radiofree.asia

Category: Book Review

  • Scheer Intelligence: War Is A Multi-Trillion-Dollar Racket

    Twenty years since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the human and financial cost of the United States’ failed “War on Terror” is plain to see: as one headline put it, “20 years, $6 trillion, 900,000 lives.” The estimates of lives lost and trillions spent vary throughout media sources, but even the most conservative estimates speak for themselves. Yet, while the Pentagon billed America’s latest imperial endeavors as an imperative series of operations aimed at protecting U.S. national security, there is a simpler, far more cynical and obscene motivation behind these forever wars, according to the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, Andrew Cockburn: money.

    On this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Cockburn joins host Robert Scheer to discuss his most recent book, “Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine,” released by Verso Books on September 21.

    The post Scheer Intelligence: War Is A Multi-Trillion-Dollar Racket appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • As the Body Is to the Mind

    Psychology, what the analyst makes of the mind, by necessity, must see toward the complex, above the ideologically convenient and beyond the simple. “Our psychology,” William James writes, “must therefore take account not only of the conditions antecedent to mental states, but of their resultant consequences as well.” Approaching the psyche, then, it is not only that which comes before that matters, all that has been, but that which comes after, one’s development onward—all that could be. On the relation between the mind and the body, the self in one’s state of being, this observation appears at the beginning of James’s 1890 work The Principles of Psychology.

    A few years ago, I remember having read a headline in The Guardian that said “Governor of Tavistock Foundation Quits Over Damning Report into Gender Identity Clinic,” published in February of 2019, about Marcus Evans. Whether more or less conservative or liberal, many have seemed mistaken in the widespread belief that what can be called “gender dysphoria” names a medical problem with a medical solution. Applied to the concept of “gender identity,” which seems to be seen as another word for one’s sense of self, this basic idea of being sick followed by being cured has seemed lacking in critical attention. Alongside the Evanses, we will return, albeit in brief, to the self in society and the paradigm of pathology—or, as Thomas Szasz critiques of psychiatric diagnoses: a belief that diagnoses are diseases. We might wonder just what it means pertaining to gender dysphoria, a state of mind in the body, and, more to the point, the great problems that have been produced by this conceptualization.

    Thinking back to that 2019 piece, a passage from Marcus Evans’s resignation email to the Tavistock, as quoted by The Guardian, seems to remain of significance. Evans writes:

    I do not believe we understand what is going on in this complex area and the need to adopt an attitude which examines things from different points of view is essential. This is difficult in the current environment as the debate and discussion required is continually being closed down or effectively described as ‘transphobic’ or in some way prejudicial.

    Then, just months later, in October 2019, another piece appeared, this time published in The Times, with a headline that said “Therapist Raised Alert at Troubling Practices at Tavistock Clinic,” about Susan Evans. As before, the following observation seems important still, especially in the aftermath of the Keira Bell case. Evans writes:

    When you work in the area of gender dysphoria you begin to see that many of these children have other areas of concern or difficulty, such as depression, autism, trauma, childhood abuse, internalized homophobia, relationship difficulties, social isolation and so on.

    Between the Evanses’ accounts, which seemed rather similar to what I had been hearing from other mental health professionals, albeit in whispers, there have been similar concerns about the pervasive medicalization of gender. Broadly having been suppressed, these concerns have particularly regarded medicalizing children and young people, but they can apply, more generally, to such practices becoming more harmful than helpful, even for adults. By 2019, my own concerns over queerly unacknowledged and unaddressed misogyny and homophobia, in both law and medicine, had only been continuing to increase. Then, I read an essay by Julia Diana Robertson about Jaah Kelly, R. Kelly’s daughter, and how the medicalization of gender has an impact upon otherwise gay youth.

    In her case, at only fourteen, Jaah believed that she must truly be male for two main reasons: her not being feminine and her being sexually oriented toward other members of her same sex. “I knew that I was a girl who liked other girls,” Jaah tells us, adding: “But because of what I was taught, I felt like the only way you could like another girl is if you were a boy.” By eighteen, however, she realized that her thinking she must not be female, in her case, seemed to come mainly from internalized homophobia. This case might well be compared with the more recent case of Keira Bell, who, unlike Jaah, had already been medicalized—going too far along with it by then.

    To me, at the time, it seemed very striking that Jaah’s case appeared similar to those of so many other females around her age, those who believed they must be male. Among patients, degrees of distress arise in relation to the developing female body, typically with relation to having breasts and, in particular, experiencing menstruation. Diagnosed as “gender dysphoria,” this bodily discomfort has seemed to be something appearing, in recent years, far more so for girls than for boys. Between the sexes, the social conditions around gender identity development also seem to be significantly different, but often unremarked as being so. A “one size fits all” assumption in treatment, which can be the case, might indicate this failure for sexual difference to be drawn out. More remarkably, there has been a change in the patients who present at gender identity clinics. In the decades before, seen in all existing studies on this subject, most cases of childhood gender dysphoria had involved male children, not teenage females.

    Over the past few years, I have been observing an odd increase, an unprecedented spike, in teenage females, a disproportionate number of whom have autism, presenting at gender identity clinics. They say how they should be male, not female—and therefore also must be medicalized to make it so. A newer paradigm of “affirming” them as “transgender,” taking each young patient here to be a boy trapped in a girl’s body, does not question what underlying problems might be there. Diving into the wreck, as others have done, I have seen deep issues that, despite any fear we might feel, require our reflection. In all of the talk about doing more research, there has been dread toward doing precisely that, primarily because ideology has come into conflict with reality. Following the Evanses and Robertson, among the few writing such analyses, I then finally joined those who have been standing on trial.

    Written by Susan Evans and Marcus Evans, Gender Dysphoria has been a critical addition to the continued analysis of our psyches and ourselves, significant in the present debates around the medicalization of gender. Discussions of gender dysphoria have been polarized by political activism, seeming to be dead ends, where one falls into empty rhetoric about “affirmation” and “conversion.” But the Evanses, as they tell us, make a point in their model of being “neither ‘pro’ nor ‘anti’ transition,” departing from the unhelpful dualistic framework. Engaging this subject with true nuance, then, the Evanses’ proposed therapeutic model considers the individual, specifically the drives and the motivations submerged beneath the surface. Of some concern here, contemporary approaches, most notably the “gender-affirming” model, have not been this way, lacking this understanding: one size does not fit all. A lack of consideration for drives and motivations for the individual could very well be dangerous and deadly. It can be especially costly in the case of misunderstanding other underlying mental health conditions.

    Above, in my sketch of Jaah Kelly, we see elements, here and there, which the Evanses explore in their book. They argue that, for the child or young person with internalized homophobia, adults being “affirming” of gender identity, such as in cases like that of Jaah, can be their collusion in homophobia. In such a case, “affirmation” would serve not to actualize, but rather to alienate the individual from coming to terms with having a homosexual orientation. The defense mechanism expresses itself in denial, here a basic fear of being gay, where continued repression takes the place of resolution. “Affirmation” poses a problem, not because it considers the changes in individual development, but rather because it actually denies the dynamic nature that needs attention in the development of the self. A contradiction, “gender fluidity,” all of this rhetoric about rebelling against “the gender binary,” corresponds to a rigid framework of “gender identity”: to make real “the ideal self,” it must be medicalized into being. “Self-actualization,” in this sense, can become revealed as self-annihilation, with the patient not closer, but rather so much farther away from the true self. What I depict here for the reader is but “a certain Slant of light,” to draw from Emily Dickinson.

    Pain can be characteristic of one’s bodily feelings—at least, it does seem to be so, in one way or another, during the life course. Psychic pain happens not only with relation to the body but also within the body. By contrast, one might imagine a painless existence, where the self can become safe from all stress, either real or imagined in nature. But the patient should not be led to expect that promise from the professional. “Psychoanalysis,” the Evanses write, “has a basic assumption that being involved in life is a painful business and that it helps if the individual can be supported in bearing pain, rather than attempting to eradicate it.” As the Evanses write, it can be far more harmful, rather than helpful, for the patient to believe in a false premise of the eradication of all pain. Indeed, as the authors explain it, the false idea of taking away all pain not only plays into paternalistic attitudes toward the patients but also presents false promises. For children, the idea that any psychic pain, including gender dysphoria, must be deadened by medicalization can be extremely damaging to their development. The Evanses write:

    Children need to develop a capacity to notice pain and be helped to understand and process the experience as part of their learning about themselves. Children also need help differentiating the type, degree, and cause of pain and to be given some confidence that psychic pain can be both tolerated and understood.

    There would seem to be, then, significance in learning that not all pain must be intolerable for us, as if utterly beyond our understanding, and that deeper issues can drive us to fear even feeling itself. On trauma, one might consider Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 work The Body Keeps the Score. Indeed, the point of psychoanalysis, as the Evanses apply it, seems to be the support of the individual as part of one’s developing sense of self, thinking about one’s interiority with relation to others in the external world. However, a contrary assumption within the wider culture has seemed to involve the patient going to the clinic and the professional then giving a cure to a disease. Following this framework, particularly applying it to the making of mental illness, one might be led to believe, rather simplistically, that a medical problem should be met by a medical solution.

    Cases discussed by the Evanses give the reader a view into the complexity of each individual patient, something far beyond the space of this review. In reading the book and writing notes, I find myself considering each patient and really wanting to return to think further into this or that set of social conditions affecting the individual psyche. Those involving teenage girls remind me of the work of the German-American psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch, particularly her 1978 book The Golden Cage, in which she discusses anorexia nervosa. Regarding the girls, the Evanses’ observations hold similarities to those observed in Bruch’s work, including fears of adulthood, hatred of the female body, and the making of identity as a method of control. In Bruch’s cases, there were also similar troubles between the girls and their families, struggles over control typical in adolescent development. But, in such cases, the identities were not being cemented into place by social institutions and their potentially harmful, even if well-meaning, interventions.

    How does one become who one is—or, more precisely, who one will be? There seems to be a concept of “killing” “the false self,” for it to “die,” thereby allowing the “birth” of “the true self.” The religiosity of this idea of identity really betrays itself. But, even more than the bizarreness of “gender identity” becoming a secular religion, this paradigm can pose any number of problems, ones that the Evanses book indeed brings into the light. In his 1984 work Narcissism, Alexander Lowen, a student of Wilhelm Reich, writes of the meaning of “specialness,” this sense that one actually must be above others. Meaning for the self, whatever one might seem to perceive as such, becomes itself bound to the subjugation of the other. The one subjects the other to one’s “specialness.” There seems to be some application here to what the Evanses discuss of “the ideal self” among patients for whom the fantasy becomes a fixation. “Through the new self-image,” Lowen writes, “they compensate for the sense of unlovableness and unworthiness that they previously experienced.” This concept of “the authentic self,” however, could be exposed as the false perception of authenticity, only further artifice in the denialism of true selfhood—all that could be.

    Reading Gender Dysphoria, I find myself reflecting on another work, old and yet oddly fitting, particularly for the present subject: The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, a 1937 work by Karen Horney. In her book, Horney defines the term “neurosis” as “a psychic disturbance brought about by fears and defenses against these fears, and by attempts to find compromise solutions for conflicting tendencies.” The analyst sees in this psychic disturbance called “gender dysphoria” a comparable set of symptoms, similar anxieties and defenses analyzed in the literature, dating back decades. As seen with Bruch and those with anorexia nervosa, with their corresponding multidisciplinary treatments, one cannot help but draw comparisons between then and now. More chillingly, one might also contrast the protocols and treatments from then with those now said to be “affirming” and sold as “life-saving.”

    Thoroughness, both the before and the after, together, matter in the analysis of the patient. One might say that, with regard to the mind, the pill and the procedure alike have been historical methods for dealing with matters of the mind. Can the patient be promised something that might not come true? “The fantasy that the body can be changed and sculpted as a way of being rid of profound psychological problems,” the Evanses write, “needs to come under much closer scrutiny.” Capitalistic and consumeristic, buying a “new” body, either to escape from development and one’s corresponding distress or to distract oneself from other pain, must be critiqued. Perhaps more consumeristic than previous eras, political activism has made a model for gender medicine now defined by the dictum “the customer is always right.” Following this point of view, in a 2018 op-ed for The New York Times, transgender theorist Andrea Long Chu writes how “surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want.”

    In these neurotic times, engaging us with their analyses, the Evanses give the reader a look into this one fashion of the mind in its feeling. Finding the body as the self left to medicalization, more so now than before, has become the more frequent lot for those who see themselves as somehow not their sex on the basis of gender identity. An understanding of a condition followed by a cure, one’s destiny in one’s diagnosis, has been the rationale for the medicalization of gender. This basic dynamic has become maybe the most evident for children and young people. Being at once compassionate and still critical can be an insurmountable barrier, as most writers know all too well, but the Evanses brilliantly do just that in this book. Although itself complex, like all matters of the mind, psychoanalysis applied to the self in relation to sexual being appears presented in a comprehensible way for the common reader. To the Evanses, I express my thankfulness for their work.

    The post As the Body Is to the Mind first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Answering the U.S. Government’s 9/11 Lies

    It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this book.  It is a tour de force that blows away twenty years of U.S. government lies and obfuscations about the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the foundational event of recent times that claimed thousands of victims whose relatives still cry out for truth and justice.

    Reading Unanswered Questions will roil you to the depths of your soul and illuminate your mind as Ray McGinnis presents fact after fact backed up by almost one thousand endnotes and twelve years of meticulous research.  There is nothing speculative about this book.  It is not a “conspiracy theory.”

    McGinnis ingeniously and brilliantly documents those murders through the eyes of victims’ relatives and their decades-long, agonizing efforts to seek honest answers from the U.S. government.  To have their simple and obvious questions answered.  To know the truth about why their loved ones died and who killed them.

    Their struggles have been met with cruel indifference from four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden), three New York City mayors (Giuliani, Bloomberg, and de Blasio), the 9/11 Commission, and so many others in positions of authority who have turned deaf ears to their cris de coeur.  The corporate mass media have rubbed salt in their wounds as they have stage-managed the lies and coverups.  And controlled opposition operatives have played slick games to direct attention away from the heart of the matter.

    The families’ search for answers to their questions have been either ignored or answered with lies and dissimulation piled upon dissimulation to protect the guilty.  McGinnis is their champion.  He insists on answers.

    He powerfully unfurls layer upon layer of facts and the government’s fictions in a timeline that brings us to the twentieth anniversary of these atrocities.  While reading it, one cannot help but think of the thousands of innocent victims of that terrible day and their suffering families, and the millions of innocent victims throughout the world who have been murdered by the U.S. government in the name of 9/11.  The “war on terror” has been waged by a government that continues to refuse to tell the truth about who the “terrorists” were on September 11, 2001.

    By refusing to answer the families’ questions and thereby hypothetically claiming the Fifth Amendment for fear of incriminating themselves, government officials have ironically incriminated themselves.

    For McGinnis is like a prosecuting attorney who works not for the state but for the people.  He forces the issue by asking the questions his clients want answered.  Like them, he is persistent and requests answers to a litany of interrogations that are met with silence.  The government’s stonewalling is deafening, and readers – who are the jury – are left to decide the case partially based on those non-answers, often justified under the sham of “national security” or just plain arrogance.  When answers are forthcoming, they are incomplete and disingenuous.

    Seventy per cent of the questions the Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission were left unanswered in The 9/11 Commission Report.  Those that were answered raised more questions than they answered.

    But the reason that this book is so powerful is because McGinnis answers the questions that the government does not.  And so his title – Unanswered Questions – is ironically false while also being true.

    This should in no way put off those who still cling to the official story. For McGinnis is exceedingly fair in assessing and presenting the facts and readily admits when there are disagreements.

    While focusing on a core group of bereaved families called The Family Steering Committee who are insistent on answers, a group that includes four New Jersey widows known as “The Jersey Girls” whose husbands died in the Twin Towers, he includes many others and does not shy away from saying when they are at odds.  The only way a fair-minded person can assess the book is to read it.  And if you don’t read it and you have bought the government’s official fabrications or are still sitting on the fence, you are in flight from truth.  This book demands attention.

    As far as I know, while there have been many excellent books critiquing the government’s account of 9/11, led by about a dozen extraordinary works by David Ray Griffin, and many books supporting the government’s explanation led by The 9/11 Commission Report, Unanswered Questions is the first to approach the subject from the perspective of the questions asked by the relatives of the victims.

    For many people, the murders of that day are abstract, although they naturally stir the human emotions of pity, fear, and terror. But from a distance, for they are now fading into history and are not personal.  For some, there may have been a catharsis with The 9/11 Commission Report which they no doubt never read although it was said to be a “best-seller.”  That would be fake catharsis, for such fiction fails to tell the truth since it was written by people blind in mind and ears as well as in their eyes.  But then again, who reads Sophocles or Aeschylus any longer?  Better to read The New York Times, Slate magazine, Time, The New Republic, The Nation, etc., all of which effusively praised the 9/11 Commission Report when it was released.  As McGinnis reports, “The New York Times called the Report ‘an uncommonly lucid, even riveting narrative’ and an ‘improbable literary triumph.’”  This is simply propaganda.

    But let us take a look inside Unanswered Questions, a genuine non-fiction book motivated by a deep compassion for the victims and a scholar’s dedication to the truth.  It is divided into four parts, each containing multiple chapters.

    “Part One: From Grief to Advocacy” is the briefest and introduces the reader to firefighters, first responders, and family members who lost loved ones in the calamity.  We learn how their grief turned to advocacy when they formed many groups to channel their energies.  We learn how President Bush and his minions (or was Bush the minion and others like Cheney in charge?) opposed establishing a special commission to probe into the events of September Eleventh and how when his opposition was overcome he had the audacity to try to name Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 Commission and how this was stopped.  Finally, McGinnis tells us how the families’ questions were greatly expanded after discovering Paul Thompson’s extraordinary Internet timeline with its vast numbers of links to news reports that was later published as The Terror Timeline.

    “Part Two: Family Steering Committee Statements to the 9/11 Commission” examines how the 9/11 Commission was a setup from the start, not even close to being an impartial investigation.  It began with the naming of Philip Zelikow as the Director.  Zelikow had deep ties to the Bush administration and its neocons.  He had been a member of Bush’s transition team.  Even “Richard Clarke, chairman of the ‘Counterterrorism Security Group,’ said ‘the fix is in’” when Zelikow was appointed.  Zelikow completely controlled the investigation and the final report despite many conflicts of interest.  He essentially wrote the report before the hearings commenced.  He had authored a book with Condoleezza Rice and was an advocate for preemptive war that was used to attack Iraq in early 2003, etc.  His appointment was a sick joke, and the Family Steering Committee called for his immediate resignation but was rebuffed just as quickly by Chairman Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton.  As a result, the final report ended being a fictional account authored by Zelikow (who has now been named to head a Covid-19 commission).

    This section also covers the lies told by Mayor Rudy Giuliani when he testified.  Three hundred and forty-three FDNY members were killed that day, heroes who didn’t have to die. Giuliani’s testimony so outraged the  families of first responders that their fury was uncontained.  McGinnis tells us:

    They held up signs that read ‘lies’ and ‘liar.’  Family Steering Committee member Sally Regenhard held up a sign that read ‘FICTION.’  She hollered, ‘My son [Christian Regenhard, a probationary firefighter] was not told to get out!  He would’ve gotten out!  My son was murdered, murdered because of your incompetence and radios that didn’t work!’

    McGinnis captures the increasing anger felt by family members throughout this section as the final report was rammed through despite their protests.

    “Part Three: The Family Steering Committee’s Unanswered Questions” is the heart of the book.  It contains eleven chapters devoted to questions addressed to NORAD, the FAA, the CIA/SEC/FBI, Mayor Giuliani, President Bush, the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld but never answered.  Over a thousand questions were posed to the 9/11 Commission to aid the investigation.  McGinnis writes:

    The questions were intended to direct the focus of the inquiry, and ask those most directly involved what led to the failures that day.  They understood that it would not be the FSC members themselves asking the  questions.  Instead, they would be posed to witnesses by 9/11 commissioners in public hearings, or asked by Commission staff behind closed-door proceedings.

    Some of these questions were directed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).  One question the FSC asked the 9/11 Commission was: ‘Why weren’t NORAD jets able to intercept the hijacked planes if they were airborne within eight minutes of notification?’

    NORAD had an extremely successful history of intercepting errant aircraft, and a part of their mission was “surveillance and control of the [domestic] territorial airspace “ in the U.S. and Canada.  Nevertheless, on September 11, 2001 none of the hijacked aircraft were intercepted even though they were allegedly being flown by inexperienced and incompetent hijackers who, according to experts, could never fly such massive commercial airliners into the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon.  Government witnesses either lied about the systemic failures to intercept the planes, omitted important details, or gave contradictory stories. Of course, they were then promoted.  And although there was an unprecedented number of war games being “coincidentally” held on September 11, none of the 9/11 Commissioners asked any witnesses about them.

    It was clear that all the questions about the failure to intercept the planes would not be answered, but McGinnis makes it obvious that their non-answers were indeed answers by omission, for in this section and all the others, he makes sure the questions are indeed answered and the cumulative effect is devastating.  He does this not simply by expressing his own opinions but by quoting others and always giving sources.

    In a similar vein, the FSC wished to know from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) why these hijacked planes were able to evade all of the highly sophisticated radar?  McGinnis says, “The 9/11 Commission concluded that NORAD had failed to do its job on September Eleventh; NORAD’s decisions impaired the FAA radar operator’s conduct.”  Of course, the radar questions were linked to the war games issue and since the war games questions were never asked, these massive failures were explained away in gobbledygook worthy of the Three Stooges.

    Mindy Kleinberg, a FSC member whose husband Alan died in the North Tower, told the Commission that its theory of luck was bullshit, although she phrased it more diplomatically:

    With regard to the 9/11 attacks, it has been said that the intelligence agencies have to be right 100% of the time and the terrorists only have to get lucky once.  This explanation for the devastating attacks of September 11, simply on its face, is wrong in its value.  Because the 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once; they were lucky over and over again…Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored?  Is it luck when 15 visas were awarded on incomplete forms?  Is it luck when Airline Security screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray?  Is it luck when emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed?  Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis?  To me luck is something that happens once.  When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.

    Comically, The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that, as McGinnis notes, “The reason for the attacks was due simply to a [U.S. government] failure of imagination.”

    In regard to foreknowledge of the attacks, the families asked the CIA, the SEC, and the FBI for the names of the individuals and financial institutions who placed “put” orders on American and United Airlines in the three weeks prior to 9/11.

    This involved the number three man at the CIA, CIA Executive Director Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, former Vice Chairman of the board at Bankers Trust that had been acquired by Deutsche Bank through which many of these suspect stock trades passed.  This insider trading that anticipated the 9/11 attacks was connected to a security firm named Stratesec that provided security to Dulles Airport, the World Trade Center, and United Airlines, and to Wirt Walker III, a business partner of the president’s brother, Marvin Bush.  Walker III was a board member of the Carlyle Group that was in turn connected to the bin Laden and Bush families.

    Despite these and other highly suspect connections, the “9/11 Commission wasn’t interested in exploring leads about possible foreknowledge of the attacks.”  Nor were they interested in the strange matter of Larry Silverstein, who had already owned World Trade Center Building 7, but who obtained a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers two months before the attack and who insisted that insurance cover a terrorist attack for $3.5. billion dollars.  Silverstein was later awarded $4.55 billion when it was determined that there had been two suicide attacks.

    Silverstein later claimed that there was agreement to “pull” (a controlled demolition term) Building 7, which happened at 5:20 PM that day despite never having been hit by a plane.  Questions about the collapse of Building 7 were, of course, never answered, but the videos of its collapse are available for all to see with their own eyes.  An excellent film about Building 7, Seven by Dylan Avery, should be seen by all.  Seeing is believing, and what any objective observer can only conclude is that the building was taken down by controlled demolition, which the government denies.

    Which brings us to other key questions that the FSC asked, McGinnis explores, and that went unanswered: Why did President Bush enter a Sarasota, Florida elementary classroom, stay there as the attacks unfolded, and not immediately return to Washington, D.C.?  Why did he enter that classroom at 9:03 AM and remain there for fifteen minutes when it was clear the U.S. was under a terrorist attack?  Why was he, unlike Dick Cheney, not immediately taken out of the building by the Secret Service but was allowed to sit and read to children and not depart the building until 9:34 A.M.?

    “The vice president was reported by President Bush’s personal secretary as being ‘seized by arms, legs, and his belt and physically’ carried out of his office at 9:03 A.M.  Cheney was taken to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center below the White House, where Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta saw him prior to 9:25 A.M.”  Yet Bush stayed to read a book when colleagues of the Secret Service agents protecting him had already been evacuated from the largest Secret Service Field Office in WTC 7.

    “However,” writes McGinnis, “on December 4, 2001, President Bush made the following statement at a Town Hall meeting about the moment – 9:01 a.m. – that he said he learned about the attack.  ‘And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower – the television was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said , “That’s one terrible pilot.”  And I said, “It must have been a horrible accident.”  But I was whisked off there – I didn’t have much time to think about it.’”

    You can’t make this stuff up, yet it’s offered to the public and the victims’ families as acceptable.  Bush was informed that a second plane had hit the South Tower by Andrew Card who came into the classroom and whispered in his ear.  But three months later he claims he saw on television the first plane hit the North Tower when no one could have seen it since video of the first plane hitting the building at 8:46 A.M. was not available until much later.

    These ridiculous discrepancies and other questions the FSC wished the 9/11 Commission to ask Bush under oath in sworn public testimony went unasked and unanswered.  Instead, as McGinnis writes:

    But, the meeting with Bush and Cheney took place in secret on April 29, 2004.  It was not held under oath.  No transcript was made available of  their conversation with the commissioners.  Nothing was learned about why the president remained at an elementary school during the attacks. Nothing was learned about what the president knew regarding foreign  intelligence agencies forewarning the U.S.  Nothing was learned about why the president had authorized America to prepare for war against Afghanistan in the days and weeks prior to the attacks of September 11.

    Nor was anything learned about why Pentagon brass suddenly cancelled flights scheduled for September 11.  Nothing about who warned them and why.

    Essentially all the key questions the families asked were not answered.  But McGinnis answers them, including those addressed to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Giuliani, the CIA, and the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York.  By using the documented records against them, he does the job the 9/11 Commission refused to do. He unravels the lies, circumlocutions, and straightforward propaganda used to hide the truth, including the following:

    • Cheney’s deceptions about when he got to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center and what he was doing there and his orders to his young assistant about the hijacked plane headed toward the capitol.
    • Rumsfeld with his lies about not knowing anything about the World Trade Center attacks until fifteen minutes before the Pentagon was hit and why the Pentagon was not defended.
    • Giuliani and the obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M. and the lies about the faulty telephones the firefighters carried.

    Since this is not meant to be a book about a book but a book review, I will stop there.  I would be remiss, however, if I failed to mention “Chapter 22: The Missing Accounts: FDNY.”

    It is part of Part Four: Acceptance And Dissent that leads to McGinnis’s conclusion.  Whatever one’s position on the events of September 11, it is generally accepted that firefighters and first responders are objective and brave in the extreme.  Of the emergency workers who responded to the call to help save the people in the Twin Towers, the vast majority who lost their lives in attempting to save their fellow human beings were firefighters – 343 of them perished that day.  They were doing their duty.  So their surviving colleagues’ testimonies are priceless and beyond dispute.  They had absolutely no reasons to lie.  McGinnis tells us:

    On September 11, 2001, Thomas Von Essen, the fire commissioner of New York City, ordered that oral histories be gathered from first responders, firefighters, and medical workers.  He wanted to preserve the accounts of what they experienced at the World Trade Center.  In the weeks and months following 9/11, 503 oral histories were taken.  However, they were not released to the public.  The 2002 mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, refused.

    The Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission why, but the Commission refused to answer their question.  After a law suit, the oral histories that run to 12,000 pages were released.  They contain copious accounts of explosions going off in the Towers before the Towers collapsed.

    FDNY firefighter John Coyne, who was in the South Tower, recalls how he had called his father and said:

    I finally got through to my father and said ‘I’m alive.  I just wanted to tell you, go to church, I’m alive.  I just so narrowly escaped this thing.’  He said, ‘Where were you?  You were there?’  I said, ‘Yeh, I was right there when it blew up.’  He said, ‘You were there when the planes hit?’  I said, ‘No, I was there when it exploded, the building exploded.’  He said, ‘You mean when it fell down?’ I said, ‘No, when it exploded.’ … I totally thought it had been blown up.  That’s just the perspective of looking at it, it seemed to have exploded out.

    Captain Karin DeShore, who was standing outside, said she saw a sequence of orange and red flashes coming from the North Tower:

    Initially it was just one flash.  Then this flash…kept popping all around the building and that building started to explode … These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going up and down and the all around the building.

    Keith Murphy:  “There was tremendous damage in the lobby…like something had exploded out…a distant boom sounded like three explosions.”

    Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory:  “I saw low-level flashes…[at] the lower level of the building.  You know when they demolish a building?”

    Explosions were being reported everywhere and by reporters as well.  Researchers Graeme MacQueen and Ted Walter viewed 70 hours of television coverage and found that most reporters were saying the Towers came down as a result of explosions and demolition.  Take a look here.

    There were explosions reported in the sub-basements before the planes hit.  William Rodriguez, who was in the sub-basement of the North Tower and heard and felt very loud multiple explosions, told this to 9/11 Commission staff and this never appeared in The 9/11 Commission Report.

    The evidence for explosives planted in the Towers and Building 7 is overwhelming but was completely discounted by the 9/11 Commission and the mass media complicit in its coverup.  In fact, the demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M was not worthy of a mention in the best-selling report.  It should be obvious to any objective thinker that if these building were wired for explosives and were brought down via controlled demolition, then this could not have been done by Osama bin Laden or his followers but only by insiders who were granted secret access to these ultra-high security buildings.

