Legacy of Climategate – 10 years later
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 12, 2019
My reflections on Climategate 10 years later, and also reflections on my reflections of 5 years ago.
Last week, an email from Rob Bradley reminded me of my previous blog post The legacy of Climategate: 5 years later. That post was the last in a sequence of posts at Climate Etc. since 2010 on Climategate; for the entire group of posts, see [link] Rereading these was quite a blast from the past.
While I still mention Climategate in interviews, the general reaction I get is ‘yawn . . . old hat . . . so 2010 . . . nothingburger . . . the scientists were all exonerated . . . the science has proven to be robust.’ I hadn’t even thought of a ’10 years later’ post until Rob Bradley’s email.
Now I see that, at least in the UK, the 10 year anniversary looks to be rather a big deal. Already we are seeing some analyses published in the mainstream media:
- The Guardian – Climategate 10 years on: What lessons have we learned?
- The Spectator – James Delingpole: My finest hour
Two starkly different perspectives. While I personally think Delingpole’s article is a superb analysis, it would not surprise me if the ‘establishment’ media in the UK is looking to rewrite history and cement the ‘exoneration,’ especially with this forthcoming one hour BBC special Climategate: Science of a Scandal, set to air November 14.
According to Cliscep (not sure what the source of this information is), McKitrick and McIntyre were both interviewed for the BBC special, but apparently McKitrick was cut completely. Lets see how they edit McIntyre.
Exoneration?
The mainstream media and the Climategater scientists themselves claim complete exoneration by the various ‘inquiries’. Were they exonerated?
There was no exoneration by any objective analysis of the various inquiries. Ross McKitrick lays all this out in his article Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
“The evidence points to some clear conclusions.
- The scientists involved in the email exchanges manipulated evidence in IPCC and WMO reports with the effect of misleading readers, including policymakers. The divergence problem was concealed by deleting data to “hide the decline.” The panels that examined the issue in detail, namely Muir Russell’s panel, concurred that the graph was “misleading.” The ridiculous attempt by the Penn State Inquiry to defend an instance of deleting data and splicing in other data to conceal a divergence problem only discredits their claims to have investigated the issue.
- Phil Jones admitted deleting emails, and it appears to have been directed towards preventing disclosure of information subject to Freedom of Information laws, and he asked his colleagues to do the same. The inquiries largely fumbled this question, or averted their eyes.
- The scientists privately expressed greater doubts or uncertainties about the science in their own professional writings and in their interactions with one another than they allowed to be stated in reports of the IPCC or WMO that were intended for policymakers. Rather than criticise the scientists for this, the inquiries (particularly the House of Commons and Oxburgh inquiries) took the astonishing view that as long as scientists expressed doubts and uncertainties in their academic papers and among themselves, it was acceptable for them to conceal those uncertainties in documents prepared for policy makers.
- The scientists took steps individually or in collusion to block access to data or methodologies in order to prevent external examination of their work. This point was accepted by the Commons Inquiry and Muir Russell, and the authors were admonished and encouraged to improve their conduct in the future.
- The inquiries were largely unable to deal with the issue of blocking publication of papers, or intimidating journals. But academics reading the emails could see quite clearly the tribalism at work, and in comparison to other fields, climatology comes off looking juvenile, corrupt and in the grip of a handful of self-appointed gatekeepers and bullies.
Is the science concerning the current concerns about climate change sound? Many people, starting with the members of the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, had hoped this question would be answered during the inquiry process, and there is a frequent refrain in the media that the investigations affirmed the science. But the reality is that none of the inquiries actually investigated the science. The one inquiry supposedly set up to address this, namely Lord Oxburgh’s, actually operated under a different remit altogether, despite multiple claims by the UEA that it was a science reappraisal panel.
Over the course of the five reviews, a few complaints were investigated and upheld, such as the problem of data secrecy at the CRU and the misleading nature of the “hide the decline” graph. And the IAC leveled enough serious criticisms about the IPCC process to substantiate concerns that the organization is unsound for the purpose of providing balanced, rigorous science assessments. But many other concerns were left unaddressed, or slipped through the cracks between the inquiries, or were set aside after taking CRU responses at face value.”
Steve McIntyre’s Brief submitted for the defendants in one Mann’s lawsuits addresses the key scientific aspects related to Michael Mann’s conduct and hockey stick research:
“Even before the release of the Climategate emails, numerous public concerns were raised about Mann’s conduct. Concerns about Mann’s research included:
- Mann’s undisclosed use in a 1998 paper (“MBH98”) of an algorithm which mined data for hockey-stick shaped series. The algorithm was so powerful that it could produce hockey-stick shaped “reconstructions” from auto-correlated red noise. Mann’s failure to disclose the algorithm continued even in a 2004 corrigendum.
- Mann’s failure to disclose adverse verification statistics in MBH98. Mann also did not archive results that would permit calculation of the adverse statistics. Climategate emails later revealed that Mann regarded this information as his “dirty laundry” and required an associate at the Climatic Research Unit (“CRU”) to withhold the information from potential critics.
- Mann’s misleading claims about the “robustness” of his reconstruction to the presence/absence of tree ring chronologies, including failing to fully disclose calculations excluding questionable data from strip bark bristlecone pine trees.
- Mann’s deletion of the late 20th century portion of the Briffa temperature reconstruction in Figure 2.21 in the IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001) to conceal its sharp decline, in apparent response to concerns that showing the data would “dilute the message” and give “fodder to the skeptics.” Mann’s insistence in 2004 that “no researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, ‘grafted the thermometer record onto’ any reconstruction. But it was later revealed that in one figure for the cover of the 1999 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) annual report, the temperature record had not only been grafted onto the various reconstructions—and in the case of the Briffa reconstruction, had been substituted for the actual proxy
- Mann’s undisclosed grafting of temperature data for “Mike’s Nature trick,” a manipulation of data which involved: (1) grafting the temperature record after 1980 onto the proxy reconstruction up to 1980; (2) “smoothing” the data; and (3) truncating the smooth back to 1980. ”
Exoneration? Not even close. However, is all this even relevant anymore? “the science has moved on . . . independently verified . . . 97% consensus . . . 8 warmest years occurred since Climategate’ . . . etc. etc.
So did all this ‘matter’, in the larger scheme of things? During the period 2001 to ~2012, the public debate on climate change rose and fell with the fortunes of the hockey stick: the IPCC TAR (2001) prominently featured the hockey stick, which made the public realize that something unusual was going on; the famous elevator version of the hockey stick in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary; in late 2009, Climategate contributed to derailing the UNFCCC COP15 outcome; and in 2010 was the clincher for the failure of the Waxman-Markey Bill (carbon cap and trade) in the U.S. Senate.
Since about 2014 or so, the public debate on climate change has become less ‘scientized’, with economics, social justice and raw politics taking center stage.
Did climate scientists learn anything from Climategate?
Looking forward, should Climategate matter? Only if scientists failed to learn the appropriate lessons.
At the time of Climategate, I wrote an essay entitled On the credibility of climate research. I raised four key issues: Lack of transparency, climate tribalism, the need for improved analysis and communication of uncertainty, and engagement with ‘skeptics’ and critics of our work.
At the time, I was rather astonished by the failure of climate science ‘leaders’ (apart from the climagaters defending themselves) to make public statements about this and show some leadership.
Interesting insights into the ‘leadership’ void at the time of Climategate are revealed by a tranche of emails obtained by the CEI [link] dated the first half of 2010, involving scientists involved in Climategate emails as well as others who are regarded as the keepers of the IPCC ‘flame’ – e.g. Michael Oppenheimer, Steve Schneider, Gabi Hegerl, Eric Steig, Kevin Trenberth.
It is very interesting to see what they were concerned about in the aftermath of Climategate. They were trying to understand why Climategate was newsworthy, and they were mostly concerned about protecting themselves from the same things that Climategate emails revealed: attacks on scientists’ reputation, ‘skeptics’ getting mentions in the mainstream media, public perceptions of scientists’ credibility, how to convince the public that AGW is ‘real’ with 3 slides in 10 minutes, top 10 list of denialist mistakes.
Steve Schneider perceptively states: “A mega heat wave this summer is worth 3 orders of magnitude more in the PR wars–too bad we have to wait for random events since evidence doesn’t seem to cut it anymore with the MSM.”
In my post Climategate essays, I pointed the way for climate science out of this morass. How was this received by climate scientists? Michael Lemonick’s follow up essay Why I Wrote About Judith Curry to his article Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on her Colleagues, provides the following insights:
“Simply by giving Judith Curry’s views a respectful airing, I’ve already drawn accusations of being irresponsible — and it’s valid to raise the question of whether giving her any sort of platform is a bad idea.
I also argue, as you’ll see in Scientific American, that the vehement reaction of climate scientists, while perfectly understandable, might be akin to the violent reaction of the human immune system to some bacteria and viruses — a reaction that’s sometimes more damaging than the original microbe.”
Given the huge stakes and the serious structural issues surrounding the assessment of climate science and policy that had emerged from Climategate, these concerns of the climate scientists seem small-minded and naïve, not to mention counter-productive – ‘circling the wagons’ even tighter made the situation even worse.
