Overweening Generalist

Friday, July 26, 2013

American Coup D'Etat Semantics: You Can't Just Pee On A Stick


"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"'The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."
-A long time ago a logician wrote a book that was double-coded: Children could enjoy it on a child's level, while mum and pop were edified at an adult level. The author's name was "Lewis Carroll" and "Charles Ludwidge Dodgson."

In my studies of assassinations in Unistat history, and associated events, certain years pop up as ones authors more or less argue could be construed as something on the order of some subspecies of the coup d'etat, or "blow against the state." 1947 and the National Security Act is still my personal object for deep study. But certainly: 1963, 1974, 1980 (the "October Surprise" and what resulted from long-time FBI snitch-President Reagan), and 2000 are all "up there." Now let's consider 2013. I think it has a lot to say to us, but because I fear I bore you far too often, I'll try to make it brief.

But first, a digression of sorts: historically the coup d'etat has been associated with a military take-over of the corridors of power, and for good reason: a very high percentage of total coups are of this sort. (See the still-seminal Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook, by Edward Luttwak, skip right to the amazing Appendices.)

We think of the President hopping on a helicopter with a suitcase in some Third World country, rushing to exile in Lichtenstein, the generals storming into the Palace, or some scenario we've ingested with spy thrillers filtered through Hollywood. 

What about a different sort of coup? One you may not have seen depicted in a novel of film or history book. Something like a "slow-motion coup d'etat"? That's the term a Berkeley professor has recently used. An M.I.T. professor used the exact same term recently. They were both talking about Unistat.

                                                      Robert Reich

Rosa Brooks
On the 4th of July last, Rosa Brooks wrote "America the Coupless" for Foreign Policy. It's about how military leadership increasingly self-identifies as "more conservative and more Republican than the general population." I find this harrowing, but she's concerned about a military coup in the US, writing on July 4, 2013. Less than 1/2 of 1% of the population actively serves in the military, and Unistatians show a very high degree of respect for the military while having almost zero knowledge about what military life is like, what problems people in the military face, etc. Brooks finds this alarming. She ends her piece this way: 

"Tocqueville famously quipped that in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. It's a good thing we don't yet have the military we deserve: If we did we might be seeing tanks in our own public squares."

Andrew Bacevich
Well, to catch the younger Sarnaev brother, we did see a militarized local police force that ought to make Rosa Brooks nuance her thinking a bit. But a military coup seems unlikely in Unistat, at this stage, largely for the reasons that Prof. Andrew Bacevich gives here, from the blog Crossed Crocodiles, 2 August, 2009, an excerpt from a discussion that included Luttwack himself and other experts on the possibility of a military coup. Bacevich thinks the military - the Pentagon - after 1945, learned to play politics with Congress and the media and they get what they want: just look at the "defense" budget! Bacevich uses the term "creeping coup" to describe a deflection of concerns from domestic needs to "national security" ones (and how hard can it be when you have morons like Michelle Bachmann on the Intelligence Committee?). No, but seriously: go back to the Crossed Crocodiles blog-link and read the back-and-forth between Bacevich and Richard Kohn, especially the part blogger "xcroc" has highlighted.

Bacevich: "creeping coup."

[Sidelight: Here's one of my main guys, George Scialabba, reviewing a book that came out in 2006 and its inconspicuousness - James Carroll's book House Of War, not Scialabba's review - seems to me unmerited and unjust. Maybe it's just another case of the Murrrkins being prejudiced against fat books?]