    Bob McIlvaine, whose son Bobby died in the North Tower, has persevered for twenty years to expose the lies surrounding September 11. McGinnis reports on his 2006 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation host Evan Solomon:

    I believe 100% that the US orchestrated 9/11 with the help of other agencies around the world…There’s people within the US that knew it happened, that planned this to happen.

    To Solomon’s question “You think your son was therefore murdered by Americans?”  McIlvaine replied, “absolutely.”

    He is joined by many others, including Matt Campbell, a British citizen and family member, whose brother Geoff Campbell died on the 106th floor of the North Tower.  Matt Campbell and his family have recently demanded a new inquest based on a 3,000 page scientifically-backed dossier claiming the buildings were blown up from within.

    After reading Unanswered Questions, you very well might believe it too.

    Learning about the determination of such stalwart souls as McIlvaine, Campbell, the FSC, and so many others to extract truth and justice from a recalcitrant and guilty government is inspirational.  They will never give up.  Nor should we.

    There is no doubt that this extraordinary book will answer many questions you may or may not have had about the mass murders of September 11, 2001.

    So don’t turn away.

    It will break your heart but restore your faith in what a writer dedicated to the truth can do for those family members who have so long sought the bread of truth and were handed stones of silence.

    In their ongoing grief, Ray McGinnis has handed them the gift of a bitter solace. He has answered them.

    He has also given the public an opportunity to see the truth and demand an independent investigation forthwith.

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  • Drought Flood Fire

    The world is on fire like never before: “Wildfires Have Erupted Across the Globe Scorching Places That Rarely Burned Before” (CNN headlines July 22, 2021) but not only is fire raging, Biblical floods are destroying entire communities; e.g., 9,000 homes swept away in central China (BBC News) as towns were nearly decimated in Germany, “Europe’s Deadly Floods Leave Scientists Stunned” (Science, July 20, 2021). All of that with worldwide droughts at a fever pitch.

    Is the sky (actually) falling?

    According to SPEI Global Drought Monitor, the current drought cycle is worldwide. Only Antarctica is spared. In some corners of the world water reservoirs are dangerously low, big hydroelectric plants sputter, as long-standing verdant forests morph into dried-out firetraps.

    This shocking coincidence of three major catastrophic events hitting at the same time is likely unequaled in modern history. Why are the most serious threats to 21st century civilization; i.e., drought, fire, and floods simultaneously ravaging the planet from east-to-west, north-to-south?

    Answers can be found in a new book:  Drought, Flood, Fire, How Climate Change Contributes to Catastrophes by Chris Funk (Director of Climate Hazards Center, UC Santa Barbara) Cambridge University Press, August 2021.

    Funk provides a very accurate description of the linchpin of climate-related trouble in one brilliant paragraph:

    We hang isolated in space, with only an incredibly thin layer of atmosphere standing between us and oblivion. If we could drive our car straight up at highway speeds, we would approach the edge of the atmosphere in a matter of minutes. And into this thin membrane we are dumping about 28 million gigatons of carbon dioxide every day. The rational decisions of nearly 8 billion people are resulting in collective insanity as we choose to destroy the delicate balances that support Earth’s fragile flame.  (p. 21)

    Moreover:

    Climate change is making climate extremes more frequent and intense… Not in the future, but right now… Over the past few years (2015-2020) the fingerprints of climate change have seemed more like a slap. Extreme heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires have exacted a terrible toll on developed and developing nations alike. These extremes have impacted hundreds of millions of people and resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in losses, all across the globe. (p. 5)

    Early on in Funk’s book a chart of weather-related losses (1980 to 2018) clearly shows a four-fold increase in less than 40 years, which is foreboding and demanding of attention. Funk educates readers how and why such huge increases have occurred in such a short time:

    One goal of this book is to describe how energy moves through the Earth’s energy system, so you can both better appreciate the beauty of our life-sustaining complex planet, and how human-induced warming is altering this system in a dangerous and alarming way. (p. 12)

    Drought Flood Fire delves into the onset of complex life, as well as the rudimentary basics of the mechanisms by which greenhouse gases warm the planet, to wit:

    Even most people who believe in climate change don’t really understand the basic mechanism of why adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere has to increase the amount of energy reaching the surface of the Earth.  (p. 65)

    This book serves as a tutorial and, as such, a compelling asset for students and advocates and world policymakers. It’s an authoritative teaching tool with occasional fun images that depict the ironic fragility of our enduring planet, e.g.,

    Imagine an egg painted blue. The atmosphere is as thick as the blue paint. (p. 67)

    Ever wonder how tropical storms originate or hurricanes or cyclones via understanding the intricate details behind the reported facts, in plain English?

    Is Earth uniquely fragile or steadfast and how is it that humans disrupt its ecosystems?

    Indeed, Drought, Flood, Fire is a primer on the most elemental developments of all aspects of the universe and solar system and the origin of complex life itself. This seminal book is essentially a lecture series about the remarkable features and development of the universe ultimately devolving into today’s anthropogenic distortion of nature. It’s well worth the read.

    Funk personally describes his approach, as follows:

    Some aspects of climate change are complex and hard to fathom. Some are fairly straightforward concepts and facts that everyone really needs to understand. This book is mostly about the latter. Some of the most important mechanisms of climate change can be understood by everyone: Why do greenhouse gasses have such a direct warming effect on our planet? How does this warming intensify the impact of droughts and fires? How can this same atmospheric warming, paradoxically, also increase the frequency of extreme precipitation events and floods? This book approaches these questions with a Do-It-Yourself  (DIY) attitude.  (p. 59)

    He explains the dynamics of extreme events, as for example, the interrelationship of California fires, warmer air temperatures, and drier vegetation like the infamous Thomas Fire of 2017, which was for a brief period the biggest most damaging fire in California history with flames roaring six stories into the sky.

    Interestingly enough, along with that California example, Funk spells out warning signals for all of humanity, to wit:

    By looking carefully at both weather data and disaster statistics, we can see with our own eyes that a 1°C warming is already having dire consequences.  (p. 64)

    That one fact alone “dire consequences” at only 1°C, especially in the context of a world currently at 1.2°C above baseline, should alert policymakers around the world to the inescapable gravity of today’s scenario with worldwide firestorms, floods, and droughts bordering on the apocalyptic, which are broadcasts on TV for all to see.  These are unprecedented, out of control real time scenes of climate destructiveness never witnessed before. And, it’s happening around the world, and it’s happening now. It’s unvarnished reality!

    According to Funk:

    The intent here is serious. California just experienced a large increase in fire extent, due in part to an exceptional increase in temperatures. We will likely see this happen again, and again, over the next forty years. (p. 65)

    Statements like that are backed up by scientific data that needs to be front and center for policymakers. His book should be on the desks of every policymaker because immediate remediation measures have never been more urgently crucial, especially with so much destruction at today’s global temperature of only 1.2°C above baseline. Whether they thoroughly read the book or not, policy wonks need a reminder of Drought Flood Fire on their desktops. It’s essential.

    The rate of increase of global warming, as detailed in Funk’s book, sends a clear message of deep concern. Figure 5-3 in the book demonstrates “exceptionally warm” ocean and air temperatures throughout the planet. It’s the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s monthly temperature data set of sea surface and land temperatures. In true Michael Mann fashion the graph is parabolic!

    The graph shows the fraction (percentage) of Earth that’s exceptionally warm over time, as explained by Funk:

    This time series should deeply disturb you. The fraction… is increasing very rapidly. When I was born, it was about 2%. By the time I started graduate school it was around 5%. When my children were born, it hovered around 7%. Since that time the area of exceptional warmth has doubled again to around 17%, increasing rapidly just between the beginning and end of our focus period (2015-2019). Now almost one-fifth of the globe experiences extreme temperatures at any given time. (p. 99)

    Those extremes result in severe health impacts, including death. For example, China has reported “at least 300 deaths” as a result of recent record-making floods whilst the same flooding traps passengers in subway trains standing in neck-deep water in the provincial capital Zhengzhou; meantime, hundreds of people died in the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave, according to estimates; there were at least 486 deaths in British Columbia, 116 in Oregon, 78 in Washington… there were more than 3,500 emergency department visits for heat-related illness this past May and June in a region that includes Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington State, which is normally a very cool region.

    Funk’s research group has developed a methodology to provide accurate estimates of maximum air temperatures called the Climate Hazards Center Infrared Temperature dataset.  His accomplishments at U of Calif. Santa Barbara involve satellites and computers used to identify and predict climate hazards. Because of the planet’s berserk climate system of late, Funk’s work should be mandatory for nation/state policy wonks.

    Funk’s Extreme Event Attribution methodology identifies “the fingerprint of climate change” well ahead of time.  For example, his research group explains the mechanisms or observations by which extreme weather events can be anticipated to help formulate humanitarian aid well ahead of a severe drought. As for example:

    In late 2016 we predicted the spring 2017 drought that struck Kenya, Somalia, and southern Ethiopia.  (p. 15)

    According to Funk, we live on a “Goldilocks Planet” with a life support system entirely dependent upon a “very thin atmosphere and the absolute necessity of maintaining temperatures with a narrow range.” In that regard, Drought Flood Fire focuses on what’s happening to the planet now vis a vis extreme heat, extreme precipitation, and out of control droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes turbocharged by human-generated greenhouse gases.

    Of interest, in spite of Funk’s careful examination of the dangers presented by human-generated greenhouse gases and examples of how devastating those have been at only 1°C above baseline, towards the end of his book he discovers an upbeat note by referencing the German and California experiences of effectively mitigating GHGs whilst experiencing rapid economic growth as examples of what the world can do to favorably resolve the climate crisis.

    He goes on to tabulate all of the wonderful positives of modern day society, the accomplishments in medicine, science, etc., which are all true.  Yet, it somehow comes across as way too Disneylandish in the face of repeated failures by the nations of the world to uphold their climate mitigation commitments. After all, every world climate conference, like Paris 2015, has failed, horribly failed. This is worse than a tragedy and cause for not holding one’s breath over the outcome of the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference to be held in Glasgow in November called COP26 where 30,000 delegates are expected.

    Yes, since 1995 in Berlin, the world has already held 25 COPs! Begging the question: What results? Namely, annual CO2 emissions have skyrocketed (double the 20th century rate), unrelenting global warming (a new heat record, 2020) CO2-e at record levels year-by-year. Meanwhile, Biblical fires, massive flooding, and killer droughts haunt civilization like never before.

    What’s to celebrate?

    Maybe it would be better if COP26 is cancelled and save the millions spent on 30,000 professionals gathering to chitchat, meaning “lots of smoke but no flames,” except for the long-standing forests of the world, which are burning like crazy.

    At the end, Funk comes back to reality, which is crucial for understanding where the planet’s health stands and what must be done, to wit:

    Right now we appear to be headed for 3°C of warming or more. This level of warming would almost certainly have catastrophic and potentially irreversible impacts on our planet’s life support system. (p. 299)

    But, according to Drought Flood Fire, it’s already happening with just 1°C warming, as Funk additionally queries: Imagine +3°C or +4°C bringing on decimated crops, super storms, and considerably higher sea levels, but yet:

    Even the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming will make an incredible difference.  (p. 300)

    Nobody knows for certain where climate change/global warming is headed, but one thing is certain, it’s always worse than climate models; it’s always worse than scientists expect. That’s a concerning preamble to yet one more UN Climate Summit.

    All of which gives one pause with today’s 1.2°C above baseline as Biblical droughts, floods, and fires scare the daylights out of scientists. They’re publicly admitting it, which is a refreshing bold approach.  Hopefully, their deep-seated concerns override, supersede the bureaucratic nightmarish results of past COPs.

    Meanwhile, Drought Flood Fire, How Climate Change Contributes to Catastrophes puts everything into perspective.

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  • The Despisers of the Earth

    “Knowledge of death helps us also to find a good road,” Jack D. Forbes tells us, “because perhaps it can bring us to deep considerations of our place in nature.” I recall this reflection Forbes makes, among other revelations, in his 1978 book Columbus and Other Cannibals, now, rather queerly, in relation to the environmental movement. Written by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies comes at a critical moment, as this machine called by the name civilization wages its war on nature, to the devastation of the living world.

    Analyzed here, bright green environmentalism occupies the position that industrial civilization, otherwise unsustainable, can be salvaged into sustainability through continued, rapid technological innovation. Anthropocentric in its thinking, thus also egocentric, all for the industrial human, rather than ecocentric, it argues for an “environmentalism,” as such, “less about nature, and more about us.” But, as the authors show us, lies should not be dressed up as truths, no matter how desperately one might desire to avoid discomfort.

    Central to the analysis in Bright Green Lies, which criticizes this anthropocentrism, we see a critique of technology, a subject also seen in other forms before in Jensen’s work, such as in his and George Draffan’s 2004 book Welcome to the Machine. Technology should not be seen as truly neutral, indeed as if apolitical, since any such neutrality simply cannot be so in technology’s connection to culture.

    Technic, a term from Lewis Mumford, refers to this relation. “A social milieu,” the authors write of it, “creates specific technologies which in turn shape the culture.” On this point, they refer to Mumford’s two-volume work The Myth of the Machine, particularly the first volume Technics and Human Development, published in 1967. On what he terms “authoritarian technics,” as referenced by the authors, Mumford, writes in his 1964 article “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”:

    [A]uthoritarian technics is a much more recent achievement: it begins around the fourth millennium B.C. in a new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and centralized political control that gave rise to the peculiar mode of life we may now identify, without eulogy, as civilization. Under the new institution of kingship, activities that had been scattered, diversified, cut to the human measure, were united on a monumental scale into an entirely new kind of theological-technological mass organization.

    Mumford’s phrase “theological-technological mass organization” matters. Here, as I do, one might recall, as examples most familiar to many, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984. We might well consider, as Margaret Atwood remarks, the dystopian arising from the utopian: “Why is it that when we grab for heaven—socialist or capitalist or even religious—we so often produce hell?” Civilization’s battle against biology itself, being in its hatred for nature, seems to be hell in reality, with heaven as fantasy. One discovers only a deceitful promise to deaden the consciousness and counteract any social change against the machine. Both ecocidal and death-bringing, as it pretends to be ecological and life-giving, this deceit seems to be characteristic of bright green environmentalism.

    “Around the world,” the authors write, “frontline activists are fighting not only big corporations but also the climate movement as wild beings and wild places now need protection from green energy projects.” It would be too simplistic, then, to misrepresent this most serious critique as seeing all technology, from the dawn of humankind, as being an inherent act of destruction. Context matters, clearly, with us in this ongoing cultural transition into what Neil Postman calls technopoly. In his 1992 book Technopoly, Postman defines it as a “totalitarian technocracy,” characterized by “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” It embodies the arrogant sense of solutionism in technological innovation, man’s new theology, under current industrial civilization. Making problems, as the authors here show, the industrial human’s use of technology, also including biotechnology, has been destructive, rather than restorative, toward the living world.

    “These technologies will not save the earth,” Keith writes in the prologue, adding: “They will only hasten its demise.” And so, as the authors show, it simply does not make sense for us, as Jeff Gibbs posits this question in his 2019 film Planet of the Humans, to believe that machines built by industrial civilization can save us, including the living world being colonized at the biological level, from industrial civilization. “Weapons are tools that civilizations will make,” the authors write, “because civilization itself is a war.”

    As it has come to be, industrial civilization poses many problems for the living world, among those noted by the authors, which cannot be worked around by only more technology. Seen as if its own theology, our technology seems to keep us within a paradigm, one that has been anthropocentric, consuming nature around civilization to feed its apparently bottomless greed. On civilization, the authors continue:

    Its most basic material activity is a war against the living world, and as life is destroyed, the war must spread. The spread is not just geographic, though that is both inevitable and catastrophic, turning biotic communities into gutted colonies and sovereign people into slaves. Civilization penetrates the culture as well, because the weapons are not just a technology—no tool ever is. Technologies contain the transmutational force of a technic, creating a seamless suite of social institutions and corresponding ideologies. Those ideologies will either be authoritarian or democratic, hierarchical or egalitarian. Technics are never neutral.

    Here, after this passage, the authors reference Chellis Glendinning, author of the 1990 book When Technology Wounds, who writes: “All technologies are political.” Power remains primary in how we must orient ourselves, in terms of our understanding, regarding the element of the theological-technological. “The mechanistic mind is built on an epistemology of domination. It wants a hierarchy,” the authors write. “It needs to separate the animate from the inanimate and then rank them in order of moral standing.” Man comes to be driven in making an order of things under which he can name all and make the world’s meaning with relation to himself, seeing woman and nature as subject to his desire. Imagined as freedom, seen for man as the self-made individual in the man-made world, it becomes realized as slavery.

    On the mechanical mind, Sir Francis Bacon, inquisitor at witch trials and inventor of the scientific method, describes his objective, science as he saw it, as “dominion over creation.” And René Descartes adds: “I have described this earth, and indeed this whole visible world, as a machine.” Clearly, even if seen among bright green environmentalists analyzed by the authors, one can see the tradition of Bacon and Descartes continuing today across social movements. The mechanical mind appears most evident in man’s continued desire to carve out nature and claim the corpse as his, colonizing and occupying that which he feels driven to possess.

    Narcissistic, consuming everything around it, the mechanistic mind, as the system of beliefs with this desire, insists upon itself as the center of all things. Any identity developed from this ideology becomes one based on destruction, thus doomed to be a repetition of reversals “in a reversal society,” as Mary Daly remarks. The death of the flesh—indeed, what Luce Irigaray describes as “the murder of the mother”—becomes life for the self, with destruction as creation, emptiness as fulfillment. It can be characterized by what Erich Fromm analyzes as necrophilia, being “the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive,” “the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.”

    “Having declared the cosmos lifeless,” the authors write, “industrial humans are now transforming the biosphere into the technosphere, a dead world of our own artifacts that life as a whole may not survive.” Technological fundamentalism, a term used by David W. Orr in his 1994 analysis, discussed by Robert Jensen in his 2017 book The End of Patriarchy, has been deployed for describing this ideology against biology and ecology. Technology, although substituted for the sacred, is killing the living world, civilization being its consumer.

    Seen in the example of bright green environmentalism, the authors critique this dependency, which, in the increasing enslavement to the machine, seems a tell-tale sign of desperation, not hope. “Unable to separate can do from should do,” Orr writes, “we suffer a kind of technological immune deficiency syndrome that renders us vulnerable to whatever can be done and too weak to question what it is that we should do” (336). At its most basic, there seems to be a failure to see boundaries, as one becomes only more obsessed with breaking them, including everything in nature to be dominated.

    A declared sense of “dominion over creation,” as Bacon would have it, does not seem compatible with local knowledge and natural variation, as globalization, and the declared universality of dominant western knowledge, has worked to make the world a monolith. On biodiversity, Rachel Carson, whom the authors cite, writes in her 1962 book Silent Spring: “Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it.” Just as Carson identifies man’s desire to control nature, to its simplification on his terms, Vandana Shiva likewise identifies it, much as the authors do here, in the violence of the Green Revolution, analyzed in her 1993 book Monocultures of the Mind. “The destruction of diversity and the creation of uniformity,” Shiva writes, “simultaneously involves the destruction of stability and the creation of vulnerability.” Nature becomes more bound to what Barbara Christian, in her 1987 essay “The Race for Theory,” terms monolithism, becoming more so mystified, thus brought into destruction, in man’s claim to control all life. “Ideologies of dominance,” as Christian analyzes them, appear to manifest in man’s technology, to manipulate nature, rather than letting the living world simply be in its multiplicity.

    Among the consequences of man’s attempted total control of nature, the world has witnessed a radical decrease in biodiversity, corresponding with the rise of industrial civilization as it colonizes nature—indeed, life—itself. As the authors note, Carson felt an urgent sense, first and foremost, of us needing to save, in her words, “the living world” in its beauty, a being in and of itself, unenslaved by any man-made sense of meaning. Added to this sensibility of hers, Carson felt, also in her words, “anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done,” a feeling seen in Shiva’s work. And, with their own work, Jensen, Keith, and Wilbert seem to follow Carson’s and Shiva’s sensibilities, being kindred witnesses for nature, seen in this time of great need.

    “Mainstream environmentalists,” the authors write, “now overwhelmingly prioritize saving industrial civilization over saving life on the planet.” As but one example of civilization as contagion, in his article “The Race to Save Civilization,” Lester Brown argues how we can “save civilization,” because the living world is, so he says, “going to be around for a while.” Indeed, as Wilbert writes in his review of Brown’s 2009 book Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, it is “fundamentally anthropocentric,” neglecting a critique of both capitalism and civilization. “If we can get the market to tell the truth,” Brown writes, “then we can avoid being blindsided by a faulty accounting system that leads to bankruptcy.” But it does not seem wise to put our hope in the market, when, as it has been so, the market would seem unlikely to tell any truth not manipulated by the green power of profit.

    Recalling the work of Robert Jay Lifton, the authors remind us that, before “any mass atrocity,” one “must have a claim to virtue.” Aside from here in Bright Green Lies, Jensen writes of this “claim to virtue” in his 2000 book A Language Older Than Words. Jensen references Lifton’s 1986 book The Nazi Doctors in which, among the doctors at Auschwitz, we see what it means to claim virtue and collaborate in atrocity. A few among us might well come to consciousness of the falsities, seeing it all for what it actually is. “But the rest of us want this bright, happy future, and we refuse to close the distance,” the authors write. “We don’t want to know about the acid rain falling, the fish strangling, and the rubble that once was mountains going up in smoke.” There seems to be a true fear of the real world there. Rather than face reality, as we should do, without lying to ourselves, we retreat into fantasy worlds, where we can have it all—even when it will not work. Desperate, one comes to convince oneself that the atrocity, whatever it might be, “is not in fact an atrocity, but instead a good thing.” Disembodied and dismembered, we become the despisers of the earth.

    Against the sacred, civilization has been presented as the cure, when it worsens the living world, akin to mere snake oil as healing salve, in a false hope for some miraculous salvation. Such would seem to be the man-eat-world world logic of environmentalism against the environment. In their analysis, the authors show a selection of lies in terms of technology, ones which not only will not work but also make things much worse. Certainly, a very commodifying vocabulary, a quality of the mechanical mind considered here, might well sell the environment to buyers, maybe even those considerably invested in its consumption, but that does not seem compatible with saving the living world. As we see argued in Bright Green Lies, the color green for the modern environmental movement has ended up becoming far less about the living world than about the money to be made from nature by man’s exploitation of it. Really mistaken for its own religion, money, in a symbiosis with technology, should not be that on which we form our faith.

    “By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering to a living creature,” Carson asks us in Silent Spring, “who among us is not diminished as a human being?” Human beings have been diminished by seeing all of nature, including our bodies and ourselves, as though mechanical, both deadened and dispossessed. But, as seen before, in our fear and guilt, being against nature, we lie. Such has been seen in man’s dominion over woman. Man tells himself all manner of lies, even seeing woman hating as a way of life, occupying himself with it as if his innermost self, all in his attempt to alleviate his own fear and guilt over the subjection of women.

    “Civilization consumes the circle, so all civilizations end in collapse,” Keith writes, asking: “How could it be otherwise if your way of life relies on destroying the place you live?” Civilization, in its doing of domination, as can be apprehended in its current form, must die for nature—indeed, all life and the interactions therein—to live in the living world. Identity should not be insisted upon as collapsing all others around the self into it, for it leads to an idea of the individual as a destroyer, caught in his own illusion of being a creator. Of the work to be done on humanity’s part, that beyond the life of Bright Green Lies, Jensen writes in the afterword:

    This way of living will not and cannot last. What we do now determines how much of the planet remains later. We can voluntarily reduce the harm caused by this culture now, and work to create spaces where nature can regenerate, or we can continue to allow—indeed, to subsidize—further destruction of the planet’s ecological infrastructure. And while that may allow the economy to limp along a few more years, I guarantee that none of us—salmon, right whales, piscine life in the oceans, humans—are going to like where that takes us.

    Human beings must consider our place in nature, not as its masters, becoming those who control it, as if the creators of all, but rather, in our being, as another part of the living world. Humanity must reject civilization’s dominion over nature. To resist the machine, one must really come to terms with biology, rejecting that mechanical mind that makes us go against nature into nothingness. There must be an understanding of the connectedness of beings in the living world, that we do not exist as disembodied and dismembered parts in any machine. “All things participate in the circle of death,” Forbes reminds us, “but as mentioned earlier, death is life.”

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  • Needed Urgently! New US National Myth

    Lenin dismantled in Berdiansk, Ukraine. Confederacy President Jefferson Davis in Richmond. Lieutenant-general Cornwallis in Halifax, Nova Scotia.


    Empires rise and fall. And usually burn themselves out rather quickly. What else is new? ‘American decline’ is a Wikipedia page. You can feel it in the air. One greets it with dread or hope, or better dread-hope. America’s sins are adding up, yet the US is a behemoth for well over two centuries and will not go in peace.

    It’s biblical in dimensions: elites brazenly steal from the poor, then use the money to lobby, privatization, to make ever more money, with God’s wrath hovering like a sword overhead, as such vile behaviour undermines the whole system.

    It’s so painful to watch, yet again, how perverse capitalism makes people act. How it rewards scoundrels unimaginable fortunes. It’s the same with atom-splitting, computers, drones, what happens to good leaders everywhere who don’t follow the script, in short: everything capitalism touches (which is by now just about everything, including sex, now retouched as gender) turns to sh*t.

    And what about the US? It presides over this bacchanalia, consuming/ destroying all it touches (consumption is derived from the Latin ‘destroy’, so I could just leave it at ‘destroy’). And what does America produce? Not an awful lot in real terms, and less and less all the time. Actual industrial output in the US has been falling for decades. What the US is producing is more and more debt. The world ‘buys’ US debt and sells it consumer goods, chained as it is to US dollars. I.e., chained to US debt. But Americans themselves are slaves to personal debt. Now, as the US totters on, ruling the waves and waving the rules, the world has reached an apotheosis.

    A quick history of the American story/ epic/ saga is:

    *20,000 years of tribal hunter gatherers, in harmony with nature,

    *settler colonialism, i.e., war, theft, genocide,

    *declaration of bourgeois revolution promising life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (scaled back to life, liberty and private property in the constitution),

    *2 centuries of wild, uncontrolled, ‘creative destruction’, using and discarding resources at an insane pace, blanketing the continent in square grids of endless roads, cookie-cutter suburbs, cities turning into ghost towns, arriving at

    *a car-choked dead end, where the threat of nuclear war and environmental Armageddon loom ever closer.

    There is already a cottage industry of Chicken Littles on US collapse, collapsarianism, Dmitry Orlov the oldest and most celebrated. Orlov is a Russian American engineer, born in 1962 in Leningrad. He emigrated with his parents in 1970s. Like the Soviet Union, the US collapse will be the result of huge military budgets, government deficits, an unresponsive political system, plus, for the US, declining oil production. Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects (2008, 2011) and  The Five Stages of Collapse (2013) are entertaining as well as informative, as is his legendary 2006 article ‘Closing the ‘Collapse Gap: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US’ which brought the collapsarianism into the mainstream.

    Martyanov, like Orlov, was born in the 1960s, though Martyanov hails from Baku, and studied at the Caspian (Kirov) Naval Academy. Their writings are both polemics by engineers. Sort-of Marxist:

    Orlov: *When faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money.

    Martyanov: *The Republican embrace of China in the 2000s shows how the capitalist will sell the very rope on which he will be hanged.

    *America’s cultural and political decline are direct consequences of its precipitously diminishing ability to make—produce, that is—things which matter and that Americans need.

    Ex-Soviets are tough nuts. And they pull no punches. Engineers, more so. Having had to bite their lips too many times pre-fall, they are unqualified in their openness and critical faculties, and generally love/hate America in equal portions. A popular saying of the day in the USSR was: “They tell us that capitalism stinks, but what a delightful smell.” Orlov enjoys the stink. (His blog ClubOrlov’s latest: Why are empires, especially dying ones, drawn to Afghanistan like moths to a flame?)

    Martyanov is unrelentless and unapologetically contrarian. He has a lot of bones to pick, with lots of detours into modern Russia.

    *He argues Germany’s economy is in free fall, overburdened by a green energy chimera, refusing to air condition airports. (Greta Thunberg is dismissed as an ‘illiterate girl from Sweden’).

    *He (and, news to me, Putin) insist climate warming is not due to human activity (not a shred of viable evidence, except for ever unreliable models, that humanity’s activity drives climate change), (p71)

    *Covid is a fraud,

    *American environmentalists are pushing an agenda which undermines the very foundation of modern human civilization.

    US mass culture a straitjacket

    He is right, though, to argue that consumerism as an ideology is a straitjacket. The rise of postmodernism since WWII has accelerated the decline of American culture. Harold Bloom observes that “instead of the pursuit of truth, there is an adolescent certainty that all is uncertain.” He criticizes such cultural icons as Mick Jagger, who portrays himself as  a nihilistic rebel, both hetero and homosexual, embracing drugs and “the rock ideal of universal classless society founded on love.” Because youth bond with such decadent anti-heroes, they miss embracing the positive heroes of the past, never achieving a deep love for culture.

    Weimar Germany is the classic example of decadent culture before the deluge. Rome in its later years was famous for its decadence, sexual promiscuity and homosexuality. It’s happening again before our very eyes. The current obsession with transsexualism, and the reforming of our sexuality according to a radical critique of ‘hetero-patriarchy’ and its replacement with an array of designer sexualities, is perhaps the strongest indicator of imminent collapse.

    Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December (1982) chronicles the state of urban culture and race relations in Chicago in the 1960s as compared to socialist eastern Europe, where traditional culture ruled. Already by the 1980s, within sight of the collapse behind the Iron Curtain, their culture was beginning to look good to outsider Bellow. The farther we ‘progress’ from those days, the better things there look.

    Just as the Soviet Union denounced western decadence, Russia too is the empire’s spoilsport. Again, today’s news: the European Court of Human Rights determined that Russian law, which defines marriage as only between a man and a woman, breached the right to private and family life enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.The decision obliges the country to legislate for recognition of LGBT+ marriages. The Court also awarded €2,200 in costs to the claimants.

    The backlash against the new sexuality being promoted by the West has begun, with protest politics in Hungary, Poland, and half the US pitted against the other half, with sexual politics at the centre of the divide. It seems Putin’s rush to change the constitution to limit marriage to male-female last year was just in the knick of time.

    On the consumer side of ideology, Veblen identified the importance that status takes on in a consumer-oriented society, where spending more on goods is a status symbol, the Veblen effect. This effect cancels the upper limit on personal consumption. The sky is literally the limit, as the billionaires Bezos and Branson  with their trips into outerspace a mere drop in their financial buckets. Where one’s worth is measured solely in money, society becomes a stage for moneyed giants to act out for the rest of society, who worship these successful, glamorous idols. And feel worthless.  With the ascendancy of Black Lives Matters, with the gay liberation forces martialed behind it, US culture lies in shreds. Consumption as the be all and end all is literally destroying the planet. Help!

    Magic numbers

    Having dispensed with lots of damned MAGA lies, we are left with statistics. When Simon Kuznets invented GDP in the 1930s (I’m not joking), he deliberately left two industries out of this then novel, revolutionary idea of a national income: finance and advertising. Kuznets’ logic was simple, not mere opinion, but analytical fact: finance and advertising do not create new value, they only allocate, or distribute existing value (Marx’s unproductive labour), in the same way that a loan to buy a television isn’t the television, or an ad for healthcare isn’t healthcare. They are only means to goods, not goods themselves.

    Congress ignored Kuznets, and included advertising and finance in the statistic. As a result, actual American GDP is formed primarily by non-productive sectors such as finance, insurance, and real estate, known as the FIRE economy. (I’m not joking, though I can’t resist fantasizing about lighting a match to all that paper ‘wealth’.)

    Martyanov’s Soviet education allows him to step back from the appearance (illusion) of wealth in US stats, and recognize that real wealth is not in financial ‘services’ — mutual shining of each other’s boots by two close friends and then paying each other $10 for doing this does not produce $20 of value, something that seems to escape most American economists.

    All the above does is yet further monetize our lives. Real value resides in food on the table, a roof over your head, a secure job and good education. There are lots of modern day shoe shiners, busily shining every day, inflating statistics, but producing no value. Viewed in real teams, the US looks more and more like a 3rd world country.

    Subtract finance and advertising from GDP, and what’s left? Well, since more than 50% every year of GDP comes from finance and advertising,  we would immediately see that the economic ‘growth’ that the US chases never actually existed at all, that the actual size of the American economy is grossly inflated. Growth itself has only been an illusion, a trick of numbers. I.e., the economy is a hollow shell. When the dollar goes, it will take the US ‘economy’ with it. That explains the consistent pattern of the ever-increasing overall trade deficit for the United States since 1970, when Nixon took the US off the gold standard.

    Food insecurity

    Martyanov and Orlov are weak on ways out of our dead end. That’s not their purpose. (Orlov: hope that the rest of the world manages to come together and build at least the scaffolding of a functional imperial replacement) but we need to prepare.

    Orlov urges us to look to Soviet experience for lessons. There is already a germ of Soviet thinking at play in food banks. Any national crisis (WWII, today) pushes us towards a communal (i.e., socialist) answer. Covid-era news has highlighted the growing  importance of food banks throughout the US, where lines of cars circled the block and shelves were constantly depleted.

    It’s as if Basic Income was being invented out of dire necessity. 30+% of Americans have food insecurity. This phenomenal growth of food banks is a clear symptom of decline, dread-hope. My foodbank is called the ‘Essentials Market’, and is always stocked with bread, some vegetables (in season or as spillover from imports from Mexico and the US), plus bizarre things like chicken flavoured peanuts. This week, sweat peas, delicious but with black spots. Also goods with package flaws, or funny shaped potatoes and carrots. It was bi-weekly before covid but is now weekly and looks like this will continue. Portions are equal, and quantity depending on supply.

    It is much more enjoyable shopping than at a ‘super’market. i donate monthly, so i’m probably not saving much on what I take home. I only go to Loblaws for frozen orange juice and canned pineapple.

    I lived in Soviet Union in its twilight years, when ”defitsiti’ were the norm, but even then, shopping was an adventure, a hunt, and your spoils brought a feeling of accomplishment. Gift parcels at work were a cause for celebration. We are programmed to think that mind-numbing, ice-cold supermarkets are the pinnacle of personal happiness, but there are other ways of structuring consumption: solidarity, social justice, modesty, gifting.

    You share or trade with others what you don’t really want. The fact that money doesn’t enter into the equation (or in Soviet times, was not important), makes it more like a social gathering. But then my foodbank is small, well-run and adequately funded. Large foodbanks are less welcoming but still provide an essential service for free. There isn’t a lot of waste — if a big load of toothpaste comes in, you might get two tubes. If you are lucky, you might get the last cake or brick of cheese, but there’s always tofu, frozen meat, potatoes and carrots.

    As for food production, while the US is roughly balanced on food imports/ exports now, there are serious problems of water access and increasing wild fires which will lead to troubles, even if government starts right now to address them.

    National myth? Israel?

    Martyanov makes an unwieldy comparison of US and Russia on the culture front. He approves of the new Russian constitution where the State language on all the territory of the Russian Federation is the Russian (Russkii) language, the language of the State-founding people. That it helps bind the nation. He then argues that nowadays in America anything even remotely comparable to acknowledging that Euro-Americans represent the core nationality of the United States would be an anathema for the primarily globalist establishment. 

    His logic should mean recognizing the natives as the founding people. No one invited the white settlers, who Martyanov seems to be arguing are the ‘founding nation’. Russian nation building was radically different, where Russians lived more or less peacefully alongside natives across Siberia, so fit well with the first ‘founding fathers’. And his attempt to square the Trumpian circle is to include black slaves and hispanics and forget the Philippinos, Vietnamese and other flotsam, doesn’t work either. Captives and other settlers are no more ‘founding peoples’ than these other settlers.

    But he’s right that America’s lack of a myth-that-fits-all is at the heart of its disintegration, and that Russia indeed has big advantage as it limps along, trying to recover. It has many moments that all Russian citizens can relate to, though the two images that stand out as icons in all Russians’ minds are surely these.

    Russians are powerful myth makers, and even look back fondly on their Soviet experience and increasingly honour it. Their Soviet national myth crashed on the hidden rocks of commodity fetishism. The ‘soviet man’ was supposed to be ascetic, a consumer minimalist, devoting himself to study, self-improvement, social activities, preserving nature, things we all wish we had time for but don’t, until retirement, when you are too old and lame to be much good to anyone. That’s good for priests and revolutionaries, maybe 10%, but not as a founding myth.

    Though flawed, Martyanov is worth reading for his details, the Russia asides. It’s fascinating to see a sharp Soviet-Russian mind at work, deconstructing the US. Martyanov would probably be writing the same book if he were still Soviet, living in still extant socialism. I’m sure Putin’s advisers think along similar lines.

    What really is missing in both Orlov and Martyanov is a chapter on how Israel contributes to US disintegration. Or rather a framing of the whole topic as referring to US-Israel, as they function as siamese twins, joined at the hip, with two heads, one much more clever than the other. Israel has pushed the US for the past 7 decades to do much self-harm, to discredit the US on the world stage, to push the entire Middle East into ceaseless, tragic turmoil. Without Israel, the US would be in much better shape, perhaps not even disintegrating.

    Hopeful signs

    If politicians heeded Hudson on debt forgiveness, maybe we could reboot the US. But it would still mean revolution.The Bezoses and Bransons stick out like sore thumbs. In the meantime, decline is relentless. There are good signs in the slow-motion US disintegration:

    *Biden’s backing off Nord Stream 2 allowing Europe to manage its own energy,

    *Biden’s bid to nab corporations in tax havens. Even Canada and Europe are on board. Can this plug the hole in the dyke propping up the rise sea of toxic dollars? As with the climate, storms are more frequent and more lethal. It’s hard to see a happy ending in all this but it won’t hurt.

    *Pride Month’s black eye, when Supreme Court allowed the Catholic church to exclude same sex couples in adoption in Philadelphia,

    *a groundswell of support, with young people at the forefront on global warming and against Israeli apartheid. As with South Africa in the 1980s, the world is slowly mobilizing to bring the Israeli part of US-Israel to justice.

    These groundswells, which Martyanov got wrong, ignores or belittles, are the seeds of a new, better post-US-imperialism. Martyanov and Orlov are engineers, not writers. Just as Martyanov dismisses nonengineers from climate policy, we can’t take engineer think as the last word to resolve the complex problems engineers have created that brought us to this fix. Orlov, dubbed a survivalist, currently is producing affordable house boats for apres le deluge.

    As for a credible founding myth, it’s not going to happen, unless you go back to the distant past. 1619+ meant slavery and genocide, 1776 meant a bourgeois revolution glorifying profit, wealth, and reaffirming slavery and genocide, 1899 seizing Philippines meant empire, though now minus slavery. Canada doesn’t have the slavery baggage, [Myth? See “Canada’s slavery secret: The whitewashing of 200 years of enslavement” — DV Ed] but the native genocide was pretty much the same. This year’s Canada Day on July 1 was without major fireworks, more a day of reflection, contrition. We’re already wrestling with a new national myth. It’s not easy. But it’s gonna be a lot hard south of the border.

    Inspired by Trump’s angry circus performance at Mount Rushmore, [the renaming of what the Lakota people called Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, Six Grandfathers — DV Ed] last year, a landback movement has begun. We land’owners’ can give back our lands to natives whose land it really is, and let them be custodians, our high priests. We must embrace the native cultures where we live. That should be our founding myth. Such a post-consumer-settler-colonial society has a chance. We can do our accounting according to a happiness index, ridding ourselves of the financial intermediaries sucking up the real wealth and leaving only debt.

    The post Needed Urgently! New US National Myth first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Scheer Intelligence: Something’s Rotten In The Science Of Food

    Leading nutritionist Marion Nestle has spent much of her long illustrious career writing about what we eat and the science of food. The James Beard award-winner and author of the blog Food Politics has written a whopping 14 acclaimed books on subjects related to nutrition, including “Soda Politics” and “What to Eat.” And yet, “Unsavory Truths: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, ” a book journalist Robert Scheer calls one of her most important books to date, has gone largely ignored by mainstream media. On this week’s installment of “Scheer Intelligence,” Nestle joins Scheer to discuss some of the shocking revelations  the author uncovered about the links between food science and the incredibly powerful food industry. 

    The post Scheer Intelligence: Something’s Rotten In The Science Of Food appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Kucinich Memoir Is A Moving Account Of The Battle Against Corporate Power

    The Division of Light and Power,” by Dennis Kucinich, like Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” is a gripping, moving and lucidly written account of the hidden mechanisms of corporate power in the United States and what happens when these corporate interests are challenged. It is essential reading, especially as we face an intensified corporate assault, done in the name of fiscal necessity following the financial wounds imposed by the pandemic, to seize total control of all public assets.  

    Kucinich warns that this assault is more than the seizure of public assets for private gain.  These corporate forces, which function as a shadow government in Washington and cities across the country, threaten to achieve a monolithic lock on all forms of power and extinguish our anemic democracy.

    The post Kucinich Memoir Is A Moving Account Of The Battle Against Corporate Power appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Making Sense of Sex and Gender

    A few months after I had written an article critiquing the ideology of the transgender movement, a comrade from a progressive group told me he wanted to understand why I was challenging trans activists, whom he saw as being political allies on the left. I outlined what is now called the “gender critical” feminist argument, which rejects the rigid and repressive gender norms in patriarchy but recognizes the material reality of human sex differences. That analysis flowed from radical feminist politics, I explained, which is essential to challenging men’s exploitation of women in patriarchy, the system of institutionalized male dominance that surrounds us.

    By the end of that long lunchtime conversation, he said he had no trouble following my argument and found little to disagree with. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t really understand a lot of what the trans movement is saying.”

    I told him I had no trouble understanding his confusion, because the transgender movement’s arguments seemed unclear, sometimes even incoherent, to me as well. Then I asked him: “Is there any other issue on which you can’t make sense of a political movement’s arguments but you still support its policy proposals?”

    He winced, knowing he couldn’t think of another such case. That was the end of the conversation. At the time I was being denounced by various people on the left for my writing, and we both knew he wasn’t going to publicly support me, or even ask trans activists for a clearer articulation of their arguments.

    If time travel were possible, I would beam back to that moment in 2014 and hand my friend a copy of Kathleen Stock’s new book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. It likely would not have changed his political choices, but it would have clarified why he was having trouble making sense of trans arguments. Stock explains, carefully and respectfully, why those arguments so often don’t make much sense. I mean that not as insult but as a recognition of so many people’s confusion. My friend was hardly the only person I have met who is perplexed by the foundational assertion of the trans movement: that a person is a man or woman, or neither or both, based on a subjective internal feeling about “gender” (for which no viable theory has yet been presented by trans activists) rather than the material reality of “sex” (about which we have an expansive understanding from biology and everyday life).

    Stock’s book, on the other hand, is eminently sensible, in both meanings of the word. It is intellectually cogent and useful in helping us make personal and policy decisions. In this polarized political moment, she delivers her analysis firmly but politely, with none of the rancor that has unfortunately become so common in this debate, especially online.

    For example, it’s sensible to define terms in a debate, although the transgender movement shies away from being pinned down on the meaning of terms and even celebrates this ambiguity as a virtue. Stock is careful with definitions, beginning with her analysis of the four ways “gender” is used these days. Once readers work through those options, it’s clear (at least to me) that the term gender is best understood as the social meaning (captured in the terms masculinity and femininity) ascribed to biological sex differences rooted in reproduction (male and female). Sex is a function of the kind of animals that we humans are, and gender is how we human animals make sense of sex differences. Sex is biological, and gender is cultural.

    That’s the way feminists have used the terms since the 1970s, as they challenged patriarchal claims that men’s domination and exploitation of women is “natural” because of biology. Patriarchy turns biological difference into social dominance. Feminists have long argued that gender is connected to our sex differences but is “socially constructed” in a way that reflects the unequal distribution of power between men and women over the past few thousand years. Anything socially constructed could be constructed differently through politics.

    The trans movement flips that understanding, routinely asserting that gender is not the product of social forces but is a private internal state of being, which may be innate and immutable (opinions in the trans movement vary). In other words, transgender ideology asserts that gender is something one feels and has no necessary connection to one’s body and reproductive system. Trans activists routinely assert that “sex is a social construction,” that the biological distinctions of male and female are not objectively real but are created by societies. Stock painstakingly explains why this—again I’ll use the phrase, though it sounds harsh—doesn’t make sense.

    In the preceding paragraph, I wrote “routinely assert” not only because there are differences of opinion within the transgender movement (which is to be expected in any movement) but because I have heard trans activists shift arguments when asked to defend a position (which is an indication of a weak argument in any movement). I once asked a trans activist, “If sex is socially constructed, that implies that it could be constructed in some other way. Do you know of any other way for humans to reproduce other than with an egg (produced by a female) and sperm (produced by a male)? By what means would human reproduction be socially constructed differently?” The activist offered no rebuttal to that, but simply dropped the claim, moving on to assert that trans people know what sex they “really” are and that any challenge to this idea was hateful and bigoted.

    [A necessary footnote: There is an extremely small percentage of the human population born “intersex,” with what are called DSDs (either Disorders or Differences in Sex Development; terminology preferences vary) that involve anomalies in genes, hormones, and reproductive organs. One of these conditions is hermaphroditism, which is still occasionally used as an umbrella term for DSDs. Stock explains those variations, noting that such conditions have nothing to do with transgenderism. Gender dysphoria (discomfort or distress when a person’s internal gender identity differs from their biological sex) is a psychological not physiological condition.]

    Stock’s emphasis on precise language continues throughout the book. For example, she explains why the term “sex assigned at birth” is deceptive in light of the stability of the categories of male and female, evidenced by the success of human reproduction over millennia. In the vast majority of cases, everyone agrees on the sex of a newborn, which is observed not assigned. These questions about words are not trivial; how we talk about the world can change how we understand the world. Stock rejects replacing “breastfeeding” with “chestfeeding,” for example, because the trans-friendly term undermines our ability to name reality. Babies nurse at the breast of a female human, and the existence of women who identify as men (transmen is the common term used today) or as non-binary (rejecting an either/or choice) but still nurse a baby doesn’t change that.

    Stock also offers sensible analysis of policy debates, most of which focus on the demands of men who identify as women (transwomen is the common term). For example, should transwomen be allowed into female-only spaces, such as bathrooms, changing rooms, hostels, or prisons? Stock explains why such a policy creates anxiety and fear for women, who live with the everyday reality of the threat of male violence, especially sexual violence. The problem is not that every transwoman is physically or sexually aggressive. But when claiming membership in the other sex category requires no explanation or evidence, the likelihood of abuse increases as predators find openings to target women when they are vulnerable.

    Stock also explains why allowing transwomen—again, males who identify as women—to participate in women’s sports will undermine and potentially eliminate sex-segregated activities that create opportunities for girls and women to thrive. Separate athletic competitions for males and females exist because of the physiological advantage males have over females, and those advantages don’t disappear by identifying as a woman.

    Does any of this really matter? Well, it matters to teenage girls who may not want to change clothes in a locker room next to a boy who identifies as a girl. It matters to women at a health club that allows transwomen in a “women only” space. It matters to clients in a women’s homeless shelter that refuses to restrain sexually aggressive behavior of transwomen in order to be “inclusive.” It matters to the woman who is bumped from a country’s Olympic weightlifting team when a transwoman is allowed to compete as a woman. It matters to the women who were sexually assaulted by a transwoman who was housed in a women’s prison. It matters to the lesbians who choose not to date transwomen—because their sexual orientation is toward female humans and not male humans who identify as women—and are then called bigots and ostracized. And it matters to the woman who had to fight to get her job back after being fired for publicly stating that she believes “that sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.”

    Trans activists’ responses to these challenges vary, but they can be reduced to a trans slogan so popular that an LGBT organization in the UK put it on a t-shirt: “Transwomen are women. Get over it!”

    To say the least, the meaning of the statement “transwomen are women” is not obvious, either intuitively or logically. It’s a claim that many people find hard to understand, not because they are bigots but because it seems at odds with material reality. It would be more accurate to say: “Transwomen are transwomen, which raises many complex intellectual, political, and moral questions. Let’s work out solutions that respect everyone’s rights and interests!”

    Not the catchiest slogan, but accurate and honest. It’s a t-shirt that I think Stock would be comfortable wearing. She doesn’t condemn or mock trans people but rather seeks deeper understanding to make public policy choices as fair as possible for all.

    Whether or not one embraces Stock’s conclusions, she argues with precision and follows the widely accepted rules of intellectual engagement that require evidence and logic to establish a proposition. If that’s the case—and I can’t imagine any open-minded reader accusing her of intellectual fraud or bad faith—then why have Stock and many others with similar views been denounced on either intellectual, political, or moral grounds? She writes:

    I find it particularly telling that academics who are strongly critical of views like mine, as expressed in this book, tend not to address them with argument or evidence—as would be expected, given disciplinary norms—but often instead resort, relatively unusually for such norms, to complaints about my presumed motives or personal failings. They also tend rhetorically to collapse criticism of the intellectual tenets of trans activism into moral criticism of trans people.

    Stock points out why this should worry everyone, even people who may never have direct experience with transgender policies or are not interested in philosophical debates:

    treating males with female gender identities as women in every possible context is a politically inflammatory act. In effect it sends a contemptuously dismissive message to women already conscious of unequal treatment of their interests. This message says: the interests of males with female gender identities are more important than yours.

    In short: Many of the demands of transgender politics are anti-feminist. If that’s a plausible claim, then why have so many feminists and feminist organizations embraced the transgender ideology? Stock suggests one factor is “the current cultural mania for ‘diversity and inclusion,’ taken as some kind of mindless mantra without genuine thought being given to what it actually means or should be doing.” The struggle for social justice is impeded, not advanced, when transwomen can insist that they must be included in any space on their terms, without explaining or justifying the policy and without regard for the effects on girls and women. Stock points out that just as replacing “Black lives matter” with “all lives matter” undermines anti-racist campaigns by ignoring the specific threats to Black people in a racist society, demanding that transwomen always be included in the category “woman” undermines feminism’s ability to advance the interests of girls and women, who face specific threats in a sexist society.

    It’s easy for people to get confused by, and frustrated with, the debate on this issue, which is too often weighed down by jargon and abstract theory. So, let’s get back to the core questions:

    • Is gender an internal subjective experience, the origins of which have yet to be explained, or is it produced by social and political systems, which can be analyzed and put in historical context?
    • Is gender immutable and private, or are gender norms open to change through collective action?
    • Is institutionalized male dominance best understood by analyzing individuals’ internal sense of gender identities, or is patriarchy rooted in men’s claim of a right to own or control women’s reproductive power and sexuality?

    The reference to “reality” in Stock’s subtitle suggests that absent a clear and convincing account of sex, gender, and power from the transgender movement, the feminist and gender-critical perspectives offer the best account of biology and history, of psychology and society.

    Since that first article I wrote in 2014, I have talked with steadily more and more progressive people who feel pressured by the transgender movement to embrace trans policy proposals without asking questions. Too often, that pressure works. Are we creating a healthy political culture on the left when people and organizations believe they have no choice but to adopt policy positions they either don’t understand or disagree with? Are progressive politics advance when legitimate differences of opinion are muted because people fear being accused of bigotry?

    Stock’s work—along with other books such as Heather Brunskell-Evans’ Transgender Body Politics and websites such as Fair Play for Women—is a valuable resource for people who want to work their way through these questions rather than simply accept the ideology or policy proposals of the transgender movement. Even if Stock’s book doesn’t change trans activists’ minds, it provides a model of principled intellectual engagement with compassion.

    I say “compassion” because Stock is trans-friendly, as are most of us who hold feminist and gender-critical positions. Stock doesn’t condemn or attack trans people but instead offers a different way to understand the experience of gender dysphoria and a different politics for challenging a patriarchal system that is the source of so much suffering and distress.

    Feminist politics is not a denial of trans people’s experiences but an alternative way to understand those experiences that does not involve drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. Feminist politics is an embrace of our differences and a way to live with those differences collectively, as we struggle to eliminate the hierarchies that impede our ability to thrive.

    [Note: Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism was published in the UK in May and is scheduled for release in the US edition in September.]

    The post Making Sense of Sex and Gender first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Few Thoughts on White Identity

    I may well be among the few people here who’ve only recently come across Robin DiAngelo’s immensely popular book, White Fragility: Why White People Have Such a Hard Time Talking About Racism, but I’ll share a few of my reactions. In my opinion, this book starkly epitomizes the dangerous consequences when discussions of white identity are divorced from class analysis. After George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police, Di Angelo’s “antiracism” training manual ascended to the top of Amazon’s best seller list. The author is a white, liberal, female sociologist who specializes in wokesplaining about whiteness to other whites. She coined the term “white fragility” in 2011 to mean the immense strain — in her words, they suffer a “a meltdown” — produced when whites are called out on their racist attitudes and behavior.

    In what has become a highly lucrative cottage industry, DiAngelo facilitates diversity training workshops and in addition to elite university administrations and government agencies, her clients include corporations like Nike, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola, CVS, Levi Strauss & Co, W.L. Gore (makers of Goretex) Google, Under Armour, Netflix and American Express. She was even a guest on The Tonight Show, where host Jimmy Fallon was reverential and gushing in his praise. DiAngelo has reportedly made over $2 million off her book and 60-90 minute talks reap up to $30,000, a two-hour workshop $35,000 and half day events, $40,00. Tickets to her public presentations range up to $160 and you can engage in telephone correspondence with DiAngelo for $320 per hour. In 2020, her three homes were reportedly valued at $1.6 million.

    Just 10 days after Floyd’ death, Nancy Pelosi introduced DiAngelo’s Zoom address to 184 Democratic members of Congress in what was designated a “Democratic Caucus family discussion on race.” For Democratic Party leaders and corporate PR departments, consultants of DiAngelo’s ilk are a wet dream of how to address racism because, as Bhasker Sundara rightly asserts, “The more that blame can be shifted to individual ‘Karens,’ the less onus is on powerful corporations, and the politicians who defend them to make real change in our system of racialized capitalism.”

    I’m reminded of Rhyd Wildemuth’s observation that “White people who identify more with their whiteness over their material conditions, protect the capitalists (most of whom have the same color of skin as them). Identifying instead with their material conditions and their history of displacement would show them they have more in common with poor black people than they ever will with the rich.”1 Of course, the ‘white race” isn’t real; it doesn’t actually exist. We know that prior to the Enlightenment, people saw themselves as members of a clan, tribe, religion or geographic region. Europeans didn’t think of themselves as “white people” until it emerged from the confluence of settler colonialism and the artificial contraction of “whiteness.” In The Price of Admission, in 1985, James Baldwin wrote: “White people are not white: Part of the price of the ticket is deluding themselves into believing they are.” And Dr. Gerald Horne adroitly depicts this transformation as follows:

    All of sudden when crossing the Atlantic, in a narrow manner that would make Madison Blush, all are rebranded as ‘white’ which subsumes many of the tensions, ethnic and class among them, in a new monetized and militarized ‘identity politics’ of whiteness based on expropriation of the indigenous and enslavement of the Africans. 2

    This is not to suggest that the social construct of whiteness, its sociology, does not continue to have a real impact on real lives. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a better, consciously conceived and malicious identity than the white race. It’s the sleight of hand deceit that conceals the underlying brutality of our capitalist economic order.

    In perusing DiAngelo’s book, which lacks an index, one searches in vain for the word “capitalism.” However, in an interview with Daniel Berger, published in the New York Times (July 15, 2020), DiAngelo abruptly volunteered that “Capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass.” So why isn’t that included in her diversity training workshops? Because, she replied, “Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid criticizing capitalism —I don’t need to give people a reason to dismiss me.” When asked for any reasons to be optimistic, DiAngelo mentioned NASCAR’S banning of Confederate flags and the renaming of military bases.

    DiAngelo asserts that “racism is the foundation of our society” and because we all grow up in America’s deeply racist culture, all white people — no exceptions — are collectively racist, including younger people. Commenting specifically on the latter, she writes: “I’m often asked if I think the younger generation is less racist. No, I don’t.” (P. 50). What to do? According to her, after acknowledging one’s racism, the quintessential question for white people to ask themselves is: “How have I been shaped by society?” This explanation is deeply suspect because, as Michael Parenti has often reminded us, cultural explanations are all too often closer to tautologies than actual explanations. That is, the culture itself is what needs to be explained. Who created it and what were their motives? Those questions and their system destabilizing answers are off the table for DiAngelo.

    In a widely circulated critique of DiAngelo’s training manual, University of Tennessee history professor, David Barber, succinctly zeroed in on the consequences of avoiding class analysis. I sense it’s a message we should emphasize in conversations with other white folks and it merits this lengthy quotation:

    White supremacy is not only white over black, it is also the small number of rich whites over the much larger number of rich whites over the much larger number of poor and working class whites. In return for a guarantee that the latter group of whites will suffer the many calamities of life afforded working people less intensely and less frequently than do people of color, the poor and the working class will not challenge the rule of the rich. [T]he contradiction of white supremacy for the poor and the working class is not that white supremacy advances us but that it ties us to our own oppression… It’s the bribe to keep the poor and working class passive in the face of their own oppression. 3

    In response to my query on this topic, Michael Yates, an economist, labor educator, writer and editor at Monthly Review, put it this way:

    White workers simply don’t want to fall as low as they think nonwhite workers are, not just economically but socially and politically.

    That is, as bad as things are or might become, whites are not at very bottom of the pecking order where Black people are. Their fear is that their white status will be undermined by any African-American gains. Pitiful as it it, this may be as concise, revelatory and serviceable a definition we can put forward for white skin privilege.

    Finally, by positing the ineluctability of white racism — the flat out futility of thinking that white attitudes can change — DiAngelo’s book uncannily dovetails with Afropessimism, an analysis most closely identified with Prof. Frank Wilderson and one that also further fragments and abandons the crucial necessity of solidarity and multi-racial struggle. I may by mistaken but by my reading, the latter neglects and negates Black agency in the present and future and also fosters the belief that white people are incapable of renouncing racism which, in turn, contributes to pervasive feelings of hopelessness. Needless to say, both schools of thought lend welcome camouflage to corporate elites and their willing enablers, in part, because racial capitalism depends on manufacturing this white ignorance.

    1. Rhyd Wildemuth, Fascism and the Deadlock of Race, Gods & Radicals Press, September 5, 2020.
    2. Gerald Horne, “Against Left-Wing White Nationalism,” Black Agenda Report, May 26, 2021.
    3. David Barber, “Renouncing White Privilege: A Left Critique of Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility,’” Counterpunch, August 3, 2020.
    The post A Few Thoughts on White Identity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Book review of “The Water Defenders” tells the story of environmental defenders in El Salvador

    In Toward Freedom of 31 May 2021 Charlotte Dennett reviews the book “The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed“. It is a very uplifting story that teaches a lot about how to continue a sometimes hopeless-looking case

    The Water Defenders

    At a time when all caring people are seeking a new way forward out of a year of unimaginable death, destruction and rampant inequality, along comes a book that gives us hope that a better world may be possible. The book, recently published, is based on a struggle in a small section of a small country—El Salvador—beginning in 2002, when a group of “white men in suits” entered the province of Cabañas and tried to convince poor farmers that gold mining would be good for them. Their resistance, done at great peril and resulting in the assassinations of some of their leaders, ended up years later in a landmark case against corporate greed, garnering support from around the world. The basis of their success lies in the most fundamental of human needs: Water, for which left-right antagonisms fall apart once the deadly consequences of mining’s misuse of it—including causing cyanide poisoning—become patently clear.

    Authors Robin Broad and John Cavanagh have brought us this amazing David versus Goliath story in their new book, The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved A Country from Corporate Greed. Their first-hand accounts of working with front-line communities, both in El Salvador and in the United States. provide lessons along the way about how to fight an immensely powerful entity and win, whether the enemy be Big Gold, Big Oil or Big Pharma (to name a few). As they write in their introduction, “You may find yourselves surprised to find the relevance of the strategies of the water defenders in El Salvador, whether your focus is on a Walmart in Washington DC; a fracking company trying to expand in Texas or Pennsylvania, or petrochemical companies outside New Orleans.” By the end of the book, they added relevant struggles in countries like Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, as well as in South Africa, South Korea, and India.

    In an interview with John Cavanagh, I asked if he and Robin had an inkling of the huge ramifications of their story right from the beginning, and his answer was decidedly no. In fact, when they first got involved, back in 2009, they never expected to win. They knew what they were up against and had no illusions. As they wrote about the ensuing years of twist-and-turn battles lost and won, the authors described a combination of events that made the water defenders’ decades-long struggle unusual… Yet now, with lessons learned, replicable.

    Their involvement with the water defenders began in October 2009. That month, the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive organization “dedicated to building a more equitable, ecologically sustainable, and peaceful society,” invited a group of Salvadorian water defenders to accept IPS’s annual Letelier Human Rights Award for their struggle against Pacific Rim (PacRim), a huge Canadian gold-mining company that sought permits in El Salvador. [See: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/06351cb8-8cc0-4bdd-ac3a-2f7ee5a0b553]That year’s award was particularly poignant because one of the awardees, Marcelo Rivera, had been assassinated the month before. Five people still came to Washington, with Marcelo’s brother, Miguel, traveling in his place. Leading the delegation was a small-statured, seemingly nervous Vidalina Morales. But when she stepped up to the podium at the National Press Club and began her acceptance speech, her voice filled the room with a sense of urgency. She described the dangers of gold mining—for drinking water, for fishing and for agriculture. By the time she got to explaining the use of toxic cyanide in separating the gold from the rock, she had the audience—including the authors—mesmerized.

    Miguel Rivera in front of anti-mining mural in his town in northern El Salvador
    Miguel Rivera in front of anti-mining mural in his town in northern El Salvador / credit: John Cavanagh

    Another factor made this occasion different. Cavanagh, who is the director of IPS, explained that usually the awardees arrive in Washington to accept their awards and return home. But on this occasion, “They asked for our help. El Salvador had just been sued by PacRim in an international tribunal that argued that El Salvador had to allow it to mine gold or pay over $300 million in costs and ‘foregone profits.’ They also asked if we could help them with research on companies involved in gold mining.”

    John had previously engaged with IPS in fighting against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and had become familiar with the tribunal and the rules set by the World Bank involved in regulating a global economy. Robin Broad, for her part, had written her doctoral dissertation and first book on the World Bank, and she had worked on the bank at her job with the U.S. Treasury Department in the mid-1980s. But she was less familiar with the workings of the tribunal the World Bank had set up in 1964, “The International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).” Its mission was to hear cases brought by foreign investors demanding compensation for lost profits from countries that tried to limit or regulate their activities. The couple figured they could be helpful.

    “That’s how we were drawn in,” John explained, while emphasizing the extraordinary role local Salvadorans played in educating local communities about the dangers of landfills and then the dangers of gold mining. It was their groundbreaking work, often under dangerous conditions, that had earned them the Letelier award.

    What happened next is a remarkable story of a growing North-South alliance that eventually went global, succeeding in two monumental victories: 1) a decision by ICSID in October 2016 that rejected PacRim’s claims for damages, while ordering the corporation to pay El Salvador $8 million in costs, and 2) the world’s first-ever comprehensive metals mining ban, brought by the El Salvador legislature in March 2019.

    The Challenge

    Up until 2016, Cavanagh explained, “we never thought we would win.” But that did not stop the momentum of coalition building, which had begun as early as 2005 by local village defenders, human rights advocates, farmers, lawyers, Catholic organizations and Oxfam America. They united to call themselves the National Roundtable on Metallic Mining, or La Mesa Frente a la Mineria Metálica—La Mesa for short. Their ultimate goal, beyond building resistance at the local level, “seemed like a pipe dream,” the authors wrote. That goal? “Getting the Salvadoran Congress to pass a new national law banning metal mining.”

    Over the years, spurred on by their quest to find out who was responsible for Marcelo’s murder, the water defenders and their international allies yielded a treasure trove of insights on how to fight the Men in Suits, regardless of the outcome. Here are just a few lessons learned from their struggles described in the book:

    • Listen to the horror stories coming from refugees, in this case, those fleeing Honduras. Marcelo; his brother, Miguel; and Vidalina made several trips to Honduras to learn more about the gold mines there. (Honduras had become a haven for Big Gold after the 2009 coup). They returned with “shocking stories of rivers poisoned by cyanide, of dying fish and skin disease, of displaced communities, denuded forests, and corruption and conflict catalyzed by mining company payoffs.” Those trips, the authors write, made a huge impression on the water defenders and “crystallized their thinking… They were vigilant researchers, thirsty to know more.”
    • Seek out unexpected allies. One was Luis Parada, a Salvadoran government lawyer with a military background. As it turned out, he was a disciple of Sun Tsu, a Chinese military strategist from 2,500 years ago, who had written The Art of War. Among the lessons Parada (and Sun Tsu) imparted: “Know thy adversaries”—be one step ahead of them, and also know your possible allies. “Befriend a distant state while attacking a neighbor.” Luis also offered valuable practical advice, including the fact that the Sheraton Hotel in the capital, with its bar and pool, “offered some of the best intelligence in El Salvador.” Another unexpected ally was the ultra-conservative Archbishop Saenz Lacalle, a member of the right wing Opus Dei. “All it had taken was the word cyanide,” the authors explain, to cause him to oppose mining. His replacement in 2008, Archbishop Escobar, followed suit. He was “hardly an activist cleric,” but he “had long-held unexpected and firm views on mining,” and in his inaugural messages called on the government to reject mining operations in El Salvador. Getting the Catholic Church behind the water defenders was crucial. The martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, “whose photo is omnipresent throughout the country,” was no doubt a factor for widespread community support behind the water defenders, as was the encyclical put out by Pope Francis urging priests to take to the streets to defend the environment. Yet another surprise endorsement came from a member of one of El Salvador’s richest families and a leader of the right-wing ARENA party, which dominated the legislature. It turned out that John Wright Sol had a passion for the environment. Also noteworthy: His family’s vast sugar plantations consumed a lot of water. As he studied the impact of mining on water, he reached out to fellow members of ARENA. “I didn’t want to turn this into mining companies are the devil,” he advised. Instead, he chose to emphasize that “every citizen in the country must have access to clear water.”
    • Be wary of corporate PR campaigns. PacRim put out a report emphasizing that a whopping 36,000 jobs would be created from its mining operations, a vastly inflated claim. In radio interviews, PacRim aimed separate messages to the ARENA party and to the left-wing FMLN party, in which it claimed revenues would fund social agendas. Trips abroad arranged by PacRim often resulted in swaying politicians, whether on the left or right, to support their corporate agenda.
    • No matter how big, corporations can make mistakes. OceanaGold, a Canadian-Australian mining company which took over PacRim in 2014, had put on a brave face after the ICSID ruled against PacRim, acting as though it had won, and refusing to cough up the $8 million the company owed El Salvador. Yet it made a fatal error by choosing its mining operations in The Philippines as an example of its environmentally pristine practices. Robin Broad knew otherwise, and along with other international allies had cultivated a professional relationship with the governor of the Philippine province where OceanaGold had its mine. Governor Carlos Padilla arrived in El Salvador on the eve of the crucial legislative vote on the mining bill and presented a “before and after” slideshow to the Environmental Committee. He pictured a lush landscape before the mining, contrasted with images of waste-filled “tailings ponds,” dead trees, dried-up springs and rivers, dead fish on river banks, and, as he explained, “No access to water for drinking or for irrigation.” He ended with an appeal to future generations. “Grandpa,” he imagined them asking. “Why did you allow mining?” 

    His presentation was “sort of a clincher,” Cavanagh told me. “It raised the level of indignation.” The legislative vote followed soon afterwards, on March 29, 2019. The results were stunning, with 69 votes tallied against OceanaGold, zero nays and zero abstentions. Shouts of Sí, Se Puede!—“Yes we can!”—erupted from the floor, as members of La Mesa waved banners that read, “No a la Minería, Sí a la Vida”—No to Mining. Yes to Life!

    Children performing on the 10th anniversary of Marcelo Rivera’s assassination
    Children performing on the 10th anniversary of El Salvadorean water defender Marcelo Rivera’s assassination / credit: John Cavanagh

    Today, the water defenders remain cautiously optimistic, though constantly on guard. In the past, mining corporations have been able to convince even leftist governments that mining is good for the economy. Cavanagh speculates mayors of small towns, pressured to provide jobs, may have been behind the assassination of Marcelo Rivera and other water defenders.

    But to date, Marcelo’s killers have never been identified. On an equally sobering note, he and Board remind us in the book that “over 1,700 environmental defenders had been killed across 50 countries between 2002 and 2018.”

    I asked John for an update since finishing his book in mid-2020. Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s “new Trump-like president,” he wrote, “hasn’t raised mining, and it doesn’t look like he is personally interested. He knows the public opinion polls that showed that the overwhelming majority of Salvadorans are opposed to mining.”

    However, he added, “We remain worried. El Salvador, like all developing countries, is suffering economically after the pandemic, and other countries have increased mining to get more revenues. So, La Mesa remains vigilant against any actions that could indicate that the government wants to mine.”

    We can only hope that water defenders around the world will strengthen their alliances. Fortunately, they now have a handbook that will help them in their journey of resistance.

    Charlotte Dennett is the co-author with Gerard Colby of Thy Will be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. Her new book is The Crash of Flight 3804: A Lost Spy, A Daughter’s Quest, and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.

    The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh. Boston: Beacon Press; 2nd edition. March 23, 2021.

    For a bit more critical review see: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/el-salvador-s-water-defenders-and-fight-against-toxic-mining

    Book Review: “The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed”

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Time for a New Toolbox

    Though his story has been widely disseminated by now, before Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong he sent a box of classified documents by snail mail from Hawaii (marked mysteriously “from B. Manning”) to a writer in New York, which made its way, unopened, from person to person until it reached journalists Laura Poitras and Glen Greenwald, who went on to meet with Snowden and tell his story of global panoptic surveillance affecting just about everybody online.

    The story, Snowden’s ToolBox: Trust in the Age of Surveillance, by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, is, as the authors emphasize, a story of trust in an age of paranoia and suspicion. They’re keen to tell us, tag-team style, how the world has changed since the events of 9/11, with the militarization of the Internet, and the rise of surveillance capitalism, leading to a pervasive sense that privacy is no longer viable. We’ve succumbed to the sad notion that if we have ‘nothing to hide’ then we needn’t worry about Big Brother watching over us.

    Many readers will be familiar with Jessica Bruder’s work through the adaptation of her travel memoir, Nomadland, which recently won the Oscar for best film, and for which she worked with the director Chloé Zhao to create a screenplay. Her road travels, living the life of a nomad for months, and talking Studs Terkel-like to American wanderers, travelling from job to job as a lifestyle, jibes quite nicely with co-author Dale Maharidge’s background. Maharidge won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for And Their Children After Them, his follow-on to the James Agee study of Alabama sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. They’re People people, and so are the cadre of journalists and independent filmmakers they hook up with in telling this side story.

    The first half of the book retells the now-familiar story of how and why Edward Snowden stole highly classified documents from NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and handed them over to Poitras and Greenwald, who went on to make a film, Citizenfour, and detail his revelations in the Guardian. The co-authors quote Snowden judiciously; in an interview shortly after he outs himself on TV, Snowden tells us that the surveillance state he’s seen represents “an existential threat to democracy…I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”

    Bruder explains that Snowden had wanted to have his revelations run in the New York Times, the nation’s preeminent paper of record, but was seriously bummed out when they quashed an October 2004 article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that exposed Stellar Wind, the government’s illegal dragnet of American electronic communications. The Bush administration had denied such activity.

    Bruder writes, “Approaching the New York Times…was out of the question. Snowden didn’t have confidence that the newspaper would have the guts to break the story… The scoop was scheduled to run right before the 2004 elections, but Executive Editor Bill Keller deferred to Bush administration officials, who claimed the revelations would damage national security.” When the story finally broke, more than a year later, it caused a political furor and popular outcry.

    A more intriguing section in Snowden’s Toolbox comes when Bruder talks about how Poitras and Greenwald got together after the Snowden revelations began running in the Guardian and were invited by Ebay billionaire Pierre Omidyar to start up a new publication — The Intercept. It was meant to be a solid alternative to the corporatized MSM and a trustworthy reporting platform for whistleblowers. The publication garnered and poached some of the best journalistic talent from NYT and WaPo and elsewhere and seemed, at first, like the Travelling Wilburys of journalism.

    But there was trouble from the start. The Terms of Service (TOS) made it clear that readers could be expected to have their presence at the site logged and their comments scanned by Google Adsense and Amazon’s algorithms. Such surveillance was troublesome, if for no other reason than that the Intercept’s readership were probably the types the State would want to gather details about.

    It recalled the deal that Greenwald had signed with Amazon to promote his Pulitzer Prize-winning post-Snowden account of the surveillance state, No Place to Hide. Viewers of the site were offered an opportunity to receive Greenwald’s book for free, if they applied and were successfully approved for an Amazon credit card. The application details would be processed by Chase, who Greenwald had once excoriated for their corrupt practices. But more importantly, by accepting the deal from Amazon, Greenwald was effectively promoting the forwarding of private information to a corporation that would collect and store that data – from exactly the kind of readers the State would be eager to parse.

    We learn that Laura Poitras, co-founder of The Intercept, was turned down when she wanted to continue working with the Snowden trove of documents, which First Look Media, owner of The Intercept, told her “the company would own all rights to any publication that resulted from our writing about the Snowden archive.” And that, she continues, “Notes we took at the archive would be confiscated for review — and possible redaction — by the Intercept.” And she added: “I laughed. The experience felt like something out of Kafka. And it gave me a sense of déjà vu, echoing how the NSA and the FBI had shut down our request to see our files.” The Intercept has since stopped writing altogether about the Snowden archive.

    It gets worse when the reader learns that Laura Poitras was stiffed by The Intercept in her compensation package. Bruder writes, “Laura had been facing challenges of her own at the company, including the startling realization that her compensation was far below that of her male colleagues Greenwald and (Jeremy) Scahill.” Unbeknownst to her, Scahill and Greenwald had renegotiated their contracts, and the resulting pay disparity was “in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

    Toward the end of the book, Bruder and Maharidge, the leit motif is repeated. Trust — at the interpersonal level, work environment and social contract with the State — is key. They write, “Trust is the basis of all cooperative action in a free society. It’s the feeling of fellowship that allows people to take risks and grow. It’s also the underpinning of democracy. And it’s fragile, easy to undermine.”

    Succinct, true, and well put.

    All in all, Snowden’s Toolbox is a good read, with humor, intelligence, and a welcome sense of journalistic collegiality. An Appendix offers a “toolbox” of stuff journalists and readers can do to maintain their privacy and the documents of their whistleblowing sources.

    The post Time for a New Toolbox first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Dissolving the State Won’t be Easy

    The State is anti-societal; some would say sociopathic. It is elitist; it is riven by affiliation with a “Core Identity Group” contraposed to the Other; in most countries, the State provides and secures the basis for capitalism to flourish, separating the population into a few haves and multitudes of have-nots. While capital flows more-or-less freely across borders, workers are at a disadvantage since they do not enjoy the same freedom of movement. Eric Laursen, in his book The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State, discusses the aforementioned and other intricacies of the State and why anarchists find the State abhorrent.

    The Operating System identifies the starting point for understanding the State being its legal, administrative, and decision-making structure — the government. (p 60) The State is the government; its writes the laws; its police, festishized by mass media, enforce the laws while shielded from accountability for their actions by qualified immunity. Prejudice forms the underbelly to the State and, hence, its “vested interest in maintaining if not promoting sexism, gender inequity, homophobia, and transphobia.” (p 177)

    That the State is regressivist, that it promotes elitism and eschews diversity, that it is anti-democratic is made clear: “Today, the State is well on its way to creating, for the first time in human history, a worldwide monoculture tied to a uniform economic model and a single pattern of governance by a self-selecting global elite.” (p 26) But the masses are inculcated to believe the State is a necessity. (p 27)

    In chapter 4, Laursen points to the European origin and cultural domination of the State. (p 84) It is a big monoculture that is hegemonic. (p 111-112) Yet, it was acknowledged in chapter 3 that not all States are the same; there are different “Versions of the Operating System.”

    The State is an out-of-control abomination. Laursen quotes political theorist Chandran Kukuthas who points out that while the State is a human creation, it has evolved into something ungovernable by humans. (p 11) Among the crimes of the State are warring, genocide, racism, elitism (the State is organized hierarchically, although not necessarily by meritocracy1 ), and setting up barriers to certain humans: the Others.

    For example: “The State does not contain Indigenous peoples who’ve never accepted the rule of a state and never adopted a functional role within it.” (p 23)

    Nineteenth century European anarchists were staunchly opposed to any type of authoritarianism, especially the State, and held the conviction that capitalism couldn’t be abolished without the simultaneous abolishment of the State. (p 15) This probably holds true for most anarchists today.

    Opposition to authoritarianism forms the backdrop for Laursen to inordinately beam his criticism at the State on China. The “authoritarian, one-party China” even gets lumped together with the “absolute monarchy” in Saudi Arabia and with the theocratic Islamic State (ISIS). (p 150) The error here is that one is led to presume that all forms of authoritarianism are the same and that all are equally anathema. Moreover, authoritarianism seems to be applied, more or less, specifically to non-western States. However, which State is not by definition authoritarian?

    Is The Operating System Sinophobic?

    Especially in recent years, China has been under unceasing criticism by the West and western mass media. The Operating System is also relentless throughout for its criticism of China. No State should be above criticism, but such criticism must be factually accurate and substantiated by whoever generates the criticism. I find that The Operating System fails miserably to substantiate its claims against China. When it does provide endnotes or footnotes for its claims, The Operating System diminishes its verisimilitude by citing western corporate media sources for such claims.

    In the second chapter, “The State and COVID-19,” Sinophobia2 becomes palpable. Laursen states, “… the virus emerged in China…” (p 31 — no substantiation) Usually, when I find myself in doubt about proffered information, I look for substantiation to support a contention. Did SARS-CoV-2 originate in China? China state media, CGTN, has challenged that depiction presenting evidence that it arose simultaneously in France and before that in the United States: “A legitimate Question: when did COVID-19 first appear in the U.S.?” The Chinese state media’s evidence can be challenged, but at least CGTN provided evidence which Laursen did not.

    Viruses can arise from various locales on the planet. The Spanish flu arose in the US; the Ebola virus arose in Africa; the H1N1 swine flu pandemic arose in Mexico. Pinpointing the source of a pandemic may seem uncritical, but Laursen followed up the sourcing of COVID-19 to China by writing that “China has developed possibly the most thorough and minutely controlling state system in the world.” (p 31) Criticism of China continues in the next paragraph: “Arguably, China was slow to address the underlying conditions that allowed the virus to spread, increasing the odds of a breakout epidemic…” The peer-review medical journal The Lancet did not find China to be slow. It found, “While the world is struggling to control COVID-19, China has managed to control the pandemic rapidly and effectively.” [italics added] The words that I italicized point to uncertainty by Laursen. Laursen provides no evidence or rationale to support his contention.

    Nonetheless, Laursen is equally scathing of the US response to the pandemic; the $500 billion for the newly jobless, a pittance compared to that offered to businesses.

    While Washington often complains that it has no money for social spending; safety-net programs or old-age pensions, in reality this is nonsense: its power to spend and to support the economic units it values is unlimited. The difference is who the State deems worthy of support. (p 54)

    Laursen tars most large countries with the same brush of a “disastrous government response” to COVID-19 (China, the US, Russia, Brazil, etc). (p 41 ) Contrariwise, the peer-review journal Science noted early on that “China’s aggressive measures have slowed the coronavirus.” The New England Journal of Medicine reported a “Rapid Response to an Outbreak in Qingdao, China.” Canadian Dimension headlined: “The difference between the US and China’s response to COVID-19 is staggering.”

    The Operating System gloms on to the western bugbear accusing China of persecuting ethnicities in its autonomous provinces: “Tibetans and Uighurs suffer [empire building] as Beijing encourages Han Chinese to establish themselves in Tibet and Xinjiang…” (p 79 — no substantiation) First, Xinjiang and Tibet are regions in China where the US and its CIA have long sought to stir up ethnic revolt against Communism.3 Second, a longtime student of China, Godfree Roberts, wrote that Tibetan fear of Han Chinese vanished when they noticed that the Han were just trying to eke out a living. Most Han Chinese did not thrive and left within a few years.4 Third, China liberated Tibet from serfdom under the lamas. Some Tibetans still regard Mao Zedong as their emancipator; they say their life is better now than under the Dalai Lama; and Tibetans remain free to practice their religion.5 Fourth, the Chinese government has sent tens of thousands of anti-poverty workers to Xinjiang who identified opportunities for the people of Xinjiang, improved infrastructure for access to markets, had major corporations relocate to Xinjiang, and Beijing moved whole universities to Xinjiang.6 Is this empire building? It was building up the Xinjiang economy. Yet Laursen charges that Beijing was underwriting the “ethnic Chinese colonization of Xinjiang.” (p 106) Laursen does not substantiate this claim, but offers an explanation: “[E]conomic rationalizations, are mostly rationalizations.” (p 106) This explanation is far from compelling. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has put the people first throughout the country. It stems from the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Mandate of Heaven — something hard to dismiss as just a rationalization.

    Laursen cites the Wall Street Journal to build a case for “cultural erasure” against Uyghurs by “demolishing some eighty-five hundred mosques” in Xinjiang. (p 106, 154) This erasure, contends Laursen, has been the intent since the days of chairman Mao Zedong. (p 125 — no substantiation) A comparison of respect for the sanctity of mosques in China with western states such as France and the US refutes the disinformation that The Operating System proffers. In the case of mosque and building demolitions in Xinjiang, it is about improving living and safety standards, a process into which Uyghurs have input and choices.7

    Laursen charges that China uses government surveillance to manage and control population (p 148 — no substantiation). No one denies the prevalence of CCTV cameras, but what is not delineated is what is meant by “manage” and “control” of the population.

    Laursen warns that China’s social-credit program collects data on individuals which can lead to blacklisting for ‘untrustworthy’ persons. (p 102) This plays into the western mass media demonization of data collection in China while ignoring that the West, as revealed by Edward Snowden (p 147), does the same. (p 138-140) That is what the CIA, NSA, Facebook, and social media do.

    From first-hand experience, my impression is that most Chinese people like the social-credit program. Imagine that! Being rewarded for paying bills on time, being able to book rail tickets, tickets to attractions easily online. For those people who refuse to pay bills, child support, fines, or engage in other untrustworthy activities, the question is: should or shouldn’t they be revealed and compelled to make amends? Most Chinese seem of the opinion that they should be compelled.8

    Laursen complains about the blurring of lines between State and capital in providing “nominally private” security for the Belt and Road Initiative while noting the staff are veterans of the People’s Liberation Army. (p 108) Laursen sources the discredited right-wing Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal.

    The author writes of protests against Beijing’s increasing encroachment on Hong Kong’s autonomy. (p 110) Encroachment? Hong Kong is not sovereign; it is part of China. One country-two systems remains in place. Moreover, Beijing allowed Hong Kong to deal with the protestors/rioters:

    What about the protests/riots that have resumed in Hong Kong? What triggered those protests? Some citizens were opposed to extradition of alleged criminals? How has China responded to rioting, sabotage, terrorism, separatism, and even murders by the so-called protestors? Hong Kong is a territory having been a under British colonial administration from 1841 to 1997 when it reverted to mainland China as a special autonomous region; it must be noted that once the original demands [of the protestors] for rescinding the extradition bill were met, the goal posts of the NED-supported protestors transformed into a purported democracy movement.

    Has China responded with military force? No. With arrests of law-abiding journalists? No. With police brutality? Most observers will acknowledge that police have been incredibly restrained, some would say too restrained in the face of protestor violence.

    The protestors, largely disaffected youth, as is apparent in all or most video footage, by and large employ random violence as a tactic, which they do not condemn. This was made clear by Hong Kong protest leader Joey Siu, during an interview with Deutsche Welle, who said she “will not do any kind of public condemnation” for the use of unjustified violence by protesters against residents who do not share their political views.

    The anarchist author also compares the one-party China to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy stating that China is elitist. (p 121) It is true that the CPC effectively rules China, but it is inaccurate to say China is a one-party State, as there are many political parties in China. One could rightfully argue that the US and Canada are effectively one-party States since two business parties with little to distinguish them apart alternate to form the government. The Chinese political system is different in that unlike the bickering among business parties in Canada and the US, the CPC and other parties in China pull together for the good of the country and its citizens. Laursen, however, argues that two-party democracies are preferable to a one-party system because this provides a venue for “citizens to channel their preferences into effective vehicles for competition and governance.” (p 160) Laursen does acknowledge that the “real purpose” of the two-party system is “to block anti-capitalist and anti-State movements.” (p 162)

    The root of the criticism of being a one-party State is seemingly directed at the State not being democratic. Australian journalist and author Wei Ling Chua challenges the western narrative on what constitutes democracy and finds the West is sorely behind in serving the needs of its people compared to China.9 Roberts writes compellingly on what constitutes genuine democracy:

    While there is an obvious tension between the ideals of democracy and the realities of power, it is fair to say that governments that consistently produce the outcomes that their citizens desire are democratic, while those that consistently fail to produce the outcomes their citizens desire … are not. By that definition, China is clearly democratic and the United States is clearly not.10

    Chinese citizens clearly seem pleased with their form of government. A recent York University-led survey of 19,816 Chinese citizens post-pandemic revealed trust in the national government at 98 percent.

    Mega-projects are intertwined with being a State. Interesting to Laursen is that these projects were carried out by “representative democracies”11 as well as by “authoritarian states.” Interestingly, he points to the “subjugation and settlement of the American West” and the spreading neoliberalism worldwide as not being carried out by an authoritarian State. (p 155)

    Laursen charges, “In Hong Kong in 2019, the Chinese government threw unprecedented force at large but peaceful prodemocracy demonstrations…” (p 169) First, the Chinese government “threw” no force at the demonstrations. Mainland Chinese security forces did not police the Hong Kong riots. Second, calling the demonstrations “peaceful” is risible disinformation.12 Third, the demonstrations were not about “prodemocracy.” The goal of the demonstrations morphed following attainment of the initial goal to prevent coming into law an extradition bill with mainland China, something Hong Kong has with the US and UK. Fourth, the funding of the protestors/rioters in Hong Kong traces back to the US and its notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

    Surely Laursen is aware of the Propaganda Model propounded by anarchist professor Noam Chomsky and lead author Edward Herman in their much praised Manufacturing Consent. So why does he cite an oft discredited corporate media publication, the Guardian, to accuse China of sterilizing Uyghur women? (p 224) This is patently false given the burgeoning Uyghur population.

    There are a litany of criticisms sprinkled throughout The Operating System about China. It causes one to wonder why this preponderence given that China is a State that has lifted all its population out of extreme poverty: no homelessness, no dumpster diving, no begging!

    Overcoming the State

    The modern State is an instrument of violence, war, conquest, repression, and counterinsurgency. The State can repress rebellion because it is above the law, and it uses the military to drive the economy. To gain rights, benefits, and respect for human rights, the population has had to rise up or revolt against the State. (p 88-89)

    Yet Laursen finds that anarchists seemingly “shy away from directly addressing the State…” (p 16) Capitalism is an adjunct to the main target, as Laursen writes, “… the fundamental problem isn’t capital or the wage system, it’s the State.” (p 20)

    By emphasizing direct action, anarchism reflects a growing disillusionment with the Sate and democratic government as engines of progressive change. (p 13)

    The State is an onerous construct that serves the 1%-ers. So, of course, 99% of the people who care about such matters, should want to overthrow the Westphalian system of states. To accomplish this overthrow, Laursen calls for a revolution. To start, a revolution of the mind. People need to liberate themselves from business as usual. In this context, The Operating System considers the Green New Deal, degrowth, deglobalization, food sovereignty, maintaining safety nets, and a community of mutual aid. In other words, becoming more self-sufficient.

    Laursen knows that no modern state has ever been overthrown by a revolution — yet. For such a successful revolution to transpire, he says the State must have discredited itself in a large segment of the population. (p 18) According to the anarchist writer Peter Gelderloos, this already is the case.13 Indeed, this may be occurring now with the poor handling of the pandemic, an underwhelming response to climate change, and the persistence of systemic racism (look no further than the self-identifying Jewish State’s war crimes against Palestinians, supported by the US and Canada governments). Laursen notes that the State will not willingly disappear; it will have to be compelled to go away.

    How? The revolution can be realized by the masses through a general strike, mutiny within armed forces, and the seizure of government facilities and key businesses. It won’t be easy. There are difficulties in bringing this about: among them are overcoming the inculcation of the “education” system (raising the question of whether critical thinking is genuinely encouraged in schools), the inability to disengage from fake news on corporate/state media and social media, and that consumers continue to shop at Walmart and big box stores.

