essays on crime (3) Secret Intelligence Services

 Every nation has them. The SS and Stasi are some of the most notorious ones, but others that face much less scrutiny, belong to the modern “democratic state”. They have the same function of course, and like private power, they are an extension of democratic totalitarianism.  The reference of course is to secret intelligence services

Gordon Thomas is the author of the book, Secrets and Lies. In it details a terrifying account of the “Nazi witch doctors”, it is not, as the name suggests, anything to do with the National Socialist German Workers Party, but has everything to do with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).  For indeed that is what the book is about.  In various chapters, it follows the debauched practices of Dr Ewen Cameron, who was quite different from a witch doctor.  His name is now synonymous with the Mk-Ultra program: brainwashing unsuspecting victims by an array of Kafkaesque methods. These included electro-shocks, sexual abuse, verbal abuse and playing voices back to the unsuspecting patients for hours on end in an attempt to brainwash them.  Many of these victims ended up dead or in mental institutions. 

 

 Of course, these witch doctors were medical men, Cameron was a Scottish psychiatrist, but it was not the Ewan Cameron’s who were responsible for the perpetuation of biological warfare, many of which were used in several adventures in Southeast Asia. Cameron, for his part, literally destroyed people, as Christine Hahn, the investigative journalist writes:

 Madeleine was rolled into the operating room on a gurney and prepared for surgery, her head shaven. A local anaesthetic was applied to a portion of her scalp. The surgeon cut away a flap of skin and drilled a hole through her skull. Wielding a spatula-type instrument, he made several sweeping incisions through her brain, slicing all the way to the back of her skull. While the surgeon worked, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron stood over the young woman, plying her with questions until he was assured the surgeon had achieved the desired result. When Madeline stared vacuously and could only grunt in response, the “surgery” ended. Madeleine lived the rest of her life an automaton in the confines of an insane asylum.

Madeleine Smith, a 28-year-old Canadian newscaster, was just one casualty of the ghoulish experiments conducted in the 1950s and early 1960s under Ewen Cameron at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.

 The experiments were part of the infamous “MK ULTRA” program conducted under the aegis of the U.S. intelligence agencies in the 1950s and 1960s, exposed in media and in hearings before the U.S. Congress in the 1970s. Cameron brutalized and maimed patients with drugs, shocks and lobotomies as he sought a means to “depattern” and program the human mind. Canadian survivors still able to seek reparation eventually obtained a $750,000 shared settlement from the U.S. government in 1988.

Nevertheless, the CIA, as we know, play a different role entirely.  William Blum wrote an important book in the 1990s called Killing Hope. The work itself, methodically well researched, details the often subversive and clandestine “work” the CIA have been involved in. From their links with the Nazis, most notoriously with Klaus Barbie and Reinhold Galen, and others, their crimes, according to the book and to history, these horrors carry on up until the Clinton administration when the book was written.  The way in which the organisation operates ought to concern us all. For they act with total impunity and with a vast degree of psychopathy; this is not so furtive.  There have been countless assassinations and assassination attempts against eminent figures.  It is not only murder and torture they use either; they use other methods, and appear to be schizophrenic to a very large degree.

 

In the 1940s alone, William Blum reports, citing vast amounts of documented evidence and facts, the CIA subverted elections in various countries in Western Europe after the second world war when the organisation were created. Just to take one example from these countries which highlight the level of depravity and criminality the CIA’s involvement in international terrorism.  Communists in Italy, during this time, were the favourites to win the election; celebrities like Frank Sinatra would send propaganda messages on the radio to Italy, warning them of the communist menace. To prevent this from happening the CIA first launched a propaganda war.  This was bad enough.  Then it escalated to a terrorist mission.

 

From that period onwards the CIA would use terror, torture, murder, propaganda, the subversion of elections abroad.  In 1953 Mossadegh in Iran was overthrown; in 1954, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala was deposed; Karim Qasim of Iraq in 1961; the attempted overthrow of Castro.  In El Salvador, Chile, Brazil, Chile, Australia, Albania, Afghanistan, Panama, Peru, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Russia, Haiti, are just some of the countries which saw terror, subversion and propaganda on a global scale with full participation from the CIA.

 

All secret intelligence agencies are racist fanatics, and act with sociopathic behaviours.  The CIA are not alone in acts of extreme violence and terror on a mass scale.  The secret Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, are notorious for murdering and torturing people they do not like very much, and the M16, the external British intelligence are just as ferocious in their fanaticism.  However, I or anyone else can speak about their list of crimes forever and a day but a key question is why do these fundamentalist organisations exist in the first place?

 

These groups are, so we are told, intelligence gathering agencies; they are nothing of the sort. It is only these and not the national police or even the government that are able to use the rather feeble excuse of “national security interests” in assaulting and arresting people, as well as tarnishing their life for a rabidly sustained period. “Suspected terrorists” can be locked up for months, even years at a time on “suspicion” in pseudo-democratic states, in more totalitarian ones, they do not even need suspicions, and they just lock people up when they choose to do so. Yet their work remains so secret that any “leaks” of the activity would end up in years of imprisonment for that individual.

 

In so-called democratic societies, people would generally expect these organisations to have some transparency, and we would expect to know how they operate and conduct their practices. The answer is we do not know a single thing about them. People in all societies appear to be quite content of this fact. Why is this? It is simply because people are happy to have their liberties and freedoms liquidated for all perpetuity in the hope a quiet and wholesome existence.

 

“We do not behave like this”, says one nation, “neither do we”, says another, “and we don’t either”, says yet another. The truth of the matter is they all behave in this fashion. It is quite natural for people to defend their own countrymen, and to believe, quite naively, that their secret intelligence services are better than others. Worse, they often defend their clandestine activities because they are “patriots” and “nationalists”, roughly translated as: “must never criticise my country no matter how many people it kills, tortures and imprisons”. This is logical enough for people who know nothing concerning the workings of these agencies. 

 

Ian McEwan, the novelist, is vacuous enough to write about the secret intelligence services, so it would seem, to sell more copies of these books he writes.  Therefore, there is entertainment for less serious people, and it may surprise some that Mr. McEwan was not even paid off by the government or by the secret service branch themselves.  Nevertheless, he is not the only one.  There are others.  In these books then, these people go on exciting missions and are national heroes because they are saving their country from crazed lunatics, and we should all be thankful for being saved from international terrorists whose aim is to drop 22,000 nuclear warheads on every house in every village, town and city.  We ought to be thankful because we have been saved from a nuclear holocaust. This, surprisingly enough, is what some people believe.

 

Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, which fall under the heading of subculture, we may even be meaner and call them propaganda fairy tales. The main premise with these stories then is about a secret intelligence officer going abroad, to hunt down enemies, (usually Russians), to stop them from running the world with their evil ideology, or perhaps worse than that, they are intent on destroying the world so they must be stopped, and, of course, nobody else can stop this evil but 007.  Only can he save the world, and we must play along with this frivolous nonsense. 

 

 Therefore, we must worship these, as we are often told we must.  Never mind the murderous campaigns; worship them we must. Imagine if some writers started writing about how benevolent and benign Jack the Ripper was, and that he essentially was a good man, despite ripping a number of women to shreds, or perhaps they would write adventure books about other notorious figures in history. They could, if they wished, write about child-murderers, serial-rapists, and psychopathic and demented torturers.  Would people be so willing to read about the jolly adventures of these people?  Of course not.

 

The reason is refulgently clear, and has already been elucidated. If people were more realistic about these malevolent organisations they will say and repeat to themselves that they do not really care because   “it does not affect me”. People even say: “people who have done no wrong need not worry too much”.  If only life was as simple as that.

 

Mark Curtis, the social historian and fierce critic of British foreign policy is the author of a number of books.  His most important being Secret Affairs. In it, he describes the British intelligence agencies and their collusion with radical Islam. The book is an in depth, comprehensive study but it would be useful to discuss events from the 1980s.

 

In this decade, the M16 were infiltrating Islamic terrorist groups throughout the Middle East, and this is not as furtive as one may imagine.  Out of these links emerged the Mujahedeen, the terrorist group, their brutality even surpasses the Taliban. It was not just the Mujahedeen either; others involved the Taliban themselves, al-Qaeda and their former leader, Osama bin Laden. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar an abominable person was one such person they were fond of.  This man’s strong moral principles included throwing acid in the faces of Muslim women who do not wear the niqab; he also was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.

