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Argo Apostasy

By GARY CORSERI | CounterPunch | February 28, 2013

A friend sends me a PressTV posting by Dr. Kevin Barrett  As is usually the case at that site, it’s a well-written, well-thought-out piece by someone with creds who has something to say.  And, as with the best journalism, poetry, drama, fiction, conversation, etc., good thinking should inspire more of the same… and even consummate in focused action!  Let’s have a go!

Dr. Barrett’s first paragraph: “The only award the makers of Argo deserve is a criminal conviction for crimes against humanity. Instead, Hollywood’s Zionist mafia has handed them an Oscar for best film of the year. The members of the academy should themselves be in the docket, facing war crimes charges, right alongside Ben Affleck.

Argo is a propaganda film. Like the films of Nazi publicist Leni Riefenstahl, it is well-made. Like those of Riefenstahl, it glorifies a murderous criminal organization. And like those of Riefenstahl, its ultimate purpose is to elicit hatred and turn its audience into mass murderers.”

There’s meat to chew on there (or organic, free-range chickens, if one prefers) but, as I wrote my friend, “The biggest problem with Barrett’s analysis is the usual specious analogy; i.e., Naziism/Riefenstahl/WWII and CIA/Hollywood/WWIII.  Best go a little further back in history to get a better sense of how dangerous and insidious ARGO really is.”

Here’s what I mean: We’ve been living in a media-driven world since Edward Bernays applied his uncle’s– Sigmund Freud’s—psychological insights to mass-consumer-marketing and public relations… and then to matters of State propaganda (which often correlates to matters of war!).  Born in Austria in 1891, Bernays was a baby when his family moved to the US a year later.  (Snapshot Wikipedia intro: “[Bernays] combined the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of … Sigmund Freud.”  Here’s the key point: Bernays “felt… manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and dangerous as a result of the ‘herd instinct.’”)

Now, let’s get back to the historical record and why Afleck’s film is far more egregious than the work of Leni Riefenstahl.

Of all the major powers in WWI, Germany had tried hardest to avoid that cataclysmic conflict. Following Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote imploring letters to his royal cousins (really!) in Britain and Russia imploring them to settle the matter of the Serbian insurrection diplomatically, to disentangle themselves from the disastrous network of alliances that had split Europe into armed camps. Nothing happened for about a month during the “July crisis” of 1914.  Austria-Hungary made demands on Serbia to repress the rebellion, but the Serbs were encouraged to press on by “outsiders” (chiefly their Slavic cousins in Russia who wanted to re-establish their power base in the Balkans, but also by Britain and France–determined to crush the rising power of Germany and ensure their control of their Middle Eastern empires!  And if these entanglements and hidden agendas sound a lot like our contemporary situation in Israel, Syria, Libya, Egypt and the whole shebang of the Middle East today, well, Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose!)

Needless to say, the Kaiser was barking up the wrong family tree! His letters and diplomatic missions came to kaput!  The toll on Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire was unimaginable (only Russia would suffer comparable damages among the Allies!). Following the Armistice, there was the sell-out of the Versailles Treaty, the Balfour Declaration, and so forth–with much input by Zionist Jews (especially in Britain and the US) determined to seize the moment to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.

Were there “good guys” and “bad guys”… or were politicians, industrialists, armaments manufacturers looking out for their own best interests, figuring how to advance themselves—and the devil be damned?  And the common man or woman or child—what did they understand of those interests?  They were “herded” together to die in filthy trenches, to slaughter, and be slaughtered by, strangers. (Poets like Thomas Hardy in “The Man He Killed” and Wilfred Owen in most of his poems, and a poet-novelist like Remarque best captured the horrific ironies.)

Following the grotesque war (as all wars are!), Germany suffered a further dozen years of hyper-inflation (wheelbarrows of deutchmarks, etc.), starvation, kids dying in the street, etc.  Meantime, kids were dancing the Charleston, etc. during America’s triumphalist Roaring Twenties. So, is it any wonder that German voters turned to Hitler and the Nazis in 1932, and, any more wondrous that by the Berlin Olympics of 1936, artists like Riefenstahl were celebrating a resurrected Germany?  (And, notably, German artists were not alone in their adjulation.  There are old Life magazines from the 1930s showing Herr Hitler as amiable host in Berchtesgaden, and one can find quotes by bulldog British imperialist Churchill praising Hitler’s accomplishments!) Notwithstanding the accomplishments, Germany remained threatened on every side by its former enemies.

