CLIP AND SAVE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE
A CONCORDANCE
or a series of notes and thoughts on
THE POWER PRINCIPLE III - APOCALYPSE
a documentary by Scott Noble and Metanoia Films
The following notes were taken by myself during viewings of the film. The text presented includes some direct references to statements made on camera (indicated by quotation marks), as well as a number of observations, side references and potential avenues for further inquiry that came to mind as I watched. I do this because I believe this film to be an important document in the field of parapolitics, and anything I can do to help get it seen by more people - and, in particular, the RIGHT people - I see as worth doing. Secondly, I wanted to create an easy-to-use text and image based "study guide" that both documents and compliments the information presented in the film. As always, I leave it for you readers to decide whether or not I have succeeded on that count. - YOPJ 15/22/2014
WATCH THE VIDEO HERE AND FOLLOW
THE CONCORDANCE BELOW!
CAVEATS AND SUCH (00:00)
“This film contains controversial subject matter. Interview subjects and creators of some source material may not agree with certain views presented. The Power Principle is a non-profit documentary and has been released online for free.”
PREAMBLE
PART ONE - THE GREAT GOD "M.A.D." (00:00)
- We begin with historic speeches by Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy.
- Churchill, speaking to America's Congress: "The sooner strong enough forces can be assembled in Europe under united command, the more effective will be the deterrence against a third World War. If I may say this, members of the Congress, be careful, above all things, therefore, not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure - and more than sure - that other means of preserving peace are in your hands."
- JFK (June 10, 1963): "It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the Cold War, which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation's closest allies, our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. So we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty and disease."
- M.A.D. stands for Mutually Assured Destruction, and it was the only thing - according to Cold War strategists and think tank intellectuals - keeping the USSR from destroying the USA with its atomic weapons, and vice-versa. "If one of the superpowers attacked, their own nation would be annihilated in turn." It was kind of an anti-strategy, a perpetual state of stalemate that only ever evolved behind a never-crossed battle-line.
- At the time of the 13-day-long incident known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took place in October of 1962, the situation was far from a level playing field. "American missiles in Turkey were already pointed straight at the heart of Moscow" giving them an obvious "first strike" capability.
- An examination of the rhetoric and - more importantly - the actions of the American military leadership at the time, the Soviet fear of Americans launching a first strike against them was no mere by-product of a paranoid imagination.
- General Curtis LeMay was the commander in chief of Strategic Air Command (SAC). He was also one of the Pentagon's self-declared "Super Hawks", and a stone cold raving lunatic who once suggested, without irony, that a good way to intimidate America's enemies would be to blow up the freaking MOON.
- Shortly after the culmination of World War II, LeMay drew up plans for a single, massive, first-strike attack on the Soviet Union. It would have entailed dropping 133 atomic bombs - America's entire stockpile at the time - on 70 target cities, over a time-span of 30 days. At the time, he was quoted by The Washington Post as stating: "Every major American city - Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles - will be reduced to rubble. Similarly principle cities of the Soviet Union would be destroyed."
- This is not to imply that the Soviets didn't engage in some bad behavior of their own. Once the arms race got underway, the rhetoric and provocations flew hot and thick both ways in the most high-stakes game of international ping-pong in history.
- On October 30, 1961, the Soviets broke a voluntary moratorium on live nuclear weapons tests and detonated a device that has subsequently been called "Russian Monster Bomb", "Mother of All Bombs", "Father of All Bombs" and - perhaps most infamously - "Tsar Bomba", or "Emperor Bomb". Detonating with the force of 50 MILLION TONS of TNT, it remains, to this day, the most powerful man-made explosion ever produced.
- The parallels between Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and what was going on behind the scenes at the Pentagon and in various think tanks, such as the Rand Corporation, are many and disturbing.
A TANGENT RE: STRANGELOVE AND THE DEEP STATE
- Over at VISUP blog, a writer going by the name of Recluse has produced an absolutely fascinating series of profound, densely-packed articles - titled Dr Strangelove: A Strange and Terrible Glimpse Into the Deep State - that tie together everything from Carroll Quigley's theories about the Anglo-American Establishment, the "Four Establishment Model of Western Politics", Cold War near-misses culled from the deep biographies of Robert MacNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Curtis LeMay and other such super-powered, death-loving lunatics of the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex...
