“In a brilliant blog post for Esquire, Josh Ozersky documents how Adam Gopnik’s recent New Yorker essay about JFK repeats key memes from a secret 1967 CIA cable about how the agency officials worldwide should enlist “friendly elite contacts” to counter critics of the Warren Commission.
The problem with calling people “conspiracy theorists,” Ozersky points out, is that you may just be repeating decades-old talking points generated by an intelligence agency with a lot to hide.
Ozersky, a food writer, shows how the influence of the cable, “Countering Critics of the Warren Report,” otherwise known as Memo 1035-960, endures in the American imagination.
The original 1967 CIA cable, “Countering Critics of the Warren Commission,” was sent by CIA director Richard Helms to agency stations worldwide on April 1, 1967.
Helms and his colleague, counterintelligence chief James Angleton, felt threatened by critics of the first official investigation of JFK’s death because their aides had learned about the travels, politics and contacts of Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1963 and raised no concerns.
Indeed aides to Helms and Angleton assured colleagues in Mexico City that Oswald was “maturing.” Forty two days later JFK was shot dead, apparently by Oswald. (See “Four CIA officers who made a lethal mistake about Lee Harvey Oswald,” JFK Facts, Sept. 30, 2013.)
Rather than disclose the CIA’s failure to protect the president, Helms ordered a campaign against those who questioned the lone gunman conclusions of the Warren Commission.
Ozersky quotes from the CIA talking points and then finds the echoes in Gopnik’s piece.
Memo 1035-960: “Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States.”
Gopnik: “No matter how improbable it may seem that all the hard evidence could have been planted, faked, or coerced—and that hundreds of the distinct acts of concealment and coercion necessary would have been left unconfessed for more than half a century.”
Memo 1035-960: “Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it.”
Gopnik: “It is, in other words, possible to construct an intricate scenario that is both cautiously inferential, richly detailed, on its own terms complete, and yet utterly delusional.”
Memo 1035-960:“The Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible.”
Gopnik: “The first truth is that the evidence that the American security services gathered, within the first hours and weeks and months, to persuade the world of the sole guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald remains formidable: ballistics evidence, eyewitness evidence, ear-witness evidence, fingerprint evidence, firearms evidence, circumstantial evidence, fibre evidence.”
Ozerky’s point is not that the New Yorker consciously follows the CIA line. His point is more damning. Gopnik’s argument is habitual, not original or even cynical.
“Gopnik doesn’t need a memo to parrot this line,” Ozersky says. “He picked it up along the way as a consensus pundit.”
—–
Author Archives: Lila
Cops kill 19 year old for not turning off engine
LRC blog reports the insane story of a father who called the police when his son took off in his truck. The cops followed the boy into a university campus and killed him.
“James Comstock refused to buy a pack of cigarettes for his 19-year-old son, Tyler, and now he’s planning his son’s funeral.
“He took off with my truck. I call the police, and they kill him,” James Comstock told The Des Moines Register on Tuesday. “It was over a damn pack of cigarettes. I wouldn’t buy him none.
“And I lose my son for that.”
Comstock said he’s outraged police shot and killed his son Monday morning on Iowa State University’s campus.”
They fired six rounds into his body in full view of bystanders:
“And why, Shepley asked, did an officer fire six rounds on a campus with innocent bystanders around, simply because Tyler Comstock refused orders to turn off the engine?
“So he didn’t shut the damn truck off, so let’s fire six rounds at him? We’re confused, and we don’t understand,” Shepley said.”
Comment:
As I’ve said before, the militarization of the police was a deliberate program introduced into the US to blur the boundaries between peace-time “policing” and war-time “military action.”
The idea is to normalize war.
The on-off screaming of sirens, helicopters, police cars racing madly through traffic, the raw display of power. (Just as staged leaks about surveillance are a display of the surveilling power of the state).
Campuses were never the safest places in America, what with the booze parties, rape (real and alleged), military recruitment, dope, traffic cops, muggings, and 24/7 propaganda.
To this you can now add homicide by cops.
Drop out…or drop dead.
The CIA, Carl Oglesby, and Business International Corp.
Update:
[I should clarify that the article on the site, which is devoted to LaRouche is not from the EIR itself, but from a critic, who has added some more interesting details to the story, in the comment section0.
Update:
Just to be clear, my link to the Lyndon LaRouche site (at the bottom) isn’t meant to support the man’s theories. LaRouche is a Hamiltonian. I am not. He was also involved, allegedly, in cult-like behavior toward followers.
However, LaRouche, as even his strongest critics (like Chip Berlet here) admit, has good research. [ To clarify, the piece is not by LaRouche but by a critic who keeps tabs on his work and thus stores an archive of it.]
Linking to people like LaRouche, Stewart Rhodes of Oath-keepers (whom someone now informs me is considered a neo-Nazi) is a no-no, apparently, in the PC world.
One is supposed to link only to certified organic, FDA-approved, brand-name thinkers.
On top of that, I just read today that the phrase “Talmudic Jew” is considered “Nazi” language. Now, I don’t think I’ve ever used it, but I’ve surely written somewhere about Talmudic Judaism.
And to add to my sins, I’ve defended Ayn Rand (not that I am a Randian by any means). But when the media piles on someone, some instinct in me compels me to rush to their defense.
Dear lord. We say “Biblical Christian” all the time. And “Shia Muslim.” What about “Vedic Hindu?” Those are fine, aren’t they? Why the difference?
I know I can denounce the “bourgeoisie” as vermin all day long and still be OK. I can even talk about femi-nazis without a problem. ….just so long as I approve of Chip Berlet’s employers bombing the right sort of victims.
I give two figs for such puerile nonsense.
Because someone might read the theories behind Hitler or Mao and try to understand them, it doesn’t follow that they are Nazis or Maoists themselves.
Vegetarianism doesn’t become Nazi become Hitler adopted it.
Hitler, Mao, PolPot…as monstrous as the crimes they enabled might be, they are not qualitatively different from the crimes of the average man.
No untouchables please, whether physically – through legal deprivations of their rights…or intellectually….through ghettoization and demonization.
ORIGINAL POST:
Carl Oglesby: “Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. . . . Nuns will be raped and bureaucrats will be disemboweled.”
Read more at http://politicaloutcast.com/2013/04/violence-and-mayhem-have-long-been-a-tool-of-the-left/#GbpcTScjJoQ0Mycu.99
One of the most respected student leaders of the antiwar movement in the 1960s was Carl Oglesby, who worked with Murray Rothbard, says Charles Burris at Lew Rockwell.
Not being more than a cursory student of this period, I did a little digging.
Here’s what I came up with:
Oglesby was initially a technical writer/editor with a defense contractor called Bendix, before entering politics. He soon rose to the head of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the best-known antiwar group.
The SDS was a splinter group from the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which was affiliated with the National Student Association, formed in 1947.
The NSA was outed in 1966 as a CIA front.
(also here).
This was in an expose in Ramparts Magazine, a Catholic left-wing magazine.
The writers were Robert Scheer and Stanley Scheinbaum, who is described here as a communist activist.
