[Peace-discuss] Hitler

[C. G. Estabrook]

I'm afraid that parts of this account of recent American history may be 
misleading.

To begin with, in more than forty years of intense investigation, there 
has been no proof that there was a plot to kill John Kennedy, though of 
course there may have been.  That's far less important, though, than the 
fantasy that if the Good Daddy (JFK) hadn't been replaced with the Bad 
Daddy (LBJ), there wouldn't have been all that unpleasantness in SE Asia 
-- where we're responsible for the murder of maybe four million people.

Call that the Oliver Stone Nightmare -- it ignores the continuity of 
American policy in SE Asia and elsewhere, and the fact that the war was 
enthusiastically begun by the Kennedy administration.  (The major 
invasion of South Vietnam -- against whom the war was fought -- took 
place a year and a half before Kennedy was killed.)  There no evidence 
that Johnson's becoming president scuttled any planned change in that 
enthusiasm.  Johnson's policy in SE Asia was Kennedy's policy, carried 
out by Kennedy's advisers.

The Watergate scandal really was a "third-rate burglary," used by a 
faction of the American political elite to remove a half-mad president 
who had indeed committed a sin: he used a bumbling version of tactics 
the US routinely used in the rest of the world (and much worse -- e.g., 
the Latin American death squads, invented by the Kennedy administration) 
and against non-elite enemies at home (e.g., COINTELPRO) -- against 
other members of the elite!  That was violation of the rules, and Nixon 
had to be punished.

Far from inspiring one of those "rare moments of truth in government" 
(and they are rare), Watergate simply demonstrated how subservient to 
power the corporate media are. The FBI COINTELPRO operations were 
exposed at the same time, and they were infinitely more serious than the 
Watergate caper. Those were actions not by a group of crooks mobilized 
by the president or a presidential committee but by the national 
political police. And it was not just Nixon's policy -- it continued 
through a series of administrations, from Kennedy to Nixon. What was 
exposed was extremely serious -- far worse than anything in Watergate -- 
including political assassination (I remember particularly vividly that 
of Fred Hampton), instigation of ghetto riots, a long series of 
burglaries and harassment against a legal political party (the Socialist 
Workers), and death-squad like tactics against the civil rights movement 
(perhaps including the death of M.L. King).  These people were outside 
the elite consensus, so it all goes down the media's memory hole, while 
they congratulate themselves on their "courage" in regard to Watergate.

What the Pentagon Papers reveal is not so much "systemic corruption of 
the Pentagon and intelligence services" (corruption of what? the high 
standards of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations?) as the 
continuity of American policy and its motives.  The Church and Pike 
hearings grew out of the "Vietnam Syndrome" that US administrations have 
worked so diligently to overcome for a generation now.  That is, the 
hearings occurred only because of a massive shift in American public 
opinion: by the 1970's, almost three-quarters of the American populace 
believed that the Vietnam War was "fundamentally wrong and immoral, not 
a mistake" (in the words of the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations, 
which did the longitudinal polling).

That frightened the elite terribly, as can be seen from the Trilateral 
Commission's 1976 book, "The Crisis of Democracy" -- the crisis was that 
too much democracy had grown up in the previous decade!  They had to put 
a stop to that, and their massive campaign has given the shape to 
American politics for a generation, from Carter's "malaise" to little 
Bush's "war on terrorism."  (That's also the reason all sides must now 
condemn "the Sixties" as either terribly naive or wickedly wrong-headed.)

Of course you're right about some of the forms that the thirty-year 
counterattack has taken -- and the Democrats' role in it.  But both 
parties today are substantially to the right of where the American 
populace is.  It's a great mistake to reduce the views of the majority 
to those of what Gore Vidal calls the "chattering classes," who have 
access to the media.

Polls of their actual opinions about society and politics show that the 
American people remain generally New Deal liberals -- which is 
remarkable, considering that they have hardly ever heard a politician or 
a media figure promoting those views.  The organizational heirs of the 
FDR's Democratic party are instead busily telling people the flat lie 
that the interests of the elite are the same as those of the majority 
("the national interest").  See any speech by Barack Obama.

But we have once again a substantial majority opposed to a foreign war. 
  The elite desperately fears the return of that high point of public 
concern and outrage, 35 years ago, which produced the most liberal 
administration since the 1930s (Nixon's -- and not because Nixon wanted 
it that way).  That fear may well be the source of last Friday's 
Executive Order.  The elite thought that the most vast and expensive 
marketing/propaganda system in history (perhaps a third of GDP) had 
succeeded in convincing people that they should sit in front of their 
televisions -- or computer screens -- and leave politics alone, because 
it won't make any difference anyway....

It's our job as activists to prove them wrong -- not by speaking truth 
to power (power already knows the truth) -- but by speaking truth to the 
people, whom power fears and urgently needs to mislead.

Regards, Carl


n.dahlheim at mchsi.com wrote:
> Bob, Your point about the parallel justice system is excellent.  The
> development of this system, as part of the secret government of the
> national security state (military-industrial-intelligence complex),
> has reared its ugly head in numerous political events and major
> scandals.  The national security state really began to usurp
> governmental power when they participated in the murder of JFK on the
> streets of Dallas.  Their covert work in this period helped fire the
> flames of conflict in SE Asia, spreading the war beyond Vietnam to
> Laos and Cambodia.  The Watergate scandal flowed directly out of this
> as well--- linking the perpetrators of the JFK murder to the systemic
> corruption of the Pentagon and intelligence services revealed in the
> Pentagon Papers.  Watergate briefly inspired those rare moments of
> truth in government where the national security state's assault on
> democracy and civil liberties became part of the accepted taxonomy of
> public discourse during the hearings of both the Church and Pike 
> Committees.  The national security state's participation in the
> infilitration of popular organizations and their accessory role in
> the murder of many leaders of the New Left became known. Even the
> House Select Committe on Assassinations admitted that the murder of
> the President was a conspiracy of organized crime (yet ignored the
> decisive role played by the national security state here).  The 
> crackdown on "alphabet" agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI,
> offered some hope for the restoration of a more democratic form of
> government.  The mass televisual delusion of the Reagan era---an era
> that has cast a long shadow over today's politics---ended the search
> for truth and the pursuit of justice. Instead, the national security
> state returned with avengeance.  Iran-Contra increased the national 
> security state's role in American politics.   They could completely
> subvert the Constitution and they flaunted both Congress and
> international law in mining the Managua harbor in contravention to
> the Boland Amendment and the Geneva Conventions.  They also
> trafficked crack into America's inner cities in order to fund arms
> sales and pocket windfall profits---thereby infecting the U.S.
> financial system with billions of laundered organized crime cash.
> (See Gary Webb's Dark Alliance and Peter Dale Scott's Cocaine
> Politics for more information on this crime).  Now, the Patriot Act,
> the overturning of the Insurrection Act, and the Military Commissions
> Act have legitimated this criminal state.  The parallel government is
> now at war with the American citizen, and this war is now backed by
> the full force of official law...  AND WE THINK SUPPORTING DEMOCRATS
> HELPS THIS?  DEMOCRATS HAVE WORKED WITH THIS AGENDA FOR A HOST OF
> REASONS FOR YEARS!  SEEING FRANK CHURCH DEFEATED BY THE RIGHT- WING
> IN THE EARLY 1980S WITH NARY A WORD FROM THE POPULATION SURELY
> EMBOLDENED THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE.  Working through Washington
> does little good.  If anything, the public's indifference and
> acquiesence for all practical purposes equals tacit support for the
> parallel criminal national security state.  I sometimes wonder if we
> deserve any better than this.  A public that believed the verbal
> hogwash spewed by an aged TV actor suffering from dementia and that
> did little to hold his corrupt Administration and their progeny to
> task surely deserves whatever comes their way. Don't misunderstand
> me.  I REALLY WANT DEMOCRACY TO WIN!  But, I don't think the mass 
> consciousness, the collective if you will, really cares.  Like John
> Wason says, Joe Sixpack doesn't care--- who will win the Super Bowl
> seems more important.  I want very badly to have Carl's passionate 
> optimism in the political righteousness of the American people.  But,
> hey they are excited for the American Idolization of the 2008
> election.  Outside of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich (and Cynthia 
> McKinney when she was the lone voice of dissent in Congress arguing
> that 911 was caused or at least abetted by the Bush Administration),
> nobody is looking at the profound disease of American political 
> society.  The people have their bread and circuses.  The Republic be
> damned, and democracy be consigned to the grave.  It's final
> relegation to the death bed dates back to 11/22/63, and it took 
> nearly forty years to expire.  The Bush-Cheney regime is the final
> stake through the heart of the American polity.  Our distracted
> society seems oblivious to this fact---and so be it for them.  A part
> of me is ready and willing to concede that the cause is lost and that
> our society is heading into its terminal decline.  Morris Berman in
> Dark Ages America and Kevin Phillips in American Theocracy, as well
> as a long list of other clear-minded social commentators, have
> accurately diagnosed this trend.  What remains to be seen is if some
> pockets of American society can construct alternatives to this
> diseased collective that are capable of being beacons of regenerative
> hope and models of sustainable democracy capable of providing models
> for posterity...