WRITING AND READING
BY PAUL ROBINSON | IRRUSSIANALITY | MAY 22, 2024
In case anybody is interested in the inputs and outputs of my intellectual life, here is a little update on what I have been writing and reading.
Reading
Here are a few things I have read recently that might be of interested to purveyors of this site:
Ian Proud is a former British diplomat who served in the UK’s embassy in Moscow and was also responsible for organizing British sanctions against the Russian Federation. He has since left the Foreign Office, written his memoirs. and started a blog on which he regularly criticizes British policy towards Russia and declares the sanctions he enacted to be a total failure. You can read his blog here.
The memoirs are written in a light, engaging style, but contain a serious message. Proud argues that successive British governments have for a long time been totally uninterested in talking to Russia. He also paints a picture of British diplomats who not only mostly didn’t speak Russian but also weren’t interested in doing so. Dispatches to London, he claims, consisted largely of bits cut and paste out of media articles. One has to wonder about the quality of the intelligence that London was receiving.
Worth a read.
I used to teach a course titled ‘Irrationality and Foreign Policy Decision-Making’, which looked at all the ways that foreign policy decision processes deviated from the kind of rational actor models that public policy students are taught to follow.
It’s interesting, therefore, to come across a book that claims that all the stuff I taught is wrong and foreign policy is for the most part a rational endeavour. I can’t say that I was 100% convinced by this book, which I found a bit repetitive, and perhaps worthy more of an extended article than a full-length book. Still, if I ever teach that course again, I will have to bear what this says in mind and suggest it to my students.
This one got a stinker of a review from Joy Neumeyer in the New Left Review, in which, among other things, Neumeyer accused author Jade McGlynn of plagiarizing her work. You can read that review here.
McGlynn’s basic argument is that the war in Ukraine is not Putin’s war but Russia’s war, as Putin and the war have broad support from the Russian population. I would generally agree, but the problem is that McGlynn then goes beyond this and tries to explain this phenomenon by recourse to a sort of Homo Sovieticus argument, namely that the reason why the Russian masses support Putin and the war is that they are psychologically retrograde.
Personally, I don’t see why it’s even necessary to write a whole book explaining the phenomenon. Populations everywhere tend to rally around the flag. It’s natural. And when they do, we don’t have to resort to explanations of the masses’ psychological failings. Why does Russians’ support for Putin mean that Russians are psychologically twisted in a way that Americans’ support for George W. Bush or Britons’ support for Tony Blair during the war in Iraq doesn’t?
By all means read ‘Russia’s War’ if you want, but I can’t say that I got anything useful from it.
This one I haven’t actually read yet. It’s on my shelf awaiting a moment when I have spare time on my hands. The reason I got it is that the description of the book’s thesis seems fascinating. If I am understanding it right, author Tomila Lankina is claiming that there was an astonishing lack of social mobility in the upper middle classes in Russia in the twentieth century. It was more or less the same families who made up that class in Imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and post-Soviet Russia. This existed alongside a newer, ‘inferior, second-class middle-class’ (as Lankina calls it) made up of ex-workers and peasants and their children, who rose up in the Soviet era. The two middle classes remained distinct, however, and it was the former that transmitted liberal values from the late Imperial era into the early post-Soviet one.
If true, this casts enormous doubt on the ability of governments of any hue to promote social mobility. Wealth and privilege, it seems, have a way of surviving even regimes dedicated to destroying them. Is it true? I guess I’ll have to read the book to find out.
The title of this book – also still to be read – says it all. ‘The Stupidity of War’. Amen to that!
Writing
Some good news! I have another book on the way. It’s title has been confirmed as Russia’s World Order: How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict with the West. It will be published by Northern Illinois University Press (now an imprint of Cornell Univesity Press) on 15 April next year. It will be published as a trade book, and thus should be available at an easily affordable price. I will post the cover once it is available.
U.S. Intelligence Operatives Appear to Have Intentionally Groomed Mass Murderer Charles Manson
Status As a Police Informant Raises Suspicion That He Was an FBI and CIA Asset Out to Discredit the 1960s Counterculture
Source: dagospia.com
By Daniel Borgström – CovertAction Magazine – May 1, 2024
The Sharon Tate murders were as bizarre as they were bloody, and the story behind the story is even stranger.
Journalist Tom O’Neill spent 20 years researching, interviewing and digging in his effort to get to the bottom of it. His book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, co-authored by Dan Piepenbring, is an account of O’Neill’s personal odyssey as well as a presentation of his findings which unfold, page after page, in tragedy, weirdness and irony.
Charles Manson’s hit-team killed ten people, perhaps more. That was in California, back in the summer of 1969, while the U.S. Armed Forces were busily slaughtering millions of Asians in Vietnam. And in opposition to that war, hundreds of thousands of Americans marched in mass protests—the anti-war movement.
Even GIs and military veterans were speaking out against the war. The counterculture movement was in full bloom, having started for at least since “the summer of love” two years earlier. Woodstock, an historic occasion which drew 400,000 people to a music event in Upstate New York, also took place the year of the Manson murders in that same month of August.
War, anti-war, and counterculture—it was all going on when Charles Manson and his “family” suddenly stole the show and took center stage with that series of infamous killings. First there was the Gary Hinman murder, then the Sharon Tate killings, followed by the LaBianca murders. Two more victims about whom we do not often hear were Donald Shea, a caretaker at the Spahn Ranch, and Filippo Tenerelli, who was found dead in a Bishop, California, motel.
Source: cbsnews.com
The FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS programs were also in play—part of intelligence’s covert war on dissent. Several shadowy characters, apparently CIA operatives, turn up in this story and appear to have crossed paths with Charles Manson. Among them was Dr. Louis Jolyon West of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind-control project. Another was Reeve Whitson who somehow knew of the Tate killings 90 minutes before anyone else did, and reported it in a phone call to Tate’s photographer. O’Neill devotes a chapter to each of them.
Dr. Louis Jolyon West [Source: jamanetwork.com
Thirty years had passed since the killings when O’Neill began work on his project in 1999. Several of the key players had already died, but Charles Manson was still in prison, and memories of the killings remained painfully alive. The topic was initially assigned to O’Neill as a magazine article, and the editor gave him three months to complete it.
However, as he launched into it, interviewing dozens—eventually hundreds—of cops, DA lawyers, clerks, Hollywood personalities, drug dealers and others, he found there was far more to the story than he had ever imagined.
He missed his deadline, then his next deadline, and the one after that. The project became his obsession, and the digging and research continued on through 20 long years of plowing through troves of documents: court records, old newspaper files, FOIA requests, and interviews. Research can be frustrating, and clearly it was. “Behind every solid lead, quotable interview, and bombshell document, I put in weeks of scut work that led to dozens of dead ends,” O’Neill tells us. His book finally came out in 2019.
