The Power of Nightmares

"In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. 

They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. 

Those dreams failed. 

And today, people have lost faith in ideologies. 

Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. 

But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. 

Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us - from nightmares. 

They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. 

And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism. 

A powerful and sinister network, with sleeper cells in countries across the world. 

A threat that needs to be fought by a war on terror. 

But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. 

It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media.

This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits. 

At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neoconservatives, and the radical Islamists. 

Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. 

And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. 

These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. 

Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world. 

A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. 

And those with the darkest fears, became the most powerful."

"He’s a marvelous man, and one of my favorite filmmakers. I think that “The Power of Nightmares” is the single best piece of documentary television I have ever seen."

Alan Moore on Adam Curtis and The Power of Nightmares

"Something extraordinary has happened to American TV since September 11. A head of the leading networks who had better remain nameless said to me that there was no way they could show it. He said, 'Who are you to say this?' and then he added, 'We would get slaughtered if we put this out.' When I was in New York I took a DVD to the head of documentaries at HBO. I still haven't heard from him." "

Adam Curtis

The Power of Nightmares - Baby It's Cold Outside from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

"[Leo] Strauss believed it was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths that everyone could believe in.

They might not be true, but they were necessary illusions.

One of these was religion; the other was the myth of the nation."

The Power of Nightmares - The Phantom Victory from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

At the end of 1992, Bill Clinton won a dramatic victory.

But the NeoConservatives were determined to regain power.

And to do this, they were going to do to Bill Clinton what they had done to the Soviet Union.

They would transform The President of the United States into a fantasy Enemy - 

an image of evil that would make people realise the truth of the Liberal corruption of America...

"Mentioning the name of Clinton provokes disgust and revulsion; the President has a heart that knows no words. 

A heart that kills hundreds of children, definitely knows no words. 

Our people in Arabia will send us messages with our words, because he does not understand words. 

If there is a message that I may send through you, I address the mothers of the American troops - to these mothers I say, 'If they are concerned for their sons, then let them object to the US Government's policy'"

Usama Bin Laden, 

CNN Interview, 

Khost, Afghanistan, 1997  

The Power of Nightmares - The Shadows in the Cave from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

"The idea... that Bin Laden ran a coherent organisation, of which you could be a member, is a myth.

That idea of a coherent, organised structure simply does not exist."

Meet Adam Curtis, Establishment Contrarian from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

The Power of Nightmares. The Century of the Self. Pandora’s Box. All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. If you’re familiar with the alternative media, you’ve doubtless come across references to the documentary work of Adam Curtis. But besides the well-known examples of brilliance within Curtis’ work is a deeply doctrinaire strain that seeks to normalize mainstream history and convince us that the driving ideologies of the political elite are exactly what they say they are. 

Join us today on The Corbett Report as we deconstruct Curtis’ documentaries and look for the deeper meaning behind the globalist ideology.

http://www.corbettreport.com/meet-adam-curtis-establishment-contrarian-video/

The Loving Trap from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

Brand: The Attacks Begin

Brand is sleeping with Princess Diana's Sister.

I felt an immense affinity with comedian and would-be revolutionary vanguardist Russell Brand as I watched his BBC Newsnight interview with dismissive interlocutor Jeremy Paxman. In a highly public forum, Brand ran the frustrating gauntlet of explaining the very basic tenets of radical politics to a defender of the status quo. It’s a maddening position to occupy — as Brand’s intensifying eyes and harried stares at Paxman evidenced — and it’s a position all too familiar for those of us who have ever identified with anarchism or a radical politics that refuses a predefined program.

Like Brand, I don’t vote (I’m British, but even if I were American, I wouldn’t). Like Brand, I will not give my mandate to this festering quagmire of a corporate political system (any more than living in it already demands, that is). A thorough anti-voting argument is beyond the remit of these paragraphs; suffice to say there are other ways and hows to enact politics. And, like Brand, I refuse to say what I propose instead when badgered by staunch defenders of capitalism. Brand patiently explained to his pompous interviewer that, no, we can’t offer you a pragmatic alternative program — we’re too entrenched in the ideology of the current one. We have to live, act, think differently, dissentfully, for new politics to emerge. I’m simplifying, of course. But the point is, I’ve learned to leave conversations when the “what do you propose instead?” question is posed to me qua anti-capitalist. If you had a blood-sucking monster on your face, I wouldn’t ask you what I should put there instead. I’d vanquish the blood-sucking monster. And it seems Brand is committed to do the same.

I have no interest in a detailed discourse on the comedian’s radical politics as expounded in his editorial essay this week in British left-leaning news magazine the New Statesman. He’s not a theorist, he’s a well-intentioned, wildly famous performer with a “fuck this” attitude and some really nice thoughts; he’s self-aware and self-deprecating. He’d probably even be there on the barricades pushing off riot cops. And that means something to me and a number of my comrades (yes, comrades; deal with it). But, no, I’m not jumping wholeheartedly on this Brand-wagon. The reasons are two-fold:

Firstly, if we want to challenge an inherently hierarchical political framework, we probably don’t want to start by jumping on the (likely purple velvet) coattails of a mega-celeb with fountains of charisma and something all too messianic in his swagger. “No gods, No masters,” after all. Brand is navigating the well-worn conflict facing those with a public platform in the current epoch (myself among them): We have to be willing to obliterate our own elevated platforms, our own spaces of celebrity; this grotesque politico-socio-economic situation that vagariously elevates a few voices and silences many millions is what Brand is posturing against. Would he be willing to destroy himself — as celebrity, as leader, as “Russell Brand”? I think he’d struggle, but I don’t really know the guy.