    Conclusion

    Should a revolution succeed, the big question is how to defend an anarchy both domestically and from external attack. A tiny minority benefits extraordinarily to the detriment of the masses, and these morally bankrupt people have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of the State and the capitalist system which places them at the top of the power hierarchy.

    The Operating System is useful in understanding the anti-humanism of the State, why the State should be abolished, and steps toward seeking the abolishment of the State. However, I found that The Operating System derailed itself mightily when it went off track to repeatedly excoriate China, apparently without knowledge of the history of China at the hands of the West or considering the Chinese side’s rebuttals to allegations against it.

    I agree with the central thesis of the State being harmful to the wider humanity, but I demur from the supposed lumping together of all big states in the basket of the bad. There are large, militarily powerful states that seek to expand their influence, exploit the wealth and resources of smaller, less militarily developed states. China is anti-imperialist. It eschews hegemony. Of course, the actions of China must be held to account with its words. Moreover, an understanding of why China does what it does is crucial. China is ringed by US military bases. The US and its allies work to destabilize China. China seeks a peaceful reunification with Taiwan that was dismembered from it by Japan, with the support of the US. In the meantime, China is caring for all its citizens, promoting the Chinese Dream, a dream that will benefit other countries. China pledges peaceful development and cooperation.14 Importantly, China promises to honor its commitments.

    Mao Zedong was, arguably, an anarchist in sentiment:

    Now to have states, families, and selves is to allow each individual to maintain a sphere of selfishness. This utterly violates the Universal Principle and impedes progress. Therefore, not only should states be abolished — so that there would be no more struggle between the strong and the weak — but families should also be done away with, too, to allow equality of love and affection among men.15

    Current chairman Xi Jinping calls for the upholding of Mao’s thought. To this end, Xi delineates the mass line of the CPC:

    Adhering to the mass line means following the fundamental tenet of serving the people wholeheartedly.16

    1. If meritocracy even exists
    2. As expressed toward the Chinese State and not toward Chinese individuals.
    3. Read Thomas Laird, Into Tibet: The CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa (Grove Press, 2003).
    4. Godfree Roberts, Why China Leads the World: Democracy at the Top, Data in the Middle, Talent at the Top (Oriel Media, 2020): 233.
    5. Roberts, 232.
    6. Roberts, 305.
    7. Roberts, 179.
    8. Roberts, 107.
    9. Wei Ling Chua, Democracy: What the West Can Learn from China (2013). Review.
    10. Roberts, 155.
    11. The representatives in so-called representative democracies, by and large, do not represent their constituents and, hence these are not democratic.
    12. View “Another Hong Kong: Chaos in the streets.”
    13. Diagnostic of the Future: Between the Crisis of Democracy and the Crisis of Capitalism: A Forecast 2018, 2018. “… the fact that an important state [the US], followed by a growing body of others, is breaking apart an old and hallowed synthesis — turning the nation-state against universal equality — is incontrovertible evidence that the world system that has governed us up to now is falling apart.” location 131.
    14. Xi Jinping, The Governance of China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2014).
    15. Mao quoting from memory Confucius’ Liyun by Kang Youwei. From Roberts, 305.
    16. Xi, “Carrying on the Enduring Spirit of Mao Zedong Thought” in The Governance of China.
    The post Dissolving the State Won’t be Easy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Jakarta Method Never Ended

    Prepare to read Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method in one sitting because it’s impossible to put down. The book is a summation of the US government assisting the Indonesian military in killing approximately one million civilians from October 1965 through March 1966.

    While the Vietnam War got most of the headlines, in Indonesia the world’s third largest communist party was winning hearts, minds and elections — much to the alarm of the United States. After years of cultivating and training the Indonesian military the US decided it was time for the Indonesian working class to put away childish things like land reform and resource nationalization. The two-million strong (but fatefully unarmed) Indonesian communist party, the PKI, had to be exterminated “down to the roots.”

    The mass murder starts on October 7 on Sumatra with a fanatical anticommunist commander named Ishak Djuarsa who trained at Fort Leavenworth. The police and military arrest leftists and their sympathizers en masse. Trusting peasants and factory workers turn themselves in for what they think is routine questioning and are never heard from again. For mass murder to spread so quickly it’s necessary for ethnic and religious fault lines to be exploited and “ordinary” citizens to directly participate in the killings, often under the threat of being killed themselves.

    Most of the killings were summary executions done with knives, swords, machetes, sickles and spears. The flow of small rivers and streams was disrupted by too many dead bodies. Rape, torture, gendered violence, castration and dismembering alive swept across the 17,000 island archipelago from Banda Aceh to Papua. The US provided arms, training, communication equipment and lists of thousands of real and alleged leftists to be killed. US-owned plantations furnished lists of “troublesome” employees. US officials repeatedly sent cables to the leader of the butchery, General Suharto, to kill the leftists faster.

    The Indonesian military “pioneers” “disappearing” people and, before 1966 ends, this will be a tactic of state terror in Guatemala. Soon right-wingers are scrawling “Jakarta is coming!” on walls throughout Latin America. 1968 brings the Phoenix Program (50,000 killed) in Vietnam and in the 1970s Chile adds the new twist of extra-territorial assassination in Operation Condor. The 1980s bring the Nicaraguan contras (50,000 killed) and Salvadorian death squads (75,000 killed.)

    The “Salvador option” migrates to Iraq in 2004 with the US creation of the Wolf Brigade death squad, overseen by some of the same villains in the Central American bloodshed: James Steele, John Negroponte and Elliott Abrams. The Obama-backed 2009 Honduran coup catapults that nation into the number spot in the world for the killing of labor leaders, land reformers and journalists. As I write this the police and paramilitaries of US client narco-state Colombia are gunning down unarmed protesters in the streets of Cali.

    It was one big capitalist party as US media and nearly all politicians cheered on the deaths of “communists” (union organizers, teachers, journalists, students, land reformers) and, after the peace of the dead was established, US oil companies flocked into Indonesia. “Communism” (i.e., the working class majority helping itself) had been “turned back” in the fourth most populous nation on earth. Capitalism’s bloodthirsty media soldiers, like “liberal” New York Times columnist James Reston, called the slaughter “A Gleam of Light in Asia.”

    Besides the million Indonesians murdered, another million were sent without charge or trial to prison camps for decades. Unlike truth and reconciliation commissions established in other countries following government atrocities, every Indonesian government since 1965 has been proud of the slaughter. Westerners party today on Bali beaches where 56 years ago massacres of 80,000 Balinese took place and bones and skulls still wash up. To give a flavor for the madness of the Indonesian ruling class since 1965 — which included killing 300,000 people in East Timor between 1975 and 1999 — it’s best to just quote Bevins:

    Much worse things happened than this to the families of communists and accused communists. In Indonesia, being communist marks you for life as evil, and in many cases, this is seen as something that passes down to your offspring, as if it were a genetic deformity. Children of accused communists were tortured and killed. Some women were prosecuted simply for setting up an orphanage for the children of communist victims.

    In January 1966 Robert F. Kennedy became the only prominent US politician to speak out against Suharto’s carnage. With the Kennedys, though, we always get a dose of historical whiplash as, earlier in the book, RFK and JFK debate sending in marines to overthrow the government of the Dominican Republic. They veto this as too obvious but Bobby helpfully suggests blowing up the US consulate themselves as a pretext to invade. (According to Ron Ridenour’s Russian Peace Threat, Robert Falseflag Kennedy also suggested a similar “Remember the Maine” incident to justify directly attacking Cuba during the missile crisis.)

    Early in the book there are a couple revealing anecdotes about Chinese leaders trying to talk sense into Indonesia’s charismatic but overconfident President Sukarno.

    Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai tells Sukarno that he should have his own armed working class militia apart from the military: “The militarized masses are invincible.” Che told Guatemalan leftists the same thing in 1954 but neither Sukarno nor Arbenz did this and their working classes paid dearly. (Decades later Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez creates the armed Bolivarian Militia of 3.3 million men and women, probably staving off a direct US invasion.)

    Chairman Mao also warns Sukarno that he’s too complacent about the Indonesian military. Mao remains the only leader in history to overthrow his own government and Bevins posits that the bloodbath in Indonesia was a partial impetus for the 1966 Cultural Revolution to purge any bourgeois elements.

    In another early chapter, Richard Nixon admits in private that communists and socialists improve people’s lives and will win elections — if the US lets elections be held. Nixon said this in 1955 about Indonesia and again in 1970 about Allende’s Chile. Over and over, it’s the “good example” of different economic systems that the insecure US ruling class fanatically seeks to crush. The US system has never been able to “compete” without bombs, bribery, brainwashing, blackmail and bullets.

    And you know what? It all worked — just like the FBI exterminating the black left “worked” in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, everywhere, whether Indonesia or the United States, we see the triumph of capitalism: staggering wealth inequality, environmental devastation, endless wars, police impunity, masses ground down to subsistence, homeless people under every bridge, tens of millions afraid that an illness or injury will bankrupt them, indebted, pauperized, surveilled and censored.

    In Youtube interviews Bevins, currently a reporter for the Washington Post, wonders if we’ll look back on the present and see other ignored atrocities. Considering that the Washington Post supported the US destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria, the decades-long and ongoing hammering of Cuba, Iran and Palestine, and the scrupulous ignoring of six million people killed in the Congo by US-ally Rwanda — I’d say we don’t have to wonder.

    What I’m wondering is when Bevins is going to write a story in the Washington Post about the illegal unconstitutional dirty war the US is currently waging on Syria, the illegal occupation of one third of Syria, the US theft of Syria’s oil and wheat, the US sanctions which only punish the Syrian working class, the US/UK domination and corruption of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the US military’s care and feeding of takfiri fanatics and US Congressional complicity in war crimes. Maybe 50 years from now it will be “safe” to tell Syria truths.

    The post The Jakarta Method Never Ended first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Intolerance as the New Normal

    Review of Dan Kovalik’s Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture

    Dan Kovalik’s latest is a much-needed, laudable enterprise, courageously sounding the alarm about a tyranny being perpetrated in the name of moral and social renewal. Similar to genocide, it is cultural cleansing, a systematic destruction of what its proponents singularly deem uncomfortable, unsavory, perhaps threatening to them and their adherents. Cancel culture is militantly aggressive, unforgiving, ruthless, aimed at vilification and final extirpation of anyone who disagrees with or in any way resists its unbending, non-negotiable agenda. Its stormtroopers are the PC Police, what I prefer to call the Woke SS. They answer only to themselves, respecting no other authority. Outside opinion, body of law, history, revered traditions, honored social practices and norms are irrelevant. Attempts to introduce any of these into conversations with them results in brutal retaliation. Their chosen battlegrounds include mainstream and alternative media, social media, the boards and HR departments of both corporations and academic institutions, and more recently the production studios for both TV and cinema.

    What authority the woke mob claims is based on an inversion of the mechanism which has underpinned moral imperatives in the rich philosophical traditions of both East and West. Traditionally, after rigorous and thorough dialectic, we did what we did because it was the right thing to do. By inverting this, all that is done in the name of woke activism is right because it’s what they do. The woke have dispensed with the cumbersome process of arriving at moral truths by free, open, and constructive conversations, then respectfully and judiciously soliciting consensus and compliance. By unilaterally deciding they are on the right side of history and all important issues, their actions are deemed a priori correct and unassailable. It’s remindful of the German nation being led to believe in the 1930s that they were a super race of ascendant humans, thus their actions could not be evaluated and judged by external standards. Super men and women were only capable of superior and unchallengeable action.

    As Dan Kovalik illustrates eloquently and in great detail, providing excellent support and documentation throughout, the woke search-and-destroy cultural scourge has precedents and parallels in other areas of social and political life. Hypocrisy and self-sabotage are equally evident.

    The U.S. has anointed itself as the exceptional, indispensable nation, chosen by history, consecrated by destiny to lead the world. Thus …

    We wage war on nations to establish peace. We overthrow democratically-elected governments to promote democracy. We destroy functioning governments, kill innocent men, women and children, and create massive refugee crises, to promote and protect women’s rights, seed and nurture freedom. In our never-ending struggle against racism and ultra-nationalism, we malign China, fuel hatred of Russia, embargo and sanction Islamic countries like Syria, Iran, destroy Libya. In our embrace of multiculturalism, we suffocate the economies of Cuba and Venezuela, separate brown children from their parents and put them in cages. In our respect for and devotion to human rights, we arm and support Israeli apartheid of Palestine, the callous destruction of a whole people.

    Now don’t get the wrong impression. It’s all good. You see, we’re America and everything we do is good.

    This, of course, is the exact same mentality we see unfolding now in our own country. Woke is R2P on our own soil.

    From its initial appearance on the American scene, the entire woke movement struck me personally as humorless, oppressive, facile, misguided, an anathema to creativity and free expression. Since those early days, it has become dangerous and frightening. Woke is turning the culture and politics of our nation into a huge snuff film.

    I genuinely fear for the safety of this brilliant author. I’ve read and reviewed several of his other books. His scholarship is impeccable and his presentation highly inspiring. I especially loved the conversational tone which generously populates Cancel This Book. But all his works are powerful, accessible, readable. Author Kovalik has taken controversial positions in the past. But taking on the goon squads of cancel culture is his boldest and most admirable effort. Without free discourse from all possible sources, the dystopia of woke is exactly what you get. Maybe the members of the woke thug battalions get their thrills from turning America into a wasteland. I personally don’t see much of a future in it.

    John Rachel has a B. A. in Philosophy, has traveled extensively, is a songwriter, music producer, neo-Marxist, and a bipolar humanist. He has written eight novels and three political non-fiction books. His most recent polemic is “The Peace Dividend: The Most Controversial Proposal in the History of the World.” His political articles have appeared at many alternative media outlets. He is now somewhat rooted in a small traditional farming village in Japan near Osaka, where he proudly tends his small but promising vegetable garden. “Scribo ergo sum.” Read other articles by John, or visit John’s website.

    This article was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2021 at 1:03pm and is filed under Book Review.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Intolerance as the New Normal

    Review of Dan Kovalik’s Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture

    Dan Kovalik’s latest is a much-needed, laudable enterprise, courageously sounding the alarm about a tyranny being perpetrated in the name of moral and social renewal. Similar to genocide, it is cultural cleansing, a systematic destruction of what its proponents singularly deem uncomfortable, unsavory, perhaps threatening to them and their adherents. Cancel culture is militantly aggressive, unforgiving, ruthless, aimed at vilification and final extirpation of anyone who disagrees with or in any way resists its unbending, non-negotiable agenda. Its stormtroopers are the PC Police, what I prefer to call the Woke SS. They answer only to themselves, respecting no other authority. Outside opinion, body of law, history, revered traditions, honored social practices and norms are irrelevant. Attempts to introduce any of these into conversations with them results in brutal retaliation. Their chosen battlegrounds include mainstream and alternative media, social media, the boards and HR departments of both corporations and academic institutions, and more recently the production studios for both TV and cinema.

    What authority the woke mob claims is based on an inversion of the mechanism which has underpinned moral imperatives in the rich philosophical traditions of both East and West. Traditionally, after rigorous and thorough dialectic, we did what we did because it was the right thing to do. By inverting this, all that is done in the name of woke activism is right because it’s what they do. The woke have dispensed with the cumbersome process of arriving at moral truths by free, open, and constructive conversations, then respectfully and judiciously soliciting consensus and compliance. By unilaterally deciding they are on the right side of history and all important issues, their actions are deemed a priori correct and unassailable. It’s remindful of the German nation being led to believe in the 1930s that they were a super race of ascendant humans, thus their actions could not be evaluated and judged by external standards. Super men and women were only capable of superior and unchallengeable action.

    As Dan Kovalik illustrates eloquently and in great detail, providing excellent support and documentation throughout, the woke search-and-destroy cultural scourge has precedents and parallels in other areas of social and political life. Hypocrisy and self-sabotage are equally evident.

    The U.S. has anointed itself as the exceptional, indispensable nation, chosen by history, consecrated by destiny to lead the world. Thus …

    We wage war on nations to establish peace. We overthrow democratically-elected governments to promote democracy. We destroy functioning governments, kill innocent men, women and children, and create massive refugee crises, to promote and protect women’s rights, seed and nurture freedom. In our never-ending struggle against racism and ultra-nationalism, we malign China, fuel hatred of Russia, embargo and sanction Islamic countries like Syria, Iran, destroy Libya. In our embrace of multiculturalism, we suffocate the economies of Cuba and Venezuela, separate brown children from their parents and put them in cages. In our respect for and devotion to human rights, we arm and support Israeli apartheid of Palestine, the callous destruction of a whole people.

    Now don’t get the wrong impression. It’s all good. You see, we’re America and everything we do is good.

    This, of course, is the exact same mentality we see unfolding now in our own country. Woke is R2P on our own soil.

    From its initial appearance on the American scene, the entire woke movement struck me personally as humorless, oppressive, facile, misguided, an anathema to creativity and free expression. Since those early days, it has become dangerous and frightening. Woke is turning the culture and politics of our nation into a huge snuff film.

    I genuinely fear for the safety of this brilliant author. I’ve read and reviewed several of his other books. His scholarship is impeccable and his presentation highly inspiring. I especially loved the conversational tone which generously populates Cancel This Book. But all his works are powerful, accessible, readable. Author Kovalik has taken controversial positions in the past. But taking on the goon squads of cancel culture is his boldest and most admirable effort. Without free discourse from all possible sources, the dystopia of woke is exactly what you get. Maybe the members of the woke thug battalions get their thrills from turning America into a wasteland. I personally don’t see much of a future in it.

    John Rachel has a B. A. in Philosophy, has traveled extensively, is a songwriter, music producer, neo-Marxist, and a bipolar humanist. He has written eight novels and three political non-fiction books. His most recent polemic is “The Peace Dividend: The Most Controversial Proposal in the History of the World.” His political articles have appeared at many alternative media outlets. He is now somewhat rooted in a small traditional farming village in Japan near Osaka, where he proudly tends his small but promising vegetable garden. “Scribo ergo sum.” Read other articles by John, or visit John’s website.

    This article was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2021 at 1:03pm and is filed under Book Review.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Intolerance as the New Normal

    Dan Kovalik’s latest is a much-needed, laudable enterprise, courageously sounding the alarm about a tyranny being perpetrated in the name of moral and social renewal. Similar to genocide, it is cultural cleansing, a systematic destruction of what its proponents singularly deem uncomfortable, unsavory, perhaps threatening to them and their adherents. Cancel culture is militantly aggressive, unforgiving, ruthless, aimed at vilification and final extirpation of anyone who disagrees with or in any way resists its unbending, non-negotiable agenda. Its stormtroopers are the PC Police, what I prefer to call the Woke SS. They answer only to themselves, respecting no other authority. Outside opinion, body of law, history, revered traditions, honored social practices and norms are irrelevant. Attempts to introduce any of these into conversations with them results in brutal retaliation. Their chosen battlegrounds include mainstream and alternative media, social media, the boards and HR departments of both corporations and academic institutions, and more recently the production studios for both TV and cinema.

    What authority the woke mob claims is based on an inversion of the mechanism which has underpinned moral imperatives in the rich philosophical traditions of both East and West. Traditionally, after rigorous and thorough dialectic, we did what we did because it was the right thing to do. By inverting this, all that is done in the name of woke activism is right because it’s what they do. The woke have dispensed with the cumbersome process of arriving at moral truths by free, open, and constructive conversations, then respectfully and judiciously soliciting consensus and compliance. By unilaterally deciding they are on the right side of history and all important issues, their actions are deemed a priori correct and unassailable. It’s remindful of the German nation being led to believe in the 1930s that they were a super race of ascendant humans, thus their actions could not be evaluated and judged by external standards. Super men and women were only capable of superior and unchallengeable action.

    As Dan Kovalik illustrates eloquently and in great detail, providing excellent support and documentation throughout, the woke search-and-destroy cultural scourge has precedents and parallels in other areas of social and political life. Hypocrisy and self-sabotage are equally evident.

    The U.S. has anointed itself as the exceptional, indispensable nation, chosen by history, consecrated by destiny to lead the world. Thus …

    We wage war on nations to establish peace. We overthrow democratically-elected governments to promote democracy. We destroy functioning governments, kill innocent men, women and children, and create massive refugee crises, to promote and protect women’s rights, seed and nurture freedom. In our never-ending struggle against racism and ultra-nationalism, we malign China, fuel hatred of Russia, embargo and sanction Islamic countries like Syria, Iran, destroy Libya. In our embrace of multiculturalism, we suffocate the economies of Cuba and Venezuela, separate brown children from their parents and put them in cages. In our respect for and devotion to human rights, we arm and support Israeli apartheid of Palestine, the callous destruction of a whole people.

    Now don’t get the wrong impression. It’s all good. You see, we’re America and everything we do is good.

    This, of course, is the exact same mentality we see unfolding now in our own country. Woke is R2P on our own soil.

    From its initial appearance on the American scene, the entire woke movement struck me personally as humorless, oppressive, facile, misguided, an anathema to creativity and free expression. Since those early days, it has become dangerous and frightening. Woke is turning the culture and politics of our nation into a huge snuff film.

    I genuinely fear for the safety of this brilliant author. I’ve read and reviewed several of his other books. His scholarship is impeccable and his presentation highly inspiring. I especially loved the conversational tone which generously populates Cancel This Book. But all his works are powerful, accessible, readable. Author Kovalik has taken controversial positions in the past. But taking on the goon squads of cancel culture is his boldest and most admirable effort. Without free discourse from all possible sources, the dystopia of woke is exactly what you get. Maybe the members of the woke thug battalions get their thrills from turning America into a wasteland. I personally don’t see much of a future in it.

    The post Intolerance as the New Normal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • W’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost, yet the Media Cocks Aren’t Crowing

    Censorship comes in many forms. One of [them] is a colossal moral indifference to official crimes at the highest levels of our government.

    — Ralph Nader, April 17, 2021, Ralph Nader Radio Hour

    Disclaimer: This is not a traditional mainstream or even left-stream book review. However, Steven C. Markoff’s book does play as the impetus and linchpin to my essay, more of an analysis/reaction to his book.  I give The Case Against George W. Bush, high marks. Read Steve’s book. Press your respective legislators to push for an investigation of W.’s crimes. Markoff sets out in the book about how those crimes were committed. I reference those. He completes his case: The evidence is there to prosecute and find guilty the 43rd President of the USA, George W. Bush.

    Nader’s Raiders of the Lost Warriors

    I was hitting the old Ralph Nader podcast a week ago when I stumbled upon Steven C. Markoff’s book, The Case Against George W. Bush. Nader had Markoff on his podcast, and both talked about the crimes of W Bush, and even more pertinently, the lack of a criminal case against George W. Bush, as well as the crickets in the so-called liberal media (SCLM) as well in the left press concerning Steve’s book.

    I quickly emailed Steve for a copy of his book to review, and he came back at me with a PDF of this book which, as I have stated, has been iced out of mainstream media: no interviews, no reviews let alone getting Steve into a room one-on-one, or onto a Zoom call with other guests to parse his well-researched, well-quoted book on the crimes of George W. Bush.

    The Case Against George W. Bush by Steven C. Markoff, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble®

    Of course, those crimes are more than crimes of omission, or crimes of secret rendition and torture sites, or the crimes of Abu Ghraib “prison” and Guantanamo. The crime was more than just all the lies about WMD’s and Saddam murdering babies. The big crime was Bush and his Regime of psychotic sociopaths of the neocon variety completely derailing valid, active and clear intelligence that Osama bin Laden was about to make a huge fiery asymmetrical splash on the world stage.

    Markoff lays out the daily briefs, the back and forth communiqués, the speeches Bush and others on his team made which all provides evidence of what “we” know about Osama bin Laden. The entire gambit goes back to the Soviet Union’s role in Afghanistan, then with Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and leading up to the ex-governor of Texas, W Bush.

    Carter Doctrine 25 years before 9/11

    Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter’s man  got the Soviet Union and then USA, all tangled up in Afghanistan.

    The best way for us to understand Afghanistan is to look at the record of American involvement going back four decades and to look at the record requires a reexamination of President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. From the start, U.S. policy formation surrounding Afghanistan has lived in a realm of magical thinking that has produced nothing but a catastrophe of nightmarish proportions. Brzezinski impacted the future of American foreign policy by monopolizing the Carter administration in ways that few outside the White House understand. In his role as national security advisor he put himself in a position to control information into and out of the White House and when it came to Afghanistan – to use it for whatever purposes he saw fit.

    “Brzezinski was an obsessive Russia-hater to the end. That led to the monumental failures of Carter’s term in office; the hatreds Brzezinski released had an impact which continues to be catastrophic for the rest of the world.” Helmer wrote in 2017, “To Brzezinski goes the credit for starting most of the ills – the organization, financing, and armament of the mujahedeen the Islamic fundamentalists who have metastasized – with US money and arms still – into Islamic terrorist armies operating far from Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Brzezinski started them off.”

    — ‘Magical Thinking’ has Always Guided the US Role in Afghanistan by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

    The Clinton “team” briefed the incoming George W. Bush “team” before his January 2001 inauguration about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. For the younger Bush, he repudiated the evidence trail from so many intelligence sources. His eyes were on Operation Iraqi Freedom, but first called, O.I.L,  which was propagated by Jay Leno incessantly after it was blurted out from the source:

    On the afternoon of March 24, 2003 days after the U.S launched missiles at Baghdad to start the illegal war, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer held a press briefing. After a few minutes, a couple of sentences into the briefing, he verbally stumbled on the name of Bush’s war, stating, “Operation Iraqi, uh, Liberation.”

    Calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom” officially is just more War is Peace, Lies are Truth bullshit. And that 2001 invasion of Afghanistan ― “Operation Enduring Freedom” – is yet more of the PT Barnum spin, all catalogued in the annals of United States Central Command and U.S. Army War College.

    Trail of Tears, Trails of Evidence

    Markoff’s book is a straightforward record of myriad published records – taped speeches, newspaper articles/Op-Eds, sections from books, redacted memos and top secret records. As a buttress to the asymmetrical history of what happened leading up to and during the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequently all that went wrong in the Middle East, this upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11, Markoff’s book should be required reading.

    But reading isn’t enough for just consuming Markoff’s book, and reading it is not enough for those of us who have been fighting the wars, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as all the others. What we need is a truth and reconciliation hearing for all those murdered in the September 11 attacks (around 3,000) as well as the countless hundreds of thousands (several million some estimates determine up to today) killed when the USA bombed and razed Iraq.

    The deep links between terror attacks and Southwest Florida - News - Sarasota Herald-Tribune - Sarasota, FL

    Remember that famous photo of Bush reading about a goat to kids in Florida:

    On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bush was at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida, reading “My Pet Goat.”

    Oh, his dedication to inner-city first graders and listening to them recite the goat story is golden. Earlier, Bush had been on the way from his hotel to the school in his motorcade when it was reported to him a passenger jet had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Old commander in Chief Bush believed the crash was an accident caused, perhaps, by pilot error.

    That old goat, man, what a story, so much so that when Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, entered the classroom at 9:06 to tell this president a second airplane had struck the South Tower and that the nation was under attack, Bush stayed on his duff for seven more minutes, following along as the children finished reading the book.

    “Class Goat”

    Goat may be an old West Point term for the man/woman graduating last in his/her class, but one infamous George the Goat from the Army Academy is none other than George Armstrong Custer.

    Unfortunately, the proverbial goat in America’s eyes is the million people murdered and millions more suffering because of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. Steve’s book lays out the three legal frameworks or cases for prosecuting Bush (and solely Bush, not Bush and Company LLC) for crimes against humanity (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Bush’s own responsibility for those several thousand who died on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.

    Mathematician Finally Solves Goat Problem: Here's the Answer

    Here’s part of a blurb on the book’s web site, Rare Bird Lit:

    Steven C. Markoff presents sourced evidence of three crimes committed by George W. Bush during his presidency: his failure to take warnings of coming terror attacks on our country seriously; taking the United States, by deception, into an unnecessary and disastrous 2003 war with Iraq; costing the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and 500,000 others; and breaking domestic and international laws by approving the torture as means to extract information. While Markoff lays out his case of the crimes, he leaves it up to the reader to decide the probable guilt of George W. Bush and his actions regarding the alleged crimes.

    Casualties of War — Truth, Honor, Duty to Protect 

    I had cut my teeth as a reporter in El Paso and elsewhere covering and following that other container ship of lies – Reagan’s crew of felons and thugs who philandered the American public with their special form of Murder Incorporated in Central America, and notably, Nicaragua. Or the illegal invasion of Panama under George H. W. Bush. Oh, those invasions, coups, clandestine bombings, proxy wars, incursions, secret operations, PsyOps.

    I even ended up “down south,” in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Nicaragua running into all sorts of odd fellows in the “drugs for guns” continuing criminal enterprise involving some of this country’s more nefarious “diplomats” and “generals” and CIA/NSA scum. Oh, those yellow belly Contras, murdering civilians and bombing schools and clinics for Reagan and Company. Those freedom fighters, AKA, the biggest lying cheats in recent times in Central America, Los Contras.

    And the dead horse isn’t dead, and another author, like Markoff, just couldn’t buy the bs on those Contras:

    Thus, in his 2012 book, The Manufacturing of a President, Wayne Madsen claims, based upon his numerous intelligence sources, that the CIA and Mossad have both been funding these rearmed Contras, and that they have been shipping these Contras arms over both the Honduran and Costa Rican borders.  He claims also that the Honduran government which came to power through the 2009 coup – a coup which the Obama Administration actively aided and abetted to unseat a leftist government which, by the way, happened to be friendly to Daniel Ortega – has been key to helping both support the Contras as well as to provide a staging ground for the covert operations to bring down the Sandinista government.  In other words, Honduras is playing the very same role it did in the 1980s, and the US-backed coup in 2009 – a mere 2 years after Ortega was elected – was crucial to this role.

