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A Diabolic False Flag Empire: A Review of David Ray Griffin’s The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic?

Edward Curtin

The past is not dead; it is people who are sleeping. The current night and daymares that we are having arise out of murders lodged deep in our past that have continued into the present. No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves. We have, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel address, been feeding on “a vast tapestry of lies” that surrounds us, lies uttered by nihilistic leaders and their media mouthpieces for a very long time. We have, or should have, bad consciences for not acknowledging being active or silent accomplices in the suppression of truth and the vicious murdering of millions at home and abroad.

But, as Pinter said, “I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.”

No one is more emblematic of this noble effort than David Ray Griffin, who, in book after book since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has meticulously exposed the underside of the American empire and its evil masters. His persistence in trying to reach people and to warn them of the horrors that have resulted is extraordinary. Excluding his philosophical and theological works, this is his fifteenth book since 2004 on these grave issues of life and death and the future of the world.

In this masterful book, he provides a powerful historical argument that right from the start with the arrival of the first European settlers, this country, despite all the rhetoric about it having been divinely founded and guided, has been “more malign that benign, more demonic than divine.” He chronologically presents this history, supported by meticulous documentation, to prove his thesis. In his previous book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, Griffin cataloged the evil actions that flowed from the inside job/false flag attacks of September 11th, while in this one – a prequel – he offers a lesson in American history going back centuries, and he shows that one would be correct in calling the United States a “false flag empire.”

The attacks of 11 September 2001 are the false flag fulcrum upon which his two books pivot. Their importance cannot be overestimated, not just for their inherent cruelty that resulted in thousands of innocent American deaths, but since they became the justification for the United States’ ongoing murderous campaigns termed “the war on terror” that have brought death to millions of people around the world. An international array of expendable people. Terrifying as they were, and were meant to be, they have many precedents, although much of this history is hidden in the shadows. Griffin shines a bright light on them, with most of his analysis focused on the years 1850-2018.

As a theological and philosophical scholar, he is well aware of the great importance of society’s need for religious legitimation for its secular authority, a way to offer its people a shield against terror and life’s myriad fears through a protective myth that has been used successfully by the United States to terrorize others. He shows how the terms by which the U.S. has been legitimated as God’s “chosen nation” and Americans as God’s “chosen people” have changed over the years as secularization and pluralism have made inroads. The names have changed, but the meaning has not. God is on our side, and when that is so, the other side is cursed and can be killed by God’s people, who are always battling el diabalo.

He exemplifies this by opening with a quote from George Washington’s first Inaugural Address where Washington speaks of “the Invisible Hand” and “Providential agency” guiding the country, and by ending with Obama saying “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.” In between we hear Andrew Jackson say that “Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number” and Henry Cabot Lodge in 1900 characterize America’s divine mission as “manifest destiny.” The American religion today is American Exceptionalism, an updated euphemism for the old-fashioned “God’s New Israel” or the “Redeemer Nation.”

At the core of this verbiage lies the delusion that the United States, as a blessed and good country, has a divine mission to spread “democracy” and “freedom” throughout the world, as Hilary Clinton declared during the 2016 presidential campaign when she said that “we are great because we are good,” and in 2004 when George W. Bush said, “Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.” Such sentiments could only be received with sardonic laughter by the countless victims made “free” by America’s violent leaders, now and then, as Griffin documents.

Having established the fact of America’s claim to divine status, he then walks the reader through various thinkers who have taken sides on the issue of the United States being benign or malign. This is all preliminary to the heart of the book, which is a history lesson documenting the malignancy at the core of the American trajectory.

“American imperialism is often said to have begun in 1898, when Cuba and the Philippines were the main prizes,” he begins. “What was new at this time, however, was only that America took control of countries beyond the North American continent.” The “divine right” to seize others’ lands and kill them started long before, and although no seas were crossed in the usual understanding of imperialism, the genocide of Native Americans long preceded 1898. So too did the “manifest destiny” that impelled war with Mexico and the seizure of its land and the expansion west to the Pacific.

This period of empire building depended heavily on the “other great crime against humanity” that was the slave trade, wherein it is estimated that 10 million Africans died, in addition to the sick brutality of slavery itself. “No matter how brutal the methods, Americans were instruments of divine purposes,” writes Griffin. And, he correctly adds, it is not even true that America’s overseas imperialistic ventures only started in 1898, for in the 1850s Commodore Perry forced “the haughty Japanese” to open their ports to American commerce through gunboat diplomacy.

Then in 1898 the pace of overseas imperial expansion picked up dramatically with what has been called “The Spanish-American War” that resulted in the seizure of Cuba and the Philippines and the annexing of Hawaii. Griffin says these wars could more accurately be termed “the wars to take Spanish colonies.” His analysis of the brutality and arrogance of these actions makes the reader realize that My Lai and other more recent atrocities have a long pedigree that is part of an institutional structure, and while Filipinos and Cubans and so many others were being slaughtered, Griffin writes, “Anticipating Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s declaration that ‘we don’t do empire,’ [President] McKinley said that imperialism is ‘foreign to the temper and genius of this free and generous people.’”

Then as now, perhaps mad laughter is the only response to such unadulterated bullshit, as Griffin quotes Mark Twain saying that it would be easy creating a flag for the Philippines:

We can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.

That would have also worked for Columbia, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, and other countries subjugated under the ideology of the Monroe Doctrine; wherever freedom and national independence raised its ugly head, the United States was quick to intervene with its powerful anti-revolutionary military and its financial bullying. In the Far East the “Open Door” policy was used to loot China, Japan, and other countries.

But all this was just the beginning. Griffin shows how Woodrow Wilson, the quintessentially devious and treacherous liberal Democrat, who claimed he wanted to keep America out of WW I, did just the opposite to make sure the U.S. would come to dominate the foreign markets his capitalist masters demanded. Thus Griffin explores how Wilson conspired with Winston Churchill to use the sinking of the Lusitania as a casus belli and how the Treaty of Versailles’s harsh treatment of Germany set the stage for WW II.

He tells us how in the intervening years between the world wars the demonization of Russia and the new Soviet Union was started. This deprecation of Russia, which is roaring at full-throttle today, is a theme that recurs throughout The American Trajectory. Its importance cannot be overemphasized. Wilson called the Bolshevik government “a government by terror,” and in 1918 “sent thousands of troops into northern and eastern Russia, leaving them there until 1920.”

That the U. S. invaded Russia is a fact rarely mentioned and even barely known to Americans. Perhaps awareness of it and the century-long demonizing of the U.S.S.R./Russia would enlighten those who buy the current anti-Russia propaganda called “Russiagate.”

To match that “divine” act of imperial intervention abroad, Wilson fomented the Red Scare at home, which, as Griffin says, had lasting and incalculable importance because it created the American fear of radical thought and revolution that exists to this very day and serves as a justification for supporting brutal dictators around the world and crackdowns on freedom at home (as is happening today).

He gives us brief summaries of some dictators the U.S has supported, and reminds us of the saying of that other liberal Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, who famously said of the brutal Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, that “he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.” And thus Somoza would terrorize his own people for 43 years. The same took place in Cuba, Chile, Iran, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, etc. The U.S. also supported Mussolini, did nothing to prevent Franco’s fascist toppling of the Spanish Republic, and supported the right-wing government of Chiang-Kai Shek in its efforts to dominate China.

It is a very dark and ugly history that confirms the demonic nature of American actions around the world.

Then Griffin explodes the many myths about the so-called “Good War” – WW II. He explains the lies told about the Japanese “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor; how Roosevelt wished to get the U.S. into the war, both in the Pacific and in Europe; and how much American economic self-interest lay behind it. He critiques the myth that America selflessly wished to defend freedom loving people in their battles with brutal, fascist regimes. That, he tells us, is but a small part of the story:

This, however, is not an accurate picture of American policies during the Second World War. Many people were, to be sure, liberated from terrible tyrannies by the Allied victories. But the fact that these people benefited was an incidental outcome, not a motive of American policies. These policies, as [Andrew] Bacevich discovered, were based on ‘unflagging self-interest.’

Then there are the conventional and atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nothing could be more demonic, as Griffin shows. If these cold-blooded mass massacres of civilians and the lies told to justify them don’t convince a reader that there has long been something radically evil at the heart of American history, nothing will. Griffin shows how Truman and his advisers and top generals, including Dwight Eisenhower and Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff, knew the dropping of the atomic bombs were unnecessary to end the war, but they did so anyway.

He reminds us of Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright’s response to the question whether she thought the deaths of more than 500, 000 Iraqi children as a result of Clinton’s crippling economic sanctions were worth it: “But, yes, we think the price is worth it.” (Notice the “is,” the ongoing nature of these war crimes, as she spoke.) But this is the woman who also said, “We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall…”

Griffin devotes other chapters to the creation of the Cold War, American imperialism during the Cold War, Post-Cold War interventions, the Vietnam War, the drive for global dominance, and false flag operations, among other topics.

As for false flag operations, he says, “Indeed, the trajectory of the American Empire has relied so heavily on these types of attacks that one could describe it as a false flag empire.” In the false flag chapter and throughout the book, he discusses many of the false flags the U.S. has engaged in, including Operation Gladio, the U.S./NATO terrorist operation throughout Europe that Swiss historian Daniele Ganser has extensively documented, an operation meant to discredit communists and socialists. Such operations were directly connected to the OSS, the CIA and its director Allen Dulles, his henchman James Jesus Angleton, and their Nazi accomplices, such as General Reinhard Gehlen.

In one such attack in 1980 at the Bologna, Italy railway station, these U.S. terrorists killed 85 people and wounded 20 others. As with the bombs dropped by Saudi Arabia today on Yemeni school children, the explosive used was made for the U.S. military. About these documented U.S. atrocities, Griffin says:

These revelations show the falsity of an assumption widely held by Americans. While recognizing that the US military sometimes does terrible things to their enemies, most Americans have assumed that US military leaders would not order the killing of innocent civilians in allied countries for political purposes. Operation Gladio showed this assumption to be false.

He is right, but I would add that the leaders behind this were civilian, as much as, or more than military.

In the case of “Operation Northwoods,” it was the Joint Chiefs of Staff who presented to President Kennedy this false flag proposal that would provide justification for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. It would have involved the killing of American citizens on American soil, bombings, plane hijacking, etc.

President Kennedy considered such people and such plans insane, and he rejected it as such. His doing so tells us much, for many other presidents would have approved it. And again, how many Americans are aware of this depraved proposal that is documented and easily available? How many even want to contemplate it? For the need to remain in denial of the facts of history and believe in the essential goodness of America’s rulers is a very hard nut to crack. Griffin has written a dozen books about 11 September 2001, trying to do exactly that.

If one is willing to embrace historical facts, however, then this outstanding book will open one’s eyes to the long-standing demonic nature of the actions of America’s rulers. A reader cannot come away from its lucidly presented history unaffected, unless one lives in a self-imposed fantasy world. The record is clear, and Griffin lays it out in all its graphic horror.

Which is not to say that the U.S. has not “done both good and bad things, so it could not sensibly be called purely divine or purely demonic.” Questions of purity are meant to obfuscate basic truths. And the question he asks in his subtitle – Divine or Demonic? – is really a rhetorical question, and when it comes to the “trajectory” of American history, the demonic wins hands down.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out one place where Griffin fails the reader. In his long chapter on Vietnam, which is replete with excellent facts and analyses, he makes a crucial mistake, which is unusual for him. This mistake appears in a four page section on President Kennedy’s policies on Vietnam. In those pages, Griffin relies on Noam Chomsky’s terrible book – Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture (1993), a book wherein Chomsky shows no regard for evidence or facts – to paint Kennedy as being in accord with his advisers, the CIA, and the military regarding Vietnam.

This is factually false. Griffin should have been more careful and have understood this. The truth is that Kennedy was besieged and surrounded by these demonic people, who were intent on isolating him, disregarding his instructions, and murdering him to achieve their goals in Vietnam. In the last year of his life, JFK had taken a radical turn toward peace-making, not only in Vietnam, but with the Soviet Union, Cuba, and around the globe. Such a turn was anathema to the war lovers. Thus he had to die.

Contrary to Chomsky’s deceptions, motivated by his hatred of Kennedy and perhaps something more sinister (he also backs the Warren Commission, thinks JFK’s assassination was no big deal, and accepts the patently false official version of the attacks of 11 September 2001), Griffin should have emphatically asserted that Kennedy had issued NSAM 263 on October 11, 1963 calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, and that after he was assassinated a month later, Lyndon Johnson reversed that withdrawal order with NSAM 273.

Chomsky notwithstanding, all the best scholarship and documentary evidence proves this. And for Griffin, a wonderful scholar, to write that with the change from Kennedy to Johnson that “this change of presidents would bring no basic change in policy” is so shockingly wrong that I imagine Griffin, a man passionate about truth, simply slipped up and got sloppy here. For nothing could be further from the truth.

Ironically, Griffin makes a masterful case for his thesis, while forgetting the one pivotal man, President John Kennedy, who sacrificed his life in an effort to change the trajectory of American history from its demonic course.

It is one mistake in an otherwise very important and excellent book that should be required reading for anyone who doubts the evil nature of this country’s continuing foreign policy. Those who are already convinced should also read it, for it provides a needed historical resource and impetus to help change the trajectory that is transporting the world toward nuclear oblivion, if continued.

If – a fantastic wish! – The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? were required reading in American schools and colleges, perhaps a new generation would arise to change our devils into angels, the arc of America’s future moral universe toward justice, and away from being the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, as it has been for so very long.


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Big B
Big B
Sep 13, 2018 10:05 AM

Dear Camelot myth-makers:

“Griffin should have emphatically asserted that Kennedy had issued NSAM 263 on October 11, 1963 calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam, and that after he was assassinated a month later, Lyndon Johnson reversed that withdrawal order with NSAM 273.”

This is a monstrous distortion of fact, coming as it does after denigrating “Chomsky’s deceptions” and Ray Griffin’s “factual false” assertion. I had occasion to review the historical facts surrounding NSAM 263 yesterday: even if I bracket out Chomsky’s ‘deceptions’, and go with the J K Galbraith version …it is still a quantum leap of circumstantial myth-making to say what Curtin is saying. Even Galbraith warns against doing so. He notes that this is a stain on JFK’s record.

As a note on the logical fallacy of ‘agumentum ad tainted source’: if any reference to Chomsky goes (not that I was reliant on Chomsky, but the false impression was created that I was to obfuscate my own sources) …then other than Douglass: I can justifiably argue that three of the main sources of Camelotism should be removed as vested interest sources, prone to distortion and deception …which doesn’t leave the circumstantial argument of Douglass much foundation …but thems your rules? I’ve adjusted my argument and sources to accommodate your rules.

However, I am keeping my powder dry, as this comment page is dead for discussion. I’m sure the historical fact v weak opinion, strongly held (with not a reference to a single historical document in sight, apart from the ones I linked to) will run and run. In November (around the 22nd): we get to do it all again!

BTW: I note the irony of subsequent articles which return the estimation of David Ray Griffin to that of an exemplary source: which I maintained throughout that he indeed is. Yet the Curtin/Douglass strawman (and Curtin surpasses even Douglass herein) is all it takes to bring that into question? If only because it would cause the Camelot sandcastle in the sky to disappear?

Catch you in November when you can defend your extraordinary claim – with facts and references please… the burden of proof is with you.

vexarb
vexarb
Sep 11, 2018 7:30 PM

Uncle’s L’t.st $cam:

https://www.syrianperspective.com/2018/09/the-fake-cw-event-is-coming-its-being-filmed-already-syrian-army-devastates-terrorists-in-hama.html

“The Anglo-American team is made up, according to my sources, of 12 Americans, all of whom used to work for major “news” outlets like NBC and CBS. Among the American group are 4 Jews who hold dual citizenship; American and Zionist. The 6 Britons in the group are primarily MI6 contractors whose job is to provide security for the crew. (Wael says that the British group contains one expert in unconventional warfare). On Sunday, September 9, 2018, the crew met with representatives from Jabhat Al-Nusra, the so-called White Helmets and the Turkestan Party where they discussed the details. What the imbeciles did not know was that the room in which they were discussing the scenario was bugged. In that conversation, the MI agents learned that the staged CW event would take place in Jisr Al-Shughoor.

Also, on Saturday, two (2) barrels of chlorine gas were delivered to Idlib City from Khirbat Al-Jawz, right on the Turk border while, as I am told, the Turk customs officers and military personnel merely looked on with orders not to interfere. The CW was collected and delivered by Qatari agents with the help of the Turks.”

Paul Rigby
Paul Rigby
Sep 10, 2018 10:45 PM

To mislead a Nation: Chomsky and the censorship of Roger Hilsman

In Milan Rai’s dreary Chomsky’s Politics (London: Verso, 1995), we find the following. Note the extent of the quiet, sustained effort to create a “left” that would ignore the November 63 coup as irrelevant; and the way in which a doctrinaire line is sold as empowerment, or similar such nonsense:

”The new options which might be opened up in academia were demonstrated by Chomsky’s own work at MIT, teaching courses in political and social thought. Together with Louis Kampf…Chomsky began teaching a course entitled ‘Intellectuals and Social Change’ in 1965, and another…entitled ‘Contemporary Issues in Politics and Ideology,’ which began in 1971. The two courses ran in alternate years thereafter until they were discontinued in 1987. Activists and observers came from as far away as Maine and Connecticut to join MIT students on the courses, which became a focus for activism. Teaching assistants, including two future presidents of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), were encouraged to make the course student-led and –organized as much as possible…Chomsky and Kampf issued a reading list of conventional texts such as Roger Hilsman’s To Move a Nation…They would then proceed to test these standard works to destruction, by exposing and exploding their basic assumptions…,” (p.133).”

In Rethinking Camelot we see the full fruits of these many years of disinterested scrutiny: the wholesale censorship of Hilsman’s passages on the CIA. You mean there were any? There certainly were: Try chapter 6, The Problem of the CIA, pp.63-68. After all the usual, time-honoured disclaimers – CIA a haven of liberalism during the McCarthyite terror; a fine bunch of patriots etc. – we get this: “But the CIA still represented a most serious problem,” p.65. Rethinking Camelot tells us that the CIA was Kennedy’s faithful servant: It cannot acknowledge or permit any criticism of the Langley mob. Chomsky therefore censored Hilsman’s writings on the subject.

Paul Rigby
Paul Rigby
Sep 10, 2018 10:42 PM

Chronicle of autobiographical deceit: Building the “legend”

One of the major problems in dealing with the real career and purposes of Chomsky the pseudo-dissident is the widespread refusal of his readers to pay attention to his actual words and texts. Such is the desire to believe in the Chomsky myth that a great deal of contradictory and, in many instances, plainly dishonest, rubbish is permitted to pass unchallenged. Here’s a classic example of what I’m getting at.

Readers of The Chomsky Reader, edited by the sycophantic James Peck, learn that the great one visited Israel in 1953 “at the time of the Slansky trails in Czechoslovakia”(1).

We are first informed that the kibbutzim on which he stayed was “a functioning and very successful libertarian commune,” that he “liked…very much in many ways”(2), so much so that he “came close to returning there to live”(3). So far so clear.

Yet in the very next paragraph, we learn that this same “functioning and very successful libertarian commune” was nothing of the sort. It was, instead, a sectarian hellhole: “…the ideological conformity was appalling. I don’t know if I could have survived long in that environment because I was very strongly opposed to the Leninist ideology, as well as the general conformism…”(4).

This is ridiculously contradictory as straight autobiographical reminiscence, but then to read these paragraphs in that conventional way is to miss the point. For these “recollections” have nothing to do with an accurate history of Chomsky’s life and intellectual development. Instead, the great, shameless, absurd volte-face is “legend” creation.

If his opinions were to carry weight with the CIA’s particular target audiences, and thus help set the limits of American dissent, Chomksy had to be armoured against two principle likely objections: that he was a self-hating Jewish intellectual, and/or a Stalinoid fellow-traveller. Now we have the key to unlocking the contradictory farrago that is Chomsky’s characterisation of the kibbutzim he visited in 1953.

(1) James Peck (Ed.) The Chomsky Reader (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992 reprint), p.10.

(2) Ibid., p.8.

(3) Ibid., pp.8-9.

(4) Ibid., p.9.

Paul Rigby
Paul Rigby
Sep 10, 2018 10:41 PM

Of plumbing, MIT, and elementary consistency

In 1966/7, the CIA snake began shedding an uncongenial skin. As part of divesting itself of the tiresome NCL (Non-Communist Left), the Agency blew details of its funding of student bodies, university research programmes etc. This left Chomsky, by now launched upon a classic wedge operation (separating anti-war activists from Warren Commission dissidents), with a little local difficulty – how to reconcile his own unhindered dissidence with the revelations concerning the funding sources of US academia in general, and MIT in particular. Bogus outrage was the solution. Here’s an extract from a less-than-probing May 1969 NYT Sunday magazine profile:

”The quintessential outside man at MIT is Noam Chomsky…(Chomsky was at one point, but is no longer, supported by the Air Force)…Chomsky…takes a hard line on the question of defence money. ‘My own view…is that science’s association with the Department of Defense is a tragic development. It has harmed the scientist’s own work, but worse than that, it has harmed national policy. The real tragedy is that people, out of their own free will, have involved themselves with the Defense Department. The Defense Department constitutes a menace to human life. I think people simply have to ask what they can do that is useful. If they can’t do anything, then they should become plumbers,”
Richard Todd, “The ‘Ins’ and ‘Outs’ at MIT,” NYT Magazine, 18 May 1969, pp.32-33, 63-64, 66, 68, 70, 73, 76, 83-84, 91, 93-94.

It was testing profile, as you can imagine, appearing as it did within the CIA’s paper of record. Unasked went all the obvious, important questions, such as: How had his own lengthy subvention by the USAF et al harmed his work? Was Chomsky’s work – machine translation seem to have been the ultimate goal – “useful” to anybody other than US military and intelligence agencies? Just why hadn’t he become a plumber?

By the late 1980s, of course, the moment of danger on the issue, slight though it had been, was long gone, and Chomsky could drop the feigned – and utterly hypocritical – anger in preference for that old favourite, insouciance:

”One the related issue of university connections with the CIA, Chomsky remarked that he had never become particularly interested in the topic: ‘The institution pretty much serves the interests of the state where it can. Whether it’s being directly funded by the CIA or in some other fashion seems to me a marginal question.’ In fact, Chomsky advocated direct, open funding by the CIA: ‘At least everything would be open and above-board,’”
Milan Rai. Chomsky’s Politics (London: Verso, 1995), p.130.

Paul Rigby
Paul Rigby
Sep 10, 2018 10:38 PM

Chomsky on the Lone Nutter in the White House, 1961-63

Oliver Stone’s JFK, whatever its precise strengths and weaknesses, provoked a new generation to look at the assassination. This bubble of interest had to be swiftly deflated, and America’s centre-left preserved from contamination by conspiratorialist froth. Who better to inject the narcotic of conformity than the CIA’s favourite left-gatekeeper, the Gnome?

Rethinking Camelot, the preferred delivery mechanism, is one of the crudest pieces of CIA hackwork ever written. Much of it is laughably bad. Consider the question of responsibility for the US assault on Vietnam.

Early on in the book – all the quotation to follow are from the Verso paperback edition published in London in 1993 – Chomsky serves up one of those impressive-seeming, quasi-aphoristic criterion which so intoxicate his army of academic exegetes and hagiographers: “Policy flows from institutions reflecting the needs of power and privilege within them, and can be understood only if these factors are recognized, including the case now under review” (p.9). That eternal verity solemnly proclaimed, Chomsky proceeds to ignore it more or less entirely for the rest of the book.

How so? The text is littered with a mantra which makes nonsense of Chomsky’s assertion: It wasn’t an institution what done it, after all, it was that bloody awful man Kennedy. Single-handedly. He was a macho Irish Papist, don’t you know? Count the violations of Chomsky’s own tenet:

“Kennedy escalated” (p.2); “John F. Kennedy’s escalation” (p.23); “Kennedy’s escalation” (p.27); “Kennedy…escalated the war” (p.37); “JFK raised the level of US attack” (p.43); “As he prepared to escalate the war…in late 1961” (p.46); “Kennedy’s 1961-62 escalation” (p.51); “his 1961-1962 escalation” (p.67).

Just in case his less nimble readers missed the point, the Gnome served up a variation on the theme. Subtlety, as we shall see, was not his strongpoint:

”Kennedy’s war” (p.2); “Kennedy’s war” (p.36); “Kennedy’s war” (p.39); “Kennedy’s war” (p.52); “Kennedy’s war” (p.53); “Kennedy’s war” (p.69); “Kennedy’s war” (p.73); “Kennedy’s war” (p.81); “Kennedy’s war” (p.86); “Kennedy’s war” (p.105).

Still not got it? Chomsky had a third variant on the same basic slogan:

”Kennedy…his aggression” (p.15); “Kennedy moved on to armed attack” (p.25); “JFK’s aggression” (p.32); “JFK’s aggression” (p.35); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.52); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.63); “JFK’s 1961-1962 aggression” (p.66); “JFK’s aggression” (p.115).

Impressively sophisticated stuff: If you can’t convince ‘em with the quality of your argument or evidence, beat ‘em into submission by mindless repetition.

Paul Rigby
Paul Rigby
Sep 10, 2018 10:34 PM

Dwight Macdonald’s heir

There has long been a touching naïveté about the intermittent attempts by Warren Report dissidents to convert Chomsky to the cause: It was never going to happen.

Some of Chomsky’s early legend-building, it is true, took place in Ramparts, which published a number of early and influential critiques of the CIA, the Vietnam War, and the official whitewash of the November 22 coup; but proximity should not have been confused with affinity, let alone tacit endorsement. All we were really witnessing was the Agency’s attempt to a) drive a wedge between dissidents while B) fabricating the legend of Noam-as-dissident; c) the same organisation’s move against the China lobby (in part, via the setting of limits to the expansion of the attack on North Vietnam); and d) the conscription of Warren Report scepticism by the Eastern establishment for its own geo-strategic and domestic purposes.

In fact, Chomsky had given the game away as to his true lineage and purposes as early as 1966 in a lecture that became the essay entitled The Responsibility of Intellectuals:

”Twenty years ago, Dwight Macdonald published a series of articles in Politics on the responsibilities of peoples and, specifically, the responsibility of intellectuals. I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just after the war, and had occasion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost none of their power or persuasiveness,” (1).

It was in the course of this essay that Chomsky offered one of his most resonant and oft-quoted sentences: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies,” (2). Of course, he didn’t mean it to apply to eminent US New Leftists contemplating the work of one Dwight Macdonald.

For Macdonald was the US establishment’s favourite Yale pseudo-leftist – an institution as American as apple pie, or carpet bombing – in which capacity, in the form of a letter to The New Republic published in a late January 1964 edition, he so generously embraced the Dallas patsy on behalf of the entire US Left: “I agree it was a great pity that the assassin turned out to be not a lunatic Birchite, as we all assumed in that first hour of shock, but a lunatic ‘Marxist.’ But such was the fact. Oswald is our baby, not theirs,” (3).

Macdonald had “previous,” though not that one would know it from reading the responsible intellectual Noam. In the mid-1950s, for example, DM had submitted a lengthy application – in the form of New Yorker-published encomium to that font of disinterested charitable-giving, the Ford Foundation – to jump aboard the editorial gravy train Encounter (4). In that prescient and probing masterpiece, Macdonald had sought to combine whitewash with francophobia, a rewarding cultural “amalgam” – to use a Trotskyite art term of disapproval much favoured in the 1930s – for ambitious US intellectuals, then as now. Ferdinand Lundberg examined the distilled wisdom of DM on the FF in a footnote to his agreeably acerbic The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today:

”A more prevalent attitude among the pseudo-knowledgeable is reflected in a report of an unidentified young sociologist quoted by Dwight Macdonald, p.20, infra. ‘The French seem totally unable to understand the Ford Foundation,’ he wrote from Paris where he was working on a Ford-financed project. ‘The “inside-dopesters” are sure of the explanation of such an otherwise incredible institution – to “cheat” the government out of tax money…Some suspect that these foundations are some sort of quasi-official intelligence agencies working for the State Department under cover of scientific respectability,’ (5).

As Lundberg noted, “As more recently it has been disclosed in massive detail that foundations as well as universities have widely acted as ‘covers’ for the CIA, it appears that the young sociologist at the time he wrote still had much to learn and the French had their wits about them,” (6). It is a reasonably safe bet that Macdonald knew of the relationship between the CIA and the foundations, and of the foundations to Encounter, even as he quoted his youthful sociologist’s penetrating observations in 1955 (7).

All of which leads us to a very different understanding of Chomsky’s silence on Macdonald’s role in the 1950s and in the decade that followed: The responsibility of responsible US intellectuals is to whitewash the role of the CIA.

Notes

(1) James Peck (Ed.). The Chomsky Reader (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992 reprint), p.59.
(2) Ibid., p.60.
(3) “Correspondence: Our Baby,” TNR, 25 January 1964, p.30.
(4) Frances Stonor Sanders. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), p.308.
(5) Ferdinand Lundberg. The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today (NY: Bantam, June 1969), p. 976, note 2.
(6) Ibid.
(7) ) Frances Stonor Sanders. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), p.395.

Kubus
Kubus
Sep 10, 2018 8:21 PM

Excellent review by Edward Curtin, and I agree with his view on Kennedy’s Vietnam policy. Fact is, when JFK died there were no American combat troops in Vietnam. Two years later there were 175,000. I strongly disagree with some of the comments here that try to portray JFK as a cold warrior. He was not. Would a cold warrior send a secret envoy to Fidel Castro to try to improve the relationship with communist Cuba? No, but JFK did. And both John and Bobby were unaware of the CIA assassination plots against Castro. Instead of zooming in on a speech JFK never gave, maybe Big
B should read the speech Kennedy gave at American University?

Big B
Big B
Sep 10, 2018 10:05 PM
Reply to  Kubus

Bobby was JFK’s “eyes and ears” on Operation Mongoose and reported directly to him. He didn’t just know about the plots to kill Castro, HE RAN THE OPERATION! It’s even admitted on CIA-ipedia. He sent an envoy to say “Sorry we tried to kill you, but …” Had Bobby had his way, the JCOS would have invaded Cuba at the height of the Missile Crisis. Which would have been problematic, as the Soviet SS-4 and R-14 missiles had received their warheads. Can I remind you that the US “quarantine” of Cuba was an act of war. An act of war that nearly killed us all. That must have been some speech to put a positive spin on Armageddon? The speech shows him to be a Cold Warrior to the day he died. Read it, please.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 11, 2018 1:43 AM
Reply to  Big B

Operation Mongoose: The Story of America’s Efforts to Overthrow Castro

And how they helped seal America’s fate in Vietnam
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/operation-mongoose/549737/

Lansdale received a thankless assignment at the end of 1961: to overthrow Fidel Castro, the bearded young revolutionary who in 1959 had had seized power in Havana. The Kennedy administration initially had tried to topple Castro, who was seen as a communist threat in America’s “backyard,” by backing a CIA-organized invasion of exiles at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. That had turned into a fiasco. Now the Kennedys were hell-bent on getting rid of Castro any way they could, and they saw Lansdale as just the man for the job. His lack of experience with Cuba was seen as a recommendation: He was not tainted by the Bay of Pigs operation, which he had opposed.

Kubus
Kubus
Sep 11, 2018 12:24 PM
Reply to  Big B

Wrong. The CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro were not part of Mongoose. They were done secretly without presidential authorization. Something which the CIA admits itself in the Inspector General Report on the plots. You also avoided my question about Jean Daniel, the journalist who was Kennedy’s secret envoy to Castro. And did you enjoy reading the Peace speech? Or do you avoid that also?

Big B
Big B
Sep 11, 2018 8:58 PM
Reply to  Kubus

My source is the CIA too. If you navigate from CIA-ipedia (the ‘Cuban Project’ page) to document [40]: “Reports on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro”: then scroll through to page 36 of the document …you’ll find this paragraph:

“The Agency’s General Counsel, Lawrence Houston, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy learned the full details of the operation in May 1962”

Remember, this is the assassination part of Mongoose you claim they had no knowledge of?

Pages 63-67 of the document have fuller details, including this:

Kennedy stated his view, reportedly quite strongly, that the Attorney General should be told in advance of any future CIA intentions to work with or through U.S. gangster elements.

So, he was fully briefed on the assassination plans, and knew of Giancana and Roselli’s Mafia involvement: and all he wanted was to be told in advance if they were going to use them again?

However, it is an “imperfect history” written after the fact. But I see no reason for the CIA to lie in an “Eyes Only” document: written for the record.

As for the more general sabotage of Operation Mongoose: RFK chaired the SGA committee that put Lansdale in charge of the day to day running: Lansdale answered to RFK (and Dulles and Lyman Lemnitzer (the signatory of the Northwoods document)) Another part of the fairy tale is that this was too much for JFK, who sacked Lemnitzer, and cancelled the operation.

However, I doubt many noticed in the Trump dump last year: the minutes of an NSC memo on Mongoose that contemplated the euphemistically named “agricultural sabotage” of introducing biological agents to destroy crops; and distribute explosives and incendiaries among the Cubans. This was after Northwoods.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/27/560352638/jfk-documents-highlight-talks-on-clandestine-anti-cuba-ops?t=1536694224865

Need I remind you that Operation Mongoose was part of the reason that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis: because everyone wants to forget that too in order to cherish the Thirteen Days auto-hagiography. Having precipitated an Extinction Level Event …he then saved the world. Do you really buy into this crap?

The ‘peace speech’ is lovely: only you have to contextualise it with a man that doubled his nuclear arsenal and increased his Special Forces by 600% …I guess we just have different concepts of peace?

King Kong
King Kong
Sep 10, 2018 6:50 PM

If I were God , I would mumble to myself:
Damn , I really messed up those two and three places, well I am God and can undo anything!
ZAP we would alll collective have no notion of the US, Israel and KSA. They never were they are just empty places nobody wants , because of … reasons.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 10, 2018 12:49 PM

I think it likely that many events have gone down in history as false flags (or, of course, alleged “terror” events) when they were really false-flag hoaxes.

Sure, there was a bombing at Bologna station but the photographic evidence does not suggest 85 killed and 200 injured and the witness reports betray the signs of the power elite letting us know what they’re up to with things that don’t add up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_massacre
https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/rescue-workers-look-through-the-rubble-of-the-train-station-news-photo/862326814#/rescue-workers-look-through-the-rubble-of-the-train-station-in-italy-picture-id862326814

In the ninth photo we see a female body under the train. We have to wonder about her location, positioning, state of dress and other features.
https://imgcop.com/img/Strage-Di-Bologna-8728750/

The BBC reported one witness (age 44 – who, according to his Wikipedia page, would have been 49) saying he saw a flash of yellow light and the crash of the masonry falling but didn’t hear the bomb. Didn’t hear the bomb but heard the crash of MASONRY – how about that? He also describes a scene not evidenced in the photos.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/2/newsid_4532000/4532091.stm

The other witness, Simon Gray, (age 22 – cf the Skripals 66 and 33) mentions a severed leg and an ambulance and yet we only see a dead (or injured) person being carried onto a bus. The namesake of the fictitious Simon Gray is the playwright, Simon Gray, who was married to a Rothschild. How about that?
http://www.bolognatoday.it/cronaca/bus-37-strage-2-agosto-STAZIONE.html

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 10, 2018 1:46 PM
Reply to  Editor

You have got to me kidding me.

How does a woman get under a train when the bomb went off in the waiting room? She is posed lasciviously – can you not see that? Can you not see that there is a complete mismatch between what the witnesses report and the images? And can you not see the Masonic symbology and numerology? He heard the crash of the masonry? Who talks like that? Quantrill was actually 49 but they reported 44 and Simon Gray was 22 – they just made a slip with the age do you think? You think that’s a far likelier explanation than 44 is a multiple of their master number 11 like 22 and the Skripals’ ages 66 and 33. Quantrill was also a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pennsylvania around the time the CIA were doing MKUltra work there – the Fulbright program was used by the CIA for recruitment. Are you guys going to be in denial forever about their numerology and symbology? Will you just deny it forever? Where oh where is there any convincing evidence of any one of the 85 dead and any one of the 200 injured? Where oh where?

I do not believe at all that we have to do meticulous research. Why should we believe ANYTHING we’re told by the media unless they give us a reason to. I mean first we’re told Red Brigades and then neo-fascists so already we’re starting with lies. If a bombing is reported that kills and wounds people but we see no clear evidence of it and we see a mismatch between show and tell and we see images that do not gel why should we feel the need to do meticulous research? I will never believe in a bombing killing and wounding unless I see evidence of it because there’s way, way too much fakery going on and I don’t believe that the evidence of a bomb that really has killed and wounded should ever be disputable. The horror of a real bombing is much too real. (Of course, there was a bombing, but obviously no one was around.)

vexarb
vexarb
Sep 11, 2018 11:49 AM
Reply to  flaxgirl

@flaxgirl: “How does a woman get under a train when the bomb went off in the waiting room?”
Perhaps the blast blew her off the platform into that gap between two carriages of a stationary train? Followed by the falling masonry which covers the rails, the buffers, her lower left leg and left shoulder.

https://imgcop.com/img/Strage-Di-Bologna-8728750/

“She is posed lasciviously – can you not see that?”
Now that you mention it. Certainly her dress has been dragged off, and is lying under the rubble with little blue patch draped over a rail. There is no rubble and almost no dust obscuring her torso, right thigh, raised right hip and white panties. But “posed”? Perhaps the blast threw her into the air and twisted her into this prone horizontal attitude before depositing her body over the rail and into the gap between two carriages.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 12:25 PM
Reply to  vexarb

What about the size of her body in comparison to the train, vexarb? Don’t you think it looks a little small? Whatever, you wouldn’t bet money that it was a real woman’s body, would you? You wouldn’t bet money, just as you wouldn’t bet money on a single piece of purported evidence alleging to represent a dead or injured person. Are you OK with images of a bombing where 85 people died and 200 were injured without a single one of those images providing anything you could claim with any kind of certainty represented a dead or injured person? Not to mention the problems with the witness reports.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 12:32 PM
Reply to  vexarb

Actually, I take it back about the size. I really don’t have a good sense of the perspective – perhaps the body is lifesize but I don’t think it looks particularly real regardless.

vexarb
vexarb
Sep 12, 2018 1:32 PM
Reply to  flaxgirl

Flaxgirl, I would go with as far as to agree the figure was more likely posed in that difficult place and in that “lascivious” attitude — rather than being blown there by a blast of wind from the explosion. Posed by whom? By unscrupulous paparazzi? Or by Gladio team then called the paparazzi? Dead woman or dummy? Although no wounds are visible on the body, the face is ghastly and the head seems deformed so might have died from a head injury. If a corpse, it must have been posed before rigor mortis. So much for speculation from an old photo.

Frankly Speaking
Frankly Speaking
Sep 10, 2018 8:25 PM
Reply to  flaxgirl

Just because you have not seen all the pictures of an event does not in any way mean that it did not happen as described in the MSM. Yes, there have been conspiracies and false flags, all of us here know that, but it appears that many people increasingly see absolutely every event as a conspiracy or involves fakery! I was in northern Italy at the time of the Bologna incident, trust me, it really happened and scores of people were decimated, I’ll say no more.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 12:10 AM

I don’t want to see all the pictures, Frankly Speaking, just one. Just one. Propaganda works like magic regardless of distance from event. It’s magical that way. It’s funny, my father came from a village a couple of hours from Bologna, and his catch cries when I was growing up were. “Propaganda” and “It was the CIA.”

A real bombing doesn’t look anything like Bologna. Nothing like it. It’s psychologically damaging to see these fake events and think that that’s what a bombing looks like. A real bombing involves severed limbs which the fictitious witness alluded to and other horrors.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 11, 2018 1:32 AM

Alex Jones type thinking going on here, all about ‘posed pictures’ and crisis actors.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 2:09 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

I judge by the evidence manfromatlan, only by the evidence. We’re given two types here:
— clues from the power elite in the witnesses saying things that aren’t credible and don’t match what we see
— complete lack of evidence of 85 dead and 200 injured

When the media tell me something and they don’t provide evidence of it, especially a bombing, whose evidence, by definition, should not be something about which one can dispute, I don’t believe it. Do you think I should? Do think that if I don’t believe the media when they don’t provide what I consider to be the evidence required for what they tell me I should believe it? Do you think I should absolutely strive my best not to engage in “Alex Jones type thinking” and swallow what the media tell me and avoid speaking of “crisis actors” lest I be considered a “conspiracy theorist”? Is that how well you’ve been indoctrinated by the propaganda?

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 11, 2018 2:39 AM
Reply to  flaxgirl

We’re all welcome to believe what we like, flaxgirl. I believe the Bologna Station bombing did happen, and no, I don’t need pictures to prove it http://www.ansa.it/english/news/politics/2018/08/02/shadows-over-bologna-bombing-mattarella_dda4df61-11f2-40f9-abe6-b693e58c6a5d.html

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 11, 2018 2:50 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

And while I do believe in an overarching conspiracy, current CT is just a colossal mind fuck by the masters of discourse. You know about Professor Cass Sunstein’s paper suggesting that they cognitively infiltrate online discussion, the better to discredit alternative thinking?

So yes, I knew some fine conspiracy analysts, but Alex Jones and “Q” leave me cold.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 5:05 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

You don’t need pictures to prove it, manfromatlan, but they feed you pictures. They feed you pictures that are completely unconvincing and you’re absolutely fine with that and they feed you propaganda of people marching behind “Bologna non dimentica” banners and you’re happy to swallow that too. Buon appetito!

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 3:03 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

What is your thinking, manfromatlan? Do you think that by definition to say that a body looks posed means that you’re a conspiracy theorist? Do you think that a body cannot be posed, that that doesn’t happen in the real world? Do you think that a woman would be found in that position in that state of dress under a train after a bombing in the waiting room with a very strange-looking head? That fits your real world perfectly fine and your real world also fits a bombing where 85 were killed and 200 were injured but we are shown no convincing evidence of such an event?

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 11, 2018 3:17 AM
Reply to  flaxgirl

Well, since you asked 🙂
A Conspirological State of Mind
March 15, 2008
https://manfromatlan.blogspot.com/2008/03/conspirological-state-of-mind.html

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 3:40 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

I simply judge by the evidence and weigh it up. These events also have hallmarks which makes it a bit easier. I only decided to look at Bologna a couple of weeks ago and it took about 2 minutes to see it was a false-flag hoax rather than a false flag. The two witness reports contradicting what we are shown were a giveaway and the lack of any clear evidence of 85 dead and 200 injured was another giveaway. It’s not hard. If you aren’t shown evidence where you expect it I see no reason to believe what you are told.

I mean, it’s a false flag in the first place, right? They’re already lying to you. What’s the big stretch in it being a false-flag hoax rather than a false flag? They can do it so easily and they don’t have to worry about the loved ones of the dead coming a’knocking. I do not understand the resistance to seeing what these events really are.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 8:37 AM
Reply to  flaxgirl

And it’s not as if they WANT to kill the people. They don’t want to kill them, they just want you to THINK they’ve killed them. Why would they kill them when all they have to do is set off a bomb in an evacuated area, get a few people carried about on stretchers covered in spotless white sheets, have a few people marching down the street behind a banner (in the following years just to keep it all going), set up a memorial inscribed with names, get people to throw flowers on it and fake the dead people’s names somehow (that’s what intelligence agencies are for, after all) – and everyone believes it absolutely no problem? Even when you try to tell people that, in fact, that’s all they’ve done and what they’ve shown us is not consistent with a real attack and they even give you pretty clear anomalous clues … when it’s just so incredibly easy to fool people with a fake attack why would they go through the hassle of dealing with the loved ones of real dead people? Why would they do it? It’s not their modus operandi and they prefer to fool us, that gives them pleasure, they enjoy it. That’s much more fun than implementing a real false flag. I don’t blame anyone for thinking it was a real bombing. Until two weeks ago I thought it was a real bombing myself but now that it’s pointed out I don’t see what’s so hard to see about it.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 9:33 AM
Reply to  flaxgirl

Actually, on closer inspection the body looks too small in relation to the train.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 11, 2018 7:33 PM
Reply to  flaxgirl

Dead people tend not to look “real” I guess. As to ‘size’ the picture doesn’t show a mature woman posed ‘lasciviously’ but a teen girl aged no more than 13-14. And it wasn’t posed that way, the bomb blast blew her clothes off and hurled her body under the train.

Incidentally the source article for that picture suggests Italian state security services SISMI was involved https://www.infoaut.org/antifascismonuove-destre/la-strage-di-bologna-del-1980-e-linfondatezza-della-pista-palestinese

Look up Operation Gladio.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 12, 2018 12:07 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

In another comment I took back my claim the body is too small. I’m not good with perspective. Regardless you are simply speculating about who the figure represents. You cannot say with certainty that it is a real dead body.

This is what I do say with certainty:

If a bombing has killed 85 and injured 200 it will be clear in the images shown. The evidence will be unmistakeable. What we are shown is very, very far from that. Additionally, witness reports do not match what we’re shown and bear the fingerprints of the power elite telling us what they’re up to.

I assert without fear of compelling contradiction that Bologna was a false-flag hoax.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 12, 2018 12:33 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

What is very interesting is that it is, to my knowledge, the only false-flag hoax pushed out (eventually) as a false flag. Any other false-flag hoaxes I know of are pushed out as simply a “terror” event. Why was it pushed out first as a “terror” event and then “recognised” as a false flag (while it was really a false-flag hoax)? And then we can only presume that all the jailings of the alleged perpetrators were fake. That is fascinating. All part of the “strategy of tension” but way too labyrinthine for my brain to cope with. Put Italians and the CIA together? Can’t go there.

Puppets
Puppets
Sep 10, 2018 10:41 AM

Efficiency in modern MSM journalism is achieved by not making the mistake of publishing articles of condemnation before a false flag operation is carried out. (BBC and WTC7?!!)

How many stories, our beloved Guardian (US) has, right now on their website, about the escalation of attacks in Idlib and Hama and about the US live-fire drills to send a strong message to Russia?

How many stories, the Guardian (US) has right now about the US live-fire drills in Syria to send a strong message to Russia?

The answer is, right now, there is Zero item on the Guardian website related to Syria.

Almost certainly, a myriad of articles, to condemn Russia and Assad, are already written and awaiting the signal from their the puppet masters to flood the internet and sway public opinion. They are careful about publishing time.

Maggie
Maggie
Sep 10, 2018 10:28 AM

Brilliant article, BUT how is this information supposed to reach those who could change the system, if armed with facts???

This book costs £24.99 on Amazon!!!!!!

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 11, 2018 2:53 AM
Reply to  Maggie

Lots of free sources out there, Maggie. And people are ‘armed with facts’ just lack the power to do anything about it.

MichaelK
MichaelK
Sep 10, 2018 9:15 AM

After all that history, about how we got to here, this is a rather good exposition of where we are now. I’m posting it because I think it’s more radical, interesting and educational, than most of what Chomsky has to say about contemporary politics in the US. Though, I suppose, that could have a sectarian source, as Chomsky isn’t a great fan of Trotsky, preferring a type of convenient anarchy.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/10/pers-s10.html

MichaelK
MichaelK
Sep 10, 2018 8:56 AM

I think one can argue and even document that the European ‘colonisation’ or… invasion of the American continent, was, from the absolute beginning an imperialistic enterprise, and obviously so, if one cares to examine what actually happened, rather than wallow in self-righteous and sentimental cant.

European expansion into the Americas was always about conquest and nothing else. The native population had land and resources we wanted and we used our superior technology, not least military, to defeat them, enslave them, slaughter in their millions and take over their land, destroying entire civilizations cultures in the process.

Modern history and archelogy shows that the population of the Americas was far higher than was previously thought, yet, in a couple of centuries it had collapsed… massively. A terrible combination of war, famine and new diseases perhaps crashing the native population by 80 or even 90 percent, with a excess death-tole in the tens of millions. The max figure I’ve seen is 90 million covering the entire era of European conquest and occupation of the Americas.

Even something as ‘benign’ and ‘legendary’ as the American Revolution is highly problematic, unless one swallows the Establishment version of events, which we do, as we’ve now been colonised by American ideas to an extraordinary degree.

The Revolution wasn’t really about democracy, but about ‘freedom’ for some powerful interests in the colonies, to throw off the rule of London and exploit the riches of North America without any rules, including those about slavery. Recent scholarship tends to emphasize the concerns about the threat to the American economy that the lobby to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, might have for slavery in the colonies. The trend was against slavery in London, but in the North American colonies the trend was in the opposite direction, a desire to expand slavery into new territories.

The British were also worried about the increasing expense of defending the American colonies, which kept growing in size as colonists moved outwards. The British had signed treatise with the Spanish Empire, the French and the various native nations, that they wouldn’t expand the New England colonies further and encroach on the interests of these actors, because ultimately this could lead to very expensive wars which London would have to pay for and supply the soldiers for. But the American elite in the colonies had the opposite interests. They dreamed of conquering the vast areas of land outside the borders of New England. The British were ‘satisfied’ with what they had and controlled, whereas the colonists wanted more and more territory, so here, once again, as with the issue of slavery, a conflict was brewing.

James Connolly
James Connolly
Sep 10, 2018 12:32 PM
Reply to  MichaelK

There are strong grounds for asking whether it deserves to be called a revolution at all. It produced no fundamental changes in the structure of American society, while the Constitution set up a government that the richest could/can depend on to protect their property.

Check out Daniel Lazare’s The frozen republic: how the constitution is paralyzing democracy

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Sep 11, 2018 4:58 AM
Reply to  MichaelK

The invasion of the New World, in what is now the USA, was always an exterminationist enterprise. The ‘Christian’ invaders openly quoted from the Torah/Old Testament descriptions of the ways and means of the genocides committed by the Israelites in Canaan, and the Divine justification, in fact direct orders to do so, that were involved. That ‘religious’ exterminationist impulse has driven the US elite ever since, and the Zionazi regime in Israel (and the Wahhabist devils of Sordid Arabia), which is why the Palestinians and all Israel’s neighbours face a dreadful fate, that is drawing nearer every day.

MichaelK
MichaelK
Sep 10, 2018 8:28 AM

I don’t one should get ‘lost’ in examining the details and context around 9/11 or Kennedy, as Griffin’s work in about much more than these two ghastly episodes in moderen American history. They are, merely actions that characterise a deeper and more fundamental malaise at the heart of US political mythology, at least on the ideological level.

Chomsky… he has some strange views, despite his perceived ‘radicalism.’ Like encouraging people to vote for Democrats, because they’re not Republicans. This means he believes their are profound and significant differences between these parties, which I and others don’t agree with.

His current stance towards Trump is also a bit problematic. He appears not to see the Establishment plotting to remove Trump from office, as particularly significant at all, which is odd, as this indicates a lot about the true character of US politics and how controlled their ‘democracy’ really is.

His utterances about Kennedy are absurd, because, on a political and cultural level alone, his murder, was enormously significant and sent echoes down the decades, that still resonate today.

Antonyl
Antonyl
Sep 10, 2018 6:29 AM

President Reagan in his second term was able to make some agreements with the Russians, much to the dislike of the US military-industrial-CIA complex. An exception, like JFK or Trump.

There was an assassination attempt on him too: it didn’t kill him but made him more popular with the voters. Always amazing how these perps are never stopped by all the mighty Secret Service, FBI, local police etc. and these failures are always brushed under the carpet. Reminds one of 9/11.

Maggie
Maggie
Sep 10, 2018 10:35 AM
Reply to  Antonyl

Weird how the assassination attempt on Reagan made him more amenable to the M.I.C, Oil Cabals and Bankers?

Antonyl
Antonyl
Sep 10, 2018 4:22 AM

Missing: Eisenhower’s farewell speech of 1961 exposing the military-industrial-CIA complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY

nwwoods
nwwoods
Sep 10, 2018 1:10 AM

There is some controversy surrounding the factual nature of some of Ganser’s work, not mentioned here.

And2
And2
Sep 10, 2018 12:40 PM
Reply to  Editor

I’m no fan of Google, but one simple search made a long list of contrary opinions, a few disputed his position on indigenous death tolls ar first contact with European bacteria , some mocked the 90 million figure that’s been disputed logically by many scholars .
Maybe a detailed inspection is called for when reading and believing any inteligencia source ?

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Sep 11, 2018 5:01 AM
Reply to  And2

Holocaust denial-so easy when the victims are seen as ‘sub-humans’.

vexarb
vexarb
Sep 9, 2018 10:08 PM

Igor Bundy reminds SyrPers of an Empire False Flag in Syria, Aug2013; the one that caused Russia to step in and protect Secular Syria from the Demonic Empire:

REMINDER: The chemical weapons “attack by the regime” in Ghouta in August 2013 never happened. Hostages and children were simply gassed in cellars by ISIS.

Some pictures of the children killed in Ghouta (#Damascus Countryside) are for children kidnapped by ISIS from Latakia countryside and their families recognized them.

http://acloserlookonsyria.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Talk:Alleged_Chemical_Attack,_August_21,_2013#Murder_investigation.2C_part_2

BigB
BigB
Sep 9, 2018 8:14 PM

I don’t have the time to contextualise NSAM 263: Chomsky does a good job, if you do not a priori dismiss him out of hand. Having read several of David Ray Griffin’s books, I feel sure that he did not rely on a single source: but cross-referenced with the Pentagon Papers and the historical (as opposed to the hysterical) record.

On the matter in hand: that JFK was perhaps other than an Exceptionalist-theologian of the diabolical false flag Empire:

The repressions against the Buddhists, we felt, were very unwise. Now all we can do is to make it very that we don’t think this is the way to win. It is my hope that this will become increasingly obvious to the government, that will take steps to try to bring back popular support for this very essential struggle.

MR. KRONKITE: Do you think this Government has time to regain the support of the people?

PRESIDENT KENNEDY: I do. With changes in policy and perhaps with personnel I think it can. …

What JFK is talking of here is offering public support to the nepotistic Diem family regime for their brutal repressions, kidnappings, murders, and the forced Catholicisation of the anti-Buddhist pogrom in South Vietnam. This public support was given volte face around the time he authorised Cabot-Lodge to greenlight Big Minh and his Generals to overthrow Diem and his psychopathic brother.

He’d either given the order (he havered and changed his mind); or he was about to give the order …I can’t recollect and its not that crucial. The point is that this is a man who would support one of the most brutal minority regimes in history if it would further the American Exceptionalist religion. Had it not been for the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức, and other Buddhist monks – he would have supported them a lot longer.

BTW: this was on 6th September 1963, just two months before he died. Turning to peace by brutalising and dehumanising a nation? Or militant Exceptionalist-theologian to the end?

Later in the same transcript:

All we can do is help [Diem murder the people], and we are making it very clear, but I do not agree with those who say that we should withdraw. That would be a great mistake. That would be a great mistake.

Double emphatic is from the original.

https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-046-025.aspx

I rest my case.

Jerry Alatalo
Jerry Alatalo
Sep 9, 2018 9:30 PM
Reply to  BigB

BobB,

How do you feel about Noam Chomsky’s “conceptualization” of Building 7? Children can watch the collapse of Building 7 on September 11, 2018 and recognize it was a controlled demolition!

Jerry Alatalo
Jerry Alatalo
Sep 9, 2018 10:24 PM
Reply to  Jerry Alatalo

Edit: BigB … 9/11/2001. Nonetheless, boys and girls are still getting it when seeing videos of Building 7’s collapse, now, very near to 17 years later.

BigB
BigB
Sep 9, 2018 10:59 PM
Reply to  Jerry Alatalo

Jerry: I posted the transcript of JFK on Kronkite …and you ask me about Building 7? Just read JFK’s words in black and white. He was prepared to support the brutal repression of the majority Buddhists, so long as it suited his delusional anti-communist agenda.

If I’m not mistaken, you are a Buddhist too? Have you read about the forced collectivisation of the Buddhist majority into fortified strategic hamlets (Operation Sunrise). Then they sprayed the jungle with Agent Orange to starve the “communists” out. They called it “pacification”: but did it really have anything to do with peace?

JFK was an imperialist, exceptionalist, and Cold Warrior to the day he died. Denigrating Chomsky won’t change that.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese monk who resisted American imperialism: and ministered to the brutalised and dehumanised people …he is a Bodhisattva of peace …we can compare and contrast their commentaries if you like?

Maggie
Maggie
Sep 10, 2018 10:52 AM
Reply to  BigB

You write as if you believe that JFK was autonomous and actually made decisions that were implemented immediately? When in point of fact he was controlled by the Establishment, exactly as here in Britain, and providing he made the ‘right’ decisions for the Corporatocracy, he was supported and left alone, but as soon as he challenged them, as with Northwoods, NSAM263… his fate was sealed…. As for the Diem family’s brutal oppression…. I have no knowledge of this, but it smacks of Saddam’s men throwing babies from Incubators, and Gadaffi giving his men Viagra to enable them to rape women, and Assad Gassing his own people on the eve of a weapons inspection? All extremely convenient narratives for the American Imperialist bandwagon, whose only goal is to line their own pockets with gold..

Jerry Alatalo
Jerry Alatalo
Sep 10, 2018 5:25 PM
Reply to  BigB

BigB,

How can you even feign astonishment over being asked about Chomsky’s “conceptualization” of Building 7. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together understands 9/11 was a false flag, especially when they observe the clear destruction of Building 7 using controlled demolition.

Believing anyone like Chomsky regarding the greatest deception of the 21st century, likely in all of history – and anything else he asserts – who claims the official narrative of 9/11 is accurate is equivalent to taking seriously the concept of FLAT EARTH!

Are you for real, man?

vexarb
vexarb
Sep 10, 2018 6:14 AM
Reply to  BigB

BigB, thanks for confronting this recent attempt to construct a Fake Leftist JFK. As with the reality of St.Jeremy’s bellicose speech against Russia and Syria, you present “the historical rather than the hysterical record”. Having lived through the JFK period, I agree that glamor boy Kennedy was yet another Evangelist of “the Exceptional People religion”, stirring up powerful primitive urges to mass murder (Cuba, Vietnam, the Missile Crisis) and mass delusions of being Superman (Moon race; Go anywhere, Pay any Price). Far from flying the Red Flag, JFK was Red in Tooth and Claw — a rabid apostle of Anglo Capitalism and extravagant waste of resources, a rich playboy turned supremely arrogant by being made POTU$.

BigB
BigB
Sep 10, 2018 8:17 AM
Reply to  vexarb

Thanks Vex, as always, your opinion is highly valued.

Michael Major
Michael Major
Sep 9, 2018 7:31 PM

In my view, the western empire has two essential values both of which may be satisfied with sufficiently realistic illusions. The first is apparent demonstrated omnipotence and the second is legitimacy conveyed by the apparent approval of the people. Between the poles of omnipotence and legitimacy the empire is freed of responsibility and accountability and takes on the personality and phobias of a jealous, paternalistic, militant and angry god. The empire thereafter monopolizes and transacts national sovereignty in exchange for obedience. Empire begins with narrative, achieves hierarchy, becomes religion and fossilizes into orthodoxy. It would seem the all consuming american mission is to make the world safe enough for a fossilized empire. Legitimacy must be withdrawn for this fascist experiment. m\

BigB
BigB
Sep 9, 2018 7:15 PM

Correct me if I am wrong: but the current article rightly denigrates America as the self-annointed Exceptionalist Nation; God’s chosen nation; and God’s chosen people? Then what does this piece of text say?

”We in this country, in this generation, are – by destiny rather than choice – the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

Or this:

In less than 3 years, we have increased by 50 percent the number of Polaris submarines scheduled to be in force by the next fiscal year, increased by more than 70 percent our total Polaris purchase program, increased by more than 75 percent our Minuteman purchase program, increased by 50 percent the portion of our strategic bombers on 15-minute alert, and increased by 100 percent the total number of nuclear weapons available in our strategic alert forces

You might be forgiven if you thought that this was delivered by an Exceptionalist-theologian such as Obama. You might be closer if you thought it was the proto-Obama JFK.

This was part of the undelivered text he was going to give to the Dallas Trade Mart. I have to ask, is there the slightest evidence that he was anything other than a Cold Warrior and Exceptionalist unti the day he died?

Read the rest of the nuclear imperialistic dick-waving speech if you think that he was not.

https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Dallas-TX-Trade-Mart-Undelivered_19631122.aspx

David Ray Griffin is an excellent author and historian. The current author’s only reservation is that his book is that it is marred by historical inaccuracy regarding JFK. He does not consider that Griffin and Chomsky (who has become an easy target to dismiss) may be right?

I believe he should read JFK’s last speech and reconsider his opinion.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 9, 2018 7:28 PM
Reply to  BigB

It might well be that JFK was responding to the Cuban missile crisis, and also sending a message to the MIC/CIA cabal that was working against him? He was drawn by forces greater than him, sadly.

BigB
BigB
Sep 10, 2018 12:47 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

The Cuban Missile crisis was the year before: if you read the text it makes it clear that he was not referring to it. The text is an epiphany of phallic exceptionalism; self-congratulatory military and nuclear projectionism; and capitalist imperialism. He openly brags of having 3-5mn troops in a stranglehold on the FSU …with the might of the US military ready to staunch any Communist “breakthrough”.

Anyone who reads it cannot possibly exclude JFK from the list of Messianic Enlightenment exceptionalists.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 10, 2018 1:59 AM
Reply to  BigB

You see American Exceptionalism in JFK’s undelivered speech, I see a different man altogether; walking a fine line between those who called for overcoming the so-called ‘missile gap’ and those who suggested that modernising the missile system and foreign and military aid to American allies Viet-Nam, Free China, Korea, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Greece, Turkey, and Iran would be a better use of resources against communist encroachment.

You also see ‘Messianic Enlightenment’ exceptionality, I see a visionary who thought strengthening the economy was the best way for America to be a world leader, not through military spending alone:

It is clear, therefore, that we are strengthening our security as well as our economy by our recent record increases in national income and output – by surging ahead of most of Western Europe in the rate of business expansion and the margin of corporate profits, by maintaining a more stable level of prices than almost any of our overseas competitors, and by cutting personal and corporate income taxes by some $11 billion, as I have proposed, to assure this Nation of the longest and strongest expansion in our peacetime economic history.

The space program mentioned here was another example of course. JFK was a great leader.

BigB
BigB
Sep 10, 2018 8:35 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

Well, at least you read the text. I honour your right to your opinion. Our difference would then stem from our pre-disposition to the text. In short, I would contend that a “visionary leader” would have no recourse to the largest nuclear arsenal in history …for the purpose of Peace. This is a monstrous inversion of what peace means to me. That the falsified reason for amassing such an arsenal were by dehumanising at least half the planet, and demonising them as the communist Other, somewhat undermines the concept of peace? That America apotheosised its atomic, militaristic, imperialistic, mass consumer industrial capitalist society, with the structural violence, racism, white exceptionalism, patriarchy, and alienation that entails further undermines the concept of peace. I guess the visionary is all in the vision?

Admin
Admin
Sep 9, 2018 7:39 PM
Reply to  BigB

the obvious difference between JFK and Obama is that Obama didn’t get his head blown off by the deep state.

This suggests a pretty significant divide, no? Maybe looking for the source and cause of that divide is more useful than finding somewhat spurious reasons to say there wasn’t one?

BigB
BigB
Sep 9, 2018 8:29 PM
Reply to  Admin

The case in point is that Obama was an Exceptionalist, but somehow JFK wasn’t. What divides what they stood for, other than a magic-bullet? They were at least equally Exceptionalist: on the evidence of the words and actions? Speculating that they were not because they met a different end does not change what is written in black and white in the ‘last speech’ and the ‘Kronkite transcript’. Inter alia, JFK supported the secret police of Diem’s brother, its rapes, murders, and brutalisations, and vaingloried in the doubling of his nuclear arsenal ….these are not “spurious reasons”. Any leader who gave either speech tomorrow we would rightly denigrate as a sociopath …but JFK is a saint? I ask in all sincerity: who is guilty of spurious reasoning …me or you?

Admin
Admin
Sep 9, 2018 8:43 PM
Reply to  BigB

I’m quite busy and don’t have time to refute statements attributed to me that I never made, so the sainthood stuff can just slide.

It’s just very obvious that the most noteworthy thing about JFK is the way he died, and if you want to understand the deep state then figuring out WHY he got his head blown off when no subsequent and very few previous POTUS have achieved that distinction is the way to go.

Debunking non-claims of sainthood might serve a purpose for you but it’s missing the real point isn’t it?

You almost seem to share Chomsky’s view that this momentous and unique public execution of an elected head of state doesn’t matter very much. Which is, ironically, exactly what the CIA worked hard to make us all believe.

Maybe the fact so many intellectuals think debunking Camelot myths is more important than figuring out why JFK was killed is a sign the CIA did a good job?

BigB
BigB
Sep 9, 2018 11:51 PM
Reply to  Admin

Likewise, I do not have time to debunk claims I did not make. JFK’s death mattered, in that it was a “Deep State event” as Peter Dale Scott would term it …that reveals the true workings of power. What has never been revealed, and likely never will, is the WHY. We do not know the why, everyone has an opinion, and it is a trillion dollar culture industry …but a trillion dollars of speculation is not fact.

If we do not know the why, the comparison of JFK and anyone else comes down to their words and actions. Based on historical fact, and the text I posted, the mythical difference between JFK and Obama becomes a fictive invention. They were both exceptionalist-theologians (read the first paragraph again, it’s Messianically delusional).

Rather than the speculative, did you read the rest of the speech? There is nothing there to speculate about. I can epistemically characterise the JFK that was traveling to deliver that speech as a cold-hearted narcissistic sociopath who sanctified the exceptionalist mythology of country above his humanity. And everyone elses humanity. Based on the text in hand: it’s written in black and white. No man of peace glories in doubling his capacity of destroying life on earth

All I asked is that you read the text: it speaks for itself as an epistemology of exceptionalism? Beyond that it’s all speculative.

Admin
Admin
Sep 10, 2018 2:09 AM
Reply to  BigB

The question isn’t how much of the usual imperialist bullcrap he enunciated, (of course he did, given his situation as POTUS how would he not?) it’s – what else did he do or say that resulted in the deep state seeing the need to murder him in public?

It’s the exceptions you need to find. The things that set him apart from all the presidents that didn’t have their heads blown off.

Focusing on that isn’t whitewashing the man, it’s recognising the most important question about him – why the deep state killed him.

Can you think of anything JFK did that might have triggered that devastating response? Could NSAM 263 have been enough?

Chomsky doesn’t think the deep state DID kill him, or at least doesn’t want us to think so. Therefore he gives no time to that question, in fact he’s keen to assure us there was nothing that made JFK a potential target. Clearly you think he’s wrong, yet you go along with him in eliding the question!

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 10, 2018 9:19 AM
Reply to  Admin

What a nincompoop! Of course, they killed him and they tell us they killed him with their little clues such as Oswald’s rifle clearly not being up to the task – not to mention all the other problems. Now this really is in the land of the theoretical but I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if Oswald wasn’t actually killed but whisked off to some island or whatever and Jack Ruby wasn’t really imprisoned. They are capable of so much fakery and disinformation it takes your breath away. I mean, really? Firstly, it’s rather far-fetched that Jack Ruby was able to walk into the police station and manage to shoot him (if he was able to do that surely it had to be a set up) and then you have to ask, if it was a set up, why would he do it when it seemed to mean certain prison. Oh yes, it was fear of the mafia – they made him do it. Does not add up at all and I don’t think the photos do either.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 10, 2018 9:21 AM
Reply to  flaxgirl

And what a great little touch, “I’m just a patsy.” It’s so stagey.

BigB
BigB
Sep 10, 2018 9:26 AM
Reply to  Admin

I did my ‘due dilligence’ on JFK’s murder. My opinion, based on my research, is that it would not be possible to find such a needle in a haystack. The Kennedy Archive alone has more than a million documents, with all the rest, that’s several lifetimes, that I do not have, of reading …to find what?

The reasons probably do not exist. There is no ‘smoking gun’ document. If you are aware of Peter Dale Scott’s research, the lead vehicle had an ultra-secret White House radio channel, from which the order for the guards to dismount came, before the turn into Deeley Plaza. This implicates the ultra-secret Continuity Of Government planning that links all of the Deep State Events, up to and including 9/11. Do you think they kept a public record? Or any record at all?

You seem to implicate the CIA, who were doubtlessly involved, but as planners, or as foot soldiers? What about the Cuban exiles, or the Mafia? Was it a super-conspiracy? My own research favours former Joint Chief of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer, who is generally overlooked as he was in Europe …but with access to the untraceable communications network of the ‘Doomsday Project? Was there a higher command of Military/Civilian planners who ordered the CIA? Very likely I say, but proof and their reasoning will likely not be forthcoming at this juncture, or probably ever.

So your admonition is a deflection from what JFK did say, or would have said, had he reached the Dallas Trade Mart. And Chomsky’s senility is a strawman, that does not change the implications of the text. And the text betrays JFK’s exceptionalism and imperialism, which, contra the Curtin/Douglass virtual history confection, exonerates David Ray Griffin and his thesis.

I notice no one has tried to portray Ray Griffin as an unreliable source. Could that be because he isn’t, yet no one else seems to think he might be right? Having read several of his books, I would say yes, he is …to which I have provided supplementary evidence. Think about the nature of Ray Griffin’s oeuvre: how easy would it be to denigrate if it were riddled with factual error, given his truther topic?

Why does everyone assume David Ray Griffin is factually incorrect? The two texts I provided in themselves seriously undermine the “turning to peace” idealism as a fiction. JFK’s own double emphatic against withdrawal from Vietnam demands a closer inspection of NSAM 263. Do you really think he went on prime time TV to lie? What about the implications of that with an elction coming up? What of his support for the genocidal Diem regime? Have you seen the footage of him grieving for the vile dictator Diem and his psychopathic brother? Does any of this factual analysis even slightly impinge on the fact that David Ray Griffin got it wrong, on the current authors say so? Or is Griffin right? I believe the facts speak for themselves and expose the Curtin/Douglass imaginal hypothesis as mistaken. Until I see the bibliography, I feel sure he did not just draw on Chomsky …so why is everyone defending the current authors confirmation bias? I contend that David Ray Griffin is the more reliable source …Chomsky or no Chomsky.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 10, 2018 12:54 PM
Reply to  Editor

Wanting to break the CIA into a thousand pieces didn’t do him any favours. Seemingly, the Australian Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, got his marching orders when he wanted to exercise a little control against CIA operations in Australia. The film, JFK to 9/11 Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick, gives a lot of reasons from a number of conspirators – the Mafia, the CIA, LBJ and oil men – perhaps more I can’t remember them all and what their reasons were.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 10, 2018 2:53 PM
Reply to  Editor

I think the JFK assassination, like 9/11, was a seminal moment in history that shaped our current times. We can only guess as to the actual perpetrators. As to the why, the clues are all there 🙂

BigB
BigB
Sep 10, 2018 5:12 PM
Reply to  Editor

Sorry Admin, you are deflecting again. To remain on topic, Curtin accused Ray Griffin of historical inaccuracy: I set out to defend Ray Griffin as a meticulous writer who is a slave to empirical fact. He has to be.

Your unstated case is that it is Curtin who is correct, based on what? The Douglass book and what else? It seems to me that you want to completely ignore the texts that I have posted, because it undermines that POV?

The veracity of the historical evidence has nothing to do with me or my motivations. I already made my case that it is a wild goose chase and the facts, as historical evidence, probably do not exist …certainly not in any publicly accessible form. Do you think the Deep State were taking notes and minutes? Peter Dale Scott, a historian who perhaps even surpasses David Ray Griffin for the meticulousness of his research, has been researching Deep State Events for 60 years, without uncovering who killed JFK, or probably more importantly, the why.

Without historicity and facticity, all you have is speculation, which aids no one. Knowledge has to be epistemically grounded, or it is not knowledge at all, not even justifiable true belief, just speculative belief and linguistic fiction. It is just such virtual history making and historiography I contend. A belief system built on historiography is a virtual belief system with no empirical grounding or contact point with reality …which is exactly what Empire is …which is exactly why it needs to justify its existence with false flags and the epistemology of absolutised exceptionalist metaphysics. We do not need another Empire of mind built on the same ontological dualist reification of the irrationality of Reason. One is enough without replacing it, like for like.

So the most important question you want me to pursue is a hypothetical question – that can yield nothing but hypotheticalisation …which does nothing to address the issue I raised regarding the current essay. You can simply read the exceptionalism and collective egotism in the undelivered speech. There is no need to speculate about anything, except how it could possibly say “turning to peace” ….”turning to peace” when?

Surely you can see that anything JFK might of done after his death remains in a mythopoietic realm …and to speculate (or mythologise) creates a dangerous misrepresentation of reality? Remaining in touch with reality and remaining epistemically grounded is what I think is the categorical imperative thing to do. Do you not agree: after all, as you uphold – facts are sacred, Where would we be without them?

You still haven’t answered the question as to why you think that David Ray Griffin is in error …maybe because he isn’t? How do you know Curtin is right, and Griffin wrong …because I believe that is the other way round.

Big B
Big B
Sep 10, 2018 8:53 PM
Reply to  BigB

Touche: I asked you to address the text of the undelivered speech or the question as how to decide whether Curtin or Griffin are correct. My position is that we concentrate on the facts. Other than that, I don’t really have a position. The Trade Mart and Kronkite Transcript are position enough: they speak for themselves and reveal the real, historically existent JFK. I’m backing David Ray Griffin’s position on that. There is nothing confused about my position other than others want to confuse my position, rather than confront it. If you want to interpret the double emphatic on Kronkite as something other than a definitive dismissal of any speculation about withdrawing from Vietnam, OK. If you want to condone the support brutal repression that resulted in Buddhist monks self-immolating, OK. If you want to read the last Messianic para in the undelivered speech, not as exceptionalist, but as an “Apostle of Peace” (one of Mr Curtin’s earlier epithets, I believe). I’m sticking with exceptionalist mass murderer as my reading, which fits perfectly well with David Ray Griffin’s “diabolical trajectory”. That’s my “odd” and “confused” position.

My original comment is lucid, and based on the text I posted I asked: “Is there the slightest evidence that he was anything other than a Cold Warrior and Exceptionalist until the day he died?”

A question that remains open and has not even begun to be addressed. Shall I take your answer as a ‘No’ then!

I could of spared you the TON of verbiage if you had addressed the question without making it about “my position”.

I hope it is clearer now?

mog
mog
Sep 10, 2018 2:23 PM
Reply to  BigB

Big B,
You write of theology.
Douglas was no doubt writing from a religiously influenced position, and I could be convinced that he viewed the legacy of the Catholic Kennedy brothers in that light.
Griffin, famously has had an academic career trying bridge the divide between American Protestantism and materialist scientism via Whitehead’s process philosophy – and his own slant on panentheism.
Maybe JFK’s exceptionalism was simply the ‘wrong sort of exceptionalism’? The book which is still effectively out of bounds on JFK is Piper’s ‘Final Judgement’ which hypothesises that the president stood in the way of the state which now effectively controls the US. Maybe Douglas’ ‘Unspeakable’ was a euphemism for this?

What is the Old Testament anyway, and why do Protestants love it so?

I think that JFK’s killing was a turning point in the 20th century, and that studying it, although perhaps not giving us definite answers, reveals to us where to look and how to look. It is just too emotionally hard for many people to grasp the level of deceit and disinformation that they have absorbed in their lives, without going through the mill of studying a deep state event in detail and seeing for themselves the obviousness of the fakery and lies. I hold it important on that basis regardless of any other.

As far as the thesis of JFK’s ‘turning toward peace’, I wonder if we can support both sides by selectively quoting his later speeches, his off-hand comments and directives. I am convinced by Douglas’ writing that Kennedy saw the danger of nuclear escalation and the mad generals around the US government, and by Piper’s work that he understood the danger of nuclear proliferation into the miiddle east and the fanticism of ultra Zionist faction gaining control in his era.

mog
mog
Sep 10, 2018 2:32 PM
Reply to  mog

Our English spokesperson for Protestantism backs Netanyahu over Corbyn:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/07/blow-jeremy-corbyn-archbishop-canterbury-backs-anti-semitism/

Mulga Mumblebrain
Mulga Mumblebrain
Sep 11, 2018 5:12 AM
Reply to  mog

The Church of England is the UK Establishment, ie the ever ruling parasite elite. Welby’s groveling, dishonesty and hypocrisy is only to be expected. These are evil swine, and Corbyn scares the vermin. The FILTHY assertion that only Jews are abused on social media, and the Zionazis do no abusing themselves, is particularly vicious. And he appears to be simply lying that ‘attacks’ on Jewish institutions have increased. The demons are firmly in charge, some posing as moral exemplars when they are its exact opposite. I wonder if this wretch has aid anything about Israel’s declaration of its apartheid state, or the continuing barbaric repression of the Palestinians.

Big B
Big B
Sep 10, 2018 11:01 PM
Reply to  mog

Mog

As a recovering Catholic myself, I well recognise the peculiar Catholic obsession with hagiography …to support their own particular brand of ‘God’s annointed’ exceptionalism. But when St Theresa of Kolkata and JP II are marketed as industrialised conveyor-belt saints …heavens above!

It is not just the Kennedy’s, but both Douglass and Curtin, I have noted, are Catholic. Perhaps, we see as we are …as you noted the other day?

The Kennedy’s pissed off everyone that put them in power. JFK also crossed two of the most evil SOBs that ever walked the Earth, in Lyman Lemnitzer and Allen Dulles. I suspect there was a disorderly queue waiting to whack them (it was a double murder). As a Deep State Event, it was crucial in showing where the real power lies. Other than that, I do not understand the need for psychological heroification: particularly when it obscures the facts. Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation is that if you cross enough psycopaths, one will kill you …has to take precedence of grand unified theories of “turning to peace”.

His double emphatic on Kronkite says he was not leaving Vietnam. His undelivered speech emphasizes the cost reduction of supporting murderous regimes, like Diem’s …or the euphemistically named ‘Free China’ of Chaing Kai Shek and the ultra-psychotic murderers of the KMT …who also happened to be the drug enforcers for the CIA heroin trade.

The undelivered speech seems to be at odds with your assertions, though I have not read Piper. JFK seemed rather proud of his doubling of the nuclear arsenal and all that phallic firepower he had amassed? I’m not sure how you combat escalation by doubling the quantity of everything!

That he resisted some of the worst humanity has had to offer is true: the “brightest and the best” that went on to administer the War in Vietnam . RFK was among the very worst of the Hawks. Being the best of of a ponerological “Unspeakable” assemblage of sociopaths leaves him a long way from Sainthood, IMO. Or even humanity.

Sorry, I don’t think there is a reputation to be salvaged. What really concerns me is that we internalise powers own heroification of power when we buy into such mythopoiesis. If nothing else, it distorts the oppressed’s own consciousness to absorb the values of the oppressor…if you just wait long enough another charismatic leader will come along to lead you back into subjugation by power …which is perhaps the most monstrous distortion and submersion of fact going on here. Power is everywhere, only, it is not their power, nor their Great Man to administer it for us (the meta-deception that could keep us ‘Waiting for Godot’) …it is our power!

To reclaim the power we need to be vigilant of the subtleties and silent inculcations and entrancements of the language regimes of power that enslaves us? We need our own values and transcendent morality which will expose the values of domination for the evil they are.

Rhisiart Gwilym
Rhisiart Gwilym
Sep 11, 2018 9:29 AM
Reply to  Big B

You make a persuasive case, Big B. Er – it would be a bit more persuasive if you substituted ‘would have/could have’ for those odd popular illiteracies ‘would of/could of’. Just a small slip, I guess. I find odd ones that I’m still making myself, even at this late stage in life. I only just realised how to spell ‘longitude’ properly, for example, having been blandly using an unrealised mis-spelling for decades! :O)

Big B
Big B
Sep 11, 2018 10:32 AM
Reply to  Big B

An edit or preview feature would be welcome: no matter how many proof reads, I always make mistakes …like “psycopath” without the ‘h’!

Maggie
Maggie
Sep 10, 2018 1:12 PM
Reply to  Admin

Does anyone here even know what DEEP STATE is?
And the ‘SECRET STATE/ Deep State’ in Britain, and their friends the British Brainwashing Corporation and MSM conspired to have PM’s removed, by programming the electorate, Just as they are attempting to do now against Jeremy Corbyn.???
The “Secret State”, which has NO ACCOUNTABLILITY to Members of Parliament, is regarded as a vital weapon by the ”ESTABLISHMENT” in its underground activities against all those who pose a threat to CAPTALISM. Trade unions and left-wing organisations and specific individuals are marked out for ”special attention”. .

THE POWER OF THE SUPER-ESTABLISHMENT actually exists and is not a flight of fancy. It is entirely manipulative and runs the country with a close-knit Mafia-like clique, This “Super-Establishment” is made up of a handful of powerful, but low-key, City brokers and Financiers; definitely the top brains at the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence and the Trade Department particularly input from Big Pharma and MIC, and key figures in the Security Forces, although not necessarily the top person for identification reasons – would be included, and so would at least one key member of the Prime Minister’s Secretariat. At least until recently, it would also have included the top Courtiers who “run” the Royal Family.
While the Police and Judiciary might not be directly part of this clique, through the Home Office they are definitely manipulated.
The Super-Establishment’s power is based upon its ability to manipulate the ‘level below it’…, ”The individuals that most people believe are Governing our country” in fact, is all but irrelevant to the overall power of the Super-Establishment. They are simply puppets.
The world in which the Super-Establishment exists is a grey and murky world in which sensitive matters of state are planned and executed in GENTLEMEN’S CLUBS (Reform and Oxford and Cambridge preferred). It is where manipulation plots are hatched. Whether it be manipulation of a certain Minister, with blackmail if necessary, or the wholesale orchestration of a Foreign Office ploy to bring down a foreign government… (false flag)
This secretive form of Government called “Twilight Politics,” because it never enjoys the spotlight or the slightest glare of sunlight. And if it is ever in danger of doing so, manipulation normally sorts it out. In the interests of the Super-Establishment it is almost the divine mission of the Secret Services in the UK to protect the status quo, and hitherto it has been their intention to thwart anyone who tried to disrupt it. (Princess Diana?) Even under the guise of democracy and being ‘answerable’ to the Government, it exercises a great deal of power behind the scenes.
The British Monarchy “is a sham power”. Allowed to exist simply to distract the proles. All of the royals without exception, particularly Prince Charles, are constantly manipulated by a small clique of very powerful Mandarins and Courtiers who in turn work hand-in-glove with top Civil Servants in such ministries as the Foreign Office.

It is no wonder that the world is in such a mess.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 9, 2018 7:07 PM

“Rational Wiki”, started by editors who were banned from Conservapedia for edit wars trying to edit pages that conflicted with their rational biases, has an interesting take on David Ray Griffin https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/David_Ray_Griffin

Long on snarky pejorative terms like ‘trutherism’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ ‘pseudo-science’ and ‘cranks’, and short on rational discussion, it confirms my belief that rationalists act like a cult, attacking those who oppose their aims.

Matt
Matt
Sep 12, 2018 3:20 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

I love Rational Wiki. It pokes fun at various conspiracy theorists and exposes the numerous fallacies in their arguments in a humorous manner.

It is the conspiracy theorists who act like a cult, attacking those that oppose their claims.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 12, 2018 4:45 AM
Reply to  Matt

The lack of integrity by the “rationalists”. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSICOP

An early controversy concerned the so-called Mars effect: French statistician Michel Gauquelin’s claim that champion athletes are more likely to be born when the planet Mars is in certain positions in the sky. In late 1975, prior to the formal launch of CSICOP, astronomer Dennis Rawlins, along with Paul Kurtz, George Abel and Marvin Zelen (all subsequent members of CSICOP) began investigating the claim. Rawlins, a founding member of CSICOP at its launch in May 1976, resigned in early 1980 claiming that other CSICOP researchers had used incorrect statistics, faulty science, and outright falsification in an attempt to debunk Gauquelin’s claims. In an article for the pro-paranormal magazine Fate, he wrote: “I am still skeptical of the occult beliefs CSICOP was created to debunk. But I have changed my mind about the integrity of some of those who make a career of opposing occultism

In 2004, CSICOP was accused of scientific misconduct over its involvement in the Discovery Channel’s test of the “girl with X-ray eyes,” Natasha Demkina. In a self-published commentary, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Brian Josephson criticized the test and evaluation methods and argued that the results should have been deemed “inconclusive” rather than judged in the negative. Josephson, the director of the University of Cambridge’s Mind-Matter Unification project, questioned the researchers’ motives saying, “On the face of it, it looks as if there was some kind of plot to discredit the teenage claimed psychic by setting up the conditions to make it likely that they could pass her off as a failure.” Ray Hyman, one of the three researchers who designed and conducted the test, published a response to this and other criticisms, and CSI’s Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health also published a detailed response to these and other objections, saying that biasing the odds against Natasha was appropriate because her claims were unlikely to be true

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 12, 2018 4:57 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

(cont’d) The (Rationalist) movement was characterised as moved by “pseudoscepticism” and criticised thusly:

http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/CSICOPoverview.htm

“Surveys show that over half the adult population in the U.S. have had psychic experiences and believe in the reality of the phenomena (Gallup, 1982; Greeley, 1975, 1987; Haraldsson & Houtkooper, 1991). Those who have had the experiences but encounter the debunking attitudes of apparent “scientific authorities” are likely to conclude that science is a dogma and inapplicable to important aspects of their lives Vallee (1990) has suggested that debunkers “are among the primary contributors to the rejection of science by the public” and are “contributing to the growth of irrational movements in modem society” (p. 21). Ironically, CSICOP’s activities will likely inhibit scientific research on the paranormal and might potentially foster an increased rejection of science generally”

This criticism applies to “Rational Wiki” and their ilk, as ‘exposing the numerous fallacies in their arguments in a humorous manner’ only serves to show you as the cranks and cult followers, not them.