But beyond this — the general furor and excitement around famous-person Russell Brand saying not-dumb political things on TV should give us pause for thought. If we’re so damn excited to hear these ideas in (in their slightly haphazard form) from a boisterous celebrity, then clearly we have some idolatry and “Great Man” hangups to address (lest we reinstate a monarchy with Brand as sovereign, Kanye as chief advisor). Everything Brand has said, I’ve heard before, especially since Occupy’s 2011 heyday; the radical suggestion that, yes, “Shit is fucked up, and bullshit,” was not first uttered by Brand and should not be more exciting nor appealing by virtue of emerging from his cheeky smile. As has often been pointed out, there is a constant conflict at play when radical or militant ideas or images enter the popular imaginary under capitalism (I’ve noted the example here before of a riot scene in a Jay-Z/Kanye music video): At the same time radical ideas might spread and resonate across mainstream and pop media platforms (and thus provide the potential for rupture), these ideas and images are recuperated immediately into capital. Brand calls for revolution, and online media traffic bounces, magazines sell, bloggers like me respond, advertisers smile, Brand’s popularity/notoriety surges, the rich, as ever, get richer.

Secondly, and more immediately worthy of attention given current Brand fever: His framing of women is nothing short of the most archetypal misogyny. I’m not asking Brand to be perfect, but I am asking that we temper celebrations of him according to his very pronounced flaws. Writer Musa Okwonga, responding to Brand and possibly coining the term “Brandwagon” was swift to elevate feminist concerns, too often ignored in the excitement around a celebrity appearing to have good politics. Okwonga noted:

… what the writer Sarah Ditum has identified as [Brand's] “lazy sexism,” evident both in his celebrated MSNBC appearance and in the opening line of his New Statesman guest editorial. Right there, beneath a sub-heading which states that “before the world, we need to change the way we think,” Brand writes that “When I was asked to edit an issue of the New Statesman I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me.”

See, here’s the thing. I and others will run the risk of sounding like killjoys for pointing this out, but if you’re advocating a revolution of the way that things are being done, then it’s best not to risk alienating your feminist allies with a piece of flippant objectification in your opening sentence. It’s just not a good look.

Brand, admirably, is not proposing a program. But Okwonga is right: In our excitement for even a hint of revolutionary fervor ostensibly permeating mainstream debate, we’ve enabled misogyny and Great Man narratives to go unchecked. This is troubling ground to build if we want to fight from it. And, of course, it’s not only through this week’s Brand hagiographies that “lazy sexism” has been troublingly permitted in the name of radical politics — it’s pervasive. Take, for well-worn example, the ongoing yet baffling difficulty many supporters of WikiLeaks and pro-transparency projects seem to have with any criticism of Julian Assange; the willingness with which thousands of Assange acolytes outright rejected sexual assault claims against him. To avoid another maelstrom myself, I simply posit: It is at least logically possible for a man to both be a sexist creepbag and espouse some good political ideas and projects. I don’t mean to draw any strict equivalences between Brand and Assange. I could list a whole host of examples: Recall the viral spread of the “Stand with Rand” sentiment, when Sen. Rand Paul mounted an epic filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination to CIA director. I too stood with Rand’s critique of the Obama administration’s unchecked executive power when it comes to drone kill lists. But I don’t stand in any solidarity with the racist Kentucky Republican.

But the point of rethinking new political and social spaces together — as was felt profoundly by many of us engaged in Occupy’s headiest, fiercest days — was that we don’t need to align with, elevate, celebrate (nor indeed wholly reject or detest) any one person. Yes, we will continue to struggle against vanguardism and sexism and so many co-constitutive problems within ourselves and each other. We will fail and fail better and fail. We will struggle to know and reconstitute what “we” even really means. And I take Russell Brand at his word that he wants to fight too. This is no referendum on the comedian or his intentions. But this is no time to forgo feminism in the celebration of that which we truly don’t need — another god, or another master.

Operation Tailwind

Operation Tailwind from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

In June of 1998, CNN/Time premiered a new joint venture, a weekly program called "News Stand'. Their first segment had revelations about a "Valley of Death' (as one of the veterans interviewed called it) during the Vietnam War. The news story of this 1970 U.S. military black operation known as Operation Tailwind aired nationally over two consecutive Sundays. It quoted members of the military who alleged that commandos from the U.S. Special Operations Group (SOG) had been dispatched to a village base camp in Laos with sarin gas, a toxic nerve agent that causes a painful death. (It's the same gas that was used by a Japanese religious cult in the 1995 terror attack in the Tokyo subway.)100 people in the Laotian village reportedly died as a result of Operation Tailwind. Moreover, the story purported that U.S. military defectors living in the village were the primary target.

