I ran across a fascinating interview at “Against the Grain” with Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi, authors of the book Wherever There’s a Fight. The book in general is about the ongoing fight for civil liberties in California. I am most interested in their comments about the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950’s, the Red Scare, and the so-called “Hollywood Ten.”

After World War II, the U.S. was under new rule, and like a kid in a candy store, had at its disposal all of the assets of the collapsed British and French empires. The country would soon embark on imperial adventures, the first the disrupting of the Greek Resistance movement and subverting their elections. President Truman signed into law the National Security Act, the CIA was born, the Department of War was renamed “Department of Defense” (meaning we were going on the attack) and we entered a state of permanent war.

But the whole world was not our footstool, as parts of it were dominated by the Soviet Union, and were thereby made inaccessible to American business penetration. A long protracted struggle was in store. (China was “lost” in 1948, but was not expansionist, so not as great a concern as the USSR.)

To prepare the American people for the long struggle, a massive indoctrination campaign went in to motion. We had to be injected with fear, a fear so great that it would allow our leaders to set aside the Constitution with its attendant Bill of Rights. The object of our fear was to be our former ally, Russia, without whom we would not have won the European war. Russia itself had undertaken imperial expansion after the war, mostly to protect its borders from yet another western invasion. It had renamed itself the “Soviet Union,” later the “evil empire,” our eternal enemy. (Russia had always been our enemy, we would learn.)

The propaganda campaign was intense. I lived through it as a young child. We were taught in school that communists were everywhere, met in secret cells, and were plotting to overthrow our country (much as we are taught about “terrorists” these days.) These were the days of fallout shelters, air raid drills, and “duck and cover.” (Because television was black and white, the current threat-level color code was not useful.) A whole generation was injected with a dose of fear meant to last for decades.

Joe Stalin’s crimes were finally exposed too- when he was our ally, these were ignored.

A small part of the larger fear campaign was the HUAC Red Scare hearings, the purpose of which were, in my view, the put out the word that there were communist cells around, in our neighborhoods, on campus, in government at all levels, and in the world of entertainment.

The Hollywood writers were selected for special prosecution. They were

* Alvah Bessie, screenwriter
* Herbert Biberman, screenwriter and director
* Lester Cole, screenwriter
* Edward Dmytryk, director
* Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter
* John Howard Lawson, screenwriter
* Albert Maltz, screenwriter
* Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter
* Adrian Scott, producer and screenwriter
* Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter

The HUAC dragged each of these men before them, the objective being to get them to “take the fifth”, which would incriminate them in the eyes of the American public. The Ten were too smart for this, and instead “took the first” and invoked their right to free speech. The committee did not take kindly to this,and eventually the Ten were accused and convicted of contempt of Congress, and went to jail. Dmytryk later turned on them to gain his freedom. The rest, in addition to jail time, were “blacklisted”,and never allowed to work again in the motion picture business.

An interesting footnote to this episode is that much of the work of these ten happened during World War II when Hollywood was a propaganda outlet for the war effort, and Russia was an ally. Their work in sympathy with our ally was also in service of our government, and was cynically used against them as part of the propaganda effort.

HUAC of course, was engaged in a much larger scare effort, and the Hollywood Ten were only minor victims. Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Stewart and Walt Disney, among others, were cowardly quislings in working for the committee and against their fellows.

But in the end, we were all victims. The “Red-baiting” did not stop after the committee’s business, but rather went on for years. The U.S. would use the Soviets as casus belli for a host of adventures costing millions of lives.

Many say that the 1950’s,with HUAC and McCarthy and all that went on, is one of the most disgraceful periods in our history, when our constitution was shredded, propaganda ran amok, and ordinary decent people thrown in jail for thought crimes.

Not hardly. It’s fairly typical.

PS: The interview I cited above was not the one I thought it was. It’s interesting, but the HUAC/Hollywood Ten was something else,and I cannot find it again.

I was reading an interesting exchange this morning between Gilbert Achcar and Noam Chomsky – the subject was terrorism, or more precisely, defining terrorism. Both, in the end, agreed that the definition of the problem is made more difficult by the need for profound dishonesty, that is, in the end, terrorism must mean “something that is done to us”, and not “something we do to others.”

That is indeed a problem. The official definition is the “calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature.” We can all agree that 9/11 was an act of terror, but what about bombing Serbia or Gaza, invading Iraq, and now attacking Pakistan by means of Afghanistan … maybe these are not acts of terrorism in that the goals are probably financial. But I’m not sure. We could be imposing an ideology on them- did not the Nazis impose their ideology on Vichy France? Do we not now have Vichy Iraq? Will we not soon have Vichy Afghanistan?

I gotta say, I’m catching the distinct odor of terrorism here – things we are doing to others … wait! Not possible. My bad.

If the real definition of terrorism is only things done to us by others, then we have to craft a definition that exempts us.

Policy experts are hard at work on the problem. They’ll come up with something, and it will be reprinted in all the fine journals and discussed on all the intellectual forums.

We’ll soon have a working definition. I’ll keep you posted.

We went to a talk last night by Jon Krakauer, author of three best sellers, Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, and Under the Banner of Heaven. Unknown to me, Krakauer is a Boulder resident. He will surely invite us over once he learns that a blogger has moved to his town. If not, we’ll have him over, right after David Barsamian, from whom we also expect a call.

Krakauer’s latest book is “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman“. It looks interesting, and as with any story involving the Pentagon, he found much, much more to that story than has been told. There are lies, lies about the lies, and lies about the lies about the lies, and military men who know that their careers are over if they say anything that is true. It will be a fun book, I’m sure, and just as interesting when it comes out in paperback as it is right now.

Krakauer talked quite a bit about the phenomenon known as “friendly fire”, which killed Pat Tillman. He says it is far more common than we realize, and that the impulse to cover it up as natural as any other lying instinct within the military. It is automatic and instinctual, from the bottom to the top. On the day that Tillman was killed, the only person who did not know it was friendly fire was his brother, Kevin, a member of the platoon, and kept in the dark.

What got my attention most of all was Krakauer’s brief mention that Tillman was somehow involved in the Jessica Lynch affair in Iraq. This falls right in with my belief that everything we see in politics and war is a lie. Telling the truth can be fatal, even saying something offhand that is true can end a political career.

(Side note – Mitt Romney’s honorable father, George Romney, was considered the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 when he went to Vietnam, and came back and said something that was true – “When I came back from Vietnam [in November of 1965], I’d just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.” Exit political career, stage left. Since that time, no American politician has ever said anything true.)

Nothing is true in politics, and I kicked myself last night after I realized I had believed a story that was a classic lie – a can of whipped cream sprayed on a turd of truth. During the invasion of Iraq, seventeen marines had died in friendly fire in one incident – a PR disaster. The Pentagon searched around for a cover story, a diversion for the leashed media, some raw meat to throw them to keep them away from a real story.

The result: The Ballad of Jessica Lynch.

P.S.: We paid $15 each for tickets, and books were on sale there – the entire proceeds for the night go to a group called Veterans Helping Veterans Now, a truly grassroots group that started when a Vietnam combat Marine vet reached out to help an Iraq War vet who had been jailed on his second DUI charge. In addition to donating the entire proceeds, Krakauer is matching dollar for dollar.

As if I didn’t know it. What’s simply amazin’, is how something so obvious can be so muddled, obfuscated, ridiculed and disdained. It was so painfully obvious, as U.S. troops protected the oil ministry, put out the oil fires, and passively looked on while Iraq’s (and all of our) priceless heirlooms were looted in 2003.

But that’s the power of the Emperor in this supposed land of free thinkers. Name one mainstream talking head, one editorial writer in the past six years that has dared make the oil connection. One!

Anyway, the title of this post is also the title of an investigative piece from Public Record by Jason Leopold.

We’ve been traveling here and there this past week, and I’ve had a chance to listen to talk radio – the liberal side of the story. It’s basically Ed Schultz’s nationally syndicated show, and the comedienne Stephanie Miller, who broadcasts out of Los Angeles. At least Miller makes no claim to unusual insight. Schultz is a cruel joke – a Limbaugh-like blowhard.

They’ve talked a lot about torture. I don’t think they get it at all. Miller especially thinks that it’s important to know that torture does not result in good information. The presumption is that the people doing it are stupid or inept.

I doubt it.

As a creature of the left, I’ve been aware of torture by U.S. agencies for years – there’s nothing new going on here. Furthermore, the techniques are sophisticated and have been refined over the years. When I saw hooded Abu Ghraib prisoners standing on blocks I knew what was going on – the procedure induces psychosis. It was not done for fun or because Lindie England was being sadistic. Try it on your kids some time.

Poor Lindie had to fry – that is a standard cover-up procedure – to offer up someone down in the ranks to get the press and public to move on. This was no different than the 1960’s when Lt. William Calley was blamed for the My Lai massacre. Torture and murder of civilians was rampant in Vietnam, and My Lai, like Abu Ghraib, exposed a small bit of it. The military instantly beats a strategic retreat, offers up a villian, and closes the door. (One man who played an important part in the My Lai cover-up: Colin Powell.)

Anyway, liberals are, as usual, clueless. Torture serves a useful purpose – it breaks people’s will to resist. Iraq was to be permanently occupied, but there was a strong resistance movement in the population. The U.S. military methodically found and broke insurgents. They weren’t after information, per se. Unless young men were willing to give up their friends and comrades, they didn’t know much. It was never about “actionable intelligence”. It was directed at a larger goal. U.S. soldiers, then and right now, routinely went on Gestapo-like night raids, breaking down doors, lining families up against the wall, making mothers and children watch as fathers and young men were taken away. They were abducted and tortured. No doubt many were murdered. When those who survived returned to society, they spread their tales, and the result was just what the U.S. wanted – terror. The object of the so-called War on Terror was to create terror. It’s kind of funny, really. Orwell would admire it, no doubt.

That’s the object of torture. It is intended to terrorize people. It’s a standard device in the counterinsurgency tool box. Go back to Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Reagan Wars in Central America, and you will find the U.S. torturing people in the same manner they did in Iraq. The U.S. military even trained torturers at the old School of the Americas, since renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”.

It’s going on, right now, as we speak.

What is Obama going to do about it? Nothing. He’s no reformer – he’s magnificently weak. He’s not going to change the way we’ve done business since the end of World War II. He’s going to do what Clinton did with Iran Contra – turn his back and walk away.

This is taken from an interview with Mark Benjamin, national correspondent for Salon.com. He and others have been investigating Mitchell Jessen & Associates, a Spokane company that has been working on torture and terror techniques for the government. He was asked if Obama was going to do anything about the Bush Administration’s terror activities:

No, I don’t think we’re going to see any arrests. And I think that the significance of what the Obama administration has done over the last few days or announced over the last few days has been largely missed, which is, if you look at the President’s statements and you combine them with the statements of Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff, and Eric Holder, the Attorney General, if you put those together, you will see that over the last couple of days the Obama administration has announced that no one, not the people who carried out the torture program or the people who designed the program or the people that authorized the program or the people who said that it was legal even though they knew that it frankly wasn’t, none of those people will ever face charges. The Attorney General has announced that not only that, the government will pay the legal fees for anybody who is brought up on any charges anywhere in the world or has to go before Congress. They will be provided attorneys.

And not only that, they have given this blanket immunity, if you will, in return for nothing. … Obama yesterday … was at the CIA and called these things “mistakes,” even though they were very carefully designed, and hasn’t demanded anything in return for this immunity. … it’s not like the Obama administration said, “Hey, let’s take a close look at this, and let’s have some people come forward and testify, and let’s take a close look at this program and see if the claims of former Vice President Dick Cheney are really true, that we really did get some good information out of this program, it really was effective.” The Obama administration has demanded nothing and has announced … effectively that the story is over and nobody will be held to account ever.

Richard Nixon quietly let Lt. Calley go. Someday in the not-too-distant future, Lindie England will walk among us again, though under strict orders never to talk. What’s interesting to watch now is the Silence of the Liberals. Stephanie Miller was so clueless that she actually said that Obama is playing chess against checker players. She thinks he’s secretly planning to hang ’em high. Good grief.

Part of the beauty of American citizenship is that we sustain ourselves by selling to each other an endless array of useless products. We have long since fulfilled all of our needs, and are deep into wants. In the advertising business, they have to constantly create new wants; to create demand for new products. We naturally resist ads, as they are intrusive. So the ads, to be effective, have to subvert those defenses.

It should come as no surprise that the people who first used mass media to undermine our resistance to war also invented modern advertising. Edward Bernays was a member of the Creel Commission, aka the Committee on Public Information. The Creel people, including the Secretaries of State, War (since changed to “Defense”), and the Navy, along with journalist Walter Lippmann and others, were given the task of convincing a pacifist American public in 1917 that Germans threatened our existence, and that we needed to go to war with them.

It was all experimental at the time – Creel infected the public consciousness with feigned atrocities and used demonic archetypes, all to stoke a mob mentality. We take it all for granted now, but in 1917, it was a new science. It was terribly effective. Later the Germans, under Goebbels and Hitler, would advance American propaganda techniques even further.

It was Bernays who realized that the same methods that undermined our natural resistance to war could also induce us to buy products. He wrote the book “Propaganda“, then an innocuous term, recently re-released with an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller. He is also famous for an advertising campaign in the 1920’s that convinced many women to smoke cigarettes.

Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, was a brilliant man. I watch now as the American public is led from one conflict to another, as our leaders and media stoke our hatred and titillate us with fantastical evil demons. These creatures are invented in board rooms and sold to us like soap. Just in my short life we have had Muammar Qaddafi’, Yassir Arafat, Manuel Noriega, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Gamal Abdel Nasser (“Hitler on the Nile”), Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, and most recently, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il and Hugo Chavez.

These are all real people, but they also serve as objects of hatred, a way of focusing public attention on a certain activity our leaders want to undertake, usually involving an attack on another country. The real reason for the attacks – theft of resources, imperialist ambitions, punishment of non-aligned bad-actors, installation of puppet governments, and economic penetration by American business interests, are never disclosed. They keep it simple. We good, they evil. We attack.

The Creel Commission was phenomenally successful, turning ordinary working/farming Americans into blathering hateful idiots. These are just a few of the incidents involving Montana pulled from a Chronology of Events in the Western United States during World War I:

November 9, 1917 – Billings, Montana – A round-up of alleged pro-Germans and non-purchasers of Liberty Bonds. 650 citizens force Curtis C. Oehme, an architect, to resign from the state board of architects, Herman Schwanz is forced to give up his seat as city councilman. Edward Kortzborn is forced to kiss the flag and declare allegiance to the United States.

March 23, 1918 – Bozeman, Montana – Julius Heuer escapes lynching when he his rescued by the sheriff and taken to the county jail. He allegedly made pro-German statements.

March 23, 1918 – Butte, Montana – The Swiss Club, Muellers Saloon and the 101 Saloon were raided by federal and local officials. 25 men were arrested and released after a patriotic talk. Rumors of pro-German celebrations led to the raids.

April 21, 1918 – Helena, Montana – Rheinold Kleinschmidt’s home was beset by a mob who painted on his house in white “Slacker” and other phrases. It was advertised by the county Liberty Bond committee that he was a “financial slacker.” He purchased $500 worth of bonds before the incident. The mob, armed with ropes and clubs, demanded entrance. He explained that he had purchased bonds the same morning. Kleinschmidt is 70 years old.

April 30, 1918 – Lewistown, Montana – Armed citizens patrol the streets after the school is burned. Weeks before the German texts were taken from the school by a mob and burned.

I doubt that government itself realized the power of propaganda before that time. In those days, pre World War II, they were quite open about it, even thuggish. There was no subtlety. These days things are a little more subdued. We are quietly inundated with Americanism throughout our lives, especially in school. American schooling is really a selection process where compliant individuals are praised and put into positions of leadership, given good grades and scholarships for higher learning, while noncompliant kids who lean towards independent thought are dealt out of the game. Many, usually boys, are even drugged to enforce compliant behavior.

So we live in a society now where leadership positions are naturally held by those people most deeply indoctrinated. Those who step out of line are quickly exorcised – in fact, rarely come to positions of influence at all. Newspaper editors, university presidents, mayors and governors and congresspeople and presidents are all people who colored inside the lines during their schooling. They are rewarded for compliance.

I’ll never forget going to one of my rowdy kid’s graduation ceremony (she received no awards, I’m proud to say). I listened to the speech given by the class “valedictorian”. The poor girl regurgitated every sad song ever sung to her in her twelve years of education. She uttered nary one original thought. She was well on her way to a position of leadership.

But there is life outside the lines. It is an excellent and fun and deeply rewarding life. I was boxed in for my first 36 years, and by means of circumstances involving my own rowdy personality, was told to make it on my own. I became self-employed. Fortunately, as a CPA, I had clients, but more importantly, I had time on my hands. It didn’t take long – two and one-half years to be precise – to leave the sphere of the compliant patriots, to feel freedom of thought and later, freedom of expression. I probably went a bit overboard. Freedom does that to a person.

April 15th is upon us – for me, a guy who does taxes, it’s freedom day. We are off the Zion and the Grand Canyon. We have something few appreciate in the wage-slave world – we own more than two weeks of our own time. We can go where we please, do as we please. But isn’t it interesting that with free time also came free thought?

Anyway, back to Bernays. Without a war to sell, he turned his mind to marketing. The book “Propaganda” is about the science of advertising. He understood then, as few do now, that the marketing of products and politicians were one and the same. A couple of excerpts:

The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the potentialities of invisible manipulation of motives which actuate man in the group. Trotter and Le Bon, who approached the subject in a scientific manner, and Graham Wallas, Walter Lippmann, and others who continued with searching study of the group mind, established that the group has mental characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology. So the question naturally arose: If we understood the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?

… No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by group leaders in who it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.

… Political campaigns today are all side shows, all honors, all bombast, glitter and speeches. These are for the most part unrelated to the main business of studying the public scientifically, or supplying the public with party, candidate, platform and performance, and selling the public these ideas and practices.

… The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but how to sway the public. In theory, this education might be done by means of learned pamphlets explaining the intricacies of public question. In actual fact, it can be done only by meeting the conditions of the public mind, by creating circumstances which set up trains of thought, by dramatizing personalities, by establishing contact with the group leaders who control the opinions of their public.

How little things change. We suffer from the “myth of progress”, as Jacques Ellul called it. How beautiful to live outside this system, as much as humanly possible. True freedom is impossible, but even small doses of it elevate the mind, engage the senses, and give a feeling of warmth and excitement that is offered by little else in life.

I’m up early today, my tax work is mostly done. Spring is upon us, baseball in full swing, and we’re about to take off on another adventure. I wish everyone could have what we have. While a CPA can make a little more money than other professions, it’s more than just that. Come over to where I am. Join me. Experience freedom. Leave the right wing, leave the left wing, leave the realm of compliance and submissiveness, join the ranks of free thinkers.

Be warned, you may stop blindly “loving” your country in the process. It’s all part of growing up.

This is a little too juicy to pass up:

From BBC News: British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is warning Brits that the threat of “terrorists” attacking Brits with a “dirty bomb” is “severe” – meaning an attack is “highly likely” and “could happen without warning”. In addition …

The BBC’s home affairs correspondent, Daniel Sandford, said chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons “have always been something al-Qaeda have aspired to” but the report warns they are now within terrorists’ grasp.

“There is a concern now among officials in the Home Office that the chances of them getting hold of this material have increased in a world of failed states, in a world of easy availability of radiological material in hospitals and in a world of greatly increased smuggling of these kinds of materials.”

He added that the greatest concern was not over an attack by a nuclear warhead, but with a so-called dirty bomb which could contaminate a wide area and trigger panic.

Here’s from Wikipedia on the so-called “dirty bomb”:

The term dirty bomb is primarily used to refer to a radiological dispersal device (RDD), a speculative radiological weapon which combines radioactive material with conventional explosives. Though an RDD would be designed to disperse radioactive material over a large area, a bomb that uses conventional explosives would likely have more immediate lethal effect than the radioactive material. At levels created from most probable sources, not enough radiation would be present to cause severe illness or death. A test explosion and subsequent calculations done by the United States Department of Energy found that assuming nothing is done to clean up the affected area and everyone stays in the affected area for one year, the radiation exposure would be “fairly high”, but not fatal. Recent analysis of the Chernobyl accident fallout confirms this, showing that the effect on many people in the surrounding area, although not those in close proximity, was almost negligible.

If they did not clean it up for a year, radiation exposure would be fairly high, but not fatal. And this assumes, of course, a year’s worth of exposure. And note that traditional explosives, which are freely available, are far more dangerous.

The Brits are still at it, doing Bushlike fear mongering. And it’s interesting, because even they say that the worst result would be that a dirty bomb could “trigger panic”. And here are Smith and Sandford, doing their best to help out.

Footnote 1: There are people who deliberately set out to hurt other people for political reasons, and some of these people are not American. But there is no such thing as “Al Qaeda”. That’s an American invention designed to make us fearful and to justify government intrusions into our lives and to shred our constitution.

Footnote 2: Who was it said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”?

Footnote 3: The late Tim Russert, supposedly one of the toughest interviewers in American media, once provided Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with a platform so that Rumsfeld could talk about the Tora Bora Complex, supposedly an impregnable fortress that housed Osama bin Laden and thousands of his dedicated soldiers. It was all a lie. A very big lie. There are bases in Afghanistan where soldiers trained – the U.S. military knows about these bases – where they are, how big they are, etc. The U.S. military built them during the 1980’s.