No doubt there were injustices in Germany/Austria/Hungary, etc.–as there were in all the major powers of that time. Have we forgotten what it was like to be a black man in the US South back then—the public lynchings with grinning white men, women and children watching the “niggers” swing?  Should we forget that long before there was any kind of “holocaust” engineered by German fanatics, there was at least as terrible a holocaust—in terms of numbers killed, 5-7 million–engineered by our future ally Stalin in Ukraine?

And this is the essence of our problem now—a problem badly exaccerbated by a movie like “Argo.” Since Bernays, we live in an often baffling, multi-layered, complex world with simplistic historical frames of reference; with simplistic solutions, pitting “good guys” against “bad guys.”  (Aside: incredible to me that adults can take a phrase like “bad guys” seriously to justify drone warfare, torture, renditions, sanctions against a non-belligerent like Iran!)  Fact is, Leni Riefenstahl had valid reasons to celebrate the accomplishments of Naziism between 1932 and 1939, and Germany had every reason to be wary of the empires—British, French, Russian and American—that had already devastated it two decades before.

Making Hitler and Naziism the locus of all evil in the world at that time, we have forgiven ourselves the barbarous acts we ourselves committed before and after the holocaustic Second World War!  And, transferring that locus of evil to another opponent—the Soviet Union for over 40 years, or Iran for the past dozen years—we forgive ourselves in advance of committing horrors in the name of peace, security, our “freedom,” our “democracy,” our “way of life,” etc.

The situation in America today is far different from that of Germany in the 30’s! Our country has not been attacked and devastated by Iran. We have, rather, been bringing about our own ruin by the aggressive policies we have pursued since the end of WWII. There never was a “smoking gun” (in Exxon’s Condoleeza Rice’s preposterous phrase), nor yellow-cake uranium (as touted by “military hero” Colin Powell)—nor any of the other charades acted out on the world stage in order to justify the US holocaust against the people of Iraq during the last dozen years.  Our CIA and Hollywood have helped to build the shaky scaffold of Middle Eastern ruin and our own.  It is scaffolding that could come crashing down if the “herded” masses will awaken from their sleep–their dreams and their nightmares–and not only reclaim, but demand, their humanity.

Movies like “Argo” should be boycotted!  Academy Award ceremonies should be picketed in the name of the First Amendment! Such movies have nothing to do with “freedom of speech” and everything to do with suppressing free speech and the truth for the sake of profits, promoting wars and hatred and slaughter.  They are worthy of nothing but the fullest condemnation.

Let the Occupy Movement emerge from its long winter hibernation and focus its admirable energy on our spurious media—this “entertainment industry” that has cast a vail over common sense and decency for the sake of promoting Zionists, billionaires and corporatists (and let’s throw in the decadent, pederast Catholic Church Establishment, too!). That is the real story that needs to be told!

Gary Corseri has taught in US public schools and prisons, and at US and Japanese universities. He has published books of poetry, the Manifestations literary anthology (edited), and the novels,  A Fine Excess and Holy Grail, Holy Grail. He can be contacted at Gary_Corseri@comcast.net.

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February 28, 2013 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Color Revolutions –The Hue of Coup d’Etat

By Ariadna Theokopoulos | Deliberation | August 8th, 2012

In his article Western Leaders Slip into Their Childhood, Thierry Meyssan reviews the color revolutions, their genesis and their commonalities. He also reveals why Syria seems to be a harder nut to crack for such idealistic revolutionaries as Obama and Cameron: not enough young Syrians properly inspired.

“The slogan “Bashar must go!” was supposed to be chanted by crowds of protesters in Damascus and Aleppo. In the absence of such demonstrations, it has been taken over by Western leaders themselves even though it goes against all the conventional rules of diplomacy. Why?

In 1985, a social scientist, Gene Sharp, published a study commissioned by NATO on Making Europe Unconquerable. He pointed out that ultimately a government only exists because people agree to obey it. The USSR could never control Western Europe if people refused to obey Communist governments.