News of the secret attack, named "Operation Tailwind', shocked the nation and also created a firestorm of protest directed at the news organization from the Pentagon, veterans, and high-placed figures like Henry Kissinger (who had been National Security Advisor at the time of the black op). It was not long before CNN was issuing apologies and firing the story's producers, reassuring the nation that the story was untrue and the whole thing was a mistake. Consequently, "Tailwind' has gone down in the annals of broadcast journalism as a cautionary tale about accuracy.

Fifteen years later, it is back in the public consciousness thanks to the award-winning scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin, who has spun his own creation off of the idea of the Tailwind journalistic scandal. In the current season of his HBO fiction series The Newsroom, the hour-long drama about a fictitious cable news program ("News Night') on a network known as the Atlantic Cable Network , Sorkin has been exploring leaks about an alleged war crime reminiscent of the Tailwind episode as CNN initially presented it. This time, the incident is more current than Tailwind was when CNN/Time ran its story; a military source reveals to Jerry, a News Night guest producer (played by Hamish Linklater), that U.S. forces used sarin gas on civilians in Pakistan during an "Operation Genoa.' (Sorkin invented the story and the codename.) Through a multi-episode flashback structure, Sorkin makes clear from the outset that the big scoop is false, and that getting sucked in by it will prove disastrous for the characters. That's certainly a rich plotline for a dramatist to mine. However, in seizing on it, Sorkin may be doing a disservice to the original producers of CNN's "Tailwind' expose, reporters who stood by their story throughout the ensuing fracas and who accused CNN of a cowardly retreat in the face of Pentagon opposition to it. And Sorkin may also be betraying the Quixotic principles the characters on his show so passionately espouse; in this case siding, not with the underdogs his dialogue so often champions, but with the powerful.

The Daily Show

Sorkin considered it no spoiler to tell the public before Season 2 premiered last month that the core of this season revolves around a Tailwind-inspired plotline: a News Night "mistake" in running a shocking story that ultimately turns out to be untrue. "Hopefully, the mistake is understandable," Sorkin told John Oliver (who was filling in for Jon Stewart on The Daily Show) on July 15th. News Night guest producer Jerry is scoffed at by his higher-ups (The Newsroom's series regulars) over the extreme claims a source makes regarding Operation Genoa -- they find them much too outrageous to believe. However, as the season progresses, switching back and forth between present-tense legal deposition scenes and flashbacks to how they got into this mess (a structure similar to The Social Network), various factors start to convince the News Night executives the Genoa tip has validity. For instance, ACN news division president Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston) comes to believe the story is true in episode 2.5 because a federal agent (or someone passing for one) snoops around the newsroom asking about the story -- it makes the government seem as if it really is worried about a secret getting out.


Now, when Sorkin went on Comedy Central to plug The Newsroom's Season 2 premiere, he could have been vague about the real news story that gave him the idea. After all, he has every right to dramatic license -- Operation Genoa and the ACN network are clearly fictional, so he can stray from what happened with CNN around its reporting of the Tailwind saga as much as he likes. But instead, he stated up front in the interview that CNN's 1998 broadcast on Operation Tailwind was his inspiration, and then he went on to describe where CNN went wrong with it. Sadly, the whole description was full of inaccuracies, beginning as soon as he broached the subject.

Warren

From the Fighting State of Massachusetts.

October Surprise 2012: The Benghazi Coup and the Plot to Kill Mitt Romney

Prologue


October Surprise 2012: Innocence of Muslims from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

It's an Israeli-Koch Brothers-Saudi-backed PsyOp to sabotage Obama's historic US-Iranian Détente.

All the protests were in Sunni Countries, where the House of Saud and the Gulf States have considerable influence, power bases and agents of influence; none of the protests were in Shi'ite countries, like Iran, Iraq and Syria, or in any Kurdish regions North of the Euphrates Shi'ia corridor - they never heard anything about this.

Pajama Media / PJ Media are a privatised Intelligence Front based in Virginia that work in partnership with the Breitbart political machine - they PRODUCED Innocence of Muslims, as well as the notorious KONY 2012 PsyOp to encourage the US to reconquer and recolonise East Africa.

The Plot

October Surprise 2012: The Benghazi Coup and the Plot to Kill Mitt Romney from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

G.B.M.G. KING 4SHO ™ @TheOfficial4sho

"I aint gone lie... Food stamps the shit! I mite assasinate romney my damn self if he get elected ! I fuxx wit free 99 on the eats"

3:38 AM - 17 Oct 2012

Secret Service said to have foiled several assassination attempts on President Obama and Mitt Romney during the campaign, but report is under scrutiny

GQ author Marc Ambinder defended his reporting with a list of public-record assassination attempts but had few other details to offer. A Secret Service spokesperson said he was unfamiliar with Ambinder’s sources.

BY CHARLIE WELLS / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

PUBLISHED: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2012, 8:20 PM

UPDATED: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2012, 10:07 PM

President Obama and Mitt Romney may have had something much more serious to lose on this year’s campaign trail than the presidency: life itself.

A number of assassination plots were thwarted by Secret Service agents over the course of this campaign, according to one reporter, whose findings have come under scrutiny from the media in the wake of Tuesday’s election.

In an article about Romney’s intensive security detail written by GQ’s Marc Ambinder, the journalist said that in the Secret Service’s busiest year yet, “Several assassination plots were nipped in the bud.”

This claim was almost immediately questioned by members of the media, especially as Ambinder took to Twitter to suggest that more information might come out in a print edition of the article.

RELATED: ONE OF OBAMA'S TOP SECRET SERVICE AGENTS DIES IN APPARENT SUICIDE

RULE NO. 9 - Filling Vacancies in Nominations

(a) The Republican National Committee is

hereby authorized and empowered to fill any and all

vacancies which may occur by reason of death,

declination, or otherwise of the Republican candidate

for President of the United States or the Republican

candidate for Vice President of the United States, as

nominated by the national convention, or the

Republican National Committee may reconvene the

national convention for the purpose of filling any such

vacancies.

(b) In voting under this rule, the Republican

National Committee members representing any state

shall be entitled to cast the same number of votes as

said state was entitled to cast at the national

convention.

Amendment XII

"The Electors shall meet in their respective states, and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves;

they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and all persons voted for as Vice-President and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate.

The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.

The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed;"

Gordon Duff - Rupert Murdoch is an Israeli Agent from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

The Law of Return, granting every Jew in the world the right to settle in Israel, was passed by the Knesset on July 5, 1950, and published in Sefer HaChukkim (Book of Laws) No. 51, p. 159. Two amendments were later added on to the Law of Return - one passed August 23, 1954, and the other passed March 10, 1970.

Right of Aliyah 1. Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh**.


(a) Aliyah shall be by oleh's visa.

(b) An oleh's visa shall be granted to every Jew who has expressed his desire to settle in Israel, unless the Minister of Immigration is satisfied that the applicant

(1) is engaged in an activity directed against the Jewish people; or

(2) is likely to endanger public health or the security of the State.

3. (a) A Jew who has come to Israel and subsequent to his arrival has expressed his desire to settle in Israel may, while still in Israel, receive an oleh's certificate.

(b) The restrictions specified in section 2(b) shall apply also to the grant of an oleh's certificate, but a person shall not be regarded as endangering public health on account of an illness contracted after his arrival in Israel.

Residents and persons born in this country 4. Every Jew who has immigrated into this country before the coming into force of this Law, and every Jew who was born in this country, whether before or after the coming into force of this Law, shall be deemed to be a person who has come to this country as an oleh under this Law.

Implementation and regulations 5. The Minister of Immigration is charged with the implementation of this Law and may make regulations as to any matter relating to such implementation and also as to the grant of oleh's visas and oleh's certificates to minors up to the age of 18 years.

DAVID BEN-GURION
Prime Minister

MOSHE SHAPIRA
Minister of Immigration

YOSEF SPRINZAK
Acting President of the State
Chairman of the Knesset

Amendment 5714-1954

Amendment of section 2(b) 1. In section 2 (b) of the Law of Return, 5710-1950** -

(1) the full stop at the end of paragraph (2) shall be replaced by a semi-colon, and the word "or" shall be inserted thereafter ;

(2) the following paragraph shall be inserted after paragraph (2):

"(3) is a person with a criminal past, likely to endanger public welfare.".

Amendment of sections 2 and 5 2. In sections 2 and 5 of the Law, the words "the Minister of Immigration" shall be replaced by the words "the Minister of the Interior".

MOSHE SHARETT
Prime Minister

YOSEF SERLIN
Minister of Health
Acting Minister of the Interior

YITZCHAK BEN-ZVI
President of the State


Amendment No. 2 5730-1970*

Addition of sections 4A and 4B 1. In the Law of Return, 5710-1950**, the following sections shall be inserted after section 4:
"Rights of members of family

4A. (a) The rights of a Jew under this Law and the rights of an oleh under the Nationality Law, 5712-1952***, as well as the rights of an oleh under any other enactment, are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.

(b) It shall be immaterial whether or not a Jew by whose right a right under subsection (a) is claimed is still alive and whether or not he has immigrated to Israel.

(c) The restrictions and conditions prescribed in respect of a Jew or an oleh by or under this Law or by the enactments referred to in subsection (a) shall also apply to a person who claims a right under subsection (a).

Definition

4B. For the purposes of this Law, "Jew" means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion."

Amendment of section 5 2. In section 5 of the Law of Return, 5710-1950, the following shall be added at the end: "Regulations for the purposes of sections 4A and 4B require the approval of the Constitution, Legislation and Juridical Committee of the Knesset.".

Amendment of the Population Registry Law, 5725-1965 3. In the Population Registry Law, 5725-1965****, the following section shall be inserted after section 3:

"Power of registration and definition

3A. (a) A person shall not be registered as a Jew by ethnic affiliation or religion if a notification under this Law or another entry in the Registry or a public document indicates that he is not a Jew, so long as the said notification, entry or document has not been controverted to the satisfaction of the Chief Registration Officer or so long as declaratory judgment of a competent court or tribunal has not otherwise determined.