 

One need not carry on documenting detailing a list of dreadful things these secret intelligence groups get up to. If one requires more details on their activities, books have been written detailing candid and honest accounts of clandestine and subversive activities within these organisations. However, these secret agencies, are not, so we are told, doing anything unlawful, because they are saving us from a nuclear holocaust.  There are all sorts of terrorists in the world: those who work for the government and those who work against it.  It should be clear which group these fanatics belong to.

 

The groups that are labelled terrorists by everyone including neo-liberal marketeers worked alongside the M15 and M16. There is no doubting these are terrorist groups, but working alongside them, donating funds, hold private meetings, does not necessarily make them terrorists at all.  However, consider what state law is in almost every country on the planet.  For an individual or a group of individuals donating money to a known terrorist organisation, discounting the government of course, the consequences for these individuals or groups involved is quite severe.  Nevertheless, for intelligence services, different rules apply. That is rather convenient. 

 

 If members of the public even considered carrying out these sorts of activities, and were caught, would, without question, spend the rest of their lives in prison.  Perhaps one day the activities of these groups will be revealed. The mass media give snippets of course, and even that, at times, elicits stern criticism. We are often told these are “bad apples”, or “isolated cases”. The government and media operate under this framework. This is to give the idea these groups, largely, act with the utmost integrity, they are moral, ethical and insanely benevolent. 

 

Alan Rusbridger, who, at the time was the editor if the Guardian newspaper, published a series of leaks concerning these intelligence agencies, not on their clandestine operations in terror operations but surveilling their own citizens, violating European and international law in the process; this ought to have been commended.  Instead, there were calls for him to be prosecuted by politicians, academics and so on.  Rusbridger was even asked by an MP at a select committee whether he loved his country.  The Guardian newspaper itself took up the story towards the end of 2013:

 

Committee chair, Keith Vaz: Some of the criticisms against you and the Guardian have been very, very personal. You and I were both born outside this country, but I love this country. Do you love this country?

Alan Rusbridger: We live in a democracy and most of the people working on this story are British people who have families in this country, who love this country. I'm slightly surprised to be asked the question but, yes, we are patriots and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of democracy, the nature of a free press and the fact that one can, in this country, discuss and report these things.

Vaz: So the reason why you've done this has not been to damage the country, it is to help the country understand what is going on as far as surveillance is concerned?

Rusbridger: I think there are countries, and they're not generally democracies, where the press are not free to write about these things, and where the security services do tell editors what to write, and where politicians do censor newspapers. That's not the country that we live in, in Britain, that's not the country that America is and it's one of the things I love about this country – is that we have that freedom to write, and report, and to think and we have some privacy, and those are the concerns which need to be balanced against national security, which no one is underestimating, and I can speak for the entire Guardian staff who live in this country that they want to be secure too.

Vaz: Thank you so much, that's very clear.

 

In the same article, they quote another passage with Rusbridger as the chief villain once again:

 

Conservative MP Michael Ellis: Mr Rusbridger, you authorised files stolen by [National Security Agency contractor Edward] Snowden which contained the names of intelligence staff to be communicated elsewhere. Yes or no?

 

Rusbridger: Well I think I've already dealt with that.

Ellis: Well if you could just answer the question.

Rusbridger: I think it's been known for six months that these documents contained names and that I shared them with the New York Times.

Ellis: Do you accept that that is a criminal offence under section 58A of the Terrorism Act, 2000?

Rusbridger: You may be a lawyer, Mr Ellis, I'm not.

Ellis: Now 58,000 documents were sent or communicated by you – as editor-in-chief of the Guardian you caused them to be communicated, and they contained a wealth of information. It was effectively an IT-sharing platform between the United States and the United Kingdom intelligence services wasn't it?

Rusbridger: I'll leave you to express those words.

 

Those who believe there will be some sort of “social revolution”, appear to me, to be rather naive. Only this churlish dream would reveal the true extent of these intelligence agencies but the likelihood of that happening is slim.  They will carry on waging their war of aggression against people of different varieties, perhaps one day democracy will be enacted and these agencies will be transparent. For now that idea sounds very Chekhovian. 

