All posts tagged: Edward Curtin

Showtime in America: Idiots’ Delight – A Quasi Review

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Edward Curtin The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.” Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” Mark Twain All cats die. Socrates is dead. Socrates is a cat.” Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros If believability is your gauge for discerning truth, you are living in a fantasy world. But that is the reality of life in the United States today. This is the land of make-believe in which actors and audiences are engaged in a vast folie à deux full of sound and fury signifying a nothingness that passes for intelligence. Assertions made convincingly enough are the new facts for a population hypnotized by a stage-managed reality show. The recently closed Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford Show that mercifully had a short run at the National Comedic Congressional Theater is the latest case in point. The believability of the actors was said to be the key issue. In other words, who seemed to be telling the truth. Demeanor …

“9/11 Unmasked” – update & reminder to READ THIS BOOK

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Catte We’re returning to 9/11 this Sunday, partly because it’s still being debated BTL on our various 9/11 threads, and partly because – 9/11 matters, maybe more than any other single issue of the 21st century. What we are noticing is the same issues being raised again and again in comments and in emails we receive. Over and over we are told the government has explained what happened that day in NYC, that it was “the planes”, or “the fires”. Repeatedly we are confronted by people who simply do not realise they have been conned – because the government has NOT explained what happened that day, nor has it even claimed to do so in scientific terms. What it has done, through its commissions and reports, is fudge and evade and elide on a scale so massive it’s hard to comprehend. It’s pulled a bait and switch on all of us. Claiming to offer proof and evidence and solid science, while in actuality it offers only guesswork, assumptions and weasel words. With this in mind, …

Updated: A compilation of OffGuardian’s 17th anniversary 911 articles

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Every year on OffG we use the month of September as a reminder of the events of 9/11 2001, and the still unanswered questions pertaining. We tend to be attacked for this from some quarters, and we understand many other alt news sites prefer to remain silent on tis controversy. The subject has been so successfully propagandised in the mainstream that anyone raising even the most rational and well-supported doubts about the official theory of what happened that day call too easily be dismissed as a lunatic. But we made an editorial decision two years ago not to let that deter us. After all, if we’re here to challenge prevailing narratives, how can we ignore one of the most impactful prevailing, and poorly substantiated, narratives of the 21st century? This year we published a number of general overviews, including retired professor Graeme MacQueen’s quick and cogent summary of why what happened that day continues to be a crucial issue for The 9/11 anniversary: Conspiracy theory or critical thinking? Journalist and academic Alison Broinowski recalled Trump’s …

The Suppression of Truth in the Land of Lies: An Oxymoron

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Edward Curtin If you are interested in reading the definitive book that demolishes the official lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001 – 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth – then Amazon has a great deal for you. While they conveniently do not offer new copies of this book that was published on September 11th, having reported it “out of print” and currently “out of stock,” after never having had it in stock, they allegedly offer 3 used paperback copies from other sellers for sale prices that are quite affordable: $917.04, $1060.20, and $1,500. If that 4 or 20 cents would bring you over budget, I would be glad to provide either amount. Don’t these sound like great deals for a book that proves that the justification for the “war on terror” and the slaughter of millions of people is one of the biggest propaganda operations in modern history? It’s always good to know you have a friend who can conveniently provide you with access to …

Amazon Censorship of 9/11 Unmasked?

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Edward Curtin On September 10, 2018, I published a laudatory review of the new book, 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth.  It is the definitive book on the defining event of the 21st century.  The book concludes that the official version(s) of the attacks of 11 September 2001 are false.  The review was subsequently reposted at many publications. There was great reader response and interest in the book, which was due for official release the next day, 11 September.  My review provided a link to the book’s Amazon page that noted the 11 September availability date. By the next day readers were responding in great number that the Amazon site was reporting the book was “out of print,” when in fact it had just been published.  This “out of print” notification lasted until the evening of 13 September when it was changed to “in stock on September 30, 2018.” By the following morning it was changed to “in stock on September 21, 2018,” only to be changed …

The Fakest Fake News: The U.S. Government’s 9/11 Conspiracy Theory

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Edward Curtin A Review of 9/11Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth If you want to fathom today’s world, absolutely nothing is more important than to understand the truth about the attacks of September 11, 2001. This is the definitive book on the subject. For seventeen years we have been subjected to an onslaught of U.S. government and corporate media propaganda about 9/11 that has been used to support the “war on terror” that has resulted in millions of deaths around the world.  It has been used as a pretext to attack nations throughout the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. It has led to a great increase in Islamophobia since Muslims were accused of being responsible for the attacks. It has led to a crackdown on civil liberties in the United States, the exponential growth of a vast and costly national security apparatus, the spreading of fear and anxiety on a great scale, and a state of permanent war that is pushing the world toward a nuclear confrontation. …

Book Reviews: 9/11 Unmasked

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Every year, at about this time, OffGuardian likes to cover the anniversary of 9/11, the most important “catalysing event” in modern history. And this year is no different. As part of this coverage, and in recognition of our willingness to discuss this often-controversial topic, we were invited to review 9/11 Unmasked, a new book from David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth, focusing on the discrepancies in the official account of that fateful day 17 years ago. We reached out to trusted regular contributors and friends of the site based on their honesty, integrity and potentially contrasting points of view. The results are three different reviews, illustrating an interesting cross-section of opinions and experiences. Philip Roddis Two years ago, on the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, OffGuardian ran my review of Dylan Avery’s Loose Change. Except it wasn’t a review but a pouring of vitriol on the film’s central assertion that the events of September 11, 2001 were an inside job. Reception below the line was hostile. But among the cat-calls were voices I could not ignore: …

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

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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 …

The Cell Phone and the Virgin: A Montreal Odyssey

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Edward Curtin And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever While Suzanne holds her mirror” Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne” Before this historical chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned from the Virgin to the Dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.” Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and …

The Satanic Nature of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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American history can only accurately be described as the story of demonic possession, however you choose to understand that phrase. Maybe radical “evil” will suffice. But right from the start the American colonizers were involved in massive killing because they considered themselves divinely blessed and guided, a chosen people whose mission would come to be called “manifest destiny.” Nothing stood in the way of this divine calling, which involved the need to enslave and kill millions and millions of innocent people that continues down to today.

The Sexual Passion of Winston Smith

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There is a vast literature analyzing the political prophecy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Big Brother, double-speak, telescreens, crimestop, etc. – all applied to our current political situation. The language has become part of our popular lexicon, and as such, has become clichéd through overuse. Blithe, habitual use of language robs it of its power to crack open the safe that hides the realities of life.

There is no doubt that Orwell wrote a brilliant political warning about the methods of totalitarian control. But hidden at the heart of the book is another lesson lost on most readers and commentators. Rats, torture, and Newspeak resonate with people fixated on political repression, which is a major concern, of course. But so too is privacy and sexual passion in a country of group-think and group-do, where “Big Brother” poisons you in the crib and the entertainment culture then takes over to desexualize intimacy by selling it as another public commodity.

Slow Suicide and the Abandonment of the World

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Most suicides die of natural causes, slowly and in silence.

But we hear a lot about the small number of suicides, by comparison, who kill themselves quickly by their own hands. Of course their sudden deaths elicit shock and sadness since their deaths, usually so unexpected even when not a surprise, allow for no return. Such sudden once-and-for-all endings are even more jarring in a high-tech world where people are subconsciously habituated to thinking that everything can be played back, repeated, and rewound, even lives.

If the suicides are celebrities, the mass media can obsess over why they did it. How shocking! Wasn’t she at the peak of her career? Didn’t he finally seem happy? And then the speculative stories will appear about the reasons for the rise or fall of suicide rates, only to disappear as quickly as the celebrities are dropped by the media and forgotten by the public.

The Boston Globe’s Hit Piece on the Assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy

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by Edward Curtin The counterattack on those, including Senator Robert Kennedy’s children, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, claiming that Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy involving at least a second gunman, has commenced. The Boston Globe, the traditional hometown newspaper of the Kennedy family, published a clearly misleading piece on May 31, 2018 by Nik DeCosta-Klipa, with the curiously long and loaded title “Bobby Kennedy’s son thinks he was killed by a second shooter. Is there anything to it? Or has RFK, Jr. “launched a whole new generation of conspiracy nuts 50 years later.” Whether DeCosta-Klipa was acting on orders from above to produce such a specious piece or is ignorant of the fundamental research in a case that shouts out conspiracy is a question I cannot answer, although based on his go-to “expert” in his article – Daniel Moldea, whose contradictory disinformation on the case is well known to serious researchers – I would guess the former to be correct. Let me begin with the …

The Blatant Conspiracy behind Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s Assassination

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Fifty years ago on June 5 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of the murdered president, was shot and killed under circumstances perhaps even more suspicious and bizarre than those surrounding John Kennedy’s murder. No even slightly satisfactory explanation has ever been offered for the glaring anomalies and contradictions in this case. Here Edward Curtin revisits some of the abiding questions surrounding this third politically motivated assassination to impact America in five years, and the legacy it left behind

Gina Haspel and Pinocchio from Rome

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by Edward Curtin Being in Rome, Italy and thinking of Gina Haspel, the CIA nominee and admitted torturer who says her “moral conscience” has changed after the fact, seems most fitting. Wherever you go in central Rome, you can hear the screams and smell the blood of those tortured and killed by the Roman Empire and those who ably followed in their stead. And you can see the crumbled stones and the pathetic architectural remains of those who thought they had triumphed. Their triumph turned to dust, and their belated mea culpas, if and when they ever came, always rang as hollow as Gina Haspel’s, Lt. William Calley’s, and Adolph Eichmann’s excuses that they were only doing their jobs and following orders. Throughout Rome there are hawkers dangling Pinocchio trinkets in your face, constant reminders of the cost of lying. Or perhaps more aptly, the fame that ensues from lying followed by a childish semi-apology, even when it’s as obvious as the nose on your face that you are lying still. So in the Senate …

Speaking the Unspeakable: The Assassination and Martyrdom of Thomas Merton

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A Quasi-Review by Edward Curtin of The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton by Hugh Turley & David Martin Killing a man who says ‘No!’ is a risky business,” the priest replied, “because even a corpse can go on whispering ‘No! No! No! with a persistence and obstinacy that only certain corpses are capable of. And how can you silence a corpse?” Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine Fifty years have elapsed since Thomas Merton died under mysterious circumstances in a cottage at a Red Cross Conference Center outside Bangkok, Thailand where he was attending an international inter-faith monastic conference. The truth behind his death has been concealed until now through the lies and deceptions of a cast of characters, religious, secular, and U.S. governmental, whose actions chill one to the bone. But he has finally found his voice through Hugh Turley and David Martin, who tell the suppressed truth of Merton’s last minutes on earth on December 10, 1968. This is an extraordinary book in so many ways. First, because the authors prove beyond a shadow of …

Sleepers Awake, We are Heading toward Imminent Disaster

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Donald Trump is preparing to ignite the Middle East and move the world a big step closer to total war. There is a very good chance the corporate mainstream media, accomplices in massive war crimes, will be announcing “breaking news” this evening or night that the U.S., in conjunction with its evil twin Israel that bombed a Syrian air base 24 hours ago, has launched a massive attack on Syria “justified” by a false flag chemical attack on Saturday

Edward Curtin: False Flag Operations Will Start New War

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Professor of Sociology Edward Curtin discusses the attempts by the US, Britain, NATO and Israel to create false pretexts for an invasion of Syria and war with Russia. He discusses how the Deep State has concocted RussiaGate and how media and propaganda make it difficult to tell fact from fiction. Show Notes Triggering War. A Manufactured “Catalytic Event” Which Will Initiate An All Out War? Are We Going to Let this Happen Again? https://www.globalresearch.ca/triggering-war-a-manufactured-catalytic-event-leading-to-all-out-war-are-we-going-to-let-this-happen-again/5632549 Further Signs of More War: A Most Dangerous Game http://edwardcurtin.com/further-signs-of-more-war-a-most-dangerous-game The Coming Wars to End All Wars http://edwardcurtin.com/the-coming-wars-to-end-all-wars Denying the Obvious: Leftists and Crimestop http://edwardcurtin.com/denying-the-obvious-leftists-and-crimestop Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon) Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, Edward Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He writes as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. …

Further Signs of More War: A Most Dangerous Game

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by Edward Curtin Donald Trump’s days of playing the passive/aggressive host of a reality-television game show are coming to an end. Either he fires all the apprentices who might slightly hesitate to wage a much larger world war and lets the bombs fly, or he will be replaced by one who will. Signs are that he has learned what his job entails and the world will suffer more death and destruction as a result. Back in the days of the first Cold War – the late 1950s to early 1960s when our little world came close to extinction – my very large family appeared on many American television shows. Their names told the story of those times: “Who Do You Trust,” “To Tell the Truth,” “Charades,” “Play Your Hunch,” and “Beat the Clock,” to name a few. It was as if those silly game shows were unconsciously suggesting we probe a little deeper behind the headlines to discover what was really going on before the Doomsday Clock ran out. Today things are far more sophisticated …

The Coming Wars to End All Wars

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By Edward Curtin, first published at the Greanville Post The compulsive hatred of Putin by many who have almost zero idea about Putin or Russian history is disproportionate to any rational analysis, but not surprising. Trump and Putin are like weird doppelgangers in the liberal imaginationJohn Steppling, “Trump, Putin, and Nikolas Cruz Walk into a Bar” The Trump and Netanyahu governments have a problem: How to start a greatly expanded Middle-Eastern war without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a “justification” (which they can’t), they will have to create one (which they will). Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. Whatever the solution, we should feel confident that they are not sitting on their hands. History teaches those who care to learn that when aggressors place a gun on the wall in the first act of their play, it must go off in the final act. These sinister players have signaled us quite clearly what they have …