    — Dan Kovalik

    Of course, the Bush Family Legacy was also all written over that fiasco, and again, it was easy for me to continue my penchant for understanding how rotten the United States is as I am the son of a Vietnam War regular army veteran, who put in 31 years in uniform.

    Lords of War, the Racket that is General Smedley Butler’s war warnings. Or Gary Webb, killing the messenger, the same CIA-infused Washington Post, New York Times and LA Times, to just name a few of the publications that corrupted the real work of Webb uncovering that entire drugs for guns Mafiosi.

    Robert Parry, deceased now, but a journalist who started Consortium News in 1994, with Webb as one of his big stories on how bad the US government is, and how bad the mainstream media has become.

    Here, Parry:

    So what I was seeking by the mid-1990s was some solid ground in which to plant a flag for honest journalism, rather than constantly being forced into retreat, pulled by nervous editors and producers looking over their shoulders out of fear of right-wing retaliation. From solid ground, I thought, we could produce journalism that simply assessed the facts and made independent judgments regardless of who might be offended.

    In 1995, it was my oldest son, Sam, who suggested the then-novel idea of “a Web site.” I didn’t fully understand what a Web site was and Sam was no techie but he demonstrated extraordinary patience in building our original Internet presence. (Back then, there were no templates; you had to start from scratch.) We married old-fashioned investigative reporting with the new technology of the Internet and began publishing groundbreaking investigative articles.

    We followed evidence where it went, even when it flew in the face of the conventional wisdom, such as our work on the 1980 October Surprise issue of whether Reagan and Bush went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back during his Iran-hostage negotiations, much the way Nixon had in sabotaging Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

    Not only did we present our own original work but we buttressed investigations by other serious journalists, such as Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News when, in 1996, he revived Ronald Reagan’s Contra-cocaine scandal. When the major newspapers set out to destroy Webb and discredit his revelations, Consortiumnews was one outlet that took on the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

    Yes, we were outgunned. Despite showing that Webb was not only right but actually understated the problem of Contra-cocaine trafficking, we still could not save Webb from having his career destroyed and then watching the big newspapers essentially high-five each other for having helped cover up a serious crime of state.

    The Three Crimes of the POTUS #43 (Secret Service called him Trailblazer)

    I am not going astray here, kind reader. What Steven talked a lot about on the Ralph Nader podcast was how that same media, the So-called Liberal Press, has virtually gone silent on his book, a type of passive censorship that can eat at the soul of any author.

    In reality, the “case against Bush” is the case against mainstream media/press and their close ties to not just the chambers of power, but within their “embeddedness,” inside the ranks, as well as their allegiance to, and participation in, the national security state’s various bureaus of hit men and hit women.

    When I finished the book, I offered the book to everybody that I had quoted, which was… around ninety authors. I offered it to Condoleezza Rice, I offered it to Dick Cheney, I offered it to the [George W.] Bush [Presidential] Library. I haven’t heard from one person about the book.

    — Steven Markoff stated on Nader’s show.

    Interestingly, Markoff incorporates Richard Clarke’s words as a preface to this book. Clarke actually strips culpability from Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others laying the blame on Bush personally. Here, early in Markoff’s book, Clarke puts it clearly in his mind.

    While I may be considered by some to be prejudiced in my judgment, there are facts that any objective observer must accept.

    • First, Bush ignored warnings about the serious threat from Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.
    • Second, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in violation of international law, when Iraq had been uninvolved in 9/11 and offered no imminent threat to the United States.
    • Third, Bush authorized the use of torture and denied prisoners due process, both acts in violation of international law.

    Note that in each case I say that Bush did these things, not the Bush administration. There is a revisionist school that seeks to place the blame on Bush’s vice president, Richard B. Cheney. While there can be little doubt that Cheney encouraged Bush to take many of these actions, it is not true that the president was merely a tool of a mendacious and scheming subordinate.

    The evidence is now clear that Bush agreed with his vice president and knew full well what he was doing. He was an enthusiastic participant, a believer in the war on terror and the war on Iraq. It is true, however, that he did not master or manage the details of either war until the last few years of his eight-year presidency.

    — Richard A. Clarke, in the Forward of Markoff’s book.

    [In 1992, President George H. W. Bush appointed Richard A. Clarke to chair the Counterterrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National Security Council. President Bill Clinton retained Clarke and in 1998 promoted him to the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. Under President George W. Bush, Clarke initially continued in the same position and later became the special advisor to the president on cyber security. He left his government position prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.]

    Markoff uses Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, as a touchstone of sorts. That was in 2007.

    Importantly, Clarke had the necessary government background, involvement, and position to know about what he wrote. When I finished Clarke’s book, I was shocked. Could Bush have really disregarded threats of bin Laden and Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11? If so, was there a compelling reason that Bush spent his political capital and energy going after Hussein? Could it be that George W. Bush’s Iraq War was about oil?

    It occurred to me that while Clarke seemed knowledgeable about terrorists, 9/11, and the run up to our 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was just one person, and his knowledge was limited to what he had personally seen and learned.

    I thought that if I combined details from Clarke’s book with related information from other diverse sources with inside or special knowledge of those times and places, that combined information could produce new and clearer insights about 9/11 and the Iraq War. I then set out to find what additional facts and information were available on those and related topics.

    — Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

    Torture, Rendition, Yellow Cake, WMD’s

    I remember protesting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales June 27, 2007, in Spokane, when he showed up to talk about his department under Bush. Many of us were there to protest publicly Gonzales and the Bush administration, for many things, including that 2002 memo written by Gonzales that said Bush had the right to waive anti-torture laws and treaties that protect prisoners of war.

    Oh, the long arm of the “law” that Wednesday afternoon took a good friend down to the ground, arborist Dan Treecraft. He did nothing wrong, but Dan along with another person, was arrested for public disturbance.

    I was there with students of mine from two community colleges where I taught, and alas, even those two respective presidents and chairs of the department where I taught thought they had the right to tell a faculty member what he could and couldn’t do as part of a class assignment on “what it’s like to come out and protest a representative of your/our government who states torture is okay.”

    Ironically, he was in Spokane to talk about “gang enforcement,” and Gonzales  wasn’t alluding to the biggest continuing criminal enterprise Gang called the United States of America.

    Steve’s book is a guide, a probable pathway for lawmakers, voters, and others, including the Press, to ratchet up the attention on George W. Bush the War Criminal, and to put to rest the fawning and ameliorating reputation of Bush as The Painter (sic) Friend of Michelle Obama and Ellen.

    The kicker in Markoff’s book, says it all, quite damningly, but the reality is that the War is a Racket machine is a very fine tuned complex – Big Business Complex: Burger King, et al; Home Depot, et al; Mercenaries ‘R Us, et al; paint, air conditioning, roads, drywall, vehicles, depleted uranium, fuel, water, food suppliers, et al; all those financial products, that medical complex et al; Big Ag, Big Oil, Big Chemical, Big Prison et al, all in the manner of the for-profit system that is subsidized – welfare-ized – by the US taxpayer. Insanity we have already seen in other wars, and that War on Vietnam, not enough lessons learned there? I’ve been up close and personal with that war, in Vietnam as a civilian, and as a son of a wounded regular Army officer, social worker for wounded veterans, homeless vets and their families, instructor of college writing for Vietnam veterans.

    There is no urban legend attributed to those $200 hammers and $600 toilet seats and $2000 each bolts holding the shrouding of Patriot missiles. War is graft central, and how many millionaires and billionaires were created after World War I? Read General Butler’s, War is a Racket.

    Evidence of Crimes as Eight Bullet Points

    This shit is personal to me, as well, since I have had friends and students coming back from Bush’s wars, full of trauma, fucked up beyond repair, walking PTSD warriors with all that resentment, anger and physical outbursts, and nowhere to go. Here is Steve’s book, again, near the end:

    Could the following quote from Payback, a book by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, in part on the strategy of redirected aggression, explain Bush’s taking our country to war on his misleading and false premises?

    “George W. Bush and his Administration were not stooges at all, but quite brilliant. They read the need of most Americans at the time: to hit someone, hard, so as to redirect their suffering and anger [from 9/11]. The evidence is overwhelming that for the Bush Administration’s ‘neocons,’ the September 11 attacks were not the reason for the Iraq War; rather, it was a convenient excuse for doing something upon which they had already decided. Their accomplishment—if such is the correct word—was identifying the post-9/11 mood of the American people, and manipulating this mood, brilliantly, toward war.”

    It’s difficult to fathom the extent of the death and destruction caused by George W. Bush’s three crimes, but his legacy of death and destruction are of Olympic proportions.

    •  An estimated 2,977 people killed by the attacks on 9/11, and thousands more injured or incapacitated that day. In addition, hundreds if not thousands have died and will die early from the toxic air from the collapse of the Twin Towers and its aftermath.
    • By one count, there were 4,400 United States personnel killed and 30,000 wounded in the Iraq War as of August 31, 2010; tens of thousands more wounded physically and emotionally crippled by participating in that war; millions of Americans and their families destroyed, devastated, and/or traumatized by 9/11 and Bush’s 2003 Iraq War.
    •  As many as 650,000 deaths or more from Bush’s Iraq War, deaths that wouldn’t have occurred but for that war.
    •  Many of our civil rights, and the civil rights of others around the world, were curtailed due to the fear created by 9/11, a fear used by some as an opportunity to weaken our liberties.
    •  Three to seven trillion dollars in costs to our country from 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Those unnecessary trillions were and will be added to our national debt, a sum burdening our future, the future of our children, and perhaps of generations to come.
    •  Bush’s torture of prisoners puts American soldiers captured in future wars at greater risk of being tortured.
    •  The loss of America’s prestige and moral authority from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq War and torturing prisoners will hurt our country in the years ahead.
    •  Sixteen different US spy agencies on September 24, 2006, concluded that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq since March 2003 has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicals— effectively increasing the terror threat in the years after 9/11—and that the Bush administration tortured detainees and that torture wasn’t effective in securing intel otherwise unavailable.

    Because America invaded a sovereign country without credible reason and tortured prisoners, how can we say without hypocrisy that other countries shouldn’t do the same to other nations or to us? What moral authority do we have to tell others it is wrong to torture?

    — Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

    Pretty damning, and as I file this review/analysis/rant, that W is at it again, and his stupidity is the stunt, no, smart as a fox, or pet-painting war criminal?

    George W Bush shakes hands with Condoleezza Rice in Washington DC on 5 January 2006.

    In a People interview, the former president said he told his former secretary of state he had written for her. “She knows it,” said Bush, 74, “But she told me she would refuse to accept the office.”

    Bush has been doing press to support the release of his book, Out of Many, One, which features his painted portraits of American immigrants and the stories of their lives.

    He called current-day Republicans “isolationist, protectionist, and, to a certain extent, nativist.”

    “Really what I should have said — there’s loud voices who are isolationists, protectionists and nativists, something, by the way, I talked about when I was president,” Bush said. “My concerns [are] about those -isms, but I painted with too broad a brush … because by saying what I said, it excluded a lot of Republicans who believe we can fix the problem.”

    Shadow of War — Ghosts of the Dead

    We’ll see if People magazine interviews Markoff, and gets a bit under the skin of his fine book, all 360 pages, with a decent bibliography and works cited section.

    His conclusion:

    Regardless of how I or others see what I submit are Bush’s criminal acts, some will continue to argue that while he wasn’t a perfect president, at least he rid the world of the tyrant, Hussein. Yes, he did, but for what reason, by what method, and at what cost?

    In addition to the unnecessary deaths and wounding of thousands of brave Americans, hundreds of thousands of others died and were injured from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq invasion. The trillions of dollars Bush’s war has cost has and will continue to be added to our national debt. A debt saddling our future.

    In conclusion, I believe the evidence in this book shows Bush’s three crimes were reckless, dishonest, and tragically unnecessary.

    I rest my case.

    — Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

    Of course, there are gross inaccuracies when it comes to US-induced casualties, and the first casualty of war is truth, for sure:

    Of the countries where the U.S. and its allies have been waging war since 2001, Iraq is the only one where epidemiologists have actually conducted comprehensive mortality studies based on the best practices that they have developed in war zones such as Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. In all these countries, as in Iraq, the results of comprehensive epidemiological studies revealed 5 to 20 times more deaths than previously published figures based on “passive” reporting by journalists, NGOs or governments.

    Taking ORB’s estimate of 1.033 million killed by June 2007, then applying a variation of Just Foreign Policy’s methodology from July 2007 to the present using revised figures from Iraq Body Count, we estimate that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003 as a result of our country’s illegal invasion, with a minimum of 1.5 million and a maximum of 3.4 million.

    — Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, March 19, 2018

    main article image

    [Civil protection rescue teams work on the debris of a destroyed house to recover the body of people killed in an airstrike during fighting between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State militants on the western side of Mosul, Iraq. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)]

    For Markoff, it’s the lives that were destroyed by Bush. That is the echo in his words, and the ghosts of those murdered are the shadows between the lines in The Case Against George W. Bush. 

    Roots of Zionism and U.S. Liberty to Iraq and Now Iran

    Alas, I am ending this analysis/response to Markoff’s book, The Case Against George W. Bush, by slogging through another quagmire, and then some reference to books on just who was lobbying to attack Iraq. We have Markoff trying to open up a case against W. Bush, and his book is clear, focused, not one we’d expect in the pantheon of history books or investigative research/journalistic screeds.

    Some writers, thinkers, educators and journalists (such as myself), however, were already looking into the scope of this terror campaign, the implications of US Patriot Act, the entire mess that is Israel’s murderous mucking about in the Middle East with Israel-Firster American corporate heads, administration wonks, politicians and more clandestine and nefarious actors behind the scenes, supreme puppet masters and Svengali types.

    All those Israeli wars led to the destruction of Lebanon, Syria and the biggest obstacle at the time, Iraq.

    And, here I go again, tangentially putting more fuel into the fires that immolated Iraq and which have blazed through the Middle East before and during and since W. Bush and his Klan invaded the Middle East.

    Here, I reference a recent piece by Timothy Alexander Guzman who briefly alludes to the AIPAC/Israel/Israel-firster connection to the invasion(s) of Iraq in his piece, “The Prospect of a Major False-Flag Operation in the Middle-East Grows by the Day: Remembering June 8th, 1967 the Day Israel Attacked the USS Liberty: “It’s was all part of the long-term plan and Iraq was part of that plan, in fact, the most powerful lobby in Washington is AIPAC and the Bush neoconservatives including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams and others who pushed Washington into a war with Iraq. According to John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee)  was a major supporter for the War on Iraq”:

    AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this very connection in his reporting [in Haaretz, April 2003] on AIPAC’s annual conference in the spring of 2003, shortly after the war started: “AIPAC is wont to support whatever is good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war, so too do the thousands of the AIPAC lobbyists who convened in the American capital.” AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr’s statement to the New York Sun in January 2003 is even more revealing, as he acknowledged “‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of “AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” And in a lengthy New Yorker profile of Steven J. Rosen, who was AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war.”

    — John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

     

    Liberty Survivors Say US Still Downplays Israel's Attack on Ship | Military.com

    [Oh, that anniversary, of the attack by Israel on the Liberty, June 8th (1967)]

    I suppose this entire mess that Markoff catalogues in his book, as a triumvirate of crimes by George W. Bush, could for me, personally, be summed up, in my mind, with President George W. Bush, speaking at the annual AIPAC conference in May of 2004:

    You’ve always understood and warned against the evil ambition of terrorism and their networks. In a dangerous new century, your work is more vital than ever.

    Steven Markoff doesn’t go there, for sure, and that is what makes Markoff’s book unique, too:  a clean record of the mess and blunder and murderous trail George W. Bush left in his wake as leader of the so-called “free world.”

    The post W’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost, yet the Media Cocks Aren’t Crowing first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Book Review: The Revolution Won’t Be Stopped

    Republican strategist Karl Rove often advised his clients to attack not the enemy’s weaknesses but its strengths. The bipartisan US foreign policy disinformation machine has taken Rove’s advice with tedious devotion. So, to attack Nicaragua, the machine’s fabrications and propaganda have targeted some of that country’s strengths: gender equity, Indigenous rights and autonomy, democracy, sovereignty, and a successful response to the pandemic, as well as the Sandinista government’s great popularity.

    This should not surprise. It’s the same Rovian method used against Nicaragua’s friends and allies and countries the US designates enemies. For example, to attack Venezuela, the machine ignores the country’s electoral hyper-democracy and dubs the popular government “dictatorial.”

    The post Book Review: The Revolution Won’t Be Stopped appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Content Control

    Historically, the state and religion have been the institutions that control what people can and cannot say, punishing people for their thoughts, for their actions, and for their words. Silicon Valley companies have emerged as a third institution. They have put forth a new set of parameters. On their platforms, the people who make the decisions about our speech are not people that we elected, or that we trust for their faith, but people like Mark Zuckerberg. They surround themselves with “yes” people.

    In the early days when Facebook was taking up this role, the rooms where decisions were made about what could and couldn’t be said were more diverse than I thought they would be, at least in terms of gender. But there was a lot less diversity in other ways. Most policymakers come from middle-to-upper-class backgrounds and many are Ivy League graduates.

    The post Content Control appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘The Ministry For The Future’

    The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020) is a magnificent novel but also an especially welcome resource for thinking about ecosocialist initiatives for a near-future global Green New Deal. Could not be more timely! This was my initial impression upon reading it last week. After some reflection, I am somewhat more critical but still highly recommend this novel for its inspiration and provocation — particularly because of how Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) concretely addresses the radical transformation of real existing capitalism dominated by its militarized fossil legacy. Ministry should certainly be subject to critique, but KSR has his heart in the left place!

    After reading KSR’s novel 2140 in 2019, I sent him an email suggesting that his scenario for this post–climate catastrophe New York City would be more relevant to the near-future pre–climate catastrophe early 21st century.

    The post Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘The Ministry For The Future’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • One-Click Shopping Has Brought American Workers To The Brink

    A historic union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama officially came to a close on Monday. Now comes the tallying of votes. The election represents the first large-scale effort to organize an Amazon warehouse and a landmark moment for the labor movement in the U.S. South. If the majority of votes are in favor of unionization, the roughly 6,000 workers of the facility will be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).

    Predictably, Amazon — the country’s second-largest employer — has made considerable attempts to undercut the campaign, including heavily-funding anti-union propaganda, changing traffic light patterns to deter canvassing and even paying workers to quit.

    The post One-Click Shopping Has Brought American Workers To The Brink appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Many Burdens Of Women’s Work

    My younger sister, 18, is in her first year of college studying marine navigation. She sees herself travelling the world one day, the captain of a cruise ship or similarly large vessel.

    Already, she has faced overt and repeated sexism, from her male peers. Both my sister and her female roommate have found themselves subjected to sexist jokes and unwanted sexual advances from those who do not appear to understand the meaning of the word “no.” They have been told by a female teacher that for the two per cent of women in the industry, sexual assault is an inevitability.

    My mother, an airline captain, has been counselling her on how to make it in an industry where women are not easily accepted. A great deal of her advice hinges on keeping the peace with male colleagues; knowing what to let slide, when to confront colleagues directly about their behaviour, and when to report them.

    The post The Many Burdens Of Women’s Work appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Mutual Aid, Abolition And Movements

    When I first got involved in organizing, in the mid-1990’s in New York City, I wasn’t aware of the term “mutual aid” but mutual aid was a core part of what I saw around me in all the groups I was in.

    Rudy Giuliani (or as we called him, Ghoul-iani) was mayor and his administration was attacking and targeting people on many fronts. He was going after taxi drivers, street vendors, unhoused people, queer bars and public meeting spaces, the sex work industry, people on welfare, and more. His administration’s brutality really “remade” the city in ways that are so visible today, increasing displacement and criminalization of poor people, pushing people off benefits, “cleaning up” Times Square and other areas to be family-friendly tourist attractions by sweeping street people into jails and prisons. It’s hard to estimate how many people’s deaths his policies hastened.

    The post Mutual Aid, Abolition And Movements appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Impossible Peter Oborne

    On the face of it, Peter Oborne is impossible.

    It’s not possible to be educated at Sherborne independent school, at Cambridge University, to work as political editor of the Spectator, as chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, as a journalist at the Evening Standard, as a commentator at the Express, to make nearly 30 documentaries for Channel 4, BBC World and BBC Radio 4, to appear endlessly on high-profile radio and TV programmes, to be made Society of Editors Press Awards Columnist of the Year twice, and still speak out honestly on systemic corporate media corruption.

    US author and ethical logician Upton Sinclair explained why it just doesn’t happen:

    ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’1

    Oborne is different. In February 2015, he resigned as chief political commentator at the Telegraph, warning:

    ‘If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.’

    More to the point:

    ‘The Telegraph’s recent coverage of HSBC amounts to a form of fraud on its readers.’

    In 2019, Oborne was interviewed on BBC Radio 2 by the BBC’s media editor and (now) Today programme presenter, Amol Rajan, formerly editor of the Independent. In the interview, Oborne named and shamed ‘client journalists’ cosying up to power, before tearing up all the unwritten ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ on ‘mainstream’ interviewing and inclusion by savaging Rajan himself:

    ‘You, yourself, when you were Independent editor, notoriously sucked up to power. You are a client journalist yourself… you were a crony journalist yourself. It’s time this system was exploded… Your record was and is shameful. Where to start?’.

    Rajan responded like a Club Secretary ruling on a breach of Club etiquette:

    ‘It’s unbecoming of you, Peter, it’s unbecoming.’

    Or consider this comment from Oborne on the arch-propagandist Daniel Finkelstein, former executive editor of The Times (also known as Baron Finkelstein of Pinner in the London Borough of Harrow, OBE):

    ‘As any newspaperman will recognise, Daniel Finkelstein has never in truth been a journalist at all. At the Times he was an ebullient and cheerful manifestation of what all of us can now recognise as a disastrous collaboration between Britain’s most powerful media empire and a morally bankrupt political class.’

    In his searingly honest new book, The Assault on Truth, Oborne directs his fire at a very specific, crucial target:

    ‘I have never encountered a senior British politician who lies and fabricates so regularly, so shamelessly and so systematically as Boris Johnson. Or gets away with his deceit with such ease.’2

    Oborne is well qualified to comment, having been hired by Johnson as his political editor at the Spectator in 2001. Oborne adds:

    ‘It has become all but impossible for an honest politician to survive, let alone flourish, in Boris Johnson’s government.’ (p. 6)

    With every example fortified by meticulous footnotes and references, Oborne nails Johnson’s lies again and again:

    ‘Johnson went on the Andrew Marr show to claim the Labour leader had “said he would disband MI5”. Marr did not demur, but to be sure I looked at the Labour manifesto. It contained no mention of MI5 but did pledge to “ensure closer counter terrorism co-ordination between the police and the security services, combining neighbourhood expertise with international intelligence”.’ (p. 22)

    And:

    ‘Boris Johnson said that Corbyn “would whack corporation tax up to the highest in Europe”. Not true. Labour had said it would raise the main rate of corporation tax to 26 per cent. This would not be anything like the highest in Europe. At the time of Johnson’s claim, the rate of corporation tax in France was 31 per cent, and in Belgium the rate was 29 per cent.’ (p. 23)

    Oborne highlights this particularly cynical example of lie-based electioneering from Johnson:

    ‘During a ten-minute speech, viewers learn that he is building forty new hospitals. It sounds a hugely impressive election pledge.

    ‘Actually it’s a lie which the prime minister has already repeated often during the campaign, and would go on to repeat on many more occasions. At best the government has only allocated money for six hospitals.’ (pp. 15-16)

    The devil is in the footnoted details at the bottom of the page:

    ‘Under Tory plans, six hospitals were allocated funding for rebuilding programmes between 2020 and 2025. Up to thirty-eight other hospitals would receive money to develop plans for upgrades between 2025 and 2030, but not to undertake any building work.’ (p. 16)

    Oborne’s conclusion:

    ‘There is irrefutable evidence that Conservative Party lies and distortions in the 2019 election were cynical, systematic and prepared in advance. Johnson’s Conservatives deliberately set out to lie and to cheat their way to victory. The strategy triumphed.’ (p. 37)

    So how on earth did Johnson get away with it?

    ‘Britain’s mainstream reporters and editors collectively turned a blind eye to the lies, misrepresentations and falsehoods promoted by Johnson and his ministers.’ (p. 7)

    But this was only part of the problem:

    ‘Many senior journalists went a step further. They actively collaborated with Downing Street in order to distribute false information helpful to Johnson’s cause.’ (p. 121)

    This democracy-killing media bias was pushed yet further by the relentless media campaign smearing Corbyn:

    ‘the mainstream press paid almost no attention to Johnson’s habitual lying, in sharp contrast to their treatment of the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who was subject to constant attack’. (p. 119)

    The difference being that Corbyn didn’t lie – he was attacked for everything and anything he said, or did, or didn’t do.

    The particular problem, as Oborne observes, is that ‘Johnson’s government was a media class government.’ (p. 115) Johnson and Michael Gove are both journalists massively supported by former colleagues and allies:

    ‘The truth was that press barons were determined to install the troika of Johnson, Gove and [Johnson’s adviser] Cummings in Downing Street.’ (p. 117)

    Michael Gove, after all, was the protégé of Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Sun, The Times and Fox News:

    ‘When Murdoch’s News International group was on its knees following revelations of criminal phone hacking, Gove came eloquently to the defence of press freedom at the Leveson inquiry. Murdoch did not forget: Gove and his wife Sarah Vine were invited to his wedding to the former model Jerry Hall.

    ‘Murdoch also supported Johnson, but his principal sponsors were the Barclay brothers, shadowy owners of the Daily Telegraph, house journal for the Conservative Party. “Many congratulations to Boris Johnson who has of course just been appointed Prime Minister,” enthused the paper when he entered 10 Downing Street. “Boris is the first Telegraph journalist since Sir Winston Churchill to lead the country.”

    ‘Associated Newspapers, owners of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail, which employed Sarah Vine, also backed Johnson. Together these three groups accounted for more than 30 per cent of British newspaper readers. All their titles backed Johnson. The same applied to the Evening Standard, which serves London, an area of predominantly Labour and Remain voters. Under the ownership of Evgeny Lebedev it became an unlikely ally of the Tories, backing Johnson for both Conservative leader and prime minister.’ (pp. 117-118)

    This is seriously damning and courageous stuff (there have been no reviews of The Assault on Truth in the Murdoch Press, Associated Newspapers or the Telegraph group – see below), but Oborne goes much further:

    ‘A great deal of political journalism has become the putrid public face of a corrupt government. There is only one good reason to be a journalist: to tell the truth. We should not go into our trade to become passive mouthpieces of politicians and instruments of their power. Too much of the media and political class have merged. The unnatural amalgamation has converted truth into falsehood, while lies have become truth.’ (p. 7)

    Chomsky’s ‘Basic Principle’

    Oborne’s book is a wonderful test for Noam Chomsky’s ‘basic principle’ determining ‘mainstream’ inclusion:

    ‘The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist.’3

    An idea of the extent to which The Assault on Truth would be allowed to exist could already be gleaned from the reaction to an article written by Oborne in October 2019 on ‘the way Boris Johnson was debauching Downing Street by using the power of his office to spread propaganda and fake news’. (p. 130) Oborne submitted the piece for his weekly Saturday column for the Daily Mail:

    ‘I received a call from the editor, who indicated, with his customary exquisite good manners, that he would prefer I wrote about another subject’. (p. 131)

    Oborne then offered the piece to The Spectator, ‘but the editor explained his refusal to publish on the reasonable grounds that the newspaper’s political team had cultivated excellent insider sources and publishing my piece would invite charges of hypocrisy’. (p. 131)

    Channel Four’s Dispatches showed strong interest before also withdrawing. Oborne finally resorted to publishing his article on the website openDemocracy. He wrote:

    ‘Papers and media organisations yearn for privileged access and favourable treatment. And they are prepared to pay a price to get it.

    ‘This price involves becoming a subsidiary part of the government machine. It means turning their readers and viewers into dupes.

    ‘This client journalism allows Downing Street to frame the story as it wants. Some allow themselves to be used as tools to smear the government’s opponents. They say goodbye to the truth.’

    The dramatic response:

    ‘This article marked the end of my thirty-year-long career as a writer and broadcaster in the mainstream British press and media. I had been a regular presenter on Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster for more than two decades. It ceased to use me, without explanation. I parted company on reasonably friendly terms with the Daily Mail after our disagreement.’ (p. 132)

    These are huge losses for a professional journalist:

    ‘The mainstream British press and media is to all intents and purposes barred to me. I continue to write for the website Middle East Eye, for openDemocracy and from time to time for the British Journalism Review.’ (p. 133)

    Oborne’s comments inevitably recall the fate that befell US journalist Gary Webb, an investigative reporter for nineteen years, focusing on government and private sector corruption, winning more than thirty awards for his journalism. In 1990, Webb was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on California’s 1989 earthquake. Webb described his experience of mainstream journalism:

    ‘In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn’t get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn’t work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as I could tell. It encouraged enterprise. It rewarded muckraking.’4

    But Webb was in for a terrible surprise:

    ‘And then I wrote some stories that made me realise how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn’t written anything important enough to suppress.’

    In 1996, Webb had written a series of stories on how a US-backed terrorist army, the Nicaraguan Contras, had financed their activities by selling crack cocaine in the ghettos of Los Angeles. Webb documented direct contact between drug traffickers bringing drugs into Los Angeles and Nicaraguan CIA agents who were administering the Contras. Moreover, he revealed that the US government knew about these activities and did little or nothing to stop them. The country’s three biggest newspapers, The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, turned on Webb, declaring the story ‘flawed’ and not worth pursuing. Webb commented:

    ‘Never before had the three biggest papers devoted such energy to kicking the hell out of a story by another newspaper.’ (p. 306)

    Webb’s career had been cynically and brutally terminated.

    The Reviews

    To recap, The Assault on Truth makes two key claims: 1) Boris Johnson regularly, systematically and shamefully lies and fabricates, and 2) ‘A great deal of political journalism has become the putrid public face of a corrupt government.’ (p. 7) One of the book’s nine chapters, ‘The failure of the British press’, is entirely devoted to this second issue.

    How have these claims, in particular the media analysis, been received?

    In the Observer, Tim Adams’ 817-word review devoted around two-thirds of its analysis to the case against Oborne’s supposed hypocrisy and U-turns, and 100 words to the case against the British press.

    This is already curious. As discussed, Oborne is a highly respected, very high-profile journalist. It is essentially unknown for someone of his stature to turn so forcefully on political lying, particularly systemic press lying. Why would a journalist commenting in the liberal Observer deem it important to devote so much space to Oborne’s alleged U-turns, and just two or three sentences to damning media criticism that is as rare as hens’ teeth? Shouldn’t the liberal press be celebrating such an unusual exposure of press lying? Adams wrote:

    ‘There have been some spectacular U-turns from political observers in the past five years – Piers Morgan’s desperate and tragically belated efforts to distance himself from Donald Trump, for example – but no reverse-ferret has been quite so vehemently trumpeted as that of Peter Oborne. Back in 2016, in his Daily Mail column, Oborne was proclaiming a new dawn of Conservatism, with Labour in collapse and David Cameron a busted flush. A “glittering prospect of 12 uninterrupted years as prime minister” awaited the winner of any leadership campaign, he suggested, and Boris Johnson’s years as mayor gave him “huge credibility” for the role.’

    Adams portrayed Oborne as an enthusiastic dupe of Johnson:

    ‘Up until about spring 2019, it seems, Oborne continued to be cheerfully taken in by this music hall act.’

    Anyone who reads Oborne knows that he is very generous in giving credit where credit’s due, even when he strongly disagrees on deeper issues of policy and political philosophy. For example, despite self-identifying as a Tory, he has repeatedly and strongly praised Labour’s foreign policy and ethical stance under Jeremy Corbyn.

    In fact, the claim that Oborne was ‘duped’ by Johnson is nonsense. To take only two examples, in September 2018, Oborne described Johnson’s foreign policy as ‘morally abhorrent’ and his officials ‘shoddy’. In November 2017, Oborne noted of the catastrophe in Yemen that Johnson ‘scarcely lifted a finger on this calamity’ and did ‘virtually nothing of any significance to help’.

    Adams similarly claimed Oborne ‘celebrated’ Trump’s election triumph in the Mail with a piece headlined: ‘At last! He may be a bigot, racist and misogynist but Donald Trump’s revolution could finally bring back family values’.

    As Adams is well aware, commentators do not choose the headlines (Oborne did not choose this one). In the piece supposedly celebrating Trump, Oborne wrote:

    ‘The majority of commentators have issued angry cries of condemnation in response to Donald Trump’s surprise victory.

    ‘That is understandable. For he is beyond doubt a bigot, a racist and a misogynist.’

    He added:

    ‘As a tax-avoiding billionaire, he will never be a genuine champion of the poor. He has no serious programme for government. He will fail.’

    Trump was, Oborne wrote, an ‘odious man’.

    Adams’ few words on the press simply ignored the most damning claims. In answer to the question, ‘What led the British people to put a liar into Downing Street?’, Adams commented:

    ‘A large part of the answer to that question Oborne lays at the door of “mainstream newspaper reporters and editors” who “collectively turned a blind eye to the lies, misrepresentations and falsehoods promoted by Johnson and his ministers” in order for him to bluster his way to power.’

    As we have seen, Oborne’s whole point is that ‘mainstream’ media did not just turn a blind eye; they functioned as fully-supportive parts of Johnson’s lie machine.

    The ‘blind eye’ comment cited by Adams is from page 7 of the book. He then quoted Oborne from page 137. In between, he wrote:

    ‘Certain political correspondents are identified as having given Johnson an easy ride – Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC and Robert Peston of ITV among them.’

    But Kuenssberg and Peston are not mentioned at all. Did Adams actually read the book?

    The Independent (online) devoted 491 words to Oborne’s book. In his review, Martin Chilton spent 431 words on Johnson and 60 words in two sentences on Oborne’s media analysis:

    ‘Part of the problem is that Johnson’s “claims” are simply not held up to inspection by most of the popular press.’5

    Again, as with Adams, this conveniently ignored Oborne’s most damning assertion – that the press contribution to the lying was highly active, not passive. Chilton continued:

    ‘Oborne, who formerly worked for the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, says his new book will “make me enemies”, especially for statements such as “a great deal of political journalism has become the putrid face of a corrupt government”.’

    Chilton was clearly keen to keep his head down, gesturing vaguely in the direction of harsh truths that Oborne spelled out with great clarity.

    In the Guardian, William Davies’ review totalled 1,261 words. Of these, 109 words discuss Oborne’s media analysis:

    ‘It’s not just the contemporary Conservative party that appals Oborne, but developments in his own profession. Newspapers, their owners and their staff have colluded with politicians to smear and fabricate without fear. Oborne’s efforts to expose these practices have not been without personal cost. Finding no mainstream media outlet that was willing to publish him on the topic of journalistic malpractice around Johnson, he took his evidence to openDemocracy, who published his article “British journalists have become part of Johnson’s fake news machine” in October 2019. Sombrely he reports that, since the piece appeared, “the mainstream British press and media is to all intents and purposes barred to me”.’

    This was something, but Davies preferred to focus on Oborne’s personal plight, rather than highlighting particular examples of journalistic corruption, or delving deeper into the significance of the chapter Oborne devotes to the issue – one of the most important chapters ever written on the UK press.

    Thus, national UK newspaper reviews of Oborne’s important and damning claims about the UK press received some 269 words in coverage in the middle of a grand total of three UK national newspaper reviews. We asked Oborne for his reaction on how his book has been received:

    ‘I haven’t been able to find any review of my book anywhere in the Murdoch press, Associated Newspapers or Telegraph group. They reviewed my earlier books. However this book (which has also been ignored by mainstream broadcasters) demonstrates that the British print and broadcast media have been complicit in Johnson’s serial dishonesty. It’s not just that they turn a blind eye to Johnson’s habitual and systematic dishonesty. I show in the book that the British media class collaborate with Downing Street in pumping out Johnson’s smears, deceptions and falsehoods. They have been an essential part of his machinery of deception. So maybe that’s why they have ignored the book.’ 6

    Conclusion

    In reality, of course, Peter Oborne is not impossible. The corporate media is not monolithic, not run by conspiracy. Honourable, rational human beings can make it past the corporate political and media gatekeepers. And when they do, they’re dealt with.

    Jeremy Corbyn got through and was unethically cleansed by a spectacularly dishonest, cross-spectrum smear campaign that rendered him unelectable. Comedian Russell Brand got through, appeared in a powerful BBC interview on Newsnight watched by 12 million people, and was unethically cleansed by Guardian liberals smearing him as a ‘Jesus clown’, ‘misogynist’ and ‘religious narcissist’. Brand was so badly beaten up he retired from political commentary and became a self-help guru.

    Oborne also got through. His meticulous book – superbly written by a high-profile journalist with impeccable credibility and experience – has simply been ignored by the vast majority of newspapers and magazines that have been, as Oborne says, ‘an essential part’ of Johnson’s ‘machinery of deception’. The rest have blown past his media criticism in a couple of anodyne sentences. Blink and a casual reader would have missed even these mostly oblique, soft-pedalled references.

    Oborne received this treatment despite major omissions that made his message far more palatable than it might otherwise have been. Remarkably, for example, his book contains no criticism at all of the BBC or ITV. As discussed, BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg’s infamously biased reporting in favour of Johnson and against Corbyn is not even mentioned.

    More importantly, while Oborne does expose active media lying, he perceives it as a ‘failure’ of the British press. By contrast, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model of media control’ – the model on which our own analysis is based – views this media bias as a success – the corporate media arm of the larger, profit-maximising state-corporate system is simply doing what it has evolved and been designed to do! Oborne does not venture into an analysis of the fundamental nature of corporate capitalist media that would locate him even more firmly among the ‘wild men [and women] on the wings’, casting him even further adrift from the ‘putrid’, stagnant ‘mainstream’.

    Nevertheless, this was a vanishingly rare opportunity for the public to witness a media insider making a complete nonsense of the myth promoted by the BBC’s leading client journalist Andrew Marr; namely, that journalism is ‘a crusading craft’ run by ‘disputatious, stroppy, difficult people’ relentlessly challenging power.

    This is the deception on which all other deceptions depend. It is too precious to be seriously challenged, and journalists know it.

    1. Sinclair, ‘I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked,’ Oakland Tribune, 11 December 1934.
    2. Peter Oborne, The Assault on Truth – Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, Simon & Schuster, 2021, p. 18.
    3. Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Hill and Wang, 1992, p. 79.
    4. Webb, in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw – Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press,’ Prometheus, 2002, pp. 296-7.
    5. Martin Chilton, ‘Smoke and Mirrors’, The Independent, 31 January 2021.
    6. Peter Oborne, email to Media Lens, 15 March 2021.
    The post The Impossible Peter Oborne first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • A new book is aiming to show how we can have ‘life-changing’ conversations about race

    Confer Books publishes material that’s “designed to deepen our understanding of psychological, relational and emotional processes”. And on 4 March, it released a new title named, The Race Conversation: An essential guide to creating life-changing dialogue.

    This fascinating read dives into a world of new vocabulary coined to initiate conversations around race. And it seeks to discuss “the race construct” which keeps “the discomfort of race oppression out of white people’s minds and bodies”.

    Author Eugene Ellis is the director and founder of the Black, African and Asian Therapy Network (BAATN). It’s the UK’s largest independent organisation of its kind. Trained as a psychotherapist, Ellis focuses on “body-orientated therapies” such as body awareness, mindfulness, and healing. Narratives in the book explore “race and mental wellbeing” through an alternative non-verbal lens which doesn’t always involve speaking.

    Credit: Confer Books

    Ellis told The Canary:

    Since George Floyd’s killing, people with mixed families have been pressured to have [race] conversations they might not necessarily have had as a family before. A lot of people feel an ethical pull towards dismantling racism in their workplaces or institutions.

    Just last week, the reaction to Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan Markle showed how rife racism is in Britain.

    “Being colour conscious”

    Opening the discussion with everyday racism, Ellis shows how today’s political and social climate has forced race conversations to the forefront. Whether we like it not, topics of race have become unavoidable as the media has suddenly taken an interest in pursuing race-related coverage.

    Ellis wrote:

    Talking about race had always been hard work, but, after George Floyd’s killing, it had somehow become hard work not to.

    Black Lives Matter protests took place across the world in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer. Millions gathered to protest for justice, with 15-26 million people in the US alone according to the New York Times.

    On 13 March, CNN reported that Floyd’s family accepted $27m after Minneapolis city council voted to settle the lawsuit.

    The report also said:

    Chauvin has pleaded not guilty to second-degree unintentional murder and second-degree manslaughter charges. He has also pleaded not guilty to third-degree murder, which was reinstated in the case on Thursday.

    For many People of Colour (POC), the global shift to support anti-racism has been a confusing time of feeling both liberated and overwhelmed. Ellis wrote:

    I went through a phase of dislocation and mourning, even paranoia as these narratives played out on the world stage

    Credit: Confer Books
    Mindfulness

    Examining the impacts of racism, the book talks about how trauma can occur “on a mental and physical level due to just existing in a racialised society”.

    Mindfulness is a technique that involves a “body-mind” connection. Ellis said it can be used as a way to “almost retune your body” to lessen the fear that arises when speaking in race conversations.

    And in this race conversation, he wants to include everyone’s experiences. He wrote:

    I also experienced first-hand that, even though white people embody conscious and unconscious race privileges, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are free from pain and suffering.

    White guilt and suffering from racism are often shunned, but Ellis said:

    That’s a taboo area you can’t talk about but why? I genuinely believe that suffering is across the board. You can’t talk about it because the race construct says you can’t. For it [the race conversation] to move [forward] that aspect needs to come in.

    Another concept deployed in the book is how “the race construct” influences individuals to “attend to white people’s hurt and pain before the hurt and pain in people of colour”.

    “It was whiteness on display”

    It’s natural that frustration weaves its way into these conversations. In comparing ‘black rage’ and ‘white rage’, Ellis wrote:

    White rage steps forward when people of colour step forward to take control of their lives and their financial circumstances. It is predictable, brutal and unforgiving.

    People of colour understand that if they put their foot on the accelerator of their lives, they can only get so far before they run the risk of losing their reputation, their possessions or even their lives.

    The recent increase in news outlets covering topics of race has put a spotlight on racism in the US. This has also sparked people in Britain to dig deeper into racism here.

    Ellis said:

    The storming of the Capitol and the US elections… I was absolutely gripped by the whole thing. It was whiteness on display. It’s easy for us in the UK to say, ‘oh it’s not like that over here’. In the US racism is brash, big, bold and the UK is a little more subdued. There’s more of a conscious effort in the UK to keep it hidden.

    Some institutions have put in place initiatives at certain times to speak about race. In the book, Ellis refers to the “dreaded race day”. He said:

    For race or any oppression there should be conversations around that all the time. It shouldn’t be for one day; you need to reflect about it and that’s not enough time.

    Mental health services have a responsibility to engage in race conversations

    Mental health services that work with Black, Asian, Ethnic Minority and POC also have a responsibility to actively engage in race conversations.

    An article written for the Guardian addresses the problem that Black and Ethnic Minority communities “are more likely to develop mental health conditions but less likely to access counselling – or find it fit for purpose”.

    Ellis wrote about his thoughts on the problem which is “the internal discomfort of mental health professionals, and their profound feelings of not feeling safe during the race conversation”.

    In the book he mentions that POC who then seek mental health services notice this discomfort. He said:

    For a lot of people of colour, a big part of their mental health experiences are not necessarily [impacted by] their families but in society by political structures and systems of oppression. This needs to be included as a part of psychotherapy, training and counselling.

    Then if their client wants to talk about race, they will feel that the therapist is available for it and most of the time, that’s not how it feels.

    PAUSE … and breathe

    If creative language, thought-provoking theories, and an honest breakdown of how we can all participate in race conversations is what you’re after, then this is the read for you. Its forward-thinking narrative aims to normalise conversations about race, highlights the significance of historical oppression, and proposes different solutions to healing from race-related trauma.

    “PAUSE … and breathe” is noted throughout the chapters and is a respectful reminder to all that taking a break from race conversations is ok; in fact it’s healthy.

    Confer UK and Ellis are holding a live webinar specifically for psychotherapists to talk about “racial divides in our society” on 20 March, and they’ll be running another event in June as a part of their Summer Programme 2021.

    You can find other publications from this author here.

    Featured image Confer Books / Thomas Allsop via Unsplash

    By Aaliyah Harris

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • That’s Not ‘How Fascism Works’

    Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was a watershed moment in the national and international arena, one that marked a new step in the accelerated decline and crisis of the U.S. empire after 2008. Trump’s popularity and the support he found in sectors of capital signaled, from the right, a growing rejection of the traditional neoliberal leaders of U.S. capitalism who had led the United States into a multipronged crisis from which it could not fully recover. Internationally, the U.S. faced the decline of its imperialist hegemony and challenges from growing powers like China; nationally, it faced growing inequality and discontent from sectors of the working class and “middle class” whose living conditions had been severely degraded while President Obama bailed out banks and corporations. Trump, with his unabashed individualism and promises to “Make America Great Again,” gave a right-wing populist voice to a certain sector of the disaffected petit bourgeoisie — mostly white, mostly located outside the biggest cities, and more than ready to find scapegoats among the Right’s traditional boogeymen: migrants, marginalized communities, and leftists.

    The post That’s Not ‘How Fascism Works’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Lessons From Mariame Kaba’s “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us”

    We can and must collectively build a world without policing, prisons, surveillance, punishment, and capitalism––a world in which all are equipped with the tools to prevent and transform harm, one in which everyone has what they need to thrive in community with others.

    This is the through line of Mariame Kaba’s powerful new book, an expansive and instructive collection of essays and interviews drawn from Kaba’s decades of work building toward abolition — work that has focused particularly on the experiences of Black women and girls and criminalized survivors of sexual violence.

    We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice is seamlessly accessible yet deeply demanding.

    The post Lessons From Mariame Kaba’s “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us” appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Indonesian Slaughter, Allen Dulles, and the Assassination of JFK

    Before I digress slightly, let me state from the outset that the book by Greg Poulgrain that I am about to review is extraordinary by any measure. The story he tells is one you will read nowhere else, especially in the way he links the assassination of President Kennedy to former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the engineering by the latter of one of the 20th century’s most terrible mass murders.  It will make your hair stand on end and should be read by anyone who cares about historical truth.

    About twelve years ago I taught a graduate school course to Massachusetts State Troopers and police officers from various cities and towns.  As part of the course material, I had created a segment on the history of the United States’ foreign policy, with particular emphasis on Indonesia.

    No one in this class knew anything about Indonesia, not even where it was. These were intelligent, ambitious adults, eager to learn, all with college degrees. This was in the midst of the “war on terror”; i.e., war on Muslim countries, and the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency.  Almost all the class had voted for Obama and were aware they he had spent some part of his youth in this unknown country somewhere far away.

    I mention this as a preface to this review of JFK vs. Dulles, because its subtitle is Battleground Indonesia, and my suspicion is that those students’ lack of knowledge about the intertwined history of Indonesia and the U.S. is as scanty today among the general public as it was for my students a dozen years ago.

    This makes Greg Poulgrain’s remarkable book – JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia – even more important since it is a powerful antidote to such ignorance, and a reminder for those who have fallen, purposefully or not, into a state of historical amnesia that has erased the fact that the U.S. has committed systematic crimes that have resulted in the deaths of more than a million Indonesians and many more millions throughout the world over innumerable decades.

    Such crimes against humanity have been hidden behind what the English playwright Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel Prize address called “a tapestry of lies.”  Of such massive crimes, he said:

    But you wouldn’t know it.

    It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.

    And when one examines the true history of such atrocities, again and again one comes up against familiar names of the guilty who have never been prosecuted.  Criminals in high places whose crimes around the world from Vietnam to Chile to Cuba to Nicaragua to Argentina to Iraq to Libya to Syria, etc. have been – and continue to be – integral to American foreign policy as it serves the interests of its wealthy owners and their media mouthpieces.

    In his brilliant new book on U.S./Indonesian history, Dr. Greg Poulgrain unweaves this tapestry of lies and sheds new light on the liars’ sordid deeds. He is an Australian expert on Indonesia whose work stretches back forty years, is a professor at University of the Sunshine Coast in Brisbane and has written four highly-researched books about Indonesia.

    In JFK vs. Dulles, he exposes the intrigue behind the ruthless regime-change strategy in Indonesia of the longest-serving CIA director, Allen Dulles, and how it clashed with the policy of President John F. Kennedy, leading to JFK’s assassination, Indonesian regime change, and massive slaughter.

    Poulgrain begins with this question:

    Would Allen Dulles have resorted to assassinating the President of the United States to ensure that his ‘Indonesian strategy’ rather than Kennedy’s was achieved?

    To which he answers: Yes.

    But let me not get ahead of myself, for the long, intricate tale he tells is one a reviewer can only summarize, so filled is it with voluminous details.  So I will touch on a few salient points and encourage people to buy and read this important book.

    Indonesia’s Strategic Importance

    The strategic and economic importance of Indonesia cannot be exaggerated.  It is the world’s 4th most populous country (275+ million), is located in a vital shipping lane adjacent to the South China Sea, has the world’s largest Muslim population, has vast mineral and oil deposits, and is home in West Papua to Grasberg, the world’s largest gold mine and the second largest copper mine, primarily owned by Freeport McMoRan of Phoenix, Arizona, whose past board members have included Henry Kissinger, John Hay Whitney, and Godfrey Rockefeller.

    Long a battleground in the Cold War, Indonesia remains vitally important in the New Cold War and the pivot to Asia launched by the Obama administration against China and Russia, the same antagonists Allen Dulles strove to defeat through guile and violence while he engineered coups home and abroad. It is fundamentally important in the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific strategy for what it euphemistically calls a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” While not front-page news in the U.S., these facts make Indonesia of great importance today and add to the gravity of Poulgrain’s historical account.

    JFK

    Two days before President John Kennedy was publicly executed by the US national security state led by the CIA on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring.  The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military.   It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.

    He had forecast his position in a dramatic speech in 1957 when, as a Massachusetts Senator, he told the Senate that he supported the Algerian liberation movement and opposed colonial imperialism worldwide.  The speech caused an international uproar and Kennedy was harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson.  But he was praised throughout the third world.

    Poulgrain writes:

    Kennedy was aiming for a seismic shift of Cold War alignment in Southeast Asia by bringing Indonesia ‘on side.’  As Bradley Simpson stated (in 2008), ‘One would never know from reading the voluminous recent literature on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Southeast Asia, for example, that until the mid-1960s most officials [in the US] still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam or Laos.

    Of course, JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles.  And Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder on November 22, 1963.  Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. Millions would die.

    While the Indonesian mass slaughter of mainly poor rice farmers (members of the Communist Party – PKI) instigated by Allen Dulles began in October 1965, ten years later, starting in December 1975, the American installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965 when the CIA engineered the coup d’état that toppled President Sukarno.  The American installed dictator Suharto would rule for thirty years of terror.  The CIA considers this operation one of its finest accomplishments.  It became known as “the Jakarta Method,” a model for future violent coups throughout Latin America and the world.

    And in-between these U.S. engineered mass atrocities, came the bloody coup in Chile on September 11, 1973 and the ongoing colossal U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

    Dulles’s Secret

    What JFK didn’t know was that his plans for a peaceful resolution of the Indonesia situation and an easing of the Cold War were threatening a covert long-standing conspiracy engineered by Allen Dulles to effect regime change in Indonesia through bloody means and to exacerbate the Cold War by concealing from Kennedy the truth that there was a Sino-Soviet split.  Another primary goal behind this plan was to gain unimpeded access to the vast load of natural resources that Dulles had kept secret from Kennedy, who thought Indonesia was lacking in natural resources. But Dulles knew that if Kennedy, who was very popular in Indonesia, visited Sukarno, it would deal a death blow to his plan to oust Sukarno, install a CIA replacement (Suharto), exterminate alleged communists, and secure the archipelago for Rockefeller controlled oil and mining interests, for whom he had fronted  since the 1920s.

    Reading Poulgrain’s masterful analysis, one can clearly see how much of modern history is a struggle for control of the underworld where lies the fuel that runs the megamachine – oil, minerals, gold, copper, etc.  Manifest ideological conflicts, while garnering headlines, often bury the secret of this subterranean devil’s game.

    The Discovery of Gold

    His murder mystery/detective story begins with a discovery that is then kept secret for many decades.  He writes:

    In the alpine region of Netherlands New Guinea (so named under Dutch colonial rule – today, West Papua) in 1936, three Dutchmen discovered a mountainous outcrop of ore with high copper content and very high concentrations of gold.  When later analyzed in the Netherlands, the gold (in gram/ton) proved to be twice that of Witwatersrand in South Africa, then the world’s richest gold mine, but this information was not made public.

    The geologist among the trio, Jean Jacques Dozy, worked for the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company (NNGPM), ostensibly a Dutch-controlled company based in The Hague, but whose controlling interest actually lay in the hands of the Rockefeller family, as did the mining company, Freeport Sulphur (now Freeport McMoRan, one of whose Directors from 1988-95 was Henry Kissinger, Dulles’ and the Rockefeller’s close associate) that began mining operations there in 1966.

    It was Allen Dulles, Paris-based lawyer in the employ of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, who in 1935 arranged the controlling interest in NNGPN for the Rockefellers.  And it was Dulles, among a select few others, who, because of various intervening events, including WW II, that made its exploitation impossible, kept the secret of the gold mine for almost three decades, even from President Kennedy, who had worked to return the island to Indonesian control. JFK “remained uninformed of the El Dorado, and once the remaining political hurdles were overcome, Freeport would have unimpeded access.” Those “political hurdles”; i.e., regime change, would take a while to effect.

    The Need to Assassinate President Kennedy

    But first JFK would have to be eliminated, for he had brokered Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua/West Irian for Sukarno from the Dutch who had ties to Freeport Sulphur.  Freeport was aghast at the potential loss of “El Dorado,” especially since they had recently had their world’s most advanced nickel refinery expropriated by Fidel Castro, who had named Che Guevara its new manager.  Freeport’s losses in Cuba made access to Indonesia even more important. Cuba and Indonesia thus were joined in the deadly game of chess between Dulles and Kennedy, and someone would have to lose.

    While much has been written about Cuba, Kennedy, and Dulles, the Indonesian side of the story has been slighted. Poulgrain remedies this with an exhaustive and deeply researched exploration of these matters. He details the deviousness of the covert operations Dulles ran in Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s.  He makes it clear that Kennedy was shocked by Dulles’s actions, yet never fully grasped the treacherous genius of it all, for Dulles was always “working two or three stages ahead of the present.”  Having armed and promoted a rebellion against Sukarno’s central government in 1958, Dulles made sure it would fail (shades of the Bay of Pigs to come) since a perceived failure served his long-term strategy.  To this very day, this faux 1958 Rebellion is depicted as a CIA failure by the media.  Yet from Dulles standpoint, it was a successful failure that served his long-term goals.

    “This holds true,” Poulgrain has previously written, “only if the stated goal of the CIA was the same as the actual goal.  Even more than five decades later, media analysis of the goal of The Outer Island rebels is still portrayed as a secession, as covert US support for ‘rebels in the Outer Islands that wished to secede from the central government in Jakarta’.  The actual goal of Allen Dulles had more to do with achieving a centralized army command in such a way as to appear that the CIA backing for the rebels failed.”

    Dulles’ the Devil

    Dulles betrayed the rebels he armed and encouraged, just as he betrayed friend and foe alike during his long career.  The rebellion that he instigated and planned to fail was the first stage of a larger intelligence strategy that would come to fruition in 1965-6 with the ouster of Sukarno (after multiple unsuccessful assassination attempts) and the institution of a reign of terror that followed.  It was also when – 1966 – Freeport McMoRan began their massive mining in West Papua at Grasberg at an elevation of 14,000 feet in the Alpine region.  Dulles was nothing if not patient; he had been at this game since WW I.  Even after Kennedy fired him following the Bay of Pigs, his plans were executed, just as those who got in his way were.  Poulgrain makes a powerful case that Dulles was the mastermind of the murders of JFK, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold (working with Kennedy for a peaceful solution in Indonesia and other places), and Congolese President Patrice Lumumba, the first president of a newly liberated Congo.

    His focus is on why they needed to be assassinated (similar in this regard to James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable), though with the exception of Kennedy (since the how is well-known and obvious), he also presents compelling evidence as to the how. Hammarskjold, in many ways Kennedy’s spiritual brother, was a particularly powerful obstacle to Dulles’s plans for Indonesia and colonial countries throughout the Third World. Like JFK, he was committed to independence for indigenous and colonial peoples everywhere and was trying to implement his Swedish-style ‘third way,’ proposing a form of ‘muscular pacifism’.

    Poulgrain argues correctly that if the UN Secretary General succeeded in bringing even half these colonial countries to independence, he would have transformed the UN into a significant world power and created a body of nations so large as to be a counter-weight to those embroiled in the Cold War.

    He draws on documents from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu to show the connection between South Africa’s “Operation Celeste” and Dulles’s involvement in Hammarskjold’s murder in September 1961.  While it was reported at the time as an accidental plane crash, he quotes former President Harry Truman saying, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him.  Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him’.”  Hammarskjold, like Kennedy, was intent on returning colonized countries to their indigenous inhabitants and making sure Papua was for Papuans, not Freeport McMoRan and imperial forces.

    And Dulles sold his overt Indonesian strategy as being necessary to thwart a communist takeover in Indonesia. Cold War rhetoric, like “the war on terrorism” today, served as his cover.  In this he had the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his side; they considered Kennedy soft on communism, in Indonesia and Cuba and everywhere else. Dulles’s covert agenda was to serve the interests of his power elite patrons.

    While contextually different from David Talbot’s portrayal of Dulles in The Devil’s Chessboard, Poulgrain’s portrait of Dulles within the frame of Indonesian history is equally condemnatory and nightmarish.  Both describe an evil genius ready to do anything to advance his agenda.

    Dulles and George de Mohrenschildt

    Poulgrain adds significantly to our understanding of JFK’s assassination and its aftermath by presenting new information about George de Mohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler in Dallas.  Dulles had a long association with the de Mohrenschildt family, going back to 1920-21 when in Constantinople he negotiated with Baron Sergius Alexander von Mohrenschildt on behalf of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.  The Baron’s brother and business partner was George’s father.  Dulles’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, was Standard Oil’s primary law firm. These negotiations on behalf of elite capitalist interests, in the shadow of the Russian Revolution, became the template for Dulles’s career: economic exploitation was inseparable from military concerns, the former concealed behind the anti-communist rhetoric of the latter.  An anti-red thread ran through Dulles’s career, except when the red was the blood of all those whom he considered expendable.  And the numbers are legion.  Their blood didn’t matter.

    Standard Oil is the link that joins Dulles [who controlled the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of JFK] and de Mohrenschildt. This connection was kept from the Warren Commission despite Dulles’ prominent role and the importance of the testimony of de Mohrenschildt. Poulgrain argues convincingly that de Mohrenschildt worked in “oil intelligence” before his CIA involvement, and that oil intelligence was not only Dulles’s work when he first met George’s father, Sergius, in Baku, but that that “oil intelligence” is a redundancy. The CIA, after all, is a creation of Wall Street and their interests have always been joined. The Agency was not formed to provide intelligence to US Presidents; that was a convenient myth used to cover its real purpose which was to serve the interests of investment bankers and the power elite, or those I call The Umbrella People who control the U.S.