Chris Hedges
Hedges seems to me like a tortured, very dramatic soul, extremely well-educated, a brilliant speaker, and he has some valuable ideas that seem to want to harness a left-wing religiosity dormant in the Unistatian mind. This righteous fervor would link working class people (most of us) with an intelligent, populist progressive politics. But I'm oversimplifying Hedges, who deserves your attention if you haven't already given him some of it. In the 17 September 2012 issue of The Economist he answered questions about a very slow capitalist coup that has happened in Unistat. It perhaps started with the destruction of popular/radical movements during World War I and gained momentum under an almost religious movement called "anticommunism" in Unistat (I think this point is woefully underrated). Hedges (and this is but one of many interesting aspects of his thought, to my eyes) sees the New Left as weaker than the Old Left. In the 1970s a neo-feudalism is seen in which the Empire went from being an Empire of Production to an Empire of Consumption. He tears Neoliberal Bill Clinton a neo-one, and says that the populace was kept mollified for a spell by easy access to credit and cheap market goods, but now the jig is up, the jobs are gone, it's a Temp/McDonald's/Wal-Mart Reality Sandwich for Unistatian workers, and they don't know what...wha?...wha happened? Read this piece: he wonders if Aldous Huxley or George Orwell was right, then he splits the difference - as I would - and gives Huxley the criminal level of hedonism untinged by any humanistic ethics, and Orwell gets the surveillance state nod. Here's Hedges on video for 17 minutes, from very recently, explaining why we're now in "corporate totalitarianism."

Hedges: a slow "capitalist coup." We're now under "corporate totalitarianism."

Brief digression: on the subject of Americans and the violence that erupts from their imposed amnesia: Henry A. Giroux: "The Violence of Organized Forgetting" (The OG does NOT want to absolve the Unistatian citizenry for allowing themselves to get into this mess!)

Robert Reich
Prof at Berkeley, formerly of the Clinton administration. On 5 June, 2012, Reich blogged that "I fear that at least since 2010 we've been witnessing a quiet, slow-motion coup d'etat whose purpose is to repeal every bit of progressive legislation since the New Deal and entrench the privileged positions of the wealthy and powerful - who haven't been as wealthy or as powerful since the Gilded Age or the late 19th century."

How have the new plutocratic oligarchy pulled off the coup? Citizen's United, and their ownership of media and the overwhelming repetition of lies about "Obama is increasing the debt by $4 billion a day! Stop the liberal spending, black man! You're  'out of control'!" The fascist Koch brothers and other billionaire right-wingers are "job creators" (they're actually job-destroyers), the government is evil, regulation is strangling every thing that's good, true, and wholesome, etc. Obama's "mortgaging our childrens' futures!" As if these multi-billionaires need to worry about their kids. The reality is that the debt is growing because the Republicans in Congress refuse to repeal the Bush tax cuts, threatening to throw the country off a "fiscal cliff" if we dare make the billionaires pay something close to their fair share of taxes. Remember: Bush and Cheney started two wars while cutting taxes on the rich, which...has that ever been done in history? It's...sorry: it's fascism. And the amnesiac public (see Giroux) let 'em get away with it. Oh hell, maybe the public is just fucking stupid. There. I said it.


Reich: a "slow-motion coup d'etat." And: "treason?" 

Paul Craig Roberts
13 July, 2013: the American people are "hesitant to acknowledge it..." (yea yea...see Giroux?)

Roberts was one of the architects of Reaganomics! So: quite some distance from Reich, Brooks, Hedges, and Bacevich. Not that any of the aforementioned are squarely in any of the others' camp.

What gets me here is the style: the appeal of the "Founding Fathers." That Bush/Cheney/Obama/Biden and their minions and cabinet are "usurpers." It's an Executive Branch coup for Paul Craig Roberts. The leadership in Unistat is "illegitimate" and the Unistatians are serfs: we can be picked up for no good reason at all, kept incommunicado, thrown in a dungeon, tortured, no lawyers, no court appearance, no evidence. We can be placed on lists compiled by the "National Stasi Agency" and killed by drone, if Caesar (at the moment: Obama) so deems. We are no longer a nation of laws or Constitution. It's sheer "lies and naked force." The only Amendment left standing is the 2nd, which is a joke in the face of the Empire's forces (see Roberts's prose). When Obama intercepted the Bolivian jet that had Morales on it, because they were sure Snowden was stowed onboard, they showed that they cared more for "revenge" than International Law. 