- ...and that's just in Part ONE! Believe it or not, Part TWO goes even deeper into multiple para-political domains, touching on everything from the JFK assassination and Operation Northwoods to those supreme technocratic elites Edward Teller and Herman Kahn. As you might have guessed, Part Three and Part Four and Part Five are equally impressive and encyclopaedic. I really can't recommend this series strongly enough. Any fan of The Power Principle documentary series will find much there to appreciate.
- Rand was a think-tank that, at the time, was largely devoted to conducting intellectual war games in preparation for an eventual - many thought inevitable - nuclear war with the USSR. One of Rand's leading technocrats was the aforementioned Herman Kahn. Kahn believed that America's nuclear arsenal was "a wasting resource"... "a precious commodity" in danger of "depreciation" on the global marketplace. He didn't advocate for a first strike, but he believed nuclear war was "winnable" and thought the US should at least plan for it. The Rockefeller Foundation liked the proverbial cut of Kahn's intellectual jib so much that they gave him a million dollar grant to continue pursuing his ideas.
WE NOW TURN TO CUBA ITSELF (08:30)
- Historically, Cuba has always been a political thorn in America's big toe. The idea of the island remaining independent has been "anathema to all American policy-makers since Thomas Jefferson."
- In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson remarked that Spain could continue to rule the island "until our people are sufficiently advanced to take those territories from the Spanish, bit by bit."
- In 1878, Secretary of State James Blaine remarked: "There are only three places that are of value enough to be taken. One is Hawaii. The others are Cuba and Puerto Rico." The Americans successfully took all three, but one had a successful revolution.
- Prior to the revolution, the majority of Cuba's arable land was owned by foreign individuals and corporations (mostly American), a situation that was just fine with the crooked regime of President Fulgencio Batista.
- During the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro's "26th of July Movement" forces killed 500 people, either in combat or via execution. It is without a doubt, however, that Castro and his forces had the support of the vast majority of the Cuban people behind them.
- After becoming President, JFK enlisted his friend, noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to head up a "Latin American Study Group". The report conducted by this group concluded that the most pressing concern was "the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands."
- Since the overthrow of the Batista regime, Cuba has been subjected to literally hundreds of terrorist attacks - everything from the bombing of hotels and industrial operations to the poisoning of crops and the sinking of fishing boats - by the United States government. Once again, we see attempts to crush "the danger of a good example", by any means necessary, regardless of how many innocent lives are destroyed in the process.
- Incidentally, if you don't know about Operation Northwoods by now, it's well past time you educated yourself on this topic, as it is one of the most illuminating incidents in regards to the lengths to which The Powers That Be are willing to go, just to get their way and punish their ideological "enemies".
- But for all its horror, at least Operation Northwoods was never carried out. The same cannot be said of Operation Mongoose. In the war against Cuba's good example, no tactic was ruled inadmissible; no holds were barred. They submitted Cuba to a perverse parody of the biblical plagues of Exodus - unleashing crop-devouring, disease-ridden insects on Cuban farmlands, giving vials of African Swine Virus to anti-Castro guerilla groups... Officially, 634 plots to murder Fidel Castro were concocted by the CIA, the Pentagon, and other American establishment organizations.
- In the paragraph above, I say that Northwoods was never carried out. Celebrated conspiracy scholar John Judge believed that they actually did go ahead with Nortwhwoods, in the form of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. See this excerpt from TPPIII director Scott Noble's interview with Judge, below, for his thinking on this topic.
- It was only after years of severe provocation that Castro began to consider allowing the USSR to construct a missile base there. Prior to that, he had gone through all the official channels in an effort to get help. In July 1960 he provided the United Nations Security Council with incontrovertible evidence of more than 20 illegal American air bombings in Cuba, but the UN turned a blind eye.
BAY OF PIGS (16:40)
- The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion "laid the groundwork for one of the most dangerous moments in history." Here, we come face to face with one of the most important parapolitical events of all time. Its echo can be heard in everything from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the War in Vietnam to Watergate, to the blatant Bush Crime Family theft of elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004, to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, etc. The connections are myriad and multifold, much too much so to be accurately summarized here. I say this to you here and now so that when you come to these realizations on your own, you'll realize that you are not alone, and that you're probably correct.
