When asked by Larry King on Monday, 26 July, who he meant to call “bastards” when he told Der Spiegel “I enjoy crushing bastards,” Assange specified he meant U.S. forces. Assange must also believe that those studying these documents will not focus as much on the atrocities committed by the Taleban, such as the devastating carnage caused by their IEDs and suicide bombers, and their apparent disregard for the scores of civilians that are killed as a result of going after one target with a massive bomb–The Guardian, with what is arguably the best coverage of the three newspapers to have obtained the documents a month in advance of their public release, has already covered this aspect quite quickly. In these same reports, the Taleban appear to be using hammers to kill mosquitoes. Left at that level of discussion, we have data, but not much understanding–for example, of why the Taleban have nonetheless gained strength and support, or why we may view their deadly attacks as something for which the U.S. and NATO share partial responsibility, for having overthrown and persecuted the Taleban after invading and occupying their country, thereby provoking a hostile and asymmetric reaction. It would be a silly or wicked person who would argue that Afghans have no right to fight back.
While I generally agree with Assange’s sentiments, to the extent that they are knowable, I do not share his optimism about the impact of these documents. Information is not power, and it is not meaning. To make sense of these documents requires interpretation and argumentation that goes beyond and outside the limits of what are, after all, reports reflective of an American optic, produced by combatants. Source criticism and cross checking will be paramount, and to the extent that is not done, Wikileaks may witness members of the public using the same documents to not only bolster the arguments to support continuation of this war, but even an escalation to direct hostilities with Iran (see The Guardian, and see the justified alarm expressed by Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy). There is also debate between The Guardian and The New York Times over the extent to which the reports can be trusted when it comes to Pakistan’s supposed role in aiding the Taleban and conducting covert operations against the government of Afghanistan and western forces–that dispute happened within the first day of reporting on the documents, and disagreement over their credibility did not stop the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan from verbally thrashing each other in public, again within 24 hours of the documents’ release. These reports overall contain enough to hurt those who are critics of U.S. foreign policy, as much as they will hurt those who support it. They contain as much potential for escalating and expanding conflict, as they contain for mobilizing popular support to stop it. I also understand that my commentary here may well be premature, but then so are all the current commentaries.
What Should Matter to Social Scientists?
To bring this discussion closer to the concerns of anthropologists and social scientists generally, there are a few points that I feel need to be made. One concerns the extent to which these records are only a partial selection of all records produced by the U.S. military. That is a significant problem, because we cannot know if the items excluded would in some way modify any conclusions we reach about the records we have. Wikileaks received a total of about 110,000 records, and released about 92,000. It is hard to believe that a period covering six years of war could have produced only this amount. To my knowledge, Julian Assange has not been asked any questions about this issue. We therefore also do not know why these records were included and others excluded. This issue will come up again when I speak about what the records reveal about the workings of the Human Terrain System.
A second problem, and it is a major one, concerns Assange’s assertions that the items were redacted to minimize the risk of harm to the sources indicated in the records. From what we have seen already, just with reference to Human Terrain Teams alone and their sources, that is completely untrue. There is no evidence whatsoever of any kind of redaction. Moreover, when one deletes information for a record, one is supposed to mark the text in some way to say either “name deleted” or “sentence deleted,” etc., and I see no evidence of that. In addition, who comprises Wikileaks’ team of redactors, and on the basis of what knowledge and expertise, as either war fighters, or people with experience and knowledge of Afghanistan, could they make calls about what was “harmless” versus “harmful” information? Which specialists did they consult, and for how long did they have the records to study? Not a word about this, merely bland and general assurances.
Indeed, Assange’s statements about Wikileaks’ “harm minimization process” seem to only focus on the safety of his “bastards,” noting that the documents “do not generally cover top-secret operations” and that they “delayed the release of some 15,000 reports” as “demanded by our source” (source). This is an exchange Assange had with Der Spiegel on this issue:
SPIEGEL: The material contains military secrets and names of sources. By publishing it, aren’t you endangering the lives of international troops and their informants in Afghanistan?
Assange: The Kabul files contain no information related to current troop movements. The source went through their own harm-minimization process and instructed us to conduct our usual review to make sure there was not a significant chance of innocents being negatively affected. We understand the importance of protecting confidential sources, and we understand why it is important to protect certain US and ISAF sources [emphasis added].
SPIEGEL: So what, specifically, did you do to minimize any possible harm?
Assange: We identified cases where there may be a reasonable chance of harm occurring to the innocent. Those records were identified and edited accordingly.
A third problem has to do with source criticism, source confirmation, and Assange’s call for crowdsourcing. Anthropologists should relate to this issue personally. Imagine that someone gets hold of your fieldnotes, and releases a part of them. No analysis, no contextualization, no doubts about the veracity of what an informant told you is in those notes. They are released, and then members of a broad public take hold of their interpretation, and take what is reported as the truth of a situation. Wouldn’t this make you freak out? Are any of our books and journal articles a mere transcription of our fieldnotes? So who is this “crowd” that will make solid arguments from these notes? How will they check their veracity? Do they know who wrote these reports, under what conditions, under what limitations, and with what motivations? Will they travel to Afghanistan and cover the ground covered by these military units? What other documents will they use to confirm these reports, or will they trust them blindly? These are already some of the issues being raised about the alleged Iran-Al Qaeda connection, and Pakistan’s role in supporting the Taleban.”
“Again, I say charges that the movement is racist are absurd. Here are a few of my personal tea party experiences. Keep in mind, I have performed at well over two hundred tea parties across America.
Reporter David Weigel’s feverish imaginings about the group he pretends to cover objectively have surfaced in emails sent to the liberal listserv, Journolist, according to Fishbowl DC (hat-tip to LRC blog).
Why am I not surprised?
Global-warming “scientists” turn out to be political hacks grinding over-sized axes; “educators” preaching “tolerance” and “love” turn out to be sexual Bolsheviks; green “activists” turn out to be shills for billionaire speculators…..(more…)
Reuters reports (June 23, 3010) that Soros is wringing his hands over Germany’s savings policy:
“Germany’s budget savings policy risks destroying the European project and a collapse of the euro cannot be ruled out, billionaire investor George Soros said in a newspaper interview released on Wednesday.
Atheists and agnostics often imply that they are a persecuted minority. I decided to look it up.
Turns out that after Christianity and Islam (which the elites have conveniently set at each others’ throats), secularists command the largest following (along with Hindus). By the time the Christians and Muslims get done polishing each other of, I guess they’d be the most dominant group. Hmm..mm, as my friends at the Daily Bell would say. For the record, I define myself as an esoteric Christian, neo-Hindu, skeptical spiritualist, and ethical occultist (“God’s Son, Falwell’s Mother, and the Rest of Us Ho’s,” Dissident Voice, May 18, 2007). (more…)
More on the ubiquitous founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. I maintain a neutral to positive rating on Assange, despite criticism of him. The whistleblower emails on anthropogenic global warming that were published on Wikileaks (climategate) hugely damaged the climate cabal, but there are some credible writers who maintain that he’s passing off disinfo as well. I honestly can’t tell one way or other. Lately it’s occurred to me that that the controversy might relate to infighting between factions of the intelligence community, but how is the question. Anyway, that’s pure speculation on my part.
Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of the influential Economic Cycle Research Institute, has said he’s sure the economy is “rolling over” but can’t definitively call it a recession yet. Today he adds that the elevated price of gold signals anxiety more than inflation concerns. ECRI has a good track record as a trend predictor, from all accounts. On the other hand, it’s also true that gold is hitting new highs and the financial media has to put a good spin on that. Wall Street doesn’t like physical gold, because whenever it dominates the news stories, it undermines the stock and fund selling on which the Street mainly depends. (more…)
Note 1: This web post by the anti-fascist author of several books on mind-control and propaganda, Alex Constantine, is perhaps a bit harsh in its conclusions. Taibbi might simply not know enough to steer clear of disinformation. Also, to be fair, he’s a more talented writer than Constantine gives him credit for being. (more…)
“The propagandists for the Israel Lobby, who occupy the Wall Street Journal editorial page while pretending to be journalists, are determined to remove Helen Thomas from the annals of journalism. In case you have already forgotten, a few days ago the distinguished career of Helen Thomas, the 89-year-old doyen of the White House Press Corps, was ended by the Israel Lobby, which made an issue about her opinion that immigrant Jews should leave Palestine and go back to their home countries.
The Great Bongon the difference between the Indian and the Israeli approach to provocation:
“As someone primarily interested in sub-continental politics, what is most interesting for me however, more than the role of Turkey, is the difference between India and Israel in their reactions to provocation, being in similar boats—- — democratic countries with strong militaries, surrounded by antagonistic countries on many sides, eager to provoke them to conflict over disputed territories.
So now we know the real reason for the Afghan war.. I wonder how long the Pentagon has had this information? BBC reports on June 14, 2010:
“Afghanistan may have more than a trillion dollars worth of untapped mineral deposits, a spokesman for the ministry of mines has suggested. The statement came after reports in the New York Times of the work of a team of Pentagon officials and US geologists. They discovered large quantities of iron and copper as well as valuable deposits of lithium. However, questions are being asked about the timing of the release of the latest information.
Shock. Pakistani intelligence (the ISI) might be involved with the Taliban.
When the obvious is stated with all the fanfare of a papal decree from such organs of the ruling class as the London School of Economics and our own JFK School of Government (Harvard), can military action be far behind? File this along with my previous post, Mad Dog alerts.
“Pakistan’s main spy agency continues to arm and train the Taliban and is even represented on the group’s leadership council despite U.S. pressure to sever ties and billions in aid to combat the militants, said a research report released Sunday.
(sung to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees from the soundtrack of the motion picture, “Saturday Night Live” )
Well you can tell by the way the buildings fell
There was something wrong, now its time to tell
Spread the word, its nothing new
You gotta educate yourself in “truth”
It’s not alright, it’s not okay
For you to look the other way
We can help you understand
The New York Times effect on man (more…)
“The bid to shape global perceptions by portraying the Palestinians as victims of Israel (my emphasis)was the first prong of a longtime two-part campaign. The second part of this campaign involved armed resistance against the Israelis.”
“One can express all sorts of outrage over the Obama administration’s depressingly predictable defense of the Israelis, even at the cost of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, but ultimately, on some level, wouldn’t it have been even more indefensible — or at least oozingly hypocritical — if the U.S. had condemned Israel? After all, what did Israel do in this case that the U.S. hasn’t routinely done and continues to do?
The Daily Bellon the tensions between Israel and the world as an elite manipulation:
“The creation of the tiny theocratic state of Israel was not something that came about because of an upsurge in sentiment that such a state was needed. Even Dr. John Coleman, who has written a recent (fairly vituperative) history of the Rothschilds, explains that the Jewish state was an invention of the elites – especially the Rothschilds – not a movement that bubbled up from Jewish populations around the world. The book, written in 2007, certainly makes a case for the Rothschilds as the driving force in the political developments and wars of the 19th and 20th century, especially. The motivating idea – the goal – is one-world government, though Dr. Coleman does not spell out the linkage between the state of Israel itself and the larger issue of global governance.
“It is interesting that the excellent statement was made in 1910 [by Francis Delaisi, La Démocratie et les Financiers, 1910]: ‘… that big capital has succeeded in creating out of democracy the most wonderful, the most effective, the most flexible instrument for the exploitation of the population as a whole.
“I know how at least 80 percent of all of the incidents there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s speak about 80 percent. It would go like this: we would send a tractor to plowin the demilitarized area, and we would know ahead of time that the Syrians would start shooting. (more…)
The Daily Bellon why the show trial of Goldman (albeit a worthy target, in my opinion) is most likely to be just another ruse of the powers that be:
“The progressive press, in our estimation, tries to blame individuals or certain corporations (Enron comes to mind, and now Goldman) to distract from the larger issue, which is the corruption of civil society itself by this horrid, pernicious mercantilism.
At times I regret the loss of privacy and the vulnerability to slander that anyone who writes publicly has to face. It seems that no good deed goes unpunished by the mob that sees only upto the horizons of its own vulgar perspective.
Being a thief itself, it sees thieves in honest people. Being a liar itself, it calls what is patently truthful a lie. Motivated solely by venality and malice, it can see no other motivation in people who obviously struggle to hew to their conscience, even when it endangers themselves.
How to escape slander without losing privacy to the envious, the malevolent, the pathological? You cannot. But you can consider your real audience, as Sir Thomas More suggests, in Robert Bolt’s fine play “A Man for All Seasons” (1960). More’s counsel addresses Richard Rich, an academic who despairs that the virtues of a great teacher can never be known beyond a small circle, but it’s advice that applies as well to anyone who has ever suffered from slander directed at them, when their actions were not only not dishonorable, they were more than ordinarily brave and honorable.
“MORE: Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher.
Perhaps even a great one.
RICH: And if I was, who would know it?
MORE: You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that . . . Oh, and a quiet life.”
“The Soviet strategists who were in control of Poland saw significant advantage in fostering an animosity between Jewish and gentile Poles. This animosity was used as a tool to aid in the subjugation of Poland early in its capture into the Soviet empire in 1944. After World War II, Soviet machinations in this regard succeeded in converting the image of Jewish victims of German-Nazi genocide into the image of Jewish oppressors (Kersten, p. 130). This was purposely done to put the Polish gentile population between “a rock and a hard place.” Polish gentiles were left with two options: either don’t respond to the Soviet oppression, or respond to the Soviet oppression and thus appear to be anti-Semitic.
Although the image of Jews as oppressors was spread beyond Poland, this phenomenon was very noticeable in Poland, where there was a steady flow of news and often well-substantiated (if sometimes exaggerated) rumors of executions of anti-communist Poles by Jewish executioners serving in the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. Kersten describes this unfortunate development when Soviet policies created the impression that Jews played the main role in the subjugation of Poland and other satellite countries to the communist system. At the same time, the communist propaganda machine equated opposition to the “socialist” regimes with anti-Semitism. So, if a Polish person opposed the socialist Sovietization of Poland, that person was branded as an anti-Semite. This smoke screen was used successfully to obscure the reality of the Soviet subjugation of Poland by the Soviet Union.
The Soviet terror apparatus in Poland included the so-called Polish military counterintelligence. It was initially integrated with the Soviet Smersh [Death to Spies] organization directed against German spying and subversion. However, when the front crossed the prewar Polish territory, Smersh was used increasingly against the significant Polish resistance to Soviet domination. In November 1944, the Polish section of Smersh became renamed Informacja, in which Col. Checinski later served for 10 years. Informacja remained under the close supervision of Smersh and was at first headed by Soviet Col. Nicolai Kozhushko. Soviet officers assigned to the Polish army were considered vulnerable to Polish influence and were under close surveillance by a special Informacja [Information] department. Informacja was clearly a Soviet-led force, not at all an independent force loyal to Poland.
At the time of the most intensive terror, between 1944 and 1955, Smersh used its Informacja branch to have agents pose as members of the military prosecutor’s office. They used this apparatus to conduct political trials in military courts in Poland. Tortured witnesses were “prepared” for these trials and later were secretly executed “to remove any trace of the provocation” (Checinski, p. 57). In that period, of the 120 officers serving in Informacja, only about 18 were Polish-born. Most of these 18 were Polish Jews and the rest were Soviet citizens, some of them Jews.
The Soviets were creative in inventing their own opportunities to manufacture conflict between Polish Jews and gentiles. For example, it was Soviet policy in Poland to change Yiddish names of Jews into Slavic-Polish names. This practice was resented by both Jewish and gentile Poles. An American journalist, Samuel Loeb Shneiderman, who visited Warsaw in 1946, wrote in his book “Between Fear and Hope” (New York, 1946) that under the cover of Polish names Jews were continuing their ethnic identity and must have felt like their ancestors forced into conversion to Christianity during their persecution in Spain (Kersten, pp.76, 108). The name-changing became widespread. It served to deprive the Jews of their cultural heritage in order to form a “progressive Jewish nation,” to use Stalin’s expression.
Checinski describes how Stalin ordered the NKVD to prepare a civilian network of police terror and repression, called the UB [Urzad Bezpieczenstwa), to work in parallel with the Informacja in Poland. The "Polish intelligentsia boycotted the security service, which was treated with universal contempt as an instrument of foreign domination" (Checinski, p. 61). Thus, the NKVD, despite its deep-rooted anti-Semitism, "could not do without Jews. Jewish officials were often placed in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for all of the regime's crimes" (Checinski, p. 62). The Soviet strategy of using people with striking Semitic features as the most visible executioners of Soviet policy in Poland was also aimed at presenting understandable anti-communist feelings within Poland as anti-Semitism. In 1945, the upper echelons of the terror apparatus were staffed with Jews. This created the appearance that many Jews in Poland were members of the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. A public proclamation, made at a convention of Jewish members of the ruling communist party [PPR, Polska Pania Robotnicza] on October 7-9, 1945, stated that in postwar Poland, conditions were created for the Jews to find an outlet for their political, social, and national ambitions. Needless to say, neither Poles nor Jews trusted this official statement. The Zionists openly advocated a massive emigration to Palestine (Kersten, p.80), which for different reasons was also desired by the Soviet leadership.”
and
” Is hatred for a person simply because of his ethnicity more acceptable today, as long as the object of the hatred is a Pole rather than a Jew? And once it is decided that it is important to instill hatred against members of a given ethnic group, can there be any limit to the perpetration of lies, myths, and mischaracterizations to drive the hatred home? And once ethnic hatred is started and nurtured in a people, where will it end? The Holocaust itself unfortunately provides one answer, one such ending point.”
The Ukrainian genocide at the hands of Stalin was as great as the Holocaust engineered by the Nazis, but is much less well known. The silence of prominent Western journalists is one reason why. Walter Duranty of The New York Times, a Pulitzer prize-winner, admitted privately that ten million or so peasants had been intentionally starved and/or killed, but in public he dismissed reports of this as exaggeration and anti-Soviet propaganda. It turned out later that Duranty was being sexually blackmailed by the KGB.
“Estimates of how many people died in Stalin’s engineered famine of 1933 vary. But they are staggering in their scale – between seven and 11 million people.
But despite the horrific number of people who died, the world is relatively unfamiliar with this grisly chapter in Soviet history which claimed lives on the same scale as the holocaust. One of the main reasons is that the Germans were eventually defeated, and thousands of eyewitnesses told their stories about concentration camps and massacres. The experience was also captured unforgettably in photographs, film, and written accounts, and many of those responsible for the genocide were captured and put on trial………
British historian Robert Conquest is an expert on the period and his 1986 study of the famine, “Harvest of Sorrow,” brought much information about the tragedy to Western audiences for the first time. Conquest said another contrast between the famine and the holocaust is that while Adolf Hitler had written down much of what he intended to do, Stalin did not go on record about the famine.
“In the first place, [the Germans] were caught, so it ended and they had themselves got into an operation where they said what they were doing. Stalin never said he was trying to starve anyone to death. He just took away their food. He never went on record. It was all done under the auspices of humanist talk, socialist talk — or else denied altogether. The operations were different. And in other ways they were different, too. Hitler did many horrible things but he didn’t torture his friends to tell lies. The operation was a different one.”
Conquest is in no doubt that the famine was primarily aimed at Ukrainians and that Stalin hated not only the country peasants but even senior Communist leaders, like Mykola Skrypnyk, who eventually killed himself…………
“[Stalin] was trying to break the Ukrainians, as you know, with the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik Skrypnyk committing suicide under the pressures that were put on them when they tried to defend just the ordinary alphabet of the Ukrainians. Here [Stalin] was trying to alter it, things like that. I think he also proved he never trusted Ukrainian Communists. The whole Ukrainian Central Committee was totally purged in 1937, even the ones who supported him. He had this terrific distrust of everybody, but particularly of Ukraine.”
Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has a different theory for why news of the famine never reached the West. He blamed a number of Western journalists based in Moscow at the time who knew of the forced starvation but chose not to write about it or deliberately covered it up.
The journalist he says played the most influential role in the cover-up was “The New York Times” correspondent Walter Duranty. A drug addict with a shady reputation, Duranty was also an avid fan of Stalin’s, whom he described as “the world’s greatest living statesman.” He was granted the first American interview with the Soviet leader and received privileged information from the secretive regime.
Duranty confided to a British diplomat at the time that he thought 10 million people had perished in the famine. But when other journalists who had traveled to Ukraine began writing about the horrific famine raging there, Duranty branded their information as anti-Soviet lies. Conquest believes that Duranty was being blackmailed by the Soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reportedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.
The year before the famine, in 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize, America’s most coveted journalism award, for a series of articles on the Soviet economy. Luciuk says members of the Ukrainian diaspora, as well as Ukrainian politicians and academics, earlier this month launched a campaign to have Duranty’s award posthumously revoked. He said he hopes the campaign will make more people in the world aware of the famine….”
“Borrow the resources of an ally to attack a common enemy. Once the enemy is defeated, use those resources to turn on the ally that lent you them in the first place.”
—- Chinese strategies for creating chaos, “Obtain Safe Passage To Conquer The State of Guo“
“Those who have studied history know that nothing invigorates and empowers an authoritarian regime more than a spectacular act of violence, some sudden and senseless loss of life that allows the autocrat to stand on the smoking rubble and identify himself as the hero. It is at moments like this that the public—still in shock from the horror of the tragedy that has just unfolded before them—can be led into the most ruthless despotism: despotism that now bears the mantle of “security.”
Please note. Bezmenov was talking about Soviet society and propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s. That means his analysis of the general dynamics of propaganda has to be cautiously reconfigured, when it comes to specifics. The US and USSR he described then (prior to the 1980s) had clearly differentiated economic/political systems. In the 30 years that have passed since, the ideological convergence he mentions elsewhere, has in many ways occurred, or is in the process of occurring. [I describe this in much greater depth in "The Language of Empire."]
The USA hasn’t been free-market capitalist in any real way for some 20-30 years, at the very least. Instead, we’ve had ever-accelerating state intervention and crony capitalism that has turned into the final danse macabre of casino capitalism and pure plunder.
Thus the terms that Bezmenov uses in discussing the totalitarian communism of the Soviet system now actually apply to the US, albeit incompletely.
Bezmenov didn’t know, or perhaps chose not to express, since this was the country he defected to, that US propaganda and psyops were far more subtle, and thus in the long run more effective, than Soviet propaganda.
He also doesn’t acknowledge that at many levels “capitalist” and “communist” leaderships were/are symbiotic and that they have ultimately led to the globalized kleptocracy, in which the two ideological forms, while retaining different emphases, copulate and spawn the “third way” of corporatized politically-correct social democracy, which is the benign face of the corrupt neo-liberalism that has always been the power behind the throne of the multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, EU, UN, and others…
There is no longer a west versus east polarity. The division is really between centralizers (neoliberal globalizers, central bankers) and decentralizers, in which, however, some of the decentralization is orchestrated to promote the globalizers’ agenda. One has to know the specifics of every situation. They can’t be understood ideologically.
1. The 1960s - 1980s is the period of demoralization
2. 1990s - 2001 The fall of the Berlin Wall marks the acceleration of this into active destabilization of the US’s economy and foreign policy (the neo-conservative paper, “A Clean Break,” as well as proposals for “full-spectrum” dominance; Yugoslav and Iraq wars; the total financialization and electronification of the US capital markets, leading to the stock market bubble). This period is initiated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989 (11-9-1989) and George Bush’s statement about a “new world order” on September 11, 9-11-1990.
3. 2001 - 2008 Period that entails vast changes in the political and economic systems, following two crises - one, political, on 9-11 and another exactly 7 years later, economic, around 9-11 too.
We are now still in the period of crisis, which, in my opinion, will throw up further catalyzing “events’ of all kinds, whether occurring spontaneously in the realm of politics/economics/nature, or whether manufactured.
Note:
Bezmenov was talking about Soviet society and propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s. That means his analysis of the general dynamics of propaganda has to be cautiously reconfigured, when it comes to specifics. The US and USSR he was describing (prior to the 1980s) had clearly differentiated economic/political systems. In the 30 years that have passed since then, the ideological convergence he mentions elsewhere, has in many ways occurred or is in the process of occurring. [I describe this in much greater depth in "The Language of Empire."]
The USA hasn’t been free-market capitalist in any real way for some 20-30 years certainly, even longer. Instead, its experienced ever-accelerating state intervention/mercantilism and crony capitalism. Now that has turned into the final danse macabre of casino capitalism and pure plunder.
Thus the Bezmenovian analyis might plausibly be applied both to the actual situation in the US, as well as to the propaganda the US directs toward its enemies.
Bezmenov didn’t know, or perhaps chose not to voice (since this was the country he defected to), the fact that US propaganda and psyops have been subtler, and thus in the long run much more effective, than Soviet propaganda.
He also doesn’t acknowledge that at many levels “capitalist” and “communist” leaderships have become symbiotic and created a globalized kleptocracy in which the two ideological forms, while retaining different emphases, copulate and spawn a “third way.” This is the corporatized politically correct social democracy that increasingly seems to be the benign face of corrupt neo-liberalism, which is the power behind the throne of the multilateral institutions - the World Bank, IMF, EU, UN, and others.
ORIGINAL POST
March 07, 2009 — Yuri Bezmenov 1983 Soviet subversion of Western Society
Yuri Bezmenov, a.k.a. Tomas Schuman, soviet KGB defector, explains in detail his scheme for the KGB process of subversion and takeover of target societies at a lecture in Los Angeles, 1983.
Yuri Alexandrovitch Bezmenov is a former KGB propagandist who was assigned to New Dehli, India, defected to the West in 1970, and was interviewed by Edward Griffin in 1985. Bezmenov explains his background, some of his training, and exactly how Soviet propaganda is spread in other countries in order to subvert their teachers, politicians, and other policy makers to a mindset receptive to the Soviet ideology.
He also explains in detail the goal of Soviet propaganda as total subversion of another country and the 4 step formula for achieving this goal. He recalls the details of how he escaped India, defected to the West, and settled in Montreal as an announcer for the CBC.
Note: As I said before about the wikileaks video, the notion that you need to ferret out secret documents, hack computers, or conduct spy v spy ops to understand what’s going on is simply romantic myth. 85% of KGB intelligence ops in the US, according to Schuman, is about ideological subversion or aggressive propaganda, which is intended to demoralize the population so that even when presented with all possible information it’s unable to draw common sense conclusions, protect its own self-interest, or act rationally. Even when confronted with evidence of war atrocities, such as those on the video, people will simply reframe the facts to fit their ideological predisposition.
Let me put this as bluntly as possible. A state cannot be “compassionate.” Policies might have well-intentioned goals, but they are policies - that is, legal and administrative enactments, often backed by force, that must be followed by whoever falls under their jurisdiction, regardless of their state of mind.
On the other hand, compassion is a quality of heart and intention. An involuntary A non-voluntary action consequent to a policy cannot be compassionate. Obedience to a legal requirement cannot be compassionate. Compassion can be understood only by the context and the state of mind of an individual.
Libertarianism is not..should not be…and cannot be… compassionate.
Instead, it is the attitude to government policy and law that best allows human beings to act with the compassion each is capable of. To force “compassion” on people who don’t want to be “compassionate” is simply force, just as surely as if you were forcing anything else on them that they didn’t want. What looks like “compassion” to you might, after all, look like “expropriation” to me.
“Compassionate” policies might indeed achieve some immediate goal that makes some group of people more satisfied than they previously were. But it surely makes another group unhappy in order to do so. Now, the trade off might..or might not…be worth it. But the entity making that utilitarian calculation isn’t an individual, it’s at best a committee of hacks, at worst, a mafia of thugs….or worst of all, some economic model cooked up in a Harvard professor’s study.
By transferring “compassion” to the state, “compassionate conservatism” encourages people to become less compassionate personally. People actually become meaner. Why wouldn’t they? They’re already being taxed at a third to half their money, effectively. Even the good lord only asked for ten percent.
(Note: I don’t necessarily agree with Robert Ringer’s other views on defense. I don’t see a necessity for the US to be on a perma-war footing that involves aggressive wars overseas and an extensive network of bases. As a libertarian, I endorse a strong defense but one that’s decentralized and limited to volunteers, not mercenaries. It would be based on universal ownership of and training in firearms and would refrain from interfering in foreign internal affairs. This would go along with a decentralized government, supported by state and citizen militias. Most of all, I endorse economic freedom and prosperity as our greatest defense. The more attractive the US is as a trade partner, the less foreign states are going to hurt their own economic interests by turning hostile.
Far from strengthening the country, anti-market economic policies and a perpetually intrusive foreign policy are draining money, time, and energy from it.
(Nonetheless, I don’t think we can disarm unilaterally “at one fell swoop,” without opening up a can of worms, now that the government has actually created multiple foreign threats by its belligerence).
“I repeat what I said earlier: If anything, I believe the tea-party rally on tax day was far too docile. It once again demonstrated just how intimidating the far left can be. Not only intimidating, but clever.
How so? The BHO oligarchy has managed to change the Big Question from ”Is Obama a socialist?” to ”Is the tea-party movement dangerously immersed in racism, hate speech, and violence-prone affiliations with paramilitary groups?” Never sell the Saul Alinsky crowd short when it comes to turning every negative around and pointing it in the direction of its accusers.
I honestly believe that Der Fuhrbama believes his verbal skills are so powerful that he can embarrass the tea-party people into submission. He may be a lightweight in most respects, but he’s a lightweight with an abundance of (over)confidence. The tea-party people had better take a page from Rules from Radicals and press down twice as hard on the accelerator, lest they lose their momentum long before November 2.
Docile simply doesn’t cut it. Just ask the compassionate conservatives who are now in the process of going down in flames.”
John Paulson - more crooked than clever, says The Big Money:
“What emerges from the SEC’s charges against Goldman Sachs (which, it should be noted, the investment bank is strenuously denying) isn’t a story of Paulson seeing a crisis coming when others are still happily buying up housing derivatives. No, it’s a story of reluctant buyers manipulated into buying more collateralized debt obligations when it was already clear that the market was falling apart.”
See below for the real thing. Note also the references to “masses”. The people appealing to the masses aren’t the Randy Weavers of the world who are lone wolves who see themselves ranged against the blind masses. The people appealing to the masses are the bland bureaucrats and apparatchiks of the government, our corpocrats and kleptocrats, and the charismatic politicians who front for them, who never met a public need they couldn’t massage. “Homeland,” perpetual war, forced labor camps are all things the militias are afraid of.
“Few cars in the history of auto manufacturing can match the sentimentality and nostalgia felt for the Volkswagen Beetle. But years before we’d come to associate our beloved Bug with the emblem of the peace sign, Volkswagen’s long strange trip began with a swastika. The iconic, quirky little car often dubbed the “hippie-mobile” was originally, quite literally, the Hitler-mobile.
The brainchild of the Führer himself, the car was masterminded as a gift to the German common man. Translated as the “people’s car,” Volkswagen would provide a cheap, fast, and fuel-efficient means of travel to a country where only a wealthy few owned cars. According to the Vintage Volkswagen Club of America, Hitler opened the 1934 Berlin Auto Show proclaiming, “A car for the people, an affordable Volkswagen, would bring great joy to the masses and the problems of building such a car must be faced with courage.”
In 1937, the Nazi Party, allied with auto engineer and Beetle designer Ferdinand Porsche, formed the state-owned Volkswagen company. A year later, Hitler presided over the tightly controlled, propaganda-heavy groundbreaking ceremony for the new Volkswagen plant before a crowd of 70,000 “Heil!”-chanting faithful. Production on the Beetle, then called the KdF-Wagen or “strength through joy” car, was ill-timed to begin in September of 1939. Only a few cars made it out of the factory before World War II forced Porsche to halt production and turn the Volkswagen plant into a war armaments labor camp. Hitler never lived to see his pet project come to fruition since the Beetle wouldn’t be mass produced until after the Nazi surrender.
In the 1980s, Volkswagen, in the spirit of candor about its Nazi past, commissioned a 10-year $2 million investigation led by historian Hans Mommsen into the extent of its role in the use of wartime slave labor. Titled “Volkswagen and Its Workers During the Third Reich,” the mea culpa reveals Ferdinand Porsche was a willing, “morally indifferent” participant in Hitler’s regime. Volkswagen hired some 20,000 forced laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp inmates from Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. Kept behind barbed wire in horrible living conditions, they worked for Volkswagen to manufacture grenades, land mines, military vehicles, warplanes, and V-1 flying bombs. They were subjected to malnutrition and savagely beaten for trying to feed themselves from food scraps off the floor.
Volkswagen wasn’t the only automaker with war blood on its hands. One of the most profitable companies to emerge from World War II was SS aider and abetter Daimler Benz whose production skyrocketed thanks to arms contracts, tax breaks, and tens of thousands of slave laborers. BMW similarly exploited 25,000-30,000 forced workers to repair airplane engines for the Nazi war machine.
If the unseemly pasts of these automakers has you ready to boycott German cars and pledge your consumer allegiance to the American auto industry, well don’t wrap yourself in Old Glory just yet.
A car enthusiast first and murdering psychopath second, Hitler drew inspiration — both technically and ideologically — from Ford Motor Company (F) founder and fellow anti-Semite Henry Ford. As creator of the mass produced and inexpensive Model T and publisher of a four-volume conspiracy manifesto titled The International Jew, the bigoted automaker paved the road and Hitler vowed to follow in his muddy tire tracks. In fact, Hitler so reveredFord, the Chancellor hung a life-size portrait of him in his Munich office, gave him a personal shout-out in Mein Kampf, and awarded him the Third Reich’s highest decoration for foreigners, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. For his part, Ford served as leader of the America First Committee, the foremost interest group opposing American entry into the war, and authored Ford’s overseas subsidiaries to produce Nazi war materials.
Not to be outdone, General Motors rendered its Nazi salute if only to protect its $100 million investment in Germany. GM not only resisted Roosevelt’s call to military production duty in its US factories but assisted the Axis arms effort instead. James Mooney, senior executive for General Motors, was rewarded for his loyalty to Hitler when he was also bestowed with a medal for his “distinguished service to the Reich.”
“President Clinton weighed in that “legitimate” comparisons can be drawn between today’s grass-roots anger and resentment toward the government and the right-wing extremism 15 years ago.”
Actually, I think the Clinton statement was a pretty fair one, all in all. It didn’t equate “right-wing extremism” with tea-party goers and anti-government activists (as the SPLC did) and it did give room for people to voice their opinions, without having to “be nice.” It cautioned, correctly, that people should stop short of advocating violence.
Any discussion of the Confederacy, said the ex-Prez, should always include a mention of slavery, which doesn’t sound like an onerous requirement to me. So too any discussion of “Islamicism” should also include a complete list of US interventions in the said Islamicist state, right?
In short, more balance and less polemics. I hope I’ve always tried to do that on this blog.
The only thing is, can we hope the government will live up to this standard and stop short of advocating violence, say, in Iran, or in Michigan…or anywhere else?
ORIGINAL POST
Thanks to David Kramer at LRC blog, for this slimy listing by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of Ron Paul among the “enablers’ of the “Patriot” movement, which, if you didn’t know by now is code to our dear leaders and their cohorts for “Nazi right-wing (definitely Christian) loons-who-share-milk-shakes-’n-training-manuals- with- OsamaJohnPatrickBedellDavidKoreshRandyWeaver-bin Laden” :
1. Michele Bachmann 2. Glenn Beck 3. Paul Broun 4. Andrew Napolitano 5. Ron Paul
On the page following, you can see what a smear this is. There’s a list of incidents making up a “Patriot” timeline (love those quotation marks) that starts with President Bush’s “New World Order” remark. (He said it, didn’t he?) and is dotted with references to anti-Semitism, white supremacy and violent acts.
Note that when “cultists” or militia members are murdered, the word used is “killed” or “left dead.” When a federal agent is killed, the term is “murdered.”
Update: I thought back to the climate-gate e-mails, which, I’d momentarily forgotten, were uploaded to wikileaks. If wikileaks were a Soros-funded disinformation operation, I wonder if it would be uploading emails that damage the AGW theory. That tends to make me wonder about the reason the left-liberals might not like wikileaks.
Update III: Here’s Justin Raimondo on the subject. Raimondo thinks the only people who criticize wikileaks are limousine liberals and tin-foil hat conspiracists…for now, I’ll let him have the last word:
“A child could understand this, but it’s way beyond the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and also far beyond the comprehension of the “liberal” Mother Jones magazine, which ought to change its name to Encounter. Kushner “reports” this nonsense uncritically, and even cites the loony John Young, of Cryptome.org, who rants:
“’WikiLeaks is a fraud,’ [Young] wrote to Assange’s list, hinting that the new site was a CIA data mining operation. ‘Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy.’”
Kushner has all bases covered: the white-wine-and-brie liberals who would rather look the other way while their hero Obama slaughters children on the streets of Baghdad, and the tinfoil hat crowd who can be convinced Wikileaks is a “false flag” operation.”
Update II: I should reiterate, I don’t endorse the WM piece. I merely present it…
Update I: I should also add that it doesn’t mean the documents they unearth might not be very important or useful. That’s not what I think this report is suggesting. A front always has a legitimate purpose, which gives it its credibility. How to differentiate disinformation from honest error? Well, evidence of someone/some outfit being funded by intelligence or government agencies; obvious lies or distortions repeated even when evidence contradicts the distortion; giving credence to very few sources or setting up some voices as totally credible and not listening to the range of voices; character assassination rather than rational debate, stigmatization; lack of self-criticism; unwillingness to rethink ideas when faced with new facts.
From The Wayne Madson Report via Alex Constantine:
“In January 2007, John Young, who runs cryptome.org, a site that publishes a wealth of sensitive and classified information, left Wikileaks, claiming the operation was a CIA front. Young also published some 150 email messages sent by Wikileaks activists on cryptome. They include a disparaging comment about this editor [Alex Constantine] by Wikileaks co-founder Dr. Julian Assange of Australia. Assange lists as one of his professions “hacker.” His German co-founder of Wikileaks uses a pseudonym, “Daniel Schmitt.”
Wikileaks claims it is “a multi-jurisdictional organization to protect internal dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers who face legal or other threats related to publishing” [whose] primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we are of assistance to people of all nations who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.”
In China, Wikileaks is suspected of having Mossad connections. It is pointed out that its first “leak” was from an Al Shabbab “insider” in Somalia. Al Shabbab is the Muslim insurgent group that the neocons have linked to “Al Qaeda.”
Asian intelligence sources also point out that Assange’s “PhD” is from Moffett University, an on-line diploma mill and that while he is said to hail from Nairobi, Kenya, he actually is from Australia where his exploits have included computer hacking and software piracy.
WMR has confirmed Young’s contention that Wikileaks is a CIA front operation. Wikileaks is intimately involved in a $20 million CIA operation that U.S.-based Chinese dissidents that hack into computers in China. Some of the Chinese hackers route special hacking program through Chinese computers that then target U.S. government and military computer systems. After this hacking is accomplished, the U.S. government announces through friendly media outlets that U.S. computers have been subjected to a Chinese cyber-attack. The “threat” increases an already-bloated cyber-defense and offense budget and plays into the fears of the American public and businesses that heavily rely on information technology.”
My Comment:
Julian Assange was always sending me emails and requests to join wikileaks a couple of years ago. I thought the outfit was interesting, but I don’t really deal in “secret” documents or cloak-and-dagger stuff, because something founded on distrust is bound to founder on distrust.
Even media activism has the same result. You start wondering if everything you’re reading is disinformation. At a certain point, you have to ask, so what if it is? Can’t I still arrive at the right conclusions by operating from strict rules of reason and ethics?
It seems to me that you can figure out what is going on without going under cover or hacking or stealing classified information because propaganda has a very distinctive flavor you get to recognize after some time. I’ll leave the exciting spy v spy stuff to more adventurous sorts. I can’t confirm anything in this piece, but since it’s something I’ve wondered about myself and since it looks like there’s at least one other person (besides Alex Constantine) who’s wondering as well, Assange’s co-worker, it becomes blog-worthy. I remain agnostic.-to-mildly skeptic about wikileaks….
“The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance.”
We are looking forward to the day when a defendant’s every legal filing also becomes the subject of such prompt attention. I’ve italicized the federal government designation of the “crime” that Isikoff has adopted as established fact:
“A former U.S. Marine rifle expert and veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War supplied the extremist Christian “Hutaree” militia with a “hit list” of federal judges and elected officials and served as the group’s “heavy gunner” who was responsible for providing a “significant volume of firepower” against designated law-enforcement targets, according to a court document released by federal prosecutors.
In a new court filing, federal prosecutors for the first time portray the former Marine, Michael David Meeks, 40, as a key figure in the Michigan-based Hutaree’s alleged conspiracy to trigger an “uprising” against the U.S. government by plotting to assassinate law-enforcement officers with improvised explosive devices.
Meeks, the prosecutors allege, used his four years of U.S. military training to become a member of the Hutaree’s “inner circle” and participated in “military-style training exercises ” with the group on a dozen occasions between October 2008 and February of this year.”
As far as I can tell from this, the only thing the federal government has got on them so far is hearsay and some combat-style exercises.
“The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses.”
– Albert J. Nock
[I had this down before as Alfred J., sorry...
For patient readers of this blog, no, I do not have dyslexia or ADD, as you might think from the strange ways I mangle names. I'm simply a recovering word-associationist. From years of writing poetry and playing music, I'm far more aural than visual. I posted something from Four Quartets a while back, and I think "Alfred J. Prufrock" was playing somewhere in the back of my mind]
“Trader Rick Ackerman interprets the cheer-leading in the headlines:
“Could the newspapers simply be misinterpreting the signs? It would certainly seem that way. To take the headlines cited above, we see oil’s price surge as having absolutely nothing to do with a pick-up in demand. Rather, the push toward $90 a barrel represents speculative excesses in the futures markets, exacerbated by the reluctance of traders to take short positions.
How could they, when, on any given day, a terrorist with a missile launcher could cause the global price of crude to double instantly by scuttling a tanker in the Strait of Hormuz?
As for “bets on growth” pushing stocks higher, it is not bullish speculation that has been driving up shares for the last 13 months, but rather a vast excess of liquidity in the financial system.
As for the rise in T-Note yields to four percent, we seriously doubt this is being caused by competition from expansion-minded borrowers in the private sector; rather, it comes from the rising fear among lenders that they will be repaid in a currency whose value looks all but certain to fall precipitously in the years ahead.
If the central bankers truly believe that strong economic growth is about to trigger inflation, why do they continue to hold the federal funds rate near zero?“
Tyler Cowen has listed from “his gut” the 10 books that have influenced him the most. Human Action by Ludwig von Mises is not on the list. None of Mises’s books are on the list. Keynes makes the list. Of Keynes, he writes:
John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes is one of the greatest thinkers of economics and there are new ideas on virtually every page.
Which raises the question for me, “Why does Cowen even care what Austrian economists call themselves?” If he can’t put a Mises book on a list of ten books that influenced him,when Human Action is the greatest economic text ever written, yet finds room for Keynes and “his new ideas,” I have to classify him a Keynesian, pure and simple.”
Why does Cowen care? It’s all about subversion of language…
“Libertarianism” thus defined (or, more accurately, labeled) comes to mean something not very removed from “liberalism”….
…which today has moved so much to the left that in many areas it’s indistinguishable from communism.
Which means you get to call yourself a libertarian but still push for the same programs and policies that the left-liberals push for.
Which keeps you within the range of “respectability.”
And keeps you out of SPLC lists that have you rubbing shoulders with the Pentagon shooter and anyone else who decides to get physical with the state apparatus.
Mind you, at our little blog, we have no quarrel with communism or communists. We don’t think they’re evil. We just don’t want them turning us into guinea pigs for their experiments. When they feel an urge to test the limits of human malleability, we suggest that they try it out first on their spouses and off-spring. See how that turns out after a generation, and then give us a call and we’ll talk….
“Eric King told GATA today, “We are on one of the top grid server systems in the world, where traffic is not an issue, and this has never happened before. This was a case of an entity needing to silence the messenger.”
No Internet site has given as much voice to GATA and other pro-gold and free-market advocates as King World News has, so given the scope of the attack on the the King World News Internet site, it is hard not be awfully suspicious about it.
King’s interview with Murphy, Douglas, and your secretary/treasurer can be found here:
Meanwhile, GATA’s friend Trace Mayer, proprietor of RunToGold.com, reports that his March 28 commentary on last week’s hearing of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission –
– was followed by a similarly massive attack on RunToGold’s Internet server. “To handle spikes in traffic,” Mayer says, “I am on an expensive enterprise-level cloud server with a company that handles hosting for some of the big dogs, like Sony and Toyota, and my server got hammered. The site was down for 2 1/2 hours, from about noon to 2:30p PT on March 30. There were no issues with my hosting provider and it appears we have everything under control now. I have never had an issue like this before. Anyway, it looks like we have someone’s attention. Keep yanking on that tail.”