Clearly any leadership that might lead climate science out of this morass would have to come from outside the community of climate scientists and probity would need to come from outside of the field of climate science. Climate science subsequently became an important topic in the fields of science and technology studies, philosophy of science, social psychology, law, statistics, computer science and communications.
The broader institutions that support climate science have implemented some improvements post Climategate:
- The UN IAC review of the IPCC has resulted in some improvements to the IPCC practices of reviewing, conflicts of interest, uncertainty assessment
- Elite journals now require data to be made publicly available and also conflict of interest statements.
On the downside:
- Politically correct and ‘woke’ universities have become hostile places for climate scientists that are not sufficiently ‘politically correct’
- Professional societies have damaged their integrity by publishing policy statements advocating emissions reductions and marginalizing research that is not consistent with the ‘party line’
- The gate-keeping by elite journals has gotten worse IMO, although the profusion of new journals makes it possible for anyone to get pretty much anything published somewhere.
The main long-term impact of Climategate on climate scientists seems to have been to put a halo around Michael Mann’s head over his ‘victim’ status, giving him full reign to attack in a Trumpian manner anyone who disagrees with him.
Cultural shifts
The social culture surrounding climate change has changed substantially in the past 10 years and even the past 5 years.
10 years ago, the climate blogs were highly influential – the big four were WUWT, Climate Progress, Real Climate and Climate Audit. Climate Progress (subsequently Think Progress ) is now defunct – what the heck happened to Joe Romm? Climate Audit has a very low level of activity. Real Climate publishes posts at a leisurely pace (about the same pace as Climate Etc.). Only WUWT has maintained its pace of publishing and its influence.
At this point, twitter has almost totally eclipsed the climate blogs; this has accelerated in the past 5 years. Also, there are now some not-for-profit organizations that have hired writers on the climate topic, notably Carbon Brief.
Further, a number of climate scientists and scientists in related fields now either have regular columns in the mainstream media (Roger Pielk Jr and Michael Schellenberger at Forbes are notable examples) or write frequent op-eds (e.g. Michael Mann).
Communication of climate science has become a big priority in climate science, although what is judged as desirable and worthy of professional recognition is more often propaganda than ‘science to inform.’
At the time of Climategate, public advocacy by climate scientists of climate policy was generally frowned upon, and only a few senior, well-established scientists dared to do this (e.g. Jim Hansen). At this point, climate scientist/activists are very large in number, and such activism seems to be a ticket to professional success.
With regards to the advocacy groups and think tanks on both sides, the conflicts a decade ago between the environmental advocacy groups (e.g. Greenpeace) and the libertarian groups (e.g. CEI, CATO) seems almost quaint at this point. With the exception of Heartland, GWPF and the newly formed CO2 Coalition, the libertarian groups no longer bother with climate science (even the long standing program at CATO with Pat Michaels no longer exists).
Instead, we have Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement on one hand, and the Yellow Vests and related movements on the other hand. These are populist movements (although apparently with some big $$ backing, esp for Extinction Rebellion). The zombie stuff of the Extinction Rebellion makes me nostalgic for the relative rationality of Greenpeace versus CEI.
‘Skeptics’ these days are generally defined by ‘lukewarmerism’ (e.g. climate sensitivity on the low end of the IPCC range), a focus on historical and paleo data records, and a focus on natural climate variability. Skeptics frequently cite the IPCC reports. Skeptics generally support nuclear energy and natural gas, but are dubious of rapid expansion of wind and solar and biofuels.
Scientists on the ‘warm’ side of the spectrum think that IPCC is old hat and too conservative/cautious (see esp Naomi Oreskes’ new book); in short, insufficiently alarming. The ‘alarmed’ scientists are focused on attributing extreme weather to AGW (heeding Steve Schneider’s ‘wisdom’), and also in generating implausible scenarios of huge amounts of sea level rise. As a result, consensus of the 97% is less frequently invoked.
Such alarmism by the climate scientists has spawned doomsterism, to the dismay of these same climate scientists – things are so bad that we are all doomed, so why should we bother.
There is also a growing dichotomy on both sides of this between the Boomers and the Millennials/GenZ. On the ‘skeptics’ side, there is a general paucity of younger scientists, with the center of mass being scientists in their 60’s and 70’s (and even older).
On the ‘alarmed’ side, there is a steady stream of younger scientists fueled by propaganda in K-12 and hiring practices and professional rewards in the universities. Some of the younger scientists think that the likes of Michael Mann are too conservative and insufficiently ‘woke’ and unconcerned about social justice objectives. This recent exchange on twitter was particularly illuminating:
Mann: “I share her (Klein’s) concern over each of these societal afflictions, but I wonder at the assertion that it’s not possible to address climate change without solving all that plagues us. My worry is this. Saddling a climate movement with a laundry list of other worthy social programmes risks alienating needed supporters (say, independents and moderate conservatives) who are apprehensive about a broader agenda of progressive social change. The pessimist in me also doubts that we’ll eliminate greed and intolerance within the next decade.”
This elicited the following responses:
Apparently this elicited a 15 hour tweet storm from Mann. P.S. I side with Mann in this particular dispute.
‘Cancel culture’ is also booming, but this is nothing new in the climate arena; the Climategaters plus Naomi Oreskes were pioneers in cancel culture as related to climate scientists or anyone else who doesn’t toe the party line (although the party line is now splitting between boomer alarmists and the Millennials). At the time of Climategate, the cancel efforts were conducted via the ‘back channels’ (e.g. emails); these days they are conducted in the open on twitter. From Hayhoe to Mann on twitter in response to a recently published paper:
“I’m also concerned as I’ve been getting some dismissives citing this. Have you had a chat with Tom about it?”
Social justice has become a major driver in climate policy (e.g. the Green New Deal), increasingly overtaking climate policy in its objectives.
‘Boomer’ Mann has the more defensible position this one. Yes, any policies should avoid making the situation of disadvantaged individuals worse. But seeking to solve the myriad problems of social justice through climate/energy policy is a recipe for accomplishing nothing for either. So Mann and I are in agreement on this one (see spat above with Holthaus).
With all these changes, you’ll be relieved to hear that Climategate lives on in numerous lawsuits that Michael Mann has filed related to criticisms of his behavior related to the hockeystick. Most of these lawsuits continue to languish since they were filed about 8 years ago (although Mann did lose his lawsuit against Tim Ball). With these lawsuits, there is no denying that the impacts of Climategate are still playing out.
Whither the debate on climate change?
I’ll lead off this section with a quote from Delingpole’s recent article:
“Right now, the struggle against this nonsense seems pretty hopeless. But we sceptics do have at least two things on our side – time and economics. Time is doing us a favour by showing that none of the alarmists’ doomsday predictions are coming to pass. Economics – from the blackouts in South Australia caused by excessive reliance on renewables (aka unreliables) to the current riots and demonstrations taking place from France and the Netherlands to Chile over their governments’ green policies – suggest that common sense will prevail in the end. Bloody hell, though – taking its time, isn’t it?”
I’ll extend Delingpole’s sentiments a bit further, to include these additional things that are on the side of an eventual rational outcome to this:
- Energy engineering realities: for a superb overview, see Michael Kelly’s recent essay Energy Utopias and Engineering Realities
- Growing concerns about energy reliability and security, e.g. the recent experience of California with massive power shutdowns and blackouts in Australia
- The climate itself; even with huge 2016 (see this recent overview by Ross McKitrick), the temperatures are not keeping pace with the CMIP5 predictions
- At some point, a spate of La Nina events, a shift to the cold phase of the AMO, increased volcanic activity, impacts of a solar minimum and another ‘hiatus’ are inevitable; sort of the reverse of what Steve Schneider was waiting for.
- Most of the CMIP6 climate models have gone somewhat bonkers, with a majority having values of ECS that exceed 4.5C and do a poor job of simulating the temperatures since 1950; makes it difficult to take seriously their 21st century projections
Ideas that are genuinely irrational eventually burn themselves out as reality bites, but we have certainly seen such ideas, policies and politics persist for decades in the past 100 years. Perhaps the information age, the internet and social media will speed this one along.
What’s wrong with current climate/energy policy? This 2013 quote by Hans von Storch sums up it up:
“Unfortunately, some scientists behave like preachers, delivering sermons to people. What this approach ignores is the fact that there are many threats in our world that must be weighed against one another. If I’m driving my car and find myself speeding toward an obstacle, I can’t simple yank the wheel to the side without first checking to see if I’ll instead be driving straight into a crowd of people. Climate researchers cannot and should not take this process of weighing different factors out of the hands of politics and society.”
Common sense approaches to reducing vulnerability to extreme weather events, improving environmental quality, developing better energy technologies, improving agricultural and land use practices, better water management polices and engineering can lead the way to a more prosperous and secure future. Each of these solutions is ‘no regrets’ – make sense however the 21st century climate plays out.
For those that are concerned about social justice: the biggest social justice issue that I see for the 21st century is to provide reliable grid electricity to Africa.
In terms of climate scientists and their influence. The relative sensibility of Boomer scientists (even Michael Mann; although this recent article is slightly nuts) are being eclipsed by the zombie-dom of the Extinction Rebellion and ‘wokeness’.