A few years later, in 1989, Sharp was tasked by the CIA with conducting the practical application of his theoretical research in China. The United States wanted to topple Deng Xiaoping in favor of Zhao Ziyang. The intention was to stage a coup with a veneer of legitimacy by organizing street protests, in much the same way as the CIA had given a popular facade to the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh by hiring Tehran demonstrators (Operation Ajax, 1953). The difference here is that Gene Sharp had to rely on a mix of pro-Zhao and pro-US youth to make the coup look like a revolution. But Deng had Sharp arrested in Tiananmen Square and expelled from the country. The coup failed, but not before the CIA spurred the youth groups into a vain attack to discredit Deng through the crackdown that followed. The failure of the operation was attributed to the difficulties of mobilizing young activists in the desired direction.

Ever since the work of French sociologist Gustave Le Bon in the late nineteenth century, we know that adults behave like children when they are in the throes of collective emotion. They become susceptible, even if for just a critical fleeting moment, to the suggestions of a leader-of-men who for them embodies a father figure. In 1990, Sharp got close to Colonel Reuven Gal, then chief psychologist of the Israeli Army (he later became deputy national security adviser to Ariel Sharon and now runs operations designed to manipulate young Israeli non-Jews). Combining the discoveries of Le Bon and Sigmund Freud, Gal reached the conclusion that it was also possible to exploit the “Oedipus complex” in adolescents and steer a crowd of young people to oppose a head of state, as a symbolic father figure.

On this basis, Sharp and Gal set up training programs for young activists with the objective of organizing coups. After a few successes in Russia and the Baltics, it was in 1998 that Gene Sharp perfected the method of “color revolutions” with the overthrow of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

After President Hugo Chavez foiled a coup in Venezuela on the basis of one of my investigations revealing the role and method of Gene Sharp, the latter suspended the activities of the Albert Einstein Institute which served as a cover and went on to create new structures (CANVAS in Belgrade, the Academy of Change in London, Vienna and Doha). We saw them at work the world over, especially in Lebanon (Cedar Revolution), Iran (Green Revolution), Tunisia (Jasmine Revolution) and Egypt (Lotus Revolution). The principle is simple: exacerbate all underlying frustrations, blame the political apparatus for all the problems, manipulate the youth according to the Freudian “patricidal” scenario, organize a coup, and then propagandize that the government was brought down by the “street.”

International public opinion easily swallowed these stage settings: first, because of a confusion between a crowd and the people. Thus, the “Lotus Revolution” actually boiled down to a show on Tahrir Square in Cairo, mobilizing a crowd of tens of thousands, while the near totality of the Egyptian people abstained from taking part in the event; and second, because there is a lack of clarity with regard to the word “revolution”. A genuine revolution entails an upheaval in social structures that takes place over several years, while a “color revolution” is a regime change that occurs within weeks. The other term for a forced change of leadership without social transformation is a “coup d’état”. In Egypt, for example, it is clearly not the people who pushed Hosni Mubarak to resign, but U.S. Ambassador Frank Wisner who gave him the order.

The slogan of the “color revolutions” harks back to an infantile perspective. What matters is to overthrow the head of state without consideration of the consequences—“Don’t worry about your future, Washington will take care of everything for you.” By the time people wake up, it’s too late; the government has been usurped by individuals not of their choosing. At the outset though, there are cries of “Down with Shevardnadze!” Or “Ben Ali, get out!” The latest version was launched at the third conference of “Friends” of Syria (Paris, July 6): “Bashar must go!“

A strange anomaly can be detected with regard to Syria. The CIA did not locate groups of young Syrians willing to chant this slogan in the streets of Damascus and Aleppo. So it is Barack Obama, François Hollande, David Cameron and Angela Merkel themselves who repeat the slogan in chorus from their respective foreign offices. Washington and its allies are trying out the methods of Gene Sharp on the “international community”. It is a risky bet to imagine that foreign ministries can be as easy to manipulate as youth groups! At the moment, the result is simply ridiculous: the leaders of the colonial powers have been stomping their feet like angry, frustrated children over a desired object that the Russian and Chinese adults won’t let them have while ceaselessly wailing “Bashar must go!“.

August 8, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment