Dr Doug Died Today

Those of you who have followed this blog have read about Dr Doug by me (and he contributed quite a few posts, himself). I have shared his videos and told you that he is the best guitarist I ever knew personally (and better than most I knew from TV and concerts).

Nuclear Winter

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He was one of the most brilliant rednecks I ever knew. He caught on quick when it came to my rantings and because he trusted me, he knew he could follow up with something I shared and expound on it far more than I ever could. He told me several times that I helped wake him up. But he honed my abilities more than I ever explained to him.

I remember when he was a teen and picked up the guitar. He always wanted to be like his idol at the time, Hobbo, who was a fantastic guitarist until he let alcohol ruin him. Dr Doug became far better than Hobbo ever dreamed of.

I lost contact with Doug for nearly 20 years. But we made contact after he moved back to our hometown and married Beckie, the love of his life. He became my best friend.

He was that one person (not family) that I could share anything with. He was my confidant. He was the person I ran my crazy thoughts and rantings by first. He was the one that I called when I needed someone to talk to.

But the truth is that he had many “best friends” who loved him and looked up to him.

He was the one person, that had you called me to tell me he had died in his sleep, I wouldn’t believe it. There are only a few of the old hands left and any of them would not surprise me. But Doug, I thought, would live far longer than I.

I will write more about him later, but I want the world to know what a fine person they lost today.

He told me during one conversation a month or so ago, as his father was dying, that he wanted to just go in his sleep… no car wreck, no pain/suffering, no vegetable hooked up to lines and machines that just kept him breathing with no quality of life.

He did precisely that.

At 47.

Fuck.

Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination by Robert Morrow

Lyndon Johnson and the JFK Assassination

On the night of New Year’s Eve Dec. 31st, 1963, at the Driskell Hotel, Lyndon Johnson and Madeleine Brown, one of his longtime mistresses, had an interesting conversation. Madeleine asked LBJ if he had anything to do with the JFK assassination. Johnson got angry; he began pacing around and waving his arms. Then LBJ told her: it was Dallas, TX, oil executives and “renegade” intelligence agents who were behind the JFK assassination. LBJ later also told his chief of staff Marvin Watson that the CIA was involved in the murder of John Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson would often stay at the Driskill (room #254 today) and LBJ is confirmed by his presidential schedule as being present at the Driskill Hotel the night of 12/31/63

History is proving that Lyndon Johnson played a key role in the JFK assassination. An important book is LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (2011) by Phillip Nelson.  Roger Stone, an aide to Richard Nixon, is writing a book pinning the JFK assassination on LBJ. Stone quotes Nixon as saying:

“Both Johnson and I wanted to be president, but the only difference was I wouldn’t kill for it.”

By 1973 Barry Goldwater privately telling people that he was convinced that LBJ was behind the JFK assassination.

Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys hated each other. So why was LBJ even put on the 1960 Demo ticket in first place? The old wive’s tale is that it was to balance the ticket and win the electoral votes of Texas. The reality is that JFK was set to pick Sen. Stuart Symington of Missouri and had already had a deal with Symington to be VP that was “signed, sealed & delivered” according to Symington’s campaign manager Clark Clifford. Then something strange happened on the night of July 13, 1960, in Los Angeles. According to Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s longtime secretary, LBJ and Sam Rayburn were using some of Hoover’s blackmail information on John Kennedy to force JFK to put Johnson on the ticket in a hostile takeover of the vice presidency.

JFK told his friend Hy Raskin:

“They threatened me with problems and I don’t need more problems. I’m going to have enough problems with Nixon.”

LBJ & Hoover were very close and literally neighbors for 19 years in Washington, DC, from 1943-1961. Both men were also plugged in socially and professionally to Texas oil executives such as Clint Murchison, Sr, H.L. Hunt and D.H. Byrd.

From that point on, for the next 3 and 1/3 years the Kennedy brothers and LBJ were engaged in a sub rosa war, even though they were ostensibly a political team. On the day of the ’61 inauguration, LBJ protege Bobby Baker told Don Reynolds that JFK would never live out his term and that he would die a violent death.

For his part, Robert Kennedy spent the remainder of JFK’s term trying to figure out a way to get rid of the power-grasping LBJ. The first opportunity to do this was the Billie Sol Estes scandal of 1961. Estes was a cut out for LBJ doing business and had received $500,000 from LBJ (which tells us how important Estes was). LBJ and his aide Cliff Carter manipulated the federal bureaucracy for Estes to ensure that he got exclusive grain storage contracts and numerous other special and highly lucrative favors. Estes says that he funneled Johnson over $10 million in kickbacks.

Henry Marshall was a US agricultural official who was investigating the corruption of Estes, particularly his abuse of a cotton allotment program. In January, 1961, LBJ, Cliff Carter, Estes and LBJ’s personal hit man Malcolm Wallace had a meeting about what to do about Henry Marshall. LBJ said:

“It looks like we will just have to get rid of him.”

Side note: the first person I know who accused Lyndon Johnson of committing a murder was Gov. Allan Shivers who in 1956 personally accused LBJ of having Sam Smithwick murdered in prison in 1952. Smithwick was threatening to go public with information about the Box 13 ballot stuffing scandal of 1948 which gave LBJ the margin of victory over Coke Stevenson in the Democratic primary.

Henry Marshall was murdered on June 3, 1961. He was shot to death 5 times with a bolt action gun and his death was astoundingly ruled a suicide at the time. The Marshall murder & cover up shows the depth, breadth and absolute ruthlessness of the LBJ organization. Billie Sol Estes died recently on May 14, 2013.

Historian Douglas Brinkley has said that by 1963 JFK and his vice president LBJ had no relationship at all. That is not correct; in fact a sub rosa war was being waged between the Kennedys and LBJ. It was an adversarial, death struggle relationship.

In the fall of 1963, the Bobby Baker scandal exploded into the national media. Bobby Baker, who as the secretary of the Senate was a virtual son to Lyndon Johnson, was being investigated for a vending machine kick back scam and numerous shady deals. Baker was known for providing booze & women to the senators. LBJ denied any relationship with Baker (who had named two of his kids after LBJ) while at the same time sending his personal lawyer Abe Fortas to run (control) Baker’s defense. Evelyn Lincoln told author Anthony Summers that the Kennedys were going to use the Bobby Baker scandal as the ammunition to get rid of LBJ.

Robert Kennedy had a two-track program to get rid of LBJ. Phil Brennan was in DC at the time: “Bobby Kennedy called five of Washington’s top reporters into his office and told them it was now open season on Lyndon Johnson. It’s OK, he told them, to go after the story they were ignoring out of deference to the administration.” James Wagenvoord, who in 1963 was a 27-year old assistant to LIFE Magazine’s managing editor, says that based on information fed from Robert Kennedy and the Justice Dept., LIFE Magazine had been developing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. This expose was set to run within a week of the JFK assassination. LBJ aide George Reedy said that LBJ knew about the RFK-inspired media campaign against him and was obsessed with it.

RFK’s other “get rid of LBJ” program was an investigation by the Senate Rules Committee into LBJ’s kickbacks and other corruptions. Burkett Van Kirk was a counsel for that committee and he told Seymour Hersh that RFK had sent a lawyer to the committee to feed them damaging information about LBJ and his corrupt business dealings. The lawyer, Van Kirk said, “used to come up to the Senate and hang around me like a dark cloud. It took him about a week or ten days to, one, find out what I didn’t know, and two, give it to me.” The goal of the Kennedys was “To get rid of Johnson. To dump him. I am as sure of that the sun comes up in the east,” said Van Kirk to Hersh.

Literally at the very moment JFK was being assassinated in Dallas on 11-22-63, Don Reynolds was testifying in a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee about a suitcase of $100,000 given to LBJ for his role in securing a TFX fighter jet contract for Fort Worth’s General Dynamics.

Three days before the JFK assassination, JFK told Evelyn Lincoln that he was going to get a new running mate for 1964.

“I was fascinated by this conversation and wrote it down verbatim in my diary. Now I asked, “Who is your choice as a running-mate.’ He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, ‘at this time I am thinking about Gov. Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.’”

At this point I should add that I think the CIA/military intelligence murdered John Kennedy for Cold War reasons, particularly over Cuba policy. The fact that the Kennedys were within days of politically executing & personally destroying Lyndon Johnson could very well have been the tripwire for the JFK assassination.

The Russians immediately suspected that Texas oilmen were involved in the JFK assassination. They and Fidel Castro both feared they were going to be framed for it by US intelligence. By 1965 the KGB had internally determined that Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination.

Hoover wrote to LBJ about this in a memo that was not declassified by the US government until 1996:

“On September 16, 1965, this same source [an FBI spy in the KGB] reported that the KGB Residency in New York City received instructions approximately September 16, 1965, from KGB headquarters in Moscow to develop all possible information concerning President Lyndon B. Johnson’s character, background, personal friends, family, and from which quarters he derives his support in his position as President of the United States. Our source added that in the instructions from Moscow, it was indicated that “now” the KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy. KGB headquarters indicated that in view of this information, it was necessary for the Soviet Government to know the existing personal relationship between President Johnson and the Kennedy family, particularly between President Johnson and Robert and “Ted” Kennedy.”

Robert Morrow, a political researcher and political activist, has an expertise in the JFK assassination. He can be reached at Morrow321@aol.com or 512-306-1510.

Notes:

1) Brown, Madeleine Duncan. Texas in the Morning: The Love Story of Madeleine Brown and President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Conservatory Press, 1997. Page 189.

2) Schlesinger, Arthur. Robert Kennedy and His Times. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978. Page 616.

3) Nelson, Phillip. LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination. Skyhorse Publishing, 2011.

4) Dickerson, Nancy. Among Those Present: A Reporter’s View of 25 Years in Washington. Random House, 1976. Page 43.

5) Hersh, Seymour. The Dark Side of Camelot. Back Bay Books, 1998. Page 126 and 407.

6) Epstein, Edward Jay. Esquire Magazine. December, 1966.

7) Estes, Billie Sol. Billie Sol Estes: A Texas Legend. BS Productions, 2004. Page 43.

8) Dallek, Robert. Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times 1908-1960. Oxford Univesity Press USA, 1992. Page 347.

9) Brinkley, Douglas. Speaking on Hardball with Chris Matthews, 2012.

10) Brennan, Phil. “Some Relevant Facts about the JFK Assassination,” NewsMax, 11-19-2003.
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/18/152526.shtml

11) Reedy, George. Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir. Andrews McMeel Publications, 1985.

12) Wagenvoord, James. Email to John Simkin dated 11-3-09. Web link:
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=14966

14) Lincoln, Evelyn. Kennedy and Johnson. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Page 205.

15) Hoover, J. Edgar. Memo to Lyndon Johnson with FBI leadership carbon copied. 12-1-66. Web link:
http://www.indiana.edu/~oah/nl/98feb/jfk.html#d1

From Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger (1978):

“In 1967 Marvin Watson of Lyndon Johnson’s White House staff told Cartha DeLoach of the FBI that Johnson “was now convinced there was a plot in connection with the assassination. Watson stated the President felt that CIA had had something to do with this plot.” (Washington Post, December 13, 1977)

James Wagenvoord email to John Simkin, dated 11-3-2009:

Posted 04 November 2009 – 07:52 AM

I thought researchers would be interested in reading this email I received last night:

I’ve been reading through you web site and believe that I can add one of the final jigsaw puzzle pieces that affect the timing of JFK’s Dallas trip and the nervousness of LBJ during the weeks preceding the killing At the time I was the 27 year old Editorial business manager and assistant to Life Magazines Executive Editor. Beginning in later summer 1963 the magazine, based upon information fed from Bobby Kennedy and the Justice Department, had been developoing a major newsbreak piece concerning Johnson and Bobby Baker. On publication Johnson would have been finished and off the ’64 ticket (reason the material was fed to us) and would probably have been facing prison time. At the time LIFE magazine was arguably the most important general news source in the US. The top management of Time Inc. was closely allied with the USA’s various intelligance agencies and we were used ofter by the Kennedy Justice Department as a conduit to the public. Life’s coverage of the Hoffa prosecution, and involvement in paying off Justice Department Memphis witesses was a case in point.

The LBJ/Baker piece was in the final editing stages and was scheduled to break in the issue of the magazine due out the week of November 24 (the magazine would have made it to the newsstands on Nov.26th or 27th). It had been prepared in relative secrecy by a small special editorial team. On Kennedy’s death research files and all numbered copies of the nearly print-ready draft were gathered up by my boss (he had been thetop editor on the team) and shredded. The issue that was to expose LBJ instead featured the Zapruder film. Based upon our success in syndicating the Zapruder film I became Chief of Time/LIFE editorial services and remained in that job until 1968.

How To Gather An Army by Mike

Amnesty = ?

So there is already an effort underway to voluntarily document “illegal’s” for the draft, but how the hell is it possible to enforce compliance with an undocumented populace. It certainly would be difficult and seems rather contradictory in nature.

(Sidenote – I also think there’s some legs to these seemingly disparate stories as well… Open queers in the military… then, women in combat duty… now, illegal’s potentially being forced to register with Selective Service… Me thinks someone is gathering an army because it sure is shit isn’t about “guaranteeing civil liberties and equal rights”…)

So this got me thinking – what does this Amnesty package equal?

—————

Amnesty = 11 million more eligible recipients of government aid (Welfare… Unemployment… Medicare… Straw that broke the camel’s back?)

Amnesty = 11 million more eligible voters (bloc for Marxist-Left – they sure as hell ain’t voting for the 82%-White Republican Party)

Amnesty = 11 million more legalized “cultural” aliens (increased demographic pressure on traditional America – furthering heterogenic tension)

Amnesty = 11 million more legal workers in labor pool (increased competition in a stressed economy – further drive down wages as labor pool increases)

Amnesty = 11 million more draftees (thanks to the recent changes and pending legislation to Selective Service)

————

I may be missing some things, but in what way is Amnesty good for Americans… Honestly, I’d like some feedback.

What Purpose Does The Boston Bombing False Flag Event Serve? Guest Post by Mike

Interesting how the Boston bombing “suspects” turned out to be Caucasians (used in the proper ethnic sense).

I – like you most probably – initially felt this was going to be a rehash of OKC in ’95 for it presented a golden opportunity to go on the offensive against those damn patriot “radicals.” Yet, interestingly enough the story was steered in another direction, though some Good-Goy journalists and their Jew-Counterparts took a few aimless shots.

So this got me to thinking…

What purpose does this event serve?

Our enemy is clearly dimensional in thought. They do not commit “A” to get “B” – no – they commit “A” to get “ALPHABET.” Yet motive can sometimes become blurred with so many moving pieces – and in order to clearly see the game – one sometimes needs to refresh and relook the whole board.

So where am I going with this?

After reading a few articles to the effect of Obama reaching out to Putin for mutual security options as a result of the Boston Bombing (LINK), this tied down a few macro-links I’d been mulling over.

The past two major-media propaganda blitzes have been: North Korea & Boston… Full-Court Big-Money mindfucks in both circumstances…

So what do these two disparate storylines share in common (since anyone with half-a-functioning brain knows the MSM version is bullshite)?

Cover… Domestically-Plausible & Internationally-Convenient Cover for further weapons system and troop deployments (aka “training exercises”)…

Further tightening the noose on the artificial antithesis (SCO v NATO).

This “buildup” seems confirmed by the recent heralded trip Obama made to Jewryland to worship the half-dicks.

The headline of the trip – Peace with Palestinians?!?…

Not a chance – fuck that goyish hippie-jive jack… Instead there was renormalized relations between the Jews & Turks…

Now, the timing of the this seems to be fulfilling several agendas (i.e. dimensional thought) and comes as a hurried result of the FSA (Fuckup-SacOshit-Amateurs) failing to oust Assad in a timely manner. As well as tying nicely to our recent domestic “Chechen” terrorists in Boston.

First

If a conflict were to erupt in the region – Russia’s Navy would have to pass through Istanbul & the Dardanelles (image below). Kind of a huge fucking problem if the Turks are not on your side…

Second

The lucrative natural-gas EU-pipeline being proposed by Turkey & Israel, as relations are now “normalized” (aka publically applauding your own ass-raping by Israel), will serve as substitute for the EU should conflict erupt with Russia (who currently provides over 50% of EU consumption). Conveniently, Cyprus now has the “economic-incentive” to cooperate with this deal, as the pipeline will have to travel through its waters (can you grab your ankles and say “Bail-In”?)…

Third

This relationship will further enclose and isolate Syria from any external aid. With engineered internal-conflict on the horizon between Sunni’s and Shia’s in Iraq (LINK), Shia Iran will have a difficult time aiding Hezbollah & Syria from fall. The Kurd’s in the northeast will not openly aid anyone (Iran nor Russia) unless they’re promised full sovereignty – something the Jews have been quietly doing for years (aided by their large Mossad presence in Mosul). This leaves Turkey in the key position to control the support in and out of Syria. And the “easing” of tensions between the Turks & Kurds (LINK – and you can bet this is working in coordination with the Shylocks) further solidifies this role…

Forth

The Jews know how to play people’s emotions and tendencies to their own advantage. The Turks traditionally hate the Russians (4-Century Russo-Turkish War). The Turks traditionally hate the Greeks (Greco-Turkish War). The Turks traditionally hate the Armenians (Armenian-Genocide). The Turks traditionally hate the Kurds (conflict still ongoing – though “change” is in the air temporarily). These age-old animosities can be called upon by crafty politicians to ”justify” these moves in coordination with Israel.

Yet, any “normalization” requires both parties getting something from the deal or at least leaving with the perception of which…

So what is it the Turks cling to?

The dream of Pan-Turkism (Neo-Ottomanism) which is still alive and well in prominent Turkish political circles, a game the Jew only knows too well (British Israelism, Christian Identity, etc). And this dream can only be “promised” if the perceptive security of Turkey is ensured…

So how does the region look?

Well, to the west, there is disunity in Greece as a result of the sacking of their economy… To the south, civil war in Syria and the destroyed shell of Iraq presents little risk… To the east lies the Kurds, a group whose traditional animosity will not willingly aid the Turks nor Persians (though creating a convenient antagonistic buffer)…

Yet to the north, lingers a rising Mother Russia – a threat the Turks most certainly cannot handle alone.

Now, there have already been repositionings to move missile systems into Turkey back in 2011-2012 (LINK), but this came under heavy international pressure. That said, I’m sure Turkey wants as much of a buffer/cannon fodder between them & Russia as possible so history does not repeat (i.e. Crimean War & WW1 – where Russia invaded through the Caucuses/Georgia). Efforts were already underway to sufficiently arm Georgia (LINK) but this was certainly not going unnoticed by Russia (LINK & LINK)…

What to do, what to do?…

Enter the Boston Bombers with the convenient background (LINK) while Israel is already underway securing alliances with Azerbaijan (LINK)…

Maybe throw in an air base for good measure (LINK)… (ß In the center of Turkey?!?!?)

Like I said – the identity of these bombers provides good cover…

The Turkish leadership is setting their people for up for slaughter in return for a few shekels and pipe dreams. They are the regional pawns who are playing a very dangerous game, particularly with their recent SCO interest being displayed (which is nothing but an effort to create confusion from my point of view)… Once this conflagration kicks off – human nature will look in the direction of bullets fired and forget the deceivers knife lurking behind….

With the rear secured for Jewryland – it’s only a matter of time before our Yid Slavemasters shout the battle cry – “Onward, Christian Soldier”…

—————-

The false-flag for the gun-loving patriots is yet to come…

Me suspects this one will be huge and probably set in Chicago (just like many recent Jewryvision shows – Chicago Code, Chicago Fire, Chicagolicious, The Good Wife, etc.). No matter how many of these shows fail (LINK), they keep coming out with more…

Why?

For every suasive-story must contain a vivid-setting and relatable characters… Because as George Lucas aptly said – “A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing”…

—————-

Just my six shekels for whatever it may be worth. This is certainly not all the agenda, merely a small piece of why this was done (N. Korea/West Pacific buildup another matter – image below). But maybe a piece that hadn’t crossed your mind which is why I thought I’d share.

Few Links Regarding Image Above:

Weapons Systems – LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK

Chinese Positioning – LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK / LINK

Passionflower

Dedicated to Dr Doug (who I know will appreciate this as much or more than I do). Doug was hit from behind as he sat at a red light. His back is in rough shape and I hope that you will join me as I pray for the best care and his quick healing:

This song is about I plant a grew in my 10-feet-square backyard in the Leeds inner city. I put the seeds in a tiny tub, but it grew like a Roald Dahl story until it took over the whole yard, then one day the sun shone extra hard and 100 flowers all went “Pop!”. It was amazing, so I wrote a song for it.

~ Jon

Thanks to Zen at zengardner.com

B’Man’s Sabbath Watch: God’s Song

And God said, “You must all be crazy to put your faith in me.”

Cain slew Abel Seth knew not why
For if the children of Israel were to multiply
Why must any of the children die?
So he asked the Lord
And the Lord said:

“Man means nothing, he means less to me
than the lowliest cactus flower
or the humblest yucca tree.
He chases round this desert
cause he thinks that’s where I’ll be
that’s why I love mankind.

I recoil in horror from the foulness of thee
from the squalor and the filth and the misery.
How we laugh up here in heaven at the prayers you offer me!
That’s why i love mankind”

The Christians and the Jews were having a jamboree
The Buddhists and the Hindus joined on satellite TV
They picked their four greatest priests
And they began to speak.
They said “Lord the plague is on the world.
Lord no man is free.
The temples that we built to you
Have tumbled into the sea.
Lord, if you won’t take care of us
Won’t you please please let us be?”

And the Lord said
And the Lord said

“I burn down your cities–how blind you must be
I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we.
You must all be crazy to put your faith in me
That’s why i love mankind
You really need me
That’s why i love mankind”

B’Man’s Patriot Watch: Thomas Jefferson’s Place in History

Thomas Jefferson’s Place in History

Martin A. Larson

In a recent Washington Post article, “Thomas Jefferson, Tarnished Icon?” (Oct. 17, 1992), staff writer Joel Achenbach subtly and snidely sought to dethrone Thomas Jefferson from the pinnacle on which he is so rightly enshrined.

“Among professional historians, Jefferson’s stock has sunk in the last generation, and it has a lot to do with race and slavery,” said historian Peter Onuf at a recent conference at the University of Virginia. In the harsh view of Paul Finkelman, another historian who is quoted here with apparent approval, Jefferson was a “pathetic” racist, and “a profligate, undisciplined spender” who “could not live without slaves. Too self-indulgent to manage carefully his own lands and his life, he relied upon slaves, as a source of ready capital, selling scores of them to support his habits and pleasures.” In Finkelman’s opinion, Jefferson was “the arch traitor” against “the hopes of the world.”

Jefferson authored the Declaration of Indepence, and then served as US minister to France, governor of Virginia, secretary of state, vice president, and president of the United States. During his decades of public service, he received no compensation above actual expenses. His duties required him to be away from his home so much that he fell into debt, and was able to save his home only with the generous help of friends. When he retired from the presidency in 1809, the legislature of Virginia, his native state, paid tribute to him in a resolution that declared:

“We have to thank you for the model of an administration conducted on the purest principles of republicanism; for … patronage discarded; internal taxes abolished; a host of superfluous officers disbanded; … more than thirty-three millions of debt discharged; … and, without the guilt or calamities of conquest, [for] a vast and fertile region added to our country … These are points in your administration which the historian will not fail to seize, to expand, and teach posterity to dwell upon with delight.”

It would take a small book merely to list and describe the blessings he conferred upon America and its people. For example, as president he abolished the internal revenue tax system established by Alexander Hamilton, reduced taxes by fifty percent, and paid off nearly half of the national debt in eight years. Contrast this with what has been and still is being done in Washington!

Jefferson’s interests were always for the welfare of the country and its citizens. Even today, though, there are dishonest individuals and various special interests who hate anyone who shares his ideals. Jefferson once said that he was assailed by so many enemies that if he were to answer them all, he would not have time for anything else. Instead, he declared, he would let judgment of him and his record be made by the people — who responded by electing him to a second term in a landslide. Later generations have similarly shown their appreciation by erecting in his honor one of the most magnificent memorials to be found in our capital.

Concerning the thorny issue of slavery, Jefferson wrote: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these [black] people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live under the same government.” He did not mean that the two races could not somehow co-exist, but rather that they could not live together in peace and harmony.

History has born out the truth of his observation. Since the abolition of slavery, the two races have co-existed in an uneasy state of mutual suspicion and animosity, in spite of the enormous efforts and vast sums spent by white America on behalf of blacks. Black urban areas have degenerated into crime-ridden slums, periodically torn apart by riots. Jefferson proposed that all young blacks, with their children, should be transported from the United States and set up in comfort in a faraway land, probably in Africa. If his proposal had been implemented, this country would have been spared the terrible Civil War, and perhaps other calamities.

Jefferson regarded slavery as an unparalleled iniquity. For this he strongly criticized Britain’s rulers, who fostered the slave trade in large part to discourage emigration to America of their own starving unemployed.

Washington Post writer Achenbach could not deny himself the pleasure of bringing up the tired old accusation that Jefferson took a black slave, Sally Hemings, as a mistress. In fact, there is not the slightest shred of evidence of such a liaison, or that Jefferson was the father of any of her children.

Commenting on lies and calumnies about him that were being published in newspapers at the time, he wrote in 1807: “As for myself, conscious that there was not a truth on earth which I feared, should it be known, I have lent myself willingly as a subject of a great experiment, which was to prove” that the calumnies of a licentious press could not batter down one who had led a blameless life and had nothing to hide.

From The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.- Feb. 1993 (Vol. 13, No. 1), pages 40-41.

About the Author

Martin A. Larson (1897- 1994) was the author of more than 20 books, including the 414-page work, Jefferson: Magnificent Populist. He received a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan.

Elia Kazan, American Hero by DCDave

Elia Kazan, American Hero

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elia_Kazan

Ben and Norma Barzman were Hollywood screenwriters and unapologetic members of the Communist Party.  As such, they became victims of the Hollywood blacklist and lived and worked in exile in Europe, mainly in France, from the late 1940s to the late 1970s.  The following passage is from Norma’s 2003 book, The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate (p. 442):

proud Communist Party member
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk

In March 1999, ten years after Ben’s death, the Writers Guild restored screenplay credit to Ben for El Cid and solo original screenplay credit (“Written By”) to me for Luxury Girls.  At the same moment, the Academy announced their intention to bestow an honorary Oscar on Elia Kazan.  Along with Abe Polonsky, Bernie Gordon, Jean Butler, Bobbie Lees, and the other surviving blacklistees and their offspring, I was goosed into action.  I’d been comparatively quiet, attending blacklist retrospectives, promoting Tender Comrades at bookstores and universities.  But I was energized once again.  I collected money for ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, picketed outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with my grandson, Matthew, Daniel’s son; spoke on radio and TV.  A big demonstration greeted Oscar-goers, most of whom did not stand or applaud Kazan.

And what was it about belatedly honoring perhaps the greatest director the American motion picture industry has ever seen that had Ms. Barzman so exercised?  Here, by way of explanation, is how The New York Times began its March 22, 1999, article entitled “Amid Protests, Elia Kazan Receives His Oscar:”

Elia Kazan said ”thank you” tonight at the Academy Awards, and then walked off stage slowly to sustained applause.

It was, in some ways, a bittersweet finale to the controversy over the honorary Oscar for the 89-year-old filmmaker, a controversy dating back to 1952 when Kazan, the director of ”On the Waterfront” and other classics, named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating Communist influences in Hollywood.

After an all-too-sketchy summary of Kazan’s many accomplishments, The Times gave Kazan’s detractors the last word with this conclusion:

But critics of the award to Mr. Kazan said that the director should not be forgiven for the decision he made in 1952. A full-page ad in Daily Variety, signed by some members of the entertainment world as well as lawyers and academics, said that Mr. Kazan ”validated the blacklisting of thousands” and that ”his action did enormous damage to the motion picture industry.”

Only a handful of the hundreds of signatories were well known, among them the actors Sean Penn, Ed Asner and Theodore Bikel.

CNN, in its coverage before the event, even went so far as to publicize the Kazan attackers by printing the Hollywood Reporter ad in its entirety:

“There is the story in our history of a man who was proclaimed a hero of the American Revolution. In one of the battles against the British he suffered a mutilating leg wound. Sadly, after the revolution he became a traitor. It was ruled that for treason he be hanged. But before they hanged him, the leg that was wounded was amputated so that the better part of him be not dishonored.

“Elia Kazan too was a traitor. Some of those betrayed were his close friends. Their lives and futures were destroyed. He became ally and accomplice to an infamous committee which shamed his country. There is no way for the films of Kazan to be amputated from the rest of him. Yet, if there were any decency left in him he should have refused the award so as not to once again sow discord and bitterness among those whose lives and devotion are given to cinema.” Signed, Jules Dassin.

Not to be outdone, in 2003 PBS had this to say about Kazan and his Congressional testimony:

One of Kazan’s defenders is Arthur Miller, much to the disappointment of many on the left. Miller is one of the heroes of the McCarthy Era. He defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1956, and refused, unlike Kazan, to name those whom he knew to be “fellow travelers.” For this he was held in contempt of Congress, fined, and sentenced to jail time.

Miller, who struggled at the time so mightily with his personal moral failing, emerged as the exemplar of courage in face of the Red scare. He has even taken on an aura of saintliness over the years. Kazan occupies the other end of the spectrum: a man defined almost entirely by his decision to name names. For many, Kazan’s brilliant career-all that he contributed to the theater, to film, to letters-will be tainted by a single decision he was forced to make some fifty years ago.

The Continuing Communism Whitewash

What in the world is going on here?  At the time that Kazan gave his testimony, we only knew a small part of the evils of Soviet Communism under Joseph Stalin.  Nikita Khrushchev had not yet made his famous speech on the cult of personality and its horrible consequences.  The Soviet historian Roy Medvedev hadn’t published his exposé of Stalin entitled Let History Judge.  Most importantly, The Gulag Archipelago and the other great writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn were still in the distant future.  On the American political scene, the revelations of a number of former Communists had been published in the form of a book entitled The God That Failed three years before, in which the insidiousness of the Communist Party in the United States was put on full display.  Former Communist spies Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers had given their Congressional testimony, and one of the people Chambers accused of being a Soviet spy, Alger Hiss, had been convicted of perjury, but there were still a lot of people who believed that he, Lauchlin Currie, Owen Lattimore, and other high level Communists and Communist sympathizers were just victims of a witch hunt.  Allen Weinstein, previously a Hiss defender, had not yet written Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, showing to the satisfaction of almost everyone in the history community how right Chambers was about Hiss and the Communist infiltration of the government.

One would think that in 1999, a decade after the collapse of the Soviet empire, Kazan would be the vindicated one and all those long-time promoters of the Soviet Union like Norma Barzman and her friend Polonsky—who, demonstrating his unreconstructed Stalinist tendencies was quoted as saying on the eve of Kazan’s award, “I’ll be watching, hoping someone shoots him. It would no doubt be a thrill in an otherwise dull evening.”—would be the ones slinking away with their tails between their legs.  Rather, it is the contrary, and they are given reinforcement by our national opinion-molding mainstream.  They are now the unvarnished heroes, while Kazan, politically at least, is the villain.

Consider the shallow and contradictory attacks they make on the man.  He “validated the blacklisting of thousands,” they say.  They don’t say that he supported the blacklisting, which he certainly did not, as he showed with his professional assistance of the pro-Communist Zero Mostel:

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Mostel

It was not until 1950 that Mostel again acted in movies, for a role in the Oscar winning film Panic in the Streets, at the request of its director, Elia Kazan. Kazan describes his attitude and feelings during that period, where, according to biographer Arthur Sainer, “MGM blacklisted Zero Mostel way before the days of the blacklist.”

Each director has a favorite in his cast, . . . my favorite this time was Zero Mostel—but not to bully. I thought him an extraordinary artist and a delightful companion, one of the funniest and most original men I’d ever met. . . I constantly sought his company. . . He was one of the three people whom I rescued from the “industry’s” blacklist. . . For a long time, Zero had not been able to get work in films, but I got him in my film.

Perhaps by choosing the word “validated” they mean that he confirmed that there were, indeed, members of the Communist Party, which he, himself had been for a short time, working in the entertainment industry in key positions.  He named eight former associates who were also Communists.  One of them, the playwright Clifford Odets, he noted, had left the Party the same time as he did.  All of them, as it happens, were already known by the committee to be Communists.  PBS is simply wrong, then, to call them “fellow travelers,” suggesting that they were just sympathizers with some of the things that the Communists purported to stand for and it is doubly wrong to put the expression in quotes, which implies that it might just be someone else’s characterization of them.  Kazan’s critics can’t have it both ways.  He either validated the hunt for genuine Communist Party members in show business or he did not.

Who Was the Traitor?

Jules Dassin’s use of the word “traitor” to describe him is also quite interesting.  The most common understanding of “traitor” is “one who commits treason,” that is, one who betrays his country.  Could one find a better word to describe those who remained loyal to the American Communist Party throughout the Stalin period than “traitor?”  As Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley has put it so succinctly in his very revealing book Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, “…the essence of American Communism was loyalty to Stalin.” (p. 287)  Anyone who was a member of the party for any length of time could see that that was the case, but one hardly had to be a party member to see it.  Just watching how quickly the Communists turned from being the biggest opponents of American involvement in the war in Europe to being the biggest proponents when Hitler turned on his Soviet allies should have been education enough.  In the national loyalty sense of the term, then, the word “traitor” comes a lot closer to describing the people Kazan fingered, with the exception of Odets, who had ended his membership in the Party.

Dassin must mean, then, that Kazan was a traitor in the sense that he betrayed either his cause or his friends and associates.  Since he had long since parted company with the “cause” of the American Communist Party, the charge boils down to his ratting out some of his former comrades, who, unbeknownst to him, had already been effectively ratted out.  For that, the sweeping conclusion is reached that by that deed this great contributor to the film-making art somehow did “enormous damage to the motion picture industry.”

It really is hard to take people seriously who speak in such absurd hyperbole.  Clearly there can be no connection between his confirmation of the Communist Party membership of those few individuals and any damage to the quality of movie making in America.  Maybe it’s somehow just the principle of the thing that they’re talking about.  But when it comes to the question of the principles involved, there is no better authority than Kazan himself.  Here, in the full text of an advertisement he purchased in The New York Times on April 12, 1952:

In the past weeks intolerable rumors about my political position have been circulating in New York and Hollywood. I want to make my stand clear:

I believe that Communist activities confront the people of this country with an unprecedented and exceptionally tough problem. That is, how to protect ourselves from a dangerous and alien conspiracy and still keep the free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect.

I believe that the American people can solve this problem wisely only if they have the facts about Communism. All the facts.

Now I believe that any American who is in possession of such facts has the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate Government agency.

Whatever hysteria exists — and there is some, particularly in Hollywood — is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.

The facts I have are sixteen years out of date, but they supply a small piece of background to the graver picture of communism today.

I have placed these facts before the House Committee on Un-American Activities without reserve and I now place them before the public and before my co-workers in motion pictures and in the theatre.

Seventeen and a half years ago I was a twenty-four-year old stage manager and bit actor, making $40 a week, when I worked.

At that time nearly all of us felt menaced by two things: The depression and the ever growing power of Hitler. The streets were full of unemployed and shaken men. I was taken in by the Hard Times version of what might be called the Communists’ advertising or recruiting technique. They claimed to have a cure for depressions and a cure for Naziism and Fascism.

I joined the Communist Party late in the summer of 1934. I got out a year and a half later.

I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936, that the American Communist Party was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin.

What I learned was the minimum that anyone must learn who puts his head into the noose of party “discipline.” The Communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. They attempted to control thought and to suppress personal opinion. They tried to dictate personal conduct. They habitually distorted and disregarded and violated the truth. All this was crudely opposite of their claims of “democracy” and “the scientific approach.”

To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but it is bitter and unforgettable. It is diluted because you can walk out.

I got out in the spring of 1936.

The question will be asked why I did not tell this story sooner. I was held back, primarily, by concern for the reputations and employment of people who may, like myself, have left the party many years ago.

I was held back by a piece of specious reasoning which has silenced many liberals. It goes like this: “You may hate the Communists, but you must not attack or expose them, because if you do you are attacking the right to hold unpopular opinions and you are joining the people who attack civil liberties.”

I have thought soberly about this. It is, simply, a lie.

Secrecy serves the Communists. At the other pole, it serves those who are interested in silencing liberal voices. The employment of a lot of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to become associated with or silenced by the Communists.

Liberals must speak out.

I think it is useful that certain of us had this kind of experience with the Communists, for if we had not we should not know them so well. Today, when all the world fears war and they scream peace, we know how much their professions are worth. We know tomorrow they will have a new slogan.

Firsthand experience of dictatorship and thought control left me with an abiding hatred of these. It left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods and the conviction that these must be resisted always.

It also left me with the passionate conviction that we must never let the Communists get away with the pretense that they stand for the very things which they kill in their own countries.

I am talking about free speech, a free press, the rights of property, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual rights. I value these things. I take them seriously. I value peace, too, when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies.

I believe these things must be fought for wherever they are not fully honored and protected whenever they are threatened.

The motion pictures I have made and the plays I have chosen to direct represent my convictions.

I expect to continue to make the same kinds of pictures and to direct the same kinds of plays.

For anyone who might still believe that Kazan’s attackers hold the moral high ground, I suggest that they just go back and read his statement again, perhaps a little more carefully the second time through.  Who can honestly take issue with a single line in it?  If that doesn’t work, then watch this powerful scene in the Kazan-directed On the Waterfront.

It is hardly noble or admirable, Kazan is telling us, to protect the secrets of murderous, power-lusting thugs in the name of loyalty to one’s associates.  And when it comes to murderousness and power lust, the mobsters who controlled the New York docks in the movie were very small timers compared to the controllers of those he informed on for HUAC.  As he wrote in his autobiography, “On the Waterfront was my own story.  Every day I worked on that film, I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go **** themselves. (Elia Kazan: A Life, p. 529; quoted in Billingsley, p. 244).

The political climate has changed now so drastically, it is very hard for most Americans to appreciate how powerful and insidious the American Communist Party was in the Red Decade of the 1930s and well into the 1940s.  In his statement Kazan says, “I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies,” but the main reason for that is that spies had no reason to infiltrate his line of work, but subversives certainly did.

“Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important,” is the quote from Vladimir Lenin that Billingsley uses to lead off his Part I.  Consonant with that dictum, burrowing into Hollywood and taking it over was as important to Stalin’s Communist Party as controlling the docks was to the mob in On the Waterfront.  And it was very successful.  Contrary to the popular notion we might have now that one was taking great risks for his ideals to be a Communist, at the height of the party’s influence, it was actually a career advantage in Hollywood:

For the cinema revolutionaries, wrote Eugene Lyons, Communism was “an intoxicated state of mind, a glow of inner virtue, and a sort of comradeship in super-charity,” a way for the wealthy to posture as proletarian wage slaves.  On the other hand, the Party triumphalist mind-set, the notion that they automatically write better screenplays and belonged to the victorious army of the future, led some to use ideology as a substitute for talent or even effort.  According to Louis Berg, longtime Hollywood journalist Max Youngstein of Universal circulated a memo informing all personnel that being a Communist was no longer sufficient reason to be employed there, and that doing a bit of work would also be required.

Former Communist screenwriter Roy Huggins says that there were a number of “awful writers” who wouldn’t have worked without their politics.  For this type of person, Huggins said, becoming a member of the Communist Party “was just another way of being Sammy Glick,” the hero of Budd Schulberg’s novel, What Makes Sammy Run? (Billingsley, pp. 58-59)

Misplaced Indignation

When it comes to the Hollywood blacklist, nothing could be clearer than that no finger of blame should be pointed in the direction of the great director, Elia Kazan.  Contrary to a popular belief that is perpetuated by people who are at odds with the truth, the blacklist had nothing to do with the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy.  The blacklist was begun by the major studio heads in 1947.  That was the year Senator McCarthy took office.  He exhibited no public interest in the Communist subversion issue until he made his famous speech in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia, about Communists in the State Department.  Throughout his investigations, his entire focus and that of his committee staff was on Communists in the federal government.  He never had anything to do with Communists in Hollywood.  Inquiries into that subject originated with the House Un-American Activities Committee.  HUAC was formed in 1938, and its original concern was with Nazi subversion.  Under Chairman Martin Dies, Democrat of Texas, it could not help discovering, though, that Communist subversion was a far bigger problem.

As Billingsley in his book makes abundantly clear, HUAC’s interest in Communist infiltration of Hollywood was hardly an idle one.  There was ample reason for their interest.  The Hollywood blacklist began with the denial of film industry employment to the members of the industry, known popularly as the Hollywood Ten, who refused to cooperate with the committee in October of 1947.

It is wrong to point the finger of blame at HUAC, though.  Perhaps it is a novel idea these days that the United States Congress should show public concern over the subversion of American institutions by a foreign country, whether the subversion be of the government or the opinion-molding industry, but that is precisely what the HUAC inquiries were about.  HUAC was not responsible for the Hollywood blacklist, though.  That was entirely the work of the heads of the major studios, who had a vise-like grip on employment in Hollywood at that time. Seeing how the molders of public opinion have come to characterize everything concerning Communists and Hollywood as just the manifestation of paranoia by grandstanding politicians, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Hollywood moguls’ blacklist was nothing but a ploy.

Like the Soviets, who airbrushed Trotsky and other foes of Stalin out of official photographs, the Hollywood Party replaced fact with legend.  The Communist Party and its involvement with Hollywood was simply left out.  The story only begins when the Committee, a group of black-hatted inquisitors, rides into town tarring anything that moves with a red brush, persecuting noble idealists, censoring artists, and launching the “dark epoch” of the blacklist, part of the “McCarthy era.”  That template, plus the appealing plot of [Dalton] Trumbo, [Michael] Wilson, and others who duped the studios by working through fronts, simply overrode the long and complicated story of the Communist Party’s cultural offensive, the front groups, and the studio labor conflicts.

As for “the industry,” it was not up to admitting that it had played the role of what Lenin called “useful idiots,” duped and bilked by militant Communists.  Though it was the industry, not the government, that blacklisted writers and performers, the blacklist legend allowed the studios to pose as victims themselves, a cover-up too intoxicating to pass up. (Billingsley, pp. 272-273)

Had the movie moguls been really sincere in their newfound anti-Communism we would have seen them producing at least an occasional movie that reveals the truth about the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and afterward.  More than half a century has passed and we have not yet seen anything out of Hollywood that might counteract the impression they left with 1940s movies like Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, and The North Star.  That has certainly not been for lack of good potential dramatic material.  Solzhenitsyn alone, we know, has stories galore, but there have been lots of others like Eugenia Ginzburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind or the sad stories of Americans in the Soviet Union like Thomas Sgovio, Victor Herman,* or Robert Robinson, whom we mention in our recent review of The Forsaken.  While Hollywood never seems to tire of movies that vilify the Nazis and, more recently, the Arabs and the Muslims, it is yet to produce anything about the Soviet bloc that begins to compare to the French movie, Est-Ouest (East-West), or the German movie, Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others).

Rather, Hollywood still seems to prefer to romanticize Communism with movies like The Way We Were and Reds and to save its greatest opprobrium for those who called attention to the Communist subversion and infiltration problem.  The most recent example of the latter that comes to mind is George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck. 

Sen Joe McCarthy

This negative focus upon the Hollywood blacklist in the one instance and upon Senator Joe McCarthy in the other suggests that what we are seeing in action here in both cases is nothing less than the thirteenth of the Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression.  Our opinion molders have successfully changed the subject by creating a distraction.  So now, just as the story of Hollywood subversion by Communists begins with HUAC, the story that M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein recount with their new book Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, as far as the dominant creators of national opinion are concerned, begins with Senator McCarthy’s presumed overly vigorous inquiries into that highly successful subversion.

There is ample reason to feel a sense of indignation at this whole sorry episode of American history.  If it must be directed at one particular American, it should be at the person responsible for consciously allowing Stalin’s subversion to go as far as it did.  Our previous writings have amply demonstrated who that person is.  His profile can be found on the dime, and he is currently being worshipfully portrayed by Asner in a one-man show.

________________________________________________________________________________

*CBS did air a rather poorly done movie version of Herman’s tragic but inspiring epic, Coming out of the Ice, in 1982.

David Martin

March 19, 2013

B’Man’s POS Watch: TN Sen Bob Corker

‘Bail-out’ Bob Corker can’t seem to grasp math except for his paying controllers and banker buddies. He was on Fox News Sunday lamenting about how atrocious Americans are that they are only paying a third of the costs of Medicare. Poor Bob and his American public funded health care. What an outrage he must feel.

His attack against the American public and especially health care is long standing:

On September 30, 2009 Corker opposed the health-care reform amendment that would legally allow Americans to buy cheaper Canadian drugs. Corker opposed President Barack Obama’s health reform legislation; he voted against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in December 2009, and he voted against the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

In late February 2010, Corker took a decidedly less bipartisan turn when he became the sole senator to back retiring Senator Jim Bunning

of Kentucky in filibustering a 30-day extension of expiring unemployment and COBRA benefits.

You see, Mr and Mrs Tennessean, at a time where you deserve all the help (and more) that his banker and war-mongering buddies receive, he wants to kick you in the nuts.

Bob, let me point this out, you ravenous war-hungry chicken hawk: Americans are paying 100% of the illegal and immoral wars you support with every vote, including your continued defense of the disastrous Iraq War:

Corker has become a defender of the Iraqi war since taking his seat in the 110th Congress. Despite frustration by the public, any further reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq must be based on improved conditions in the country, Corker said. He urged ultimate success will be determined by the Iraqi government, over which the U.S. has limited control, and the withdrawal of some of the troops that were added in 2007 has created some pressure on the Iraqi government, but warned

that further cuts now could destabilize the country.

Corker denied Democrat’s Afghan war strategy which boosts civilian efforts to rebuild the impoverished country and places nuclear-armed Pakistan at the center of the fight: “I have no idea what it is, other than sending additional troops. I hope we dig a lot deeper,” said Corker. He expected that the United States is having to build the economic and

governmental structure of Afghanistan after decades of war.

You see how that works, right? He wants to take away your healthcare and fights to stop the extra help needed for the unemployed, but has no problem spending $BILLIONS on shit holes of his making. People, will you ever wake up to this smarmy redneck who is spitting in your face and laughing at you on behest of his paymasters? He believes you are involved in “generational theft” because you have paid into and must use Medicare. As a matter of fact, he wants all social services cut to the bone or completely done away with. He has fought against you and good paying jobs many times, but expects even more money out of you to pay for his idiotic boondoggles of Empire and subservience to the Jewish banking cartel.

But, Bob, it is far deeper than just those two issues, you tainted SOB. They are paying 100% of the banker bailouts you vote for. They are paying 100% of your salary, including your benefits and healthcare.

You must know that the elections are rigged or most of your constituents are too ignorant for you to be able to say such things right now when your rich ass has little to worry about, but the rest of us are suffering and need all the help we can get. It doesn’t matter that most of your political career is stained with illegal property sales, missing records (just like your ‘nemesis’, Barack Obama), conflicts of interest galore.

He votes yes for warrant-less searches, additional funding for wars, increasing military spending, free trade agreements, continued IMF funding, cash for clunkers and the Patriot Act extensions. He voted no to auditing the Fed.

In other words, he votes AGAINST you, Mr and Mrs Tennesseans, and FOR his money providers. A true POS.

Some day, Bob, I hope people wake up and see you for the shill you are. You are despicable and those who vote for you are morons.

Chavez Laid To Rest by Steve Lendman

Chavez Laid To Rest

by Stephen Lendman

He died on March 5. Smart money says Obama killed him. His death was very suspicious. A previous article discussed it.

Hopefully forensic evidence will prove what many people believe.

He meant so much to so many. He spoke in language people understood.

He meant what he said. He kept promises made. He championed social democracy. Venezuelans have the real thing.

Progressive Radio News Hour regular James Petras discussed his legacy. He calls him a “21st century renaissance man.”

He was “unique.” He made a difference. He contributed hugely to advancing humanity. He did so “in the spheres of political economy, ethics and international law and in defining relations between political leaders and citizens.”

He cared. He showed it. No one anywhere matched him. He believed popular needs matter more than power. He transformed Venezuela from neoliberal harshness to social democracy.

He was reelected overwhelmingly four times. In 2006, his landslide topped all presidential victories in US history.

Except for the close race in 1812 and 1800 deadlock, Jefferson/Madison Democrat-Republicans dominated US elections. It remained so through 1820.

James Monroe ran virtually unopposed. He won over 80% of the vote. Like Washington, he wasn’t elected. He was coronated.

Competitive elections began in 1824. From then to Chavez’s 2006 near 63% majority, his victory margin exceeded all US presidents. His popularity was overwhelming. It was so for good reason.

He governed democratically. He engaged Venezuelans responsibly. He “invited comments and criticism,” said Petras. He challenged imperial Washington. “You don’t fight terrorism with state terrorism,” he said. These type comments infuriated Washington.

He abhorred violence and war. He championed peaceful conflict resolution. Straightaway in office he began implementing his vision.

He let Venezuelans decide whether to convene a National Constituent Assembly. At issue was drafting a new constitution. Chavez believed in Bolivarian change.

Venezuelans agreed. They approved overwhelmingly. Three months later, National Assembly elections followed. Chavistas won 95% of the seats.

They drafted a Bolivarian constitution. A second referendum followed. Venezuelans again overwhelmingly approved. Historic provisions became law.

No constitution anywhere matches it. It’s a living document. Venezuelans cherish it. It shames America’s.

Articles 83 – 85 mandate quality healthcare. It’s called a “fundamental social right and…responsibility of the state…to guarantee it…to improve the quality of life and common welfare.”

It established national public health. It’s proscribed from being privatized.

Other provisions mandate participatory democracy, quality education to the highest levels, free speech, indigenous rights, housing assistance, social security pensions and more.

Articles 166 – 192 established citizen assemblies. They constitute grassroots participatory democracy. So do thousands of communal councils. Over 30,000 exist. They empower local citizens.

Ordinary people elect their own representatives. They do so throughout the country. What they say matters. They contribute to Bolivarian fairness.

The Law of Communal Councils “represent(s) the means through which the organized masses can take over the direct administration of the policies and projects that are created in response to the needs and aspirations of the communities, in the construction of a fair and just society.”

Social missions were established. Ordinary Venezuelans benefit enormously. Innovative programs include healthcare, education, food, housing, land reform, job training, micro-credit, and more.

Thousands of worker cooperatives exist. Ordinary Venezuelans manage them. Instead of a job, they’re owners. They benefit from profits earned.

At the same time, Chavez championed worker rights. He encouraged trade unionism. America wages war on labor. At issue is destroying decades of hard won rights. Obama’s in the forefront doing so.

Chavez instilled “solidarity and mutual support,” said Petras. He changed Venezuela’s power balance. He shifted it from ruling elites and corrupt politicians to ordinary people.

Petras said his greatest contribution perhaps was believing “that many of the most challenging contemporary political and economic problems can be successfully resolved.”

Nothing is more challenging than transforming longstanding money power-run states to socially democratic ones. Chavez “largely succeeded,” said Petras.

He radically changed Venezuela progressively. His redistributive policies work. He used the nation’s oil wealth responsibly.

He increased social spending over 60%. FY 2013 spending is budgeted to rise another one-third. Income inequality is Latin America’s lowest. Before Chavez, it was the highest.

Poverty fell from 60% to 26%. Extreme poverty decreased from over 16% to 7%.

He grew the economy impressively. Economic growth in 2011 was 4.8%. In 2012, it was 5.6%. Forecasts estimate 6% in 2013.

Nationalized oil, telecommunications, electricity, cement, steel, and other sectors let Venezuela regain economic sovereignty.

Chavez created jobs. Unemployment dropped from 14.5% to 6.4%. Venezuelans receive Latin America’s highest minimum wage.

Women without income and disabled people get 60% of minimum wage support.

Chavez withdrew Venezuela from IMF/World Bank debt peonage. The nation’s debt is about 20% of GDP. America’s exceeds 100%. It rises exponentially annually.

Child mortality fell from 20 per 1,000 to 10. Child malnutrition declined from 21% to less then 3%. Five million children get free meals in school. Life expectancy rose from 72.2 to 74.3.

Around 95% of Venezuelans have access to safe drinking water. Pre-Chavez, it was 82%.

Hundreds of thousands of new homes were built. Commerce, communications, construction, and manufacturing grew impressively. Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves.

Around 2.5 million acres of land were returned to aboriginal people. About 7.5 million overall were redistributed. Doing so lets tens of thousands of farmers own their own land.

Chavez eradicated illiteracy. Doing so shames America. Around 32 million Americans can’t read. Forty-eight million do so below a fifth grade level. Computer and math skills are sorely lacking.

Inner city schools don’t teach. Two-thirds of students can’t read proficiently. One in four children grow up unable to read.

America is the only OECD country where the current generation is worse off than previous ones. Prioritizing war and corporate favoritism explains why.

Venezuelan democracy is the world’s best. It’s real. It’s unmatched. Its elections are open, free and fair. Venezuelans are automatically enfranchised at birth.

Its Law of Social Responsibility affirms free expression without censorship, respect for human rights, Venezuelan cultural values, a balance between public duties and private rights, and citizen participation in national affairs.

Chavez championed fair trade. ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) reflects it. It’s comprehensive, bold and innovative. It’s mutually beneficial. It’s polar opposite NAFTA, FTAA, and one-way bilateral agreements.

It’s based on complementarity (not competition), solidarity (not domination), cooperation (not exploitation) and respect for each nation’s sovereignty. It’s free from the control of other nations and large corporations.

Venezuela joined with Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay in establishing Mercosur. It hopes doing so will strengthen ALBA.

In December 2006, Chavez proposed establishing a Bank of the South (Banco del Sur). Doing so is an alternative to Western debt slavery.

A November 2007 summit launched it. In September 2009, it was established. Its members include Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay. Plans are to increase initial capitalization.

Member countries pledge to contribute. Full operations are expected to begin later this year. At issue is representing the needs of the South and contributing to its development.

Chavez urged Latin American integration. UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) was another initiative.

Members include Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay (suspended after its 2012 coup), Chile, Guyana, and Suriname.

Petrocaribe lets most Caribbean states buy Venezuelan oil on preferential terms.

Chavez proved challenging neoliberalism works. Petras calls doing so a major 21st century “breakthrough.” His legacy is “multi-faceted. His contributions are original, theoretical and practical.”

They matter. They’re “universally relevant.” They work. Chavismo lives! Bolivarianism’s institutionalized!

Chavez was “a complete political leader,” said Petras. His stature is unmatched. He’s the most important figure of our time. What he achieved won’t die.

Chavistas promise to carry the torch. Preserving and strengthening Bolivarian achievements matter most.

A Final Comment

On March 5, Chavez died. His body lay in half open coffin. It was on display in Caracas’ Fuerte Tiuna Military Academy. Over five million Venezuelans queued for hours.

They came to honor him. They paid their last respects. They said farewell.

On March 15, 10 days of official mourning ended. Hundreds of thousands of red-shirted Chavistas filled Caracas streets.

A formal procession followed. Chavez’s body was transferred to the 4th February Museum of Military History (Barracks on the Mountain). He’ll remain there for now.

It’s where Chavez launched his February 4, 1992 revolt against neoliberal harshness. Years later he succeeded.

Regional leaders paid their last respects. Acting President Nicolas Maduro said:

“Mission accomplished Comandante! Fully accomplished: with pain, with sacrifice, not even sickness stopping him. Nothing stopped him, and no one is going to stop our people.”

Viva Chavez! Millions of Venezuelans resolve never to let his legacy die. They’re courageous. They’ll put their bodies on the line to assure it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/chavez-laid-to-rest/

B’Man’s Comment:

Of course, you hear the government and media lap-dogs demonize and denigrate Chavez. That is to be expected. However, when the likes of Alex Jones and Mike Rogers (Alex’s lapdog) come out spewing the same rhetoric that the government and media vomits (Chavez was a tyrant and Fascist Socialist, etc), does that not make you question their motive and purpose? Just like their other disinformation that has many of you brainwashed, when has the government and official sources ever told you the truth?

So, you disbelieve ALMOST everything they tell you, but this, you believe? The fact is that they lie to you about EVERYTHING.

By virtually every metric, Chavez and the Bolivarian movement (now embraced by the mass majority of Venezuelans)  has been FOR the people and NOT for giant corporations. Now, why in hell would you not want something similar for the people of America? What idiotic thought process does it take for you to continue being ripped off and your life made a living hell by believing and supporting what the government and lying media tells you, compared to what has been achieved in Venezuela?

What, you don’t want better education? Life expectancy? True participatory democracy? True “free-speech”?

Seriously. WTF is wrong with you?

Related articles

• Chavez Laid to Rest (sjlendman.blogspot.com)
• Stephen Lendman – Media Scoundrels Pillory Chavez Before He’s Buried (prn.fm)
• Chavez: A Personal Tribute (sjlendman.blogspot.com)

B’Man’s Hypocrite Watch: Steve Katz

Katz represents the Hudson Valley in New York and voted against legalizing medical marijuana

 

Maybe he’s mellowed out.

According to The New York Post, Steve Katz, a Republican state assemblyman from Yorktown, New York was arrested on pot possession yesterday despite the fact that last year he voted against legalizing medical marijuana.

A former veterinarian, Katz was pulled over Thursday morning for driving fifteen miles over the speed limit near Coeymans, New York.

The state trooper who stopped Katz noticed the smell of marijuana.

According to the New York state police, Katz was not disruptive.

Spokeswoman Darcy Wells told the media that Katz ‘was cooperative and handed the trooper a bag of marijuana.’

The assemblyman was charged with unlawful possession of marijuana and is due in court later this month.

Full Article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294201/New-York-state-assemblyman-voted-legalizing-medical-marijuana-arrested-pot-possession.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

What a POS. Instead of voting for the stuff that heals, he votes against it and then uses it himself. Being a hypocrite does not surprise me though: He’s a Jew.Just look at all the Jews in congress that are trying to take away guns from citizens while surrounded by armed thugs or actually own guns themselves (or get their husbands to buy them) or try to enact laws to take away citizens’ guns and right to purchase, while exempting government officials.

Jesus was correct when he called them all out for the liars and hypocrites they are.

h/t JackHerer.com

Aching News!

I’ve been after Kenny to do a video on some of his stuff and when I saw his latest post I knew that was the one. If you aren’t familiar with his blog, you need to be:

Satirical video pointing out the ludicrous recent claims bolstering something that never happened to begin with. Will they ever stop or is this simply a desperate last ditch effort because they know the jig is up.

Original article found at Kenny’s Sideshow

Additional reading:

New York Times

Huffington Post

Snippits and Snappits

Video, narration and voices by BuelahMan

American Victims of the Soviet Gulag

A Review of The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and before that with the revelations of the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others, virtually every educated American not named Oliver Stone or Peter Kuznick now knows that the Soviet Union, particularly during the long period of Joseph Stalin’s absolute dictatorship, was little more than one big killing machine.  Stalin ruled through terror and fear, but also with a cult of personality in which he was regarded as a god-like father figure for the country and for worldwide Communism.  The main instrument of the terror was the precursor of the KGB, the dreaded NKVD.  The major victims were first the losers in the civil war, primarily the aristocracy and the supporters of the tsar, including the Orthodox Christian Church; then the small land owners who resisted the draconian collectivization program or just anyone who owned land; then in the 1930s the revolution turned in on itself with the years of the Great Terror, and literally no one was safe.

The slain of all nationalities numbered in the tens of millions.  Many were summarily executed with a bullet to the back of the head or neck.  A far larger number were done to death by a sentence, of whatever length, to one of the many work camps.  Conditions were often such that the prisoners were hardly expected to survive.  The food was typically inadequate for replacement of the calories used up in the labor, and the clothes often provided insufficient protection from the elements.  That was especially the case at Kolyma, perhaps the harshest of all the labor camps.  One reason author Tim Tzouliadis focuses particularly upon Kolyma is that American memoirist Thomas Sgovio, who managed to survive ten years there because of his artistic skills and amazing good fortune, has left us a very good description of the experience.  It was also the place that one of the heroes of Stone and Kuznick’s Untold History of the United States, Vice President Henry Wallace, visited in May of 1944 as part of his NKVD-hosted 25-day tour of the Russian Far East from which he returned with glowing reports on the Soviet pioneer spirit.

The American Common Man’s Route to the Gulag

It might have been a real American pioneer spirit that motivated some of the thousands of people who moved from this country to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s in what Tzouliadis aptly calls a “forgotten exodus.”  For many, with the nation’s economy flat on its back in the throes of the Great Depression, it was simple desperation.  Tzouliadis reports that in the first eight months of 1931 alone, the Soviet trade agency, Amtorg, based in New York, received one hundred thousand American applications for emigration to the USSR.  “Ten thousand optimistic Americans were hired that year, part of the official ‘organized emigration,’ who received their good news with glee closer to lottery winners than economic migrants.”

Another reason why so many people made such an ultimately foolish decision was that they just didn’t know.  Virtually everything they had heard about the Soviet Union was positive, because almost everything anyone in the United States had heard at that time was propaganda.  Almost nothing had been published to counter the favorable impression of the Russian revolutionaries since John Reed’s very influential Ten Days that Shook the World in 1919.  Many had already left for Russia before the man-made famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, but news of that event was highly distorted by no less a powerful news organ than The New York Times, and the flow of migrants continued.

Heavily represented among the emigrants were Americans on the far left of the political spectrum.  Given the state of the economy at that time, though, the radical left perspective had a much broader appeal then than it does now.  For those good, patriotic Americans today who find it impossible to empathize with these thousands of ill-fated migrants to Russia, Tzouliadis has a good corrective at the end of his first chapter:

Few paused to distinguish whether they were being pulled by an ideology or pushed by their need.  Nor were these Americans merely a confederacy of political fanatics, hopeless idealists, or naïve adventurers.  Theirs was a reaction to the actuality and future threat of poverty, and to understand them we must place ourselves momentarily in a similar position of unknowing: when the idea of the Soviet Revolution was still filled with hope, and only the most perspicacious could discern the truth that lay beneath that promise.  It was an era when the political system of communism had yet to be fully tested, just as once upon a time democracy, too, had presented an equally radical affront to conservative opinion.  (p. 11)

That chapter is titled “The Joads of Russia,” after the main characters in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the fictional family that was forced to migrate from Oklahoma to California at about the same time as the migration to Russia took place.

The title of the second chapter, “Baseball in Gorky Park,” captures what the migration experience was like for many in the early days.  There was a brief honeymoon period when the presence of so many Americans was a source of pride for the government and for many of the Russian people.  Baseball was at the peak of its popularity in the United States, and the young Americans brought their game with them.  Teams and leagues were formed.  The review of the book in The Telegraph of London has a heartbreaking photograph of the members of one such team.  It is heartbreaking because there is a very good chance that not a single young man in that photograph made it through the next decade alive, not only that, but their deaths were likely to have been quite agonizing.  The young players at that time, looking happy in the photograph like contented beef cattle clueless as to their eventual fate, could even read about their baseball exploits in the English language Moscow News.  The pro-Soviet Anna Louise Strong was the editor at that time and one of the reporters for a brief period was the later New Deal-connected business writer, Eliot Janeway.

To the extent that Kolyma is representative, there was a certain cruel politico-economic logic to the Great Terror that began in the later 1930s and swallowed up millions of people, including most of the Americans.  The rigidly planned economy produced little that anyone outside Russia wanted to buy.  The only desirable Soviet exports were raw materials.  The most valuable raw material, and the best form of payment for needed imports, was gold.  Much of the gold and many of the other raw materials were located in places with such a cold climate that no amount of money would lure workers to go there.  Prisoners were the solution.  At the same time, rigid political control required arbitrary arrests for the most trivial offenses, or in many cases, for no offense at all.  That assured an endless supply of prisoners.  The collective farms didn’t produce enough to feed both the free and the imprisoned populace, so the prisoners were underfed, died off, and were replaced by constant streams of new prisoners.  The author notes that many of the prisoners were transported to Kolyma in ships donated to the Soviet Union by the United States through the Lend Lease program.

What was done by the American government to rescue its citizens or “former citizens” from this horror?  The answer is precious little.  The government reacts to public pressure, but before there can be public pressure there must be publicity, and there was virtually none.  To be sure there were family and loved ones contacting their Congressmen and petitioning the State Department, but they might was well been the family members of American POWs abandoned in Southeast Asia almost a half a century later.  Even had there been strong domestic pressure, the obstacles faced by the American embassy in Moscow were daunting:

In Moscow, the American diplomats understood very well that low-level negotiation with the Soviet Foreign Ministry was entirely useless, given the fact that the entire Commissariat was petrified of the NKVD and were themselves frequent victims of the Terror.  Clearly more forceful intervention was required at the very highest levels of government.  Had the diplomats been willing, action might still have been taken, and the lives of the American emigrants might well have been saved.

But what was abundantly clear was that if this was about to happen, the “captured Americans” needed a heroically protective figure to intervene on their behalf—someone with the courage of Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg—someone willing to lend sanctuary, to hand out passports, to speak to the president, and to kick up a very loud and very public fuss in a time of peril.  Someone, in short, who might hold a protective hand over them when their lives were so evidently endangered.

What they got, instead, was Ambassador Joseph Davies.  (pp. 106-107)

The Biggest American Villains

In the whole sorry story there are few, if any, American heroes, unless you count the pitifully few survivors.  Certainly there were none in the U.S. government or among the U.S. reporters assigned to the Soviet Union.  Whatever they sent out had to pass through Soviet censors, and they knew that if they managed to smuggle out anything critical of their host country they would be finished as reporters there.  Even Eugene Lyons, whose under-publicized 1937 book Assignment in Utopia, written after his return to the States, finally gave Americans a look at Stalin’s horrors, followed the rules when he was in Moscow and kept the lid on the story of the American expatriates’ virtual imprisonment in the years before they were being sent off to the Gulag.

Paul Robeson

There are American villains aplenty, though.  If one counts Walter Duranty, an Englishman, as an honorary American because he worked for The New York Times when he wrote the award-winning cover-up stories that helped lure the migrants in the first place, the top three would be Davies, Duranty, and the famous black athlete, singer, and actor, Paul Robeson.   (Curiously, the aforementioned Strong, who was a prolific promoter of Soviet Communism, gets a virtual pass from Tzouliadis.  He mentions her only once.*) Davies and his heiress wife at the time, Marjorie Merriweather Post, come across as decadent royalists of the let-them-eat-cake variety.  Davies is best known for his embarrassingly gushing book, Mission to Moscow, which endorsed the Moscow show trials as legitimate and was made into a wartime movie by Warner Brothers, upon the personal insistence of FDR to Jack Warner.  Post, for her part, spent most of her time in Russia buying up art and antique treasures that had been plundered from the murdered or exiled aristocracy.  They now fill up her Hillwood Estate in Washington, DC, open for public viewing.

Robeson is a particularly sad case.  Like Strong, he was brilliant and seemed to have only the very best intentions, but also, like Strong, he was ultimately led astray by rigid adherence to ideology.  He had every reason to know the true story of the Soviet tyranny because he made a number of visits to the country.  On one such visit the black American automobile worker, Robert Robinson, encountered him personally in a desperate attempt to enlist Robeson’s assistance to get him out of Russia, but Robeson gave him the cold shoulder and did nothing.   Worse than that, he defended Stalin’s Soviet Union his entire life.

Paul Robeson’s steadfast campaign for civil rights in America made his acquiescence to Stalinism all the more tragic.  There were many American communists who recanted once they understood the nature of the crimes committed in the USSR.  There remained, however, a psychological conflict among those who understood, yet whose pride or ideology could not allow them to admit their error.  Robeson’s actions and speeches had justified, and therefore contributed to, the crimes of Stalinism, and for that at least, he was morally culpable. (p. 327)

The Tragedy Hits Home

When it comes to psychological reactions, it is perhaps a natural thing for all of us to want to put some distance between ourselves and unbearable tragedy, whether it be in the Soviet Union or anywhere else..  Tzouliadis makes it harder for Americans to do that than Solzhenitsyn did.  Early on, he tells us that the emigrants came from every state in the union.  From the stories I had heard from my mother about her farm family’s deprivations in North Carolina during the Great Depression I could easily see how she or her siblings would have found an opportunity to go to the purported “workers’ paradise” of Russia attractive.  But then I noticed that nowhere in the book is anyone mentioned among the migrants who came from the South.  As Richard M. Weaver has observed, “Southerners are not a traveled people.”  Steinbeck’s story of the Joads was a lot closer to home to me, both literally and figuratively, than this one was, that is, until I reached Chapter 23 entitled, “Citizen of the United States of America, Allied Officer Dale.”

That chapter is full of reports by witnesses in the Gulag of sightings of American prisoners in the 1950s.  Our government apparently knew that the Chinese were sending prisoners captured in the Korean War to the Soviet Union.  George Kennan, working in the U.S. embassy in Moscow sent a letter to Washington urging that the matter be publicized.  Instead, his letter was stamped “Secret” and eventually buried away in the archives.

Tzouliadis has unearthed minutes from a Politburo meeting with China’s Chou En-lai in which Stalin recommends that the Chinese hold back 20 percent of the Korean War POWs:

In the early 1950s—well before the Sino-Soviet quarrels—if Stalin’s “advice” had called for the retention of 20 percent of UN prisoners of war during the Korean War, then to the Chinese such a “proposal” carried the sanctity of a commandment from the “Great Leader” of the Communist cause.  It was Joseph Stalin, after all, who had armed the sixty Chinese divisions poured into the conflict in Korea.

My mother’s younger brother, William Gray Bell, who went by his middle name, was a draftee who served with the U.S. Army occupation forces in South Korea after the end of World War II.  He got an early hardship discharge of a few months when his father died.  He was needed back on the farm where there were two much younger twin brothers, and an even younger sister and a step-sister.  His mother had died at age 36 during the Great Depression.  When the Korean War broke out, as a reservist, he was called back to active duty and sent into the fray.  Not long after his arrival in Korea he was reported missing in action.  We never heard from him again.  He was, to my recollection and from all I have heard about him, a prince of a man.  I have eulogized him with this short poem.  It chills me to think that he could have been one of the Gulag victims.

The Forsaken’s Tragic Flaw

For all the book’s importance and general praiseworthiness, it does have one major shortcoming.  Interestingly, it is the same shortcoming that I noted in Stalin’s Secret Agents.  We must state it bluntly.  Like M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Tim Tzouliadis covers up for Franklin Roosevelt.  The cover-up is not as central to his book as it is theirs, but it involves the same episode and he is perhaps even more dishonest about it than they are.  Here is what Tzouliadis writes on page 282:

As early as September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers, a former American Communist Party member and Soviet military intelligence agent, gave a long interview to Adolf Berle, the assistant secretary of state, revealing the names of several Soviet agents working inside the State Department and other branches of the U.S. government, including Alger Hiss and his brother, Donald.  According to Chambers’ account, Adolf Berle immediately passed this information on to Roosevelt’s secretary, but Berle had been unable to take seriously the notion that the “Hiss boys” were planning to “take over the United States’ government.”

At that point there is an endnote that leads one to p. 466 of Witness: An Autobiography by Whittaker Chambers.  The quote from Berle is indeed there, at the top of page 466, but Tzouliadis has taken it completely out of context so as to virtually reverse its meaning.  Let us look at the full passage, starting at the bottom of page 465 to reveal the trickery:

After midnight, [Isaac Don] Levine and I left.  As we went out, I could see that Mrs. Berle had fallen asleep on a couch in a room to my right.  Adolf Berle, in great excitement, was on the telephone even before we were out the door.  I supposed that he was calling the White House.

In August, 1948, Adolf A. Berle testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities not long after my original testimony about Alger Hiss and the Ware Group.  The former Assistant Secretary of State could no longer clearly recall my conversation with him almost a decade before.  His memory had grown dim on a number of points.  He believed, for example, that I had described to him a Marxist study group whose members were not Communists.  In any case, he had been unable to take seriously, in 1939, any “idea that the Hiss boys and Nat Witt were going to take over the Government.”

At no time in our conversation can I remember anyone’s mentioning the ugly word espionage.  But how well we understood what we were talking about, Berle was to make a matter of record.  For when, four years after that memorable conversation, his notes were finally taken out of a secret file and turned over to the F.B.I., it was found that Adolf Berle himself had headed them: Underground Espionage Agent.

What follows in the second half of page 466 through two thirds of page 469 are the actual notes, which follows with this summing up by Chambers:

These notes are obviously rambling and garbled…

But if the notes are studied carefully, it will be seen that the essential framework of the conspiracy is here even down to such details as the fact that [Vincent] Reno was working as Colonel Zornig’s assistant at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.  It is equally clear that I am describing not a Marxist study group, but a Communist conspiracy.  The Communists are described as such.  The reader has only to ask himself what he would have done, if he had been a security officer of the Government, and such information had come into his hands, or even if he had been told no more than the address for cables to the Soviet apparatuses, which is the meaning of one of the entries, or the fact that a Communist was working on the bombsight.

Contrary to the impression left by Tzouliadis, Berle took the revelations of Chambers every bit as seriously as he should have.  So what happened?  Did that unnamed secretary of Roosevelt sit on the information?  That’s not possible because Tzouliadis has made that part up from whole cloth.  Chambers makes no mention of any intermediary between Berle and the president.  Let’s pick up his story at the bottom of page 470:

The same night that I talked with Berle, I returned to New York.  For the second time in two years, I had laid my life in ruins.  I had only to wait for what would happen next.  One of the things most likely to happen, it seemed to me, was my arrest.

But nothing at all happened.  Weeks passed into months.  I went about my work at Time.  Then, one day, I am no longer certain just when, I met a dejected Levine.  Adolf Berle, said Levine, had taken my information to the President at once.  The President had laughed.  When Berle was insistent, he had been told in words which it is necessary to paraphrase, to “go jump in a lake.”

The thought crossed my mind that the story might have been put out to conceal the Government’s real purpose.  Surveillance and investigation were necessary.  It might be some time before the Government was prepared to act.  Meanwhile, it would watch and check.

I tried to believe that that was the fact.  But I knew that it could not be, for if the Government were checking, it could not fail also to check with me.

What Tzouliadis has done, besides lying about Berle passing the information on to FDR’s secretary instead of FDR himself is that he has collapsed what Adolfe Berle said in his cover-up testimony of August 30, 1948, into how he reacted on the night of September 2, 1939, and immediately afterward.  Why would he do such a thing?  His brief biography in the front of the book might provide the answer:

Tim Tzouliadis is a writer and filmmaker.  Born in 1968, he read philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford and went on to pursue a career in television current affairs and documentary making for the BBC Channel 4, NBC, and the National Geographic Channel. (links added by me, obviously)

Unfortunately, in this day and age, working for such organizations is not a very reputable way to make a living.  The fact that the paperback edition has 33 favorable blurbs for the book from across the mainstream political spectrum is also not the best of signs.  One has to wonder if the book would have been so well received had Tzuoliadis told the full truth about the complicity of Roosevelt in the Soviet horror.  One can be almost certain that no mainstream reviewer has faulted him for what I have pointed out here, a dishonest use of a source that I can only characterize as journalistic and scholarly malpractice.

The Publisher’s Spin?

There is another possibility.  Maybe the publisher—Penguin Books (2008) in this case—changed his original manuscript to cover up for Roosevelt.  This is a possibility that I would not have thought of had I not followed up on a suggestion that Tzouliadis makes in his acknowledgments at the end:

All memoirs from the survivors of the camps are invaluable, but I would like to acknowledge two books in particular as primary sources for this one:  Thomas Sgovio’s Dear America and Victor Herman’s Coming Out of the Ice.  I would encourage all interested readers to search out and read these authors’ firsthand accounts.

I tracked down a reprint of the Herman book.  It is a 1983 paperback version by Freedom Press, Ltd., of Oklahoma City, OK.  The original publisher in 1979 was Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.  My version has a typewritten message stuck to the inside cover.  It is a jaw dropper.  I have added emphasis where deemed appropriate, and I would remind the readers that Victor Herman came from an American Jewish family.

This book is a special edition of COMING OUT OF THE ICE, prepared especially for Dr. D. James Kennedy and Coral Ridge Ministries.

Expletives have been deleted and replaced with an asterisk (*).  It should be noted, however, that the expletives were not those of the author.  They were inserted by the publisher.

Certain portions of this book are somewhat sensual in nature which we and others may find objectionable.  But, like the affair of David and Bathsheba, these passages need to be considered in the light and context of the entire message.

Please also note that Victor Herman’s original manuscript contained an account of his conversion to Christ.  This portion was deleted by the publisher.

Out of millions of Americans, God raised up this one man to live through this experience and share with us the story of his imprisonment and torture in the Soviet Union.

CORAL RIDGE MINISTRIES

David Martin

February 26, 2013

__________________________________________________________________________________

*”By the winter of 1931, sufficient numbers had arrived for a weekly English-language newspaper to be established in Moscow with the aim of reporting the ‘truth about what the Soviet government is trying to do.’  Staffed by young American journalists keen to salute the progress of the Five-Year Plan, The Moscow News was the ramshackle brainchild of its editor, Anna Louise Strong, a redoubtable progressive and personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt.  On her trips back to the United States, Strong was an occasional guest of the White House, where the ever-curious president would pepper her with questions about Soviet Russia.  How, Roosevelt asked, could Stalin afford to buy all those factories?” (p. 13)

Who Killed James Forrestal? Part 4

Who Killed James Forrestal?  Part 4

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Short Version, Synopsis, Letters to Historians, James Carroll’s Dishonesty, Patrick J. Hurley Meets David Ben-Gurion

Britain’s Forrestal

Imagine this scenario:  A powerful, radical Middle East movement, with a record of terrorism, decides to embark upon a program of bombings and assassinations of high government officials in the home territory of a major Western power.  The plot is to be carried out by five teams infiltrated into the Western country, and the primary target is the leading government minister opposing the actions and the aspirations of the radical group.

As luck would have it, the secret service of the Western country discovers the plot, and the terrorist movement has to fall back to a plan of sending 20 letter bombs to various government officers, including the aforementioned leading opponent of the terrorists as well as his predecessor.  The letter bombs also fail to reach their intended targets.

What would the Western power do in response to these bombing and assassination attempts?  You would be right if you answered that it would keep quiet about them for sixty years.  In the meantime, it would be a party to giving the terrorist group everything it hoped to get, and more, from the failed assassination.  It would even help the terrorists to develop their own nuclear weapons.

The scenario is not fanciful.  According to recently declassified British intelligence documents, it actually happened.  The targeted official was British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin.  His targeted predecessor was Anthony Eden.  The terrorists were the Zionist gang Irgun Tsvai Leumi, or Irgun, for short.  Its leader at the time of the assassination attempts in 1946, before the state of Israel had been carved out of Palestine, was Menachem Begin.  Begin would later become Israel’s Prime Minister and would be awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 1978 for the agreement that he would reach with Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, known as the Camp David peace accords.

The intelligence documents were declassified in early March 2006.  The assassination attempts occurred in 1946 and 1947; the supplying of plutonium to Israel by Britain first occurred in 1966, but it had supplied heavy water, another nuclear weapons ingredient, in the 1950s.  The Times of London reported on the failed assassinations on March 5, and the BBC reported on the illegal nuclear assistance on March 9.

These shocking, extraordinarily important new revelations shed a great deal of light upon what we have virtually proved to be the assassination of America’s first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal.   The parallels in the government careers of Bevin and Forrestal are great.  Although Bevin came up through the labor movement and was a member of the opposition Labor Party, Tory Prime Minister Winston Churchill had made him his Labor Secretary during World War II.  In that capacity, he played a key role in mobilizing Britain’s economy for the war.

Forrestal was a Wall Street investment banker whom Franklin Roosevelt made Under Secretary of the Navy.  A tireless worker, Forrestal was the key liaison person between the Roosevelt administration and the private industrial sector, and he was largely responsible for the transformation of the economy from production for consumption to production for the war effort.

When the Labor Party won a majority after the war, Bevin was appointed foreign secretary in the new government.  Forrestal had been elevated to Secretary of the Navy when the previous Secretary died near the end of the war.  He continued in that position when Harry Truman replaced Roosevelt upon the latter’s death in 1945.  When the National Security Act of 1947 consolidated the armed services, Truman made Forrestal the first Secretary of Defense.

Though both men were very popular and both were very successful in their government careers, each suffered major setbacks over the issue of the creation of a state for Jews in the territory of Palestine.  The Labor Party, heavily influenced by its Jewish members, when out of power during the war actually favored expulsion of the Arab population of Palestine to clear the way for a Jewish state.  As Foreign Minister of the new Labor government, Bevin, repulsed by Zionist terrorist actions directed at British military and government officials in Palestine, steered the British government toward a position more heavily favoring the rights of the Arab residents of the region.  In doing so, he made himself British public enemy number one of the Zionists.

As we have previously noted, Forrestal was enemy number one of the Zionists in the United States.  Near the end of part one of “Who Killed James Forrestal?” we told of the December 4, 1948, letter to The New York Times signed by a number of prominent Jews, including Albert Einstein, warning the American public about Menachem Begin and his terrorist organization upon Begin’s visit to the United States.  At the conclusion of the letter recounting the Begin organization’s murderous activities, we asked this question, “Would men like Menachem Begin and his followers have hesitated at assassinating the most popular, outspoken, and powerful critic of the nascent state of Israel in the United States if given the opportunity?”

How apt that question was has now been made manifest.  We now know that they had no compunction against assassinating Forrestal’s precursor and counterpart in Britain.  The main difference seems to be that the powers that be in Britain did not give them the opportunity, while those in the United States did.  Maybe that is a measure of the relative power of the Zionists in the two countries.  The federal government and the organs for molding public opinion were penetrated at the very top in the United States by the most extreme and violent elements of the Zionist movement, and they continue to be so, or, at least, effectively so.

That is not to say that the Zionists are exactly weak in Britain.  Official Britain hardly reacted with appropriate fury at the outrage.  Rather, the country sat on information about the attempted assassination, and soon fell into line behind the United States in its pro-Israel policies.  It even got a bit ahead of the United States over the nuclear weapons issue, as we have noted, and also during the Eisenhower administration when the British, the French, and the Israelis attempted a power grab known as the Suez Crisis.

Even now, the release of the news of the outrage of the attempted Bevin assassination has been extremely timid.  A search of the Internet some three weeks after the initial revelation shows only one other major newspaper in the world picking up on the story, the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.  It has a slightly different version of events, though, claiming that it was the Stern gang, rather than Irgun, that planned the assassinations, though both stories are ostensibly based upon the same release of British intelligence documents.  The Times, itself, has barely squeaked out the news.  When I telephoned the newspaper, attempting to locate the reporter of the story, Peter Day, the person I talked to was unable to find Day in their directory, nor could he find the article in the hard copy of the March 5 Times.  The online version of the story lists no page number.  The folks at The Times foreign desk, with whom I was then connected, were familiar with the story, which the first contact person was not, but they did not know Mr. Day.  They were able to confirm only that he was not one of their own regular reporters.  Perhaps, as has been asserted in the case of the author of the only critical book on James Forrestal’s death, Cornell Simpson, the name is a pseudonym.*   The topic, after all, is a hot one, and it may not be good for one’s journalism career to be associated with it.  Maybe the publishers of The Times have had some second thoughts about what they have done in letting this news out.  As of April 5, the article could no longer be found on their web site.

The veritable radioactivity of the subject would explain, as well, the complete blackout of this news by the mainstream news organs of the United States.  The news suppression is of a piece with the complete failure of the U.S. press to report that the long secret report on the investigation of Forrestal’s death was finally made public in 2004.  The Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University even sent out a press release,  and the online History News Network of George Mason University made mention of it, but the mainstream press made certain that this very important news, like the news of the attempted assassination of Britain’s foreign minister, never reached the attention of the general public.

That the American press should vigorously suppress this news should hardly surprise us.  As we have seen throughout this series, they were a very active party in selling the story that the far-sighted statesman, Forrestal, the man who saw better than anyone where America’s Middle East policy was leading it, ended his own life.  The last thing such a press would want would be for the public to learn of the existence of powerful evidence that undermines the suicide thesis, and worse, points the finger of blame at Zionist terrorists.

The complete suppression of the news of Irgun’s assassination attempt on Foreign Minister Bevin for all these many years is almost as important as the attempt, itself.  Imagine how much stronger that 1948 New York Times warning letter by Albert Einstein and a number of other prominent American Jews about the murderous proclivities of Menachem Begin and company could have been had they known about Begin’s previous attempt on the life of Bevin.  In all likelihood, no such warning letter would have even been needed.  If Begin was known to have attempted to kill Britain’s most powerful opponent, when Britain was the power over Palestine, he and his organization would certainly have been regarded as a similar threat to Forrestal when the United States had become the main controller of Palestine’s destiny.

Who Knew? 

Although it is apparent that those signers of the warning letter to The New York Times had no knowledge of the previous attempt on the life of Ernest Bevin, one must wonder who, outside the ranks of British intelligence, did know about it.  In particular, we have to wonder if one so connected to the higher reaches of power in the world as Bernard Baruch, when he warned his friend Forrestal in February of 1949 that he had already become too identified with opposition to Israel for his own good, knew more than he was telling about the danger that Forrestal faced.  And when Forrestal complained about being followed and bugged, did he know that the Irgun crowd had come pretty close to snuffing out the life of his British counterpart?  Could such knowledge have been behind his resistance to commitment to Bethesda Naval Hospital and his reported claim that he would never leave the hospital alive when he attempted to get out of the car taking him there?  Might that have been the revelation from Secretary of the Air Force Symington on the day of Forrestal’s departure from office that drove him into his sudden funk?

And after Forrestal’s death, could there have been any doubt in the minds of those aware of the attempt on Bevin who had ultimately been behind the later crime?  Might these have included those powerful friends such as Ferdinand Eberstadt and Robert Lovett, who had failed to visit him in the hospital and then, when the results of the investigation of his death were never made public, failed to register any public complaint?  At the very least, those in the know included the contemporary and future leaders of Great Britain, and the knowledge that the leaders of the United States government had conspired with Zionist thugs in the assassination of the one courageous voice of reason in their midst would very likely have animated their own future Middle East policy.

Zionists and Communists

The Times article on the Bevin assassination attempt has one particularly intriguing passage, which might fill in some more pieces of the puzzle.  That is that Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, believed that Menachem Begin was backed in his terrorist activities by the Soviet Union.  One might wonder whether their belief was founded on solid evidence and, if so, how far this backing went.  Did they just generally encourage him in his murderous endeavors, or were they actually calling the shots?  If MI6 was right, then those like author Cornell Simpson who argue that the Communists killed Forrestal and those who suggest that the Zionists did it are probably both right.

The Soviets, as Simpson explains quite well, certainly had ample reasons to want to be rid of Forrestal.  Not only was he the leading anti-Zionist in the Truman administration, but he was also the leading anti-Communist.  Interestingly enough, the same can probably be said for Ernest Bevin in Britain’s Clement Atlee administration.  Bevin’s anti-Communism carried a particular potency because he came from a British labor movement that was heavily influenced and infiltrated by the Communists.

In many instances in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s pro-Communism and pro-Zionism could be found in the same individuals.  As we noted in the first installment of this series, that appears to have been the case for the very powerful and secretive adviser to both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, David Niles.**

With these new revelations, Niles is due even greater scrutiny than before as the most likely coordinator of the Forrestal assassination.  Some measure of Niles’s power can be gained from the following passage in the oral history interview of Truman aide, Stephen J. Spingarn:

David Niles worked with nobody. He was sui generis. David Niles was the oldest senior staff man in point of service. He came over from the Roosevelt administration. His titular jurisdiction was minorities. But, actually, his main job, I suppose you could say, was Jewish problems on the one hand, and the intricate politics of New York City, those two things; maintaining liaison with Dave Dubinsky and Alex Rose and the Liberal Party there, you know, and keeping the White House abreast of that. But David Niles seemed to me to pay very little attention to Negro and other minority matters, so it seemed to me. Philleo Nash was his assistant and Philleo paid a lot of attention, but it didn’t seem to me that Dave paid much. And there was another interesting thing, Dave Niles did not attend the President’s morning staff conferences — ever.

[JERRY] HESS: Can you tell me about those morning staff conferences?

SPINGARN: Yes. The President held a morning staff conference every morning at 9:30 — I think it was 9:30. It was indispensable to a staff man — a senior staff man — to attend that thing, but it was a very delicate matter as to who attended.
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/sping1.htm

Elsewhere Spingarn makes it clear that Niles was very much a part of Truman’s inner circle, so it would have been natural for him to attend these daily meetings.  The impression one gets is that he was so powerful, and confident of his power, that the staff meetings were actually beneath him.  He didn’t have to go in order to stay on top of the issues that really mattered, and to continue to have the ear of the putative boss, President Truman.  Or perhaps he realized that it wasn’t all that important to have influence with Truman, when he had influence with the people who really mattered.

At this point, the observations of the son-in-law of President Franklin Roosevelt, Colonel Curtis Dall, as relayed by Henry Makow, are apropos:

Dall maintained a family loyalty but could not avoid several disheartening conclusions in his book [FDR: My Exploited Father-in-Law, 1970].  He portrays the legendary president not as a leader but as a “quarterback” with little actual power.  The “coaching staff” consisted of a coterie of handlers (“advisers” like Louis Howe, Bernard Baruch and Harry Hopkins) who represented the international banking cartel.  For Dall, FDR ultimately was a traitor manipulated by “World Money” and motivated by conceit and personal ambition.

If such a commanding politician as Franklin Roosevelt, a man widely believed to be the most powerful president the United States has ever had, was really little more than a quarterback executing plays called in by the coaching staff, what would that have made the former haberdasher and protégé of the Kansas City machine of boss Tom Pendergast?  Certainly it was not Truman’s idea to have James Forrestal assassinated and very little was required of him for the assassination to be carried out and covered up.  In matters such as this, the President would not have been calling the shots.

David Martin

April 9, 2006

*As I reported in March of 2005, former John Birch Society official, J. Bruce Campbell asserts that the name “Cornell Simpson” is a pseudonym.  I had suspected as much because this “Simpson” is clearly a polished professional writer, but the name, to my knowledge, appears nowhere in any political writing except as the author of The Death of James Forrestal.  Recently, an acquaintance in Washington with Birch Society contacts confirmed that “Cornell Simpson” was the name assumed in this instance by Medford Evans, the father of noted conservative, M. Stanton Evans.  The elder Evans also wrote under his own name an even more obscure book, also published by the Birch Society’s Western Islands Press, The Assassination of Joe McCarthy.

(April 22, 2011 update:  Now the conclusion that “Cornell Simpson” was actually Medford Evans has been called into question by Evans, the younger.  Stay tuned.)

**The following passage from Alfred Lilienthal’s 1953 classic What Price Israel? is very revealing of the person described by Alfred Steinberg in the December 24, 1949, Saturday Evening Post as “Truman’s Mystery Man”:

There were many ways in which Niles served the State of Israel after partition, too.  Early in 1950, when the United States first awoke to the Soviet danger in the Middle East, our Government requested the various Arab countries for information regarding troops, equipment, and other confidential military data.  These statistics were necessary in order to plan possible assistance under the Mutual Security Act.  The Arab nations were naturally assured that the figures, supplied for the Chief of Staff, would be kept secret.

Late that year, military representatives of the Middle East countries and of Israel were meeting with General [W.E.] Riley, who headed the United Nations Truce Organization.  Trouble had broken out over the Huleh Marshes, and charges and countercharges of military aggression were exchanged between Israel and the Arab countries.  The Israeli military representative claimed that the Syrian troops were employed in a certain manner, and General Riley remarked: “That’s not possible.  The Syrians have no such number of troops.”  Whereupon the Israeli representative said, “You are wrong.  Here are the actual figures of Syrian military strength and the description of troops.”  And he produced the confidential figures, top-secret Pentagon information.  General Riley himself had not been shown the new figures given by the Syrian War Ministry to his superiors.

When the question of Egyptian military strength was raised, a similar security leak appeared.  It was obvious that top-secret figures had been passed on to the Israeli Government.  Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army G-2 investigated the security breach but discovered only that these figures had been made available to the White House.  How and through whom they leaked out of the White House remained forever obscure.  However, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Omar Bradley, reportedly went to the President and told the Chief Executive that he would have to choose between him (Bradley) and Niles.  Not too long after this reported intervention, David Niles resigned from his post as Executive Assistant to the President and went on a visit to Israel. (Pp. 72-73)

Addendum 1

While doing some additional research on the September 17, 1948, assassination in the new state of Israel of United Nations mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, by the Stern Gang (Lehi), I ran across this intriguing entry on the Bernadotte discussion page on Wikipedia:

Contrary to what you say, Lehi being a terror organization is very much disputed. Most (or at least many) Israelis (myself included) do not consider Lehi to be a terrorist organization. Lehi never targeted innocent civillians [sic] in attempt to terrorize them. All of Lehi’s attacks were against military or government targets (including high-ranked officials such as Bernadotte). This is very different than what “proper” terrorist organizations do – attacking random civilian targets such as busses or airplanes.

Avraham Stern’s memorial day is attended every year by Israeli political and government officials. Given Israel’s effort to gain international support for its ongoing war against terrorism of all kinds, you wouldn’t expect Israeli leaders to associate themselves with the memory of someone who led a terrorist organization. Indeed they don’t – like me they believe that Lehi, while sometimes using extreme measures, was not a terrorist organization.

I’m not really trying to convince you that Lehi was not a terrorist organization (you are entitled to your own opinion on that) – only that the issue is disputed. Since it is indeed so, the proper place to discuss it is on the Lehi page – rather than have is stated on every page which mentions Lehi.

This is a perfect example of the attitude toward the attempted Bevin assassination described in the aforementioned London Times article:

Lord Bethell, author of The Palestine Triangle and an expert on Soviet intelligence, said Bevin was detested by Zionist groups. He added, however: “Zionists would be very angry if you compared these people with terrorists now. You have to remember that Irgun were the grandfathers of today’s ruling politicians.

“They would say they were at war with the British and behaved well, fighting under Marquess of Queensberry rules. They would say that they didn’t target civilians.”

James Forrestal, as the leading opponent in the United States government of the new state of Israel would have been regarded as anything but an “innocent civilian,” and that would have made this great American patriot fair game for assassination in Zionist eyes.  Hardly anything could be more incriminating of them than their own words…unless it is their known deeds.

David Martin

April 13, 2006

Addendum 2

On June 13, 2006, Reuters reported that according to the Lebanese Army, a Lebanese man by the name of Mahmoud Rafeh had confessed to a series of assassinations of senior Hezbollah and Palestinian militants over a seven year period on behalf of Israeli intelligence.  If true, it would demonstrate that Israel has continued to use assassination as a weapon for what it considers to be the good of the state.  Any “senior official” in the world whom Israel should regard as a danger to its interests surely must be made uneasy at this latest development.

David Martin

June 14, 2006

Addendum 3

The beat goes on.  This is from the Lebanon Daily Star:

Beirut steps up search for head of terror group tied to Mossad

BEIRUT: Lebanese security forces redoubled their efforts Monday to find Palestinian Hussein Khattab after Mahmoud Rafeh, the reported leader of a recently uncovered Mossad-linked terrorist network, confessed that Khattab was the actual leader of the group.

Judicial sources told The Daily Star that Rafeh admitted receiving a list of names of Lebanese and Palestinian political figures to be assassinated on orders from Israel.

The sources said Rafeh told the authorities Khattab also received the list, and was “leading” assassination operations…

David Martin

June 20, 2006

Addendum 4

Just last year I discovered that the Jewish Stern Gang actually made an assassination attempt against President Harry Truman in 1947.  It seems not to have been reported by any news media at the time and biographers of Truman and other historians have kept the matter a secret even though it was reported in a book by the former head of the White House mail room in 1949 and again by Margaret Truman in her book about her father in 1972.  You can read about that episode in “’Jews’ Tried to Kill Truman in 1947.”

David Martin

February 21, 2013

When The Roll Is Called By AIPAC