Regarding Boomer wisdom, I was particularly struck by this recent interview of Barack Obama about the ‘call-out’ and ‘cancel’ culture. This was greeted by numerous criticisms typified by this article in the New York Times Obama’s Very Boomer View of ‘Cancel Culture’ and the epithet ‘Yo Boomer.’ Michael Schermer of Skeptical Inquirer nails it with this tweet:
“I’m trying to understand Millennial/GenZ cancel culture & not just be an old Baby Boomer, but it seems to me that if you think @BarackObama is not woke enough to understand what injustice means I think you’ve gone off the rails of moral progress.”
“Gone off the rails of moral progress” – a perfect description of where this seems to be headed, at least in the short term.
Personal impact
My personal saga in the five years following Climategate was summarized in my essay ‘5 years later.’ Upon rereading, I was struck by these excerpts:
“In 2014, I no longer feel the major ostracism by my peers in the climate establishment; after all, many of the issues I’ve been raising that seemed so controversial have now become mainstream. And the hiatus has helped open some minds.
The net effect of all this is that my ‘academic career advancement’ in terms of professional recognition, climbing the administrative ladder, etc. has been pretty much halted. I’ve exchanged academic advancement that now seems to be of dubious advantage to me for a much more interesting and influential existence that feels right in terms of my personal and scientific integrity.
Climategate was career changing for me; I’ll let history decide if this was for better or worse (if history even cares).”
In the end, Climategate ended my academic career prematurely (JC in transition). I realized how shallow the ‘academic game’ has become, and the games one needs to play to succeed. Throwing all that off has been personally and intellectually liberating for me.
I now have more time to read and think. Unfortunately I have less time to write blog posts since I am focusing my efforts on projects of relevance to the clients of my company Climate Forecast Applications Network. These projects are pretty wide ranging and pushing me in interesting new directions.
As for my ‘influence’ in the public debate on climate change, I never cared too much about this and probably care even less at this point. I have a unique perspective, and I appreciate any substantive opportunities that come my way to share this with the public and decision makers.
As Roger Pielke Jr tweeted:
“It wasn’t all fun, I’ll tell ya, but I’d do it all over again if it meant I get to now”
A Holocaust of Biblical Proportions
By Laurent Guyénot • Unz Review • November 11, 2019
Jewish blood for Zion
Holocaust is term taken from the Hebrew Bible (in the Greek translation), designating the religious sacrifice of animals that are burned completely on an altar. The first holocaust recorded in the Bible is performed by Noah in Genesis 8. In a fit of rage, Yahweh has said to himself: “I shall rid the surface of the earth of the human beings whom I created, […] for I regret having made them.” But after drowning almost all his creatures in a flood, Yahweh regrets having regretted, when Noah offers him a huge holocaust. “Yahweh smelt the pleasing smell and said to himself, ‘Never again will I curse the earth because of human beings, because their heart contrives evil from their infancy.” Yahweh has been addicted to the “sweet smell” of carbonized flesh ever since. According to the Book of Ezra, a gigantic holocaust was offered to Yahweh by the Judeo-Babylonians who (re)colonized Palestine, in preparation for the (re)building of the Temple (7:12-15).
Why, then, was the name “Holocaust” chosen to designate the destruction of “six millions” European Jews during World War II? Everything of importance in the history of Israel gets a biblical name, even Israel’s nuclear deterrence policy, the “Samson Option”. But why “holocaust”? In what sense is the Holocaust a holocaust? The obvious implication is that the death of millions of European Jews pleased Yahweh, and, by consequence, hastened the fulfillment of his messianic promise. As evident as it is, that implication is of course unspeakable in explicite terms. It will only be whispered cryptically among initiates (read for example about Irving Greenberg’s controversial statements on Wikipedia). At best, it can be veiled in religious terms: “The State of Israel is God’s answer to Auschwitz,” in Abraham Herschel’s Trinitarian formula linking Yahweh (the Father), Israel (the Son), and the Holocaust (the Holy Ghost?).[1]
But in his book The Holocaust Victims Accuse, anti-Zionist rabbi Moshe Shonfeld comes close to the outrageous claim that the Zionists needed six millions cremated Jews for the foundation of the Jewish State: “The Zionist leaders saw the spilt Jewish blood of the holocaust as grease for the wheels of the Jewish national state.” (Read a review of Moshe Shonfeld’s book here, and get the book on pdf here.)
Are there any facts to back the theory that the Zionist elites willingly sacrificed the German Jews on the altar of Zionism? I think there are. We can start with the declaration of war published on the front page of the British Daily Express, March 24, 1933, at the initiative of Zionist Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer: “the Israeli people around the world declare economic and financial war against Germany.” The words were carefully chosen to implicate the 400,000 Jews living in Germany among the conspirators against the German State and the German people: “Jews of All the World Unite in Action,” read the headline, while the article insisted: “Fourteen million Jews dispersed throughout the world have banded as one man … to stand by the 600,000 Jews of Germany.” This declaration, heard loud and clear in Germany, was a provocation meant to put the German Jews in extreme danger, at a time when “not a hair on a Jew’s head had been touched,” as Goebbels protested.
Many Jews, it must be said, protested at the irresponsibility of the Jewish financial elites’ call for boycott. American rabbi Harry Waton would write in 1939 in his in Program for the Jews:
“by this stupid boycott they aggravate the position of the Jews in Germany. In their vanity and stupidity the Jews in this country do not realize how inhuman and cruel it is to sacrifice the Jews in Germany in order to satisfy a stupid, and insane vanity. […] Six years passed since the Jews outside of Germany declared war against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Jews will never admit that the recent pogroms had much to do with their stupid boycott.”[2]
Neither would they admit, of course, that the pogroms were the intended outcome of the boycott, as the necessary pretext needed to escalate the economic war into a military one, which would in turn bring hell down upon the German Jews.
How Hitler was trapped by his own prophecy
Predictably, five days after the declaration of the boycott, Hitler announced a counter-boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany as “defensive measure.” At the same time, he warned that, “Jewry must recognize that a Jewish war against Germany will lead to sharp measures against Jewry in Germany.”[3]
On January 30, 1939, in an ultimate attempt to deter England from declaring war on Germany, Hitler sent her a warning from the Reichstag tribune. After recalling that he had often been a prophet, as when he predicted his own rise to power, Hitler added:
“I want once again to be a prophet. If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of earth, and thus a Jewish victory, but the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe.”
This “prophetic warning to Jewry!” as the headline of Völkische Beobachter put it the following day, was widely distributed and discussed. As if in response to it, England declared war on September 3, 1939. The World Jewish Congress (founded in 1936 to rally world Jewry against Hitler) immediately stated that it stood wholeheartedly by Britain.
Hitler repeated his prophecy on January 30, 1941, this time at the address of the United States. The New York Times responded with an article that was tantamount to challenging him to act on his word:
“there is not a single precedent to prove he will either keep a promise or fulfill a threat. If there is any guarantee in his record, in fact, it is that the one thing he will not do is the thing he says he will do.”[4]
The United States entered the war in December 1941. A few days later, during the Reich Chancellery meeting of 12 December 1941, according to Goebbels’ diary, Hitler declared that his prophecy “was not just a phrase. The world war is here, and the annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.” Again, Hitler should have considered the obvious: he was being pushed to act on his prophecy.
That same year of 1941, in response to a plea for rescuing the Jews of Europe, Nathan Schwalb, head of the Jewish Agency in Switzerland, declined with the following justification:
“if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations and territories after the war? […] only through blood will the land be ours.”[5]
Already in 1938, the Anglo-American Zionists had sabotaged the Evian International Conference on Political and Economic Problems Caused by the Expulsion of Jews from the Reich, and the resolution of Western democracies to open their borders to the Jews that Germany would be happy to get rid of, because, said David Ben-Gurion, this “will endanger the existence of Zionism.”[6] German Jews were either to be forcibly converted to Zionism and emigrate to Palestine—but the British only allowed limited quotas—or be left to die in Nazi concentration camps—in both case, for the ultimate benefit of Zionism. When war broke out, there remained in Germany about 275,000 Jews who, for want of a visa granted by a foreign country, were unable to emigrate. This had been planned by the Anglo-American Zionists.