(b) For the purposes of this Law and of any registration or document thereunder, "Jew" has the same meaning as in section 4B of the Law of Return, 5710-1950.

(c) This section shall not derogate from a registration effected before its coming into force.".


GOLDA MEIR

Prime Minister

Ronald Reagan

"Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. 

If he ran unopposed he would have lost."

- Mort Sahl

Cats That Look Like Ted Cruz

Who Won World War II?

"The allies may have won the Second World War, but unfortunately the ideology that won was not that of Roosevelt, but that of Hitler." 

Jose Arevalo, 

member of the left-leaning cabinet of President Arbenz of Guatemala prior to its overthrown by a CIA orchestrated coup, 1953

"University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. 

After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. 

Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. 

These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide)."

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/stop_talking_about_hitler/

Khalid Muhammad and the Million Youth March

The Million Youth March 1998 - Feat. The Black Power General Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

Next time, Mayor Giuliani, don't rein in the parade

Baltimore Sun Times
September 09, 1998
By GREGORY KANE

SOME 6,000 or so marchers went to the Million Youth March in Harlem this past Saturday. They came, they talked, they clashed with police.

As police moved in to remove marchers and enforce a court-ordered 4 p.m. deadline, some marchers responded by hurling rocks and bottles at police. None of this was necessary. But who should get the blame?


Khalid Muhammad, a former Nation of Islam official - you have to figure Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is happy to be rid of this albatross around his neck - could have suggested something to marchers other than beating up or shooting cops. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan - who ruled the march could only be held from noon to 4 p.m. - should have realized that free speech is best practiced when not handed out in four-hour increments. March organizers could have chosen a weekend other than a busy holiday to hold the march.

But it's Rudolph Giuliani, mayor of the Big Apple, who has been the target of criticism. Giuliani is Republican, conservative, a white guy - in short, a perfect villain for 1990s America's political scene. It would be difficult to list all the things he's been called, but "racist" and "undemocratic" are among the top.

Story after story accused Giuliani of calling the proposed march a "hate march" and denying organizers a permit for that reason. Colleen A. Roche, Giuliani's press secretary, says that Giuliani's characterization of the march as a "hate march" is true. The charge that he denied a permit is not.

"The mayor did grant the marchers a permit," Roche said. "It was for January on Randall's Island. It was the Police Department, for safety reasons, that denied the permit for the Harlem rally of Sept. 5 on Malcolm X Boulevard. There were 130 other events in the city that day. The issue of content was not a factor in the denial of a permit."

(Kaplan overruled the Police Department and chided them for setting up criteria for granting permits that "were a virtual prescription for unconstitutional decision making," according to a wire story.)

Giuliani is the conservative, tough-on-crime Republican whom many credit with lowering New York City's crime rate. His zero-tolerance policy on crime even has panhandlers quaking in their boots. You hardly see any on the city's streets anymore. Giuliani's approach to crime distinguishes him from liberal Democratic big-city mayors who seem content to mollycoddle miscreants.

Giuliani took one look at who was leading the Harlem march - Muhammad - and correctly, if somewhat knee-jerkedly, dubbed it a hate march. Muhammad is the guy who has consistently referred to Jews as "the hook-nosed, lox-eating, bagel-eating, just-crawled-out-of-the-caves-of-Europe-perpetrating-a-fraud Jew." In another inspired moment, Muhammad expressed admiration for Colin Ferguson, the deranged black man who went on a shooting spree on a New York commuter train and killed whites and Asians. In yet another lapse into idiocy, Muhammad advocated race war in South Africa, suggesting that blacks rise up and kill whites en masse.

Black folks call such talk "selling woof tickets." Muhammad sold his from the comfort of his expensive apartment in New Jersey. No surprise then that when police and marchers clashed in Harlem Saturday, Muhammad scampered for safety to a nearby church.

Saturday's Harlem rally was, predictably, peppered with anti-white and anti-Semitic rhetoric, as if some speakers were determined to prove Giuliani correct. Jesse Jackson and Cornel West, two liberal black misleaders who never pass on a chance to criticize police, accused cops of overreacting. (Heaven forfend they should criticize Muhammad's comments.) Jackson, ever lacking a sense of proportion, was quoted in wire stories as saying, "I haven't seen that type of overreaction since Mayor [Richard J.] Daley sent the police out after demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic convention."

Not surprisingly, Roche said Giuliani has a different view.

"The mayor feels the police acted commendably," Roche said. "He supports their decision to stop the march. Muhammad was on stage exhorting people to take officers' guns and shoot them and to break barricades and hit police with the barricades."

That may be true, but in the eyes of many, Giuliani is still the villain. So a little advice for the Big Apple's mayor should Khalid Muhammad come a-calling again. Grant a permit for anywhere he chooses. Let him talk for as long as he chooses. And then let people ignore him.

Pub Date: 9/09/98

Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends - Black Nationalists feat. Rev, Al Sharpton & Dr. Khalid Muhammad & The Israelites from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

Louis has some great dialogue and interaction with Dr. Muhammad in the last 2 years of his life, set against the backdrop of Amadou Diallo shooting, and almost gets arrested with Al Sharpton.

Plus, he meets the Black Israelites, who are great value.

Following his remarks at Howard University, like Malcolm, Dr. Khalid was relieved of his position as national spokesperson for Minister Louis Farrakahn in the nation of Islam in 1994 - he immediately became the first private citizen to be ever censured by resolution of the United States Congress and survived two attempts on his life in 1994 by orchestrated quasi-governmental conspiracies, of which he was later able to supply his own analysis of the plot on video, in conjunction with Bro. Steve Cokely.

Shunned by Farrakhan at the Million Man March in 1996, in 1998, he was expelled from the Nation of Islam following allegations by Mayor Guliani and the NYPD that his remarks he had made at the Million Youth March (organised by himself in the face of vigourous NOI opposition), he formed the New Black Panther Party in Harlem.

Russell Brand and the New Statesman

Brand/Paxmam from Spike1138 on Vimeo.

"He tells us it would take $40bn to eradicate global poverty – nothing compared to the $50tn held by the richest corporations. "That's the equivalent of refusing a starving boy 40p when you've got £500 in your pocket." There's a ferocity in lines such as these, which he balances with a lot of orgasm impressions and sly digs about marriage ("Marriage and prison are quite similar, in that they're both institutions designed to inhibit personal freedom. But there's a lot more anal sex in one of them… ")

It's quite an achievement to have created a show that manages to be crowd-pleasing and provocative at the same time, and I hope he continues in this vein. For all his showing-off, Brand is using his influence to spread a message – a bit like the men he wants to emulate:

"Choose your heroes carefully or the culture will choose them for you."

"In 1953, the CCF launched Encounter, a joint Anglo-American monthly journal involving MI6 agent C.M. Woodhouse, a covert action veteran who had been involved in Operation Ajax in Iran (a joint CIA/MI6 plot to overthrow the elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq). The magazine exchanged facilities with Socialist Commentary and used many of the same staff and writers. 

Encounter became one of the most influential liberal journals in the West.

As the CCF network grew, it embraced many prominent figures in the Labour Party - among them Anthony Crosland, who began attending CCF seminars along with Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey, Rita Hinden, Daniel Bell and a bevy of American and European politicians and academics.

Crosland's book The Future of Socialism was a major new political thesis which had been influenced by CCF conferences, in which he argued that growing affluence had radically transformed the working class in Europe and thus Marx's theory of class struggle was no longer relevant. The book was immediately adopted as the gospel of Labour's new leadership under Hugh Gaitskell.

During the 1950s, Gaitskell and his friends in the Socialist Commentary group adopted the argument forcibly put in the New Leader that a strong united Europe was essential to prevent the West from Russian attack. They received support from a New York-based group called the American Committee on United Europe, whose leadership included General Donovan, wartime head of the OSS (the fore-runner of the CIA), George Marshall, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Allen Dulles of the CIA.

How the CIA plotted against us

The NS made the left seem clever. Something had to be done, reports Frances Stonor Saunders

"Have you seen Encounter?" Mary McCarthy asked Hannah Arendt in October 1953, after reading the debut issue. "It is surely the most vapid thing yet, like a college magazine got out by long-dead and putrefying undergraduates." McCarthy was not alone in denigrating Encounter. Anthony Hartley, also in October 1953, remarked somewhat prophetically that "it would be a pity if Encounter, in its turn, were to become a mere weapon in the cold war". More mischievous was an item in the Sunday Times's Atticus column, which referred to the magazine as "the police-review of American-occupied countries". And A J P Taylor, writing in the Listener, complained: "There is no article in the [first issue] which will provoke any reader to burn it or even to throw it indignantly into the waste-paper basket. None of the articles is politically subversive . . . All are safe reading for children."

It is a measure of Encounter's success that it was able to ride these criticisms and establish itself in the "newborn Euro-American mind" as the leading review of its day. People still remember Nancy Mitford's famous article "The English aristocracy", a bitingly witty analysis of British social mores which introduced the distinction between "U and Non-U". Or Isaiah Berlin's four memorable essays on Russian literature, "A marvellous decade". Or Vladimir Nabokov on Pushkin, Irving Howe on Edith Wharton, David Marquand on "The Liberal revival", stories by Jorge Luis Borges, critical essays by Richard Ellmann, Jayaprakash Narayan, W H Auden, Arnold Toynbee, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Read, Hugh Trevor-Roper - some of the best minds of those decades.

The cultural side of Encounter (which political nymphomaniac Melvin Lasky sneeringly referred to as "Elizabeth Bowen and all that crap") thus secured its respectability among the intelligentsia. And yet, when it finally folded in 1991, few were willing to grant it a proper testimonial. It had become gouty, smug, anachronistic. Reeking of the cold war at a time when that conflict was all but exhausted, it had become a "whifflebird", the name one New York intellectual invented for a fabulous creature that "flies backward in ever decreasing circles until it flies up its own asshole and becomes extinct".

Encounter's demise can be traced directly to its origins as part of the "high-minded low cunning" of those British and American intelligence agents responsible for running the cultural cold war. Meeting in Whitehall in early 1951, the top echelons of the CIA and MI6 discussed the idea of an "Anglo-American left-of-centre publication" aimed at penetrating the fog of neutralism which dimmed the judgement of so many British intellectuals, not least those close to the New Statesman. What they needed was a voice that could oppose the "soft-headedness" and "terrible simplifications" of Kingsley Martin's magazine, and its "spirit of conciliation and moral lassitude vis-a-vis Communism".

The Foreign Office's secret subventions to Tribune had been a gesture in this direction. In April 1950 Malcolm Muggeridge, after meeting its editor Tosco Fyvel, reported that Tribune was "obviously badly on the rocks, and I said that in the interests of the cold war [it] should be kept going as a counterblast to the New Statesman. Developed one of my favourite propositions - that the New Statesman's great success as propagandist had been to establish the proposition that to be intelligent is to be Left, whereas almost the exact opposite is true."

The New Statesman and Nation was flourishing, its weekly circulation of 85,000 showing an impressive resilience to attempts to sap its "ideological hegemony". In these pre-Encounter days the CIA was dishing out secret subsidies to Michael Goodwin's journal Twentieth Century, on the specific understanding that it should address itself to rebutting the New Statesman's positions. "I fully agree the New Statesman is an important target, and must be dealt with systematically," Goodwin told his backers in January 1952.

But Goodwin's efforts were not enough to satisfy his secret sponsors, who now followed up their Whitehall meetings with a definite proposal for a new magazine. Cleared at the highest levels of the CIA and MI6, the project was passed down the lines and into the hands of three intelligence officers: Michael Josselson, Lawrence de Neufville and Monty Woodhouse. Woodhouse, a dashing, daring spy of the old school, was assigned to the Information Research Department, the Foreign Office's secret ministry of cold war. Josselson and de Neufville were acting under cover of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the organisation born in Berlin in 1950 as the beachhead from which western culture would be defended against communist encroachments. Funded and managed by the CIA, the congress announced itself in its Freedom Manifesto as the protector of cherished liberal values, the champion of every man's "right to hold and express his own opinions, and particularly opinions which differ from those of his rulers". Ironically it was not Stalinism but Washington realpolitik that would ultimately pose the greatest threat to this noble right.

It fell to Josselson, de Neufville and Woodhouse to devise the "operations and procedures" for creating and running the magazine that was to become the house organ of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Lunching at the RAC Club on Pall Mall one day in spring 1952, they agreed on how the then unnamed journal would be financed and distributed, who (subject to security clearance by both services) would edit it, and how its editorial content would be monitored, guided and, in extremis, controlled. The finance was handled mostly by the CIA, which used a dummy foundation to piggy-back dollars to Encounter's London account. For their part the British supplied a lesser amount, either in brown envelopes handed over to the magazine's managing editor or in cheques signed by the film director Alexander Korda and the millionaire Victor Rothschild, both of whom were willing "fronts".

What follows is, as they say, history. Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, then Stephen Spender and Melvin Lasky, was outed in 1967 as a recipient of CIA funding. Spender resigned, Lasky stayed on. Pooh-pooh, said its apologists, who defended Encounter's impeccably independent credentials and derided claims that cultural freedom had been in any way compromised. Tut-tut, said its detractors (many of whom had received generous fees to write for it), we always knew that there was something fishy about it. And that was that. The axe fell on the cover-up, rather than on what one historian has described as "the sweetheart deal that western intellectuals enjoyed with the dark angel of American government for nearly two decades".

The deal was this: Encounter's editors were free to publish anything they wanted, as long as this did not adversely affect American interest. "We agreed that all articles on controversial topics should be seen by us before they were shown to anybody outside," wrote one of the front-office Metternichs of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, admonishing Encounter's editors for accept-ing a piece critical of US foreign policy in China. "We agreed that one of the fundamental policies of Encounter should be to work towards a better understanding between England and America."

New documentary evidence shows that Encounter received, and was receptive to, CIA "guidance". This explains what Bob Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, referred to as its "peculiar blind spot - it hardly ever contained any critical articles about the US, as if this was forbidden territory". For this acquiescence, Encounter earned the moral indignation of Conor Cruise O'Brien, who in 1966 attacked it, famously, for serving the power structure at a time when American soldiers were dying in Vietnam.

Encounter's wishy-washy record on McCarthyism should also be viewed in this context. It was a matter of policy that the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journals leave McCarthyism well alone, as one English activist later recalled: "It was clearly understood that we must not criticise the American government, or the McCarthyism which was then at its height in the US." Generally managing to avoid the issue altogether, when it did examine it, Encounter's tone was far from condemnatory. In an essay of extraordinary obfuscation, Tosco Fyvel argued that, although McCarthy was to be regretted, he had to be viewed in the context of America's "insistent search for new national security, for a world, indeed, made safe for democracy". This, concluded Fyvel, was infinitely preferable to "European weariness, and scepticism of any such achievement".

Encounter is rightly remembered for its unflinching scrutiny of cultural curtailment in the communist bloc. But its mitigation of McCarthyism was less clear-sighted: where the journal could see the beam in its opponent's eye, it failed to detect the plank in its own.

