A glimpse into madness

• Psychological projection: A theory in which humans defend themselves against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in themselves, while attributing them to others.

In prosecuting his widening war in Ukraine, [Putin] has also resurrected the tyranny of the Big Lie, using state-controlled media to twist the truth so grotesquely that most Russians are in the dark — or profoundly misinformed — about events in their neighbor to the west. Most Russians get their news from state-controlled broadcast outlets, which have moved beyond mere propaganda into outlandish conspiracy theories and unhinged jingoism.

The above words are from a Washington Post editorial dated August 31st. Since it is the United States that is prosecuting a wider war in Ukraine by means of proxy, and it is the American public that is profoundly in the dark, kept so by its state-controlled news media, I conclude that the editors of the Post are either profoundly dishonest, or deranged.

Regarding the state of awareness in Russia, who is to say. We cannot do much about them. We can only affect our own leaders.

Reading the above piece, which I should note came to my attention via Moon of Alabama, I was reminded of a document written in 1950 and declassified in 1975 known as NSC-68. It should be required reading in all of our classrooms, for in it are contained the seeds of the “Cold War,” the expenditure of a trillion dollars on unnecessary military hardware and the loss of tens of millions of innocent lives. The document is written is readable prose and so is accessible to mere mortals. It tags the Soviet Union, the ” Kremlin,” as the source of all evil on the planet. It says that they want to overrun Western Europe, bury Great Britain, and ultimately rule the world.

The Soviet Union at that time was barely limping, recovering from the loss of twenty million citizens and destruction of two-thirds of its industrial base in the Second World War. Much of its military capability was horse-drawn. Its people were largely peasantry incapable of engaging in an industrial world. Having been attacked by Germany and Japan, Stalin was rightly distrustful of the other imperial powers, especially those calling themselves the “Free World.”

The Soviet Union posed no threat to the U.S. It was time for rapprochement and peace. But the newly founded U.S. National Security State, freshly infused with Paperclipped German SS and the American OSS, was ambitious. Peace was not an option.

Reading NSC-68, one is tempted to think that the Soviet Union in 1950 was a fully formed military power ready to strike. Why the paranoia? Why the urgency?

I can only imagine that our new creations, CIA and NSC, were intent on doing exactly what they were laying on the Soviets. The Department of War had been changed to “Defense,” and every evil had been projected on the Soviets. That meant, as Orwell advised around that time, that every evil imaginable was going to spring forth from a new Washington, intent on War and and not Defense. NSC-68 was the declaration of World War III, not against the Soviets, but against the world, done by the only superpower standing at that time.

As I read WaPo above, given that organ’s proximity to the seat of power, I have to assume that they, like the authors of NSC-68, are knowingly lying and projecting their own evil intent on others. While Moon of Alabama regards it as lunacy from a “Funny Paper,” I tend to take it more seriously. These are deranged psychopaths, as is our military leadership and Capitalism’s Invisible Army. There’s a sense of urgency in the words, meaning there is great danger now to the world. The source of that danger is Arlington, Langley, and Foggy Bottoms.

Below the fold here are a few choice paragraphs from NSC-68. I know a few who traffic here have or have or will read the whole thing. It is well worth the time. It helps to form a sense of the enemy, and the paranoia of those who run our funny farm.

C. MEANS

The free society is limited in its choice of means to achieve its ends.

Compulsion is the negation of freedom, except when it is used to enforce the rights common to all. The resort to force, internally or externally, is therefore a last resort for a free society. The act is permissible only when one individual or groups of individuals within it threaten the basic rights of other individuals or when another society seeks to impose its will upon it. The free society cherishes and protects as fundamental the rights of the minority against the will of a majority, because these rights are the inalienable rights of each and every individual.

The resort to force, to compulsion, to the imposition of its will is therefore a difficult and dangerous act for a free society, which is warranted only in the face of even greater dangers. The necessity of the act must be clear and compelling; the act must commend itself to the overwhelming majority as an inescapable exception to the basic idea of freedom; or the regenerative capacity of free men after the act has been performed will be endangered.

The Kremlin is able to select whatever means are expedient in seeking to carry out its fundamental design. Thus it can make the best of several possible worlds, conducting the struggle on those levels where it considers it profitable and enjoying the benefits of a pseudo-peace on those levels where it is not ready for a contest. At the ideological or psychological level, in the struggle for men’s minds, the conflict is worldwide. At the political and economic level, within states and in the relations between states, the struggle for power is being intensified. And at the military level, the Kremlin has thus far been careful not to commit a technical breach of the peace, although using its vast forces to intimidate its neighbors, and to support an aggressive foreign policy, and not hesitating through its agents to resort to arms in favorable circumstances. The attempt to carry out its fundamental design is being pressed, therefore, with all means which are believed expedient in the present situation, and the Kremlin has inextricably engaged us in the conflict between its design and our purpose.

We have no such freedom of choice, and least of all in the use of force. Resort to war is not only a last resort for a free society, but it is also an act which cannot definitively end the fundamental conflict in the realm of ideas. The idea of slavery can only be overcome by the timely and persistent demonstration of the superiority of the idea of freedom. Military victory alone would only partially and perhaps only temporarily affect the fundamental conflict, for although the ability of the Kremlin to threaten our security might be for a time destroyed, the resurgence of totalitarian forces and the re-establishment of the Soviet system or its equivalent would not be long delayed unless great progress were made in the fundamental conflict.

Practical and ideological considerations therefore both impel us to the conclusion that we have no choice but to demonstrate the superiority of the idea of freedom by its constructive application, and to attempt to change the world situation by means short of war in such a way as to frustrate the Kremlin design and hasten the decay of the Soviet system.

For us the role of military power is to serve the national purpose by deterring an attack upon us while we seek by other means to create an environment in which our free society can flourish, and by fighting, if necessary, to defend the integrity and vitality of our free society and to defeat any aggressor. The Kremlin uses Soviet military power to back up and serve the Kremlin design. It does not hesitate to use military force aggressively if that course is expedient in the achievement of its design. The differences between our fundamental purpose and the Kremlin design, therefore, are reflected in our respective attitudes toward and use of military force.

Our free society, confronted by a threat to its basic values, naturally will take such action, including the use of military force, as may be required to protect those values. The integrity of our system will not be jeopardized by any measures, covert or overt, violent or non-violent, which serve the purposes of frustrating the Kremlin design, nor does the necessity for conducting ourselves so as to affirm our values in actions as well as words forbid such measures, provided only they are appropriately calculated to that end and are not so excessive or misdirected as to make us enemies of the people instead of the evil men who have enslaved them.

But if war comes, what is the role of force? Unless we so use it that the Russian people can perceive that our effort is directed against the regime and its power for aggression, and not against their own interests, we will unite the regime and the people in the kind of last ditch fight in which no underlying problems are solved, new ones are created, and where our basic principles are obscured and compromised. If we do not in the application of force demonstrate the nature of our objectives we will, in fact, have compromised from the outset our fundamental purpose. In the words of the Federalist (No. 28) “The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.” The mischief may be a global war or it may be a Soviet campaign for limited objectives. In either case we should take no avoidable initiative which would cause it to become a war of annihilation, and if we have the forces to defeat a Soviet drive for limited objectives it may well be to our interest not to let it become a global war. Our aim in applying force must be to compel the acceptance of terms consistent with our objectives, and our capabilities for the application of force should, therefore, within the limits of what we can sustain over the long pull, be congruent to the range of tasks which we may encounter.