- As mentioned above, a lot more happened on that day. For instance, an American U-2 spy plane made an "accidental" 90-minute overflight of Soviet airspace on the USSR's far eastern coast, causing the Soviets to scramble MiGs, and the US, in turn, to scramble nuclear-capable fighter jets over the Bering Sea. It was also the day that Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev received the so-called "Armageddon Letter" from Fidel Castro, urging the Soviets to launch a nuclear strike if the US tried to invade Cuba again.
- It was only through a series of Top Secret communications between Kennedy and Khrushchev - kept secret from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were itching for a nuclear conflagration - that all out nuclear war was averted. In fact, the October 28 agreement that brought hostilities to an end was hammered out the night before in a secret meeting between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. While the Soviets agreed to pull their missile base out of Cuba, the US agreed to dismantle its missile batteries in Turkey and Italy. The Joint Chiefs would never have agreed to such bartering... so it's a damn good thing they were left out of the decision making process. The Kennedys, of course, would eventually pay dearly for this brief, shining moment of basic human sanity.
THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION (21:30)
- What role did President Ronald Reagan, his "Evil Empire" rhetoric, and his policies play in the Soviet collapse? But was Reagan's increase in military spending really such an important factor? It has been argued that, with the successful invasion of Grenada (the most one-sided fight in military history), Reagan single-handedly overcame the Vietnam Syndrome and gave birth to a new, simplistic American "militarism".
- One of the most harrowing and disturbing documentary explorations of the effects that nuclear weapons have on human being is 1980's Nuclear War: Guide to Armageddon. and you may watch it in its entirety below. If you've ever wondered what flying glass can do to a pumpkin, or what hunks of meat look like when blasted with a flamethrower, then this is the movie for you!
- Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, nick-named Star Wars by the press, was only one facet of his military build-up. The most dangerous venture was his proposal for the stationing of new, medium-range missiles throughout Europe in November of 1983.
- September 29, 1983. A computer malfunction at a nuclear warning facility near Moscow falsely indicates an American nuclear attack on multiple Russian targets. The probability indicator was at LEVEL ONE... the highest possible rating. So what prevented the Soviets from launching a retaliatory strike? Only one thing... one man. His name was Stanislav Petrov. He didn't have the ability to launch a retaliation, but it was his responsibility to inform his superiors, who could have done so. Indeed, subsequent research has found that, if Petrov had passed along the message, Soviet authorities very likely would have launched a retaliatory strike. So one man's "hunch" that something wasn't right very likely prevented World War III.
- Also in 1983, The Pentagon and NATO engaged in a massive operation war-gaming an all-out nuclear first-strike attack on the USSR, code-named "Able Archer". Because the Nazi invasion of Russia had also begun under cover of war-game preparations, the Soviets worried that history was about to repeat itself. Thus, they secretly mobilized their entire military in preparation. "One mistake by either side, and a holocaust would have resulted."
- Ronald Reagan is given credit for "ending" the Cold War. When the rest of his body finally followed his brain into the grave, the USA was caught up in the kind of bizarre paroxysms of cultish grief not seen since the days of the early Egyptian Pharaonic Dynasties. The truth is, he very nearly succeeded in causing Armageddon.
PERESTROIKA AND GLASNOST (36:30)
- By the end of the "transition" to "free markets" in Russia, a full 40 percent of that nation's economy was run by underworld, or criminal, organizations.
- Why wasn't NATO disbanded after the USSR fell apart?
- Noam Chomsky: "In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed. I mean, anybody who believed the propaganda of the last fifty years would say, okay, NATO will be disbanded. In fact, there was a promise to Gorbachev - George Bush Number One, who was President at the time, made sure that the promise was never in writing; it was a verbal agreement - this has been well studied - it was a verbal agreement which Gorbachev naively took seriously, not realizing who he was dealing with. It was a verbal agreement that if Gorbachev permitted Germany to be reunified and incorporated within NATO - which was quite a concession - then NATO would guarantee that they wouldn't extend one inch to the east... But Bush was careful enough not to put it in writing, so that promise went out the window very quickly."
- So why wasn't NATO disbanded? According to Chomsky, it was because the US had to "make sure Europe doesn't go off on an independent course. And NATO prevents that, keeps Europe under US command.
- Today, NATO has become "a US-run global intervention force." The current NATO mission is "to protect oil resources, energy resources, pipelines and sea lanes."
YUGOSLAVIA AND LIBYA (39:00)
- March 2011, US and allied forces attack Libya. This time, the attack was sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council.
- In both attacks, the official reason for American involvement? "Humanitarian intervention." In both attacks, the US sided with some very unsavory allies, indeed. In both attacks, thousands of innocent people were slaughtered. In both attacks, leaders who had once been American allies (however tenuous), but who had fallen out of favor, were "taken out" with extreme prejudice.
- Sara Flounders: "After the war, when they did the count, they found that US NATO bombs had destroyed 14 tanks in Serbia. 14 tanks! But they had also bombed 437 schools."
THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP (43:00)
- American military geostrategist Thomas Barnett has laid the whole thing out for us in a nice, neat, tight little package called "the Pentagon's New Map". It relates to the graphic directly above in a number of ways that become no less spooky or "new world order-ish" once you understand the full context.
- In his essay Slaying Goliath - Give David a Stone, Bo Filter says: "The report US MILITARY SPENDING FISCAL YEARS 1945-2008 by the Center for Defense Information calculates that the US has spent $21 trillion on 'defense' since WWII. The Campaign Against Arms Trade estimates that it would cost $17 billion per year to provide adequate food, water, education, health and housing to everyone in the world. According to these figures, war is 20.5 times more expensive than lifting the entire world out of poverty, based on US spending alone."
"It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
PART ONE - THE GREAT GOD "M.A.D." (00:00)
- We begin with historic speeches by Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy.
- Churchill, speaking to America's Congress: "The sooner strong enough forces can be assembled in Europe under united command, the more effective will be the deterrence against a third World War. If I may say this, members of the Congress, be careful, above all things, therefore, not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure - and more than sure - that other means of preserving peace are in your hands."
- JFK (June 10, 1963): "It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the Cold War, which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation's closest allies, our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. So we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combat ignorance, poverty and disease."
- M.A.D. stands for Mutually Assured Destruction, and it was the only thing - according to Cold War strategists and think tank intellectuals - keeping the USSR from destroying the USA with its atomic weapons, and vice-versa. "If one of the superpowers attacked, their own nation would be annihilated in turn." It was kind of an anti-strategy, a perpetual state of stalemate that only ever evolved behind a never-crossed battle-line.
- At the time of the 13-day-long incident known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took place in October of 1962, the situation was far from a level playing field. "American missiles in Turkey were already pointed straight at the heart of Moscow" giving them an obvious "first strike" capability.
- An examination of the rhetoric and - more importantly - the actions of the American military leadership at the time, the Soviet fear of Americans launching a first strike against them was no mere by-product of a paranoid imagination.
- General Curtis LeMay was the commander in chief of Strategic Air Command (SAC). He was also one of the Pentagon's self-declared "Super Hawks", and a stone cold raving lunatic who once suggested, without irony, that a good way to intimidate America's enemies would be to blow up the freaking MOON.
- Shortly after the culmination of World War II, LeMay drew up plans for a single, massive, first-strike attack on the Soviet Union. It would have entailed dropping 133 atomic bombs - America's entire stockpile at the time - on 70 target cities, over a time-span of 30 days. At the time, he was quoted by The Washington Post as stating: "Every major American city - Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles - will be reduced to rubble. Similarly principle cities of the Soviet Union would be destroyed."
"LeMay was absolutely certain that the United States was going to have to fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and that we should fight it sooner rather than later."- Former CIA officer Robert Steele lays it out bluntly: "It was the United States that provoked the Soviet Union. The Strategic Air Command was flying strategic bombers over the north pole deep into the Soviet Union when they had no defenses, just to see how far they could get. This is why the Soviets built up missile defenses and so forth. They didn't have the money for this, but we pushed them into an arms race. And that was our mistake, and the public was completely ignorant of the fact that the United States of America was pushing the Soviet Union into defending themselves."
-
Robert MacNamara, US
Defense Secretary
- This is not to imply that the Soviets didn't engage in some bad behavior of their own. Once the arms race got underway, the rhetoric and provocations flew hot and thick both ways in the most high-stakes game of international ping-pong in history.
- On October 30, 1961, the Soviets broke a voluntary moratorium on live nuclear weapons tests and detonated a device that has subsequently been called "Russian Monster Bomb", "Mother of All Bombs", "Father of All Bombs" and - perhaps most infamously - "Tsar Bomba", or "Emperor Bomb". Detonating with the force of 50 MILLION TONS of TNT, it remains, to this day, the most powerful man-made explosion ever produced.
- The parallels between Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and what was going on behind the scenes at the Pentagon and in various think tanks, such as the Rand Corporation, are many and disturbing.
A TANGENT RE: STRANGELOVE AND THE DEEP STATE
- Over at VISUP blog, a writer going by the name of Recluse has produced an absolutely fascinating series of profound, densely-packed articles - titled Dr Strangelove: A Strange and Terrible Glimpse Into the Deep State - that tie together everything from Carroll Quigley's theories about the Anglo-American Establishment, the "Four Establishment Model of Western Politics", Cold War near-misses culled from the deep biographies of Robert MacNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Curtis LeMay and other such super-powered, death-loving lunatics of the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex...
- ...and that's just in Part ONE! Believe it or not, Part TWO goes even deeper into multiple para-political domains, touching on everything from the JFK assassination and Operation Northwoods to those supreme technocratic elites Edward Teller and Herman Kahn. As you might have guessed, Part Three and Part Four and Part Five are equally impressive and encyclopaedic. I really can't recommend this series strongly enough. Any fan of The Power Principle documentary series will find much there to appreciate.
- Rand was a think-tank that, at the time, was largely devoted to conducting intellectual war games in preparation for an eventual - many thought inevitable - nuclear war with the USSR. One of Rand's leading technocrats was the aforementioned Herman Kahn. Kahn believed that America's nuclear arsenal was "a wasting resource"... "a precious commodity" in danger of "depreciation" on the global marketplace. He didn't advocate for a first strike, but he believed nuclear war was "winnable" and thought the US should at least plan for it. The Rockefeller Foundation liked the proverbial cut of Kahn's intellectual jib so much that they gave him a million dollar grant to continue pursuing his ideas.
WE NOW TURN TO CUBA ITSELF (08:30)
- Historically, Cuba has always been a political thorn in America's big toe. The idea of the island remaining independent has been "anathema to all American policy-makers since Thomas Jefferson."
- In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson remarked that Spain could continue to rule the island "until our people are sufficiently advanced to take those territories from the Spanish, bit by bit."
- In 1878, Secretary of State James Blaine remarked: "There are only three places that are of value enough to be taken. One is Hawaii. The others are Cuba and Puerto Rico." The Americans successfully took all three, but one had a successful revolution.
- Prior to the revolution, the majority of Cuba's arable land was owned by foreign individuals and corporations (mostly American), a situation that was just fine with the crooked regime of President Fulgencio Batista.
- During the Cuban Revolution Fidel Castro's "26th of July Movement" forces killed 500 people, either in combat or via execution. It is without a doubt, however, that Castro and his forces had the support of the vast majority of the Cuban people behind them.
- After becoming President, JFK enlisted his friend, noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to head up a "Latin American Study Group". The report conducted by this group concluded that the most pressing concern was "the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands."
- Since the overthrow of the Batista regime, Cuba has been subjected to literally hundreds of terrorist attacks - everything from the bombing of hotels and industrial operations to the poisoning of crops and the sinking of fishing boats - by the United States government. Once again, we see attempts to crush "the danger of a good example", by any means necessary, regardless of how many innocent lives are destroyed in the process.
- Incidentally, if you don't know about Operation Northwoods by now, it's well past time you educated yourself on this topic, as it is one of the most illuminating incidents in regards to the lengths to which The Powers That Be are willing to go, just to get their way and punish their ideological "enemies".
- But for all its horror, at least Operation Northwoods was never carried out. The same cannot be said of Operation Mongoose. In the war against Cuba's good example, no tactic was ruled inadmissible; no holds were barred. They submitted Cuba to a perverse parody of the biblical plagues of Exodus - unleashing crop-devouring, disease-ridden insects on Cuban farmlands, giving vials of African Swine Virus to anti-Castro guerilla groups... Officially, 634 plots to murder Fidel Castro were concocted by the CIA, the Pentagon, and other American establishment organizations.
- In the paragraph above, I say that Northwoods was never carried out. Celebrated conspiracy scholar John Judge believed that they actually did go ahead with Nortwhwoods, in the form of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. See this excerpt from TPPIII director Scott Noble's interview with Judge, below, for his thinking on this topic.
- It was only after years of severe provocation that Castro began to consider allowing the USSR to construct a missile base there. Prior to that, he had gone through all the official channels in an effort to get help. In July 1960 he provided the United Nations Security Council with incontrovertible evidence of more than 20 illegal American air bombings in Cuba, but the UN turned a blind eye.
 |
| Click to Enlarge |
BAY OF PIGS (16:40)
- The disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion "laid the groundwork for one of the most dangerous moments in history." Here, we come face to face with one of the most important parapolitical events of all time. Its echo can be heard in everything from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the War in Vietnam to Watergate, to the blatant Bush Crime Family theft of elections in 2000, 2002 and 2004, to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, etc. The connections are myriad and multifold, much too much so to be accurately summarized here. I say this to you here and now so that when you come to these realizations on your own, you'll realize that you are not alone, and that you're probably correct.
"I thought, if we expected the Soviets to fight on our behalf, to run risks for us, and even involve themselves in war for our sake, it would be immoral and cowardly on our part to refuse the acceptance of those missiles here."- October 27, 1962 would eventually earn the name "Black Saturday" at the Kennedy White House. That's because even though it was the last day of the crisis, it was also on this day that - among other terrifying incidents - American Navy ships dropped practice depth charges on a Soviet submarine that was holding steady at the blockade line... a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo and orders to launch if their hull was breached. As the explosions grew closer, the three Soviet officers on board began debating whether to launch. The decision would have to be unanimous. One of the three refused to consent. His name was Vasili Arkhipov, and many Cold War scholars believe he single-handedly averted World War III.
- Fidel Castro
- As mentioned above, a lot more happened on that day. For instance, an American U-2 spy plane made an "accidental" 90-minute overflight of Soviet airspace on the USSR's far eastern coast, causing the Soviets to scramble MiGs, and the US, in turn, to scramble nuclear-capable fighter jets over the Bering Sea. It was also the day that Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev received the so-called "Armageddon Letter" from Fidel Castro, urging the Soviets to launch a nuclear strike if the US tried to invade Cuba again.
- It was only through a series of Top Secret communications between Kennedy and Khrushchev - kept secret from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were itching for a nuclear conflagration - that all out nuclear war was averted. In fact, the October 28 agreement that brought hostilities to an end was hammered out the night before in a secret meeting between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. While the Soviets agreed to pull their missile base out of Cuba, the US agreed to dismantle its missile batteries in Turkey and Italy. The Joint Chiefs would never have agreed to such bartering... so it's a damn good thing they were left out of the decision making process. The Kennedys, of course, would eventually pay dearly for this brief, shining moment of basic human sanity.
THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION (21:30)
"For much of the 20th century, the philosophy of Communism served as a justification for the Imperial ambitions of the West, and yet the fall of the Soviet Union was not even predicted by the CIA itself. The collapse was caused by numerous factors. In the West, analysts often point to a corrupt bureaucracy, the desire for more consumer goods, lack of civil liberties, and the weakening of the Old Guard. Perhaps the greatest factor was the Soviet Union's own internal contradictions."- Former Russian Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev - and initiator of both Glastnost and Perestroika - believed that "the primary determinant" in the collapse of the USSR was... the meltdown at Chernobyl.
- What role did President Ronald Reagan, his "Evil Empire" rhetoric, and his policies play in the Soviet collapse? But was Reagan's increase in military spending really such an important factor? It has been argued that, with the successful invasion of Grenada (the most one-sided fight in military history), Reagan single-handedly overcame the Vietnam Syndrome and gave birth to a new, simplistic American "militarism".
"The general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union."A GUIDE TO ARMAGEDDON (27:00)
- One of the most harrowing and disturbing documentary explorations of the effects that nuclear weapons have on human being is 1980's Nuclear War: Guide to Armageddon. and you may watch it in its entirety below. If you've ever wondered what flying glass can do to a pumpkin, or what hunks of meat look like when blasted with a flamethrower, then this is the movie for you!
- Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, nick-named Star Wars by the press, was only one facet of his military build-up. The most dangerous venture was his proposal for the stationing of new, medium-range missiles throughout Europe in November of 1983.
"To ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an Evil Empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding, and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, between good and evil."- Launching a nuclear attack from Europe would allow the USA to deliver a first-strike that gave the USSR only six minutes to respond... a virtual impossibility. When considered in conjunction with Reagan's increasingly bellicose rhetoric, it's easy to see why the Soviets were deeply concerned. His tactics fueled the paranoia of the hardliners in the USSR's leadership.
- Ronald Reagan
- September 29, 1983. A computer malfunction at a nuclear warning facility near Moscow falsely indicates an American nuclear attack on multiple Russian targets. The probability indicator was at LEVEL ONE... the highest possible rating. So what prevented the Soviets from launching a retaliatory strike? Only one thing... one man. His name was Stanislav Petrov. He didn't have the ability to launch a retaliation, but it was his responsibility to inform his superiors, who could have done so. Indeed, subsequent research has found that, if Petrov had passed along the message, Soviet authorities very likely would have launched a retaliatory strike. So one man's "hunch" that something wasn't right very likely prevented World War III.
- Also in 1983, The Pentagon and NATO engaged in a massive operation war-gaming an all-out nuclear first-strike attack on the USSR, code-named "Able Archer". Because the Nazi invasion of Russia had also begun under cover of war-game preparations, the Soviets worried that history was about to repeat itself. Thus, they secretly mobilized their entire military in preparation. "One mistake by either side, and a holocaust would have resulted."
- Ronald Reagan is given credit for "ending" the Cold War. When the rest of his body finally followed his brain into the grave, the USA was caught up in the kind of bizarre paroxysms of cultish grief not seen since the days of the early Egyptian Pharaonic Dynasties. The truth is, he very nearly succeeded in causing Armageddon.
PERESTROIKA AND GLASNOST (36:30)
In the late 1980's Mikhail Gorbachev began his policies of Perestroika and Glasnost. Gorbachev proposed cutting offensive strategic arms in half, jointly safe-guarding the environment, banning weapons in outer space, ending exploitation of the Third World, and cancelling Third World debt payments. Elites in the United States had something different in mind.- "Gorbachev had envisioned for post-Soviet Russia a social democracy similar to the Scandinavian nations. Instead, the West insisted on savage "free market" reforms that amounted to a mass-pillaging of Russian resources, with some industries being sold for as little as 2 percent of their actual value. The Russian parliament disapproved of the measures by a rate of 10 to 1. After a coup and counter-coup, Boris Yeltsin bombed his own parliament."
- By the end of the "transition" to "free markets" in Russia, a full 40 percent of that nation's economy was run by underworld, or criminal, organizations.
"We feel that Boris Yeltsin is the best hope for democracy in Russia."
- Vice-President Al Gore
- Why wasn't NATO disbanded after the USSR fell apart?
- Noam Chomsky: "In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed. I mean, anybody who believed the propaganda of the last fifty years would say, okay, NATO will be disbanded. In fact, there was a promise to Gorbachev - George Bush Number One, who was President at the time, made sure that the promise was never in writing; it was a verbal agreement - this has been well studied - it was a verbal agreement which Gorbachev naively took seriously, not realizing who he was dealing with. It was a verbal agreement that if Gorbachev permitted Germany to be reunified and incorporated within NATO - which was quite a concession - then NATO would guarantee that they wouldn't extend one inch to the east... But Bush was careful enough not to put it in writing, so that promise went out the window very quickly."
- So why wasn't NATO disbanded? According to Chomsky, it was because the US had to "make sure Europe doesn't go off on an independent course. And NATO prevents that, keeps Europe under US command.
- Today, NATO has become "a US-run global intervention force." The current NATO mission is "to protect oil resources, energy resources, pipelines and sea lanes."
YUGOSLAVIA AND LIBYA (39:00)
"You do not come to the rescue of civilians with bombs and missiles. Bombs and missiles are part of a killing machine, and they inevitably will kill civilians."- March 1999, US and NATO forces attack Yugoslavia.
- Michael Chussudovsky
- March 2011, US and allied forces attack Libya. This time, the attack was sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council.
- In both attacks, the official reason for American involvement? "Humanitarian intervention." In both attacks, the US sided with some very unsavory allies, indeed. In both attacks, thousands of innocent people were slaughtered. In both attacks, leaders who had once been American allies (however tenuous), but who had fallen out of favor, were "taken out" with extreme prejudice.
- Sara Flounders: "After the war, when they did the count, they found that US NATO bombs had destroyed 14 tanks in Serbia. 14 tanks! But they had also bombed 437 schools."
THE PENTAGON'S NEW MAP (43:00)
- American military geostrategist Thomas Barnett has laid the whole thing out for us in a nice, neat, tight little package called "the Pentagon's New Map". It relates to the graphic directly above in a number of ways that become no less spooky or "new world order-ish" once you understand the full context.
"A premium on forward deterrence and strikes! We've got to stay out there! We've got to avoid what we've been doing for the last 15 years, which is sucking the troops back home. So, are the boys coming home? No! They're NEVER coming home!"COLD WAR CONCLUSIONS (52:30)
"In 2009, 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the PEW Charitable Trust conducted a poll of Eastern Europeans. It revealed a deep ambivalence about the transition from Communism to free market capitalism. The poll notes that, in many nations, majorities or pluralities say that most people were actually better off under Communism. The figure is lowest in East Germany and highest in Hungary, where fully 72% of the population prefer the Communist model. In Eastern Europe as a whole, only 1/3 believes their country is run for the benefit of all people, only 1/4 believes that most elected officials care what ordinary people think, and only 1 in 3 is satisfied with capitalist democracy. The poll gave participants two options: Soviet style communism or free market capitalism. A third choice was not offered."- Michael Albert describes a pretty rosy potential future world, as well as a slew of great reasons why currently entrenched elites will never in a million years allow that rosy potential future world to happen. Not on their watch, it won't.
- In his essay Slaying Goliath - Give David a Stone, Bo Filter says: "The report US MILITARY SPENDING FISCAL YEARS 1945-2008 by the Center for Defense Information calculates that the US has spent $21 trillion on 'defense' since WWII. The Campaign Against Arms Trade estimates that it would cost $17 billion per year to provide adequate food, water, education, health and housing to everyone in the world. According to these figures, war is 20.5 times more expensive than lifting the entire world out of poverty, based on US spending alone."
*** **** ***
A report by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation lists over 20 "close calls" involving a potential nuclear exchange during the Cold War. In 1998, a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that the risk of accidental nuclear war had increased since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Globally, there are now over 23,000 nuclear warheads. The United States and Russian possess the vast majority of the total. China, Israel, France and the UK also possess huge arsenals.
In 1963, the U.S. began testing the "Neutron Bomb:. The weapon was explicitly designed to kill humans with radiation while preserving property.
In January 2001, a congressionally mandated space commission headed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recommended the US government "vigorously pursue" weapons in outer space.
In response to the US push to weaponize space, Chinese ambassador Sha Zukang stated in 2005 that "China... may be forced to review the arms control and nonproliferation policies it has adopted since the end of the Cold War."
On September 17, 2002, the US released its new National Security Strategy. It announced that the United States would "make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that harbor them", and that American forces would preventively attack other nations "before threats materialize."
In 2002, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue space weaponization and a "missile defense shield: in Europe.
The "missile defense shield", which the Obama administration continues to support, would "neutralize Russia's deterrence potential", according to a top-level Russian diplomat quoted in Der Spiegel.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedv warned in 2011 that Russia will deploy missiles against the "shield" and may opt out of the New START nuclear reductions agreement.
Under the Obama administration, drone attacks against Pakistan and other nations have increased dramatically, killing thousands of people.Let's polish things off with a massive dose of major league bullshit by American military "geostrategist" Thomas P.M. Barnett (discussed above) via his infamous 2002 "New Map Brief", which he delivered to dozens upon dozens of military audiences in the scrambled wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when there was a collective thrashing about as the elites searched for some kind of direction in the chaos. See if you can count all the ways in which Barnett has since been proven WRONG. It's a fun drinking game, if nothing else!
Another good book on the subject is "Understanding International Conflicts" by Joseph S Nye Jr, a detailed analysis on how liberals meddled in foreign affairs
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