My Comment:
You see. This isn’t paranoia. In the past, following certain sorts of posts, I’ve experienced peculiar things too. Sometimes, the blog feels like it’s been hacked. Or my email suddenly doesn’t work. Or I get nasty comments from what sounds like the same person, only writing from different IP’s. Or I get flooded with spam from porn sites (more than the usual quota, I mean).
You tend to dismiss these things as coincidental. But after a couple of years of noticing when they happen, you start realizing that someone doesn’t like what you’re saying.
And if that’s true of my little blog, it’s going to be doubly so for bigger venues.
I posted this excerpt from Lewis yesterday, not because I entirely endorse it, but because it sets off so many interesting trains of thought..
Some libertarians would be unsettled by the description of “true” pedagogy as a kind of reproduction of the teacher. The description even set me thinking whether, contra Lewis, there may actually be a devious line running from the good kind of pedagogy to the bad kind….
But the confrontation between “fact” and “value” that Lewis describes does seem accurate to me and actually reminds me, strangely, of Robert Pirsig’s analysis of “quality” in the philosophical novel, Lila.
“Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
Over against this stands the world of The Green Book. In it the very possibility of a sentiment being reasonable—or even unreasonable—has been excluded from the outset. It can be reasonable or unreasonable only if it conforms or fails to conform to something else. To say that the cataract is sublime means saying that our emotion of humility is appropriate or ordinate to the reality, and thus to speak of something else besides the emotion; just as to say that a shoe fits is to speak not only of shoes but of feet. But this reference to something beyond the emotion is what Gaius and Titius exclude from every sentence containing a predicate of value. Such statements, for them, refer solely to the emotion. Now the emotion, thus considered by itself, cannot be either in agreement or disagreement with Reason. It is irrational not as a paralogism is irrational, but as a physical event is irrational: it does not rise even to the dignity of error. On this view, the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.
Hence the educational problem is wholly different according as you stand within or without the Tao. For those within, the task is to train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists. Those without, if they are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally non-rational, as mere mists between us and the real objects. As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil’s mind; or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic ‘justness’ or ‘ordinacy’. The latter course involves them in the questionable process of creating in others by ’suggestion’ or incantation a mirage which their own reason has successfully dissipated.
Perhaps this will become clearer if we take a concrete instance. When a Roman father told his son that it was a sweet and seemly thing to die for his country, he believed what he said. He was communicating to the son an emotion which he himself shared and which he believed to be in accord with the value which his judgement discerned in noble death. He was giving the boy the best he had, giving of his spirit to humanize him as he had given of his body to beget him. But Gaius and Titius cannot believe that in calling such a death sweet and seemly they would be saying ’something important about something’. Their own method of debunking would cry out against them if they attempted to do so. For death is not something to eat and therefore cannot be dulce in the literal sense, and it is unlikely that the real sensations preceding it will be dulce even by analogy. And as for decorum—that is only a word describing how some other people will feel about your death when they happen to think of it, which won’t be often, and will certainly do you no good. There are only two courses open to Gaius and Titius. Either they must go the whole way and debunk this sentiment like any other, or must set themselves to work to produce, from outside, a sentiment which they believe to be of no value to the pupil and which may cost him his life, because it is useful to us (the survivors) that our young men should feel it. If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely ‘conditions’. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds— making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
It is to their credit that Gaius and Titius embrace the first alternative. Propaganda is their abomination: not because their own philosophy gives a ground for condemning it (or anything else) but because they are better than their principles. They probably have some vague notion (I will examine it in my next lecture) that valour and good faith and justice could be sufficiently commended to the pupil on what they would call ‘rational’ or ‘biological’ or ‘modern’ grounds, if it should ever become necessary. In the meantime, they leave the matter alone and get on with the business of debunking. But this course, though less inhuman, is not less disastrous than the opposite alternative of cynical propaganda. Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism (such as Gaius and Titius would wince at) about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ’spirited element’.20 The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity,21 of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
I thought I’d repost a piece that I wrote inDissident Voice, way back in 2006. It helps give some background to the JP Morgan manipulation story.
And it also adds some background to the ongoing re-valorization of the once discredited IMF. Along with that re-valorization, is the hyping of anyone supporting even further central regulation, although the financial crisis occurred in all sorts of places that have plenty of it.
All this centralization and global government is supposedly for the welfare of the world - but there is no “welfare of the world” that can be safely accepted as gospel from the mouths of the financial industry and its political and media allies.
Note the date of the piece below - back on June 6, 2006, when, dare I say it, most of the financial talking- heads and blogs now being treated as the only legitimate interpreters of reality were doing…well, they weren’t reading GATA or supporting its work, I’m pretty sure. To have done so then would have made them persona non grata in the very same liberal media that is now embracing this researchand that GATA, in turn, seems to be endorsing….for its own reasons..
Also, at Dissident Voice, you can find “Was The IMF Involved in Gold Price Manipulation” (June 8, 2006) which was also posted at Daily Reckoning and on one of the gold sites. I think it’s been taken off Daily Reckoning since.
“The unofficial theory is naturally a lot juicier, although described by even sworn enemies of paper currency as conspiratorial. Still, it’s managed to rear its head in the Wall Street Journal, so it can’t be all wet. Here is what widely respected libertarian Congressman Ron Paul had to say on Feb 14, 2002:
While the Treasury denies it is dealing in gold, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) has uncovered evidence suggesting that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, operating through the Exchange-Stabilization Fund and in cooperation with major banks and the International Monetary Fund, have been interfering in the gold market with the goal of lowering the price of gold. The purpose of this policy has been to disguise the true effects of the monetary bubble responsible for the artificial prosperity of the 1990s, and to protect the politically-powerful banks that are heavy invested in gold derivatives. GATA believes federal actions to drive down the price of gold help protect the profits of these banks at the expense of investors, consumers, and taxpayers around the world.
GATA has also produced evidence that American officials are involved in gold transactions. Alan Greenspan himself referred to the federal government’s power to manipulate the price of gold at hearings before the House Banking Committee and the Senate Agricultural Committee in July, 1998: Nor can private counterparts restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise. [Emphasis added] (3)
More specifically:
Gold is borrowed by Morgan Chase from the Bank of England at 1 percent interest and then Morgan Chase sells the gold on the open market, then reinvests the proceeds into interest-bearing vehicles at maybe 6 percent.
At some point, though, Morgan Chase must return the borrowed gold to the Bank of England, and if the price of gold were significantly to increase during any point in this process, it would make it prohibitive and potentially ruinous to repay the gold. (4)
In plain English, the strong dollar policy that put the sizzle in the stock market under Clinton was made possible only by manipulating the gold market to keep prices low. The low interest rates which kept the economy on the boil went hand in hand with low gold prices. Investment banks used the low rates to borrow gold from the central banks and sold them short (short selling being the technique of selling assets you don’t actually own in the hope of buying back at a cheaper price because you anticipate a fall in the price). This allowed the banks to make billions from a market rigged to take the risk out of their shorting. And it kept the dollar pumped up. And who was the architect of this strong dollar policy? Why, none other than Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs — one of the bullion banks most implicated in the gold fixing scenarios.
So, the appearance of another Gold-man at this critical moment is all the proof the gold cartel theorists need that more manipulation is in store to keep the dollar up, gold down, and the bullion banks from losing their . . . er . . . shorts. (5)
And if this seems conspiratorial, consider what Paul Mylchreest, investment analyst at Cheuvreux, top ranked for its research in Western Europe and part of Credit Agricole, the largest bank in France says today, “Central banks have 10-15,000 tonnes of gold less than their officially reported reserves of 31,000. This gold has been lent to bullion banks and their counterparties and has already been sold for jewellery, etc. Non-gold producers account for most and may be unable to cover shorts without causing a spike in the gold price…” (6)
Or what the Wall Street Journal itself wrote about what took place in the seventies:
Worried the falling dollar was undermining its anti-inflation efforts, the Carter administration announced a multi-part support package on Nov. 1, 1978: The Treasury would use gold sales and foreign borrowing and draw on its reserves with the International Monetary Fund to defend the dollar. At the same time the Federal Reserve raised its discount rate a full point. (7)
And that was in the ’70s, when there was no credible alternative to the dollar, India and China were sleeping giants, Russia was still the Soviet Union, and the United States was not threatening to nuke the Middle East.
How bad is the situation?
[A]s of June 2000, J.P. Morgan reported nearly $30 billion of gold derivatives and Chase Manhattan Corp., although merged with J.P. Morgan, still reported separately in 2000 that it had $35 billion in gold derivatives. Analysts agree that the derivatives have exploded at this bank and that both positions are enormous relative to the capital of the bank and the size of the gold market.
It gets worse. J.P. Morgan’s total derivatives position reportedly now stands at nearly $29 trillion, or three times the U.S. annual gross domestic product. Wall Street insiders speculate that if the gold market were to rise, Morgan Chase could be in serious financial difficulty because of its “short positions” in gold. In other words, if the price of gold were to increase substantially, Morgan Chase and other bullion banks that are highly leveraged in gold would have trouble covering their liabilities. (8)
That was 2000. This is 2006.
So long as gold remains a mere relic . . . a yellow reminder of what used to be money . . . no harm done. Unless something absurd happens, that is. Something absurd like, say, gold doubling to $573 an ounce inside 5 years. If that happened, then the “carry trade” of borrowing gold to invest in paper could become a very expensive way to bankrupt the entire global financial system. (9)
This spring gold hit over $700. And that’s why the hanky-panky is likely to begin in earnest now.
(1) “Good as Goldman: Bush drafts Hank to bat third,” Daniel Gross, Slate, Tuesday, May 30, 2006.
(2) “Please, Sir, I Want Some More. How Goldman Sachs is carving up its $11 billion money pie,” Duff Mcdonald, New York Metro, Dec 21, 2005.
(3) Speech of Congressman Ron Paul, U.S. House of Representatives, February 14, 2002, www.house.gov/paul
(4) “All That Glitters Is Not Gold,” Kelly Patricia O’Meara, Insight Magazine, March 4, 2000.
(5) According to GATA, the cartel includes J.P. Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the U.S. Treasury, and the Federal Reserve
(6) “How Central Banks Have Kept Gold Down,” Adrian Ash, Money Week, February 9, 2006.
(7) “As Dollar Weakens, Hidden Strengths May Stave off Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, January 17 2005.
You don’t have to be a fan of Jesse Ventura to ask why Huffington Post, a liberal outlet, would be so illiberal as to prevent someone from even questioning the government’s version of what happened on 9-11.
Ventura didn’t say he subscribed to any “conspiracy theory” or alternative explanation. He didn’t claim he knew what happened.
He just questioned the government. That was enough to shut him down. And shut him down not in a conservative, pro-censorship venue, but on a leading “liberal” site. An online site, at that.
“Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law (as well as the church) on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.”
Toward the end of this video, John Taylor Gatto, the iconoclastic critic of compulsory education and state schools and ardent advocate of “unschooling,” has an especially memorable passage.
He points out that while the state can violently coerce a few people at a time (through arrest and shooting), there’s no way (outside war or genocide, I presume) to coerce large masses of people over time, except through controlling their minds.
Or more accurately, through creating the habits and attitudes that make them obedient to puppet strings in their own minds.
Compulsory schooling by the state, he argues, is a way to colonize the minds of children to make them their own police-force, eager to report other deviants.
Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher says:
“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”
Of course, climate skeptics (or rather, critics of anthropogenic global warming, AGW) would argue that it’s the climatistas who’ve brought Barrow boy(street-wise) tactics into what ought to be a nice, genteel gathering of Harrow alumni.
Popular British TV writer and eminent free-speech QC, John Mortimer, author of the serial, “Rumpole of the Bailey,” saw through this convenient sentimentality about “gentlepersons” a bit more keen-sightedly than most.
In one episode of the serial, Rumpole, Mortimer’s aging, scruffy, Shakespeare-quoting Old Bailey barrister, defends Nigel Timson, a youthful member of a clan with an inelegant and chequered past, a true Barrow boy, who’s accused of insider- trading at the silk-stocking firm where he’s a broker.
It doesn’t help things that Nigel is living with the daughter of the head of the firm, who isn’t keen on a Barrow boy for a son-in-law. The plot-twist is that the Barrow boy, despite his spotty family history, is actually innocent. I won’t tell you the rest, but the larger point is that clever crooks know how to play to their advantage on public preconceptions about class behavior.
The same holds true for university intellectuals. They also usually enjoy the general presumption that they hold to higher standards of behavior and ethics than the ‘baser sort’ outside the ivory towers. What the climate fracas shows is that that presumption might be just as outdated as the presumption about the virtues of Harrow boys that Rumpole overturns…
We have an elite that has a stranglehold on what gets heard through its grip on professional societies and the major print and TV news. Prizes, media attention, peer approval go to very few media outlets. It’s well- known that only reporters and columnists at a handful of papers get serious attention. That’s a truly dangerous state of affairs and we’re suffering the fall-out from it. What makes it even worse is that news itself is more and more swept aside by trashy, sensation-seeking reporting, which leaves the audience with misinformation or simply a great black hole of ignorance.
Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips analyze the “truth emergency” ravaging the corporate media in the West (and to a lesser degree, everywhere):
“Truth Emergency: Keeping the Facts at Bay
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
– Rabindranath Tagore
What are some of these truths, that not knowing them creates a literal state of emergency for human society? Here are two of many possible examples. A 2008 report from The World Bank admitted that in 2005, over three billion people lived on less than $2.50 a day and about forty-four percent of these people survive on less than $1.25. Complete and total wretchedness can be the only description for the circumstances faced by so many, especially those in urban areas of so-called developing nations. Simple items Americans take for granted like phone calls, nutritious food, vacations, television, dental care, and inoculations are beyond the possible for billions of people.6
In another ignored but related story, Starvation.net logged the increasing impacts of world hunger and starvation. Over 30,000 people a day (eighty-five percent of children under five) die of malnutrition, curable diseases, and starvation. The number of deaths has exceeded three hundred million people over the past forty years. These stories should be alarming headlines, certainly more significant than celebrity tripe and tabloid hype.7
Continuing on the theme of human poverty and its ramifications, farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3 billion tons in 2007, up four percent from the year before, yet, billions of people go hungry every day. The website Grain.org describes the core reasons for continuing hunger in a recent article “Making a Killing from Hunger.” It turns out that while farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge grain traders like Cargill control the global food prices and distribution. Starvation is profitable for corporations when demands for food push the prices up. Cargill announced that profits for commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were eighty-six percent above 2007. World food prices grew twenty-two percent from June 2007 to June 2008 and a significant portion of the increase was propelled by the $175 billion invested in commodity futures that speculate on price instead of seeking to feed the hungry. This results in erratic food price spirals, both up and down, with food insecurity remaining widespread.“
My Comment:
Some of this commentary of course paints speculation with too broad a brush. Futures markets can, and do, provide efficient allocation of resources if they function as they should. The problem is not the futures market but the corruption of the market and the constant meddling in it by the state, which blunts the normal checks that the market would otherwise provide.
And again that goes back to public culture and professional standards that have become debased. The deeper question is how they became debased.
Which, of course, leads us to the government’s manipulation of the interest rate. That is where the problem lies.
But meanwhile, where is the media in all this? Providing the context so people can understand what’s going on?
No. It’s rooting around in John Edward’s trash can……
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