Bulletin N° 961
“JULIUS CAESAR”
by William Shakespeare
(FULL AudioBook)
(2 :25:12)
Subject: Revolution from Above : Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
March 16, 2021
150th Anniversary of the Paris Commune
(18 March
- 28 May 1871)
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
History is littered with rebellions and failed revolutions. The
first imperative of political power is to maintain its control, and this has
been done in a variety of ways. In the case of the ruling class during the Roman
Republic, for example, the assassination of Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC) was thought
necessary to maintain the power stucture. At the start of the Third Republic in France (between Sunday, May 21 & Sunday, May 28),
Paris became a slaughterhouse as the mass murder of more than 20,000 Communards in the streets and parks of the city continued throughout what became known as "Bloody Week," in order to preserve ruling-class capitalist control over the state.
In Cold War America, the assassination of the President Kennedy (1917-1963) was
ordered, carefully planned, and professionally covered up by vested interests in order to protect profitable investments in the expanding
military-industrial complex which was threatened by Kennedy's secret peace
initiatives with leaders of the Soviet Union and Cuba.
When we look at revolutionary attempts – whether from above or
below – we find in history a corresponding mobilization of the ruling-class interests
preparing to control or destroy them with a variety of instruments at their
disposal.
James W. Douglass’ book, JFK and the
Unspeakable, Why He Died and Why it Matters (2008) is a 400-page tome of detailed
information presented in six chapters of page-turning narrative that defies
summary. In this case, the U.S. ruling-class response to “a possible
revolution from above” against capitalist militarism and the “mutually assured destruction”
of nuclear war, following the Second World War, contains many useful lessons about the society we live in today,
and about its political economy.
With this book we are invited to look within
ourselves and at the altered paradigm which now insures our collaboration
with mass murder and makes us oblivious to our self-deceptions.
Who murdered Kennedy? We all did, and we continue to do so ….
At the same time, JFK is “Everyman” - the system’s creation and
its victim.
The discomfort this book inspires is colossal, and the lessons it offers are numerous. The author, a student of theology, is skilled at penetrating our psyche to drive us out of our miserable minds and to alert us to this creation of the "Unspeakable," a tyrannical silence which now exists like a dark hole silently assigning all enlightened thought to an infinity of darkness, with the destructive force of antimatter reducing to non-existence everything it touches.
The
elephant in the living room.
In the Preface and Introduction of this book, Douglass formulates an original
problematic for his research project:
As
recent polls indicate, three out of four Americans believe Kennedy was killed
by a conspiracy. The evidence has long pointed toward our own government. Yet
with recurrent defenses of the Warren Commission, conjectures of Mob plots, and
attacks on Kennedy’s character, we in this media-drenched society drink the
waters of uncertainty. We believe we cannot know . . . a truth whose basic
evidence has been presented since the work of the Warren Commission’s earliest
critics. Could there be a deeper reason for our reluctance to know the truth?
Is our wariness of the
truth of JFK’s assassination rooted in our fear of truth’s consequences, to him
and to us? For President Kennedy, a deepening commitment to dialogue with our
enemies proved fatal. If we are unwilling as citizens to deal with that
critical precedent, what twenty-first-century president will have the courage
on our behalf to resist the powers that be and choose dialogue instead of war
in response to our current enemies?(p.x)
The author then introduces us to Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk, living in a monastery in rural Kentucky who
is publishing and
corresponding regularly with people around the world and from all walks of life.
Douglass first contacted Merton after reading a poem he had published in the Catholic Worker in 1961. The words of
this poem were spoken by the commandant of a Nazi death camp; it was entitled,
“Chant to be Used in Processions around a Site with
Furnaces.”
Merton’s ‘Chant’ proceeded matter-of-factly through the speaker’s
daily routine of genocide to these concluding lines: ‘Do not think
yourself better because you burn up friends and
enemies with
long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have
done.’(p.xiii)
After
reading his poem, Douglass wrote Merton. This was the start of a long correspondence
on nonviolence and the nuclear threat. Merton sent Douglass a
copy of his manuscript, “Peace in the Post-Christian Era,” which his superiors
had forbidden him to publish.
Merton feared the US would launch a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union, and he wrote:
‘There
can be no question that at the time of writing what seems to be the most
serious and crucial development in the policy of the United States is this
indefinite and crucial development of the necessity of a first strike.’(p.xiv)
In
this book on the assassination of JFK, Douglass tell
us in his preface that Merton became “my Virgil on this pilgrimage….”
Although
this book is filled with history and biographical reconstruction, its ultimate
purpose is to see more deeply into history than we are accustomed. If, for
example, war is an unalterable reality of history, then we humans have a very
shot future left. Einstein said, ‘The unleashed power of the atom has changed
everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled
catastrophes.’ Unless be turn our thinking (and acting) away from war, we
humans have had our day. Thomas Merton said it again and again at the height of
the Cold War, as did Martin Luther King – and John Kennedy. What the
contemplative Thomas Merton brought to that fundamental truth of our nuclear
age was ontology of nonviolence, a Gandhian vision of
reality that can transform the world as we know it. Reality is bigger than we
think. The contemplative knows this transforming truth for experience.
Thomas Merton has been my guide through a story of deepening
dialogue, assassination, and a hoped-for resurrection. While Kennedy is
the subject of this story, Merton is its first witness and chorus from his
unique perspective in a monastery in the hills of Kentucky. In terms of where
this narrative began and how it has been guided, it is contemplative history.
Thanks to Merton’s questions and insights, founded on a detachment few other
observers seemed to have, we can return to the history of JFK, the Cold War,
and Dallas on a mind-bending pilgrimage of truth. Reality may indeed be bigger
than we think.
What is the reality underlying the
possibility of nonviolent change? I believe the story of JFK and the
unspeakable, a story of turning, is a hopeful way into that question.(pp.x-xii)
The first chapter, following an eleven-page chronology from January 17, 1961 to
November 24 1963, takes up the theme of the President’s
transformation from “Cold Warrior” to “anti-nuclear peace advocate.” This attempt at “change from above” was
perilous business, and he knew it. Vested interests in war had created a
political culture in Washington, D.C. against which any opposition could be
destroyed in a variety of ways. Even the chief executive of the US government
could find himself isolated and vulnerable.
Kennedy understood this danger, and negotiated the waters knowingly.
He left behind him a torrent of verbal contradictions and murderous concessions
to the military and the arms industry. Nevertheless, he soon came under suspicion
and the phalanx of militarists and anti-Communists, using extremist rhetoric, attempted to flush him out.
One day, it was brought to his attention that a new book had just
come out. Seven Days in May, by
Charles W. Bailey II and Fletcher Knebel was
published in hardcover by Harper & Row in 1962. Seven Days in May was political thriller novel, whose plot
concerned an attempted military coup in the United States. Kennedy read the
book immediately and assured his advisors “this will not happen on my watch.”
He nevertheless took the precaution to actively encourage the production of a
film based on this book, “as a warning to the republic.” A screenplay, by the
same title, was written by Rod Serling, and the film
was produced by Edward Lewis, and by John Frankenheimer in 1964.
Following the Cuban missile crisis, James Douglass describes an
increasingly dogmatic pro-war political culture in Washington, D.C.
Kennedy was fiercely determined but not
optimistic that the [nuclear] test ban treaty [with the USSR] would be ratified
by the defense-conscious Senate. It was on August 7, 1963, that he made his
comment to advisers that a near-miracle was needed. He said that if a Senate
vote were held right then it would fall far short of the necessary two-thirds.
Larry O’Brien, his liaison aide with the Congress, confirmed the accuracy of
the president’s estimate. Congressional mail was running about fifteen to one
against a test ban.
. . .
The
president and his committee of activists hoped that in a month public opinion
would be on their side.
In the meantime, they were bucking the
military-industrial complex, which had become alarmed at the president’s sudden
turn toward peace and his alliance with peace activists in support of the test
ban. The August 5, 1963, U.S. News and World Report carried a major article
headlined; ‘Is U.S. Giving up in the Arms Race?’ The article cited “many
authorities in the military establishment, who now are silenced?” as thinking
that the Kennedy administration’s ‘new strategy adds up to a type of
intentional and one-sided disarmament.’
The alarm was sounded even more loudly in
the August 12 U.S. News with an article headlined, ‘If Peace Does Come – What
Happens to Business?’ [This article concluded that,] ‘Talk of peace is catching
on. Before shouting, however, it is important to bear some other things in
mind.’
. . .
[It]
went on to reassure its readers that defense spending would be sustained by
such Cold War factors as Cuba remaining ‘a Russian base, occupied by Russian
troops’ and ‘the guerrilla war in South Vietnam’ where ‘the Red Chinese, in an
ugly mood, are capable of starting a big war in Asia at any time.’
However,
an insider could have asked, what would it mean to defense contractors if
Kennedy extended his peacemaking to Cuba and Vietnam?
The president’s peacemaking had moved
beyond any effective military control or even monitoring. In the test-ban
talks, the military weren’t in the loop. Kennedy had made a quick end run
around them to negotiate the teatyt. As JFK
biographer Richard Reeves observed, ‘By moving so shiftily on the Moscow
negotiations, Kennedy politically outflanked his own military on the most
important military question of the time.’
Kennedy pointed out to [Norman] Cousins
that he’ and Khrushchev had come to have more in common with each other than
either had with his own military establishment. ‘One of the ironic things about
this entire situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the
same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a
nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which
interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar
problems.(pp.52-53)
The
chickens come home to roost.
Chapter Two deals with “Kennedy, Castro,
and the CIA.”
In this chapter, Douglass discusses Kennedy’s seeming hipocracy as he is dreawn into a
confrontation with the CIA. The political context of this duplicity is
essential for understanding the President’s policy toward Castro and the Cold
War. At the end if this chapter, the author cites Castro’s question about
Kennedy’s motives.
In the 1970s, Fidel Castro reflected on a
peculiar fact of Cold War history that related closely to the story of John
Kennedy. Thanks to the decisions made by Khrushchev and Kennedy, “in the final
balance Cuba was not invaded and there was no world war.”
‘We did not, therefore, have to suffer a war like Vietnam –
because many Americans could ask themselves why a war in Vietnam, thousands of
miles away, why millions of tons of bombs dropped on Vietnam and not in Cuba?
It was much more logical for the United States to do this to Cuba than to do it
ten thousand kilometers away.’(p.92)
Chapter Three is a detailed description of Kennedy’s stratagems in
the Vietnam War. Again, the historic context provides perspective and
understanding.
Ten years before he became president, John
F. Kennedy learned that it would be impossible to win a colonial war in Vietnam.
In 1951, when he was a young member of
Congress, Kennedy visited Vietnam with his twenty-two-old brother, Robert. At
the time France was trying to reassert control over its pre-World War II colony
of Indochina. Although the French army’s commander in Saigon insisted to the
Kennedys that his 250,000 troops couldn’t possibly lose to the Viet Minh
guerrillas, JFK knew better. He was convinced by the more skeptical view of
Edmund Gullion, an official at the U.S. Consulate.
Kennedy knew and trusted Gullion, who had helped him
earlier as a speechwriter on foreign policy.
At an evening meeting on top of a Saigon
hotel, in a conversation punctuated by distant blasts from the Viet Minh’s
artillery, Gullion told Kennedy: ‘In twenty year’s
there will be no more colonies. We’re going nowhere out here. The French have
lost. If we come in here and do the same thing, we will lose, too, for the same
reason. There’s no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. The homefront is lost. The same thing would happen to us.’
After becoming president, Kennedy would
cite Edmund Gullion’s farsighted analysis to his
military advisers, as they pushed hard for the combat troops that JFK would
never send to Vietnam. Instead, on October11, six weeks before he was
assassinated, President Kennedy issued his secret order for a U.S. withdrawal
for Vietnam in National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263. It was an order
that would never be obeyed because of his murder.
Kennedy had decided to pull out one
thousand members of the U.S. military by the end of 1963,
and all of them by the end of 1965. In the month and a half before his death,
this welcome decision received front page headlines in both the military and
civilian press . . . .
However, because of the president’s
assassination, even the first phase of his withdrawal plan was quietly gutted.
The Pentagon Papers, a revealing Defense Department history of the Vietnam War
that was made public by defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, points out: ‘Plans for
phased withdrawal of 1,000 U.S. advisers by the end-1963 went through the
motions by concentrating rotations home in December and letting strength
rebound in the subsequent two months.
JFK’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam
was part of the large strategy for peace that he and Nikita Khrushchev had
become mutually committed to, which in Kennedy's case would result in his death.
Thomas Merton had seen it all coming. He has said prophetically in a Cold War
letter that if President Kennedy broke through to a deeper, more universal
humanity, he would before long be ‘marked out for assassination.’ Kennedy
agreed. As we have seen, he even described the logic of a coming coup d’état in
his comments on the novel Seven Days in May. JFK felt that his own demise was
increasingly likely if he continued to buck his military advisers. He then
proceeded to do exactly that. After vetoing the introduction of the U.S. troops
at the Bay of Pigs, he resisted the Joint Chiefs’ even more intense pressures
to bomb and invade Cuba in the October 1962 missile crisis. Then he simply
ignored his military
and CIA advisers by turning sharply toward peace in his American
University address, his Partial Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev, and his
a quest for a dialogue with Fidel Castro. His October 1963 decision to withdraw
from Vietnam once again broke the Cold War rule of his national security state.
As Merton had noted, Kennedy was breaking through to deeper humanity – and to
its fatal consequences.
Yet for those who could see beyond the
East-West conflict, Kennedy’s high-risk steps for peace made political sense.
Four decades after these events we have lost their historical context. It was a
time of hope. JFK, like many, was inspired by the yearning for peace spanning
the world like a rainbow after the barely averted storm of the Cuban Missile
Crisis. John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and even Khrushchev’s Caribbean
partner Fidel Castro were, in the relief of those months, all beginning to
break free from their respective military establishments and ideologies As 1963
began, political commentators sensed a new morning after the long night of the
Cold War.
For example, Drew Pearson in his Washington
Merry-Go-Round column datelined January 23, 1963, headlined the
presidential challenge of the year ahead, ‘Kennedy Has Chance to End the Cold
War.’ Pearson stressed the need for the president to seize the time for peace:
‘President Kennedy today
faces his greatest opportunity to negotiate a permanent peace, but because of
division inside his own Administration, he may miss the boat.
‘That is the consensus
of friendly diplomats long trained in watching the ebb and flow of world
events.’
. . .
The
diplomats Pearson was drawing upon could already discern a massive shifting of
political fault lines beneath the Kennedy-Khrushchev settlement of the missile
crisis. At the same time they had identified the primary obstacle to an end of
the Cold War – powerful forces in the U.S. government who did not believe in
such a change, and who were throwing their weight against it.(pp.93-95)
Douglass goes on to underscore Kennedy’s ideological contradictions.
As a committed Cold Warrior, John Kennedy
from the first moments of his presidency has wanted to ‘let every nation know,
whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden,
meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival
and the success of liberty.’ Kennedy was a true believer in his inaugural’s
collective adaptation of Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ He
was articulating a vision of political freedom however one-sided its
implication that not only most Americans but hundreds of millions of allies
believed in fervently at the time. It was set against a countervision
of economic freedom believed by hundreds of millions of Communist
opponents. Thus the thousand-day-long series of crises between those two
opposite believers, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, who almost unwillingly
then became co-creators of a new, more peaceful vision. Both the crises, which
were beginning to fade away, and the new vision that was taking their place
ended with Kennedy’s assignation.
From Kennedy’s side of their dogmatic
battle, the saving factor was what few commentators have remembered from his
inaugural address but what he believed in just at profoundly as he did freedom
– peace in the nuclear age, through negotiation with the enemy . . . .(p.113)
John Kennedy contradicted his commitment
to a peaceful settlement of the Laos crisis by his decision to deploy CIA and
military advisers there and to arm covertly the members of the Hmong tribe
(known by the Americans as the ‘Meos’). On August 29,
1961, following the recommendations of his CIA, military, and State Department
advisers, Kennedy agreed to raise the total of U.S. advisers in Laos to five
hundred and to go ahead with the equipping of two thousand more ‘Meos.’ That brought to eleven thousand the number of
mountain men of Laos recruited into the CIA’s covert army. From Kennedy’s
standpoint, he was supporting an indigenous group of people who were profoundly
opposed to their land’s occupation by the Pathet Lao
army. . . . But he was working within
Cold War assumptions and playing into the hands of his own worst enemy, the CIA.(pp.115-116)
. .
.
. .
. Kennedy was making piecemeal concessions to the military on Vietnam. That
fall marked one of the worst: on October 2n 1963, he authorized a ‘limited crop
destruction operation’ in Phu Yen Provence by South
Vietnamese helicopters spray U.S.-furnished herbicides. Dean Rusk had argued
against the military’s push for crop destruction, saying that even though ‘the
most effective way to hurt the Viet Cong is to deprive them of food,’
nevertheless those doing it ‘will gain the enmity of people whose crops are
destroyed and whose wives and children will either have to stay in place and
suffer hunger or become homeless refugees living on the uncertain bounty of a
not-too-efficient government.’ While sensitive to Rusk’s argument, Kennedy had
to the pressures of McNamara, Taylor, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
approved a criminal action.
By going along with the military on crop
destruction, Kennedy was violating both his conscience and international law.
In August he had already approved a separate herbicide operation whose purpose
of defoliation, as recommended by McNamara, was to ‘deny concealed forward
areas, attack positions, and ambush sites to the Viet Cong.’ However, in his
August approval, Kennedy has asked ‘that every effort be made to avoid
accidental destruction of the food crops in the areas to be sprayed.’
In October, the actual purpose of the
program he approved was crop destruction. Why did he do it? According to
Michael Forrestal, ‘I believe his main train of thinking was that you cannot
say no to your military advisors all the time.
JFK had in fact said yes in 1961 to a
policy of widening military support to South Vietnam. The consequences were
adding up. By November 1963, there would be a total of 16,500 U.S. military
personnel in Vietnam. Although they as ‘advisers,’ many were fighting alongside
the South Vietnamese troops they were advising. In spite of JFK’s
having ruled out U.S. combat units, he was being moved along step by
step by the military command toward the brink of just such a commitment. (pp.122-123)
. .
.
Even as Kennedy turned toward a withdrawal
from Vietnam, he continued to say publicly that he was opposed to just such a
change in policy. At his March 6, 1963, press conference, a reporter asked him
to comment on Mansfield’s recommendation for a reduction in aid to the Far
East.
The president responded: ‘I don’t see how
we are going to be able, unless we are going to pull out of Southeast Asia and
turn it over to the Communists, how we are going to be able to reduce very much
our economic programs and military programs in South Viet-Nam, in Cambodia, in
Thailand . . . .’
As Mansfield knew, Kennedy was in fact
changing his mind in favor of a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam. . .
. President John F. Kennedy was not only thinking the unthinkable. He was on
the verge of doing it. But he wanted to be able to do it – by being reelected president.
So he lied to the public about what he was thinking.
Kenny
O’Donnell recounts Kennedy’s words at meeting with Mike Mansfield in spring
1963:
“‘But I can’t do it until 1965 – after I’m
reelected,’ Kennedy told Mansfield.
“President Kennedy explained, and Mansfield
agreed with him, that if he announced a withdrawal of American military
personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild
conservative outcry against returning him to the Presidency for a second term.
“After
Mansfield left the office, the President said to me, ‘In 1965, I’ll become one
of the lost unpopular Presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a
Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now
from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I
can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make dammed sure that I am
reelected.’ ”(pp.125-126)
In Chapter Four, James Douglass suggests more fully why President
was “marked out for assassination.” American corporate leaders were familiar
with the president’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who “while being a businessman
himself, had also been President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first chairman of the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a former Wall Street insider who
knew the system, the senior Kennedy had cracked down on Wall Street profiteers.
Some of the
finical titans of the thirties regarded JFK’s father as a class traitor, “the
Judas of Wall Street,” for his work on behalf of FDR.”
It
was in the light of Joseph Kennedy's fight to initiate government controls over
Wall Street, and the opposition he encountered, that he made his
all-businessmen -are-s.o.b.'s remark to JFK.
That opinion of his father, President
Kennedy told the press, ‘I found appropriate that evening [when] we had not
been treated altogether with frankness. . . . But that’s past, that’s past. Now
we’re working together, I hope.’
It
was a vain hope. John and Robert Kennedy had become notorious in the ranks of
big business. JFK’s strategy of withdrawing defense contracts and RFK’s
aggressive investigating tactics toward men of power were seen as unforgivable
sins by the corporate world.
. .
.
As
Shakespeare had it, Caesar was warned of his coming assassination by the soothsayer:
‘Beware the ides of March.’ Fortune [magazine] gave Kennedy a deadly
warning of its own by the title of its editorial: ‘Steel:
The Ides of April.’
Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department
continued its anti-trust investigation into the steel companies. U.S. Steel and
seven other companies were eventually forced to pay maximum fines in 1965 for
their price fixing activities between 1955 1961.The steel crisis defined John
and Robert Kennedy as Wall Street enemies. The president was seen as a state
dictator. As the Wall Street Journal put it in the week after Big Steel
surrendered to the Kennedys, ‘The Government set the price. And it did this by
the pressure of fear – by naked power, by threats, by agents of the state
security police.’ U.S. News and World Report gave prominence in its
April 30, 1962, issue to an anti-Kennedy article on ‘Planned Economy’ that
suggested the president was acting like a Soviet commissar.
. . .
We have no evidence as to who in the
military-industrial complex may have given the order to assassinate President
Kennedy. That the order was carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency is
obvious. The CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading
up to it.
The
head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Branch form 1954 to 1974 was James Jesus
Angleton, known as the ‘Poet-Spy.’ As an undergraduate at Yale in the early
forties, Angleton had founded a literary journal, Furioso,
which published the poetry of Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, and Archibald MacLeish.
After he went on to Harvard Law School, Angleton was drafted into the U.S.
Army. He became a member of the Counterintelligence Branch of the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), World War II predecessor to the CIA. The OSS and CIA
suited Angleton perfectly. Counterintelligence became less a wartime mission
than a lifelong obsession. For Angleton, the Cold War was an anti-communist
crusade, with his CIA double agents engaged in a battle of light against
darkness.
Investigative journalist Joseph Trento
testified in a 1984 court deposition that, according to CIA sources, James
Angleton was the supervisor of a CIA assassination unit in the 1950s. The
‘small assassination team’ was headed by Army colonel Boris Pash.
At the end of World War II, Army Intelligence colonel Pash
had rounded up Nazi scientist who could contribute their research skills to the
development of U.S. nuclear and chemical weapons. The CIA’s E. Howard Hunt,
while imprisoned for the Watergate break-in, told the New York Times
that Pash’s CIA assassination unit was designed
especially for the killing of suspected double agents. That placed Pash’s terminators under the authority of
counterintelligence chief Angleton. Joseph Trento testified that his sources
confirmed, ‘Pash’s assassination unit was assigned to
Angleton.’
In the 1960s, Angleton retained his
authority over assassinations. In November 1961, the CIA’s Deputy Director of
Plans, Richard Bissell, directed his longtime associate William Harvey to
develop an assassination program known at ‘ZR/RIFLE’ and to apply it to Cuba,
as the Senate’s Church Committee later discovered. Among the notes for ZR/RIFLE
that Harvey then scribbled to himself were: ‘planning should include provisions
for blaming Sovs or Czechs in case of blow. Should
have phony 202 [a CIA file on any person ‘of active operational interest’]in RG [Central Registry] to backstop this, all documents
therein forged and backdated.’ In other words, in order to blame an
assassination on the Communists, the patsy should be given Soviet or Czechoslovakian
association. (Oswald’s would be Soviet and Cuban.) An appropriate fraudulent
CIA 201 personnel file should be created for any future assassination
scapegoat, with ‘all documents therein forged and updated.’ Harvey also
reminded himself that (the phony 201’should look like a CE [counterespionage]
file,’ and that he needed to talk with ‘Jim A.’
. . .
As
we shall see in the Oswald project under Angleton’s supervision, the CIA’s
Counterintelligence head blended the powers of assassination and disinformation.
Deception was Angleton’s paradoxical way toward a victory of the light. In the
war against Communism, Angleton thrived on deceiving enemies and friends alike
in a milieu he liked to call ‘the wilderness of mirrors.’ His friend e.e. cummings
suggested the contradictions in James Angleton in a letter he wrote to
Angleton’s wife: ‘What a miracle of momentous complexity is the Poet.’
In the mid 1970s, the Senate’s Church
Committee on intelligence and he House Select Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA) opened the CIA’s lid on Lee Harvey Oswald and discovered James Jesus
Angleton.(pp.140-144)
We have only touched the
surface of these first four chapters of Jame
Douglass’s book, JFK and the Unspeakable.
This work is filled with little-know facts that point to the general failure of
American culture to perform its essential function, i.e. to provide a mirror
for the population to see themselves. Instead, we have “the Unspeakable” – a
black hole into which the light of humanity and human creativity is forever
vanishing.
The 23 + items below are a
selection of articles and essays which reflect contemporary attitudes and
behaviors in response to the multiple crises we are now facing. From this chaos
we can only hope that a rational libertarian order will evolve and new voluntary
associations will be supported by a political economy that serves the interests
of human beings rather than simply driven by the pathological quest for maximum private profits.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
___
Professeur honoraire de l'Université
Grenoble-Alpes
Ancien Directeur de
Researches
Université de Paris-Nanterre
Director of The Center for the Advanced Study
of American Institutions and Social Movements
(CEIMSA-in-Exile)
The University of California-San Diego
http://www.ceimsa.org
a.
The Pentagon's Failure To Protect Congress Is Coming Into Chilling Focus
with Stephen Colbert
(12:34)
+
‘Mindblowing
Corruption At FBI’ - NSA Whistleblower Reveals
with Jimmy Dore
(34:57)
+
“Who Controls the Gates Family”
with reallygraceful
(16:02)
+
Global Capitalism: March 2020-March 2021: “Covid
and the Crash”
with Richard Wolff
(1:28:55)
+
From: Cat McGuire
[mailto:cat@catmcguire.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2021
Subject: MUST LISTEN - Alison McDowell interview on the "Great
Reset"
This interview on Guns & Butter by Bonnie Faulkner with Alison McDowell is extremely important. It’s one of the best, most easy-to-understand overviews I’ve heard explaining the radical dystopian transformation beginning to be implemented worldwide across all dimensions of society, especially education, health, and the environment – much of it hidden in plain view as it comes to us via non-profits, social services, and the healthcare system.
Alison weaves in how the colonial-settler mentality against indigenous
peoples is being extended to an artificial intelligence (AI) settler colonialization of all humanity. I love how she ends her talk on a positive,
spiritual, manifesting note.
FYI for those in the New York City area – The first meeting of our monthly Great Reset study group will be Wednesday, March 24, 4:00-6:00 at a private office space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Please RSVP to me if you (or anyone you know) are interested in probing deeper into Alison’s research to understand the alarming next steps being planned for humanity, especially our children.
===========
b.
From: Richard Greeman
[mailto:rgreeman@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Subject: Maati Monjib
on Hunger Strike
Professor Maâti Monjib,
the well-known historian, journalist and human rights defender has been held in prison in Rabat, Morocco since December
29 on trumped up charges. Deprived of justice, he has begun and open-ended
hunger strike – despite his age (60) and poor health. Support committees have
been organized in Morocco, France, the U.S.and elsewhere to pay his legal expenses. Please support
him by contributing to the Free Maati Monjib campaign at the following address.
For more information, please visit the Free Maati
Monjib website in English at this address: https://maatimonjib.net/?cat=712009957&lang=en
Here is an update:
·
Home
·
Update
about Dr. Maati Monjib’s
Imprisonment
Update about Dr. Maati
Monjib’s Imprisonment
On January 27, Moroccan historian, journalist, and human
rights activist Maati Monjib
was sentenced to one year in jail and a fine of 10,000 Dirhams.
Monjib is
the founder of the Ibn Rochd
Center for Studies and Communication, a think tank he was forced to close in
2014, as well as co-founder of the Moroccan Association for Investigative
Journalism. Although the Moroccan regime has accused Monjib
of fraud and threatening the safety of the state since 2015, he had neither a
hearing nor a fair trial. In fact, Monjib has been in
El Arjat 2 prison since December 29,
2020 for additional accusations of money laundering because of the funding
he lawfully received from international donors to fund the activities of the Ibn Rochd Center. The publication
of his sentence in the official website mahkama.ma coincided with his appearance in
the prosecutor’s office on January 27, 2021. Neither Monjib
nor his lawyers had a chance to attend his sham “trial”. The sentence is
baseless. It is a flagrant abuse of power destined to silence Dr. Monjib and remove him from the public sphere. Dr. Monjib’s persecution by the Moroccan regime is part of a
familiar practice that reemerged in the country after a period of promising
openness between 1999 and 2013. Ever since the end of the term of the first
government formed after the 2011 revised Constitution, Moroccans have witnessed
a rise in police brutality and the use of subtle mechanisms of repression
through the justice system, to intimidate and silence journalists, human rights
activists, and opposition figures. In this regard, the Moroccan security
apparatus has exploited the autonomy of the Prosecutor’s Office, which
used to be under the purview of the Minister of Justice, to prosecute, even by
fabricating charges, all those who hold independent opinions vis-à-vis the
regime’s iron grip on the country, and continued violation of Moroccan people’s
rights. Moreover, the security regime, established under the leadership of
Mohammed VI, has encouraged the mushrooming of a powerful yellow press that specializes
in exposing opposition figures’ sexual lives. Videos of the supposedly
extramarital affairs of these activists are used to threaten them and their
families with scandal. Even more damaging is the fact that these videos could
be used to force human rights activists to cooperate with the police. Since Dr.
Monjib did not fall into this category, the police
regime resorted to the fabricated charges of money laundering to “neutralize” him . The regime opened two court cases against Dr. Monjib—a strategy that the new version of Moroccan
authoritarianism has been using to exhaust its opponents and keep them under
the sword of a justice system that is entirely enthralled to the state. We, the
members of the Movement for Solidarity with Maati Monjib in America, condemn the Moroccan regime’s
dictatorial and unjust use of the justice system to silence its opponents. We
firmly remind the world public opinion that Morocco has returned to its
notorious practices during the “Years of Lead,” which were the object of the
detailed, official report of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission in
2006. We also would like to remind all those who defend human rights and
dignity that Dr. Monjib suffers from a heart
condition as well as diabetes—two chronic illnesses that require constant
medical care. We hold the Moroccan regime responsible for any danger that may
threaten Dr Monjib’s life in jail.
The members of the Movement for Solidarity with Maati Monjib in America
+
From: Richard Greeman
[mailto:rgreeman@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2021
Subject: Defend Maâti Monjib
Dear
friends,
My dear
friend and human rights activist Maati Monjib is in the eleventh day of his hunger strike while in
prison in Morocco. Maâti, a distinguished historian
and professor of journalism, was arrested without a warrant on Dec. 29.
Without Monjib or his attorneys being present at his
trial, Maati was sentenced to one year in prison on
fabricated charges of "attacking state security" and of
"financial fraud." He was sentence to a year in prison.
Faced
with humiliation and injustice, Monjib began an
open-ended hunger strike on March 4 – despite his age (60) and poor health.
Defense committees have been organised
in Morocco, France, and the US as well as through NGOs like Amnesty. They have
been quite effective, but we are now on day eleven and time is running
out.
Please make
a donation to Maâti's legal defence
via the link below (for which you can use your credit card):
For more
information on his case, please consult his website and send the link to as
many people as possible.
https://maatimonjib.net/?lang=en
Please give
us generously as you are able. In addition, in the link above is a way to sign
a petition on Maati’s behalf.
Solidarity
forever,
Richard
+
Julian Assange's
Partner, Stella Moris, Speaks Out
with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper
(1 :33 :57)
The Suppressed History of the United
States
with reallygraceful
(54:29)
+
“Crossroads of US Politics Today”
with Richard Wolff
(8:34)
===========
c.
Marc Lamont Hill & Mitchell Plitnick
on ICC Probe & the “Palestine Exception” in Progressive Politics
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/3/4/except_for_palestine_marc_lamont_hill
with Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh
(13:20)
+
“Voice of Hope in a Time of Crises” Symposium
with Chris Hedges
(21:40)
+
“Microsoft Forms Ministry of Truth”
with reallygraceful
(6:26)
===========
d.
Squad WON'T Force $15 Minimum Wage In Stimulus Bill
with Jimmy Dore
(16:14)
+
‘Progressives’ Sell Out Workers on $15 Minimum Wage
with Jimmy Dore
(25:15)
+
“New York families in crisis”
with Richard Wolff
(3:31)
+
Nomadland captures the
contradictory heart of the American dream
https://therealnews.com/nomadland-captures-the-contradictory-heart-of-the-american-dream
with Marc Steiner
(20:55)
+
Award-winning ‘Nomadland’ documents poverty
and survival in America
https://therealnews.com/award-winning-nomadland-documents-poverty-and-survival-in-america
with Marc Steiner
(20:32)
+
“Something Strange
Is Happening to Our DNA”
with reallygraceful
(32:35)
===========
e.
Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: China's
Economic Rise
Part 2
with David Harvey
(20:13)
+
Marxism 101: “How Capitalism is Killing Itself”
with Abby Martin
(35:46)
+
What You Need To Know About MONEY
with Jimmy Dore
(30:41)
+
“Imagining a Real American
Rescue”
with Richard Wolff
(31:12)
===========
f.
Biden Continues Destabilizing Middle East As
Corporate News Cheerleads
with Jimmy Dore
(8:40)
+
Is Biden plotting a soft coup in Saudi Arabia?
with Rick Sanchez
(25:22)
+
The Lies They Told Us About Syria
with reallygraceful
(14:47)
+
Biden's First Act Of War Hits 3 Countries
with Abby Martin
(5:23)
+
Airstrikes in Syria Illegal?
with Jesse Ventura and Brigida
Santos
(23:00)
+
More Than 40 Organizations Call on Biden Administration To Abandon "Virtual Wall" Immigration Bill
by Derrick Broze
===========
g.
Economic Update: “The System Implodes: Amazon, Evictions, Tax Abuses,
& Minimum Wages”
with Richard Wolff
(29:45)
+
Amazon workers demand to be treated
like human beings
https://therealnews.com/amazon-workers-demand-to-be-treated-like-human-beings
with Maximillian Alvarez and
Jennifer Bates
(1:14:10)
+
Interview 1621 – “New World Next Week
with James Evan Pilato”
https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1621-new-world-next-week-with-james-evan-pilato/
with James Corbett and James Pilato
(22:45)
+
The Pain of ‘The Pandemic’
with Rachel Blevins
(25:21)
===========
h.
Why Use the word ‘Socialism’
with Richard Wolff
(11:29)
+
Marxism and the Slogan “Abolish
Billionaires”
with Richard Wolff
(5:49)
+
Why Capitalism Reproduces Inequality & a Solution
https://www.democracyatwork.info/eu_why_capitalism_reproduces_inequality_and_a_solution
with Richard Wolff
(29:15)
===========
i.
Palestine in Pictures:
February 2021
https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-pictures-february-2021/32456
===========
j.
NFU – NEWS FROM UNDERGROUND
https://markcrispinmiller.com/category/nfu/
·
A 10-point rebuttal of Amy Goodman and Denis
Moynihan’s “Vaccine Apartheid”
·
Swedish epidemiology professor quits the field amid
mass fury at his findings
===========
k.
Capitalism has become
'techno-feudalism'
with Yanis Varoufakis
(25:25)
+
“The Richest Family in America You've Never Heard of”
with reallygraceful
(14:38)
+
Surveillance Capitalism
with Shoshana Zuboff
(49:59)
===========
l.
Govt-Linked CSIS Urges DC To Partner with Social Media Firms To “Promote Protests
Movements”
https://www.mintpressnews.com/csis-urges-dc-social-media-firms-promote-protests-movements/275994/
by Alan MacLeod
+
“Why Public Schools and the
Mainstream Media Dumb Us Down”
(10:46)
+
"The Never-Ending List of Hypocrisy"
with reallygraceful
(7:15)
+
NATO Video Talks ‘Diversity,
Respect, Embrace’ But Critics See Through the Wash Job
https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-panned-for-woke-imperialism-in-latest-wearenato-video/275921/
by Alan MacLeod
+
Aurora Police Killed Without
Consequence, Now Their Protestors Face 48 Years for “Kidnapping” Cops
by Alan Macleod
The cops and the district attorneys want people to see
what we are going through — the conditions of our arrests, our experiences in
jail, and our legal battle — and to think that this is what you risk when you
stand up against them. – Lillian House, Aurora Activist and Defendant
+
Why Finland's schools outperform most others across the developed world
by ABC News (Australia)
(6:47)
===========
m.
What the Media Won't Tell You About China
with really graceful
(16:07)
+
As leaks expose UK op to 'weaken' Russia, suppression of Grayzone reporting backfires
by Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté
+
Greek political prisoner is at death’s door
https://therealnews.com/greek-political-prisoner-is-at-deaths-door
by Eddie Conway
===========
n.
Tulsi Gabbard
calls out the US dirty war on Syria that Biden, aides admit to
by Aaron Maté
+
America's Longest War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahMUgX5rVZs
with Chris Hedges and Erik Edstrom
(27:04)
+
Coup-supporting academics spread lies to censor The Grayzone
reporting exposing Ecuador's pseudo-left
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/03/01/academic-letter-censor-grayzone-ecuador-yaku-perez/
by Ben Norton
===========
o.
Israeli ambassador seeks to exploit Black struggle in US
by Michael F. Brown
+
Israel: Orthodox Parties Shaken by Court Ruling on Law of Return
by Miko Peled
+
“The trial of Leo Frank … [and] the inception of
the Anti-Defamation League
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0sNB8uWAUs
with reallygraceful
(13:49)
===========
p.
Israeli-US Airstrikes On Syria Part Of Battle
Over Iran Nuclear Deal Decision
by Robert Inlakesh
+
“Bioethics and the New Eugenics”
https://www.corbettreport.com/bioethics/
with James Corbett
(39:13)
===========
q.
From Standing Rock and J20 to the US
Capitol: Who gets treated like the enemy?
https://therealnews.com/from-standing-rock-and-j20-to-the-us-capitol-who-gets-treated-like-the-enemy
with Marc Steiner
(52:38)
===========
r.
The Story of ‘Sodom & Gomorrah’
with reallygraceful
(22:34)
===========
s.
“Ask Me Anything,
with Noam Chomsky,
on Jung, Wittgenstein, and Gödel”
Dec. 21,
2020
with Curt Jaimungal
(1:17:44)
&
transcript
@
https://drive.google.com/file/d/141Z0iSFaMn_vJQleFMeNNZrWHzAB6EL-/view
+
“A Conversation with Bertrand Russell”
1952
with Romney Wheeler
(30:56)
===========
t.
“How to Present Information
for Visual Learners”
https://www.corbettreport.com/how-to-present-info-for-visual-learners-solutionswatch/
with James Corbett and Keith Knight
(52:28)
===========
u.
“The Rise of Digital Currencies and
Human Capital Markets”
by Raul Diego and Mnar Adley
(37:06)
The latest anti-Chinese lockdown narrative is
obscuring a much broader effort by the financial and tech sector to create
state-backed digital currency that will turn humanity into data assets.
+
Bill Gates Funded 'DNA Mining' Through COVID Tests, MSM Lies &
Netanyahu’s ‘Global Vaccine Empire' and much more. . .
with Ryan Christian
March 6,
2021
(4:40:49 )
As always,
take the information discussed in the video below and research it for yourself,
and come to your own conclusions. Anyone telling you what
the truth is, or claiming they have the answer, is likely
leading you astray, for one reason or another. Stay Vigilant.
+
The Bits and Bytes of The Great Reset:
COVID-19 and the Scaling Up of Data-Capitalism
by Raul Diego
The so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than
a campaign to turn humanity into datasets, which the world’s most powerful
hedge funds and transnational corporations can use to create more profits for
themselves and their clients.
+
Whistleblower Video Exposes Dementia Patients Forcefully Vaccinated In
Nursing Home - 8 Dead
with Ryan Christian
(26:57)
+
“The Age of Social Murder”
https://www.mintpressnews.com/chris-hedges-age-of-social-murder-ruling-elites/275801/
by Chris Hedges
The ruling elites, despite the accelerating and
tangible ecological collapse, mollify us, either by meaningless gestures or
denial.
+
‘Is This Who We Are?’: Gitmo
is America’s Enduring Shame
https://www.mintpressnews.com/joe-biden-close-guantanamo-america-enduring-shame/275966/
by Ramzy Baroud
Even if Biden is able to overcome pressure from the
military, from the CIA, and from Congress to shut Guantánamo down, justice will
still be absent, not only because of the numerous lives that are forever
shattered but because America still refuses to learn from its mistakes.
===========
v.
From: The Corbett Report
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2021
Subject: Hello, I Must Be Going!
|
Posted: 12 Mar 2021 04:21
AM PST I'm
one strike away from having my main YouTube channel deleted and Patreon has permanently "suspended" my account,
so if you're only following my work through these controlled platforms then
all I have to say is: It was nice knowing you! For everyone else, here's how
you can continue watching The Corbett Report even after YouTube pulls the
plug... This posting includes an audio/video/photo media
file: Download Now |
Vaccine Lawsuit, Cyberwar On, Fukushima 10 – New World Next Week Posted: 12 Mar 2021 04:17
AM PST This
week on the New World Next Week: New Mexico leads the way with the first US
lawsuit against mandatory vaccinations; the US loudly announces their super
secret cyber offensive on Russia; and the UN claims no adverse health effects
ten years after Fukushima. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media
file: Download Now |
Investing in Agorism – #SolutionsWatch
(video) Posted: 12 Mar 2021 04:14
AM PST We
all want to stop feeding the beast, but how do we go about doing it? Today
Patrick writes in to ask about the ins and outs of agorist
investing. Joining us to start the conversation on agorist
investment solutions are Tim "The Liberty Advisor" Picciott, Jack "The Survival Podcast" Spirko and Sal "The Agorist"
Mayweather. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media
file: Download Now |
===========
w.
A Guide to US Empire in Africa: Neocolonial Order & AFRICOM"
with Abby Martin
(53:59)
Abby Martin
speaks to Eugene Puryear to discuss the big picture
of US imperialism in Africa: From the Berlin Conference to the subversion of
liberation movements to neocolonial puppets and the current sprawl of AFRICOM
"counterterrorism."
Dear Historians for Peace and Democracy,
Renate Bridenthal, Molly Nolan and I from the Empire Working Group have finished at last the syllabus on economic sanctions--their forms, legality, and effectiveness, their history across the twentieth century and their current deployment, as well as blowback from and resistance to them. The syllabus can be used in whole or individual weeks or parts can be selected. All materials are readily available online.
Thanks for the help many of you gave as we developed the syllabus which is now downloadable from the HPAD website. Here is the link.
https://www.historiansforpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Empire-of-Sanctions-Syllabus.pdf
Best,
Prasannan Parthasarathi