It's a short piece, but this former Reaganite is sure we've undergone a coup. While I find much sympathy with Roberts here, the style - for what it's worth - doesn't gleam for me. He repeats at least three times that since 2000 the leadership is not legitimate, but he asserts it's less legit than So.Africa under apartheid, Israel in Palestine, the Taliban, Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein. Okay, yea. Maybe. I'll give ya this, brother Paul: it's one clusterfuck of a mess.

I like that he took pains to single out John Yoo and Jay Scott Bybee as legal legitimators of the Imperial President who is above Constitutional Law. (maybe see my blogspew on NeoMedievalism?

Roberts: "a coup" with heavy stress on the Executive Branch; and "illegitimate."

Jimmy Carter
The same week that Roberts blogged - it's really all starting to coalesce now, <cough> isn't it? - Jimmy Carter was in Atlanta, giving a talk to further German-Unistat relations. Der Spiegel covered it in German, but oddly, it wasn't "news" to the hordes of dipshits who get paid as "journalists" in Unistat, so it didn't appear in mainstream press here, but some guy Tweeted, and...well, read the very very short piece. Basically, Carter thinks that the Snowden revelations mean there's a "suspension of American democracy." (As opposed to actual democracy? Anyway...) Carter apparently added that the NSA story will leave Google and Facebook with less credibility worldwide, which...don't hold your breath. Still: Carter is not exactly in any of these other peoples' camp, is he? 

Carter: vague: didn't utter the "c" word, but a "suspension" of "democracy." A real cliff-hanger.

                                                          John Tirman

John Tirman
M.I.T. professor at the Center for Intl. Studies, and along with Reich and Hedges, my favorite. He boldly asserts Unistat has undergone a coup, and tells why: five days after the 4th of July, Tirman wrote that the Snowden revelation are a "blow to the traditional authority of constitutional government, the sine qua non of American political experience." He's no Paul Craig Roberts, clearly.

Tirman is a man after my own heart by reminding us of Unistat's fomenting of traditional-style military coups in Iran (1953), Gautemala (1954), Chile (1973), and Turkey (1980). 

What I appreciate most about Tirman is his use of the terms "parallel state" and "deep state," which deserve far wider use by the citizenry. Yes, we have the FISA court, which resembles democracy in the way a horse resembles a hippo. The parallel state, now in its 12th year, is secret, nondemocratic, up to its ears in spooks, spies on everyone, friend and foe alike, and is basically lawless. It has had 12 years to grow structures that institutionalize an alternative authority, a hidden set of rules, and who knows what is permissible. Thomas Jefferson, that old wig, is spinning at 78 rpms as he hears about this. As Paul Craig Roberts wouldn't hesitate to say: "illegitimate."

Tirman says that Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin warned us, and he's worth quoting when he's quoting them:

Snowden's and others' revelations should not be completely surprising, given the work of Dana Priest and William Arkin in their 2011 book Top Secret America. Many of the most shocking bits were excerpted in the Washington Post , where Priest is a reporter. They uncovered a vast, opaque security bureaucracy, extremely inefficient but aggressively intrusive. "The federal-state-corporate partnership has produced a vast domestic intelligence apparatus that collects, stores, and analyzes information about tens of thousands of US citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing," they wrote.  It involved, they calculated, nearly 4000 organizations in the United States, "each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions."

After Tirman ticks off a litany of explosively obvious corrosive effects of Big Money and corporations on the body politic, he ends with this: "The seduction of policymakers by corporate money is sad. The psychotic, parallel state is terrifying." 

Tirman: "slow-motion coup d'etat."

Here's Dana Priest on NPR for 39 mins. Take what she says with a pinch of Snowden, and a snifter of Cheney, add some torture and the Patriot Act and a dash of All-American Idiocy, and tell me Unistat hasn't undergone a coup, that, in the immortal prose of Paul Craig Roberts, is an "illegitimate" state.

