found all these drugs in water bodies and in drinking water. And they found that the concentrations were highest in heavily populated areas. Once they had ruled out industrial spillage the researchers realised that the drugs had come from human body wastes.
Exactly what I had predicted in 1982.
The chances are that no one knows what drugs can be found in your drinking water. Why? Because no one is looking. Most governments do not monitor water supplies to see if they contain drug residues. Nor do they require anyone else to do this.
But there seems little doubt that drinking water is now heavily contaminated with drug residues. And the long-term effect of all this is difficult to estimate. Minute amounts of antibiotic in drinking water can affect bacteria in many different ways. They can surely have a dramatic effect on the development of antibiotic-resistant organisms.
How are the drugs in your drinking water affecting your health? Is your daily cocktail of tranquillisers, antibiotics, hormones, steroids, chemotherapy drugs, heart drugs, painkillers and so on making you ill? How do all these drugs interact? Are they likely to be at least partly responsible for the way the incidence of cancer is increasing? Are they affecting your immune system? Are the hormones affecting fertility?
No one knows.
And no one in authority seems to want to know.
Maybe they are frightened to discover the truth.
Maybe politicians wanted our drinking water to be contaminated with female hormones and tranquillisers. Maybe it is these contaminants which explain why so few people are standing up to evil, totalitarian governments. Female hormones, for example, have feminised men – and turned them into wimps. And there have been many suggestions that tranquillisers be put into drinking water to quieten people down. And, of course, much of our drinking water is already dangerously laced with fluoride.
Sadly, you can’t remove the drug residues by boiling your water before drinking it. Indeed, this could make things worse because distillation concentrates the drug residues. And I don’t believe that filters will remove the drug residues.
Meanwhile, politicians around the world now drink spring water, at taxpayers’ expense; water which is bottled at source before it has too much chance of becoming contaminated. And now, as promised, back to vaccines.
I have discovered another scary fact about our drinking water.
In 1995, the Journal of Clinical Microbiology published a paper entitled, `Detection of Measles Virus RNA in Urine Specimens from Vaccine recipients’.
Researchers from the Division of Viral and Rickettsial Diseases at the National Center for Infectious Diseases in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, discovered that measles virus RNA was detected in urine samples from four young adults.
What does this mean?
Does it mean that the covid-19 mRNA vaccine may soon be found in our drinking water?
I don’t know the answer. But I don’t think anyone else knows the answer either.
Finally, in case you are interested, I drink bottled water.
Oh, and one other thing.
Will blood transfusions be contaminated with vaccine residues?
I ask in case anyone knows.
I certainly don’t.
This article is partly based on two of Vernon Coleman’s books.
1.`Superbody’ – now available as an eBook and a paperback on Amazon. The book is subtitled `The Secret of Survival in the 21st Century’ and includes sections on How to Boost Your Immune System, The 101 Best Foods in the World and How to Increase Your Resistance to Infection and Disease.
2. `Meat Causes Cancer and more Food for Thought’ is also available as an eBook and a paperback on Amazon. The book contains details about the fluoridation of our drinking water.
Copyright Vernon Coleman February 9th 2021
February 11, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular |
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As the spirit of patriotism and belief in scientific and technological progress was slowly suffocated throughout the Cold War, the governing class that Russell represented sunk its talons into civilization ever more deeply.
Ninety years ago, Bertrand Russell wrote a book entitled The Scientific Outlook.
In it, the philosopher and sometimes imperial grand strategist made the point that society has become far too complex to be left to democratic institutions. In the modern age of advanced warfare, only a scientific dictatorship could be trusted to lead society, while the thoughtless masses of human cattle should be given the illusion of democracy and freedom. Sovereign nation states must be superseded by world government and thus two parallel cultures, two educations and two moralities must be shaped.
Russell laid out his grim worldview of a master/slave dominated order in the following terms:
“The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless and contented. Of these qualities, probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psycho-analysis, behaviorism and biochemistry will be brought into play… all the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called “cooperative” i.e.: to do exactly what every body else is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished will be scientifically trained out of them.”
For the elites in Russell’s dystopic world, a different role was envisioned:
“Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world state and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous, and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific techniques and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements”.
Twenty three years after writing this, Russell creepily updated his work in the form of a book called The Impact of Science on Society (1953). It was here that the celebrated mathematician and philosopher looked upon the wonderful advances in mass entertainment, psychotropic drugs, and behaviorism saying:
“It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment… This subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray.”
The challenge faced by Russell and his co-thinkers was not so much found in the realm of ivory tower theorizing, but rather in the practical world. For how would it be possible to induce a society to accept such conditions when their targets had only recently sacrificed so much to stop global fascism and eugenics during WWII?
The Post-War Takeover
As the spirit of patriotism and belief in scientific and technological progress was slowly suffocated throughout the long night of nuclear terror that was the Cold War, the governing class that Russell represented sunk its talons into civilization ever more deeply.
The target? Sovereign nation states and the cultural dynamics that brought these pesky new institutions into being after the 14th Century dark age which enshrined both the general welfare and the sacredness of the individual into statecraft and law. It was this movement that drove the explosion of new discoveries (and population growth) after the 15th century golden renaissance, leading up to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and later American Revolution. This was a fire that kept oligarchs up at night and which no amount of water could permanently destroy… and they tried.
During the early decades of the post-WWII age, there was resistance of course. Leaders resistant to the renewed emergence of imperialism stood in defense of humanity’s right to access the Four Freedoms made famous by Franklin Roosevelt.
Dag Hammarskjöld, Enrico Mattei, John Kennedy, MLK, Bobby Kennedy and many other moral leaders were quickly snuffed out as the engines of industrial progress were converted into factories for never-ending wars and cheap consumer goods. Large scale infrastructure and programs of scientific exploration into space and the properties of the atom increasingly fell out of practice as society was compelled to adapt to a new paradigm in the early 1970s.
While Russell spoke well of science, it was never the sort of science that would end poverty or war to which he referred, but rather sciences of entertainment, population control, and behaviorism.
The Post-Industrial Technetronic Age: Brzezinski and Holdren
Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a book in 1970 entitled Between Two Ages which served as a manifesto for the new Trilateral Commission which was created in 1973 under his lead. In this book, Brzezinski restated Russell’s vision in his own words:
“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”
At this time, a new social order was unleashed as the dollar was floated on the speculative markets killing the gold-reserve industrial era of Bretton Woods in 1971, tying the U.S. dollar to oil prices in 1973 and ushering in a new deregulated epoch of “everything goes” monetarism, and post-industrial consumerism. Foreseeing this emerging unbounded age of unreason, Brzezinski wrote:
“In the technetronic society the trend seems to be toward aggregating the individual support of millions of unorganized citizens, who are easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, and effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.”
Another figure from this nest of sociopaths emerging onto the scene during these years was a young John Holdren whose 1977 book Ecoscience (co-authored with his mentor Paul Ehrlich) outlined his future dystopia with bone chilling detail saying:
“Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime- sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all-natural resources, renewable or non-renewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus, the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market. The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”
While the late Zbigniew Brzezinski’s career as a senior diplomat, architect of weaponized radical Islam, and later advisor to Barack Obama are well known, lesser known is the person and career of John Holdren.
Resetting Civilization
From 2009-2017 Holdren acted as “science czar” under the Obama administration where the respected climate scientist spearheaded the defunding of NASA space exploration programs, the collapse of nuclear investments, the killing of fusion power and the re-direction of billions of dollars into “sustainable” green energy fiascos such as Solyndra.
Today, Holdren is ecstatic that he might be admitted back into the corridors of power now that the “aberration” of Trump has been removed, and a “scientifically” managed governance agenda is being quickly brought back online.
On January 27, 2021, Biden signed into effect a “Memorandum on Restoring Trust in Government Through Scientific Integrity and Evidence-based Policy Making” which revives the earlier 2009 and 2010 science policy memoranda authored by Holdren. This reform calls for imposing a new Director of the Office of Science and Technology in Policy as a sort of Grand Referee to ensure that “evidence-based” policy making are enforced across all departments and sub-departments of state. Expert councils such as the Chief Data Officers’ Council and Evaluation Officer Councils will be created and empowered to keep all science in alignment with behaviorist operating systems. Biden’s memorandum literally calls for “using behavioral science insights to better service the American people” to define the decision making of the system as a whole.
It is here that the ugliness of Behaviorism and the collapse of real standards of scientific practice show their ugly heads. Many terms and techniques used by Russell’s modern governing class are consciously obscured or sanitized for the lower classes and so I would like to take a bit of time to dwell on two of the most important terms here: 1) Evidence Based Decision making and 2) Economic Behaviorism.
Evidence-Based Lying: Case Study #1
“Evidence-based decision making” may seem harmless on the surface. After all, why would we want to take actions without being informed by “evidence”? However, when one begins to scratch the surface of this term and its real-world applications, a very different picture emerges.
A 2009 article by Dr. Cathy Helgason MD pointed out that evidence-based practices (in her case, those shaping the medical practice field), stating:
“It has become clear to me that evidence-based medicine either was in its original intent, or has become, a budget cutting and potential population-control measure. Because it is wrapped up in scientific-sounding rhetoric, it has captured the attention of well-meaning physicians who want to incorporate science into their decisions, and has been sold to the public as an advancement in care.”
In her article, Dr. Helgason points out that doctors conditioned to follow such standards lose their fundamentally human ability to judge, diagnose and treat diseases which often lurk below the surface of data which computer models might pick up and transmit as probabilistic “answers” for what may or may not be wrong with a patient.
As one example, take the case of thousands of coronavirus patients whose intubations induced their deaths since “evidence-based” protocols (a LiveScience analysis reported that 9 out of 10 patients intubated on ventilators ended up dying in one major New York hospital). When frontline doctors like Dr. Kyle Sidell began making the case that COVID-19 symptoms are more akin to high altitude sickness (wherein alveoli in the lungs fail) rather than the typical flu-based respiratory problems, he was silenced for his “heresy”, and intubation was continued under the guise of “evidence-based best practice”.
When looking at how COVID-19 mortality statistics are gathered, one should not be surprised to discover that World Health Organization expert councils have mandated that all deaths be labelled “COVID-19” even if the patient died of heart attack, brain hemorrhage or broken neck while having tested positive for COVID-19. How does that affect the reading of the statistics which experts are projecting into the mass psyche?
Evidence-Based Lying: Case Study #2
Another example of the misuse of statistics can be found in large scale energy policy reforms being driven by the apparent need to lower world temperatures by 1.5 degrees in 30 years.
Sounds pretty noble right?
But what if the data sets being used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s computer models are flawed? What if vast swaths of data sets and higher astrophysical variables shaping climate change are being overlooked in the effort to transform mass behavior in accord with a technocratic elite?
What if the experts deciding which data sets used by climate models are consciously or unconsciously ignoring all data which disproves the conclusions built into their models, as Michael Mann’s now infamously fraudulent hockey stick chart demonstrates? What if increased cooling in Antarctica is ignored while increasingly CO2 detectors near active CO2-spewing volcanic zones like Mauna Loa are kept active? Can this data still be trusted? What about the 2009 and 2011 leaked emails from East Anglia climate scientists that shape all IPCC models demonstrated a vast coverup of data to justify apocalyptic outcomes for political agendas?
What if a closer inspection of CO2:Temperature relationship actually ends up showing that climate change does not follow but is rather followed by CO2 variability? What other factors cause the heating or cooling of the earth other than carbon dioxide? How could we ever find out if we are told the question isn’t worth asking because the scientific debate is over?
While contemplating these matters, the question should always emerge:
Who would benefit by all this sleight of hand? Who would want humanity to falsely adopt fearful and self-loathing states of mind in order to drastically alter its behavior?
Could feelings of mass-fear and shame possibly render humankind more pliable and perhaps more inclined to acquiesce to a Great Reset and Green Central Bankers’ dictatorship?
As Bill Gates’ favorite book How to Lie with Statistics (1954) makes clear: “a well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s Big Lie; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.”
Since statistics and evidence-based thinking are the bedrocks of Behaviorism, and since the Behaviorists of the Obama era are consolidating their power under Biden, it is now worth saying a few words about Behaviorism.
Behaviorism: Fascism By Another Name
Ignoring the fact that Behaviorism has gotten a lot of positive press in recent years (one of the leading behaviorists Richard Thaler who co-authored Nudge with fellow behaviorist Cass Sunstein, was even awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2017), it isn’t an exaggeration to say that the school of thought is fundamentally fascist in its nature.
Why do I say this?
Well, the easy answer is to re-read Holdren’s own words from 1977 cited above and trace out his life’s policy actions. That’s the sledgehammer answer.
The more subtle but useful answer can be found in Holdren’s recent December 2020 interview on science policy in the upcoming Biden Administration (wherein he most certainly hopes to have a role):
“It is very important that, in talking about these matters, scientists separate what they know or believe as scientists from what they prefer as citizens in terms of public policy. It’s very important to distinguish between issues of fact and issues of values and preferences.”
In Holdren’s eyes, “science” and “values” are two opposing worlds.
The unscientific person might think naively that depopulation is atrocious or that a society run by an unelected master class of technicians is offensive to morality, but that is just our “subjective pollution” talking. The priest of science knows that statistical data sets and computer models are the best and only substitute for 1) mapping out and 2) manipulating reality.
For a behaviourist, subjective phenomena such as Love, Justice, Beauty, Free Will and Intentions are non-scientific pollution.
The educated behaviourist seeks only to find materialistic explanations for measurable behavior without resorting to unscientific concepts like “soul” or “mind” or “God” (these concepts being transcendental, immeasurable, unweighable and thus non-existent).
For similar reasons, concepts like “universals”, “Truth”, “Good”, “Evil” are also considered deplorable non-entities to the “scientific thinker” of Holdren’s calibre. Metaphysical gobbledygook and nothing more.
A Word on B.F. Skinner
The founder of modern radical Behaviorism, B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) was himself very candid about the scientific management of society when he wrote “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” (1971) saying that the behavioral scientist of the new post-industrial age must avoid at all costs concepts like dignity, freedom, good or evil:
“We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environments and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. We do not need to try to discover what personality, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions or the other prerequisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior”.
All that exists in this cold soulless world are clusters of ants calling themselves “human”, propelled by electro-neural signals masquerading as free will and urges for sex, dominance over the weak and sensual pleasure.
In a typical case of oligarchical projection, Skinner says clearly:
“we must remember that wars begin in the minds of men, that there is something suicidal in man – a death instinct perhaps – which leads to war, and that man is aggressive by nature”.
And so, you see, in the minds of Skinner, Holdren, Brzezinski, or any of the giddy technocrats managing the Great Reset, it isn’t “empires” or “oligarchs striving to enslave humanity” which are the causes of humanity’s problems.
The enemy of man is in fact man himself.
And for this unfortunate “fact”, it is the duty of the elite to save mankind from himself.
If that means cleansing society of its traditional values that have deluded him into believing that such notions as Family, Nation, God, Progress or Soul are somehow sacred, then so be it. In his vicious tautology, the behaviorist high priest concludes that these ideas must be cleansed- for if they were not destroyed, then humanity would forever resist a return to feudalism under a scientific dictatorship.
Contact the author: Canadianpatriot1776@tutamail.com
February 7, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Human rights |
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A determination from the OPCW, that civilians in Douma, Syria were killed by chlorine gas canisters dropped from the sky, was undermined after internal documents revealed manipulation of the conclusions made by the expert team of inspectors who actually visited the site in question.
UK-based firm Bellingcat has come under heavy criticism for leaving out key information from it’s new book, regarding the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) whistleblower leaks in relation to the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria.
“The book [We Are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People] excludes key evidence, shown in [my Twitter] thread, that has emerged from both OPCW sources and leaked documents regarding how attempts were made to manipulate the Douma investigation and the scientific flaws in the final report”, Dr Piers Robinson of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies explained in response to a request for comment.Robinson laid out a detailed twitter thread accusing Bellingcat, which is credibly suspected of being linked to Western intelligence agencies, of whitewashing “fraudulent conduct within the OPCW” and engaging in an exercise in “deception though omission”.
The omissions from Bellingcat’s book mean that readers could be forgiven for never knowing that the controversy surrounding the OPCW report began when a member of the Fact Finding Mission to Douma discovered that their original interim report, agreed by the inspection team, was modified to make it look like chemical attack had occurred despite their conclusions to the contrary.
Bellingcat’s book also apparently omits reference to a panel discussion, with the former head of the OPCW, organised by the Courage Foundation, an organisation that supports whistleblowers.
Robinson outlines in his thread that the Courage Foundation panel “learned that an engineering study, sidelined by OPCW management, indicated that the damage seen [on a] chlorine cylinder and roof were not consistent with each other”.
Additionally, the panel learned that “a toxicology report by NATO chemical warfare experts had been suppressed come the final OPCW report”. This toxicology report “concluded that observed symptoms [of certain victims] were not consistent with chlorine gas poisoning them where they were found”
The omissions in the book continued, with Bellingcat being accused of ignoring support for the OPCW whistleblowers from Jose Bustani, the organisation’s former chief.
In doing so, Bellingcat “instead reinforces the attempt by OPCW senior management to smear some of its most experienced inspectors using a ‘leak investigation’ to spread lies and disinformation”, Robinson argues in his thread.
“The primary issue here is that Bellingcat are not properly independent of either western governments or indeed of elements within the OPCW itself”, Robinson told Sputnik. “They are clearly partial and yet Bloomsbury publishers has allowed this to be obscured and, predictably, for Bellingcat to present a manifestly partial description of the OPCW controversy”, he concluded.
In April 2018, allegations emerged of a chemical attack in the rebel-controlled area of Douma. The US, Britain and the EU accused the Syrian government of carrying out the attacks, and one week later launched strikes against the country, before any investigation was able to be completed. A team of experts from the OPCW ultimately conducted an onsite inspection of the site, 14 days after the alleged chemical attack, though the final report which concluded that chlorine canisters were likely dropped from the air, has since been marred in controversy.
The Syrian state and their Russian government supporters have always maintained that the alleged attack was staged by rebel forces in control of the region.
February 5, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, False Flag Terrorism | OPCW, UK |
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Several years ago I published a hardcover collection of my more substantial articles, entitled The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays.
More recently, various people had suggested that I produce a similar collection of my American Pravda articles, so I’ve now done so in an eBook format. The full title is Our American Pravda and Other Essays in a Historical Counter-Narrative of the Last One Hundred Years.
I also decided to produce an eBook version of my previous Meritocracy collection, now updated to include my more recent articles that fell outside the American Pravda category.
Given the very low Amazon royalties for eBooks, I’ve decided to make both these books freely available for downloading in both the Mobi/Kindle and standard ePub formats. Just click on the appropriate links below:
Meritocracy Collection (Mobi, ePub) and American Pravda (Mobi, ePub)
Each of these books runs well over 300,000 words, and they together contain nearly 200 of my articles from The Unz Review and a wide variety of other publications.
These eBook versions are convenient for reading without use of the Internet, sometimes an important issue in these troubled times, and feel free to redistribute the copies to whomever might find the information of interest. … continue
January 31, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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Sixty years ago, John F Kennedy (JFK) was inaugurated as president of the USA. In less than three years, before he was assassinated in November 1963, he initiated major changes in foreign policy.
These foreign policy changes are documented in books such as “JFK and the Unspeakable” (2008) and “Betting on the Africans” (2012). One of the foremost scholars on JFK, James Di Eugenio, has an excellent new article of the Kennedy foreign policy at Covert Action : “Deconstructing JFK: A Coup d’Etat over Foreign Policy?”. Despite this literature, many people in the West do not realize the extent to which JFK was an exception. This article will briefly review some of the actions he took while alive, and what happened after he was gone.
While JFK was a staunch advocate for capitalism and the “free world”, in competition with the Soviet Union and communism, he promoted acceptance of non-aligned countries and supported nationalist movements in Africa, the Middle East and Third World generally. In the summer before he was killed, he reached out to the Soviet Union and proposed sweeping changes to promote peace and prevent war.
The previous Eisenhower administration was hostile to post WW2 nationalist movements in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In 1953 the CIA supervised the overthrow of Iran’s elected government. They supported the Saudi monarch and undermined the popular Egyptian Nasser. In contrast, Kennedy was sympathetic to the “winds of change” in Africa and beyond. He criticized France’s repression of the Algerian independence movement and was sympathetic to Patrice Lumumba leading the Congo’s independence from Belgium. Kennedy worked with UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold to preserve Congo’s independence and try to restore Lumumba to power. The CIA managed to have Patrice Lumumba executed three days before Kennedy’s inauguration.
Under Kennedy, the United States started voting against the European colonial powers in Africa. Kennedy provided tangible aid to Nasser in Egypt. After Kennedy’s death, the US policy returned to support for European powers and CIA intervention. The US supported NATO ally Portugal in its wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau. The US supported secessionist and tribal forces in the Congo, Angola, Somalia, and many other countries with hugely damaging results. The US supported apartheid South Africa until the end. The US supported the sectarian Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser.
This was also a critical time for Israel Palestine. JFK was more objective and balanced that most US politicians. Just 22 years old in 1939, Kennedy visited Palestine and wrote his observations / analysis in a 4 page letter to his father. He is thoughtful and recognizes the Palestinian perspective. He speaks of the “unfortunately arrogant, uncompromising attitude” of some Jewish leaders. In May 2019, more documents were released from the National Security Archives. They show that JFK, as president, was intent on stopping Israel from surreptitiously building a nuclear weapon. In a letter to the new Israeli Prime Minister Eshkol, Kennedy gives a diplomatic ultimatum that US support of Israel will be “seriously jeopardized” if Israel did not comply with inspection visits to the Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona. After JFK’s death, the Johnson administration was submissive to Israel and pro-Israel supporters. Johnson showed the ultimate political subservience by preventing the rescue and hiding Israeli treachery regarding the USS Liberty. The Israeli attack killed 34 and injured 172 US sailors. Would Israel have had the arrogance and chutzpah to do this if Kennedy had been in the White House? Unlikely.
The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs took place just three months after Kennedy took office. The CIA and generals expected Kennedy to provide US air support for the anti-Castro attackers. Kennedy said no and resolved to get rid of the long-standing CIA Director who had managed the operation. Allen Dulles and two Deputy Directors were forced to resign by the end of the year. The Pentagon, CIA and anti-Castro Cubans were furious at JFK. When the Soviet Union sent nuclear capable missiles to Cuba, the hawks demanded that the US attack. Kennedy opposed this and ended up negotiating an agreement whereby the US removed its nuclear missiles in Turkey as Soviet nuclear missiles were removed from Cuba.
Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country with vast natural resources and strategic location. President Sukarno led the country to independence and was a leader in the global Non-Aligned Movement seeking a middle ground between the poles of the USA and Soviet Union. The Eisenhower/Dulles administration tried to overthrow Sukarno. In contrast, JFK changed the policy from hostility to friendship. Sukarno invited JFK to visit the country and the invitation was accepted. Following JFK’s assassination, the policy returned to hostility and just two years later, in 1965, the US engineered a coup leading to the murder of about half a million Indonesian citizens suspected of being communist.
JFK visited Vietnam in 1951 as the French colonial powers were trying to assert their control. He saw the situation as 400,000 French soldiers were losing to the Vietnamese nationalist movement. Thus, when he became president, he was skeptical of the prospects. President Kennedy authorized an increase of US military advisers but never sent combat troops. As the situation deteriorated, JFK finally decided the policy was wrong. In October 1963 Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum 263 directing US withdrawal to begin in December and be completed by the end of 1965. After JFK’s death, President Johnson reversed course and began sending massive numbers of US soldiers to Vietnam. Twelve years later, after 58,000 American and about two million Vietnamese deaths, the US military departed Vietnam.
The Soviet Union was the largest communist country and primary challenger to the US and capitalist system. The Cold War included mutual recriminations and a huge amount of military spending as both sides designed and produced ever more hydrogen bombs, air and sea delivery systems. During the Cuba crisis, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khruschev both realized how dangerous the situation was. Nuclear war could have accidentally or intentionally begun. In June1963, JFK delivered the commencement address at American University. It was probably his most important speech yet is little known. JFK called for a dramatic change in US posture, from confrontation to mutual acceptance. He called for re-examination of US attitudes toward peace, the Soviet Union, the Cold War and peace and freedom within the USA itself. He called for a special communication line between Washington and Moscow to allow direct communications between the two leaders. And then Kennedy declared that the US would end nuclear testing as a first step toward general and complete disarmament.
In the last months before his death, JFK opened secret communications with Soviet Premier Khruschev and used a journalist to communicate directly with Fidel Castro. JFK proposed face-to-face talks aimed at reconciliation with Cuba.
Kennedy’s initiatives toward reconciliation and peace were opposed by the CIA and militarist elements in the government. As reported in the NY Times, Kennedy privately told one of his highest officials he “wanted to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds”. Before that could happen, JFK was assassinated, and his policy changes reversed.
From Moscow to Cairo to Jakarta, Kennedy’s death was met with shock and mourning. Leaders in those countries sensed what the assassination meant.
The day after JFK’s funeral, President Johnson supplanted Kennedy’s planned withdrawal from Viet Nam with National Security Action Memorandum 273. This resulted in 12 years of aggression and bloodshed in southeast Asia. Coups were carried out in the Dominican Republic and Indonesia. US resumed support for South African apartheid and Portuguese colonial wars. Assassination attempts on Fidel Castro escalated while military coups took place in numerous Latin American countries. In the Middle East, the US solidified support for Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The author of “JFK and the Unspeakable”, Jim Douglas, writes “President Kennedy’s courageous turn from global war to a strategy of peace provides the why of his assassination. Because he turned toward peace with our enemies, the Communists, he found himself at odds with his own national security state.”
*
Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the SF Bay Area. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com
January 30, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | CIA, Israel, JFK Assassination, United States |
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After the end of World War II, the U.S. national-security establishment convinced the American people that there existed an international communist conspiracy to take over the United States and the rest of the world. This supposed conspiracy, U.S. officials steadfastly maintained, was based in Moscow, Russia. During the Cold War, the tentacles of this supposed conspiracy spread to China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and other places around the world, including the United States. The Reds, they said, were everywhere and were coming to get us.
This supposed threat of communism, in fact, is what motivated U.S. officials to convert the federal government into a national-security state, a totalitarian type of governmental structure in which officials wield omnipotent powers, such as assassination. It also motivated U.S. officials to intervene in the civil wars in Korea and Vietnam, which killed more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers, many of whom had been conscripted to “serve.” The Pentagon and the CIA maintained that if the communists weren’t stopped over there, they would soon be in the halls of Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, not to mention the public schools, running the country over here.
Thus, for an American few things could be considered worse than to be labeled a communist. People who were suspected of being communists were fired from their jobs, ostracized, and sometimes criminally prosecuted. Recall the McCarthy hearings, when many people’s lives were destroyed simply through the government’s asking the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Recall the Hollywood Blacklist and the criminal prosecution of Hollywood writer Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten. Recall the spying on and blackmail of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who U.S. officials suspected of being a communist.
Immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy, the word went out that he had been killed by a communist, a young former U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald. The very first organization to begin publicizing Oswald’s communist bona fides was an anti-Castro exile group in New Orleans called the DRE, which immediately sent out a press release announcing that Oswald was a communist. The publicity was highly effective in dissuading people, especially people on the left, from questioning the official narrative of the assassination — that Kennedy had been killed by a communist. People were scared to death that if they questioned the official narrative, they would be labeled communists or communist sympathizers.
What people did not know at the time — and what they would not discover for several decades — was that the DRE was being secretly funded and directed by the CIA. The CIA’s supervising officer for the DRE was a man named George Joannides.
In the late 1990s, former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley uncovered Joannides’ role in the DRE back in 1963 and began requesting the CIA for its files on Joannides. The CIA steadfastly refused to comply with Morley’s request and made it clear that it would never disclose most of Joannides’s secret activities.
Morley filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the CIA, which, owing to the massive resistance of the CIA, lasted for years. The fascinating story of Morley’s battle against CIA secrecy on Joannides is now told in FFF’s newest book, Morley v. CIA: My Unfinished JFK Investigation, which is available in Kindle format on Amazon for $1.
In the course of his investigation and litigation, Morley uncovered some fascinating and intriguing facts about Joannides. In the 1970s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations reopened the investigation into the Kennedy assassination. When committee attorneys began seeking too many documents relating to Oswald’s trip to Mexico City, the CIA called Joannides out of retirement, ostensibly to serve as a facilitator between the House committee and the CIA.
As it turned out, however, Joannides’s real role was to serve as an obstructor to the efforts by the House committee attorneys to securing JFK-assassination-related information from the CIA, including information relating to Oswald’s trip to Mexico City. In the process, Joannides and the CIA failed to disclose his role with the DRE in the months leading up to the assassination, just as they had failed to disclose it to the Warren Commission back in 1964.
During the term of the Assassination Records Review Board, Joannides and the CIA once again failed to disclose his pre-assassination relationship to the DRE. Former House Select Committee counsel Robert Blakey later accused the CIA of obstruction of justice, which is a felony. Judge John Tunheim, who chaired the ARRB, declared that “the Agency should come completely clean.”
But the CIA refused to come clean on Joannides, as detailed in Morley’s fascinating account of his long judicial fight against the CIA.
Morley is the author of another book published by FFF: CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files. He will be delivering two presentations at FFF’s upcoming online weekly conference series “JFK’s Foreign Policy and the Assassination.”
The conference series will begin on Wednesday, March 3, and continue weekly on Wednesdays through April 21. Registrations will open next month. Admission will be free.
January 29, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | CIA, United States |
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Book argues ‘strategic acceptance of property destruction & violence has been the only route for revolutionary change’
NYT’s Tatiana Schlossberg (the daughter of Caroline Kennedy): How to Blow Up a Pipeline author Andreas Malm “argues that there should be room for tactics other than strict nonviolence and peaceful demonstrations — indeed, he is a bit contemptuous of those who offer strategic pacifism as a solution — and notes that fetishizing nonviolence in past protest movements sanitizes history, removing agency from the people who fought, sometimes violently, for justice, freedom and equality. Sure. But the problem with violence, even if it’s meant only to destroy “fossil capital,” is that ultimately it’s impossible to control.”
Climate Depot note: The website of the publisher of the book, Verso books, asks, “why haven’t we moved beyond peaceful protest?” The publisher website explains: “[How to Blow Up a Pipeline author Andreas] Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change.”
“Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop—with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.”
New York Magazine climate reporter David Wallace-Wells, also provided a featured review of Malm’s book: “If a livable world requires an all-over transformation, where and when and how do we start? Perhaps with this book, a provocative manifesto from the pioneering theorist of the climate age.” – David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth
In 2010, NASA’s former lead climate scientist also endorsed a similar sounding book. See: James Hansen declared author ‘has it right…the system is the problem’ — Book proposes ‘razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine’
2013: Video: Eco-Terror Threats Issued at Rally: Climate Depot attended: ‘We will dismantle the Pipeline’ sign prominently displayed at rally — ‘By any means necessary’
January 25, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | United States |
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A year or two ago, I saw the much-touted science fiction film Interstellar, and although the plot wasn’t any good, one early scene was quite amusing. For various reasons, the American government of the future claimed that our Moon Landings of the late 1960s had been faked, a trick aimed at winning the Cold War by bankrupting Russia into fruitless space efforts of its own. This inversion of historical reality was accepted as true by nearly everyone, and those few people who claimed that Neil Armstrong had indeed set foot on the Moon were universally ridiculed as “crazy conspiracy theorists.” This seems a realistic portrayal of human nature to me.
Obviously, a large fraction of everything described by our government leaders or presented in the pages of our most respectable newspapers—from the 9/11 attacks to the most insignificant local case of petty urban corruption—could objectively be categorized as a “conspiracy theory” but such words are never applied. Instead, use of that highly loaded phrase is reserved for those theories, whether plausible or fanciful, that do not possess the endorsement stamp of establishmentarian approval.
Put another way, there are good “conspiracy theories” and bad “conspiracy theories,” with the former being the ones promoted by pundits on mainstream television shows and hence never described as such. I’ve sometimes joked with people that if ownership and control of our television stations and other major media outlets suddenly changed, the new information regime would require only a few weeks of concerted effort to totally invert all of our most famous “conspiracy theories” in the minds of the gullible American public. The notion that nineteen Arabs armed with box-cutters hijacked several jetliners, easily evaded our NORAD air defenses, and reduced several landmark buildings to rubble would soon be universally ridiculed as the most preposterous “conspiracy theory” ever to have gone straight from the comic books into the minds of the mentally ill, easily surpassing the absurd “lone gunman” theory of the JFK assassination.
Even without such changes in media control, huge shifts in American public beliefs have frequently occurred in the recent past, merely on the basis of implied association. In the initial weeks and months following the 2001 attacks, every American media organ was enlisted to denounce and vilify Osama Bin Laden, the purported Islamicist master-mind, as our greatest national enemy, with his bearded visage endlessly appearing on television and in print, soon becoming one of the most recognizable faces in the world. But as the Bush Administration and its key media allies prepared a war against Iraq, the images of the Burning Towers were instead regularly juxtaposed with mustachioed photos of dictator Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden’s arch-enemy. As a consequence, by the time we attacked Iraq in 2003, polls revealed that some 70% of the American public believed that Saddam was personally involved in the destruction of our World Trade Center. By that date I don’t doubt that many millions of patriotic but low-information Americans would have angrily denounced and vilified as a “crazy conspiracy theorist” anyone with the temerity to suggest that Saddam had not been behind 9/11, despite almost no one in authority having ever explicitly made such a fallacious claim.
These factors of media manipulation were very much in my mind a couple of years ago when I stumbled across a short but fascinating book published by the University of Texas academic press. The author of Conspiracy Theory in America was Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, a former president of the Florida Political Science Association.
Based on an important FOIA disclosure, the book’s headline revelation was that the CIA was very likely responsible for the widespread introduction of “conspiracy theory” as a term of political abuse, having orchestrated that development as a deliberate means of influencing public opinion.
During the mid-1960s there had been increasing public skepticism about the Warren Commission findings that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been solely responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination, and growing suspicions that top-ranking American leaders had also been involved. So as a means of damage control, the CIA distributed a secret memo to all its field offices requesting that they enlist their media assets in efforts to ridicule and attack such critics as irrational supporters of “conspiracy theories.” Soon afterward, there suddenly appeared statements in the media making those exact points, with some of the wording, arguments, and patterns of usage closely matching those CIA guidelines. The result was a huge spike in the pejorative use of the phrase, which spread throughout the American media, with the residual impact continuing right down to the present day. Thus, there is considerable evidence in support of this particular “conspiracy theory” explaining the widespread appearance of attacks on “conspiracy theories” in the public media.
But although the CIA appears to have effectively manipulated public opinion in order to transform the phrase “conspiracy theory” into a powerful weapon of ideological combat, the author also describes how the necessary philosophical ground had actually been prepared a couple of decades earlier. Around the time of the Second World War, an important shift in political theory caused a huge decline in the respectability of any “conspiratorial” explanation of historical events.
For decades prior to that conflict, one of our most prominent scholars and public intellectuals had been historian Charles Beard, whose influential writings had heavily focused on the harmful role of various elite conspiracies in shaping American policy for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, with his examples ranging from the earliest history of the United States down to the nation’s entry into WWI. Obviously, researchers never claimed that all major historical events had hidden causes, but it was widely accepted that some of them did, and attempting to investigate those possibilities was deemed a perfectly acceptable academic enterprise.
However, Beard was a strong opponent of American entry into the Second World War, and he was marginalized in the years that followed, even prior to his death in 1948. Many younger public intellectuals of a similar bent also suffered the same fate, or were even purged from respectability and denied any access to the mainstream media. At the same time, the totally contrary perspectives of two European political philosophers, Karl Popper and Leo Strauss, gradually gained ascendancy in American intellectual circles, and their ideas became dominant in public life.
Popper, the more widely influential, presented broad, largely theoretical objections to the very possibility of important conspiracies ever existing, suggesting that these would be implausibly difficult to implement given the fallibility of human agents; what might appear a conspiracy actually amounted to individual actors pursuing their narrow aims. Even more importantly, he regarded “conspiratorial beliefs” as an extremely dangerous social malady, a major contributing factor to the rise of Nazism and other deadly totalitarian ideologies. His own background as an individual of Jewish ancestry who had fled Austria in 1937 surely contributed to the depth of his feelings on these philosophical matters.
Meanwhile, Strauss, a founding figure in modern neo-conservative thought, was equally harsh in his attacks upon conspiracy analysis, but for polar-opposite reasons. In his mind, elite conspiracies were absolutely necessary and beneficial, a crucial social defense against anarchy or totalitarianism, but their effectiveness obviously depended upon keeping them hidden from the prying eyes of the ignorant masses. His main problem with “conspiracy theories” was not that they were always false, but they might often be true, and therefore their spread was potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of society. So as a matter of self-defense, elites needed to actively suppress or otherwise undercut the unauthorized investigation of suspected conspiracies.
Even for most educated Americans, theorists such as Beard, Popper, and Strauss are probably no more than vague names mentioned in textbooks, and that was certainly true in my own case. But while the influence of Beard seems to have largely disappeared in elite circles, the same is hardly true of his rivals. Popper probably ranks as one of the founders of modern liberal thought, with an individual as politically influential as left-liberal financier George Soros claiming to be his intellectual disciple. Meanwhile, the neo-conservative thinkers who have totally dominated the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement for the last couple of decades often proudly trace their ideas back to Strauss.
So, through a mixture of Popperian and Straussian thinking, the traditional American tendency to regard elite conspiracies as a real but harmful aspect of our society was gradually stigmatized as either paranoid or politically dangerous, laying the conditions for its exclusion from respectable discourse.
By 1964, this intellectual revolution had largely been completed, as indicated by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the famous article by political scientist Richard Hofstadter critiquing the so-called “paranoid style” in American politics, which he denounced as the underlying cause of widespread popular belief in implausible conspiracy theories. To a considerable extent, he seemed to be attacking straw men, recounting and ridiculing the most outlandish conspiratorial beliefs, while seeming to ignore the ones that had been proven correct. For example, he described how some of the more hysterical anti-Communists claimed that tens of thousands of Red Chinese troops were hidden in Mexico, preparing an attack on San Diego, while he failed to even acknowledge that for years Communist spies had indeed served near the very top of the U.S. government. Not even the most conspiratorially minded individual suggests that all alleged conspiracies are true, merely that some of them might be.
Most of these shifts in public sentiment occurred before I was born or when I was a very young child, and my own views were shaped by the rather conventional media narratives that I absorbed. Hence, for nearly my entire life, I always automatically dismissed all of the so-called “conspiracy theories” as ridiculous, never once even considering that any of them might possibly be true.
To the extent that I ever thought about the matter, my reasoning was simple and based on what seemed like good, solid common sense. Any conspiracy responsible for some important public event must surely have many separate “moving parts” to it, whether actors or actions taken, let us say numbering at least 100 or more. Now given the imperfect nature of all attempts at concealment, it would surely be impossible for all of these to be kept entirely hidden. So even if a conspiracy were initially 95% successful in remaining undetected, five major clues would still be left in plain sight for investigators to find. And once the buzzing cloud of journalists noticed these, such blatant evidence of conspiracy would certainly attract an additional swarm of energetic investigators, tracing those items back to their origins, with more pieces gradually being uncovered until the entire cover-up likely collapsed. Even if not all the crucial facts were ever determined, at least the simple conclusion that there had indeed been some sort of conspiracy would quickly become established.
However, there was a tacit assumption in my reasoning, one that I have since decided was entirely false. Obviously, many potential conspiracies either involve powerful governmental officials or situations in which their disclosure would represent a source of considerable embarrassment to such individuals. But I had always assumed that even if government failed in its investigatory role, the dedicated bloodhounds of the Fourth Estate would invariably come through, tirelessly seeking truth, ratings, and Pulitzers. However, once I gradually began realizing that the media was merely “Our American Pravda” and perhaps had been so for decades, I suddenly recognized the flaw in my logic. If those five—or ten or twenty or fifty—initial clues were simply ignored by the media, whether through laziness, incompetence, or much less venial sins, then there would be absolutely nothing to prevent successful conspiracies from taking place and remaining undetected, perhaps even the most blatant and careless ones.
In fact, I would extend this notion to a general principle. Substantial control of the media is almost always an absolute prerequisite for any successful conspiracy, the greater the degree of control the better. So when weighing the plausibility of any conspiracy, the first matter to investigate is who controls the local media and to what extent.
Let us consider a simple thought-experiment. For various reasons these days, the entire American media is extraordinarily hostile to Russia, certainly much more so than it ever was toward the Communist Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s. Hence I would argue that the likelihood of any large-scale Russian conspiracy taking place within the operative zone of those media organs is virtually nil. Indeed, we are constantly bombarded with stories of alleged Russian conspiracies that appear to be “false positives,” dire allegations seemingly having little factual basis or actually being totally ridiculous. Meanwhile, even the crudest sort of anti-Russian conspiracy might easily occur without receiving any serious mainstream media notice or investigation.
