Are you as confused as I am about the expanding conflict as US-backed terrorist forces advance on Baghdad, while the Iraqi government seeks help from the US? What is ISIS? What is IEIL? Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Here’s a clue:

Baghdadi fought in some capacity with Sunni militant groups after the U.S. invasion of Iraq but was arrested in 2005 and interred by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca, the main U.S. detention facility after the closing of Abu Ghraib. He wasn’t considered much of a threat and was released in 2009.

Translation: He was trained by the US over the period 2005 and then put into action in 2009. You gotta know how to read this stuff – the US prisons at Guantanamo, Bucca, Abu Ghraib are not in any sense prisons, but serve two purposes: Torture facilities, and terrorist training centers.(Did you really think they were keeping Gitmo open all these years to hold some ragtags they picked up in Afghanistan in 2001? Those poor souls have to be mere window dressing to disguise the true purpose of the place.)

That’s just a side note, and yes, I am confused as you, dear reader. Understand that, according to Voltaire, IEIL (ISIS) is overseen by French, American and Saudi officers. The object has to be the breakup of Iraq, which in the wake of the US defeat and withdrawal in 2011, has been considered a client state of Iran. So expect Iran to get involved in this dangerous, explosive situation.

Here’s some briefs from Voltaire, here, here and here. Moon of Alabama is doing its usual good work too. Do avoid American news, unless you are analyzing it for lie content. That is the only thing those moving lips indicate.

Of course, distrusting American news and government pronouncements does not convey truth-telling status on any other news source. As with everything else in this world, we are handed a bag of puzzle pieces. Our job is to find the ones that fit and see if a picture forms before our eyes. Confusion is the normal starting point.

“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.

Quid pro quo, Clarice.
Continue reading “The road to self-encirclement” →

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