10-16th April 2014

 

This is the third essay on 'crime', the next one will be posted soon. The previous two essays are the last entries on my blog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

essays on Crime (2): Private Power

Adam Smith, that political thinker who was in favour of the free market, so we are told, berated “merchants and manufacturers”, who went on to use the state for their own interests, so Smith said.  In chapter IV in the Wealth of Nations, he writes:

 The capricious ambition of kings and ministers has not, during the present and the preceding century, been fatal to the repose of Europe, than the impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers. The violence and injustice of the rulers of humankind is an ancient evil, for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. Nevertheless, the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be the rulers of humankind, though it cannot perhaps be corrected, may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquillity of anybody but themselves.

Actually, Smith was never in favour of the free market, which we are presented with.  These “merchants and manufacturers” in today’s world would not be merchants and manufacturers but transnational corporations and concentrated private power. The sorts of people who idolise Smith today evidently never read him. If they did, they would know that if he were alive today he would be regarded as a dangerous radical.  He would, no doubt, be spewing blood at the emergence of the free market.

Deregulation, lower taxation (for the rich) and privatisation was, in a nutshell, Thatcherism. In Naomi Klein’s book about free market fundamentalism, the Shock Doctrine, she presents a very ugly picture of countries adopting this fascist framework.  These include Chile, Iraq, Argentina, South Africa, Russia, Poland, South Korea, even the United States.  This model was adopted in Chile under Augusto Pinochet.  He was a fascist, openly so, who overthrew the Marxist democrat, Salvador Allende, in a military coup, aided and abetted by the U.S.  “Make the economy scream”, Nixon said of Chile.  This “economic miracle” people speak of in referring to Chile is a myth of sorts.  American journalist Greg Palast writes:

 In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile's unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile's population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year "President" Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile's economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman's trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward ... into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile's industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan's State Department issued a report concluding, "Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management." Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, "The Miracle of Chile." Friedman's sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet's Chile was, "a showcase of what supply-side economics can do."

According to Naomi Klein “In 1974, inflation reached 375 percent-the highest rate in the world and almost twice the top level under Allende.”  It was only in 1988, fifteen years after Pinochet seized power that the economy stabilised.  So real economic growth was not seen until Pinochet had been President for well over ten years.  It was the “Chicago boys”, at the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman oversaw much of the bloodshed in Chile.  Later, Thatcher would refer to Friedman as a “freedom fighter”.  A “freedom fighter” for private, tyrannical power perhaps.

 The fascist economic model Chile adopted laid the groundwork for others to follow. In the 1980s, Russia followed the model with economic advisors, such as Jeffrey Sachs.  Janine R. Wedel of Nation writes:

 Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia’s economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of “shock therapy” to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock–not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent–than therapy. One result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of Russians.

 In the 1990s South Africa, under the tutelage of Nelson Mandela, Thatcherism and neoliberal thuggery was their economic model.  Mandela’s promise of nationalisation, turned into privatisation. Mandela’s successor said of himself, “Just call me a Thatcherite”.  In Iraq, after the 2003 invasion, the country was overtaken by large U.S corporations, thus resulting in economic strangulation for the natives amidst the tremendous carnage and shock, Klein speaks of. 

This is free market fanaticism to put it mildly.  These corporate elites have this totalitarian monopoly upon which entire societies work under a certain framework.  These Company Executive Officials (CEOs) have only two choices for their business model: to maximise their profits or leave the company altogether.  To maximise their profits they do various reprehensible things.  For example, they are quite content to employ sweatshop labour and pay their workers an absolute pittance; the working conditions themselves are so despicable that not even a Milton Friedman could even justify them. Another example of state protection roughly translated into capitalism.  All these major companies are able, through criminal state law, in repugnant free market societies, to avoid paying vast amounts of taxes; many of these private tyrannies pay less than 1 percent tax.

When the British government wish to implement policies concerning these colossal companies, they must regulate themselves.  Self-regulation is an interesting phrase but is often unscrutinised.  The government can make no decisions concerning these powerful tyrannies, thus asking their permission before implementing policies, which concern them.  This ought to surprise no one because such practices go on for such a sustained period.  This goes on while economic warfare is waged on everybody else.

Banking institutions are notoriously the worst offenders. These banks are nothing more than rackets and cartels. Some of these banks operating in the city of London have been known to have committed criminal acts so serious that it has even reached the mainstream media; that is rare. Therefore, these many-monied institutions are given two options after having been “found out” after committing serious acts of fraud: they can either spend the rest of their lives in prison or pay a fine, not out of their own pocket but out of the pockets of others.  The choice is inevitable. Only a madman would choose the former option.  Even after the disgraceful practices are disclosed to the wider public fraud continues nonetheless. Incidentally, banking is one of the top professions where psychopathy is prevalent.

Oil is also another area where criminal actions occur, and as is the case with banking cartels, this is widely known.  After the First World War or the Great War, as it was known seven major oil companies known as the “Seven Sisters”, devised a plan between themselves in a perverse capitalist objective.  These companies were:

●      Anglo-Persian Oil Company (United Kingdom):
●      Gulf Oil (United States):
●       Royal Dutch Shell (Netherlands/United Kingdom)
●      Standard Oil of California (SoCal) (United States)
●      Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso) (United States):
●      Texaco (United States)
●      Standard Oil Co. of New York (Socony) (United States)

Emine Dilek writes:

 In 1928, three main global petroleum producers met in the Scottish castle named Achnacarry, to sign a secret contract in order to control and distribute the world’s oil and the profits from the oil business. The agreement is known as the Achnacarry Agreement, or “As-Is” Agreement, was signed on September 17th, 1928…

Their vision was that the production zones, transport costs, sales prices – everything would be agreed and shared. And so began a great cartel, whose purpose was to dominate the world, by controlling its oil.

Soon, other biggest oil companies joined them in the plot. Now, they were known as the Seven Sisters: Exxon, Shell, BP, Mobil, Texaco, Gulf and Chevron...

At the end of the First World War, through signed treaties, France and Britain divided up the Middle East that was taken over from the Ottoman Empire. American oil companies were enraged. An American oil broker, Kalouste Gulbekian, came up with a solution. The plan was to create a red zone around the oil rich areas of the Middle East, and form a new oil company to equally own shares. The company was called Iraq Petroleum Company.

Oil filled lands were bought from the land owners without disclosing the riches their lands were hiding underneath the ground. Governments of the countries, such as the Shah (king) of Iran, were bought and paid for by the oil companies through bribes and other forms of political and military support guarantees.

Oil companies became more powerful than governments. Delivery of the oil also was such a crucial matter that in USA or Britain no one could become a President unless they guaranteed the smooth delivery of the oil to the refineries and sellers.

Oil companies were so dominant that they set the rules in every aspect of the oil production, its export and prices. Together with covert agencies of USA and British Governments, they have helped create and support the monarchies in Iran and Saudi Arabia, toppled democratically elected leaders who refused to be bribed, opposed the creation of OPEC and profited from the Iran-Iraq war, leading to the ultimate destruction of Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

BP has a wicked history concerning these matters; I cite two examples.  During the time of the Red Line Agreement it was Venezuela which became the world's’ leading oil producer; after the second world war, the dynamics of strategic power and interests changed: it was Saudi Arabia which overtook Venezuela the decades that followed this, with furtive deals with the U.S which allowed America to control oil reserves in the Middle East.  In 1952 disaster struck the western world: Gamal Abdel Nasser ruled over Egypt for almost two decades, during that time he committed one particular major crime: he overthrew the yoke of western imperialism and instead opted for Arab nationalism.

Before and during Nasser’s first few years in power, parts of the region were in turmoil. In Iran, there was a spate of demonstrations by a popular uprising.  Mohammad Mossadegh led this movement.  The main reason for the protests was the oil giant, BP. They were literally controlling vast amounts of the Iranian economy, at the behest of the British government. In 1953, when Mossadegh was Prime Minister of Iran, he nationalised Iranian oil.  The response was inevitable; the British government, backed up by their ally in North America, overthrew Mossadegh and subjected Iran to a savage nightmare. 

Fifty years later BP were at it again.  It was against another enemy of the west, Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan revolutionary or “mad dog”, if we listen to Ronald Reagan long enough.  Tony Blair, during that time, was the British Prime Minister, which is significant.  During talks with Gaddafi he decided the Libyan would relinquish his chemical weapons then he would “do business” with him.  Roughly translated as opening up the markets in Libya.  BP were once again, accruing huge profits in these somewhat clandestine deals.  It was not so long after this period that Al Baset Al-Megrahi was released from prison for one of the worst terrorist atrocities in the 1980s.  The lengths BP have gone to in order to accrue stupendous profits is quite astonishing. 

Other major oil companies tell a similar story.  However, one other area of repugnancy is the fast-food cancer factories such as McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Domino's Pizza Hut, KFC, as well as many others.  Again, these companies have one key objective: to maximise their profits, in fact their objective is two-fold.  The other objective is to gain control over markets, thus creating smear campaigns in putting smaller competitors out of business altogether. This “junk” food which these sub-cultural, sub-human, inhumane factories operate under giving people all sorts of dietary problems and health dilemmas, including cancers, heart-attacks, strokes, and a whole array of other terrible conditions.  All this is for financial profit.  Nevertheless, one should not be so surprised because after all, we live in a world of the free market and any sort of morality seems miles away in the distant hills. 

Globalisation is an interesting term, and it ought to be tackled.  A great deal of people have written about this matter, coming to debate it from a range of different angles. One man that wrote about it was Vladimir Lenin. Nevertheless, in Lenin’s lifetime-he died in 1924-capitalism in comparison to today’s world was incomparable in terms of private power.  Enmeshed in this globalised  sort of terror is the public relations industry which Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays wrote about, and public relations is synonymous with propaganda, and propaganda ties in with the entertainment industry, which is essentially the public relations industry anyway.  It is corporate private power that advertises throughout the entire industry.  It also goes through sport, all forms of popular culture and so on.  All advertising, or rather, what is referred to as advertising, ought not to exist. It ought not to exist because it is crypto corporate fascism, and we are forced to watch this obscenity.  With marketing, they remove all other cultures and replace them with infantile, unrelenting defecation. 

 But, why? Well it has different functions of course.  In the media, it creates better selling power; it helps to depoliticise and pacify people. It de-intellectualises the individual, and so long as they are following these puerile, irrational, frivolous trends, such as spectator sports, following a person or perhaps a group of them like a religious fanatic, they are out of harm's way.  They are not thinking about the things they ought to be thinking about and of course all of this is rationalised.  This nonsense creeps into serious journals, it is even spoken by highly respected professors in educational establishments, it is on the high street, in shops, at the workplace, even on the street.  This barbarity is inescapable. Yet when one mentions Herbert Marcuse, Edward Herman or Erich Fromm, they are laughed at, branded as extremists, and told they ought not to exist. 

Never mind Aristotle’s insights, Beckett’s absurdity, Steinbeck’s humanity, Homer’s picturesque poetry, John Stuart Mill’s liberalism or anything of the sort.  Now, we are told we must forget all this insignificant indulgence.  Instead, you must not be a dinosaur and become a “modern man”, and think “business”; everything else ought not to exist at all.  For business is the new way.  If there is no profit in this or that then it really ought not to be done; what good will come of it? 

The rules of the game have changed, so to speak.  Now, even CEOs appear on television shows, encouraging their viewers to engage in real principles: the avarice of financial greed and a lust for “free enterprise”, and not much else besides.  The person who reads Sophocles or Heinrich Boll is a danger, a danger to this whole ideology.  Thinking outside of this spectrum is strictly forbidden, and for having such iconoclast beliefs, you must be eliminated from airing your insidious and tiresome views; there is no opportunity to speak in the mainstream media; you are eliminated.  This is a model, which has been hideously successful.  The career liberal journalists would rather close their vacuous mouths and do as they are told.

This is intolerable; nevertheless, it appears indomitable.  What is this called?  It is clearly a form of totalitarianism.  Nevertheless, it goes far beyond even that.  When private concentrated power controls many aspects of our peculiar lives, and in this abominable way, it is a fundamentalist sort of fascism; that is not to be mocked at.  Fascism, many people believe, are Hitler’s gas chambers, Stalin’s gulags, and so on.  Political fascism not only exists but there is financial, as well as fiscal.  For it eliminates entire sections of society, of every society.  People call Hitler a fascist; Lenin a socialist; Thatcher, a conservative and Pinochet a benevolent dictator.  They are all fascists.

 For at the heart of their ideology is free market fundamentalism.  In fact, Lenin was perhaps a more virulent free market villain than Thatcher ever was.  So in Britain, the U.S, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and much of the world have political parties with a single thing in common: they all are part of a fascist ideology because they stick to the free market economic model.  This is seen as rational governance; it should not be. 

A great number of eminent people today have their heroes, heroines and inspirations like Milton Friedman, Jeffrey Sachs and others.  However, these same people do not worship, or at least do not claim to worship figures such as General Franco, Heinrich Himmler or Pol pot.  Yet the only difference is that the economic fascists like have not been found out.

We live in an age now where people feel the inescapable need to hide their perverse acts and views because it is not tolerated by modern society, and inevitably the public relations industry is geared to protect the “ethical” companies and “green” corporations, and so on.  When people vent their ire and tempers-it is inevitably at political power and not private power. For private power is well protected and their repugnant crimes are largely hidden, and so people become unaware of such practices.  The propaganda model, which protects these criminal acts, has even metamorphosed the legacy of Adam Smith, as we have seen. Big business and private unelected tyrannies are the order of the day, nothing else will do. 

30th March-6th April 2014

This is the second part of essays on 'crime'...see my previous post for the first part.  The third part will be posted shortly.

Propaganda against Iran

In 1979 three things or rather events happened in the Middle East which had devastating consequences, in all these events, Washington played a key part.  A little background information is required before speaking about the present state of affairs.

In February 1979 Afghan militant fundamentalists abducted the American ambassador in Kabul.  This did not prevent the U.S from supporting the terrorists who carried out this outrage.  Later, Ronald Reagan, called the murderers and torturers “freedom fighters”, one tactic these “freedom fighters” used was “to torture victims by first cutting off their noses, ears and genitals, then removing one slice of skin after another”.  The Afghan Government “invited” the Soviet Union to intervene and so they did.  Jimmy Carter gave the Mujahideen terrorists $500 million; Reagan, in the following years, gave them so much more.  It has been said by commentators in the U.S that this was Washington’s revenge.  America lost thousands of marines in Indochina, so they were determined the same fate would happen to the Russians, and it did.  Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, gave the following interview, years after he had left office, or rather kicked out of office:

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

There was another reason why Washington took this course of action: its major ally in the Middle East, at least one of them, fell.

In 1953, Mohammad Mossadegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, was overthrown in a coup. It was Britain who intended to get rid of him because he drew up plans to nationalise the AIOC (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company), which was an English company. With Washington’s help the coup was a success.  The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was put in his place, and for a quarter of a century ruled like a bloodthirsty tyrant.  In the 1970s, Amnesty International, the human-rights group, published a report saying the Shah was  one of the biggest violators of human rights abuses in the world.  From 1953 until 1979, Washington Backed him until he fell from grace. When They lost their ally they sought refuge in Afghanistan and Iraq.                                                                                                                     In Iraq, a similar story is told.  In the late 1950s and early 60s’ the country was led by Karim Qasim. In 1961 he announced that the Government had intended to take fifty percent of the profits from oil exports.  By February, 1963, Qasim was dead; he had been executed.  Again, Britain and the U.S were the proud initiators of yet another coup.  The C.I.A then handed out lists to the new government of 5,000 names, they were subsequently hunted down and murdered.  The Baathist party ruled until November of 63’, and there was another coup.  In the late 60s’ they regained power once again, and a decade later Saddam Hussein became the country’s President, with consequences that would haunt the country for many years to come.  One ally was lost in Iran, but no matter, because Saddam Hussein was promoting American interests in Baghdad, and they would thank him.  They sent him enough weapons to wage a war against his own population.

Since 1979 propaganda against Iran has been unrelenting.  The United States, of course, needs an “official enemy”, and the enemy  must be known to everyone.  Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden, just to name a few.  The U.S was waging its second war of terror, announced by George.W.Bush and supported during the Obama administration.  Iran is one of the most important and biggest powers in the Middle East, so the U.S have come up with creative and fairytale nonsense to launch the Americans into a state of frenzy and panic, believing Iran to be an imminent threat to the U.S.  How could they do this?  The answer is very simple.

The discussion was now about Iran’s military arsenal.  They wanted people to believe Iran was a threat to the world, and that Iran was intent on developing nuclear weapons.  This would be the sole justification for a military invasion.  It had already been justified for the brutal sanctions, where the civilian population of Iran suffers, but this is of no concern to Washington.  Part of the reason is for Iran to rise up and overthrow the current regime.  Its neighbours, Israel, not only has enough nuclear warheads to wipe it out; it has enough weapons to wipe out every country in the Middle East.  This is well known, but largely ignored.

Washington has allies in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt and so on but Iran is the one that got away, and it needs pulling back, so to speak.  This would be the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle.  If the U.S could somehow have a client regime in Iran, they would have total control over the Middle East, and indeed they know it.  So why did not George.W.Bush and his henchmen not overthrow the Ahmadinejad Government, as it had done in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Unlike these two countries Iran actually has an army to defend itself, not only that, it is organised, it is not a small army either.  They would be well disposed to defend themselves, that is the ultimate sin to Washington, self-defence.  When George.H.Bush assumed the presidency of the United states in 1989, a National Security Policy Review read: “in cases where the U.S confronts much weaker enemies, our challenge will be not simply to defeat them, but to defeat them decisively and  rapidly”.  In other words Washington wants weak enemies, a power that is unable to defend itself and a quick victory with few American casualties, so belligerent America can stand proud of this.  Panama and Iraq are striking examples.  

When his son, George.W.Bush made a speech on “the Axis of Evil”, he named Iran.  But fortunately for the Iranians they have sufficient military power to defend themselves from cowardly states.  They often paint Iran as evil and menacing, cruel, bloody and so forth.  It may be the case the Iranian Government is cruel and bloody to its own people, which Washington has no concern about, but in terms of international terrorism, rather Iranian state terror, it hardly goes bombing nations on a regular basis.  It is Israel’s duty to carry out such barbarism, the home of state terror in the Middle East, not Iran but Israel, beautiful Israel as its baleful sycophants call it.  

Barack Obama and the rest of the “civilised world” placed stupendous and barbaric sanctions on Iran, the main aim of sanctions of course is to attack the civilian population, to declare a kind of war on them, a war by other means, it is an economic war, that Iran has vast amounts of oil is no coincidence.  If the Iranian Government were overthrown, America and other “friendly” states would reap the awards.  So the propaganda against them has been rampant and constant.  Under what is labelled communism, the “threat of the red menace”; the propaganda on this is one of the biggest success stories of the 20th century.  We had briefly what was labelled “the drugs war”, this came in the form of bombing an old ally, Daniel Noriega, of Panama.  In the early ‘80s he was one of their most-favoured allies, this is when the M16 and the CIA were running drug cartels, and of course Noriega himself was heavily involved with this narco trafficking, but then he decided against letting the Reaganites use his country to carry out their terrorist war with Nicaragua, then came the obscenity of “humanitarian intervention”, this largely meant increasing murder and destruction in the Balkans, there was finally “a war on terror”, first launched in 1981 by Ronald Reagan, to terrorise Nicaragua, Guatemala, El-Salvador and others, in 2001, “the war on terror” was re-launched by George.W.Bush, it was more a corporate affair.  But it was all mass propaganda which allowed this criminal behaviour to perpetuate. But now the U.S and its client states have mounting problems, people are more aware of the actions of government.  The internet has allowed people to attain information that was previously unobtainable, they are now going on radical and dissident websites, they are also organising online, also there are protests, boycotts, information is being received by the general population, even through social networking sites, for many people use them.  So there is room to be concerned from the imperial powers.  Iran, meanwhile remains the “official enemy”, and Israel, the land of state terror and oppression, is an “official ally”.

Samira Makhmalbaf, an Iranian Film director, was asked along with ten other international film directors, to make a short film, eleven minutes long, to be exact, about September 11th, 2001.  She made the film from the perspective of the Iranians.  She showed how terrified Iranians were at the prospect of of Washington attacking the country at any moment.  One of the biggest liars in history and the biggest propagandists of modern times, is Tony Blair, at any appearance at the Chilcot enquiry about Iraq, he emphasised the need to deal with Iran, in fact he mentioned them no less than 50 times; this was from an enquiry that did not even concern Iran.

In this new age people are no longer people.  They do not have feelings, emotions, they do not feel excitement or pain.  States that do not adhere to the postwar global fascist framework are evil monsters.  The children in countries like Iran are unpeople, as are the elderly, the sick, women and everybody else.  They have become the new Vietnam, they have become the Filipino, the Cambodian, the Indonesian, the Guatemalan, the Nicaraguan, the Cuban, the Chilean, the Bolivian, the Albanian, the Palestinian, the Afghan, the Mexican, the Nigerian, the sudanese, the Brazilian and now the Iranian.  All this propaganda has now become official history, indeed history has been engineered.  Whatever will happen next?

5th January, 2013