This argument may be more than purely hypothetical. A crucial turning point in America’s renewed Cold War against Russia was the passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act by Congress, punitively targeting various supposedly corrupt Russian officials for their alleged involvement in the illegal persecution and death of an employee of Bill Browder, an American hedge-fund manager with large Russian holdings. However, there’s actually quite a bit of evidence that it was Browder himself who was actually the mastermind and beneficiary of the gigantic corruption scheme, while his employee was planning to testify against him and was therefore fearful of his life for that reason. Naturally, the American media has provided scarcely a single mention of these remarkable revelations regarding what might amount to a gigantic Magnitsky Hoax of geopolitical significance.
To some extent the creation of the Internet and the vast proliferation of alternative media outlets, including my own small webzine, have somewhat altered this depressing picture. So it is hardly surprising that a very substantial fraction of the discussion dominating these Samizdat-like publications concerns exactly those subjects regularly condemned as “crazy conspiracy theories” by our mainstream media organs. Such unfiltered speculation must surely be a source of considerable irritation and worry to government officials who have long relied upon the complicity of their tame media organs to allow their serious misdeeds to pass unnoticed and unpunished. Indeed, several years ago a senior Obama Administration official argued that the free discussion of various “conspiracy theories” on the Internet was so potentially harmful that government agents should be recruited to “cognitively infiltrate” and disrupt them, essentially proposing a high-tech version of the highly controversial Cointelpro operations undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Until just a few years ago I’d scarcely even heard of Charles Beard, once ranked among the towering figures of 20th century American intellectual life. But the more I’ve discovered the number of serious crimes and disasters that have completely escaped substantial media scrutiny, the more I wonder what other matters may still remain hidden. So perhaps Beard was correct all along in recognizing the respectability of “conspiracy theories,” and we should return to his traditional American way of thinking, notwithstanding endless conspiratorial propaganda campaigns by the CIA and others to persuade us that we should dismiss such notions without any serious consideration.
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January 24, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | CIA, United States |
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What exactly is the New World Order (NWO)? Readers of this newspaper know that George H.W. Bush announced its advent on Sept. 11, 1991—exactly 10 years before the mother of all false flags. NWO researchers suspect that behind this nebulous yet ominous phrase lurks a plan for global governance by a handful of billionaire bankers and their hired guns.
In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins famously exposed the NWO’s main weapon: international usury. The banksters drown the world in exponentially increasing debt that is designed to be unpayable. When the victims start to default, the banksters threaten them with economic and military devastation. The victims are forced to hand over real resources—oil and gas, forests, farmlands, minerals, water, and future productivity—in return for “restructuring” payments of exponential interest on imaginary money that was created out of nothing, backed by nothing.
So what is the purpose of the New World Order? Obviously the NWO’s architects intend to consolidate more and more power in their own hands. Is that power an end in itself? Of course. But the NWO’s secretive accumulation of ever-increasing power since World War II may be driven in part by a perceived emergency: global overpopulation and resource depletion.
That is the thesis of Kevin Galalae, author of Killing Us Softly: The Global Depopulation Policy.* According to Galalae, the globalists have murdered half a billion people, and prevented another two billion from being born, since World War II, in what would be the greatest genocide in history by many orders of magnitude.
Some of Galalae’s claims are undisputed. For example, the Third World has obviously been hit heavily by depopulation measures. China’s one-child policy has resulted in forced abortions, 30 million unwilling bachelors, and the confiscation of children by the communist government. India forcibly sterilized much of its rural female population. Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, and their allies have not been shy about pushing abortion, birth control, family breakdown, and sociosexual deviance on every nation on Earth that would let them in.
But those programs, Galalae asserts, are just the tip of the iceberg. Here in the West, home of the religion of democracy and individual liberty, unwary populations have not only been propagandized, dumbed down, and deliberately drowned in degeneracy; they have also been poisoned. The author claims that the demographic collapse of the West is not just cultural, but is primarily the result of “chemical sterilization” by such agents as fluoridation of water and salt, BPA poisoning from plastic and metal packaging, and the spraying of aluminum, barium, and strontium from airplanes. GMO crops and glyphosates, for their part, weaken the immune system and increase mortality.
He might have added electromagnetic pollution to the list. Arthur Firstenberg’s The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life makes it clear that most of humanity is the guinea pig in a giant electrical experiment that will, in all likelihood, badly damage the human gene pool, progressively corrupting germline DNA in order to collapse the global population.
Galalae argues the NWO is waging biological warfare on many fronts. He claims HIV was developed to check the rapidly increasing African population, while flu viruses have been researched, enhanced, and deployed to target North Asians and Westerners.
All of these programs have to be kept secret, since most people would not accept them. The depopulation war, Galalae says, is the main reason for the explosion of secrecy and the transformation of Western democracies into pseudo-democracies.
Galalae’s book casts the Covid-19 crisis in a whole new light. He notes that “economies of nations with decreasing populations are in a downward economic spiral.” Key problem: the bulge of aging baby boomers hitting the retirement threshold. Conveniently, these expensive, unproductive “human assets” are being wiped out by the coronavirus. Was Covid-19 designed, in part, for precisely that purpose?
Advocates of the “Great Reset” say pandemic life should become the new normal. We should “build back better” by continuing to avoid driving, flying, going to restaurants and theaters, visiting our friends and family, and so on. Self-driving Amazon robot cars will deliver us all we need to stay alive while we permanently “shelter in place.”
Meanwhile, Bill Gates tells us, “This is only Pandemic 1; just wait till you see Pandemic 2,” and suggests that vaccinations can be used to slow population growth. No wonder he is sometimes portrayed as a stock cartoon villain.
The tiny handful of people who know about the Global Depopulation Policy, and direct it, believe they are doing good—by treating humans like vermin who need to be hoodwinked, sterilized, and exterminated. They are corrupters of the Earth, but do not realize it—or maybe they do.
We must rise up against them and demand the truth.
*Killing Us Softly: The Global Depopulation Policy (softcover, 142 pp., $18) by Kevin Galalae is available from AFP, 117 La Grange Avenue, La Plata, MD 20646. Call 1-888-699-6397 toll free to charge, Mon.-Thu. 9-4:30 ET.
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin.
January 16, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, United States |
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