Tom O’Neill – Source: warwicks.com
Told in the first person, the book is a gripping detective story that I could not put down—actually an audio that I could not turn off. It is well written, and the audio by Kevin Stillwell is well read. My partner wanted to know what I kept listening to all the time. So I took off my headset and played it out into the room. She caught the bug and we listened to it together day after day, smitten by Tom O’Neill’s obsession.
At Charles Manson’s orders, people were murdered. This is a “mystery” where we know the “who-done-it” part of the story, but we are left to wonder and speculate about almost everything else—motives, the roles of intel and law enforcement, facts that were covered up, and who or what else might have been operating behind the scenes.
Crime novels typically end with the pieces all falling into place to form a coherent picture. Not so in most real-life crime mysteries, O’Neill cautions us. Some pieces are missing; others do not seem to belong, but they are there nonetheless, often in some grotesquely misshapen form.
A good many pieces are left over; they may seem important, but we do not know what to make of them. In this book, the author takes us into a world where cops, judges, prosecutors, witnesses and others do not function in ways that seem rational or above board.
Among the strange pieces in this picture puzzle is something O’Neill calls “Charlie Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card.”
After having spent much of his life in various prisons, in 1967 Charles Manson was finally out on “federal parole for grand theft auto.” Being on probation is almost like living on the doorstep of a jailhouse.
A parolee can get thrown back in prison for the slightest mis-step. However, Charles Manson went around committing one offense after another—stealing cars, credit cards and firearms, sex with underage women, drugs, etc. Whatever a parolee was not allowed to do, Charles Manson did. He even flouted it. He was caught repeatedly, but none of his numerous violations landed him in jail for more than a few days at a time.
“We were told not to bother those people,” former Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Preston Guillory told O’Neill. It was a policy handed down from on high, Guillory said: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”
Cops who had clues, evidence or solid proof of Manson’s violations were pulled back from their investigations. On the occasions when Manson was arrested, judges would let him go. His probation officer, Roger Smith, wrote glowing letters about Manson’s supposedly wonderful progress.
Normally, a probation officer would supervise 20 to 100 parolees; but Roger Smith was supervising only one person—Charles Manson. It was with the encouragement of Probation Officer Roger Smith that Manson spent a year in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, at the time a Mecca of the hippie counterculture.
There Charlie acquired his “family” of followers, and morphed into the Charles Manson known to history and legend—the charismatic guru and apocalyptic cult leader, acid-dropping mystic, guitarist and songwriter, con artist, car thief and general predator, manipulator and abuser, and evangelist who expatiated on the Book of Revelation.
Members of the Manson family. Source: reprobatepress.com
Manson was well-connected with Hollywood celebrities and music personalities: Doris Day’s son, music producer Terry Melcher, the Beach Boys, and many more, though most did not wish to have it known that they had been associated with him. Even after 30 years had passed, many refused to be interviewed by Tom O’Neill. The refusers’ list reads like a who’s who of Hollywood stardom. Cops and prosecutors were more inclined to talk, and some of them opened the author’s way to troves of documents and records.
Reading the accounts of these interactions, I sense that O’Neill must be something of a Will Rogers-type person who rarely met a person he did not like. And people in turn seemed to like him. Even officials who worked hard to cover things up seemed to warm up to him. Several, of course, including legendary prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, eventually screamed at him and threatened to sue for millions of dollars.
Bugliosi was the attorney who had prosecuted Manson and afterwards wrote the best-selling Helter Skelter. In the courtroom and later in his book, Bugliosi presented Manson’s murder rampage as a scheme to blame the Black Panthers and thus spark a race war between blacks and whites. That became the official narrative, though it was doubted by people who had researched the case. Tom O’Neill devoted a chapter to reviewing “Holes in Helter Skelter”; he exposes Bugliosi’s handling of the case and does the coup de grâce on that theory.
Vince Bugliosi surrounded by reporters when he was prosecuting the Manson case in 1971. Source: nytimes.com
However, by the time O’Neill’s book came out, Bugliosi had passed on, and thus far his ghost has not risen up to carry out the threatened lawsuit. Another person who had threatened to sue O’Neill was music producer Terry Melcher, also dead by the time the book came out. There can be upsides to being a slow writer, taking a long time to do research.
Terry Melcher Source: alchetron.com
“I’d spoken to duplicitous celebrities, seedy drug dealers, bumbling cops, and spurious prosecutors. I’d been threatened and cajoled and warned off my investigation. But I didn’t have a smoking gun. There were only mountains of circumstantial evidence,” O’Neill tells us.
So he kept going, finding more pieces of the picture. And it reads like the script of a film noir.
Throughout the drama, Charles Manson was being closely monitored by law enforcement agencies and intel. And yet, even while they were watching him, he sent his acolytes out on those brutal killing sprees of August 1969. Incredibly enough, despite the surveillance, it took law enforcement four long months to eventually arrest him and his hit team. During those extra months of free rein, Manson killed Shea and Tenerelli and perhaps more.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detectives had almost immediately found clues leading to Charles Manson; many Hollywood people also suspected him. So why did it take law enforcement so long to catch him? It appears that the “hands off Manson policy” was still in effect.
Actually, Manson was not the only person in this story who seemed to be immune to prosecution; similar immunity appears to have been granted to two or three Hollywood drug dealers who turn up in the story. That seems to be a fairly common practice in law enforcement.
“A lot of times we arrest people and the DA would say, ‘We can’t keep this person in custody, he’s too valuable, we want him on the streets,’” former Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Guillory told O’Neill. “My suspicion is that Manson was left alone for a while for some reason.”
Former head deputy DA of Van Nuys, Lewis Watnick, gave a similar opinion. “Sometimes this is explained by just pure incompetence,” he said. “But this is not that. It dovetails right in. Manson was an informant.” Of course, that was just his guess, Watnick conceded, but it was an educated one, based on his 30 years of experience. “They’d been watching this guy for something large.”
Looking at the tolerance that authorities had for Manson’s lawbreaking, his relationship with probation officer Roger Smith, and more, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that somebody up there had a major investment in Mr. Charles Manson. They must have wanted him to do something. But what?
Along with his findings, O’Neill shares his uncertainties. “My work had left me, at various points, broke, depressed, and terrified that I was becoming one of ‘those people’: an obsessive, a conspiracy theorist… I don’t consider myself credulous, but I’d discovered things I thought impossible about the Manson murders and California in the sixties.” Further on, he tells us, “I thought most of all about the possibility that Manson, of all people, had some type of protection from law enforcement… It boggled the mind even to speculate that someone like Manson could be plugged into something bigger, and presumably even darker, than he was.”
Something darker than Charles Manson? Our leaders, and the establishment they work for, have a lot of closely guarded secrets—secrets that occasionally make their way out by way of researchers, whistleblowers, hackers, and even congressional hearings.
For background on the political environment of the late 1960s, O’Neill reviews the establishment’s war against the anti-war movement. That includes cases of people who were murdered as a result of FBI and CIA activities and manipulations here in the U.S. He ties this brutality to U.S. actions overseas.