Back at CIA headquarters in Washington, Encounter was regarded proudly as a "flagship", an effective vehicle for advancing the arguments for a pax Americana. It even became a calling card for CIA agents. Arranging a meeting with Ben Sonnenberg, a rich young wanderer who worked for the CIA in the mid-1950s, an agent told him, "I'll be carrying a copy of Encounter, so you'll know who I am". Josselson, the CIA agent who headed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, referred to it as "our greatest asset". In agency-speak an "asset" was "any resource at the disposition of the agency for use in an operational or support role".

Crucially, the CIA's operational principle dictated that organisations receiving its support should not be required "to support every aspect of official American policy". This meant that a leftish agenda could survive in an organ like Encounter. But while it "was left-wing in the sense that it gave expression to some left-wing views, it wasn't a free forum at all, which it purported to be", according to the British philosopher Richard Wolheim. "I think the effect of it was to give the impression that it was the whole spectrum of opinion they were publishing. But invariably they were cutting it off at a certain point, notably where it concerned areas of American foreign policy." This, according to one CIA chief, was precisely how Encounter was expected to perform: "It was propaganda in the sense that it did not often deviate from what the State Department would say US foreign policy was."

Encounter never shrank from exposing the useful lies by which communist regimes supported themselves. But by "keeping silent on any hot controversial issues" as Dwight MacDonald wrote, and "by excessive diplomacy and hush-hush attitude toward all the fakery and shoddiness that's for years been growing so in our whole intellectual atmosphere", Encounter suspended that most precious of western philosophical concepts - the freedom to think and act independently - and trimmed its sails to suit the prevailing winds. Encounter, "a weapon in the cold war", is gone, the New Statesman is going strong. Is there a lesson here?

On leaving MI5, Charles Elwell went to work for Brian Crozier as an editor and researcher on an anti-Communist news sheet, Background Briefing on Subversion, later known as British Briefing. Echoing MI5's line of action, British Briefing's technique against left-wing Labour MPs was to establish "Communist" guilt by association. Its tone was best expressed with this editorial: "The march of Communism through the trade unions, the Labour Party, local government, religion, education, charity, and the media under the leadership of Communists who may or may not be members of the Communist Party, is what BB is all out. BB seeks to provide those who have the means to expose a Communist threat with clear evidence of its existence."

Among the Labour politicians targeted by British Briefing were Neil Kinnock, shadow health secretary Robin Cook, spokesman for social services Michael Meacher and spokesmen for local government David Blunkett (an ironic list of names considering those MPs' right-wing credentials today). The Labour MP Chris Mullin was singled out for his "perpetual vendetta against British security arrangements", while Derbyshire MP Harry Barnes was labelled as "quite a vigorous Stalinist underminer of British parliamentary democracy". Other organisations were tarred with the Communist brush, notably the charity Shelter (for its "Communist affiliations"), the Institute for Race Relations ("effectively controlled by revolutionary socialists") and the World Council of Churches.

The newsletter was printed by the anti- Communist Industrial Research and Information Service (IRIS), whose parent body had been Common Cause. Copies were circulated to "political leaders, MPs, journalists and others", who were requested to treat it as confidential. British Briefing was funded to the tune of £270,000 over a three year period by Crozier's friend Rupert Murdoch.
The 61 was active in attacking the Labour Party in the run-up to the 1981 general election, with Douglas Eden writing a series of articles for the Daily Telegraph alleging Communist penetration of Labour. Tony Kerpel, a Tory councillor in Camden, designed for the Coalition for Peace Through Security a poster of Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich in 1918 with his piece of paper signed by Hitler, alongside a picture of Labour leader Michael Foot with a piece of paper. The captions under the pictures read: "1938, Neville Chamberlain" and "1981, Michael Foot" with the wording at the foot of the poster stating: "Don't let appeasement cause another World War". The poster was published by Norris McWhirter's Freedom Association.

On February 26th 1985, Crozier met again with Thatcher, when the prime minister asked him to help with a propaganda campaign against the municipal councils, including the Greater London Council (GLC); Crozier suggested a full counter- subversion programme. Also present was the CIA's William Casey, who proposed a "suitably substantial budget" for this rapid expansion of Crozier's UK operations.

Crozier planned action on several fronts, which he called: "penetration, legislation, influence and publicity". An organisation called Campaign Against Council Corruption (CAMACC) was set up, whose director Tony Kerpel was later appointed to the post of special adviser to Kenneth Baker, secretary of state for the environment. In Parliament, CAMACC's main activist was The 61's Edward Leigh MP. CAMACC briefed various peers and drafted speeches for them in relevant debates in the House of Lords. Letters and news coverage were secured in national papers and the councils were branded in much of the British public's imagination as "loony lefties" who were misusing public funds.

With Thatcher's approval, Brian Crozier liaised with Keith Joseph in "certain psychological actions" in the election year of 1987. One move was to brief the television presenter David Frost for a proposed interview with Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Frost met with Crozier at the Connaught Hotel on 6th January, where Crozier supplied a detailed background paper on Kinnock's "views, activities and personal relations in politics". The interview took place on May 24th during the election campaign and Crozier reported that a number of his points were raised by Frost; the interview "made a considerable impact" against Labour.

http://spikethenews.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-cia-and-new-labour.html