On this day in 1961, the clandestine invasion of Cuba ends in spectacular failure when JFK refuses to lend air support to the unapproved covert military action kicked off by CIA-trained Cuban ex-pats who land at the rocky cliffs at Cuba's Bay of Pigs.
***
On this day in 1971, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to die for his role in the Tate/LaBianca murders, which serve as an unofficial demarcation zone for the 1960's.
***
On this day in 1985, the FBI surrounds the compound of the radical Christian identity group known as The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, in Arkansas. The siege ends quickly, without bloodshed, as negotiators succeed in convincing the groups leaders to lay down their arms and come out peacefully. Eight years later, after studying the strategies engaged in during the CSAL standoff, the FBI chose this date to put an end the standoff in Waco. This time, as detailed in the next entry, things don’t go exactly as planned...
***
On this day in 1993, the FBI puts their plan to end the standoff at David Koresh's Branch Davidian Compound into action. At 5:59 in the morning, via megaphone, Koresh and his followers are told that they are under arrest, and to come out peacefully. They are also once again warned to stay out of a central tower where the insertion of tear gas is slated to begin. The previous night's reaction to these warnings was to hold children up to the windows, as well as signs that read: "Flames Await." At 6:02, two FBI combat engineering vehicles begin inserting gas into the compound. At 6:04, the Davidians start shooting. At 7:30, a CEV breaches the front side of the building on the first floor, injecting more gas. At 9:30, another CEV begins enlarging the opening in the front of the building, and a third CEV breaches the rear of the building, creating openings from which the FBI hoped cult-members would escape. At seven minutes past noon, the Davidians are seen starting fires throughout the compound. At 12:12, negotiators get on the phone and ask Koresh to lead the Davidians out to safety. Nine Davidians flee the compound, and are arrested without incident. Ten minutes later, the sound of gunfire can be heard coming from the compound. At 12:41, fire-trucks begin pumping water on the now rapidly-burning buildings. By mid-afternoon, it was confirmed… 86 corpses, including over a dozen children, lay dead under the rubble of the compound. After 20 years of studying this tragedy, during which time your humble correspondent has read and watched documentation from every conceivable viewpoint - including but not limited to the documentaries The Rules of Engagement and A New Revelation - I have come to believe the following: After 51 days of begging for it, those members of the Branch Davidian Cult remaining in the compound finally managed to succeed in their bid for collective "suicide by cop", making themselves martyrs and heroes to right-wingers and religious fundamentalists in the process. Which brings us to our next entry...
***
In the early morning of 1995, enraged by the conflagration at Waco two years earlier, Timothy McVeigh drives a rented Ryder truck up to the north side of the A.P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. At 9:02, a huge fuel-bomb in the back of the truck detonates, collapsing the north face of the building, and snuffing out the lives of 168 unsuspecting souls, including many children who had just been dropped off at the building's daycare center. Once again, a huge volume of "alternative journalism" has risen around this event, some of it good, but much of it not. Regardless, serious and substantial questions do remain about what really happened in the days and weeks before, during and after this Satanic conflagration. Most of the popular conspiracy theories center on the federal government's foreknowledge of and even participation in the bombing. Ironically, your humble correspondent finds the more persuasive arguments to be on the other side of the fence, by which I mean probably a lot more Christian identity extremists were involved than we have been led to believe.
***
On this day in 2011, after 45 years in charge, Fidel Castro resigns from the Communist Party of Cuba's central committee.
One of the goals I have for Useless Eater Blog is that it serve as something like an ongoing undergraduate-level course in parapolitical science. Obviously, not every post or article is going to be in keeping with this lofty ambition - I'm only human after all, and am not above using my tiny platform to launch the occasional editorial cheap-shot, or pick on the odd easy target for a laugh - but my resolution for the New Year is to make sure the substance/bullshit ratio becomes a little less embarrassing to me.
In order to separate the wheat from the chaff, I will be creating a new Useless Eater Blog sub-section called ParaPolitical Science 101. In this section, I will be warehousing those posts and articles that I feel meet a certain standard and serve to increase my regular readers' knowledge and awareness about everything from forgotten chapters in ancient history, to in depth analysis of contemporary "conspiracy culture" developments... for better or worse.
Having said that, my study guides, or "concordances", for Scott Noble's excellent documentary series The Power Principle represent exactly the kind of work that I'm going to be doing more of in the coming years. In these three articles, I attempt to summarize - and, in certain respects, expand upon - the information presented in these insightful, thought-provoking documentary films, which Information Clearing House called "probably the best documentary ever made about American foreign policy."
I'll be using Metanoia Films' own summaries to describe the contents of each film in the series.
An Introduction to the Empire; Iran – Oil and Geopolitics; Guatemala – the “merger of state and corporate power”; The Congo – Neocolonialism; Grenada – “The Mafia Doctrine”; Chile – “libertarianism with a small l"; Globalization: Consequences. 1945: Grand Area Strategy; Fascism: a “rational system of the plutocracy”; Case Studies: the Greek Communists; The Italian Communists; the Spanish Anarchists; Fascism’s Western backers; Trading with the Enemy; Fascism as “preservation of civilization”; the Cold War and “A Century of Fear”.
The Soviet Menace?; Case Studies: El Salvador, Nicaragua; Propaganda: Self-Deception and blowback; The “International Communist Conspiracy”; Declassified Documents; NSC 68; The Pentagon as Keynsian Mechanism; The Military Industrial Complex; The War against the Third World; Shifting rationales; What is imperialism?; Case Study: Haiti; “War is a racket”. Fear-based conditioning - The War of the Worlds, The Triumph of the Will; World view Warfare; The Russians are coming; Television: The “perfect propaganda medium”; Soviet vs. American propaganda; Hollywood and the Pentagon; Psywarriors and the media; Operation Mockingbird; The Pentagon Pundits; Project Revere; The Bomber Gap; “scare the hell out of them”.
Mutually Assured Destruction; MAD men - Curtis Lemay and the super hawks; MAD men - Hermann Kahn and the Rand Corporation; Over flights as provocation; Cuba: the “danger of a good example”; terrorism against Cuba; “Unconventional warfare”; the Cuban Missile Crisis and the “man who saved the world”. Why did the Soviet Union collapse?; Gorbachev: a “more violent, less stable world”; the Pentagon’s New Map; Did Ronald Reagan end the Cold War?; The Brink of Apocalypse: Able Archer; The betrayal of Russia; The expansion of NATO; Yugoslavia and Libya; the Yeltsin coup; Living standards in the former Soviet Union; A third way?
Ideally, I would urge you to watch each of these three films from beginning to end, in the proper order, with my study guides open in another browser should you require clarification or more information about all the various historical events, individuals, or contributors therein. However, for the parapolitical seeker who is short on time, my concordances can also serve as a handy summary of these three feature-length films, in a format that shouldn't take you much more than twenty minutes to read, total. Hence my suggestion that you "clip and save" them somewhere for future reference.
***
If you enjoyed my concordances for The Power Principle series, then you might also enjoy a similar piece I wrote a couple years ago for Lutz Dammbeck's 2003 documentary The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet. As with the above films, I guarantee that you will encounter a bunch of new, mind-blowing information that you've never come across before... all of it impeccably sourced and researched.
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 15/16/2014
“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
"The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
- Alex Carey
PART ONE - SETTING THE STAGE (00:00)
- We kick things off with a typically ham-fisted clip from an anti-Communist "educational" film from the 1950's. Literally thousands of these short industrial movies were created during the Cold War, the vast majority of them shot by private industrial film producers, like Coronet, under the guidance of the Defense Department, and paid for by the American taxpayer.
- Here, for your delectation and amusement, is the full version of the short film COMMUNISM, by the aforementioned Coronet, which is excerpted at the onset of The Power Principle II - Propaganda (TPPII-P):
- The dominant narrative of the Cold War was always simple: "The Soviet Union is engaged in a massive conspiracy, run out of the Kremlin. The goal? World domination! In light of this threat, the USA has no choice but to counter the Soviet menace with massive military spending and constant interventions in the internal politics of sovereign states around the world."
- A brief recap of the first chapter of this documentary series ensues: The illegal, CIA-planned, petro-biz-funded overthrow of the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, in 1953. The Bernays-concocted media-blitz that led to the ouster of Guatemala's Arbenz one year later. The CIA's cold-blooded murder plot against the Congo's first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. The interventions in Grenada and Chile are also recapped. Check out my concordance for the previous episode to learn more about these issues.
- Just in case anyone was laboring under the sad misapprehension that the above "extra-legal interventions" were the only ones laying heavy on America's collective conscience, TPPII-P lists more, even bloodier actions. There was the (very likely) American-sponsored1961 assassination of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, followed by the 1963 coup that ousted Juan Bosch, that country's democratically-elected President, followed by the 1965 coup that kinda put him back in charge! Another CIA-backed coup, this time in Brazil in 1964, saw the ouster of (you guessed it) democratically-elected leader Joao Goulart. And then there was the 1971coup against Juan Jose "J.J." Torres in Bolivia. The CIA had him replaced with a torture-loving freak named Hugo Banzer who banned all political parties! And let's not forget the US-backed "Dirty War" (and subsequent 1976 coup) in Argentina, deposing the Peron regime in favor of a brutal military junta! Those cats were a special kind of crazy, "disappearing" over 30,000 civilians.
- Had enough? Too bad, because all that stuff above was just for starters. Now we're getting to the 80's and some truly evil shit is about to go down.
- For instance, how about American meddling in the never-ending atrocity exhibition that was the Salvadoran Civil War in El Salvador? That's where the US-backed junta killed untold tens of thousands of civilians and indigenous people... oh, and they also raped, tortured and murdered a bunch of priests and nuns, too. But you probably shouldn't feel too bad about that. See, those particular clerics? They actually cared about poor people (Yuck!). So that means they were probably secret atheists, or even Communists or something.
- Which brings us to Nicaragua, where some of the Reagan/Bush administration's most notorious crimes were committed. This is where America waged a massive, semi-covert war against the widely-beloved, social-democratic Sandinista National Liberation Front in favor of a regime that liked to dispose of its victims by tossing them into an active volcano, just because they thought that was "fuckin' bad-ass", or something.
- Considering the forces arrayed against them, the levels of success enjoyed by the Sandinistas were nothing short of astonishing. In fact, I urge you to watch this John Pilger documentary, Nicaragua - A Nation's Right to Survive. - which is partially excerpted in TPPII-P - before continuing, and I'll explain why in a moment.
- Okay, now that you've seen what the Sandanistas were all about, you'll be able to better understand why Reagan/Bush Treasury Secretary George Schulz called them, quote: "a cancer, right here on our land mass."
- The information contained in the above film also goes a long way towards explaining why the US decided to arm, train, and otherwise support the "counter-revolutionary" CONTRAS, whose tactics included blowing up oil pipelines, illegally mining Nicaragua's harbors and ports, bombing farms and greenhouses, not to mention the wanton rape, murder and torture of thousands of men, women and children whose only crime was wanting to be a part of something positive for once in their miserable lives.
- The above kind of makes the video clip of Reagan praising the Contras to high heaven seem all the more vile.
- This section ends with a clip from the above Nicaragua doc in which Washington (successfully) distracts world media from Nicaragua's 1984 elections by claiming that Soviet MiG fighter jets had just been delivered to the port city of Corinto. It would be funny if it weren't so disgusting. Also, Ted Koppel has never looked more like Howdy Doody than he does in that clip.
30 years later, Charles Rocket is found dead in a Rhode Island park.
PART ONE - PROPAGANDA (12:00)
Following World War II, American policy planners were faced with a choice: to embrace democracy in all its forms, or suppress huge populations around the globe, through violence. The first major test came from Greece. Rejecting the participatory government created by the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, both the British and Americans chose to support Fascist elements that the resistance had been fighting only months before. The resulting civil war caused over one hundred thousand deaths. Though seldom acknowledged in official histories, Western elites had long supported Fascism in Europe as a means of counteracting the Left.
No Russian military attack is threatened in Western Europe... I certainly do not pretend to understand the Russian mind, but for four years they have shown no intention of making a military advance beyond the zones of influence in Central Europe allotted to them at Yalta.
- Senator Robert Taft (R)
- Historian William Blum (his website) explains Joseph Stalin's essential conservatism and lack of revolutionary zeal. Trotsky was Russia's internationalist revolutionary, and he lost the internal battle with Stalin (swiftly followed by his life).
- The mainstream view (the one we're taught) is that the Cold War was an ideological battle between the Soviet Union and the United States. In reality - and quite obviously in practice - the Cold War was a a series of small, hot wars between the United States and numerous, unconnected Third World revolutionary and/or liberation movements around the globe. This is a paradigm that becomes all to clear and sharply defined when one studies history with even a modest degree of rigor. A number of examples are listed above.
- Author/historian Howard Zinn points out that the USSR was never really in a position to pull off a world-wide Communist conspiracy: "The Soviet Union didn't start the revolution in Cuba... Vietnam... China... Those revolutionary movements came out of the needs of the people in those countries." But it was all blamed on the USSR, because they were a convenient Boogey Man, and because Americans may have balked. Slaughtering poor people just because they want a better life for themselves isn't exactly pride-inducing. Attacking a faceless, sinister Evil Empire on the other hand... that's actually kind of cool.
Numerous internal documents from the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, and other Western intelligence services reveal that many top policy planners were well aware that the International Communist Conspiracy was a myth. [A Department of Defense internal memo dated 1957], speaking of American designs against Syria, notes that "the USSR has shown no intention of direct intervention in any of the previous mid-Eastern crises, and we believe it is unlikely that they would intervene." Another document [from the UK Foreign Office Joint Intelligence committee, 1968] states that "the Soviet Union will not deliberately start general war or even limited war in Europe", and that "Soviet foreign policy has been generally cautious and realistic."
- Charles E. Wilson, President of General Electric Co. and great friend to President Truman, suggested the implementation of what he termed a "general war economy". Many in the corporate media agreed, taking to the media to declare how important "defense spending" was to the American economy. Why this sudden chorus of elite corporate voices speaking in unison?
- Turns out, it all had something to do with a 58 page "Top Secret" National Security document drafted in 1950 called NSC-68, in which (among other things) chair Paul Nitze warns that "the US and other free nations will, within a period of a few years at most, experience a decline in economic activity of serious proportions without government intervention."
- Never fear, however! Nitze found a solution to the nation's multiplying woes! He writes: "I recommend a substantial increase in military expenditures, a substantial increase in military assistance programs and some increase in economic aid to our allies in the anti-Soviet crusade, that we have a mass propaganda campaign to build and maintain confidence on our side, and sow mass defections on theirs, that we have covert economic, political and domestic psychological warfare, tighter internal security and expanded intelligence."
- Sound familiar? It should! NSC-68 was basically the Table of Contents for the final half of the so-called American Century. Chapter One? The Korean Conflict, which didn't just kick off the Permanent War Economy, but also resulted in the deaths of 38,000 Americans and a couple million Asian people. Here's a nice hot mug of historical context with which to wash this harsh truth down.
THE THIRD WORLD WAR (35:45)
- And so it went (and goes). Instead of developing social programs or devoting its resources to bringing about the science-fiction future promised us in such shows and films as Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the rest of the American Century would be all about setting up a planet-straddling, military based, covert system of empire-by-any-other-name. Tax dollars would go towards enriching the already rich.
- CIA whistleblower John Stockwell defines the typical Cold War enemy: "Far more Catholics than Communists. Far more Buddhists than Communists. Most of them couldn't give you an intelligent definition of Communism or of capitalism." Thus he coined the phrase "Third World War."
- In the above video, Stockwell explains how, in terms of loss of human life, the Third World War was (at the time) the 3rd bloodiest war in human history -" bloody and gory beyond comprehension" - and it was conducted completely above or beyond the grasp of the law. Considering what's gone on around the world since the above video was shot, I wouldn't be surprised if the Third World War has since risen to second, if not first, place.
- The USA has specialized in cheap-shots, according to Stockwell, attacking only those who could not defend themselves. One need only look to the example of Iraq in 2003 - which the US made sure was pretty much completely disarmed and defenseless before daring to invade - to see that nothing has changed.
- In the mid-70's, a US Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) conducted a massive investigation of the CIA and FBI’s misuse of power at home and abroad. The multi-year Church Committee provided extensive documentation via 14 separate reports on domestic spying, attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, efforts to infiltrate and disrupt leftist organizations at home and abroad, secret drugging of unwitting victims, Nazi-style mind-control experimentation, destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice on a massive scale, etc, etc... It's the stuff of horror movies. Just watch the video below for a tiny taste of what they (or we, if you're in the USA) were up to.
- Here's The Nation on why we desperately need a new Church Committee as soon as freaking possible, even if the probability of putting together such a bi-partisan committee again seems particularly slight in these days of neo-conservative fundamentalist extremism and "Tea Party" style rule-by-obstruction.
ECONOMIC IDEOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM (41:00)
- Historian Michael Parenti (his website) explains: "Imperialism is the process of Empire. ... Imperialism is when the dominant interest of the Empire country go out and they expropriate the land, natural resources, labor and markets of another country for the benefit of the rich of the imperial country, and sometimes for the benefit of a collaborating, controlling class in the colonized country. It no longer means direct colonization. You have what is called neo-imperialism which involves not taking over the country and planting your flag and conquering it. It involves simply moving in and dominating its economic and political life."
- Professor William I. Robinson (his website) explains how the antagonism against the poor and powerless of the world that seems to have been one of the defining hallmarks of the Cold War - and thus excused as a by-product of anti-Communist zeal - has, in actuality, always existed. It existed before Karl Marx had even come up with the idea of Communism, much less the Russian revolution.
- And so, in the last few centuries, the contradiction between the Haves and the Have Nots has variously been ideologically framed as "Manifest Destiny", or the "Fight against Anarchists. Then the Cold War happened, and it was framed as "Struggle Against Communism". Then the Cold War ended, and it was framed as the "Struggle Against the Drug Trade". Then the terrorist attacks of September 11 happened, and we have the "Struggle Against Terror". Always somehow involving the wanton slaughter of thousands upon thousands of poor people, indigenous people, or non-White people.
- Journalist Russ Baker (his website) discusses American Imperialism in the broader historical context, going as far back as the Monroe Doctrine of 1923.
THE HEARTBREAK OF HAITI (45:30)
"The history of Haiti is the history of the world capital system. If you study what's happened in Haiti, the stuggle of the Haitian people, you study the history of humanity for the last 500 years.
- William I. Robinson
- Haiti was the first place Christopher Columbus landed when he crossed the "ocean blue". Upon landing there, he immediately enslaved that portion of the native population there that had survived the arrival of European smallpox and worked them literally into extinction. With all the native slaves dead, Haiti's rulers had to start importing African slaves. Thus was begun the "peculiar institution" of Africans-only, race-based slavery.
- As Spanish domination of the area waned, the French were able to wrest away control of Haiti, which quickly became the highly profitable "gem" of that nation's colonial holdings, with profits generated by 400,000 slaves accounting for a large portion of France's total wealth.
- In 1793, the Haitian slaves revolt in what would go on to become, in 1802, the first successful Spartacist rebellion ever on the planet. They set up the first independent and free republic in the Americas. The United States, of course, a republic half-composed of slave-holding states, could not rightly be called "free".
- Obviously, since wresting control away from the "Haves", Haiti's history has been the farthest thing possible from an easy one, with repercussions of the First World's animosity towards this would-be upstart slave state reaching well into the 21st century.
THE "HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION" EXCUSE (53:00)
As with Serbia and, more recently, Libya, events in Haiti were sold to the public as 'humanitarian intervention'. This technique has long been used as a justification for imperialism. Originally, the idea was to civilize the savages. Then, to promote democracy.
BRINGING RELIGION TO THE SAVAGES
BRINGING PROGRESS TO THE BARBARIANS
BRINGING DEMOCRACY TO THE MIDDLE EAST
"War is a racket."
- Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler
- That's not all General Smedley Darlington Butler said. He described his military career thusly: "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Cuba a safe place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 to 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested."
- You can read the entirety of Gen. Butler's short but revealing book, War is a Racket, online at the link provided.
- Oh, and Butler also "snitched" on the cabal of fascist bankers and industrialists who, impressed by his successes overseas, tried to lure him into their plot to overthrow by force the Presidency of "that man", President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Quite frankly, the fact that heads didn't roll down a blood-slicked Pennsylvania avenue over this conspiracy speaks volumes about FDR's essential (if relative) kindliness and tolerance. Oh, and guess which prominent American political dynastic patriarch was balls-deep in this imbroglio? I'll give you a hint: it wasn't Joseph Kennedy.
TARGET: YOU (55:00)
- Although President Eisenhower thought the idea of an international Communist conspiracy was "the product of a paranoid imagination." Unfortunately, a paranoid imagination was exactly what The Powers That Be needed to inspire in the American public, if their plan to lock American economic growth permanently with military expansionism (see above) was ever going to fly.
- John Foster Dulles proclaimed: "In order to make the country bare the burden, we have to create an emotional atmosphere akin to wartime psychology. We must create the idea of a threat from without."
- In 1947, Senator Arthur Vandenberg told President Truman: "Scare the Hell out of the American people."
- But how could this be done? On October 30, 1938, the single most famous radio broadcast in history - Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre version of H.G Wells' classic science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds, presented in the form of late-breaking news bulletins cutting into a regularly scheduled music program - provided would-be psychological warriors with a treasure trove of priceless research data, not to mention a slew of hyper-effective propaganda techniques.
- Hadley Cantril's 1940 study is a case in point. This former college roommate of Nelson Rockefeller - who went on to have his work funded by the Rockefellers' network of "philanthropic" foundations - took apart this "Great Martian Event" to better understand the anatomy of public panic. But it wasn't in order to prevent future cases. Rather, he (and his backers) wanted to weaponize panic itself.
- And who would be the targets of these attacks? As professor James F. Tracy, author of the just-linked article, points out: "the elite class to which the Rockefeller family belongs has traditionally failed to distinguish between domestic or foreign subjects as targets for propaganda and behavioral modification."
WELTAUNSHAUNSKREIG ~ NEXT LEVEL PROPAGANDA (1:02:45)
"Weltaunshaunskrieg is German, and it means world-view warfare. The activists who were most committed to Nazi principles would confront other parts of the society and say 'you have the wrong world-view'. So this world-view warfare was a way in which they went about consolidating their hold on German society, in Nazifying universities, in Nazifying companies, or cultural institutions, or churches. You can call it propaganda, but it wasn't propaganda in the narrow sense of the term, like radio broadcasts or something like that. This was not just publicity. This was not just persuasion. This was a whole range of techniques... exploiting the psychology of fear, exploiting tensions between races... use of terror, use of violence... it was a whole range of applied manipulation of people.
- Christopher Simpson
- Simpson goes on to explain how Office of Strategic Services head and father of American intelligence Wild Bill Donovan - although an ardent anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi - looked to the example of Nazi propaganda minister JosephGoebbels with some degree of envy. He dreamed of creating an "Americanized" version of the Nazi propaganda mill, replacing, for instance the Nazi desire for a "strong leader" with the American desire for a "legitimate leader".
- And then came TV.
- Center for Media and DemocracyfounderJohn Stauber: "Television is the perfect propaganda medium because it appeals to emotion. ... People see something on television and they immediately internalize it."
- Which should mean that people who get their news from TV, what with all that "internalized information" banging around in their skulls, should be damn well informed about current events... right?
- Stauber: "There's very little actual information actually imparted in TV news. It's not a long script. After the first Gulf War, the University of Massachusetts Amherst did a study about the war, and what they found was that people who watched the most coverage of the first Gulf War were convinced that they knew the most about the war, were the most likely to support the US war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. But in actual tests, when asked to give factual responses to questions about the war, they actually tended to know the least and get the information wrong.
- In fact, one recent study conducted at New Jersey's Fairley Dickenson University found that people who got their information from FOX News knew less about current events than people who didn't watch any news at all.
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING (1:09:45)
- Cold War propaganda was schizophrenic in the extreme. On the one hand, it sought to terrify Americans with the idea that the Soviets were constantly on the verge of unleashing nuclear Armageddon upon us. But they couldn't scare Americans to the point where they began insisting on a sane, rational approach to America's dealings with the USSR. Rapprochement or de-escalation would only hinder the military spending on which American prosperity precariously hinged. So The Powers That Be simultaneously mollified their subjects with light-hearted "we can do it" propaganda like the classic Duck and Cover, which implied that you could survive an ICBM strike by quite literally hiding your head beneath your comfy, cozy duvet (see below).
- Propaganda doesn't begin and end with the news. There is also the issue of the CIA and the Pentagon's long history of covert involvement inHollywood.
- Movies were a big part of the propaganda machines during both the Great World and World War II. In 1956, the Joint Chiefs of Staff met with John Ford, John Wayne and Merian Cooper to discuss how to help foster "militant liberty" in America. By the time Top Gun was released in 1986, the Navy had recruitment booths set up at some theaters.
- Other movies that benefited from the Pentagon loaning out personnel and hardware include Armageddon, Air Force One, and Iron Man.
"Sir Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down was given similar support. This might help to explain why the character of John Grimes is not shown raping a 12-year-old Somali girl as he did during the mission portrayed in the film."
- As a particularly rabid fanatic for the films of Stanley Kubrick - I actually have an entire blog devoted exclusively to them - I was pleased (more like moved) to see that both Full Metal Jacket and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb were among the films to which the Pentagon had explicitly denied any funding or assistance. Other "losers" include Apocalypse Now, Platoon, and The Thin Red Line.
- Although it's not covered in TPPII-P, recent revelations about the American intelligence community's covert "weaponization" of Abstract Expressionism have rocked the art world. As meticulously detailed in Frances Stonor Saunders' essential The Cultural Cold War (1999), this was a vast conspiracy, a complicated enterprise that remained pretty much completely uncovered for decades.
UNIFORM IN PRINCIPLE, POLYFORM IN NUANCES (1:14:15)
"A good government can no more exist without propaganda than good propaganda without a good government."
- Joseph Goebbels
- Goebbels had a theory that media should be "uniform in principle" but "polyform in nuances". By this, he meant that the same message should be broadcast from all frequencies, while maintaining the illusion of multiplicity of voices and opinions.
- The mainstream media in America achieves essentially the same thing by marginalizing dissident voices even as they pat themselves on the back for giving them any airtime whatsoever.
- Yes, I know it's almost three hours long. And yes, I know that Noam Chomsky can come across as a holier-than-thou, supercilious douche. And yes, I know he's taken Pentagon blood money for his linguistics research, and I know his take on the JFK assassination and the parapolitics of 9/11 are downright toxic. But he's also very smart, and very ballsy, and you really do need to watch Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992). It's an essential "text" for all students of the parapolitical to deal with at some point. Here it is:
- Morris Berman (his website) describes how a delegation of Soviet officials visiting America were stunned by the uniformity of opinions they found there, much to their hosts' chagrin.
Corporate media today is very similar in terms of presenting stories that support the government like Pravda was to the Soviet Union. The difference is that the people in Russia knew that Pravda was an organ of the state. In the United States, we still believe it's a free press.
- Peter Phillips of Project Censored
FULL CIRCLE (1:18:00)
- Author Nancy Snow (her website) explains how the realpolitik milieu of the late Cold War period seems like a realization and extension of the systems set up by the founders of the science of propaganda, being the aforementioned Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann who, despite his relatively low profile, was one of the most important public intellectuals of the 20th century. I guess when you coin a phrase like "the Bewildered Herd" to describe your fellow citizens, keeping a low profile is de rigeur.
- So we have to ask ourselves, what was the Cold War all about, really? Was it truly about reigning in Soviet influence around the globe? Or was it about controlling "the bewildered herd" in the Homeland for the benefit of a tiny, entrenched and connected class of elites?
- To understand why the message was so uniform, we must understand who the messengers really were.
- After the end of World War II, former OSS men like William Paley (psychological warfare expert) became head of CBS, and continued to work with the CIA on propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe. Edward Barrett, one time chief of psy-war, eventually became Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. These were not isolated examples.
- The aforementioned Church Committee hearings into CIA and FBI abuses uncovered numerous examples of intelligence agencies covertly putting writers at national TV stations and newswire agencies on the payroll. It made for riveting viewing, even though the most damning revelations would come in executive session, away from the prying cameras of the public hearings.
- Another way we've come full circle. Back in the 1950's, Time Magazine founder Henry Luce - an early supporter of Fascism and a Skull and Bones man - wrote a document called The American Century. It called on America to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." Luce's conduit to the CIA was C.D. Jackson, a man who ran psychological warfare office in Europe during and for a period following World War II.
- The whole thing is shockingly well explained and laid out in the 1946 pro-union documentary Deadline for Action, embedded below, in two parts.
PART ONE
PART TWO
- After the end of the Cold War, we got The Project for the New American Century with such august signitors as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle, about which I'm sure you've all heard lots, but if not, here's a rundown.
- The aforementioned C.D. Jackson was instrumental in establishing the infamous Project Mockingbird, the CIA's highly illegal covert infiltration and subversion of the American media, not to mention its recruiting of media personnel for covert intelligence duties overseas and at home.
- Journalists Russ Baker and Christopher Simpson do a great job of describing the porous nature of the theoretical membrane separating American media from the American intelligence community. Early on, social pressures, cooperation and (to be honest) a shared belief system led to a high degree of cooperation.
- Wow. I'd never even heard of the domestic propaganda psy-op/study known as Project Revere. TPPII-P offers an excellent overview by seemingly inexhaustible Christopher Simpson.
- William Blum discusses the "gap" cycle. In short over, during the Cold War, The Powers That Be proclaimed a "Bomber Gap", a "Laser Gap", a "Missile Gap", and a "Mine-Shaft Gap". (Sorry... couldn't help myself!)
THE POST-POSTWAR WORLD (1:30:00)
"Donald Rumsfeld and Terry Clarke - the head of public relations for the Pentagon - designed a program to recruit 75 former military officers - most of them now lobbyists or consultants to military contractors - and insert them, beginning in 2002 before the attack on Iraq was even launched, into the major networks, to manage the messages, to be surrogates. And that's the words that are actually used. Message multipliers for the Secretary of Defense, and for the Pentagon. The program continues up until now. ... What they did was illegal."
- John Stauber, PBS NewsHour, April 24, 2008
- And that was just a tiny smidgen of the shenanigans that went on in just this tiny sliver of America's sad history ofdis-and-misinformation. Remember the ridiculous "neocons only" intelligence stove-piping operation, the Office of Special Plans? What a fucking disaster.
- One area in which US elites' fear of the USSR was as sincere and heartfelt as can be is, of course, in regards to the issue of nuclear weapons. But that is a very heavy subject for a very heavy next chapter.
- Choosing to end this chapter with Pete Seegar's haunting rendition of Jose Marti's beautiful song Guantanamera - just like the blazing finale of the apocalyptic Canadian film Last Night - is a documentarian's master stroke. It is an unsettlingly beautiful and almost impossibly appropriate choice.
***
A MESSAGE TO THE THOUGHTFUL CONSERVATIVE
I believe that there is a valuable if chilling lesson for American conservatives in these documentaries for which I am currently creating these concordances/appendices.
In the 1970's and 80's, what did the peoples of Central and South America want? They wanted to have a greater say in the politics that shaped their nations and impacted on their day-to-day lives. They wanted to kick out the entrenched, crooked elites who were bleeding them dry and who were completely unresponsive to the will and desires of those whom they were exploiting without pause or mercy.
Basically... they wanted what YOU want, now, my conservative friend. And there's a great lesson for you in the way that the American Establishment treated those people, back then. Because that's exactly how they're going to treat YOU, if and when you should ever decide to try - and I mean, really dig in and TRY - to make a difference in your nation, in your lives, and in your futures. They will crush you without pause or mercy.
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, as I did with my relatively popular concordance for The Net, I wanted to create an easy-to-use text and image based "concordance" 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 15/12/2014
“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
In the years between the end of World War II and 1989, when it fell, 171 people were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall. With the Cold War over, why didn't Eisenhower's prophesied Military Industrial Complex collapse? Why did Clinton’s promised "Peace Dividend" fail to appear in any truly significant way? Why did most of the meager cuts to the military budget simply migrate to private enterprise, where taxpayers still ended up footing the bill?
Ah, but all those pressing questions became totally moot on September 11, 2001. The USA now spends over 1 TRILLION DOLLARS a year on the military. As much as the rest of the world combined. There are over 800 military bases in 150+ countries. More money is now spent on air conditioning for American military personnel than the entire budget of NASA. Cuts to war spending are now all but unthinkable.
This film sets out to examine the reasons why.
PART ONE – EMPIRE
Adam Smith and George Washington both believed America would one day become an Empire. Most historians agree that the project really got started with the Monroe Doctrine (1823). But it kicked into high gear after the Second World War, in the wake of which the world had only two Superpowers, or potential Empire builders: the USA and the USSR. There was, however, a significant power imbalance. The USA was far wealthier and 20 million Russians had just been slaughtered by the Germans.
It's true that the Red Army expanded into Europe in the years after WWII. Before the breakup of the Soviet bloc, people from Poland, Hungary, Checoslovakiaet al experienced real repression. But did this make American atrocities, ostensibly committed in the "fight against communism", legitimate? Was the idea of a Global Communist Conspiracy realistic? Or was it just propaganda?
National Security Document #68, which states: “US military superiority is a policy which the US would peruse whether or not there was a Soviet Union”, gives us cause to wonder. Let’s look at Five Interventions during the Cold War to put this theory to the test:
INTERVENTION ONE - IRAN (8:00)
- 1951. Mohammed Mossadegh wins landslide elections, but the Brits and Americans are disturbed. Dr. Mossadegh was elected on a policy of partially nationalizing that nation's oil. This would endanger Western control of oil supplies (Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. being the old name for none other than British Petroleum, aka BP).
- Nafeez Ahmed's book War on Freedom is an excellent resource. Here is his blog.
- Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Teddy), along with MI6 and the CIA and a bunch of oil industry businessmen organized the coup that overthrew Mossadegh. Needless to say, this was illegal.
- Despite his claims to be able to transform into a puma at will, John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man, offers some decent insights, here. Also, anybody interested in parapolitics should probably have a link to his website bookmarked, regardless of whether or not they agree with everything he says.
- The Shah of Iran was re-installed by the coup plotters. So the USA put an un-elected KING back into power in Iran, replacing a democratically elected secularist. This unfortunately fits in with the West's tradition of supporting anti-Democratic "strongmen" wherever it suits Big Business (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, etc, etc, etc).
- "In 1976, Amnesty International concluded that the Shah's CIA-trained security force, SAVAK, had the worst human rights record on the planet. ... It went on to claim that the torture techniques the CIA had taught SAVAK were 'beyond belief'." It was from this boiling well of resentment from which the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamist Shi'a revolution rose.
- And yet, despite this, even Jimmy Carter wasn't above publicly supporting the Shah, calling his Iran "an island of civility" in the region. It should be noted that, despite occasionally violent covert operations undertaken against it by the USA and Israel, Iran has not initiated aggression against another country in over 200 years.
- As an "appendix" of sorts to this section on Iran - more of an expansion, really - be sure to watch this highly entertaining and highly illuminating History of Oil by British comedian/activist Robert Newman. It will help to round out your understanding of the issues and probably disabuse you of some long-cherished beliefs about history (sorry about that).
INTERVENTION TWO - GUATEMALA, 1954 (15:40)
- Whenever you hear politically savvy comedians making jokes implying that the Rockefeller-owned produce company United Fruit - global purveyors of everybody's favorite brown bag lunch fruit, Chiquita Bananas - is actually kind of sinister, it is the 1954 CIA coup d'etat in Guatemala to which they are making sly reference. So, now and forever more, you, too, are in on the joke. You're welcome. But really, it's not that funny.
- This section begins quite bluntly with CIA man Howard Hunt admitting, on camera, that the US waged Nazi-inspired terrorism against the democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. His exact words are astonishing:
"What we wanted to do was have a terror campaign to terrify Arbenz, particularly - terrify his troops - much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland, Belgium and Poland at the onset of World War II, and has rendered everybody paralyzed."
- Howard Hunt, Head of CIA Operation, Guatemala, 1954
- When Arbenz took office, 2% of the population owned 70% of the arable land. He initiated some progressive programs, including granting some unused land to landless peasants for agriculture, giving labor unions the right to exist, and other modest, moderate reforms. He was not a communist, and had no links to communists. But he also wasn't willing to play ball with United Fruit, who just so happened to "own" 43% the land in that country (with only 1/3 of that land cultivated, and several hundred thousand unemployed peasants who were happy to farm it). Therefore, by the logic of Empire, democratically elected or not, the man had to go.
- Of course CIA director Allen Dulles - one of the most evil characters in the parapolitical milieu; we're talking Project Paperclip, MK-Ultra, Bay of Pigs, the JFK assassination, the Warren Commission cover-up, etc, etc, ad nauseum - is up to his neck in this bloodbath.
- But how to legitimize a coup when Arbenz wasn't a communist, and Guatemala didn't even have diplomatic relations with the USSR? Enter Edward Bernays, "double nephew" of (and hardworking promoter of) Sigmund Freud, and one of the early pioneers of advertising, the "public relations" (PR) industry, as well as advanced, psychological propaganda techniques. Bernays also happened to be a firm believer that democracy simply didn't work, and that an "elite" or "vanguard" needed to be in control of society, with platoons of public relations experts on the payroll, helping to control the masses by engineering consent.
- One of documentarian Adam Curtis's best works is his multi-part documentary about propaganda, , The Century of the Self. This introduction gives a pretty good taste of what the series is about, which is mainly: "how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." It is "must watch" material and I will be doing a group-watch, concordance of it eventually. Keep your eyes on this space!
- John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy links Bernays to Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, and points to the fact that this "liberal Jewish intellectual" was "completely comfortable" with playing a part in the anti-democratic coup against Arbenz as proof of the man's moral culpability.
- How did Bernays help the coup? By doing what he did best and organizing a wide-ranging, well-funded propaganda campaign! His "media blitz" linked Arbenz to Guatemala's grass-roots communist organizations in all the most influential newspapers, magazines and media outlets of the day. This was a lot easier to do back then, with no Internet and far less suspicion of power elites among the working and middle classes.
- Binghampton University Professor Emeritus James Petras explains how Arbenz was removed to restore the right-wing regime of Carlos Castillo to power and how, between 1954 and 1990, somewhere close to a quarter million native people were massacred by government forces in what can only be described as an attempted genocide. Maria Esparza founded the Historical Memory Project to document this atrocity as well as other often poorly documented events in South and Central America.
INTERVENTION THREE - CONGO, 1961 (27:00)
"I wanted to mention one case in particular, the painful one of the Congo. Unique in modern history, this shows how one can flout, with total impunity and the most insolent cynicism, the rights of peoples. Under the United Nations flag, Patrice Lumumba was killed in the Congo. And it's the same United Nations which the Americans want to send to inspect our own territory!
- Che Guevara, UN speech, 1961
- The Post-World War II era gave birth to a number of revolutionary and anti-colonial movements around the world. The Powers That Be soon figured out that, instead of outright massacres and military suppression - neither of which were particularly good for business - better to give the restless natives a semblance of independence while retaining covert control behind the scenes. Thus did the era of colonialism give way to the era of neo-colonialism.
- Author and educator Peter Linebaugh (here's his blog)explains the main difference between colonialism and neo-colonialism thusly:
Colonialism is when one political economy dominates and conquers another. Neo-colonialism is when the imperial power takes down its flag and a local or national one puts up its flag. But the economic relations remain the same. That is, the imperial country still extracts value from the human beings in the colony, but now it's done in the name of trade. Neo-colonialism means so-called independence for states. But all that basically means is they have their own flags, sometimes their own airlines, their own stamps and sometimes their own coinage.
- In the Congo, between 8 and 10 MILLION people were KILLED in an incredible slew of atrocities perpetuated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the colonial forces of King Leopold II of Belgium. Therefore, there was a lot of hope when, after decades of struggle, Patrice Lumumba - an educated man of humble origins - was elected Prime Minister in the newly liberated country. It took all of 12 weeks for The Powers That Be to put the kaibosh on that nonsense.
- Here was the problem with Lumumba in a nutshell. Immediately upon being elected, he wanted Belgium to vacate its military. Belgium refused, so Lumumba went to the UN, who backed Belgium. He then approached the USA and asked for support, stating with almost heartbreaking sincerity: "It's with great pleasure that I find myself today in the United States, home of democracy and freedom!" But Eisenhower rejected him. So he approached the USSR for help. Even though Khrushchev offered only minor material support, Lumumba had signed his own death warrant.
- Another problem was the fact that Lumumba felt that some of the wealth generated by the Congo's vast mineral resources should stay in the Congo and be used to better the lot of its people. Obviously, another unforgivable sin.
In 2001, the minutes of a long buried meeting of the National Security Council were revealed to the public. During the gathering, President Eisenhower told CIA chief Allen Dulles that Lumumba had to be "eliminated".
- Once again, a public relations propaganda blitz painted Lumumba as a communist stooge of the USSR. The CIA readied an assassination-via-poisoning plot cooked up by CIA witch-doctor Sidney Gottlieb - head of the nefarious MK Ultra mind-control division and a truly despicable sack of sub-human filth - which was eventually abandoned in favor of a more brutal and direct option: a Belgian-sponsored military coup. Cameras rolled as a sad-eyed Lumumba was hanged by his captors. He was replaced by Joseph Mobutu, who looted the nation, and let Belgium continue to do the same.
INTERVENTION FOUR - GRENADA, 1983 (34:00)
The United States has been engaged in an effort to stop the advance of communism in Central America by doing what we do best: by supporting democracy. Grenada, that tiny little island... it isn't nutmeg that's at stake in the Caribbean and Central America. It is the United States' national security.
- Ronald Reagan, 1983
- In the 1970's, the teensy-tiny island nation of Grenada saw the rise of something called the New JEWEL Movement. Led by a young lawyer named Maurice Bishop, it's aim was a "Joint Endeavour for Welfare, Education and Liberation". After the NJM gained power in Grenada, literacy and disease rates dropped precipitously as the new government accepted labor and donations from anybody willing to help. They made the mistake of accepting free labor from Cuba in the building of an airport (which was actually funded mostly by the UK). Then, in early October of 1983, an internal power struggle led to Bishop being first detained, then executed, by former NJM partner, Bernard Coard. This combination of minor communist connections and political instability put Grenada square in the middle of the Pentagon's incredibly simplistic and oft-debunked Domino Theory of incipient communist take-over efforts... and the Reagan administration's cross-hairs.
One of the leading themes of the Cold War has been the Domino Theory; what critics call "the danger of a good example". ... You could call it the Mafia Doctrine. The Godfather does not tolerate disobedience. It's too dangerous. If some small storekeeper doesn't pay protection money, the Godfather may not care about the money, but he does care about the refusal. ... The Domino Theory is always ridiculed after the dominoes don't fall. ... There's nothing ridiculous about the theory. That's why it keeps being resurrected. The Mafia principle is correct.
- Noam Chomsky
- A 7,300-strong force of American Army Rangers, Airborne Paratroopers and Delta Force commandos, as well as Navy SEALS, were joined by a couple hundred Jamaican soldiers for Operation Urgent Fury. Their opponents? 1,500 troops from Granada, reinforced by 720 Cubans and a couple dozen North Koreans. It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most ridiculously mis-matched war in the history of military combat.
- Something this otherwise excellent documentary fails to point out is that the American-led invasion of Grenada took place only two days after a terrorist drove a truck loaded with 2000 lbs of TNT and compressed gas into the lobby of Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, resulting in the deaths of over 300 American Marines and affiliated personnel. It was an unmitigated disaster, brought about as a direct result of the President's purely political choice to maintain a land-base rather than a more easy-to-defend flotilla, a decision that flew in the face of advice from military brass at the time. In context, it seems very likely that Grenada simply fell victim to an unfortunate coincidence of timing. It was the invasion of Grenada, by the way, which inspired the satirical film Wag the Dog.
INTERVENTION FIVE - CHILE, 1973 (45:00)
General Pinochet and bosom buddy Henry Kissinger
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."
- Henry Kissinger
- "Nowhere was the danger of a good example more apparent than in Chile." Ah, yes. Now we reach the OTHER September 11th. September 11, 1973, which saw the American-orchestrated coup d'etat that ousted Chile's democratically-elected leader: Salvador Allende. Under Fascist military dictator August Pinochet, soccer stadiums became concentration camps, thousands began to disappear without a trace, women were kidnapped, impregnated, forced to give birth (the children were farmed out to Chilean elites), then dumped into the sea from military helicopters. Keep that in mind as you read about this regime's cozy relations with Henry Kissinger (America's own Merlin), the Bush Crime Family, revolutionary economist Milton Friedman, and various other Friends in High Places, listed below.
Poet and singer/songwriter Victor Jara
[Victor Jara] was taken to the stadium where he was a source of strength for his fellow prisoners, singing for them until soldiers beat him to the ground and smashed his hands. In his last poem, smuggled out of the stadium, he wrote: "What horror the face of Fascism creates / They carry out their plans with knife-like precision / For them, blood equals medals / How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror / In which silence and screams are the end of my song." After two days, they killed him.
- John Pilger, "The War on Democracy" (2007)
General Pinochet with high school sweetheart Maggie Thatcher
- The Fascist "Generalisimo" Pinochet found an unlikely confederate in self-declared "small-l libertarian" Milton Friedman, the "Free Marketeer" and "Laissez-Faire" theorist of the Chicago School who, as a European Jew who fled the Nazis, you would think might have some issues with a regime with a penchant for concentration camps, torture chambers, political reeducation prisons, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Rather, he went around telling anyone who would listen about how he and his chums, the Chicago Boys, had helped precipitate a Miracle in Chile!Jeepers Creepers! Gosh Golly Wow! Too bad it didn't last... and probably never actually ever happened, depending on how you measure such things. Oh, the excuses they made! But hey, you know, it's all water under the bridge now. Or rather, blood. Endless gushing rivers of blood.
"It's an honor for me to be here to pay tribute to a hero of freedom: Milton Friedman. He has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision. We have seen Milton Friedman's ideas at work in Chile, where a group of economists called the Chicago Boys brought inflation under control and laid the groundwork for economic success."
- George W. Bush
- Graeme McQueen, co-founder for Center for Peace Studies and author of The 2001 Anthrax Deception(forget about Building 7, guys, THIS is the "smoking gun" of Neoconservative involvement in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001), explains quite succinctly the difference between the two types of Market Fundamentalism. First, there is the sincere form that evinces a deep faith in the power of the market to solve economic and other kinds of problems. The second type of Market Fundamentalists are, in reality, "Bullet Fundamentalists". They believe in FORCE, and the market is just one among many things that they will use.
HERE COME THE GLOBALISTS! (57:00)
"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini
Over a very short period of time overlapping parts of the 80's and 90's, the so-called "economic miracles" of free market reforms led to huge increases in misery and precipitous declines in the standard of living for millions upon millions of people in Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere. In Argentina, in less than a decade, neo-liberal "austerity" reforms caused unemployment to rise from 3% to 20%, and saw the number of people living in "extreme poverty" swell from 500,000 to five MILLION. The "economic miracle" in Argentina ended in Apocalyptic food riots. Fucking FOOD RIOTS. Before free market measures were put in place, Argentina was, like, the Canada of South America. Then, all of a sudden, formerly middle-class people were reduced to foraging for food in garbage dumps. It was insanity.
- A good topic for further study is the concept of what is now referred to as "Grand Area" Strategy or Planning. Cooked up by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Working Group in the cauldron of World War II and the early days of the Cold War, it lays out a plan for a planet-straddling "command and control" apparatus evolving away from the British-style rule of Empire to a Pax Americana. Basically, the uncontested control of populations and resources around the world. Global Domination. Full Spectrum Dominance.
- Chomsky explains that Soviet imperialism after World War II did take place, but interventions took place in a narrow way, within Eastern Europe. "That was their domain." For the US, it was the rest of the world. "The history of the Cold War was wars against independent countries by the Superpowers."
THE MARSHALL PLAN, GREECE, AND ITALY (1:03:30)
- After World War II, with the Marshall Plan, the US pumped vast sums of cash to its European allies, ostensibly to help rebuild obliterated infrastructure, but also to help dissuade them from turning towards communism. And yet, even so, of the 50 BILLION dollars committed, only five billion went towards non-military purposes.
- The first real test to America's commitment to democracy was in Greece, where the peasant-led anti-Nazi resistance had evolved into a non-Stalinist form of grass-roots, bottom-up, semi-communist "self government" that caught fire and spread from village to village. The churches supported this new way of governing, simultaneously insisting upon a separation of church and state. Winston Churchill called it "anarchy" and insisted that Greece put King George back on his throne, with a Fascist puppet dictator by his side. This precipitated the Greek Civil War, which saw the UK, the USA and allies provide arms and support to the very Fascists and Nazis that they'd just spent the better part of a decade trying to remove from power! 150,000 dead Greeks later, nothing much was changed. Afterwards, when crushing the school teachers and farmers of highland Greece didn't prove to be sufficient to dampen their revolutionary spirit, the US supported the first direct revival of Fascism in Europe after WW II, which took place there and lasted until 1974.
"Adhereing strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October... During all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens, not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia."
- Winston Churchill
Z by Costa-Gavras
- Chomsky: "Italy has been the target of more CIA action than anywhere else in the world up until at least the late 1970's, at which point the historical record runs dry."
- Few people understand what went on in Italy during and immediately following World War II. As Chomsky explains, the anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist resistance in Italy had been so successful in chasing out the Axis powers that the Americans and Allies were actually forced to re-install Fascist police, military, business leaders and even politicians in order to crush the increasingly pro-Communist resistance forces.
- Although this documentary doesn't go into this topic, during the post-war period, the Left in Italy was so popular and well organized that NATO and the CIA - under the leadership of former top Nazi "super-spy" Reinhard Gehlen, a prize Paperclip pig second only, perhaps, to Werner Von Braun - initiated a Strategy of Tension code-named GLADIO. Essentially, Fascist and Nazi agents either funded or outright committed savage acts of terrorism that were then blamed on left-wing and Communist agitators in order to terrify various European populations into the arms of "strong" conservative, anti-Communist political leaders. Thousands died and, perhaps more insidiously, the political life of Europe became something like a vast, Satanic chessboard. And the going price for pawns was dirt-fucking-cheap.
THE GREAT SPANISH TRAGEDY (1:18:00)
The embrace of Fascist leaders by the West is often explained as a product of Cold War necessity, yet the reality is more complex. From the very beginning of the Fascist movement, many Western business leaders not only praised Fascists, but offered significant intellectual, financial and moral support. The case of Spain provides one of the most striking examples. When peasants and workers took control of production, consumption and social life across much of the country, world leaders united in opposition against them. Their system of self-government threatened not only the Fascists and Communists, but also the liberal democracies in America and the rest of the world.
- The documentary that we are currently studying features some choice excerpts from the 1997 film Living Utopia, considered "a jewel" by historians, students of documentary film, and rebel hearts the world over. It features first-hand recollections of the rise of the anarchist Spanish Revolution in the mid-1930's. It is well worth your time and attention, so I link it here, as a reminder, in case you'd like to watch it later.
"Fascism is a very rational system. It is an instrument by the ruling plutocracy to distract the people with the accouterments of a false revolution. ... Much of politics is the rational use of irrational symbols. So when people study Italian Fascism or Nazism, especially, they focus on it as a kind of insane movement that just happened... In fact, what they tried to do is direct the real grievances of the German people towards irrelevant enemies. ... And when the Fascists came into power, they cut wages by 50%, they destroyed every labor union, they destroyed every opposition party and every newspaper, they abolished all inheritance taxes for the rich or cut them drastically, they abolished all cartel taxes for the corporations, pretty much what's being done here without having to go, politically, all that far. So Fascism is an instrument whereby the plutocracy can control and hopefully effect a Final Solution to the class struggle. ... What substantiates what I just said ... is the way in which the plutocracy reacted to the Fascists."
- Michael Parenti, historian and author
- Journalist Russ Baker points out that there were a great many "industrialists" and Wall Street types who had a great deal of sympathy for Hitler and Mussolini and who were very much in tune with their beliefs. This included those pesky Dulles Brothers, Allen and John Foster, not to mention Prescott Bush, father to George Herbert Walker "Poppy" Bush and grandfather to George W. Bush. As President of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott was even charged under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
- Yes, that's right... as all you old time Daily Dirt readers were already aware, I don't call them the Bush Crime Family for nothing.
- The Power Principle 1 - Empire ends with a truly breathtaking montage of footage from World War II and a quote from maverick progressive politician Henry Wallace, who predicted that the Cold War would lead to "a century of fear."
- Closing to the strains of Richard Wagner's epic orchestral composition Siegfried's Death and Funeral March was an altogether fitting choice, in my opinion.
- Stay tuned for my concordance to The Power Principle II - Propaganda, coming soon.