    While working in 1941 for Humble Oil  (Prescott Bush was a major shareholder, Dulles was his lawyer, and Standard Oil had secretly bought Humble Oil sixteen years before), de Mohrenschildt was caught up in a scandal that involved Vichy (pro-Nazi) French intelligence in selling oil to Germany.  This was similar to the Dulles’s brothers and Standard Oil’s notorious business dealings with Germany.

    It was an intricate web of the high cabal with Allen Dulles at the center.

    In the midst of the scandal, de Mohrenschildt, suspected of being a Vichy French intelligence agent, “disappeared” for a while.  He later told the Warren Commission that he decided to take up oil drilling, without mentioning the name of Humble Oil that employed him again, this time as a roustabout.

    “Just when George needed to ‘disappear’, Humble Oil was providing an oil exploration team to be subcontracted to NNGPM – the company Allen Dulles had set up five years earlier to work in Netherlands New Guinea.”  Poulgrain makes a powerful circumstantial evidence case (certain documents are still unavailable) that de Mohrenschildt, in order to avoid appearing in court, went incommunicado in Netherlands New Guinea in mid-1941 where he made a record oil discovery and received a $10,000 bonus from Humble Oil.

    “Avoiding adverse publicity about his role in selling oil to Vichy France was the main priority; for George, a brief drilling adventure in remote Netherlands New Guinea would have been a timely and strategic exit.”  And who best to help him in this escape than Allen Dulles – indirectly, of course; for Dulles’s modus operandi was to maintain his “distance” from his contacts, often over many decades.

    In other words, Dulles and de Mohrenschildt were intimately involved for a long time prior to JFK’s assassination. Poulgrain rightly claims that “the entire focus of the Kennedy investigation would have shifted had the [Warren] Commission become aware of the 40-year link between Allen Dulles and de Mohrenschildt.” Their relationship involved oil, spying, Indonesia, Nazi Germany, the Rockefellers, Cuba, Haiti, etc.  It was an international web of intrigue that involved a cast of characters stranger than fiction, a high cabal of the usual and unusual operatives.

    Two unusual ones are worth mentioning: Michael Fomenko and Michael Rockefeller.  The eccentric Fomenko – aka “Tarzan” – is the Russian-Australian nephew of de Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jean Fomenko.  His arrest and deportation from Netherlands New Guinea in 1959, where he had travelled from Australia in a canoe, and his subsequent life, are fascinating and sad. It’s the stuff of a bizarre film. It seems he was one of those victims who had to be silenced because he knew a secret about George’s 1941 oil discovery that was not his to share. “In April 1964, at the same time George de Mohrenschildt was facing the Warren Commission – a time when any publicity regarding Sele 40 [George’s record oil discovery] could have changed history – it was decided that electro-convulsive therapy would be used on Michael Fomenko.” He was then imprisoned at the Ipswich Special Mental Hospital.

    Equally interesting is the media myth surrounding the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, Nelson’s son and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who was allegedly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea in 1961. His tale became front-page news, “a media event closed off to any other explanation and the political implications of his disappearance became an ongoing tragedy for the Papuan people.”  To this very day, the West Papuan people, whose land was described by Standard Oil official Richard Archbold in 1938 as “Shangri-la,” are fighting for their independence.

    The Sino-Soviet Split

    While the gold in West Papua was very important to Allen Dulles, his larger goal was to keep the Cold War blazing by concealing the dispute between China and the Soviet Union from Kennedy while instigating the mass slaughter of “communists” that would lead to regime change in Indonesia, with Major-General Suharto, his ally, replacing President Sukarno. In this he was successful. Poulgrain says:

    Not only did Dulles fail to brief Kennedy on the Sino-Soviet dispute early in the presidency, but he also remained silent about the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing to wield influence over the PKI or win its support.  In geographical terms, Beijing regarded Indonesia as its own backyard, and winning the support of the PKI would give Beijing an advantage in the Sino-Soviet dispute.  The numerical growth of the PKI was seen by Moscow and Beijing for its obvious political potential.  Dulles was also focused on the PKI, but his peculiar skill in political intelligence turned what seemed inevitable on its head.  The size of the party [the Indonesian Communist Party was the largest outside the Sino-Soviet bloc] became a factor he used to his advantage when formulating his wedge strategy – the greater the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing over the PKI, the more intense would be the recrimination once the PKI was eliminated.

    The slaughter of more than a million poor farmers was a trifle to Dulles.

    The September 30, 1965 Movement

    In the early hours of October 1, 1965, a fake coup d’état was staged by the CIA’s man, Major-General Suharto.  It was announced that seven generals had been arrested and would be taken to President Sukarno “to explain the rumor that they were planning a military coup on October 5.”  Suharto declared himself the head of the army. Someone was said to have killed the generals. In the afternoon, a radio announcement was made calling for the Sukarno government to be dismissed.  This became Suharto’s basis for blaming it on the communists and the so-called September 30 Movement, and he gave the order to kill the PKI leaders.  This started the massive bloodshed that would follow.

    With one hand, Suharto crushed the Movement, accusing the PKI of being the ultimate instigator of an attempt to oust Sukarno, and with the other hand he feigned to protect the “father of the Indonesian revolution,” while actually stripping Sukarno of every vestige of political support.

    When the generals’ bodies were recovered a few days after October 1, Suharto falsely claimed the PKI women had tortured and sexually mutilated them as part of some primitive sexual orgy.  This heinous perversion of power was the start of the Suharto era.  In total control of the media, he manipulated popular wrath to call for revenge.

    If this confuses you, it should, because the twisted nature of this fabricated coup was actually part of a real coup in slow motion aimed at ousting Sukarno and replacing him with the CIA’s man Suharto.  This occurred in early 1967 after the mass slaughter of communists.  It was a regime change cheered on by the American mass media as a triumph over communist aggression.

    New Evidence of U.S. Direct Involvement in the Slaughter

    Poulgrain has spent forty years interviewing participants and researching this horrendous history. His detailed research is quite amazing. And it does take concentration to follow it all, as with the machinations of Dulles, Suharto, et al.

    Some things, however, are straightforward.  For example, he documents how, during the height of the slaughter, two Americans – one man and one woman – were in Klaten (PKI headquarters in central Java) supervising the Indonesian army as they killed the PKI. These two would travel back and forth by helicopter from a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet that was off the coast of Java.  The plan was that the more communists killed, the greater would be the dispute between Moscow and Beijing, since they would accuse each other for the tragedy, which is exactly what they did.  This was the wedge that was mentioned in the Rockefeller Brothers Panel Report from the late 1950s in which Dulles and Henry Kissinger both participated.

    The hatred drummed up against these poor members of the Communist Party was extraordinary in its depravity.  In addition to Suharto’s lies about communist women mutilating the generals’ bodies, a massive campaign of hatred was directed against these landless peasants who made up the bulk of the PKI.  False Cold War radio broadcasts from Singapore stirred up hostility toward them, declaring them atheists, etc.  Wealthy Muslim landowners – the 1 per cent – made outrageous charges to assist the army’s slaughter.  Poulgrain tells us:

    Muhammadiyah preachers were broadcasting from mosques that all who joined the communist party must be killed, saying they are the ‘lowest order of infidel, the shedding of whose blood is comparable to killing a chicken.’

    For those Americans especially, who think this history of long ago and far away does not touch them, its compelling analysis of how and why Allen Dulles and his military allies would want JFK dead since he was a threat to national security as they defined in it their paranoid anti-communist ideology might be an added impetus to read this very important book. Indonesia may be far away geographically, but it’s a small world.  Dulles and Kennedy had irreconcilable differences, and when Dulles was once asked in a radio interview what he would do to someone who threatened national security, he matter-of-factually said, “I’d kill him.”  The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed.

    I would be remiss if I didn’t say that the introduction to JFK vs. Dulles by Oliver Stone and the afterward by James DiEugenio are outstanding.  They add excellent context and clarity to a really great and important book.

    The post Indonesian Slaughter, Allen Dulles, and the Assassination of JFK first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Indonesian Slaughter, Allen Dulles, and the Assassination of JFK

    A Review of Greg Poulgrain’s book JFK vs. Allen Dulles

    Before I digress slightly, let me state from the outset that the book by Greg Poulgrain that I am about to review is extraordinary by any measure. The story he tells is one you will read nowhere else, especially in the way he links the assassination of President Kennedy to former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the engineering by the latter of one of the 20th century’s most terrible mass murders.  It will make your hair stand on end and should be read by anyone who cares about historical truth.

    About twelve years ago I taught a graduate school course to Massachusetts State Troopers and police officers from various cities and towns.  As part of the course material, I had created a segment on the history of the United States’ foreign policy, with particular emphasis on Indonesia.

    No one in this class knew anything about Indonesia, not even where it was. These were intelligent, ambitious adults, eager to learn, all with college degrees. This was in the midst of the “war on terror”; i.e., war on Muslim countries, and the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency.  Almost all the class had voted for Obama and were aware they he had spent some part of his youth in this unknown country somewhere far away.

    I mention this as a preface to this review of JFK vs. Dulles, because its subtitle is Battleground Indonesia, and my suspicion is that those students’ lack of knowledge about the intertwined history of Indonesia and the U.S. is as scanty today among the general public as it was for my students a dozen years ago.

    This makes Greg Poulgrain’s remarkable book – JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia – even more important since it is a powerful antidote to such ignorance, and a reminder for those who have fallen, purposefully or not, into a state of historical amnesia that has erased the fact that the U.S. has committed systematic crimes that have resulted in the deaths of more than a million Indonesians and many more millions throughout the world over innumerable decades.

    Such crimes against humanity have been hidden behind what the English playwright Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel Prize address called “a tapestry of lies.”  Of such massive crimes, he said:

    But you wouldn’t know it.

    It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.

    And when one examines the true history of such atrocities, again and again one comes up against familiar names of the guilty who have never been prosecuted.  Criminals in high places whose crimes around the world from Vietnam to Chile to Cuba to Nicaragua to Argentina to Iraq to Libya to Syria, etc. have been – and continue to be – integral to American foreign policy as it serves the interests of its wealthy owners and their media mouthpieces.

    In his brilliant new book on U.S./Indonesian history, Dr. Greg Poulgrain unweaves this tapestry of lies and sheds new light on the liars’ sordid deeds. He is an Australian expert on Indonesia whose work stretches back forty years, is a professor at University of the Sunshine Coast in Brisbane and has written four highly-researched books about Indonesia.

    In JFK vs. Dulles, he exposes the intrigue behind the ruthless regime-change strategy in Indonesia of the longest-serving CIA director, Allen Dulles, and how it clashed with the policy of President John F. Kennedy, leading to JFK’s assassination, Indonesian regime change, and massive slaughter.

    Poulgrain begins with this question:

    Would Allen Dulles have resorted to assassinating the President of the United States to ensure that his ‘Indonesian strategy’ rather than Kennedy’s was achieved?

    To which he answers: Yes.

    But let me not get ahead of myself, for the long, intricate tale he tells is one a reviewer can only summarize, so filled is it with voluminous details.  So I will touch on a few salient points and encourage people to buy and read this important book.

    Indonesia’s Strategic Importance

    The strategic and economic importance of Indonesia cannot be exaggerated.  It is the world’s 4th most populous country (275+ million), is located in a vital shipping lane adjacent to the South China Sea, has the world’s largest Muslim population, has vast mineral and oil deposits, and is home in West Papua to Grasberg, the world’s largest gold mine and the second largest copper mine, primarily owned by Freeport McMoRan of Phoenix, Arizona, whose past board members have included Henry Kissinger, John Hay Whitney, and Godfrey Rockefeller.

    Long a battleground in the Cold War, Indonesia remains vitally important in the New Cold War and the pivot to Asia launched by the Obama administration against China and Russia, the same antagonists Allen Dulles strove to defeat through guile and violence while he engineered coups home and abroad. It is fundamentally important in the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific strategy for what it euphemistically calls a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” While not front-page news in the U.S., these facts make Indonesia of great importance today and add to the gravity of Poulgrain’s historical account.

    JFK

    Two days before President John Kennedy was publicly executed by the US national security state led by the CIA on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring.  The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military.   It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.

    He had forecast his position in a dramatic speech in 1957 when, as a Massachusetts Senator, he told the Senate that he supported the Algerian liberation movement and opposed colonial imperialism worldwide.  The speech caused an international uproar and Kennedy was harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson.  But he was praised throughout the third world.

    Poulgrain writes:

    Kennedy was aiming for a seismic shift of Cold War alignment in Southeast Asia by bringing Indonesia ‘on side.’  As Bradley Simpson stated (in 2008), ‘One would never know from reading the voluminous recent literature on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Southeast Asia, for example, that until the mid-1960s most officials [in the US] still considered Indonesia of far greater importance than Vietnam or Laos.

    Of course, JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles.  And Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder on November 22, 1963.  Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. Millions would die.

    While the Indonesian mass slaughter of mainly poor rice farmers (members of the Communist Party – PKI) instigated by Allen Dulles began in October 1965, ten years later, starting in December 1975, the American installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965 when the CIA engineered the coup d’état that toppled President Sukarno.  The American installed dictator Suharto would rule for thirty years of terror.  The CIA considers this operation one of its finest accomplishments.  It became known as “the Jakarta Method,” a model for future violent coups throughout Latin America and the world.

    And in-between these U.S. engineered mass atrocities, came the bloody coup in Chile on September 11, 1973 and the ongoing colossal U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

    Dulles’s Secret

    What JFK didn’t know was that his plans for a peaceful resolution of the Indonesia situation and an easing of the Cold War were threatening a covert long-standing conspiracy engineered by Allen Dulles to effect regime change in Indonesia through bloody means and to exacerbate the Cold War by concealing from Kennedy the truth that there was a Sino-Soviet split.  Another primary goal behind this plan was to gain unimpeded access to the vast load of natural resources that Dulles had kept secret from Kennedy, who thought Indonesia was lacking in natural resources. But Dulles knew that if Kennedy, who was very popular in Indonesia, visited Sukarno, it would deal a death blow to his plan to oust Sukarno, install a CIA replacement (Suharto), exterminate alleged communists, and secure the archipelago for Rockefeller controlled oil and mining interests, for whom he had fronted  since the 1920s.

    Reading Poulgrain’s masterful analysis, one can clearly see how much of modern history is a struggle for control of the underworld where lies the fuel that runs the megamachine – oil, minerals, gold, copper, etc.  Manifest ideological conflicts, while garnering headlines, often bury the secret of this subterranean devil’s game.

    The Discovery of Gold

    His murder mystery/detective story begins with a discovery that is then kept secret for many decades.  He writes:

    In the alpine region of Netherlands New Guinea (so named under Dutch colonial rule – today, West Papua) in 1936, three Dutchmen discovered a mountainous outcrop of ore with high copper content and very high concentrations of gold.  When later analyzed in the Netherlands, the gold (in gram/ton) proved to be twice that of Witwatersrand in South Africa, then the world’s richest gold mine, but this information was not made public.

    The geologist among the trio, Jean Jacques Dozy, worked for the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company (NNGPM), ostensibly a Dutch-controlled company based in The Hague, but whose controlling interest actually lay in the hands of the Rockefeller family, as did the mining company, Freeport Sulphur (now Freeport McMoRan, one of whose Directors from 1988-95 was Henry Kissinger, Dulles’ and the Rockefeller’s close associate) that began mining operations there in 1966.

    It was Allen Dulles, Paris-based lawyer in the employ of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, who in 1935 arranged the controlling interest in NNGPN for the Rockefellers.  And it was Dulles, among a select few others, who, because of various intervening events, including WW II, that made its exploitation impossible, kept the secret of the gold mine for almost three decades, even from President Kennedy, who had worked to return the island to Indonesian control. JFK “remained uninformed of the El Dorado, and once the remaining political hurdles were overcome, Freeport would have unimpeded access.” Those “political hurdles”; i.e., regime change, would take a while to effect.

    The Need to Assassinate President Kennedy

    But first JFK would have to be eliminated, for he had brokered Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua/West Irian for Sukarno from the Dutch who had ties to Freeport Sulphur.  Freeport was aghast at the potential loss of “El Dorado,” especially since they had recently had their world’s most advanced nickel refinery expropriated by Fidel Castro, who had named Che Guevara its new manager.  Freeport’s losses in Cuba made access to Indonesia even more important. Cuba and Indonesia thus were joined in the deadly game of chess between Dulles and Kennedy, and someone would have to lose.

    While much has been written about Cuba, Kennedy, and Dulles, the Indonesian side of the story has been slighted. Poulgrain remedies this with an exhaustive and deeply researched exploration of these matters. He details the deviousness of the covert operations Dulles ran in Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s.  He makes it clear that Kennedy was shocked by Dulles’s actions, yet never fully grasped the treacherous genius of it all, for Dulles was always “working two or three stages ahead of the present.”  Having armed and promoted a rebellion against Sukarno’s central government in 1958, Dulles made sure it would fail (shades of the Bay of Pigs to come) since a perceived failure served his long-term strategy.  To this very day, this faux 1958 Rebellion is depicted as a CIA failure by the media.  Yet from Dulles standpoint, it was a successful failure that served his long-term goals.

    “This holds true,” Poulgrain has previously written, “only if the stated goal of the CIA was the same as the actual goal.  Even more than five decades later, media analysis of the goal of The Outer Island rebels is still portrayed as a secession, as covert US support for ‘rebels in the Outer Islands that wished to secede from the central government in Jakarta’.  The actual goal of Allen Dulles had more to do with achieving a centralized army command in such a way as to appear that the CIA backing for the rebels failed.”

    Dulles’ the Devil

    Dulles betrayed the rebels he armed and encouraged, just as he betrayed friend and foe alike during his long career.  The rebellion that he instigated and planned to fail was the first stage of a larger intelligence strategy that would come to fruition in 1965-6 with the ouster of Sukarno (after multiple unsuccessful assassination attempts) and the institution of a reign of terror that followed.  It was also when – 1966 – Freeport McMoRan began their massive mining in West Papua at Grasberg at an elevation of 14,000 feet in the Alpine region.  Dulles was nothing if not patient; he had been at this game since WW I.  Even after Kennedy fired him following the Bay of Pigs, his plans were executed, just as those who got in his way were.  Poulgrain makes a powerful case that Dulles was the mastermind of the murders of JFK, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold (working with Kennedy for a peaceful solution in Indonesia and other places), and Congolese President Patrice Lumumba, the first president of a newly liberated Congo.

    His focus is on why they needed to be assassinated (similar in this regard to James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable), though with the exception of Kennedy (since the how is well-known and obvious), he also presents compelling evidence as to the how. Hammarskjold, in many ways Kennedy’s spiritual brother, was a particularly powerful obstacle to Dulles’s plans for Indonesia and colonial countries throughout the Third World. Like JFK, he was committed to independence for indigenous and colonial peoples everywhere and was trying to implement his Swedish-style ‘third way,’ proposing a form of ‘muscular pacifism’.

    Poulgrain argues correctly that if the UN Secretary General succeeded in bringing even half these colonial countries to independence, he would have transformed the UN into a significant world power and created a body of nations so large as to be a counter-weight to those embroiled in the Cold War.

    He draws on documents from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu to show the connection between South Africa’s “Operation Celeste” and Dulles’s involvement in Hammarskjold’s murder in September 1961.  While it was reported at the time as an accidental plane crash, he quotes former President Harry Truman saying, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him.  Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him’.”  Hammarskjold, like Kennedy, was intent on returning colonized countries to their indigenous inhabitants and making sure Papua was for Papuans, not Freeport McMoRan and imperial forces.

    And Dulles sold his overt Indonesian strategy as being necessary to thwart a communist takeover in Indonesia. Cold War rhetoric, like “the war on terrorism” today, served as his cover.  In this he had the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his side; they considered Kennedy soft on communism, in Indonesia and Cuba and everywhere else. Dulles’s covert agenda was to serve the interests of his power elite patrons.

    While contextually different from David Talbot’s portrayal of Dulles in The Devil’s Chessboard, Poulgrain’s portrait of Dulles within the frame of Indonesian history is equally condemnatory and nightmarish.  Both describe an evil genius ready to do anything to advance his agenda.

    Dulles and George de Mohrenschildt

    Poulgrain adds significantly to our understanding of JFK’s assassination and its aftermath by presenting new information about George de Mohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler in Dallas.  Dulles had a long association with the de Mohrenschildt family, going back to 1920-21 when in Constantinople he negotiated with Baron Sergius Alexander von Mohrenschildt on behalf of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.  The Baron’s brother and business partner was George’s father.  Dulles’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, was Standard Oil’s primary law firm. These negotiations on behalf of elite capitalist interests, in the shadow of the Russian Revolution, became the template for Dulles’s career: economic exploitation was inseparable from military concerns, the former concealed behind the anti-communist rhetoric of the latter.  An anti-red thread ran through Dulles’s career, except when the red was the blood of all those whom he considered expendable.  And the numbers are legion.  Their blood didn’t matter.

    Standard Oil is the link that joins Dulles [who controlled the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of JFK] and de Mohrenschildt. This connection was kept from the Warren Commission despite Dulles’ prominent role and the importance of the testimony of de Mohrenschildt. Poulgrain argues convincingly that de Mohrenschildt worked in “oil intelligence” before his CIA involvement, and that oil intelligence was not only Dulles’s work when he first met George’s father, Sergius, in Baku, but that that “oil intelligence” is a redundancy. The CIA, after all, is a creation of Wall Street and their interests have always been joined. The Agency was not formed to provide intelligence to US Presidents; that was a convenient myth used to cover its real purpose which was to serve the interests of investment bankers and the power elite, or those I call The Umbrella People who control the U.S.

    While working in 1941 for Humble Oil  (Prescott Bush was a major shareholder, Dulles was his lawyer, and Standard Oil had secretly bought Humble Oil sixteen years before), de Mohrenschildt was caught up in a scandal that involved Vichy (pro-Nazi) French intelligence in selling oil to Germany.  This was similar to the Dulles’s brothers and Standard Oil’s notorious business dealings with Germany.

    It was an intricate web of the high cabal with Allen Dulles at the center.

    In the midst of the scandal, de Mohrenschildt, suspected of being a Vichy French intelligence agent, “disappeared” for a while.  He later told the Warren Commission that he decided to take up oil drilling, without mentioning the name of Humble Oil that employed him again, this time as a roustabout.

    “Just when George needed to ‘disappear’, Humble Oil was providing an oil exploration team to be subcontracted to NNGPM – the company Allen Dulles had set up five years earlier to work in Netherlands New Guinea.”  Poulgrain makes a powerful circumstantial evidence case (certain documents are still unavailable) that de Mohrenschildt, in order to avoid appearing in court, went incommunicado in Netherlands New Guinea in mid-1941 where he made a record oil discovery and received a $10,000 bonus from Humble Oil.

    “Avoiding adverse publicity about his role in selling oil to Vichy France was the main priority; for George, a brief drilling adventure in remote Netherlands New Guinea would have been a timely and strategic exit.”  And who best to help him in this escape than Allen Dulles – indirectly, of course; for Dulles’s modus operandi was to maintain his “distance” from his contacts, often over many decades.

    In other words, Dulles and de Mohrenschildt were intimately involved for a long time prior to JFK’s assassination. Poulgrain rightly claims that “the entire focus of the Kennedy investigation would have shifted had the [Warren] Commission become aware of the 40-year link between Allen Dulles and de Mohrenschildt.” Their relationship involved oil, spying, Indonesia, Nazi Germany, the Rockefellers, Cuba, Haiti, etc.  It was an international web of intrigue that involved a cast of characters stranger than fiction, a high cabal of the usual and unusual operatives.

    Two unusual ones are worth mentioning: Michael Fomenko and Michael Rockefeller.  The eccentric Fomenko – aka “Tarzan” – is the Russian-Australian nephew of de Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jean Fomenko.  His arrest and deportation from Netherlands New Guinea in 1959, where he had travelled from Australia in a canoe, and his subsequent life, are fascinating and sad. It’s the stuff of a bizarre film. It seems he was one of those victims who had to be silenced because he knew a secret about George’s 1941 oil discovery that was not his to share. “In April 1964, at the same time George de Mohrenschildt was facing the Warren Commission – a time when any publicity regarding Sele 40 [George’s record oil discovery] could have changed history – it was decided that electro-convulsive therapy would be used on Michael Fomenko.” He was then imprisoned at the Ipswich Special Mental Hospital.

    Equally interesting is the media myth surrounding the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, Nelson’s son and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who was allegedly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea in 1961. His tale became front-page news, “a media event closed off to any other explanation and the political implications of his disappearance became an ongoing tragedy for the Papuan people.”  To this very day, the West Papuan people, whose land was described by Standard Oil official Richard Archbold in 1938 as “Shangri-la,” are fighting for their independence.

    The Sino-Soviet Split

    While the gold in West Papua was very important to Allen Dulles, his larger goal was to keep the Cold War blazing by concealing the dispute between China and the Soviet Union from Kennedy while instigating the mass slaughter of “communists” that would lead to regime change in Indonesia, with Major-General Suharto, his ally, replacing President Sukarno. In this he was successful. Poulgrain says:

    Not only did Dulles fail to brief Kennedy on the Sino-Soviet dispute early in the presidency, but he also remained silent about the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing to wield influence over the PKI or win its support.  In geographical terms, Beijing regarded Indonesia as its own backyard, and winning the support of the PKI would give Beijing an advantage in the Sino-Soviet dispute.  The numerical growth of the PKI was seen by Moscow and Beijing for its obvious political potential.  Dulles was also focused on the PKI, but his peculiar skill in political intelligence turned what seemed inevitable on its head.  The size of the party [the Indonesian Communist Party was the largest outside the Sino-Soviet bloc] became a factor he used to his advantage when formulating his wedge strategy – the greater the rivalry between Moscow and Beijing over the PKI, the more intense would be the recrimination once the PKI was eliminated.

    The slaughter of more than a million poor farmers was a trifle to Dulles.

    The September 30, 1965 Movement

    In the early hours of October 1, 1965, a fake coup d’état was staged by the CIA’s man, Major-General Suharto.  It was announced that seven generals had been arrested and would be taken to President Sukarno “to explain the rumor that they were planning a military coup on October 5.”  Suharto declared himself the head of the army. Someone was said to have killed the generals. In the afternoon, a radio announcement was made calling for the Sukarno government to be dismissed.  This became Suharto’s basis for blaming it on the communists and the so-called September 30 Movement, and he gave the order to kill the PKI leaders.  This started the massive bloodshed that would follow.

    With one hand, Suharto crushed the Movement, accusing the PKI of being the ultimate instigator of an attempt to oust Sukarno, and with the other hand he feigned to protect the “father of the Indonesian revolution,” while actually stripping Sukarno of every vestige of political support.

    When the generals’ bodies were recovered a few days after October 1, Suharto falsely claimed the PKI women had tortured and sexually mutilated them as part of some primitive sexual orgy.  This heinous perversion of power was the start of the Suharto era.  In total control of the media, he manipulated popular wrath to call for revenge.

    If this confuses you, it should, because the twisted nature of this fabricated coup was actually part of a real coup in slow motion aimed at ousting Sukarno and replacing him with the CIA’s man Suharto.  This occurred in early 1967 after the mass slaughter of communists.  It was a regime change cheered on by the American mass media as a triumph over communist aggression.

    New Evidence of U.S. Direct Involvement in the Slaughter

    Poulgrain has spent forty years interviewing participants and researching this horrendous history. His detailed research is quite amazing. And it does take concentration to follow it all, as with the machinations of Dulles, Suharto, et al.

    Some things, however, are straightforward.  For example, he documents how, during the height of the slaughter, two Americans – one man and one woman – were in Klaten (PKI headquarters in central Java) supervising the Indonesian army as they killed the PKI. These two would travel back and forth by helicopter from a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet that was off the coast of Java.  The plan was that the more communists killed, the greater would be the dispute between Moscow and Beijing, since they would accuse each other for the tragedy, which is exactly what they did.  This was the wedge that was mentioned in the Rockefeller Brothers Panel Report from the late 1950s in which Dulles and Henry Kissinger both participated.

    The hatred drummed up against these poor members of the Communist Party was extraordinary in its depravity.  In addition to Suharto’s lies about communist women mutilating the generals’ bodies, a massive campaign of hatred was directed against these landless peasants who made up the bulk of the PKI.  False Cold War radio broadcasts from Singapore stirred up hostility toward them, declaring them atheists, etc.  Wealthy Muslim landowners – the 1 per cent – made outrageous charges to assist the army’s slaughter.  Poulgrain tells us:

    Muhammadiyah preachers were broadcasting from mosques that all who joined the communist party must be killed, saying they are the ‘lowest order of infidel, the shedding of whose blood is comparable to killing a chicken.’

    For those Americans especially, who think this history of long ago and far away does not touch them, its compelling analysis of how and why Allen Dulles and his military allies would want JFK dead since he was a threat to national security as they defined in it their paranoid anti-communist ideology might be an added impetus to read this very important book. Indonesia may be far away geographically, but it’s a small world.  Dulles and Kennedy had irreconcilable differences, and when Dulles was once asked in a radio interview what he would do to someone who threatened national security, he matter-of-factually said, “I’d kill him.”  The Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed.

    I would be remiss if I didn’t say that the introduction to JFK vs. Dulles by Oliver Stone and the afterward by James DiEugenio are outstanding.  They add excellent context and clarity to a really great and important book.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2021 at 9:37am and is filed under Book Review, Indonesia, John F. Kennedy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.