Denis O'hAichir
Denis O'hAichir
Sep 9, 2018 7:06 PM

Yep, it’s demonic, the reason for Christian majority countries to have so much power and subsequent blood-letting under the banner of religion, this applies also to Saudi, Pakistan, India and of course Israel is that through the actions of these nations, all monotheist religion will be rejected by the masses, and the faithful will be persecuted, slaughtered by decree from the antichrist, paving the way for the return of Jesus Christ. Interesting times.

archie1954
archie1954
Sep 9, 2018 7:01 PM

Thank you for the truth!

Thomas Prentice
Thomas Prentice
Sep 9, 2018 6:36 PM

Lost in the mists of history and perhaps covered in the book but not the review, are the two early Regime Change actions by the young US state.

The first, called the War of 1812 rather than the Invasion of Canada 1812, was intended to acquire Canadian provinces in the same way Israel acquired Palestinian provinces in 1967 or the way Israel acquired Canaan. The invasion met fierce resistance and Detroit was surrendered to the British and the White House was burned.

The second, after the end of the disastrous “War of 1812” is called “The Seminole Wars” rather than the “US Regime Change Invasion of Florida,”. Gen. Andrew Jackson was dispatched to Florida twice, clearly NOT the victorious general of New Orleans, but Spain finally turned over the peninsula to the Americans.

However, the Seminoles were never really defeated and indeed, scored some Little Big Horn-style victories over the invading Americans, led by Osceola, in the succeeding “Seminole Wars.” One victory has been styled “The Dade Massacre” rather than “The Seminole Victory over Invading American Troops and Settlers.”

Lots of Regime Change “In The Beginning … “.

Thomas Prentice
Thomas Prentice
Sep 9, 2018 6:23 PM

One must wonder at Chomsky. He recently provided intellectual cover for the incursion of US troops into Syria. When I emailed to call him on it and suggested that is reflected hypocrisy based on his vast oeuvre of criticism of US imperialism, he wrote back offended.

It would be worth pointing this out again and again bout Kennedy versus the swirling sharks of the Deep State, mostly because it is the truth. Besides, one just cannot fathom Chomsky’s hatred for the man Kennedy. Trashing Kennedy was a known CIA plot after 1967 along with inserting the pejorative term “conspiracy theorists” into the lexicon. I wondered at the time why all the disclosures about womanizing but nothing about the June 1963 peace speech, as but one example.

Overlooked in all the Kennedy histories and bios is that Kennedy was putting severe pressure of Israel’s ben Gurion to open the Dimona nuclear lab to US inspectors for the purpose of preventing Israel from becoming a nuclear power, thus destabilizing the region. The Unz revieew recently pointed out that the only commonality among all conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination is this: The Mossad is never mentioned in ANY of them. Hmmmm.

RE: Chomsky’s deceptions, motivated by his hatred of Kennedy and perhaps something more sinister (he also backs the Warren Commission, thinks JFK’s assassination was no big deal, and accepts the patently false official version of the attacks of 11 September 2001

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 9, 2018 6:43 PM

Being an Israelite, Chomsky, like Bernie Sanders there are certain lines that Zionists cannot cross 🙁

Matt
Matt
Sep 12, 2018 3:16 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

Wow. I always knew this website regularly published fake news and disinformation from Russia, say, about MH17. And I was also aware of that this website publishes anti-American conspiracy theories – the frontpage being plastered by 9/11 fake news as one example – but the above comment really drives home just how bad it’s gotten here.

Jews like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein have been some of the most critical voices of Israel.

But like all extremist cults, the members eventually turn against those whose beliefs are deemed not extreme enough. In the case of people like Chomsky, for their refusal to endorse various conspiracy theories involving Jews.

I recall a while back, when I similarly criticized a completely false article, Admin responded to me by saying that this website was “just discussing” topics ignored by the MSM.

How hypocritical.

If you can’t hold yourselves up to the same standards that you hold the MSM up to, then you’re not just hypocritical, but arrogant.

Look at all these deranged comments from know-nothings, plastered all over this article and other articles about 9/11. The co-founders of this website must be feeling quite proud of themselves for getting so much more traffic. They don’t care about how many people believe their lies. After all, when you brand yourselves as “Guardians of the Truth” or “Watchdogs of the Media”, like the so-called “alternative media” does, then you can make any claim you want, lower the standard of evidence as much as you want, and avoid standard journalistic ethical requirements like being thorough in reporting information and publishing retractions when false information is discovered. You can even pretend to be victims of a non-existent censorship campaign if your Facebook page gets so much as suspended for a few hours.

I truly despite the alternative media. It’s sickening.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 12, 2018 4:34 AM
Reply to  Matt

“Jews like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein have been some of the most critical voices of Israel”.
Sorry, but that’s a false dialectic, that only Jews can assess what is effective criticism of Israel and what isn’t. Or that you can wag the Labour dog (sorry) forevermore with appeals to progressive values like anti-racism while muting criticism of apartheid policies and crimes against humanity, to wit, the Palestinian people.

I’m not sure your opinion is ‘cult-like’ but it does seem a bit tribal 🙂

Matt
Matt
Sep 13, 2018 2:02 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

“Sorry, but that’s a false dialectic, that only Jews can assess what is effective criticism of Israel and what isn’t.”

Red herring: I never claimed that. I was responding to the following claim:

“Being an Israelite, Chomsky, like Bernie Sanders there are certain lines that Zionists cannot cross”

You were implying that Jews like Chomsy and Sanders can not cross “certain lines” because they are “Zionists”. And these “certain lines” involve believing various anti-American conspiracy theories about 9/11, as an example. I pointed out that Jews like Chomsky and Finkelstein are some of Israel’s most ardent critics, and that they are being unfairly attacked by extremists for their refusal to endorse the above-mentioned conspiracy theories.

So no, I never claimed that “only Jews can assess what is effective criticism of Israel and what isn’t”.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 13, 2018 7:43 PM
Reply to  Matt

Since you, Matt, elided my criticism of Chomsky and Sanders by attributing ‘various conspiracy theories’ to my argument by saying ‘Jews like Chomsky and Finkelstein are Israel’s most ardent critics’ here’s how I know “there are certain lines that Sanders and Chomsky can’t cross”. (Aside from the fact it’s a universal adage that there are certain lines politicians and academicians can’t cross, or, the third rail in western foreign policy).

A Jewish anti-war activist in Vermont that Sanders admitted in private conversation he couldn’t criticize Israel too strongly because that would be political suicide.

Zionists might say that Chomsky is an ardent critic, others do not https://www.thenation.com/article/responses-noam-chomsky-israel-palestine-and-bds/

Zionists control discourse on Israel/Palestine, and the evidence is right there in front of you (see, Jeremy Corbyn), whether you robotically come back with more talking points or not.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 13, 2018 7:47 PM
Reply to  manfromatlan

I know the activist in Vermont is how I support my statement, that is.

Matt
Matt
Sep 15, 2018 3:51 AM
Reply to  manfromatlan

The fact that Chomsky does not support BDS does not mean he isn’t critical enough of Israel. It simply means that he doesn’t think it will work. Whether you agree or disagree with him, one can’t claim that Chomsky is saying this because he’s a Jew; he’s saying it because he thinks it is not effective.

Likewise, regarding the Vermont activist, not criticizing Israel too much due to politics is completely different than not criticizing Israel enough due to Sanders’ Jewish roots.

Both criticisms you have of Sanders and Chomsky have nothing to do with their opinions being influenced by their Jewish ancestry. Any normal person could make the same arguments.

manfromatlan
manfromatlan
Sep 15, 2018 6:21 PM
Reply to  Matt

Any normal person could also argue it has to do with the realities of tribal Jewish politics. Why are they so allergic to the terms Apartheid and Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions? Because historically, it worked against Apartheid South Africa, and no amount of hand flapping and deflection on to individuals take away the fact that you have no moral capital left and your treatment of decent people who take up the cause of Palestine marks you as vulnerable, insecure bullies.

Matt
Matt
Sep 16, 2018 7:39 PM
Reply to  manfromatlan

Your claim has no evidence, while I have explained away Sanders’ and Chomsky’s refusal to support BDS as having nothing to do with their Jewish roots.

But you have made another claim:

“Why are they so allergic to the terms Apartheid and Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions? Because historically, it worked against Apartheid South Africa…”

Here, you claim that Jews like Sanders and Chomsky don’t support BDS because it is effective and they want it to fail.

If Chomsky didn’t want the same goals as BDS, namely, for Palestinians to get their own state and be treated humanely, he would never have spent the time and energy that he has to help achieve this.

What you’ve done is taken a narrow strategy that is not supported by Sanders and Chomsky, and used this as evidence that they don’t want Palestine to get their own state, because they are Jewish. You also imply that the activism of Jews like Chomsky is fraudulent. Think about the claim you are making, and then examine the weak logic you have provided to back this up.

My reasoning makes much more sense and far less assumptions that that of your own.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 22, 2018 12:17 PM

I just watched this film made by Michele Metta which discusses Dimona and JFK’s opposition to it. I watched this film agog and then was even more agog when Valerio Borghese was mentioned as his son emigrated to Australia and his son’s family and mine were friends for many years (although his son’s politics were very different from my parents’). It seems that Italy, as part of a labyrinthine right-wing/fascist Italian, Vatican, Israeli, CIA, Mossad, Masonic, Mafia, shady banks network, played a role in JFK’s assassination. The rifle allegedly used by Oswald was a Carcano, a surplus WWII weapon used by Mussolini’s Armed Forces. That’s the power elite mashing their crime right in our faces – making the alleged weapon hardly suited to the task while also giving some clues with its provenance.

edited by Admin to fix link

Alex Cox
Alex Cox
Sep 9, 2018 5:36 PM

A good review, but the reviewer is a little naive about John F. Kennedy. Kennedy had proposed the removal of some of the “advisers” he sent to Vietnam, but there is no real evidence for the romantic claim that, had he lived, he would not have pursued the American War in Vietnam, just as Johnson did.

Kennedy was an extreme right-winger (like subsequent Democratic presidents). He campaigned against Nixon on the basis of a non-existent “missile gap.” He twice brought the world to the brink of nuclear war – over Berlin, then over Cuba. He authorized the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba and a series of murder plots against Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders, and supported “counterinsurgency” and right-wing regime change throughout Latin America.

In foreign policy terms, Johnson was a disastrous president. Kennedy, quite possibly, could have been even worse.

Big B
Big B
Sep 9, 2018 6:42 PM
Reply to  Alex Cox

Thanks Alex, it’s normally me that feels compelled to ask: “If David Ray Griffin is such an excellent scholar, and he is, perhaps he got it right about Kennedy?” He did, and so do you.

There is an hell of a lot of context that has to go in to reading NSAM 263, which is a memo, short and sweet, that can be read either way – when suitably decontextualised. The ‘Court Jester Historians’ rely on presenting it on its own, backed up with an unintelligible fragment of a tape they released. The Douglass novella then takes this uncritically as a virtual reality historicised factlet, as does the present author, to churn out their version of a Barbara Cartland romanticised historiography.

It does not even occur to the present author that David Ray Griffin may be correct? His myopia and obsession spoils what was, up till then, a very interesting read.

Punnoval
Punnoval
Sep 10, 2018 5:26 AM
Reply to  Big B

Perhaps a (re) read of Carl Oglesby’s book “The Yankee-Cowboy War” would be appropriate. Oglesby’s claim that the USA was (circa 1975) comprised of two sets of oligarchs that had different attitudes towards the cold war – neither favorable towards the 3rd world.

flaxgirl
flaxgirl
Sep 11, 2018 1:03 PM
Reply to  Big B

He is an excellent scholar … except the US commits more false-flag hoaxes than “real” false flags. That’s much more their modus operandi. They save all the killing for their invasions and their other covert operations.

Helmut Taylor
Helmut Taylor
Sep 9, 2018 4:23 PM

Lovely exposé; but to omit that nagging thought that there is, perhaps, a method to this madness – supported by the assumption that “the ends justiy the means” – begs the question: what could this grand scheme be?
Any takers?

vexarb
vexarb
Sep 9, 2018 6:03 PM
Reply to  Helmut Taylor

Helmut, the grand scheme is the one described by Jesus and Darwin: To them that hath shall begiven, and from them that hath not shall be taken away — yeah, even the little that they hath. Ethics is the struggle between those who accept (or even approve of) mendacity, theft and murder as part of this “grandeur from which there emerges beings most wonderful”; and those who say, Dont Lie, Dont Steal and Dont Kill if you want to help build The Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven.