“Between 50 and 55 million people have died around the world as a result of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism since the end of World War II as a direct result of wars initiated by the West, pro-Western military coups and other conflicts. … Hundreds of millions have died indirectly, in absolute misery, and silently. … [Just in the last few years] six to ten million people have been killed in the DR Congo, approximately as many as killed at the beginning of the twentieth century by Belgian King Leopoldo II. Although it is Rwanda, Uganda and their proxies who are murdering millions of innocent people, behind them are always Western geopolitical and economic interests.”(Novelist, filmmaker, journalist, photographer and playwright Andre Vltchek, compiled from his soon-to-be-released movie, On Western Terrorism, from Hiroshima to Drone Warfare.)
The “Cold War” war was largely an illusion, a cover story that the US used when it attacked various countries in the post-war period. The Russians, like all powerful states, vigorously defend their borders, but were never an imperialist force. Every action on that side during that period is easily seen to be, instead of action, response. Khrushchev’s near-fatal gambit, putting missiles in Cuba, is easily understood when we realize that the US had missiles in Turkey.
The title of this post, according to Gore Vidal, contains the four most beautiful words in the English language.
We watched the documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, on Saturday. I confess, as the movie pushed to its inevitable end and showed a picture of Vidal’s desk, typewriter, with piles of paper strewn about … and an empty chair … I welled up with tears. I miss this man.
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The video above was a clip from American television coverage of the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. So many things were different in that era. A real “left” point of view was allowed to air, and the images from the night before went out largely unfiltered. (I don’t watch enough mainstream news to know, so tell me: Was the clubbing by police of OWS people aired on American news networks?) In addition, the participants were scholars, and decorum required them to adhere, as much as possible, to moderator Howard K. Smith’s advice given late in the exchange, “Now let’s not all talk at the same time.”
We suffer from TV-induced short attentions spans these days, so I feel obligated to advise you that the fireworks between the two men begin at around eight minutes in. [Which reminds me, the clip is 13 minutes long! That’s unheard of today.]
I very much admire these two men, and say, I think with some objectivity, that Vidal won the exchange with both his arguments and demeanor. Buckley, as we now know, was recruited by the CIA out of Yale, and so might have been super-sensitive to the “crypto-Nazi” invective that Vidal so skillfully leveled at him. He comes unglued and starts hurling patrician threats at Vidal at that comment. We now know about Project Paperclip. Most who know of it assume had to do with Nazi scientists being brought over to make bombs and rockets. It was much larger than that. It included rescue of hundreds, if not thousands of SS agents as well. It was the fictitious piece of junk Argo writ large. “CIA” would become an amalgam of SS and the old OSS. I wonder how much Buckley and Vidal knew of this, as Buckley does leave his shoes momentarily.
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Back to the movie: There were perhaps a dozen people in the sprawling theater at Chez Artiste in Denver. So I not only felt a sense of loss that Vidal is gone, but also one of loneliness that so few people can appreciate him or operate on his intellectual level. I will pass on just a couple of impressions and then leave the reader to see the movie when it comes out on Netflix or some other platform.
First, just changing times I suppose, but a movie theater is not the right venue for a movie of this type. Also,
Vidal was gay. But his reflections on sex in general are stunning in their sensibility and startling for the time that he sat on national TV and espoused them.
Vidal’s partner, Howard Austen, died in 2003, and one gets a sense that the last nine years of Vidal’s life were a downward spiral. He was lonely. Aside from those closing years, Vidal comes across as a thoroughly happy man, confident in his abilities and affectionate of people in general. Austen said to Vidal around the time of his passing, “It went by so quickly.”
Gore was a graduate of Exeter Academy, and was accepted at Harvard. He said he realized at that time that he had been institutionalized his entire life, and opted to forgo college. I suspect Harvard would have tamed this man, robbed us of the wit, rancor, insight and talent that he possessed. It might have turned him into Erich Segal. [Or worse yet, Al Gore.]
Austen and Vidal, according to Vidal, were not sexual partners. Vidal did not believe in having sex with friends, as it inevitably complicated friendship. Their expressions of love and devotion to one another, however, were profound. (He did say he would never turn down an opportunity to have sex or appear on TV.)
Vidal, even though born of the oligarchy, willfully cast it aside. He said that Truman Capote spent his whole life trying to get in to the thing that he was trying to get out of.
I enjoyed Vidal’s writings, mostly his historical tracts, and appreciate them now more than when I read them. I understand better now that the job of the historian in an empire is to walk backwards reassembling the facts to better shape and form our official lies. Vidal brought Burr and Lincoln to life for me, but more so helped me understand that it was Lincoln, and not the so-called founders, who invented the American Republic. It was the doe-eyed Missouri petty criminal Truman who destroyed it.
Men like Vidal pass by so seldom that I think it appropriate to pause and take note: His was a charmed life, and his contributions to American literature and intellectual culture are unparalleled. I cannot think of another of his caliber, though I know they are there. For right now, I am just mourning the loss of Gore Vidal.
Lobotomies were a common medical procedure during the 1960’s, with over 10,000 children receiving them. Electroshock therapy, now on the rise again (promoted by none other than Carrie Fisher), was also common.
These treatments were shown to be redundant and unnecessary due to the rise of TV
Dave McGowan offers here, from the preface to his book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, advice not on investigative journalism so much as on proper thinking in general.
Although I am regarded by many people as a “conspiracy theorist,” which is more often than not used as a pejorative term, I do all my research through very mainstream channels. I am a big believer in the notion that ‘the truth is out there,’ but don’t expect it to be delivered to you in a tidy package by any mainstream media outlets. Finding it involves assembling a jigsaw puzzle of sorts, with the goal being to gather up all the bits and pieces of information that other writers tend to present as throwaway facts and/or interesting anomalies. Sometimes those bits and pieces end up being no more than interesting anomalies, but past experience has taught me that if those divergent facts are properly assembled a new picture often begins to emerge that is strikingly at odds with what is widely accepted as our consensus reality.
At the end of the day, its is really all about pattern recognition.
It is a feature of our brainwashed society that critical thinking is ridiculed, often called “conspiracy theory” but just as often relegated to paranoia. But the whole notion that there are no conspiracies to unfold is groupthink, creating an atmosphere in which the most incurious and non-inquisitive people get to parade about as intelligent because they do not question official truth. This creates a society of inert brains, tyranny of the dull. Lord knows as I walk about American news media and blogs that I am struck by how our writers, journalists, comedians and entertainers, talking heads, bloggers and pundits lack basic skepticism, and barely register on the scale of intelligence in public affairs. It’s pretty damned boring.
Advertisers know that groups of people exhibit characteristics that are not apparent in the individuals within those groups. An adult American might think himself skeptical to a fault (and a critical thinker to boot), but as a group the American public is highly suggestible and gullible. It believes in fairy tales and are easily manipulated by symbols and lies. Our relationship with the government and news media is that of parent-child. News is written at a fifth grade level, and symbols and imagery are used to make it believable. Continue reading “The transformation of al Qaeda into freedom fighters, again”→
Mark Twain said that a book considered a classic was one that “… people praise and don’t read.”
Similarly, “free markets” are things that people praise and studiously avoid. Clever use of the word “free” is part of it, making it sound like a noble ideal. But substitute the more correct “unregulated” or “unfettered” for “free,” and it gives you a better idea of what is really going on.
People hate free markets, and with good reason. They are destructive of life, business, and freedom itself. “Free” markets expose everyone to competition, a destructive force. Price competition drives companies out of business. Competition for market share drives price cutting, with the same result. There is security in free markets, but only to the degree one is insulated from competition. Freedom from competition is market power. But it is not a free market. Continue reading “Free markets: economic jihadism”→
Was Eric Cantor removed by voters, or machines?For elections to matter we must have good candidates. But in addition to that small matter, votes need to be accurately counted. It is not complicated, but like everything else in this country, our vote counting system has been taken over by private corporations. We have no way of knowing if outcomes are real.
Take the Eric Cantor defeat in Virginia’s 7th district. He lost by 10 points, or 8,000 votes, while his internal polling showed he had a typically American gerrymandered 34 point lead. It could happen, people make mistakes, change their minds, and last minute events can turn elections. (Brad Blog, as usual, on top of this.) Continue reading “But I vote, dammit!”→
I spend a lot of time up to my knees in the backwaters – its part of staying informed. I do my best, but can never say I understand events well enough to be ‘on top’ of anything. The only things certain are uncertainty and the knowledge that liars lie. Time and distance usually fill in much of the missing information. But with the exception of E. Howard Hunt, we are never given benefit of confessions by guilty parties. In the United States, the guilty either walk free or themselves die ugly deaths. Continue reading “Not even light escapes …”→
Readership shot up on June 5th, if I can use that expression for a low-traffic blog. The post was “Bill Pepper’s lonely journey,” about the murder of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and the overwhelming body of evidence now accumulated proving (I rarely use that word) Sirhan Sirhan’s innocence. I doubt if anyone actually read the Pepper interview, as I understand behavior in a thought-controlled environment quite well. You are curious, but also afraid. So even if you clicked on the article, you decided not to pursue it any further.
Yes, Robert F. Kennedy was murdered by a domestic conspiracy. At least the Los Angeles police department was involved, as we know they confiscated and destroyed important evidence. But we also know now that Sirhan was under control of a group of psychiatrists prior to the event, that he was hypnotized and drugged and shocked, and that night he was in the control of a woman in a polka-dot dress, and that the bullets that killed RFK came from close behind him and were probably fired by a security guard, Thane Cesar, who now resides in Simi Valley and is living the life. We know that two agents connected to the CIA intimidated witnesses into silence. We know a whole lot now.
Who carries out such elaborate plans? Who decided that RFK had to die? Who has the power to prevent an investigation of the murder? Who, forty-six years later, can still muffle media coverage of the event? It’s called “shadow government” and is not a new phenomenon. Fletcher Prouty called it our “secret team,” and Winston Churchill referred to it as our “High Cabal.”
This force is so powerful and deeply embedded in all of our institutions that most likely even those who planned and carried out the murder do not know the answer to those questions. We are a pathocracy now, a country so infested with evil and corruption that we cannot be saved. We can only die and be reborn, as were the Russians*. Maybe we’ll be that shining city on the hill again some day down the road. Right now, we’re just a big dirty ghetto.
But that does not even begin to describe the nature of this power. This link will take you to a two-hour presentation by Dr. Judy Wood which will debunk the 19-Arab-Guy-In-A Cave theory about the events on 9/11. This link is to a man who explains how government agencies and military drills are used to run these false flag events. You will not click on these links, will not watch these videos, just as you did not read the William Pepper interview. You’ve been conditioned to avoid evidence. Not only are your thoughts controlled. So too is your behavior.
I am not taunting you into clicking on the link. I am describing the immense power that resides in this land that controls you. You won’t click on the link because you are afraid, both of the content, but also the ridicule that you have to endure if you dare commit thoughtcrime. In a society like ours, with institutions corrupted beyond repair and which has the lowest of liars and cowards for leaders, something else must be said: our people are corrupt too. Just because you are afraid, confused, thought-controlled, is no excuse. You need to be alive and vigilant and sentient, and you are not.
You are part of the problem. You are corrupt too, reader. Yes, you. You look away, tune out.
Piece of Mindful 