Everything possible was done to intensify German rage against Jews. In early 1941 appeared the 96–page booklet by Jewish American businessman Theodore Kaufman, Germany Must Perish, advocating “the extinction of the German nation and the total eradication from the earth, of all her people,” by sterilizing all German males under sixty, and females under forty-five, which could be done in less than a month by about twenty thousand surgeons. “Accordingly in the span of two generations, […] the elimination of Germanism and its carriers, will have been an accomplished fact.”[7] Interviewed by the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, Kaufman speaks of the Jews’ “mission” to guide humankind toward “perpetual peace”; thanks to them, “slowly but surely the world will develop into a paradise”; but for the moment, “let us sterilize all Germans and wars of world domination will come to an end!”[8] Kaufman’s book was reviewed positively in the New York Times and the Washington Post. In 1944, it would be commented upon by Louis Nizer in his influential book What to Do with Germany? (highly praised by Harry Truman). Nizer rejected Kaufman’s solution as exaggerated, but recommended the death penalty for 150,000 Germans, and “labor battalions” for hundreds of thousands more.[9]
Louis Marschalko, in The World Conquerors: The Real War Criminals (1958), cites a few more well-published Jewish authors advocating a “final solution” for the “German question”: Leon Dodd, who in How Many World Wars (New York, 1942), proclaims that no Germany and no German race must be left after the war; Charles Heartman, who in There Must Be No Germany After This War (New York, 1942), also demands the physical extermination of the German people; Einzig Palil, who in Can We Win the Peace? (London, 1942), demanded the dismembering of Germany and the total demolition of German industry; Ivor Duncan, who in the March, 1942, issue of Zentral Europa Observer, demanded the sterilization of forty million Germans, estimating the total cost at five million pounds sterling.[10]
Shortly after the Normandy landings, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed the future of Germany at the Second Quebec Conference of September 11, 1944, and signed a project developed under the leadership of Jewish-Americans Henry Morgenthau Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, and his assistant Harry Dexter White. This Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany, or Program to Prevent Germany from Starting a World War III, “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character,” by dismantling and transporting to Allied nations “all industrial plants and equipment not destroyed by military action,” while calling for “forced German labor outside Germany.” The revelation of this insane “Morgenthau Plan” by the Wall Street Journal (September 23) pushed the Nazis into a desperate fight-to-the-death mentality, and further rage against Jews.[11]
Meanwhile, in 1944, a new effort by the Roosevelt administration for opening the borders of allied countries to Jewish refugees was again aborted by American Zionists. When Morris Ernst, sent by Roosevelt to London to discuss the project, returned with British agreement to welcome 150,000 refugees, Roosevelt was satisfied: “150,000 to England—150,000 to match that in the United States—pick up 200,000 or 300,000 elsewhere and we can start with half a million of these oppressed people.” But a week later, Roosevelt announced to Ernst the abandonment of the project “because the dominant vocal Jewish leadership of America won’t stand for it.” The Zionists, said Roosevelt, “know they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place for this poor Jew to go.’ But if there is a world political asylum, they cannot raise their money.” Incredulous, Ernst made the rounds of his Jewish contacts. He wrote in his memoirs that, “active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration [into the US] in order to undermine political Zionism.”[12]
The same Jews who had lobbied so hard until the 1930s in favor of unrestricted Jewish immigration in the US now wanted Jews to remain trapped in Germany, until the survivors could be forced into Palestine.
How, otherwise, could they be able to capitalize on a death toll of six million Jews? Six million is the number they had settled on long ago for Israel’s founding holocaust, it seems (read “Two hundred ‘Six million Jews’ allegations from 1900-1945” or watch “Six million Jews 1915-1938”). On October 31, 1919, for example, in an article titled “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!” The American Hebrew had warned of “this threatened holocaust of human life” on “six millions” European Jews (a figure repeated seven times in one page) who “are being whirled toward the grave … through the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood,” and concluded that “Israel is entitled to a place in the sun.” “Jewish blood” referred in this case to the pogroms by Russian and Ukrainian counter-revolutionaries, which made 6,000 victims that year—a disappointing number.
Ever since Theodor Herzl used the Dreyfus Affair as a springboard for Zionism, it was understood that “Anti-Semitism is a propelling force which, like the wave of the future, will bring Jews into the promised land,” as Herzl wrote in his dairy. “Anti-Semitism has grown and continues to grow—and so do I.”[13] Logically, the propelling force will be proportional to the violence of the anti-Semitism, that is, to the reported number of its victims and the graphic horror of their doom.
The Nazis’ good Jews
The Jews who suffered the most under Nazi Germany were not the Zionist Jews. The Zionist Jews were regarded by the Nazis as the good Jews.[14] And for good reasons: they applauded the 1933 Nuremberg laws, and they protested against the economic boycott imposed by American Jews. The Zionist Federation of Germany addressed a memorandum to “the New German State” (dated June, 21) condemning the boycott, and expressing sympathy for the Nazi ideology:
“Our acknowledgment of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we do not wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group and reject any trespasses in the cultural domain.” “The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda—such as is currently being carried on against Germany in many ways—is in essence un-Zionist.”[15]
A prominent leader of German Jewry, Joachim Prinz, future president of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in his book Wir Juden (“We the Jews”) published in Berlin in 1934:
“We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind.”[16]
This was not just opportunism. There had always been sympathy between Jewish and German racialism, to the point that rabbi Waton (quoted above) claimed that, “Nazism is an imitation of Judaism.”[17] It was not Hitler, but Zeev Jabotinsky who wrote in his Letter on Autonomy, some twenty years before Mein Kampf:
“A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German custom, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-racial type are Jewish. […] A preservation of national integrity is impossible except by a preservation of racial purity.”[18]
So it was very logically that Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the SS Security Service, wrote in 1935 in Das Schwarze Korps, the SS journal:
“We must separate Jewry into two categories: the Zionists and those who favour being assimilated. The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state. […] The time cannot be far distant when Palestine will again be able to accept its sons who have been lost to it for over a thousand years. Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.”[19]
Sixty thousand wealthy German Zionists were allowed to settle with their fortune in Palestine under the Haavara Agreement, a decisive contribution to the Jewish colonization of Palestine.[20] As Hannah Arendt reminded in 1963, “all leading positions in the Nazi-appointed ‘Reichsvereinigung’ [compulsory organization of all Jews in Nazi Germany, who selected Jews for emigration] were held by Zionists.” This created “a situation in which the non-selected majority of Jews inevitably found themselves confronted with two enemies—the Nazi authorities and the Jewish authorities.”[21] The Zionists and the Nazis were united against the very notion of assimilation and the abomination of intermarriage.
To say that Hitler was a Zionist would be exaggerated, for he wrote in 1923:
“For while Zionism tries to make the other part of the world believe that the national self-consciousness of the Jew finds satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian State, the Jews again most slyly dupe the stupid goyim. They have no thought of building up a Jewish State in Palestine, so that they might inhabit it, but they only want a central organization of their international world cheating, endowed with prerogatives, withdrawn from the seizure of others: a refuge for convicted rascals and a high school for future rogues.”[22]
Yet from 1933 to 1938, Hitler regarded German Zionists as ideological and strategic allies in his desire to rid Germany of its Jews. And there is no question that most Jews who died under Nazism were among the assimilationist Jews, those who had no sympathy for Zionism, and whom Zionists regarded as apostates and traitors to their race.
That, I believe, explains why the Holocaust is called the Holocaust: the idea that assimilationist Jews must perish is consistently biblical. The notion comes straight from Deuteronomy:
“If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries secretly to seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ […], you must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God. […] All Israel, hearing of this, will be afraid, and none of you will do such a wicked thing again” (Deuteronomy 13:7-12).[23]
And if in one town, “scoundrels from your own stock […] have led their fellow-citizens astray, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’” then
“you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword; you must lay it under the curse of destruction—the town and everything in it. You must pile up all its loot in the public square and burn the town and all its loot, offering it all to Yahweh your God. It is to be a ruin for all time, and never rebuilt” (Deuteronomy 13:13-17).
Or, according to another translation: “the entire town must be put to the torch as a burnt offering to Yahweh your God.”
The Levites’ rule of terror
In biblical terms, assimilation means “serving other gods.” The Jews who seek assimilation deserve death, and their death will serve as an example to the rest. When, in the second century BC, some Israelites said, “let us ally ourselves with the gentiles surrounding us, for since we separated ourselves from them many misfortunes have overtaken us,” the Maccabees “organized themselves into an armed force, striking down the sinners in their anger, and the renegades in their fury” (1Maccabees 1-2), and established their Hasmonean theocracy.[24]
Terrorizing the Jews into submission to strict separateness and endogamy is the essence of the Yahwist covenant. The Torah shows that Yahweh’s rule of terror rests on the sacrifice of assimilationist and rebellious Jews. In the Book of Numbers, when an Israelite had the gall to appear before Moses with his Midianite wife, Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, “seized a lance, followed the Israelite into the alcove, and there ran them both through, the Israelite and the woman, through the stomach.” Yahweh congratulated Phinehas for having “the same zeal as I have,” and, as a reward, gave “to him and his descendants after him, […] the priesthood for ever” that is, “the right to perform the ritual of expiation for the Israelites” (Numbers 25:11-13). Let us ponder the fact that, according to the Bible, the Aaronite priesthood was a reward for the double murder of an assimilationist Israelite and his non-Jewish wife.
Even more revealing is the story in Exodus 32. After the episode of the Golden Calf, Moses conspires with the sons of Levy who rallied around him:
“He said to them, ‘Yahweh, god of Israel, says this, ‘Buckle on your sword, each of you, and go up and down the camp from gate to gate, every man of you slaughtering brother, friend and neighbour.’ The Levites did as Moses said, and of the people about three thousand men perished that day. ‘Today’, Moses said, ‘you have consecrated yourselves to Yahweh, one at the cost of his son, another of his brother; and so he bestows a blessing on you today’” (Exodus 32:27-29).
As a reward for having slaughtered 30,000 Israelite “apostates”, the Levites receive their privilege as the hereditary sacerdotal class, an oligarchy sustained by the other tribes. Here is how the biblical scholar Karl Budde paraphrases this episode, the founding story of the institution of the Levites:
“Here we have, in fact, the very moment of Levi’s origin, and this is how it must be understood. At Moses’ call the faithful from all the tribes hasten to him and lend him their arm even against their own kindred. Those thus tested and proved remained from this time on united, and formed a new tribe, ‘Levi.’ […] Levy is thus, as it were, the bodyguard, the pick of those faithful to Yahweh who gather about Moses, renouncing the old ties of tribe and family.”[25]
In Numbers 16-17, a group of two hundred and fifty Levites, led by Korah, are themselves exterminated for having rebelled against Moses and Aaron. “I am going to destroy them here and now,” said Yahweh, and “Fire then shot out from Yahweh and consumed the two hundred and fifty men offering incense” (16:20-35). “On the following day, the whole community of Israelites were muttering against Moses and Aaron and saying, ‘You are responsible for killing Yahweh’s people!’” Then Yahweh said “I am going to destroy them here and now,” and a plague decimated fourteen thousand seven hundred of them (17:6-14).
What these episodes highlight is that the authority of Yahweh and of his elite cast of Levites is entirely founded on violence and terror against the Israelites themselves. It also shows that the Covenant is based on the permanent threat of destruction. Jews who challenge their representative elites and who socialize with their non-Jewish neighbors, who eat with them, who intermarry with them, and who, while doing all this, show respect to their gods, are the dregs of the Jewish people, traitors to Yahweh and to their race. They deserve to be eliminated without mercy, especially since they endanger the whole community by attracting Yahweh’s wrath.
Yahweh teaches the Jewish people that friendship with non-Jews is a betrayal of the covenant, and will be punished by disaster, possibly extermination. Joshua, Moses’ successor, said to the Israelites who had taken possession of Canaan:
“Never mix with the peoples who are still left beside you. Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them. […] if you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, then know for certain that Yahweh your god will stop dispossessing these nations before you, and for you they will be a snare, a pitfall, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you vanish from this fine country given you by Yahweh your god. […] For if you violate the covenant which Yahweh your god has imposed on you, if you go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then Yahweh’s anger will be roused against you and you will quickly vanish from the fine country which he has given you.” (Joshua 23:6-16)
Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land is the blueprint for the Zionist colonization, and the mentality has not changed. Zionism, the founding ideology of the Jewish State, is a secularized version of Yahwism. Its concept of Jewish nationhood is strictly biblical, and therefore intensely ethnocentric and xenophobic. And so it is natural that a Zionist like Benzion Netanyahu (Benjamin’s father) would consider that for a Jew to marry a non-Jew is “even from a biological point of view, an act of suicide.”[26] Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, reportedly formulated the same idea in more evocative terms: “To marry a non-Jew is to join the six million [exterminated Jews].”[27] In other words, those assimilationist Jews who break the endogamic covenant might as well be holocausted, as far as Israel is concerned. That is so biblical!
The psychopathic biblical paradigm
In the World War II Holocaust, Jews were not killed by other Jews, as in the biblical passages mentioned above. But from the biblical point of view, it makes no difference, because it is always Yahweh who hits the Israelites, whether he is using Moses (a murderer on the run from the beginning), or sending them plagues, stones from heaven or foreign armies. To punish David for having ordered a national census (counting dead Jews in OK, but living Jews is not), Yahweh gives him the choice: “Which do you prefer: to have three years of famine befall your country; to flee for three months before a pursuing army; or to have three days of epidemic in your country?” David chose the epidemic, which made seventy thousand dead (2Samuel 24:13), but Yahweh could just as well use a foreign army.
Whenever Israelites are attacked, it is because Yahweh wants to punish them for their rebelliousness and their idolatry. It is Yahweh who sent the Assyrians to destroy the Northern kingdom of Israel to punish the Israelites for their “idolatry” (2Kings 17; Amos 3:14), and it is Yahweh who moved the Babylonian army to destroy the towns of Judah, “because of the wicked deeds they committed to provoke my anger, by going and offering incense and serving other gods” (Jeremiah 44:3).
The real cause-effect relationship between religious pluralism and the Babylonian campaign against Jerusalem was, in fact, exactly the opposite of what the Bible claims. In the ancient world, international diplomacy was closely related to religious tolerance: nations showed respect to each other by respecting each other’s gods. The Judean king Manasseh is blamed by the biblical scribes for having done “what is displeasing to Yahweh, copying the disgusting practices of the nations whom Yahweh had dispossessed for the Israelites” by worshipping “the whole array of heaven” (2 Kings 21:2-3). But his 55-year-long reign was a period of exceptional peace and prosperity. By contrast, his grandson Josiah, who is praised for removing from the temple “all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven,” and exterminating all the priests “who offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven” (2Kings 23:4-5), brought disaster to his kingdom by his arrogant policy of exclusivism and provocation toward Babylon.
But the lessons of history are lost on the biblical scribes. Their teaching is not only historically deceptive; it is an insult to common sense and moral sense, which teaches that conviviality (sharing meals, occasionally intermarrying…) fosters trust and civil peace, while separateness creates mistrust and conflict. Yahweh’s message is a recipe for catastrophe (shoah in Hebrew). It amounts to telling the Jews: “Do not socialize with your neighbors, but despise their traditions, and, if possible, dispossess them or exterminate them. If, after that, they violate you, it is your fault: you have not obeyed scrupulously enough.” Such is the insane “wisdom” internalized by Jews for a hundred generations.
With their minds framed by the biblical paradigm, Jews are not easily persuaded that they may bear some collective responsibility for the persecution that befalls them. After all, even Gentiles now tell them that, “the Jew, that object of so much hatred, is perfectly innocent, nay harmless” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946).[28] Assured by their tradition and their leadership of the perfect innocence of their community, Jews naturally view their critics as irrational and pathological. It is, it seems to them, in the nature of non-Jews to hate Jews. “Judeophobia is a variety of demonopathy,” wrote Leon Pinsker (a medical doctor). “As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.”[29] What the Jews have to do, then, is to protect themselves, even preventively, from the hatred of non-Jews, and whatever form of deception or coercion they have to employ in doing so is mere self-defense. “For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts,” wrote Henry Miller.[30]
Like most traits of Jewish collective psychology, this is a cognitive pattern learned from the Bible. A good illustration of it is the black-out in the causal chain of events between, on the one hand, the end of Genesis, when Joseph ruined the peasants of Egypt, forced them into debt and finally into bondage, while enriching his tribesmen, and, on the other hand, the beginning of Exodus, when a king of Egypt “who had never heard of Joseph”, seeing that the Israelites had become “more numerous and stronger than we are,” decided to take measures “to stop them from increasing any further, or if war should break out, they might join the ranks of our enemies” (Exodus 1:9-10). Considering the parasitic activity of Jacob’s tribe, the king’s worries and his decision to tax the Israelites with forced labor may seem entirely justified; but because Joseph the stockjobber is Yahweh’s saint, acting for the prosperity of Yahweh’s chosen people, his behavior is beyond reproach, and Pharaoh is therefore presented as irredeemably evil. Come to think of it, it is perfectly appropriate that Pharaoh be seen as the biblical prototype of Hitler, who wanted to curtail Jewish influence in Germany and had reasons to fear that Jews might “join the ranks of his enemies.”
Another symbolic illustration of the way the Torah inhibits any consideration of the responsibility of Israel in the nations’ hostility, is found in the short prophetic book of Obadiah: Esau is blamed by Yahweh for his resentment against his brother Jacob (aka Israel), without a reminder that Esau has been cheated of his birthright by Jacob:
“For the violence done to your brother Jacob, shame will cover you and you will be annihilated forever! […] The House of Jacob will be a fire, the House of Joseph a flame, and the House of Esau like stubble. They will set it alight and burn it up, and no one of the House of Esau will survive.” (Obadiah 10-18)
We have here, actually, a nice prophecy of a holocaust for the House of Esau (symbolizing the nations, and, in later rabbinic tradition, specifically Christian nations).
Holocausts of Gentiles for Yahweh and Zion
Obviously, Yahweh can use holocausts of Gentiles too. After all, there is little difference between Gentiles and animals. The first reported case appears in Numbers 31, after the slaughter of the Midianites, save their flocks and 32,000 virgin girls. The booty was divided in two: half for the combatants, half for the rest. From the combatants’ half, Yahweh required as his own “portion”, “one out of every five hundred persons, oxen, donkeys and sheep.” Yahweh’s portion included 32 girls, all entrusted to the priest Eleazar for him to offer them to Yahweh. How were they offered to Yahweh? The Good Book doesn’t say. But we know that animals were always served to Yahweh as holocausts, and the wording of Numbers 31 makes no distinction between human and animal spoils, but rather insists on putting them in the same bag. So there is no reason to suppose that “Yahweh’s portion” of virgin girls were offered to Yahweh in any other way than Yahweh’s portion of oxen, donkeys and sheep.
King David’s treatment of the inhabitants of the city of Rabba also qualifies as a holocaust: David gathered all the prisoners, and “cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes,” and “made them pass through the brick kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon” (2Samuel 12:3 and 1Chronicles 20:3).[31] Although it is not made explicit that dismembering and cremating the Ammonites in brick kilns was meant as a “burnt offering” to Yahweh, we are given to understand that he approved of it; we guess he liked the smell.
The complete extermination of the Canaanites (“men and women, young and old”) in the towns of Jericho, Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, and Hazor in the Book of Joshua, chapters 6 to 12, and the same fate reserved for the Amalekites in 1Samuel 15, are also holocausts that obviously pleased Yahweh.
From the Zionist viewpoint, the First and the Second World Wars can be interpreted as holocausts for Zion, since they brought blessings upon Israel. In my first article for unz.com, I suggested that even the Vietnam War could be considered a Holocaust for Zion, because it was willed by the Zionist agent Lyndon Johnson and his National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, and provided the favorable international context for Israel to launch its 1967 war of annexation. This was remarked by French President Charles De Gaulle who, in a famous press conference (November 27, 1967), called for an international settlement on the basis of Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories, but added:
“But one cannot see how such an agreement could be reached as long as one of the greatest among the four will not withdraw from the heinous war that they are waging elsewhere. Without the tragedy of Vietnam, the conflict between Israel and the Arabs would not have become what it has become.”[32]
The Holocaust cult
History is a study of causes and effects in human decisions and actions. But Israel sees its own history through the biblical prism of its chosenness, which makes it blind to its own responsibility in Gentile hostility. History is replaced by memory, the substance of legends and myths. That is why Yosef Yerushalmi argues in his book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, that Israel “chose myth over history.” That applies to the Holocaust: “its image is being shaped, not at the historian’s anvil, but in the novelist’s crucible.”[33]
When a historical tragedy cannot be put into a cause-effect perspective, it enters the realm of mythology. If it cannot be analyzed on a rational mode, it is fantasized on a religious mode. And so Elie Wiesel can declare that the Holocaust “defies both knowledge and description,” “cannot be explained nor visualized,” is “never to be comprehended or transmitted,” is ‘”noncommunicable”.[34] “Whoever has not lived through the event can never know it. And whoever has lived through the event can never fully reveal it.”[35]
Those who control Jewish public discourse forbid anyone to voice the possibility that Nazi persecution may have some causes in Jewish deeds (such as pushing England and America into war). Since the Jews are, by definition, blameless, Nazi violence against them is gratuitous and therefore a manifestation of pure, metaphysical evil: Hitler’s hair lock and his moustache have replaced the devil’s horns and tail in popular iconography.
In the realm of mythology, everything is possible. The mythographs’ imagination is the limit. With the Holocaust, even the unimaginable, the absurd, the impossible, the miraculous must be believed. Here is, for example, how renowned professor Simon Baron-Cohen—a serious man compared to his cousin, actor Sacha Baron Cohen—starts his book The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, published in 2011 by Basic Books:
“When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades. Just one of those comments that you hear once, and the thought never goes away. To a child’s mind (even to an adult’s) these two types of things just don’t belong together. He also told me the Nazis turned Jews into bars of soap. It sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true. I knew our family was Jewish, so this image of turning people into objects felt a bit close to home. My father also told me about one of his former girlfriends, Ruth Goldblatt, whose mother had survived a concentration camp. He had been introduced to the mother and was shocked to discover that her hands were reversed. Nazi scientists had severed Mrs. Goldblatt’s hands, switched them around, and sewn them on again so that if she put her hands out palms down, her thumbs were on the outside and her little fingers were on the inside. Just one of the many ‘experiments’ they had conducted. I realized there was a paradox at the heart of human nature—people could objectify others—that my young mind was not yet ready to figure out. […] Today, almost half a century after my father’s revelations to me about the extremes of human behavior, my mind is still exercised by the same, single question: How can we understand human cruelty?”[36]
Against those who dare raise issues of credibility, Primo Levi, whose memoir If this is a man (1947) is “considered a pillar of Holocaust literature, alongside Elie Wiesel’s Night and Anne Frank’s Diary” (French Wikipedia), has provided an unbeatable answer. He wrote in The Drowned and the Saved (1988) how “The SS militiamen cynically enjoyed admonishing the prisoners” with such cynicism:
“However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.”[37]
The Holocaust is now a religion, requiring faith and banning critical inquiry. For the Jews, it is an efficient substitute for the cult of Yahweh. “The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust,” once remarked Yeshayahu Leibowitz.[38] A 2013 Pew Research poll on the theme “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” shows that, to the question “What’s essential to being Jewish?”, “Remembering the Holocaust” comes first for 73 percent of respondents, before “Caring about Israel,” and “Observing Jewish laws.”[39]
The Holocaust is a jealous god. They is no museum of the Vietnam War in the United States. To the Ukrainians who wished to commemorate “Holodomor”—the death of 7 to 8 millions of them in 1932–1933 by a deliberately provoked famine against the kulaks resisting collectivization—Israeli president Shimon Peres advised, during a visit to Kiev on November 25, 2010: “Forget History.”[40]
The Holocaust is eternal. “Today we are facing, plain and simple, a danger of annihilation. […] People think that the Shoah [Holocaust] is over but it’s not. It is continuing all the time,” proclaimed Benzion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli Prime minister.[41] In Israel, explains Idith Zertal, “Auschwitz is not a past event but a threatening present and a constant option.”[42]
The Holocaust is not just a religion for the Jews. In some European countries like France, it is becoming a State religion: worship is compulsory at school, and blasphemy is severely punished. But even though the whole world is now “remembering the Holocaust” almost daily, not all men are equal in this cult. Just as Yahweh separated the chosen people from the rest of humankind, the Holocaust draws a line between the victims—“the people chosen for universal hatred,” in Pinsker’s words[43]—and their tormentors—virtually the rest of the world. And so the Holocaust cult turns out to be functionally interchangeable with ancient Yahwism: its primary function is to alienate the Jews from humankind, exile them into their morbid exceptionality, and at the same time terrorize them into submission to their elites. While Jews were told in the Tanakh to “fear Yahweh,” they are now urged to fear the Holocaust.
Notes
[1] Abraham Herschel, Israel: An Echo of Eternity, Doubleday, 1969, p. 115.
[2] Harry Waton, A Program for the Jews and an Answer to All Anti-Semites, 1939 (archive.org), p. 48.
[3] Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust, Harvard UP, 2006 , p. 39.
[4] Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy, op. cit., p. 78.
[5] Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony of Jewish War Criminals, Bnei Yeshivos, 1977, p. 24.
[6] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 1: The False Messiah, Clarity Press, 2009, p. 164.
[7] Theodore Kaufman, Germany Must Perish, Argyle Press, 1941 (archive.org), p. 30.
[8] “‘Hitler Will Be Nothing But a Rosebud,’ Says the Author of ‘Germany Must Perish,’” The Canadian Jewish Chronicle, September 26, 1941, quoted in Brandon Martinez, Grand Deceptions: Zionist Intrigue in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Progressive Press, 2014, kindle, k. 226.
[9] Louis Nizer, What to do with Germany?, Brentano’s, 1944 (archive.org), pp. 98–107.
[10] Louis Marschalko, The World Conquerors: The Real War Criminals, 1958 (archive.org), p. 105.
[11] Quoted in David Irving, Nuremberg: The Last Battle, Focal Point, 1996, p. 20.
[12] John Mulhall, America and the Founding of Israel: An Investigation of the Morality of America’s Role, Deshon, 1995, p. 109.
[13] Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl (1960), vol. 2, p. 581, quoted in Alan Hart, Zionism, The Real Ennemies of the Jews, vol. 1, The False Messiah, Clarity Press, 2009, p. 163. The full 5 volumes of Herzl’s diairies are on archive.org
[14] Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators, Lawrence Hill & Co., 1983.
[15] Lucy Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader, Behrman House, 1976, pp. 150–155.
[16] Quoted in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 86.
[17] Harry Waton, A Program for the Jews, op. cit., p. 54.
[18] Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, Barricade Books , 2002, pp. 7–20.
[19] Quoted in Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, Penguin Books, 2001, p. 133.
[20] Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill and Wang, 1993 .
[21] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin, 2006, pp. 136–138.
[22] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941 (archive.org), pp. 447–448.
[23] All Bible quotes from the New Jerusalem Bible, www.catholic.org/bible
[24] Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, Harper Perennial, 1995 , pp. 55–61.
[25] Karl Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile, New York, 1899 (archive.org), p. 82.
[26] Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism (1938), Balfour Books, 2012 , kindle 2203–7.
[27] Quoted in Edgar Morin, Le Monde moderne et la question juive, Seuil, 2006.
[28] Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (1946), Gallimard, 1985, p. 183.
[29] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882), on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html.
[30] Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, quoted in Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, New York UP, 2013 , p. 125.
[31] I have conflated the two almost identical accounts of the same episode in 2Samuel 12:31 and 1Chronicles 20:3.
[32] Video on www.youtube.com/watch?v=03if1QnA5MI ; text on http://akadem.org/medias/documents/3-conference-degaulle.pdf
[33] Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982), University of Washington Press, 2011, kindle 530-35 and 1846-78.
[34] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Verso, 2014 , p. 47.
[35] Quoted in Tim Cole , Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold, Routledge, 1999, p. 16.
[36] Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, Basic Books, 2011. This passage is from the kindle édition (108-150), and can also be read on the online edition on archive.org, or by “looking inside” on Amazon the edition retitled Zero Degrees of Empathy by Penguin. But, as I had a hard time believing what I read, I also “checked inside” other editions Amazon, and had the surprise to see that the author has modified this passage in a 2012 new edition by Basic Books, deleting the sentence “it sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true”, and requalifying the soap and lampshade stories as “rumors”. Yet he sticks to his belief in the surgical miracle of the reversed hands. This passage is even reproduced, in a slightly altered form, in the New York Times.
[37] Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1988), 2013, Abacus, p. 2.
[38] Reported by Uri Avnery in 2005, quoted in Gilad Atzmon, The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics, Zero Books, 2011, pp. 161–162.
[39] “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” on www.pewforum.org.
[40] Alexander Motyl, “Ukrainians and Jews…,” April 15, 2011, worldaffairsjournal.org.
[41] Quoted in Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 3: Conflict Without End? Clarity Press, 2010, p. 364.
[42] Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 4.
[43] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, op. cit., on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html.
Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014
American Conspiracies & Cover-ups
By Douglas Cirignano | OffGuardian | November 3, 2019
In today’s world, the phrase “conspiracy theory” is pejorative and has a negative connotation. To many people, a conspiracy theory is an irrational, over-imaginative idea endorsed by people looking for attention and not supported by the mainstream media or government.
History shows, though, that there have been many times when governments or individuals have participated in conspiracies. It would be naïve to think that intelligence agencies, militaries, government officials, and politicians don’t sometimes cooperate in covert, secretive ways. Following are five instances when it’s been proven that the government engaged in a conspiracy.
THE GULF OF TONKIN RESOLUTION
On August 4, 1964, Captain John J. Herrick, the commander of the USS Maddox, a US Navy vessel that was on an intelligence-gathering mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported to the White House and Pentagon that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired torpedoes at his ship, and, so, the Maddox had fired back.
Two days later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified to the Congress that he was certain that the Maddox had been attacked. On August 7, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed, the Congressional act that allowed President Johnson free reign to commence war; Johnson immediately ordered air strikes on North Vietnam and the Vietnam War—which would eventually kill fifty-eight thousand Americans and two million Asians—was underway.
Since then, it has been shown and proven that no North Vietnamese boats ever fired on the Maddox, and that McNamara had been untruthful when he testified before Congress. According to the official publication of the Naval Institute,
… once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full US involvement in the Vietnam War.”
In the weeks prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, South Vietnamese ships had been attacking posts in North Vietnam in conjunction with the CIA’s Operation 34A. According to many inside sources, the Johnson administration wanted a full-scale war in Vietnam and through Operation 34A was trying to provoke North Vietnam into an attack that would give Johnson an excuse to go to war. But when McNamara was asked by the Congress on August 7 if these South Vietnam attacks had anything to do with the US military and CIA, McNamara lied and said no.
Within hours after reporting that the Maddox had been attacked, Captain Herrick was retracting his statements and reporting to the White House and Pentagon that “in all likelihood” an over-eager sonar man had been mistaken and that the sonar sounds and images that he originally thought were enemy torpedoes were actually just the beat of the Maddox’s own propellers.
Herrick reported that there was a good probability that there had been no attack on the Maddox, and suggested “complete reevaluation before any action is taken.”
McNamara saw these new, updated reports and discussed them with President Johnson early in the afternoon of August 4. Even though this was so, on the evening of August 4, President Johnson went on national television and announced to the American public that North Vietnam had engaged in “unprovoked aggression” and, so, the US military was retaliating.
A few days after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson remarked, “Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”
Recently, new documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident have been declassified and according to Robert Hanyok, a historian for the National Security Agency, these documents show that the NSA deliberately “distorted intelligence” andand “altered documents” to make it appear that an attack had occurred on August 4.
When President Lyndon Johnson misrepresented to the American public and said he knew that North Vietnam had attacked a US ship, and when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lied to the Congress and said he was sure that the Maddox had been attacked and that the CIA had nothing to do with South Vietnam aggression, and when NSA officials falsified information to make it appear that there had been an attack on the Maddox, that was a government conspiracy.
OPERATION NORTHWOODS
In 1962, the most powerful and highest ranking military officials of the US government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt strongly that the communist leader Fidel Castro had to be removed from power and, so, came up with a plan to justify an American invasion of Cuba.
The plan, entitled Operations Northwoods, was presented to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, and was signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer.
Operations Northwoods was a proposal for a false flag operation, a plan in which a military organizes an attack against its own country and then frames and blames the attack on another country for the purpose of the purpose of initiating hostilities and declaring war on that country.
The proposal was originally labeled Top Secret but was made public on November 18, 1997, by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. The complete Operation Northwoods paper was published online by the National Security Archive on April 30, 2001, and this once-secret government document can now be read by anyone.
The actions that General Lemnitzer and the other chiefs wanted to d to take under Operations Northwoods are shocking. According to the plan, CIA and military personnel and hired provocateurs would commit various violent acts and these acts would be blamed on Castro to “create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility” and “put the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances.”
One of the most ambitious plans of Operation Northwoods was to blow up a plane in midflight. The strategy was to fill a civilian airplane with CIA and military personnel who were registered under fake ID’s; an exact duplicate plane—an empty military drone aircraft—would take off at the same exact time.
The plane of fake passengers would land at a military base but the empty drone plane would fly over Cuba and crash in the ocean, supposedly a victim of Cuban missiles. “Casualty lists in US newspapers” and conducting “fake funerals for mock-victims” would cause “a helpful wave of national indignation” in America.
The Operation Northwoods proposal also states: “We could blow up a US ship and blame Cuba.” Whether the ship was to be empty or full of US soldiers is unclear. The document also says: “Hijacking attempts against US civil air and surface craft should be encouraged.”
Some of the recommendations of Operation Northwoods would have surely led to serious injuries and even deaths of Cuban and American civilians. The plan suggests:
We could sink a boatload of Cubans on route to Florida (real or simulated).”
And:
We could foster attempts on lives of anti-Castro Cubans in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized…We could explode a few bombs in carefully chosen spots.”
Lemnitzer and the chiefs wanted many of these staged terrorist attacks to be directed at the Guantanamo Bay United States Naval Base in Cuba. The plans were:
- “Start riots near the entrance to the base”
- “lob mortar shells from outside the base to inside the base”
- “blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires”
- “burn aircraft on airbase (sabotage)”
- “sabotage ship in harbor; large fires—napalm.”
When Secretary of Defense McNamara was presented with the Operation Northwoods plan, he either stopped and rejected the plan himself or passed it on to President Kennedy and JFK then rejected it. But if Kennedy and McNamara had agreed with the plan, then the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to begin enacting Operation Northwoods “right away, within a few months.”
Even though Operation Northwoods was never initiated, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the other highest-ranking military officials of the United States Government planned to organize violent attacks on Americans and anti-Castro Cuban citizens, knowing those attacks could severely injure and kill those citizens, and when they planned to blame those attacks on Cuba and then use that as an excuse to invade Cuba, that was a government conspiracy.
FBI AND THE MAFIA
In March 1965, the FBI had the house of New England organized crime boss Raymond Patriarca wiretapped and overheard two mobsters, Joseph Barboza and Vincent Flemmi, asking Patriarca for permission to kill another gangster, Edward Deegan. Two days later, Deegan’s blood-soaked body was found dead in a Boston alley.
Within days, an official FBI report confirmed that Joseph Barboza and three other mobsters were the murderers. Instead of those men going to prison for murder, though, three years later a man named Joseph Salvati was brought to trial for the murder of Edward Deegan. At that trial Joseph Barboza testified and lied that Salvati was one of the murderers. On the basis of Barboza’s testimony, Joseph Salvati was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
At that time, in the mid 1960s, the FBI was being pressured more and more to do something to stop organized crime. The bureau began using members of the mafia—criminals and murderers—to inform against fellow mafia members. Joseph Barboza was one of these FBI-protected, paid informants. The FBI didn’t want Barboza to go to prison for the murder of Deegan because they wanted him to continue infiltrating the mafia and testifying against other mafia members.
The bureau, apparently, did want a conviction in the Deegan murder case, though, and, so, let Barboza lie under oath and let a man they knew to be innocent, Joseph Salvati, go to prison.
The Witness Protection Program was first created for Joseph Barboza, and Barboza was the first mafia informant to be protected under the program. After helping to convict a number of mobsters, Barboza was sent off to live in California. While under the Witness Protection Program, Barboza committed at least one more murder, and probably more.
On trial for a murder in California, FBI officials showed up for Joseph Barboza’s trial and testified on his behalf, helping Barboza to get a light sentence.
Joseph Salvati ended up serving thirty years in prison for a murder that he was innocent of. During that thirty-year period, lawyers for Salvati requested documents from the FBI that would have proved Salvati’s innocence, but the bureau refused to release them.
Finally, in 1997, other evidence came forth suggesting Salvati’s innocence and the governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, granted Salvati’s release. A few years later, the FBI was ordered to release all its reports on the case; hundreds of documents showed the FBI knew that Barboza was a murderer, that he had murdered Edward Deegan, and that Joseph Salvati had had nothing to do with the crime.
Salvati was exonerated in a court of law, and was eventually awarded millions of dollars in a civil lawsuit against the government. (Three other defendants were also exonerated. At the 1968 trial, Joseph Barboza had testified that three other men—men who were also not guilty—had participated in Deegan’s murder. These three innocent men were, with Salvati, also sent to prison.)
Perhaps the most shocking thing that the FBI documents showed, though, was that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself knew Salvati was innocent and that Barboza had killed Deegan.
Hoover was working closely, almost daily, with the agents handling Joseph Barboza, and it was probably Hoover directing the operation. The congressional committee that investigated the case was the House Committee on Government Reform and Congressman Dan Burton was the chairman.
When asked by CBS’s 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace “Did J. Edgar Hoover know all this?” Burton replied:
“Yes . . . It’s one of the greatest failures in the history of American justice…J. Edgar Hoover knew Salvati was innocent. He knew it and his name should not be emblazoned on the FBI headquarters. We should change the name of that building.”
Congressman Burton claimed there was evidence that there were more cases when the FBI did the same sorts of things they did in the Joseph Salvati case; when Burton and his committee requested the files on these cases, the Attorney General and the White House refused to release them.
When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and top FBI officials let a known murderer lie and perjure himself in a courtroom, when they let four men they knew to be innocent suffer in the hell of a prison cell for thirty years, and when they deliberately covered that up for decades, that was a government conspiracy.
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
In 1939, Albert Einstein and two other European physicists sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt informing Roosevelt that the German government was working on developing the science that could lead to the creation of a nuclear bomb. FDR immediately formed a committee to look into the idea of the US government making an atomic bomb.
In 1942, the Manhattan Project, the United States program to build a nuclear bomb, headed by General Leslie R. Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers, was formed.
The program existed from 1942–1946, spent two billion dollars, had plants and factories in thirty cities, and employed 130,000 workers. But virtually no one knew about it. The Manhattan Project is considered the “Greatest Secret Ever Kept.”
The US government wanted to keep the Project a secret lest Germany or one of America’s other enemies found out about it and built—more quickly—a larger, better bomb. In the early 1940s, when American scientists began working on splitting atoms and nuclear fission, US government officials asked the scientists to not publish any reports on the work in scientific journals. The work was kept quiet.
In 1943, when newspapers began reporting on the large Manhattan Project construction going on in a few states, the newly formed United States Government Office of Censorship asked newspapers and broadcasters to avoid discussing “atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission . . . the use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials” or anything else that could expose the project. The press kept mum. The government didn’t talk about the Manhattan Project, the press didn’t report on it, and the public knew nothing about it.
Not even the 130,000 Manhattan Project laborers knew they were building an atom bomb.
In 1945, a Life magazine article wrote that before Japan was attacked with a-bombs, “probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved.”
The workers were told they were doing an important job for the government, but weren’t told what the job was, and didn’t understand the full import of the mysterious, daily tasks they were doing. The laborers were warned that disclosing the Project’s secrets was punishable by ten years in prison, and a hefty financial fine.
Whole towns and cities were built where thousands of Manhattan Project workers lived and worked but these thousands didn’t know they were helping to build nuclear bombs.
The Manhattan Project finally became known to the public on August 6, 1945, when President Harry Truman announced that America had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
Truman, himself, had not been informed of the Manhattan Project until late April 1945.
When the government kept the purpose of the Manhattan Project a secret from the press, from the public, from America’s enemies, from Harry Truman, and even from the 130,000 laborers who worked for the Manhattan Project, that was a government conspiracy.
THE CHURCH COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION
In the early 1970s, after the Watergate affair and investigative reports by the New York Times, it became apparent that the CIA and other US intelligence agencies might be engaging in inappropriate and illegal activities. In 1975, the Church Committee, named after the Committee’s chairman Senator Frank Church, was formed to investigate abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS.
The Church Committee reports are said to constitute the most extensive investigations of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Many disturbing facts were revealed. According to the final report of the Committee, US intelligence agencies had been engaging in “unlawful or improper conduct” and “intelligence excesses, at home and abroad” since the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt.
The report added that “intelligence agencies have undermined the Constitutional rights of citizens” and “checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.”
One of the most well-known revelations of the Committee was the CIA’s so-called “Family Jewels,” a report that detailed the CIA’s misdeeds dating back to Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. The committee also reported on the NSA’s SHAMROCK and MINARET programs; under these programs the NSA had been intercepting, opening, and reading the telegrams and mail of thousands of private citizens.
The Church Committee also discovered and exposed the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, the bureau’s program to covertly destroy and disrupt any groups or individuals that J. Edgar Hoover felt were bad for America. Some of the movements and groups that the FBI tried to discredit and destroy were the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr.
The most alarming thing that the Church Committee found, though, was that the CIA had an assassination program. It was revealed that the CIA assassinated or had tried to assassinate Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, General Rene Schneider of Chile, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and other political leaders throughout the world.
The Committee learned about the different ways the CIA had developed to kill and assassinate people: inflicting cancer, inflicting heart attacks, making murders look like suicides, car accidents, boating accidents, and shootings. At one point, CIA Director William Colby presented to the Committee a special “heart attack gun” that the CIA had created. The gun was able to shoot a small poison-laden dart into its victim. The dart was so small as to be undetectable; the victim’s death from the poison would appear to be a heart attack, so no foul play would be suspected.
In response to the Church Committee report, in 1976 President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11,905, which forbade employees of the US government from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassinations.
In that same year, the Senate approved Senate Resolution 400, which established the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee responsible for providing vigilant oversight over the intelligence agencies.
Many former CIA employee-whistleblowers and other people, though, claim that US intelligence agencies are still acting in improper ways. In 2008, it was revealed that the CIA had hired Blackwater, a private company made up of ex-Navy Seals, to track down and assassinate suspected terrorists.
Later in the 2000s, when the Congress formed a committee to investigate if CIA waterboarding and other methods of interrogation constituted torture, congressmen complained that they couldn’t get to the bottom of the matter because CIA officials and the CIA director were lying to the congressional committee.
Forty-five years after the revelations of the Church Committee, it seems US intelligence agencies are still engaging in covert and improper conduct.
When US intelligence agencies and the CIA plot to influence the affairs of foreign nations, when the CIA plots assassinations and assassinates foreign leaders and political dissidents, when the CIA develops new ways to kill and assassinate and interrogate and torture, and when the CIA keeps all that from Congress, the press, and the public, that’s a government conspiracy.
***
If these five instances of government engaging in conspiracies have been proven to be true—and they have been—isn’t it logical to assume that government agencies may have engaged in other conspiracies? It is the very nature of intelligence agencies and militaries to act in secretive, conspiratorial ways.
The phrase “conspiracy theory” shouldn’t have a negative connotation. Politics always plays out with backroom handshakes. It is the suggestion of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups that government agencies and officials and the special interests that influence them are often engaging in conspiratorial actions, and that conspiracies have been behind some of the most iconic and important events of American history.
A conspiracy theorist was regaling a friend with one conspiracy theory after another. Finally, the friend interrupted and said, “I bet I know what would happen if God Himself appeared out of the sky right now, looked down at us, and said, ‘There is no conspiracy.’ I bet you would look up and say, ‘So the conspiracy goes higher than we thought.’”
Perhaps if the Almighty appeared to inform us that politicians and governments and government officials don’t act in secretive, covert, conspiratorial ways, then we could accept that.
But when the evidence indicates otherwise….
Theories questioning if multiple people might have shot at JFK, or if interior bombs brought down the World Trade Center, or if somebody was able to rig the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections can make for dramatic, sensational storytelling.
But it is not the purpose of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups to be sensational; the purpose of this book is to talk about “conspiracy realities” that can hopefully give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding of politics.
If elements in the intelligence agencies participated in assassinating President Kennedy, then how can the intelligence agencies be better controlled? If elements in the government allowed or caused 9/11 to happen to give us an excuse to go to war in the Middle East, then how much of the War on Terror is disinformation and propaganda?
If presidential elections can be rigged, then how can we have fairer, uncorrupted elections? If secretive influences behind the scenes, a Deep State, are controlling our social, political, and financial systems for their own selfish purposes, then it would benefit us to expose who and what these secretive influences are.
American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups may give us a glimpse into the way that government and politics work.
Or don’t work.
This is an extract from American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups, by Douglas Cirignano published by Simon&Schuster. It can be purchased in hard copy, digital and audio-book form through Amazon and other booksellers.
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From the Archives
British Intel Tried to Make N Irish Gang ‘Shoot Up’ School, Documentary Claims
Sputnik – 23.02.2019
A new documentary, based on an interview with a self-confessed member of the Glennane Gang, gives some insights into allegations that British military intelligence was behind a shocking murder plot to cause the situation in Northern Ireland to “spiral out of control”.
In a documentary, Unquiet Graves: The Story of the Glennane Gang, John Weir, a former officer from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), alleges that British intelligence tried to persuade paramilitary group Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to attack a Catholic primary school at Belleeks in County Armagh.
Weir claimed that the UVF was urged to kill children and teachers in retaliation for the 1976 Kingsmill massacre, in which gunmen stopped a minibus carrying twelve workmen and shot them; only one person survived despite having been shot 18 times.
“The plan that was decided on was to shoot up a school in Belleeks”, he said, adding that the British intelligence plot was to make the situation in Northern Ireland “spiral out of control”. … continue
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