Anthony Herbert – Source: ronsherman.com
O’Neill looks at the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, a kill-capture campaign, which resulted in the death of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. He quotes from a Special Forces soldier, Anthony Herbert, about his time in the Phoenix Program: “They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it appear as though the Viet Cong had done it themselves. The rationale was that the Viet Cong would see that other Viet Cong had killed their own and… make allegiance with us. The good guys.”
A mission shared by the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS was to disrupt and discredit the anti-war movement, and that, O’Neill points out, was one effect of the Manson murders. Of course, Charles Manson was not an anti-war activist; it is doubtful that he ever attended an anti-war rally. He was a product of the prison system who somehow found his way into the fringes of the counterculture movement, and there was a lot of overlap between the anti-war and counterculture movements. Many hippies were anti-war, and many activists smoked grass and grew their hair long.
Scene from the 1967 Summer of Love that Manson and the CIA/FBI were out to destroy. Source: allthatsinteresting.com
The corporate media, then as now, was the voice of the establishment elite, and dutifully presented the murderous Manson and his “family” to the world as poster children of the “hippie movement.” A lot of people bought that framing. Even people who self-identified as countercultural were saying, “Manson ended the Summer of Love!”—a message the corporate media pushed.
Although the killings were billed as the “crime of the century” and have received massive newspaper coverage ever since, few articles went beyond the sensational aspects and asked truly penetrating questions. When (in 1971) whistleblower LA Sheriff’s Detective Guillory went public with what he knew about Manson’s get-out-of-jail-free card, the media showed little interest. Nor did many journalists work out a related source and connection between these killings and a society waging a brutal and unjust war.
We assume that our leaders in Washington care about the lives of ordinary people. Our experience with them shows otherwise.
We remember Vietnam. There have been several murderous wars since then, and now Gaza. As I write this, our president and our Congress are in the sixth month of funding, arming and giving diplomatic support to apartheid Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
Our leaders are not averse to promoting mass murder. We have the immortal words of former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright: When asked in 1996 about U.S. sanctions causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, she replied, “We think the price is worth it.”
The powers that be are a bloodthirsty lot when it serves their interests, every bit as murderous as Charles Manson himself. But who might have been the local- or regional-level functionaries authorizing immunity for such criminals?
O’Neill tells us about several high-placed California officials. One was Evelle Younger, then Los Angeles DA. Younger was a former FBI agent who, during World War II, was with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and also oversaw the prosecution of Sirhan Sirhan; he went on to be California Attorney General from 1971 to 1979.
Evelle J. Younger Source: wikiwand.com
Another was California Governor Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the “Task Force on Riots and Disorders,” William W. Herrmann. Herrmann was a veteran of the CIA’s Phoenix Program; he had also been a lieutenant with the LAPD. However, O’Neill was not able to establish a definite connection between them and the on-the-ground operatives. We do get an idea of who they seem to have been.
In this book of strange dark characters, one of the stranger ones was Dr. Louis Jolyon West, known to his friends as “Jolly” West. He was a pioneering scientist of the CIA’s mind-control project—MK-ULTRA. In 1966 he came to San Francisco, shortly before Manson arrived, and his project was to study and manipulate hippies.
So there they were, the two of them, in the Haight-Ashbury. Tom O’Neill, with meticulous documentation, suggests that Manson became a product of Jolly West’s experiments.
Another dark character who seems to have worked for the CIA was Reeve Whitson, a friend of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. He somehow knew of the killings before anyone else did, and telephoned the awful news to Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami. That was 90 minutes before the bodies were discovered by Polanski’s maid.
Both Dr. Louis Jolyon West and Reeve Whitson are dead and gone, West in 1999 and Whitson in 1994, and are, thus, not available for interviews or comment.
In this book Tom O’Neill shows us convincing evidence that Charles Manson was some sort of operative, maybe unwittingly. It looks like the purpose of his handlers—presumably from the CIA’s CHAOS or the FBI’s COINTELPRO—was to set him up to create a bloody scene such as the one on August 9, 1969.
It needs to be recognized that Charles Manson and his followers served the establishment well. Nevertheless, they went to prison where they remained for the rest of their lives. Only one, Leslie Van Houten, was finally released last year on parole.
Lyndon Johnson’s Role in the JFK Assassination
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | April 29, 2024
Ever since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a question has naturally arisen: What role, if any, did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson play in the assassination?
With the publication of Douglas P. Horne’s massive 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, the national-security establishment’s role in the assassination has now been established beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s because Horne meticulously detailed the fraud in the autopsy that the U.S. military carried out on Kennedy’s body on the very evening of the assassination. Horne served on the staff of the ARRB in the 1990s.
Examples of autopsy fraud set forth by Horne (which are summarized in my book The Kennedy Autopsy) include (1) sneaking JFK’s body into the Bethesda Naval morgue before the official start of the autopsy in order to perform pre-autopsy surgery designed to hide evidence of shots having been fired from Kennedy’s front and (2) two separate brain examinations, the second of which involved someone else’s brain rather than Kennedy’s. Horne’s findings have now been reinforced and built upon in a new book, The Final Analysis by David Mantik, M.D., Ph.D. and Jerome Corsi, Ph.D.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It necessarily means criminal culpability of the national-security establishment in the assassination itself. There is no way around that. That’s how we can definitively conclude that the JFK assassination was one of the national-security establishment’s patented regime-change operations based on what have become the two most important words in the American political lexicon — “national security.” See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated.”
But what about Johnson? Was he just an innocent beneficiary of the assassination? Actually not. The circumstantial evidence establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Johnson himself was up to his neck in the assassination. Johnson had three primary roles in the assassination.
The first role was to get JFK’s body out of Dallas and deliver it into the hands of the military. Keep in mind that JFK’s murder was a state criminal offense. At that time, it was not a federal crime to assassinate a president. Therefore, no federal agency had any jurisdiction over the crime. That includes the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI.
Under Texas law, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, was required to perform an autopsy on JFK’s body. Immediately after JFK was declared dead, Rose announced that he was going to perform the autopsy. A team of Secret Service agents immediately declared that no such autopsy would be permitted. Headed by a Secret Service agent named Roy Kellerman, who was brandishing a Thompson sub-machine gun, the Secret Service team began screaming, yelling, and cussing as they began forcing their way out of Parkland Hospital with the president’s body, which had been placed in a heavy casket. Rose refused to give ground, insisting, correctly so, that Texas law required him to perform the autopsy before the body could be released. One Secret Service agent physically picked up Rose, carried him to a nearby wall, and wagged his finger in his face. The others pulled back their suit coats to brandish their guns, thereby threatening to use deadly force against anyone who got in their way.
Kellerman declared that he and his team were simply following orders. There is only one person who could have issued such an extraordinary order to Kellerman — Lyndon Johnson, either directly to Kellerman or indirectly through one of Kellerman’s superiors. Who else would have dared to issue an order that violated state criminal law?
In fact, Johnson’s own actions confirm that he was the person who issued the order. Once JFK was declared dead, Johnson headed to Love Field, where he ordered seats to be removed from the back of Air Force One to make room for the big casket in which JFK’s body had been placed. Johnson had absolutely no intention of waiting at Love Field for the 2-3 hours that would have been needed to complete the autopsy. He was removing those seats in the full expectation that the casket and the body would be arriving shortly. How would he know that? Because he had to have been the one who issued the order to Kellerman to get the body out of Parkland at all costs and deliver it to Johnson at Love Field.
The second role that Johnson had was to conjure up the prospect of World War III by suggesting that the assassination might be the first step in a nuclear attack on the United States by the Soviet Union. He first raised this possibility while he was waiting at Parkland Hospital for Kennedy to be declared dead. He raised it again on the way to Love Field.
Yet, when Johnson arrived at Love Field, his actions belied any such concern. Rather than get up in the air immediately in order to direct America’s defenses and counterattacks to a possible Soviet nuclear attack, he instead lollygagged at Love Field, waiting, first, for a federal judge to arrive and swear him in as president and, second, for JFK’s body to be delivered to him. In fact, JFK was declared dead at 1 p.m. and LBJ waited until 2:47 to take off. That was the action of a person who knew for certain that the assassination could not possibly have been the first stage of a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States. The only way that Johnson could have been so certain is that he knew that it was not the Soviets who committed the assassination.
Once Johnson arrived at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, he dutifully delivered JFK’s body into the hands of the military, notwithstanding the fact that the military had absolutely no jurisdiction whatsoever to conduct such an autopsy.
It was not the last time that LBJ conjured up the possibility that the Soviets or the Cubans had assassinated JFK, however. When he began inducing people to join what became known as the Warren Commission, he once again conjured up the possibility that the assassination had been committed by the Soviet Union or Cuba. Why would he do that? Because that was the way that the plotters were able to get the investigation into the assassination shut down immediately — in order to ostensibly avoid World War III and all-out nuclear war that would come with it.
How did this ingenious strategy play out? As I detail in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, the plot called for shots being fired from the front and the back. That would establish a conspiracy with the supposed communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, a U.S. intelligence agent who the national-security establishment was setting up to take the fall. The only people with whom Oswald would have been supposedly conspiring were the Soviet Union and Cuba. That was the purpose of setting up Oswald in New Orleans and Mexico City as a supposed communist agent.
Keep in mind that JFK and his brother RFK had initiated Operation Mongoose, whose aim was to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power. Keep in mind also that the CIA had repeatedly tried to assassinate Castro. Thus, Johnson’s second role was to assert that the communists had gotten to JFK first and that if the United States responded to their assassination of JFK, World War III would occur. Therefore, the only way to obviate going to war based on what the Kennedy brothers had started was to immediately shut down the investigation and hide the fact that shots had been fired from the front.
The third role that LBJ had was to ensure that there would never be an official investigation that could lead to the national-security establishment, including, of course, with respect to the military’s fraudulent autopsy. That was the purpose of appointing former CIA Director Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission. Dulles, who Kennedy had fired after the Bay of Pigs disaster and who loathed Kennedy, ensured that the commission stayed on track with the official lone-nut narrative.
Finally, it should be noted that if JFK had not been assassinated, it was a virtual certainty that LBJ would have been removed from office, indicted, and convicted for political corruption. In fact, it is also a virtual certainty that Johnson knew that Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, who loathed Johnson, was furnishing evidence of Johnson’s corruption to LIFE magazine. Thus, LBJ, who had a lifelong obsession to become president, had a choice: Go to jail or participate in the assassination of JFK and become president. He chose the latter course of action and, after being elected president in the 1964 election, gave the U.S. national-security establishment what Kennedy had refused to do–its war in Vietnam.
The Queen of Climate Crackpottery
By Tony Thomas | Quadrant | April 15, 2024
Trigger warning: if your household companions include a cat, dog, canary, goldfish or turtle, this article is not a safe space. I’m writing about Harvard’s distinguished agnatologist Professor Naomi Oreskes (above) and her 2014 warning that global warming would kill your pets in 2023. The warning is in her acclaimed but glum book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future. Given margins of error in climate science, the pet die-off might be this year instead. Oreskes wrote,
The loss of pet cats and dogs garnered particular attention among wealthy Westerners, but what was anomalous in 2023 soon became the new normal . … A shadow of ignorance and denial had fallen over people who considered themselves children of the Enlightenment (p9).
Smarter climate alarmists don’t make short-term predictions. They choose a date like 2050 for when the oceans will boil. They’ll be senile or dead by then and can’t be humiliated if the oceans stay chilly.
Top environmentalist Paul Ehrlich forecast in 1971 that by 2000 the UK “will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”[1] His 1968 book, Population Bomb, predicted starvation would shrink the US population to 23 million by 1999. Strangely, Oreskes in her book hails Ehrlich as a vindicated futurist. (p3-4 and 56).
The only good news from Naomi is that the IPCC becomes [more] discredited and is disbanded. She replaces it with such alphabet soups as the UNCCEP’s ICCEP which launches IAICEP, which she says is pronounced “ay-yi-yi-sep” (p27).The mission of ay-yi-yi-sep is to sprinkle enough fairy dust aka sulphates in the air to make an anti-sun umbrella and save the planet by 2079.
In September 2014 she was interviewed on the ABC’s Science Show by Dr (honoris causa) Robyn Williams, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, about the pet-deaths. One reader, she explained,
… started crying when the pets die, so I didn’t mean to upset people too much … I was just trying to come up with something that I thought people wouldn’t forget about, and I thought, ‘Well, Americans spend billions of dollars every year taking care of their pets’, and I thought if people’s dogs started dying, maybe then they would sit up and take notice.
Interviewer Dr Williams[2] was delighted with Oreskes’ pet-panic strategy. He chimed in,
Yes, not only because it’s an animal but it’s local. You see, one criticism of the scientists is they’re always talking about global things…And so if you are looking at your village, your animals, your fields, your park, your kids, and the scientists are talking about a small world that you know, then it makes a greater impact, doesn’t it.
Oreskes: Well, exactly. It was about bringing it literally home, literally into your home, your family, your pet, the dog or cat that you love who is your faithful and trusted companion.
As I type this, I look down fondly at Natasha, our doomed spaniel, although she is neither faithful nor trustworthy.
Oreskes began her Science Show appearance by reading from her book in sepulchrul tones:
Then, in the northern hemisphere summer of 2041, unprecedented heatwaves scorched the planet [and] led to widespread outbreaks of typhus, cholera, dengue fever, yellow fever, and viral and retroviral agents never seen before.