This Catholic writer says Ramparts was a communist front posing as Catholic outlet to better attack the church.
In 2006, I wrote a piece called “Portrait of the CIA as an artist,” about cultural outlets that were set up or operated by the CIA, as the Cold War developed. Among the CIA-funded outfits was the Congress for Cultural Freedom .
All this is well known.
Besides that, several leaders in the antiwar movement, including feminist leader Gloria Steinem, received funding from the CIA.
Again, this is well-known.
New to me was that there was a meeting set up between the business establishment and the leadership of the SDS. The outfit involved was something called Business International, which seems to be the same Business International Corporation for which Barack Obama worked.
It’s long been considered an intelligence front.
So, you have a high-security employee of a defense contractor that was working for NASA and was later affiliated with Raytheon, entering an anti-government student movement, quickly becoming its spokesman, and letting the CIA spy on the movement without a qualm,…..but, yo, it’s all good…
The ex- Bendix employee suspects the company is an intelligence front trying to co-opt the movement, but that’s a good thing, because there’s an even worse bunch of business interests called “cowboys” that needs to be bested.
So, no problem.
The student movement thereafter develops a violent faction that blows up – literally as well as figuratively – while from 1968 onward, the whole antiwar “scene” turns into a drug-addled, bead-wearing, orgiastic escape into self-help.
Oglesby worked closely with Murray Rothbard, about whose interactions with suspected CIA-affiliated figures – James Dale Davidson (of Agora Inc.), Robert Kephart, and Noam Chomsky – I’ve blogged at length.
The Business International connection adds to the list.
Of course, I make no hard and fast claims. I just raise the issue.
Some links:
“Clinton, Quigley, and Conspiracy,” Daniel Brandt (NameBase.org):
“Almost everything that happened to the student movement (Lila: the antiwar protests against US involvement in Vietnam) is best explained without conspiracy theories. There are, however, some bits of curious evidence that should be briefly mentioned. Each of these alone doesn’t amount to much, but taken together they suggest that something more was happening — the possibility that by 1969 a significant sector of the ruling class had decided to buy into the counterculture for purposes of manipulation and control:
- Student leaders James Kunen[19] and Carl Oglesby[20] both report that in the summer of 1968, the organization Business International, which had links to the CIA, sent high-level representatives to meet with SDS. These people wanted to help organize demonstrations for the upcoming conventions in Chicago and Miami. SDS refused the offer, but the experience convinced Oglesby that the ruling class was at war with itself, and he began developing his Yankee-Cowboy theory.
- Tom Hayden, who by 1986 was defending his state assembly seat against those trying to oust him because of his anti-war record, was quoted as saying that while he was protesting against the Vietnam War, he was also cooperating with U.S. intelligence agents.[21]
- The CIA was of course involved with LSD testing, but there is also evidence that it was later involved in the distribution of LSD within the counterculture.[22]
- Feminist leader Gloria Steinem[23] and congressman Allard Lowenstein both had major CIA connections. Lowenstein was president of the National Student Association, which was funded by the CIA until exposed by Ramparts magazine in 1967. He and another NSA officer, Sam Brown, were key organizers behind the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium.[24] (In 1977 Brown became the director of ACTION under Jimmy Carter; his activism, which was more intense and more sincere than Clinton’s, didn’t hurt his career either.)
- Symbionese Liberation Army leader Donald DeFreeze appears to have been conditioned in a behavior modification program sponsored by elements of U.S. intelligence.[25]
- The CIA has a long history of infiltrating international organizations, from labor to students to religion. I submit that if an anti-war activist was involved in this type of international jet-setting, the burden is on them to show that they were not compromised. Clinton comes close to assuming this burden.
For more on Carl Oglesby’s meeting with Business International (the CIA front):
“Omnisicient Gentlemen of the Atlantic,” Maureen Tcacik at The Baffler, 2012 (Tcacik is an exceptionally talented writer and astute analyst of politics):
“In one of the many surreal chapters of Journey in Faith, Gene [ Lila: Gene Bradley] later attempted to influence—thought-lead?—what he saw as the perilously bereft civic “education” of the student left. The year was 1968, and the official story is that he was researching a Harvard Business Review feature—which he produced, although the research seems to have been rather more intensive than required. Gene describes consulting with the FBI, a connection made via “mutual good friends,” and a deputy of J. Edgar Hoover’s gladly inviting him to take a look at the Bureau’s secret files on the student left; then traveling through Switzerland, Germany, and France “observing” demonstrations (though none are shared in the book or the story); and, finally, most bizarrely, leading a delegation of fellow businessmen in a “debate” with Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby—hosted (“with the best of intentions but with a full measure of naiveté,” he writes) by a concern called the Business International Corporation.
It seems likely that the 1968 summit at which Bradley “debated” one-time SDS president Carl Oglesby was the same SDS-BI meeting referenced in James Simon Kunen’s SDS memoir The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. In the SDS version, the purpose of the meeting is straightforward. Certain unnamed businessmen who portray themselves as “the left wing of the ruling class” are seeking to “buy off some radicals”—purportedly because they’re rooting for Gene McCarthy to win the presidency. The businessmen “see fascism as the threat, see it coming from [segregationist George] Wallace,” Kunen reports. The idea is that heavy protests, which the businessmen offer to finance, will “make Gene [McCarthy] look more reasonable.”
This stated fear and motive seems dubious. Gene, after all, reported in the first chapter of his memoir how effectively he repressed his own fear of fascists. And the only people spooked by Wallace were those powerless enough to intimidate. Whatever the executives wanted from a bunch of college hippies, though, they were willing to both lie about and pay for. It’s all too easy to see in retrospect that lopsided “debates” of this sort had accumulated into a political reality that, for the lifetime of a college kid in 1968 anyway, was inextricable from the concoctions of Cold War propagandists.
Just the year before, the National Student Association, the dominant campus activism network that had spawned SDS, had been outed (along with the CCF enterprises) as a CIA front. It would not be until the late seventies that the bland-sounding sponsor of the Oglesby Bradley forum, Business International, would concede its own dual role as a CIA operation.”
“Ravens or Pigeons: SDS Meets Business International” (From Lyndon Larouche’s archives):
In his monumental history of SDS, Kirkpatrick Sale arguably makes a monumental goof. In his detailed discussion of 1968, he fails to mention one critical incident: the attempt by former SDS president Carl Oglesby to broker an alliance between SDS and the “Eastern Establishment” via Business International (BI), a firm that published sophisticated economic reports and advised top corporations. Sale’s mistake seems especially odd since the debate over Business International inside SDS was hardly a well-kept secret; there was even a long article about BI in New Left Notes.
The SDS-BI talks inspired the discovery of a supposed war between the “Yankee” and “Cowboy” factions of U.S. capitalism. In April 1968, Oglesby wrote a long article in the National Guardian promoting the idea of a deep split in the ruling class between two capitalist factions that he labeled “Yankees and Cowboys.”12 He argued that SDS should align with the Eastern Establishment Yankees, who, he argued, were anti-war, pro-Bobby Kennedy and opposed to newer and meaner factions of U.S. capital centered in the South and Southwest.13 In an August 1974 Ramparts article, Steve Weissman reports that in 1968 there was even a “vague proposal” by the Business International network to do “whatever was possible” to help SDS stage “a massive demonstration against Humphrey” in Chicago and one against Nixon in Miami.14 Weissman then recalled that SDS “refused the offer.”
In his memoir Ravens in the Storm, Oglesby discusses his negotiations with BI president Eldridge Haynes.15 Oglesby recalls that he first met Haynes at the Gotham Hotel in New York in the spring of 1968. As for Haynes:
He was a Harvard man. He had spent much of his career in the Foreign Service but had left government during the Kennedy years to become a consultant to businesses operating in the “frequently turbulent” countries of the Third World. This work had grown into Business International, Inc. CIA, right?16The next day Oglesby took part in a roundtable presentation about SDS to a select group that included executives from GM, GE, AT&T, IBM, Ford, the AP, and even “a man from the State Department.” Two weeks later, Oglesby helped organize another dialog between BI clients and half a dozen SDSers from Columbia and CCNY. . . . SDS groups without me continued these meetings, sitting down with BI people four times that spring. . . . Haynes and I kept meeting. A little later that same spring, Haynes popped the big question. “Suppose Robert Kennedy were to become a presidential candidate. Do you imagine, Carl, that SDS might be inclined to support him?”17
Oglesby then explains:
I must confess, too, that I’d been scared of heavy-metal politics from the beginning . . . My fears of SDS’s leftward inclinations were strengthened by my sense, as of the BI meetings, that an alternative to a politics of rage was within our reach, and that it was essential that we choose it. . . . There was no way for us to achieve our objectives, I thought, without at some point establishing a sotto voce relationship with mainstream grown-ups.18Clearly Haynes had done his homework and chose his first big SDS contact well.
Oglesby relates a conversation he had with Bernardine Dohrn who, like the vast majority of SDS members, opposed any alliance with BI, “sotto voce” or not. Oglesby says that he told Dohrn that even if “Haynes or the CIA has a secret agenda, I believe it’s not to screw us up but to use us in some way to help make RFK president.”
[Lila: as I believe the CIA – and Ron Paul’s campaign – used the Ron Paul libertarians to make Barack Obama president again.]
Dohrn replied:
Well, it could be both, couldn’t it? . . . You say this BI’s thing is to gather intelligence on Third World countries and sell it to the guys you once denounced as corporate imperialists. I don’t understand you, Carl. It seems like you talk one way and act another.“19Oglesby remarked that Dohrn “was probably right in assuming that BI and Haynes were tied to Kennedy and very possibly to the CIA. . . . But who cared? As far as I was concerned, the more the CIA knew about SDS, the better. We had nothing to hide!”
Gene Bradley was one of the participants in a BI-sponsored meeting with Oglesby. A Christian Science devotee, Bradley headed up the International Management Association. In a 2012 article for The Baffler, Maureen Tkacik notes that Bradley’s life reads like the history of a “big-time spook.”20 In September 1968 Bradley, a vice-president of the National Strategic Information Center as well as a businessman, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled “What Businessmen Need to Know about the Student Left.” In his memoir The Story of One Man’s Journey in Faith, Bradley reports that as part of his research, “mutual friends” invited him to meet Hoover’s top FBI aide William Sullivan, who let Bradley read FBI files on the New Left. Bradley also recalls debating SDS’s “Carl Ogilsvie.”
Lila:
And, finally, here is Russell Kirk on the progression of Carl Oglesby from high-security employee of defense contractor Bendix, which made telecom equipment for NASA, to president of SDS, whose parent organization was a CIA front.
Oglesby was a friend of both Bernadine Dorn and of Hillary Clinton…until he finally left politics to write history and make music.
“Humane Letters and the Clutch of Ideology”
(Russell Kirk, The Imaginative Conservative, March 2012, originally published in The Political Science Reviewer, Fall, 1973)
“Indeed, the eagerness of certain contributors to withdraw from political activism into literary scholarship is almost embarrassing. Take Mr. Carl Oglesby, who once led the riots at the University of Wisconsin.
Mr. Oglesby here gives us an essay entitled “Melville, or Water Consciousness 8c Its madness.” Herman Melville, he says, found a madness he could live with. Ahab was evil, exploiting his crew, and Moby Dick was the victim of Ahab’s imperialism.”
QUOTE FROM OGLEBY
“So with a subdued Melville, I ask: Given some broad estimate of the scale, tempo and rhythm at which protoimperial systems condense out and acquire historical outline and social architecture, then swell and grow fevered, finally either to hang suspended a moment before a sometimes luminously sweeping descent, or else to burst all at once and splash blood everywhere, leaving little behind besides shards, cripples and memories that everyone who survives them pants to forget: given ‘these choices, what is the political utility of the concept anti-imperialism?”END QUOTERussell Kirk:
“Is this rich, beautiful prose, transcending the sorry time? Mr. Oglesby clearly hopes so. But Mr. Oglesby’s prose will make no revolution; it may not even make sense. He sedulously avoids any direct reference to Viet Nam, as if he were writing in the Circum- locution Office – as if he would be prosecuted for so heroic a dissent. One thinks of a remark by Georges Sorel, meant to be approbatory: “Our experience of the Marxian theory of value convinces me of the importance which obscurity of style may lend to a doctrine.
They talk of liberty, but hunger for power; they idolize the People, but serve the ego. If one is bound for Zion, it is not well to plod round a prickly pear planted long ago by Mr. Marx of the British Museum; nor is that a good exercise for rousing the literary imagination. Nevertheless, the cactus land of ideology is perfectly safe for an American writer nowadays.
Blessed are the academic revolutionaries, for they shall know tenure.”
The theater of torture
From mindjustice.org:
“Under the peculiar conditions of psychological torture, victims, isolated from others, form “emotional ties to their tormentors” that make them responsive to a perverse play in which they are both audience and actor, subject and object—in a script that often leaves them not just disoriented but emotionally and psychologically damaged, in some cases for the rest of their lives. “”(A Question of Torture, 10)
Comment:
Those who believe that only physical aggression is “real” violence; that only physical rape is “real” rape, that only physical property is “real” property, should look through the results of the greatest practical inquiry into the functioning of human beings under coercion – the US government’s research into mind-control – and reconsider.
In Language of Empire (Monthly Review Press, 2005), I devoted a chapter – Theater of Pain – to this aspect of torture.
Bleeding–heart “libertarians” are statists….
…and not libertarians.
[Added: I use the word statist not as a pejorative, but to describe accurately. As readers of this blog know, my goal is to subvert these kind of slogans…
But, historically, the use of the government to redistribute after the fact has been understood as statism.
The classical liberal position is thus not statist. It was Mises’ position and Rand’s, but not Rothbard’s, although Rothbard also selectively dropped pure anarcho-capitalism (sic) when it came to fractional banking.
The full anti-state position of the right seems so internally contradictory that in my estimation it returns one to socialism and the left…
Again, I am being descriptive. I don’t demonize the whole left or socialism as such and I distinguish between types of socialism…and communism…and between voluntary communism and state-enforced communism.
Whether that return to socialism was Rothbard’s intention all along is my fear…or suspicion…or unhinged paranoia….]
Bleeding hearts are very nice statists, of course.
Cultured, well-read, and much better to invite over for dinner and trust with your silverware or your sons than your average libertarian.
[Here I am talking about real libertarians, not poseurs working hand-in-hand with the financial elites and backed by intelligence……of which there are so many I’ve stopped looking, unless I trip right over them.]
Unfortunately, never having been at the receiving end of government force, and only indirectly of its largesse, bleeding-hearts exaggerate both government power and government virtue.
Their opponents (the Rothbardians) take the other tack. They exaggerate the evil. But they too over-rate the power of governments.
Governments are merely machinery.
[I deleted the last few lines of this blog-post because they needed explanation and clarification that I’d prefer not give in this venue.]
Aaron Swartz: folk hero and also NWO front? (Update)
Update:
And confirming my suspicions, here’s a detailed piece about Swartz’s ties to the hacker community, linking Aaron Swartz to Wikileaks (which had already claimed he was a source after his death); to Jacob Applebaum. Applebaum is the WL hacker whom I’ve mentioned before as being linked (in a Rolling Stones article) to imagery from the “V for Vendetta” movie. Swartz is also linked to Bradley Manning.
The Manning tie suggests a motive for Swartz’s depression (if indeed depression was what led to his death).
Swartz might have feared much worse from the Feds than just the investigation of the JSTOR articles.
It also makes one wonder if someone else might have had a motive for eliminating him. It was always implausible to me that Bradley Manning got all those documents on his own. If someone had to get them for him, who better than Aaron Swartz, with his savant0-like skills.
ORIGINAL POST
I’ve never swallowed the media’s uncritical praise for “information activist,” Aaron Swartz.
One story that kept getting repeated was how Swartz co-founded Reddit.
Indeed he did no such thing. He was the founder of Infogami.
The founders of Reddit were Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. Infogami merged with Reddit and one of the pay-offs to Swartz was that he got to claim that he was co-founder.
It’s time put that story to bed. Along with the notion that Aaron Swartz was a hacktivist who gave his life for information freedom.
That’s the story pushed by the media establishment, including its Internet billionaires, who, naturally can make anything a story all on their own, with no factual “there” there.
Aaron Swartz made a lot of money out of what’s in the public realm. He just couldn’t let other people do the same thing.
Just as Julian Assange wanted everyone else’s secrets outed, but not his own.
That’s a self-contradiction so obvious only the media here could gloss over it.
Swartz, a Chomsky and Michael Moore admirer, achieved Internet sainthood, but it is the sainthood conferred by cyber-swarms that engage in kamikaze attacks on any blog that doesn’t join their enthusiasms.
Aaron Swartz was very smart and gifted, but he was also young and naive. He was, I believe, used by the globalist establishment in its ongoing attack on the nation-state of America……..in the services of the supra-national world order.
[Added, Nov. 9. The NWO both attacks and defends the nation-state alternately so as to co-opt both sides of the struggle, but it’s an international order. If there was a natural devolutionary process, I would be all for it. A managed devolution can have only the result all managed processes have – a top-heavy central bureaucracy and increasingly hollowed -out societies.]
[Lila: Nov 8. I rewrote one passage above because I was much too sharp toward Swartz, who was, after all, only 26 or 27. He couldn’t be expected to know all the forces at work in politics nor understood how attractive a great talent would be to them, as a mouthpiece for their ambitious projects. ]
The nation-state is dead. Long live the global state.
When Reddit was created, it struggled initially. Then it suddenly acquired millions of readers and was bought out by Conde Nast publications.
Who is behind Conde Nast?
Samuel Newhouse, the 47th richest American in 2011 (according to Forbes) and the chairman and CEO of Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast.
Through Conde Nast, Newhouse owns a whole host of magazines: Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Glamour, Ars Technica, Wired, Architectural Digest, and many others.
One meaning of Hoo Ha is vagina. Does that ring a bell?
Vagina was the 2012 book by OccupyWallStreet advocate and chief agitator, Naomi Wolf.
Vaginas are called “p******” in slang.
P**** Riot was the CIA-inflected group behind agitation against the Orthodox Church in Russia.
The New World Order ostentatiously celebrates female sexuality, although it ostentatiously denounces female fertility.
Wired is the magazine whose chief investigative writer Kevin Poulsen worked on a project with Swartz.
Poulsen was once a serial black-hat hacker. He also worked in Silicon Valley in the employ of defense contractors and he hacked into telephone systems, spying on and stealing information from anyone. Poulsen was in the thick of a fight between Glenn Greenwald and Salon on the one hand and Wired and Poulsen on the other about whether chat logs between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning actually showed evidence of Wikileaks’ involvement. Poulsen was accused of withholding information, in the same way Greenwald is in turn accused of withholding information.
Is it just coincidence that the same outfits keep showing up in these squabbles or can we surmise that though on opposing sides they set up the parameters of the debate and indeed create the debate?
That Swartz hid his tracks shows he knew what he was doing wouldn’t be passed off as a prank.
That he chose to commit suicide only lends credibility to the suspicion that he might have been used by more powerful entities.
Yes, the prosecution was over-zealous and blundering. But Swartz himself was not doing anything completely innocuous. He was engaged in the “propaganda of the deed” and had been for a while. That made him an enemy of the government.
Too stupid to uncover the networks behind Swartz, the government, as usual, hit the weak link in the chain with as big a hammer as it could.
Swartz took his life.
No telling where the investigation might have led.
Had we even the suspicion of a press, someone would have followed the money…
The real story behind much contemporary “hacktivism” and a good deal of social activism.
You heard it first here –
Aaron Swartz was a front.
Advance Publications was the 52nd largest private company in the US in 2012 and it is the holding company for the Newhouse family’s interests.
Through Advance, the Newhouse family owns such cable/telecom companies as Brighthouse Networks and a 31% share in the cable-network Discovery Communications.
Discovery’s other owners include reclusive billionaire John Hendricks, its founder.
Discovery’s most famous shows are the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. In 2009 it ran a viral pandemic survival show.
Discovery Channel has been fingered by several independent bloggers as a venue for the dissemination of disinformation that sanitizes or mainstreams the New World Order and its symbols.
Newhouse and Advance are the powers that propelled Reddit to fame and success.
A precocious savant, Swartz used his credibility as a computer genius to enter politics on behalf of bigger government, surely a strange career move for a “libertarian” folk-hero.
I’m not talking of a law changed here or there. I am not talking about removal of subsidies and enforcement of existing laws.
Schwartz was a front for Democrat interests, as the mover behind Demand Progress and Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
PCCC was behind the rise to stardom of chief “sheriff” on Wall Street, Elizabeth Warren:
“The campaign to draft Elizabeth Warren was declared “The Most Valuable Campaign of 2011” by The Nation magazine.[13] With almost 50,000 individual contributions, the PCCC raised more than $800,000 for Warren’s campaign. (Wikipedia)
The point is not the individual positions for which PCCC advocated – whether for Wall Street reform and net neutrality or against SOPA and Stand Your Ground. I have been on the same side on some of them.
The point is that the PCCC advocated progressive Democrat positions across the board.
It was a partisan political organization. Not an individualist advocate of this or that position, each judiciously considered on its own merits.
Swartz’s last post on his blog before his suicide was about the film, “Dark Knight,” according to a blog calling itself Digital Dark Knight (it carries the subtitle The Ethics of Anonymous).
This Digital Dark Knight blog appears to carry only a few posts from January to April 2013 and they deal with Anonymous, the Dark Knight, the Joker, Swartz and Batman.
Swartz wrote:
“The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the villain, but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is actually the hero. But even though his various games only have one innocent casualty, he’s much too crazy to be a viable role model for Batman. His inspired chaos destroys the criminals, but it also terrorizes the population. Thanks to Batman, society doesn’t devolve into a self-interested war of all-against-all, as he apparently expects it to, but that doesn’t mean anyone enjoys the trials.”
The Dark Knight is another of those movies, like “V for Vendetta,” “Avatar,” and “Zeitgeist,” that propagates images and themes needing to be impressed on the public mind.
The masks from Vendetta appear in a Rolling Stone article about Wikileaks and Jacob Applebaum.
Imagery from Dark Knight follows Julian Assange in his media appearances.
The Digital Dark Knight blog looks much like one of the fake internet persona promised to us by the new information warfare technology of the government and its corporate big brothers.
It seems to have been set up solely to make a connection between Swartz and Dark Knight.
Swartz must be linked in the public consciousness with liberation and salvation.
Assange/Swartz/Anonymous are batmen. Lulz and other pranksters are the Joker.
This is subliminal prepping of the public mind for revolution against the state. But it is a corporate-state sponsored revolution, like Occupy Wall Street.
Behind Wikileaks we find the Rothschild machinery.
Behind Anonymous, Snowden and Greenwald, mega-billion dollar spy corporations.
Behind Aaron Swartz and the anti-IP movement, the cyber-warriors, and the hacktivists, we will also find the information/internet billionaires who make money from the use of public information but object to others doing exactly the same thing.
Their objection is not an ideological one. It is simply a pragmatic one, a partisan one.
The more information a company can take without paying for it, the more money it makes when it commercializes the information. The bigger their market share, the less for others (so they believe) and the more power – financial, social, and political- they gain.
Theft is a great business model, saving R&D costs.
How better to get the public to regard theft as innovation than by adding the word activism to hack?
Doing well by doing good.
Sometimes, just doing well.
Leave doing good to the movie.
Greenwald new media is more of the old media…
O. H. Tarzie at the Rancid Honey-Trap reports on the excruciatingly slow leak-rate of the mother-of-all-leakers:
“1. A writer at the Cryptome site recently estimated that at current rates of disclosure, it will take 26 years for the Guardian to reveal all of Snowden’s documents. That estimate was based on an estimate from Greenwald of 15,000 documents, which we now know to be false. The trove is at minimum five times that size and probably much larger.
As savvy reader Paley Chayd pointed out, Cryptome generously equated the vague Leak Keeper word, ‘document’ with the more precise, ‘page.’ Chayd also noted that in Greenwald’s tirade here recently, he claimed that he and his colleagues had published ‘hundreds’ of documents. According to Cryptome, they have published no more than 300 unique pages, a figure that consolidates everything published in the US, British, Brazilian and German press.
2. When The Guardian introduced Snowden to the world, they stressed the meticulousness with which he chose the documents, and emphasized, offensively really, the extent to which this distinguished him from Chelsea Manning, whose trial had just begun. This emphasis on Snowden’s meticulousness, which was picked up immediately by the mainstream press, certainly suggested a relatively small trove, since large troves can not be meticulously gone through by single, better-than-Manning whistleblowers with limited time.
3. Only four news organizations have unlimited access to any part of what looks like a rather large trove: The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and ProPublica. Greenwald has made his lack of interest in distributing documents to other news organizations quite plain. That means whatever we learn about these documents will come through these organizations, plus whatever Greenwald and his colleague Laura Poitras write in partnership with other news organizations and publishing houses.
4. The New York Times received over 50,000 documents two months ago. They have published one story based on The Snowden Leaks so far. Now is a good time to remember that when The New York Times had custodianship over parts of Cablegate, then editor Bill Keller bragged that he checked with the White House before publishing anything. Greenwald had some thoughts on this at the time, which Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting quoted in this write-up on Keller. Considering Greenwald’s and The Guardian’s current conduct, and FAIR’s entirely unsurprising, cowardly silence about it, it’s amusingly ironic and instructive.
Now, at last, the tale of the living, growing document trove, as told by various news reports:
The Guardian, June 9, 2013
[Snowden:]
“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,”Morning Joe, June 10, 2013
Thomas Roberts: What makes Bradley Manning any different from Edward Snowden . . . because Manning is widely considered to be a traitor and not a whistleblower?
Greenwald: … if you ask [Snowden] what the difference is, he will say that he spent months meticulously studying every document. When he handed us those documents they were all in very detailed files by topic. He had read over every single one and used his expertise to make judgments about what he thought should be public–and then didn’t just upload them to the internet–he gave them to journalists who, he knew, and wanted to go through them each one by one and make journalistic judgments about what should be public and what wasn’t, so that harm wouldn’t come gratuitously, but that the public would be informed, and that he was very careful and meticulous about doing that.
Der Spiegel, July 13, 2013
[Greenwald] told [German news show] host Reinhold Beckmann that he and journalist Laura Poitras had obtained full sets of the documents during a trip to Hong Kong, with around 9,000 to 10,000 top secret documents in total.
MSNBC, July 17, 2013
“I think there’s a real misconception over whether he’ll continue to leak,” Greenwald said. “He turned over to us many thousands of documents weeks and weeks ago back in Hong Kong… As far as I know he doesn’t have any intention of disclosing any more documents to us.”
AFP, August 6, 2013
“I did not do an exact count, but he gave me 15,000, 20,000 documents. Very, very complete and very long,” Greenwald said, responding to questions from [Brazilian] lawmakers.
The Telegraph, August 30, 2013
Oliver Robbins, the deputy national security adviser for intelligence, security and resilience in the Cabinet Office, said in his 13-page submission: “The information that has been accessed [from the siezure of David Miranda’s belongings at Heathrow] consists entirely of misappropriated material in the form of approximately 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents.
The New York Times, September 5, 2013
The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization. They focus on GCHQ but include thousands from or about the N.S.A.
There you have it, folks: from 9,000 meticulously chosen docs to many times that in just four months. Clearly, The Leak Keepers lied, which is something they seem very inclined to do, and which seems particularly revolting in light of the all the un-Manning shenanigans. More importantly, the surveilled people of the world — and by that I mean everyone — are never going to see most of those docs. Three cheers for old media, doing what old media always do.”
Comment
Tarzie’s blog, Rancid Honey Trap, seems to be the origin of the fine analysis of Snowden that I first found on David Shurter’s blog in the piece by Yoichi Shimatsu I posted here yesterday.
I traced that piece back to Wayne Madsen, who seems to have rehashed it from Tarzie’s blog.
Tarzie’s blog and Arthur Silber’s have been attacking Greenwald’s performance in the Snowden affair from a left perspective. I see that as especially productive. They too find the gate-keepers of dissent, the activists, even more worthy of resistance and deconstruction than the government.
Politicians after all do not exercise nearly the level of power wielded by the mandarins of the press and the universities.
I differ from Tarzie and Silber in thinking Snowden actively played a role in the deception. I think Silber’s come around to thinking that too, once he’d considered why Snowden should ever have revealed his identity, if whistle-blowing or leaking was what he was really about.
Yes, why? Ask yourself why Snowden made himself the story, rather than the leaks, and the whole saga unravels.
Point two.
I don’t see Wikileaks and Assange as much different from Greenwald, at least, in the way they/he went about leveraging the secrets they gathered. WL and JA used power just as state actors would.
It goes back to a theme I’ve hammered on this blog over and over. The state only reflects and amplifies the tendencies of the individual. You cannot fight it while adopting its methods. And the corporation and its methodologies are creatures of the state.
So if propaganda is the language of the state, corporate advertising, marketing, ideology, mass movements – all of which are kissing cousins of propaganda – cannot be the language of resistance.
Better a lone voice which carries all the inflections of its speaker than a melange of voices that congeal into white noise.
Greenwald-backer Omidyar: front for CIA, data-mining, biowarfare
UPDATE 2:
Madsen seems to be behind The Rancid Honey Trap on this
UPDATE:
The piece I posted in excerpt, by Shimatsu, seems to rely a lot on research done at Wayne Madsen’s Report. The biowarfare conspiracy theory (the weakest part) seems to be Shimatsu’s addition. Perhaps that’s the disinformation bit meant to discredit the rest.
[lLila, March 16, 2022: Shimatsu was a lot MORE prescient than I suspected and the biowarfare theory now sounds DEAD ON. No conspiracy at all. This was 2013 and this is 2021 bioterror is what it is all about. Hats off to Shimatsu. ]
An excerpt from Madsen’s piece October 23, 2013)I
“And Snowden and Obama are not the only ones with connections in Hawaii. It turns out that Omidyar’s parents settled in Hawaii after living for a short time in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC before moving to Hawaii. Omidyar attended the elite private Punahou High School in Manoa for the eighth and ninth grades, having arrived at the school in 1979, the same year Obama graduated from the school. Omidyar’s wife, Pamela Wesley Omidyar, is a graduate of Hawaii’s I’olani school, another of Hawaii’s elite private secondary schools. Omidyar maintains a residence in the wealthy Kahala neighborhood of Honolulu.
Omidyar is interested in supporting Hawaiian culture. However, that ruse has been used by the Mormons for years to increase their influence not only in Hawaii but also in Pacific island nations of Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and the Cook Islands. Another cult that is active in Hawaii is the Bahais, which originated in Persia and now have their global headquarters in Haifa, Israel. The Bahais not only push the Polynesian culture theme in the same manner as the Mormons but even consider Mormon founder Joseph Smith to be a true seer of God. Some observers have pointed out that the Omidyars’ Roshan Foundation pushes Bahai-like principles. The Shah of Iran supported the Bahais to counter the influence of the Shi’a mullahs who ultimately overthrew him in 1979, the year the Omidyars moved to Hawaii from the Washington, DC area.
Iran has accused the Bahais of being involved in cyber-attacks on Iranian computer systems and networks, as well as working with the CIA-supported terrorist Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) guerrillas that have launched violent attacks inside Iran. With their headquarters in Haifa, the links between the Bahai organization and Mossad are well-known throughout the Middle East and South Asia.
– See more at: http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/11190#sthash.hdKcrx2t.dpuf
ORIGINAL POST
Yet another embarrassing chapter in the ongoing brain-washing of the endlessly malleable public, reported by Hong-Kong journalist Yoichi Shimatsu at DavidShurter.com.
Shimatsu is a Japanese journalist who writes anti-NWO pieces. Some say he passes on disinformation. But the analysis of the Snowden story sounds quite credible to me, except for its faith in Mr. Snowden.
Shimatsu’s thesis is that the super-snitch was a patsy in a frame-up concocted by lawyer-blogger Glenn Greenwald and that Greenwald is one of the infiltrators promised by Obama’s surveillance czar, Cass Sunstein.
Cass Sunstein’s program had as its goal the cognitive infiltration of conspiracy theorists.
First, activists and dissidents were gulled by Greenwald’s performance as “good cop” opposite Sunstein’s “bad cop” in a well-publicized face-off. That enabled Greenwald to lure his readers into the banal legal quibbling that diverted outrage against the Bush administration’s war crimes from effective prosecution into toothless debate.
In this blog post, Shimatsu presents a compelling picture of Greenwald’s new financial backer, Ebay founder and billionaire Pierre Omidyar as as an intelligence-front from way back, the perfect “minder” for the spy warfare (MI6 & CIA versus NSA) that plausibly produced the whole Snowden saga.
Shimatsu is more trusting of Snowden’s role in all this than I am, but the post is quite a read.
Some outstanding take-aways include his description of Omidyar’s mother, a PhD linguist, engaged in work similar to that of Barack Obama’s mother, who was an anthropologist in Asia:
“For purposes of discussion here, the Omidya valorization of Persepolis indicates attachment to the Shah of Iran, whose court included many advisors and officials were Bahai followers or Jewish by birth.
Oddly, the Roshan Institute board includes only one cultural expert, Dr. Omidyar. The others are deans, which makes sense because Roshan’s main activity is to provide scholarships to students and place them in allied universities. One of the more interesting board members is former Democrat Florida congresswoman Jan Scheider, a former staffer with Terry McAuliff and lawyer for Bill Clinton. Mrs. Omidyar is one of her campaign contributors.”
and this:
“Among the board members is former University of Hawaii Mano chancellor Virgina Hinton. The microbiologist is a top expert in the avian influenza or bird flu virus, which whe weaponized poses the greatest threat of a mass-destruction epidemic. Before coming to Hawaii , Dr. Hinton served as head of the animal lab at the University of Wisconsin Madison . Her chosen successor at that position was Yoshikiko Kawaoka, the Japanese scientist from Kobe University who in fact did soon at UW weaponize H5N1 into a highly lethal and contagious super-flu strain.”
Shimatsu even sees the Greenwald-Omidyar alliance as a replay of earlier New World Order alliances:
“Occult Triangle
The triangular relationship of the Disraeli/Rothschid – Oxford Movement – Bahai/Salafism of the 19th is now being reflected in the Snowden affair with the collusion of the Zionism/Greenwald – Guardian/Royalist – Bahai/Omidyar. History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as a farce.
As Israel edges toward a first-strike attack against Iran , while ramping up its covert wars against Iranian influence in Sudan and Palestine , is it any wonder that Pierre Omidyar and Glenn Greenwald are preparing to launch a major online propaganda mouthpiece? Is this new media venture, too, part of the Bahai plan to prepare for the imminent End of the World to be delivered by an unstoppable contagion of super-flu?”
This part seems to reach a bit but Shimatsu analyses the Snowden affair well:
“Whistle-blower Edward Snowden was taken for a ride by con artists in the service of the US and UK intelligence agencies.
[Lila: I disagree that he was “taken in.” I think he’s part of the staging.]
Under the cover of “independent journalism”, the scammers conned him out of his trove of secret NSA files, hustled him from Hong Kong ahead of legislature-sponsored public hearings on cyber-espionage, and unceremoniously dumped him, minus documents, in a transit lounge at Moscow Airport . This report shows how the American and British spymasters retrieved the top-secret files by luring the fugitive into a well-laid trap, while the mass media went along with the deception to aid the authorities in evading public calls to abolish the global surveillance state.
Pierre Omidyar, founder of the online flea market e-Bay, is betting a reported $250 million that the accomplices of whistleblower Edward Snowden can follow up their caper with the launch of an online news site with global reach. The ethnic Iranian tycoon is funding a new media project for the team of Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill because he became “more alarmed about the pressures coming down on journalists with the various leak investigations in Washington .” (Pacific Business News)
An angel investor committed to press freedom and opposed to government surveillance is every journalist’s dream even though it sounds too good to be true. There are serious grounds for questioning the credibility of Greenwald and his newest patron, whose business venture Omidyar Network is closely connected with NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, Edward Snowden’s erstwhile employer.
[Lila: Which suggests that Snowden is himself complicit in some way. Perhaps as a patsy, perhaps with more culpability.]
Known for his globalist vision and “social-impact” projects in the developing countries,
[Lila: Public philanthropy from the inner circle of the Internet billionaires is rarely charity but simply business as usual.]
..backed by immense personal wealth, Omidyar follows in the footsteps of other billionaires who launched their own electronic media projects: George Soros with his slew of propaganda organs, Ariana Huffington at HuffPost and Michael Bloomberg with his financial news arm, to name a few. These well-oiled publicity machines hardly qualify as standard-bearers of objective reporting since each of these opinion-shapers has a political agenda, from running City Hall to fomenting uprisings for regime change in support of market economics. Early on, it already appears that Omidyar, for all his sentimental sound bites, could turn out to be the worst of a bad lot.
Partnering Booz Allen
In stark contrast to his libertarian posturing
[Lila: The Internet billionaires (Thiel, Omidyar, Zuckerberg, Brin, Page) whose corporations profit from data collecting profess everything from left to right libertarianism and liberalism]
I’ve blogged about this repeatedly, in relation to Wikileaks, Face-book, and Google.]
Omidyar is connected at the hip to the very same intelligence nexus that he publicly condemns, particularly Booz Allen Hamilton, the NSA security contractor that employed Snowden in Hawaii and Japan . One of the major investment partners with Omidyar Network, Salvadore ”Sal” Gambianco, sits on the board of directors of Booz Allen Hamilton Holdings.
[\As head of Omidyar Network’s human capital operations, Giambanco vets trainees and assesses employee performance for promotion or termination. For more than a decade, Omidyar Network has had a revolving door for its employees with Booz Allen, shuttling staffers and interns for intelligence-related postings. Just a few of these individuals who worked for both Omidyar Network and Booz Allen include:
– Dhaya Lakshminarayan who was sent to Cuba to research development programs;
– Pranay Chulet hired to head Omidyar-backed Quikr in India ;
– Patricia Sosrodjojo, Indonesian venture capital expert in Jakarta ; and
– Michael Kent, a Booz Allen counter-terrorism specialist who served as a research associate at the Omidyar campus in Redwood City , California .The relationship, simply put, is corporate collusion, and if businesses could be married, Booz Allen and Omidyar Network are husband and wife.
Inside the NSA’s Big Tent
Booz Allen and Omidyar Network are corporate members of an NSA-linked consortium called Innocentive, a consultancy focused on crowdsourcing (read: data-mining of public-opinion polls, consumer surveys and Internet-based personal data).
[Lila: That’s what “transparency” is all about. It’s “transparency” for us and “privacy” for them.]
Other member-companies include In-Q-Tel, a developer of communications monitoring software spawned with millions in start-up capital from the CIA.
Also represented is the In-Q-Tel spin-off Palantir, which creates fictive personas or virtual trolls to mount smear campaigns to debunk or threaten journalists and critical websites online and in letters to editors.
{Lila: I ‘ve really wondered about a few trolls who’ve followed me around. They always seemed to me to be phony…)
“Palantir, which refers to itself as an “electronic warfare” firm, has created a meta-data collection program similar to the NSA’s PRISM. Michael Leiter, former head of the National Counter-Terrorism Center , is the executive counsel to Palantir.
[Another corporate partner in Innocentive is Lilly Ventures, the investment arm of Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals, which produced LSD for the MK-ULTRA mind-control program and is now the lead partner in the Obama-sponsored national brain-mapping project. Full-spectrum surveillance is advancing from wireless electronics into the bio-network of the human synapses, the last frontier for total mind control. The objective of pre-crime pre-cognition, that is, the detection of criminal tendencies, for instance, resistance to authority, and intervention before the crime can happen. Using drugs to impair the mental capabilities of individuals is, of course, only a part of a wider and larger program of social engineering to ensure domination of the globalist elites over any increasingly dependant and expendable population.
As birds of the feather that flock together, Booz Allen Hamilton and Omidyar Network are a pair of ducks in the NSA-CIA pond. These intelligence links are so thinly guised, it beggars belief that an attorney like Greenwald who practiced law in New York City could be so oblivious to the conflict of interest in regard to the security of his client Edward Snowden.
Either Glenn Greenwald is a gullible village idiot or he is one of many actors planted in this spy charade. Nobody in the intelligence game is allowed to be that naïve, especially when it is crystal clear from these interlocking corporate connections that Pierre Omidyar is hardly an innocent when he has every incentive to work on behalf of Booz Allen and the NSA to recover the Snowden files.”
Read the rest at DavidShurter.com.
Francis Galton: Imperial eugenicist
Peter Quin at America on Jean Raspail’s fears of the brown woman’s womb:
“On the face of it, Raspail’s notion of a conscience-stricken West being overwhelmed by an army of disheveled immigrants is less discomforting than laughable. The West has shown itself perfectly capable of using sufficient force whenever its vital interests are at stake—or perceived as being so—
(Lila: And its vital interests are always at stake…)
as it did most recently in the Gulf War. Indeed, for all the handw-ringing over immigration and the future of the West, there seems little appreciation that for the last 500 years at least it has been the West that has been threatening and battering the rest of the world, colonizing entire continents and waging war to secure the resources it needs. The current virulent reaction against immigrants in France, Austria and Germany—or, for that matter, the U.S.’s recent treatment of Haitian refugees—is hardly a sign of societies suffering from terminal humanitarianism.
The pessimism evinced by Connelly and Kennedy is mitigated somewhat by their call for international cooperation to deal with the underlying causes of the present population crisis. But as with so many descriptions of the threat posed by the third world, the authors’ underlying sense of the West’s vulnerability before the procreative puissance of the world’s nameless poor is far more vivid and forceful than any formulaic list of possible solutions. The threat is from below, from Raspail’s “kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms,” from the teeming races that Rudyard Kipling once described as “lesser breeds without the law.”
(Lila: That is, without Western law. Of course, there were always Hindu, Chinese, and Islamic laws…)
“In the United States, the question of intelligence as a distinguishing characteristic between greater and lesser breeds has come to center stage with The Bell Curve (1994), the best-selling treatise by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Hermstein. Unlike The Camp of the Saints, this sedate and statistics-laden book is not directly concerned with immigration, and its central thesis—that I.Q. is a function of race—is more subtle and complex than the horrific vision evoked by Raspail.Despite their differences, however, there are similarities. At the heart of The Bell Curve and The Camp of the Saints, as well as of Connelly’s and Kennedy’s article, is a world in which the central divisions are racial and in which, when all is said and done, the white race is endangered. In fairness to Murray and Hermstein, they credit Asians with higher I.Q.’s than white Americans. Yet here again is found the implicit threat of a Caucasian community being challenged by another race, one that has been traditionally credited with being shrewder and craftier—in its own “inscrutable” way, smarter—than Westerners.
(Lila: Notice that when the IQ in question is lower than that of Caucasians, it is seen as a mark of inferiority and brutishness. But when IQ is higher, then it is a mark of craft, duplicity, and moral inferiority. In other words, at the heart of racist tropes, is a confirmed and unmerited sense of one’s global superiority over others. A sense founded on ignorance of real history from subjection to decades, if not centuries, of imperial propaganda. That is, at the bottom of such racist ideologies and narratives, you inevitably find the state.
And where the state is the strongest (I use the term state to mean not just government but the entire complex of government organs, including corporations, media, and academia) – in the West – there too mass indoctrination is at its greatest).
“The fear that white civilization is growing steadily weaker and is at risk of being overwhelmed by barbarians from within and without marks a new life for an old and ugly tradition. The most infamous manifestation of that tradition is the Ku Klux Klan and the host of so-called Aryan resistance groups that continue to spring up on the periphery of American political life. But its most powerful and enduring effect was not limited to cross burnings or rabble-rousing assaults against blacks and immigrants. There was a far more respectable, educated version of this tradition that clothed itself in the language of science and not only won a place in the academy, but helped shape our laws on immigration, interracial marriage and compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and retarded.The movement derived its authority from the work of an Englishman, Francis Galton—Darwin’s cousin—who in 1883 published his masterwork, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. In it Galton advocated the modification and improvement of human species through selective breeding and coined a name for it as well: eugenics. In Galton’s view, which was shared by many of his Victorian contemporaries and buttressed by a wealth of pseudo-scientific skull measuring and brain weighing, the races were totally distinct. Eugenics, he believed, would give “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.”
At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was ripe for the gospel of eugenics. The country’s original immigrants—Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish Protestants—were feeling battered and besieged by the waves of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe (i.e., Italians, Slovaks and Ashkenazi Jews) who were judged so immiscible in appearance and conduct that they would undermine the country’s character and identity. According to the eugenicists, the racial “germ plasm” of these groups was riddled with hereditary proclivities to feeble-mindedness, criminality and pauperism. These suspicions were given scientific justification by studies that purported to trace family behavior across several generations and discern a clear pattern of inherited behavior.
By the eve of World War I, eugenics was taught in many colleges. Its research arm was generously funded by some of America’s wealthiest families, including the Harrimans, Rockefellers and Carnegies. Alfred Ploetz, the German apostle of “racial hygiene,” hailed the United States as a “bold leader in the realm of eugenics,” a leadership that consisted of the widespread ban on interracial marriage and the growing emphasis on compulsory sterilization.
In the wake of the First World War, the eugenicists helped direct the campaign to halt the “degeneration” of the country’s racial stock by changing its immigration laws. As framed by Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the Museum of Natural History (at that time a center of eugenic fervor), America would either stop the influx from southern and eastern Europe or it would perish: “Apart from the spiritual, moral and political invasion of alienism the practical question of day by day competition between the original American and the alien element turns upon the struggle for existence between the Americans and aliens whose actions are controlled by entirely different standards of living and morals.”
The eugenicists played an important role in achieving the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, a victory noted and approved by Adolf Hitler in his book of the same year, Mein Kampf. In fact, nine years later, when the Nazis took power in Germany, they would hail U.S. laws on immigration, intermarriage and sterilization as models for their own legislation.”
Jean Raspail: sage dystopia or severe diplopia?
At Zobenigo blog, Jean Raspail’s gloriously muddle-headed dystopia about the destruction of a virginal Europe by inchoate brown masses (the yellow peril recycled) gets a keen rebuttal:
“The reasons for the popularity of Le Camp des saints are easy enough to decode. Here’s the novel’s synopsis from the usual place:The story begins in Bombay, India, where the Dutch government has announced a policy that Indian babies will be adopted and raised in the Netherlands. The policy is reversed when the Dutch consulate is inundated with parents eager to give up their infant children as it would be one less mouth to feed. An Indian “wise man” then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run down freighters approaching the French coast. The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the plentiful food and water that are in short supply their native India. Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of England must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia.
In short, it’s the OYPA — the old yellow peril alarm — all over again.THE OYPA seems a weird beast to me since I have spent all my life being bored with the familiar and seeking out out the exotic as its antidote. I welcome Asian immigration on several grounds: first, the wonderfully zany Indians seem a million times more interesting to me than the predictable familiar boring French, whom I have no reason to love anyway; certainly, on average, Pakistani women are prettier than the English; the food they bring is more tasty; etc.I therefore cannot fit into my head: why would not everyone else feel the same way?
What is more interesting about Jean Raspail’s brain is that it appears to be internally split: while writing his Dantean yellow perilist visions about foreigners flooding (and destroying) good old France, he simultaneously writes other books of scathing criticism of the very same modern France as a rotten perversion of its former self. He is a monarchist to the core and writes movingly about the spark of divinity which resides in the person of the king; his inviolability and irreplacability; the dire consequences of regicide; the lack of proper legitimacy in the person of a merely elected President; lack of authority; lack of respect for authority; etc. This is not merely a political fantasy: Jean Raspail senses that there is something deeply and fundamentally rotten about modern French (and, more generally, European) culture (about which he is probably right) and seeks its causes in the abolition of the monarchy two hundred years ago (I withhold my opinion).
But then he defends that very same rotten France against subversion by foreigners. Why? If France is rotten, then, heck, why not let it sink?
This is known to psychologists as cognitive dissonance.”