18 comments:

Sue Howard said...

I'm familiar with Hedges & Tirman from other contexts. They both struck me as somewhat paranoid (in the "bad" sense of vocally suspecting that anyone who disagrees with their particular Chomsky-inspired(?) doctrine must be part of the Problem (and probably a paid agent of Power).

I loved your phrase "a left-wing religiosity" (and it seemed apt to me here given my negative take on political religiosity).

Then again, I've never been disappointed in the past with thinkers that you've linked to, so maybe I'm missing something important here - I'll take another look at their writings.

Maybe things have moved so far to the hard-right, that we're grateful for *any* uncompromising voices on the left - even the dogmatic, ideological ones?

Eric Wagner said...

Interesting piece. I think of Tolstoy's line, "What then shall we do?"

In terms of the anti-communist fervor of the fifties, I enjoyed David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, which suggests that anti-communist fervor shaped our experience in Vietnam. I just rewatched "All the President's Men." I love the bit where the judge asked one of the critters who broke into the Watergate his profession and he replies, "Anticommunist."

michael said...

@Sue: There are no doubt many other "expert" types who think the US has undergone a coup and I'm obviously cherry-picking, but I tried to cite from a broad spectrum. There were points in the past in which almost all of these people would hardly agree with each other on anything. I think Hedges is the only one who seems really close to Chomsky's outlook; Tirman, though at MIT, seems to me (I have not really studied him) a Left-Statist. He's not an anarchist like Chomsky, though they are both paid by MIT (basically: the Pentagon).

Reich is witty and strikes me as very bright and the only "progressive" who was in Clinton's cabinet. I once found myself standing next to him outside a theater in Berkeley and the dude's not even 5 feet tall, which has nothing to do with anything...but he might miss being closer to power. (He once went on a date with Hillary Clinton!) I do admire him for suggesting that the coupsters are also (logically?) traitors. I agree with him, but apparently Murrkins just want a parking space closer to the Mall so they don't have to walk too much, get back home to the flat screen to watch "reality TV." So: if this is a coup (on a certain semantic level, I do think it qualifies), it seems historically unprecedented.

The idea that Paul Craig Roberts (Reagan), Carter (schooled in foreign affairs by Zbigniew Brzezinski), Reich(Clinton), and Hedges seem to agree on this was the quasi-occult idea I was tryna get at.

Yes: I think things are so normally hard-Right it's refreshing we still get to hear anything that dissents from that...even from ex-Insiders and well-paid Statist academics. I confess I find it difficult to spot obvious dogmatic ideology when it comes to assertions or suggestions that the State I live in has undergone a "coup" and it's not even noticed. And I do think Reich, Hedges, and Tirman are trying to think for themselves. At least that's the impression I get as of today, reading their stuff. They're doing the best with what got 'em where they are and probably NOT consciously adhering to some party line.

My snarky tone around Roberts has to do with his past and where he's come from there, combined with the quality of rhetoric.

(Interesting study that I'm not qualified to do: Rummy and Cheney were from Nixon; a handful of ex-Reaganites have repudiated large chunks of what they were part of [viz: besides Roberts, a guy like David Korten], and what's are the most telling differences between the two Nixon/Kissinger and NeoCons, and some of the Reaganites?)

michael said...

@Eric-

I think it was Hegel who said that, historically, it's never been good enough to define yourself according to what you're AGAINST. Although it works politically, it's always false, and the State and people and Ruling Class pay, in some way. The geist moves on. (I'm no Hegelian, so shoot me.) The real work is to articulate what you're FOR and work at integrating energies towards those ends.

I keep thinking of right-winger Aristotle, who thought Democracy was unworkable. The only thing that will keep it going is a strong middle-class. And since Reagan, I do see a concerted assault by the 1% to destroy the middle class. And they basically have. Mission accomplished!

Although I confess, still: when I get Qs about my political stances I do use the term "antifascist," though now it feels dark ad ironic right off my lips. Unistatians think "fascism" was only what Mussolini did, and maybe Hitler. Aside from that, I get the feeling Murrrkins know next to nothing about fascism, and its many historical hues.

What then shall we do? I have no good answer...and I hate feeling so compelled to write about this shit...this SHIT! This endless SHIT! in the OG.

What shall we do? Intuition bubbles up with the first answer: try to keep our senses of humor, and try to love even more, with all our faults.

I made a passing remark in the Coup blogpost above, something about not letting Murrkins off the hook for responsibility, but on another level - of cognitive psychology? - we're hedonists until things fall apart, then we look for someone below us to blame. I think we may be wired that way. Education (mostly outside of organization) seems the way out, but let's not go down that depressing road right now...

Anonymous said...

Down that road the right place not
to go.

I find that taking the long view is
a much better idea. These aren't new
problems when framed against the
last 700 years, capitalism from its
inception as proslavery still has
the same agenda if you're brown or
foreign or both. The pendulum always
swings across the spectrum in politics, what I do dislike is the
framing of the discourse as left
vs right because real rightists
are as rare as hens teeth. That
may change the same way it did the
last time. Mark Blyth got that
exactly correctly, once you get a
big enough dis-enfranchised mass
it will move to the tune of the
fascists (Reichian version).

You can forget all the alarmists
views on such things, it won't be
reincarnations of the 20th century
boogeymen, it will be the ordinary
folk who switch their allegiance
hoping for simple answers.

The recent NSA stuff being exposed
as comp illiterate internally as
Alexander scurries to save his
budget from the elected is about
what you'd expect from incompetent
bureaucrats.

Talk to someone who is a unix admin
and get him to explain how the
grep command works, if General
Alexander can't do that he should
be fired for incompetence.

The elected suffer from the same
delusions, hooking everything onto
the Net is a horrid idea, because
it is two way and interactive. If
you understand that it is your
friend. If you don't it leaves you
naked in a vast sea of indifference
and casual malice. Some of it has
invisible monsters as well. The
coin of that realm is knowledge
and woe to the organization that
thinks they can substitute for it.

What is truly weird is the utopian
dream that used the comp to connect
the world together to make things
better has been pre-empted to make
paranoia stylish.

I imagine the historical record of
these days will be like Vietnam
Giap said we won the war twice but
everybody with power was busy at
playing their own games and lost
it through sheer stupidity. That's
why the military and civilians do
not see each other clearly, that
kind of support distances the
troops from them with good reason.

michael said...

To a certain extent, I feel the Q about the semantics of "coup" for Unistat seem very much like the joke David Cross was telling around 2003: The Bush admin would change the Terror Alert Color-Coded flags every now and then, without saying why.

"Honey, they changed the Terror Alert from Orange to Red today, again. What should we do?"

"Well, get out the bread and let's make dinner."

Sue Howard said...

Admittedly, on Tirman, I don't see anything dogmatically ideological in the piece you linked to. But I have read quite a lot of what he's written in his role as "expert" on Iraqi mortality research (and on media coverage of it - his writings on media do sound quite like Chomsky's).

Someone I know (who's knowledgable in this field, and antiwar) corrected a few errors Tirman made in a Alternet piece, and listed scientific research contradicting Tirman's claims. Tirman replied:

"I don't doubt that this phony counter-attack by pro-war bloggers and DoD consultants has aided the Pentagon's efforts to suppress the true human cost of the war. Shame on you." (link below*)

That's not a one-off - it seems fairly typical of his responses to critics of his "expertise" in this area. That doesn't necessarly mean he's dogmatically ideological, politically, in general, of course - although I've seen enough examples of what I regard as his fitting facts to his beliefs (in this area) to wonder about his "approach".

Professor Michael Spagat, who does have some claim to "real expertise" in this field (his research on distribution of deaths in conflicts has made the cover of Nature magazine, for example) writes this interesting response to Tirman's claims in this field:

http://opencanada.org/features/awakening-blank-memory/

*http://www.alternet.org/comments/story/148622/wikileaks_docs_underestimate_iraqi_dead#disqus_thread

Eric Wagner said...

Thanks for your response. It seems anachronistic to call Aristotle a right-winger. John Adams thought democracy needed literate voters. He thought the low literacy rate in France led to the failure of the French Revolution. This and your comments about education reminded me of Bob Wilson's comments about the dumbing down of American education since the 1960's. However, I don't think people have intentionally weakened the schools. The people I've met whose ideas about education I most disagree with still seem to me to genuinely believe their ideas will help the students.

Your comments about fascism remind me of reading about Operation Paperclip twenty years ago and contemplating all the ex-Nazi's who've worked for the US government helping to give our system a Nazi/fascist flavor.

"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross," as one fascist concluded. Pound's mixture of love and hatred still seems a guidepost and a warning.

michael said...

@Sue Howard-

That's more about Tirman than I'd known. The picture I have of him now is more..."typical thin-skinned, if brilliant, academic."

What do you make of this recent article on estimating death tolls?:

http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2013/07/17/guest-post-estimating-deaths/

michael said...

@ Eric-

I stole the Arry as right-winger line from, believe it or not, Isaac Asimov.

Interesting points about the best intentions for schools. I see literate education as declining due to the far broader context of a culture that has far too many hedonistic devices to compete with what literacy that fosters critical thinking and civility. Even deeper: the graphs for economic inequality seems isomorphic enough to the decline in literacy that I don't think it's a coincidence.

Re: Operation Paperclip and where we've gone since 2000: I think maybe TSOG was too arcane a pun, but I do think RAW seems prescient. The three books I read around Paperclip that made a big impression on me: The Belarus Secret by John Loftus, Blowback by Christopher Simpson, and Cookridge's Spy of the Century, on Gehlen.

I assume someone has come along to update and "top" those ones, but, for me, for now, I got the message: time to hang up.

BTW: that is one topic - Paperclip and some related ones - that seems way up on the list of ones I can bring up among people with degrees from universities and they almost always think it's fringe/hearsay stuff...like I was repeating something I heard on Art Bell or George Noori shows.

Which...I find revealing.

Pound lost his center fighting "evil," for lack of a better term. This is something I try to remember every day.

I can't help but think how lucky a bright student is when they find you as their teacher.

Sue Howard said...

I don't know much about the Syria case. Patrick Ball, the expert referred to, was also cited in the PR package for the 2006 Lancet Iraq study (which was commissioned by John Tirman - small world, indeed). Ball's work in Guatemala was taken as some sort of proof that reported deaths make up a tiny proportion ("less than 5%") of all deaths in violent conflicts.* This "explained" the vast gulf between the "correct" 2006 Lancet estimate and the "incorrect" IBC count.

That 1999 Guatemala study looks at a relatively narrow media sample (thirteen mainstream newspapers in Guatemala) and notes that they failed to cover massacres in Guatemala in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It's a different situation now, of course, with international news wires, non-mainstream sources, etc, all available online (Reuters hires local reporters in Iraq to cover bombings).

A more recent study** (of Afghanistan since 2001) - by colleagues of the authors of the Lancet 2006 study - compared "reported deaths" count with mortality estimate from a population-based survey. The survey estimated 5,576 deaths, compared to a media-based count of 3,620 civilians killed (over same period). A much higher proportion than the "typically 5%-10%" that's been touted (rather misleadingly, by Tirman & others) on Iraq.

* Ball has since changed his mind about the Lancet Iraq survey. He's written: "First, I want to be clear that I have no interest in defending the Burnham et al. [Lancet 2006] estimates. The flaws in that study are now well known." http://andrewgelman.com/2010/04/27/ethical_and_dat_1/#comment-53979

** Benini, A. and Moulton, L. 2004. Journal of Peace Research, 41(4): 403–422.

Sue Howard said...