Naomi’s actually playing down her future horrors, she omits to tell him about the arrival of the Black Death:
Dislocation contributed to the Second Black Death, as a new strain of the bacterium Yersinia pestis emerged in Europe and spread to Asia and North America. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed as much as half the population of some parts of Europe; this second Black Death had similar effects. (p30).
Australians will wonder: does Medicare charge extra premiums to cover bubonic plague?
Williams, instead of asking Oreskes what she’s smoking, merely observed that all of the above is “fairly shocking”. He further wondered why it is only Western civilization that collapses, leaving the Chinese in charge. One reason, says Oreskes, is that Chinese civilisation is more durable, and two, that authoritarian regimes are better able to deal with hypothesised climate apocalypses.
Looking back from the future, Oreskes viewed China in the early 2000s as a beacon of carbon enlightenment. China, she said,
… took steps to control its population and convert its economy to non – carbon – based energy sources. These efforts were little noticed and less emulated in the West, in part because Westerners viewed Chinese population control efforts as immoral, and in part because the country’s exceptionally fast economic expansion led to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions, masking the impact of renewable energy. By 2050 , this impact became clear as China’s emissions began to fall rapidly. Had other nations followed China’s lead, the [grim future] history recounted here might have been very different. (p6).[3]
Another interviewer — a friendly one, actually — played the devil’s advocate:
Interviewer: Just how much do you hate the American way of life? What gives you the intellectual chutzpah to make these kinds of projections?
Oreskes: Our story is a call to protect the American way of life before it’s too late.
I identify with Oreskes, who grew up in New York, because as a lass she was a geologist working on Western Mining Corp’s Olympic project in central Australia. I phoned WMC’s retired boss Hugh Morgan but he couldn’t give me any piquant anecdotes about young Naomi.
Her sojourn Down Under must have been unhappy because she’s forecast that the climate emergency will kill off every Australian man woman and child (all 26 million of us). “The human populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.” (p33). As a resident of Australia’s pagan state of Victoria, I don’t believe in the afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear. (Witticism courtesy Woody Allen).
Oreskes dropped geology to co-write that Merchants of Doubt book, painting “climate deniers” as the evil twins of those denying that smoking causes cancer. The book in 2021 was set to music by composer Yvette Jackson, who sees climate doubt as having the
… low, somber insistence of the bass clarinet, skittering flute that cranks up anxiety, sonorous cello to hold things together, and the deep, doubting rumble of double bass.
Listen to that anxious, sonorous cello and more here (fourth video down).
At 65, Naomi’s job title is Harvard Professor of the History of Science — but don’t call, she’s on leave. She co-wrote her civilisational-collapse book with fellow alarmist Erik Conway. Her other collaborators include Pope Francis: she did the intro for his Laudato si’ encyclical in 2015.
Wikipedia lists only 30 of her honours, including the Stephen H. Schneider Award in 2016 for communicating “extraordinary scientific contributions” to a broad public in a clear and compelling fashion. Schneider (1945-2010) was a top IPCC climate scientist. He urged colleagues there to strike a balance between scaring the pants off the public and being honest about how weak the CO2 evidence really is. Oreskes also scored the 2019 Mary Rabbit Award from the US Geological Society. Her lifetime of bashing denialists is surely worth a million-dollar Nobel.
The Collapse book is about Western civilisation’s ruin while China saves the planet with its enlightened anti-CO2 measures. She is writing from the future in 2393 when she will be aged 435. Oreskes (as at 2393) is cross because we have refused to build enough windmills to stop at 11degC warming (p32) and eight-metre sea rises (p30). We should not have eaten so many fillet steaks[4] and, personally, I should not have tooled around in my reasonably priced, petrol-powered Hyundai i30 when Teslas were available at $80,000.
Oreskes was talking about Collapse at a Sydney Writers’ Festival when someone in the audience piped up, “Will you write fiction next?” She doesn’t of course view Collapse as fiction: “Speculative? Of course, but the book is extremely fact-based” (p79). And she elaborated to the ABC’s Dr Williams, “Well, it’s all based on solid science. Everything in this book is based on the scientific projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All we did was to add to the social and human aspects to it and to ask the question; what does this really mean in terms of what its potential impacts would be on people and its potential impacts on our institutions of governance?”
Her “science based” technical projection involved an angry summer in 2023 continuing year-round, “taking 500,000 lives worldwide and costing nearly $ 500 billion in losses due to fires , crop failure , and the deaths of livestock and companion animals” (p8) In 2014, how was Naomi (no-one’s perfect) to know that current agricultural output and yields continue smashing records?
The book’s “fact-based” projections have drought and desert ravaging the US in the 2050s:
The US government declared martial law to prevent food riots and looting [similar to 2020s’ mostly-peaceful burning and robbing]. A few years later, the United States announced plans with Canada for the two nations to begin negotiations … to develop an orderly plan for resource-sharing and northward population relocation (p26).
The talks led to the combined United States of North America. I imagine Texans started adding “eh” to their sentences, as in Why do Canadians say “eh?”? It’s so silly right? Because we want to, eh.
Even at the age of 435 in 2393, Oreskes remains really sore about the Climategate email scandal of 2009 (IPCC climate scientists conspiring to fudge data). She blames Climategate on a “massive campaign” that was “funded primarily by fossil fuel corporations” (p8) — this alleged largesse must have by-passed sceptic bloggers, who still rely on their tip jars. Oreskes remains vigilant to smite deniers:
It will also be crucial not to allow new forms of denial to take hold. We are already seeing examples, such as the false claim that off-shore wind kills whales and that restrictions on gas stoves are the latest excuse by liberals to control our lives and deny our freedom. Scientists will have to work with climate activists to block the spread of such misleading narratives.
She finished her interview with the ABC’s Dr Williams by claiming, improbably, that some readers of Collapse wished her 80-page book to be longer. She explained,
We didn’t want it to be too depressing, we didn’t want to go on and on and on, like 300 pages of misery, that really wouldn’t be any fun. So we are sort of hoping that the book, despite the fact that it’s a depressing topic, it’s actually we think kind of a fun read.
Apart from our dead kittens, that is.
[1] Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971. Link broken.
[2] The ABC Ombudsman told me it’s fine for people with honorary doctorates to be called “Dr” in any context.
“The ABC style guide does not form part of the editorial standards and we consider there is nothing materially inaccurate in referring to Ms O’Donoghue as Dr O’Donoghue.” Email from James, Investigations Officer, ABC Ombudsman’s Office, Feb 14, 2024. (The late Ms Donoghue’s Doctorates are honorary).
[3] On the ABC iview’s posting of the Oreskes/Williams interview, the ABC claimed the planet was warming at the top of the IPCC models’ forecasting. I wrote to my friend Kirsten McLiesh, who runs Audience & Consumer Affairs (i.e. the complaints department) pointing out that actual warming was at the bottom of the IPCC models’ range. In those days (2014) the ABC had some integrity and Kirsten wrote back,
“Having been alerted to your complaint, the program acknowledges that the sentence read on the website as an incontrovertible fact and have undertaken to remove it. An Editor’s Note has been added to the page.”
[4] Oreskes, Twitter May 4, 2023: “I’m often asked “What can I do to stop climate change.” That’s a hard question because so much of the change we need is structural, but this new study proves one thing: EAT LESS BEEF. (And now, drum roll, here come the beef industry trolls.)”
Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here
Review of “Unmasking Anne Frank, Her Famous diary Exposed as a Literary Fraud” by Ikuo Suzuki
By Karl Haemers | Occidental Observer | August 27, 2022
I am going to assume that most readers of The Occidental Observer are familiar with the official story of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl (aged 13–15) who kept a diary while hiding in a house from Jew-hunting “Nazis” in the Netherlands during World War II. In searching the TOO site for “Anne Frank,” I found no hits, but the Anne Frank story is almost as prevalent and persistent as the holocaust story itself, and surely TOO readers know the basics.
Publisher Clemens & Blair has just released a new book focused on the fraudulence of The Diary of Anne Frank. A number of other works examining the fraudulent Anne Frank diary have been published over the course of many years, most famously “Is the diary of Anne Frank Genuine?,” an article in English in 1982 by Robert Faurisson. But this new book surpasses the old ones in many ways.
Author of the current work, Ikuo Suzuki, a Japanese researcher, reviews a number of these earlier analyses of the diary in his new book, as does editor Thomas Dalton in his Foreword. As assistant editor, I do the same in my Introduction. (Disclaimer: I have a partial financial interest in this book.)
From there, Mr. Suzuki explores new analyses of the diary, including an illuminating graphic depiction of the many changes among the many various publications of the diary over the span of decades. So numerous and detailed are the diary’s entries over 26 months that logical inconsistencies and physical and logistical impossibilities inevitably occur; Suzuki identifies many new ones. He calls some of this “Anne magic,” and indeed only a magical explanation can reconcile some of the diary’s many internal flaws and self-contradictions.
Suzuki’s book is arranged into five main chapters, each having four to nine sections. As an example of inconsistency among various published versions of the diary, Chapter 1 is titled “Absurdity on the Surface,” and one section is titled “The Translation of ‘Cat’ Into ‘Tarantula’.” This Chapter displays pictures and drawings of the “Annex” in which Anne Frank supposedly hid out with seven other Jews, along with examinations of physical and architectural impossibilities.
Suzuki goes on to explore “Absurdities Lurking in the Depths” in Chapter 2, closing with the section “Was Everything a Figment?.” Here we see pictures of diary pages themselves, and careful comparisons among the bewildering number of different versions of the diary published at different times in different languages. Here we find Suzuki’s unique graphic display of the many changes among the versions. For example, Anne Frank is said to have edited her own diaries at a later point in her time in the “hideout.” Edited is not the proper term when we see that one early entry in her Diary as presented in the English publish version is actually a combination of two entries more than a month apart from the original diaries.
Chapter 3, “Annie Ample: A Soft-Core Porn Romantic Life?,” examines the core drama at the heart of the diary: the love (or lust) affair Anne supposedly had with a Jewish boy from another family also confined in the “hideout.” One of the great revelations that Suzuki presents is just how grotesque and sexually perverse the diary truly is, raising doubts on its own whether a young girl could even think such thoughts, much less write them down.
I’ll say here that, in my Postscript, I present the content of five missing pages of the diary that supposedly were found in 1998, and then two more “uncovered” in 2018. The five pages contain a scathing denunciation of Anne’s mother Edith and an oblique critique of her father Otto, but the two “uncovered” pages contain “perhaps the filthiest pornographic smut of the entire diary.” (I will spare readers the details here, though the book will not.)
Chapter 4 explores Anne’s writing career (or lack of it), the “infamous bookshelf door,” and the story of the beginning and end of the “hideout” (which is the chapter title). More pictures of documents and infrastructure assist the inquiry. This chapter engages in a staple of Diary doubters—handwriting analysis, and clarifies some former confusion. A letter Anne Frank supposedly sent in 1940—before the “hideout”—to a pen pal in the US was found, and when its handwriting is compared to the handwriting of the Diary, even an amateur analyst can see the two are different. It also debunks the absurd story—or stories—of how the diaries were finally found after the “hideout” inhabitants were hauled away by the Gestapo.
Chapter 5, “The Diary Unmasked,” explores the core issue of The Diary of Anne Frank, one that all revisionists have addressed: who really wrote the diary? Many speculate that Anne’s father Otto Frank was the actual author all along, but Suzuki excludes Otto as lacking the character, ability and motivation to forge the diary. He says: “there was at least one person in Otto’s vicinity who definitely possessed those qualities.” Suzuki’s in-depth profile and examination of this one person—Jewish playwright and journalist Meyer Levin—I found compelling. For instance, Levin’s relationship with Otto Frank included Frank appointing Levin his copyright agent in 1952. Levin’s history involved him working in the “Office of War Information” in the US, producing propaganda movies. Thus Levin had the presence and ability to invent the Diary as on-going war propaganda.
Mr. Suzuki closes with a touching Afterword he calls “Annelies Next to You,” in which the focus of our outrage is inverted from the evil “Nazis” to those who would fabricate lies in Anne’s name. This is a virtue of this book; Suzuki never blames Anne for the fraud, but rather points the finger at other Jews. “Not a single word in (the diary) contains her truth. It is merely a prison for Annelies’ soul, covered by a thick wall of falsehood in the name of a legend.” Our compassion should be for the real Annelies (her full name) Frank who has been so brutally used and misrepresented to promote a Jewish victim/”Nazi” perpetrator agenda.
The book closes with my Postscript, where, as stated, the five “missing” and two “uncovered” pages bring us up to date on diary developments. Unfortunately, Revisionists can also generate myths to their discredit, and one of these is the “ball-point pen” story. Hopefully I put to rest the claim that the diary is a fraud merely because it was written in ball-point pen, which was not invented until 1950. (Only two attached notes were written in pen, but nothing in the diary text itself.) The Postscript is framed as “Re-Rebutting the Anne Frank House,” which is the lavishly funded and well-organized foundation administering the “hideout” building itself as a museum, curating the diaries themselves (though not all are displayed), and issuing the on-going education about the iconic Jewish victim of “Nazi” tyranny, Anne Frank. I believe that just about the only point on which the Anne Frank House is correct regarding the diary is its position on the ball point pen issue. Everything else is tendentious and misleading propaganda, or outright deception.
In the words of main author Suzuki: “All other textual information, even the testimonies of friends and relations, is too biased and too fraudulent to be believed.” As he carefully demonstrates, there is so little truth to the diary itself that one can hardly accept any of it as valid.
This is one of those books that in parts of a couple sections presents such exhaustive detail as to make reading tedious, while at the same time my fascination with the revelations drew me onward. Suzuki could not completely resist the temptation to depart from a strict scholarly tone and lapse into humor—but neither could Dalton or I. I suppose this has to be accepted in such revisionist material, as we see all over certain “free speech” social media platforms. The lapses are rare and brief however, and the depth and scope of scholarship prevail. If I have any final critique of Unmasking Anne Frank, it is that it treated the perpetrators of the hoax too lightly, failing to express the appropriate loathing and contempt and even criminal accusations they deserve. Suzuki’s compassion is for Annelies, who was so cruelly used by these criminal fraudsters, but he expresses not enough outrage at those who exploited her posterity. We are all victims of the fraud as well.
Unmasking Anne Frank by Ikuo Suzuki, including the excellent Foreword by editor Thomas Dalton and Introduction and Postscript by myself, achieves the difficult task of summarizing and updating previous diary revision, while presenting new crucial insights. The end effect is to drive a dagger of certainty into the bleeding heart of Diary pathos. Suzuki’s detailed biographical analysis of the person he concludes actually wrote the diary—Meyer Levin—is the climax of a book filled with stunning insights. This book has much to consider for those new to Diary doubt, and much more to ponder for those already familiar with Anne Frank revisionism. Unmasking Anne Frank is, without doubt, the best such revisionist text ever produced; it is not only a great contribution to diary revision, it may be a culmination.
Samantha Power and the Power of a Word
BY DIANA JOHNSTONE • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 3, 2024
Twenty-five years ago, NATO was bombing Serbia as the first performance in its new role. The collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the military alliance of its initial official role of defending its member states from a theoretical communist threat. Under no threat and devoid of UN Security Council approval, NATO assumed the self-ordained role of virtuous defender of allegedly oppressed minorities by bombing what was left of largely dismantled Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 on behalf of Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
NATO’s air attacks on the Balkan nation were the practical application of a new post-Cold War doctrine. To succeed, this doctrine relied on Western media to report on crisis areas with the appropriate mixture of exaggerations, omissions and outright lies to justify NATO’s virtuous interventions. The military industrial complex could breathe easy and a new generation of journalists began successful careers eagerly spinning their reports to serve the new humanitarian war ideology.
None was more successful than Dublin-born Samantha Power, whose novice reports from Bosnia in the mid-1990s provided the basis for her 2002 book on “genocide” which “quickly became an international sensation, glowingly reviewed almost everywhere, a huge bestseller that won her a Pulitzer Prize and launched her career as a leading figure in human rights doctrine.” She has gone on from one top governmental post to another, a Washington star, urging the United States to intervene on moral grounds.
Samantha Power owes her remarkable success to her talent as a writer, her ambition, her striking presence, but not least to the man at the origins of the whole humanitarian war policy.
That was none other than Morton Isaac Abramowitz, a highly influential member of the foreign policy establishment and the main inventor of what would become the “R2P” (Responsibility to Protect) doctrine. The crucial policy contribution of Abramowitz is explained at the start of my 2002 book, Fools’ Crusade, as follows:[1]
As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the early 1990s, Abramowitz headed a project to develop a new U.S. foreign policy for the post-Cold War era. Rather than identifying “threats”, especially at a time when few threats could be seen, a successful new policy needed to combine promotion of U.S. interests with proclamation of U.S. “ideals”.
Theory and Practice
At the Carnegie Endowment in 1992, Abramowitz published the theory of the new U.S. “humanitarian intervention” policy as Self-Determination in the New World Order.
“The vision of a ‘new world order’ since 1990 has been a world with one superpower – the United States – in which the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle, disputes are settled peacefully, aggression is firmly met by collective resistance, and all people are justly treated.”
That sounds very nice. But put into practice, “collective resistance” means NATO, and “all people are treated justly” depends on Washington’s preferences. The new rules-based order was not to be confused with traditional international law, based on national sovereignty. Globalization was making national sovereignty outdated (except for the United States). “Ideals” make rules more flexible.
The sovereign nation is being broken down subtly by the pressures of economic globalization. It may also be undermined from within, by domestic insurgencies. In the post-Cold War world, the Carnegie Endowment study noted, “groups within states are staking claims to independence, greater autonomy, or the overthrow of an existing government, all in the name of self-determination”. […] In the future, the authors announced, “humanitarian intervention will become increasingly unavoidable”. The United States will have the final word as to when and how to intervene.
Abramowitz subsequently helped put his theory into practice in crumbling Yugoslavia. He was the eminence grise behind U.S. diplomats, steering the events leading to the “Kosovo war” that split the province of Kosovo off from Serbia. He was advisor to the Kosovo Albanian delegation at the imitation “peace negotiations” staged at Rambouillet to provide an excuse for the bombing of Serbia. The moderate Albanian Kosovo leader Ibrahim Rugova was replaced by the armed gangster, Hashim Thaci. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright set terms no Serbian leader could accept, demanding the right to station NATO troops over the entire country, with full impunity. The Serb side was then blamed for the failure, and NATO began to bomb on March 24, 1999.
Samantha Steals her Way into Bosnia
Back in 1992, fresh out of Yale, 22-year-old Samantha Power was given a position as intern in the office of Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. As a proofreader, she quickly absorbed the new official doctrine. At that time, her boss was obsessed with the conflicts in Bosnia as implicating the future of NATO. Determined to get to Bosnia where the action was, Samantha stole stationery from the neighboring office of Foreign Policy magazine and forged a letter from the editor to the head of the UN Press Office, asking that the UN provide her, as Foreign Policy’s “Balkan correspondent,” with “all necessary access.”[2]
From that time on, her work functioned precisely to advance the new “humanitarian intervention” policy of her mentor, Morton Abramowitz. She recalls that his influence helped her get increasingly important assignments – most crucially, writing about the Srebrenica massacre for The Washington Post.
With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.
The Western press corps based in Sarajevo tended to become emotionally involved with the Muslim side which was its principal news source. Missing from their dispatches were reports on Muslim massacres of Serbs villages or on the well-armed Islamic fighters who joined the Muslim side from Afghanistan and Arab countries, some of them settling permanently in Bosnia.
When Bosnian Serb forces captured the Muslim base at Srebrenica in July 1995, they evacuated women, children and the aged to safety, while men fled, fearing retaliation. Many were killed in unclear circumstances.
Without reference to such context, Western media focused on reports of a massacre of 8,000 male prisoners as a unique event which branded the Serbs as the guilty party in the three-sided civil war. With the Srebrenica reports, the term “genocide” emerged as the power word that could give NATO its new mission.
Calling Srebrenica “genocide” provided the argument for NATO bombing: if Serbs committed genocide in Bosnia, it implied that Serbs were genocidal and risked committing genocide in Kosovo unless NATO intervened. This theory was supported by wildly inaccurate accusations voiced by leading Western politicians during the bombing campaign.
That was the story that was sold to the public by politicians and the media. From the start, the Serb majority in Yugoslavia had been portrayed as invaders in their own country, with everyone else as victims. Thus was destroyed the last semi-socialist, nonaligned country in Europe.
The Kosovo war indeed combined U.S. “interests and ideals”. The ideals were preventing a genocide that never would have taken place (and also, incidentally, preventing a negotiation that could have settled the whole conflict as well). The interests included the immediate construction by the Americans of a giant U.S. military base on the territory of Kosovo, once Serbian forces were obliged to leave.
Genocide and R2P
Samantha Power’s 2002 book was subtitled “America in the Age of Genocide”. To speak of the present as an “age of genocide” is wildly melodramatic, but the purpose is to place virtuous America in the center of drastic moral demands. America must save the world from its genocidal self. “Genocide” was thereby promoted as the most potent pretext for U.S. military intervention – precisely by deploring its absence, both in Bosnia and more convincingly, in Rwanda. The Clinton administration was certainly not going to intervene in Rwanda, because the bloody chaos was in fact favoring the conquest of Rwanda by Paul Kagame and his army, which had invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. Kagame was a favored client of the United States. There was no reason for Washington to interfere with Kagame’s victory.
But the “failure to stop genocide” was an appeal to the liberal conscience to intervene later on, whenever the U.S. was in need a powerful argument to get rid of a someone it wanted to get rid of. Moammer Gaddafi had been on the U.S.-UK hit list for decades, but had made concessions to gain reconciliation. But when Gaddafi’s usual fundamentalist Islamic opponents in Tripoli used the 2011 “Arab spring” to raise protests, the “threat of genocide” alarm was raised on their behalf. In Washington, action to stop Gaddafi from “committing genocide” was urged by Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power, while Bernard Henri Lévy raised the alarm in Paris. NATO rose to the challenge, destroyed the most economically successful country on the African continent and murdered its leader, creating a flood of refugees to Europe and other disasters. Most of the liberal left cheered.
Today it is widely recognized that the Irak war was based on deceit and ended in disaster. Other U.S. wars are mostly conceded to have been unfortunate mistakes. There are doubts about Libya, due mainly to the refugee flow. But the destruction of Yugoslavia, and in particular the 1999 “Kosovo war”, is still widely accepted in the West as what it was arranged to appear: NATO’s generous humanitarian intervention to prevent “genocide” by racist Serbs against the oppressed Albanian minority.
The distortions of the Bosnia conflict and the Kosovo war were precisely the practical application of the Abramowitz policy: promote minority rebellions to break down national sovereignty and change governments the U.S. doesn’t like, while supplying NATO with a new geographically unlimited mission of “humanitarian intervention”. Yugoslavia was the starting point of the whole aggressive post-Cold War U.S. policy as “single superpower” determining the world order, using the idealistic pretexts set out by Abramowitz. Young Samantha Power, who was very smart, got the point and ambitiously cheated her way into a supporting role as reporter in the Bosnia spectacle, which she eventually transformed into an astonishingly successful career.
I was in Kosovo on my own in months prior to the NATO bombardment and saw quite clearly that in that small province, the Serbs were a frightened minority while Albanians were already tasting their future triumph. There was absolutely no danger of a Serbian “genocide” of Albanians. But Western editors kept sending in ignorant young aspiring journalists, on the lookout for some “Serb atrocity” that could advance their budding career. Editors rejected any report that went in a different direction. It was at that time just plain impossible to publish an unbiased report. I know from experience.
Above all, breaking up Yugoslavia was an exercise in subsequent efforts to undermine the Russian Federation, by inciting the Federation’s ethnic minorities against the Russians. Ukraine was the crucial battering ram. I always used to think of Ukraine when studying the conflicts in the Krajina regions of Croatia and Bosnia, as both words have the same root (border land) and suffered from similar conflicts, notably in World War II. Western powers had revived the Nazi-supported Croatian nationalism against the Serbs to break up Yugoslavia. They would revive much more virulent Nazi-supported Ukrainian nationalism against Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine, in an effort to weaken and eventually even break up the Russian Federation.
And for the United States, the humanitarian “ideals” of supporting minorities would be compensated by the major strategic “interest” of eventually gaining control of Crimea, and with it, Russia’s main naval base in Sebastopol. Putin did what any Russian leader not brain-dead would have done: he headed off this disaster by mobilizing the Russian inhabitants of Crimea to vote to return to Russia, which they had never chosen to leave. This obvious act of self-determination is denounced in the West as an invasion.
The Ideological Backlash
Unfortunately, the blatantly tragic misuse of the “humanitarian intervention” or R2P doctrine in Libya has not managed to achieve its discredit. It is threatened now by the danger that it is changing sides in the very global conflicts it has stimulated.
The referendum in Crimea was a democratic measure of self-determination that fit the Abramowitz standards. The Russian “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in 2022 was partially motivated by the sort of consideration featured in the Abramowitz doctrine: defense of the population of Donbas, under attack from an ultranationalist regime in Kiev. Of course, Western governments and media have simply totally ignored any Russia appeal to the ideals of human rights and self-determination, which they consider their own private property as self-declared unique “democracies”. Russia is classed as an “autocracy” whose interests must be malevolent and thus don’t count.
A greater threat to the West’s self-proclaimed monopoly on virtue is coming from Israel’s merciless attack on the people of Gaza. Most of the Global South and growing sections of Western populations are horrified by Israel’s destruction of hospitals, mass murder of children and efforts to starve the Palestinians. They see Israel, with full Western backing, committing Genocide – the real thing this time, out in the open, blatant and unrelenting.
The NATO war machine may have to conjure up a new set of moralizing pretexts for its aggressions.
Notes
[1] See Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Pluto Press, 2002, pp 9-10; Monthly Review 2003
[2] Here, with William Burns, Samantha Power discusses her new autobiography The Education of an Idealist and recalls her short term working for Abramowitz at the Carnegie Endowment. https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/09/13/samantha-power-on-education-of-idealist-event-7178
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The Ways of the Jewish Slave Traders
NOI RESEARCH GROUP • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 8, 2024
“As Mr. Yakub continued to preach for converts, he told his people that he would make the others work for them. (This promise came to pass.) Naturally, there are always some people around who would like to have others do their work. Those are the ones who fell for Mr. Yakub’s teaching, 100 per cent.” — The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, chapter 55 of Message to the Blackman in America titled “The Making of Devil”
“Three blessings a Jewish man is obligated to pray daily: ‘(Blessed art Thou,) Who did not make me a gentile; Who did not make me a woman; and Who did not make me a slave.’” — Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 43b–44a
The story of the Jewish American experience that most Jews want to believe, and want the world to believe, is one of almost endless historical victimhood. They insist that they fled anti-Semitic oppression in Europe, landing safely on Ellis Island long after the Civil War’s end in 1865, and certainly some did. … continue
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- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
- Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon Challenges The Climate Consensus … It’s The Sun, Not CO2
- Regional Cooling Since The 1980s Has Driven Glacier Advance In The Karakoram Mountains
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