I just read Tirman's Wikipedia entry. By God, he certainly knows how to promote himself - I'll give him that.

Anonymous said...

I find the academic ignorance about
Gehlen appalling to contemplate.

Just how disconnected do you have to
be to achieve academic status ?
The most horrifying part of his
involvement was the cryptoTsarists
who supplied us with the view into
the Rus that made them the boogeymen
of the MAD nuclear era.

Check out the BlackHat going on in
Vegas thru the Boingboing link.

We truly live in a RAW world.

GRIN

michael said...

@Sue: I once read somewhere that most of the Wikis about Profs are commissioned by some colleague or close friend/grad student. Then supposedly the Prof reads through it and says yea, that's good, go ahead. But some of them seem to have been written by the subject himself. I guess it's to be expected.

In the future any and all estimates of atrocities and death Qs I have will be addressed to you first. You seem more reliably knowledgeable on the subject than any other source i know of.

The comments at the OG oftentimes seem more interesting than the OG himself, I'm afraid. But I do love the value you guys add to the site. I wish I could pay you people, but I'm not being either.

michael said...

@Anon: the argument often being made by para-intellectual types about conspiracies: just look at how often the Gummint has been caught lying. Documented, egregious, duplicitous lying, involving theft, death, and fomentation of idiocy.

Another one that ought be mentioned more often: How utterly HORRID American History classes are, K-12, and often beyond. (I had two college professors get very upset in front of the classroom when I brought up unseasonable, non State-sanctioned "truths" that were well-documented, about Shay's Rebellion and the Bonus Marchers. Make it four: I brought up the Church Committee findings with a prof who openly told us he'd been in the CIA. He told me Philip Agee was a "traitor." Also: another guy at LA Harbor College hadn't heard of Smedley Butler, and asked me who he was, and when I told him, in front of the class, he cut me off and dismissed my "information" when I got to the good stuff.)

Cover story: we fought the fascists and the Nazis and then Uncle Joe turned into a Russian Bear gonna kill us all gonna git yo mamma...within 5 yrs (from ally to enemy via massive PR/brainwashing campaign against Murrkin masses): WHY? Gosh: they don't value the Individual and his Rights! Then immediately: the conformist 1950s, Man In the Grey Flannel Suit, Lonely Crowd, McCarthy witchhunts against anyone who questioned the Divine Rights of property and free thought. Paul Goodman called it "compulsory miseducation."

I don't know why I'm still stunned when a properly Milled and Humed person doesn't know a thing like Gehlen. (They tend to HAVE heard that we wrestled Werner Von Braun away from the Rooskies, but that's usually the extent of it. Who is Otto Skorzeny? No one knows...)

Anonymous said...


Since Smedley is the only winner of
two Medals of Honor you'd think all
children would be taught about him.

My cousin was Skorzenys pilot when
he broke Mussolini out of jail.

I loved T. McKenna saying most can't
say whether Joseph Goebbels served
in the first or second Nixon
administration. History is so much
fun to read it makes no sense to
me that school makes it boring.

michael said...

We must have just enough children indoctrinated into the ways of thinking and methods of administering the affairs of the Ruling Class, which includes technological innovation: so math and science for everyone, even if they don't like it. We need technological innovation ("Wizards," in Fuller's terminology) to continue to compete with other Ruling Class gene-pools.

History and literature, when taken far enough, tend to make an intellectual class which has been historically AGAINST the Ruling Classes.

Your cousin was likely being paid by the American taxpayers to fly brutal Nazi thug (one of Hitler's favorites) Skorzeny, and Mussolini. But you knew that. I write this in case there's someone who doesn't know. (See Blowback, Christopher Simpson, pp.246-252)

Thomas said...

This is cool!