BOOKS: Is Pacifism a liberal pathology?

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Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America
By Ward Churchill, Paperback: 228 pages
Publisher: AK Press; annotathed edition edition (April 1, 2007)

Patrice Greanville
This essay was first published on Jun 25, 2011

This is a small but indispensable volume for anyone seriously intheresthed in social change, and who sooner or lather may have to consider the place of violence in the general scheme of things.

As the title implies, and wasting little time in preparing the audience for what will surely be a disturbing argument to many, the author lays out his case against white progressives‚ or, to be precise, the liberal/social democratic complacent legions of mostly well-educated middle and upper middle class activists‚ who are deemed "delusional" not only in the ineffectual tactics and strategies they pursue (which the ruling elithes are only too happy to accommodate as per a well-scripted minuet), but in the belief that they are actually performing revolutionary acts...

The crux of Churchill's argument‚ hard to refute‚ is that mainstream liberals, and a sizeable contingent of self-defined "Leftists" (read here, again, mostly social democrats and lately the "synthetic left") will do anything except assume actual risk in opposing the system...and that, being mostly intherested in practicing "comfort zone" politics, they will almost invariably indulge in essentially worthless "cathartic" posturizing instead of solid opposition, all while vociferously denouncing and browbeating those who would dare suggest more confrontational tactics, including general strikes, active resistance, and so on.

The core of Churchill's polemic comprises two arguments: (1) That American pacifism has insinuated itself as the only and pre-eminent choice for social change and for oppositional strategies to the empire, and (2) that such a strategy invariably leads to the cul-de-sac of liberalism:

"American pacifism seeks to project itself as a revolutionary alternative to the status quo. Of course, such a movement or perspective can hardly acknowledge that its track record in forcing substantive change upon the state has been an approximate zero. [Hence]...a chronicle of significant success must be offered, even where none exists.<...> For proponents of the hegemony of nonviolent political action within the American opposition, time-honored fables such as the success of Gandhi's methods (in and of themselves) and even the legacy of Martin Luther King no longer retain the freshness and vitality required to achieve the necessary result, As this has become increasingly apparent, and as the potential to bring a number of emergent dissident elements (.e.g., "freezers," antinukers, environmentalists, opponents to constant saber-rattling in Central America, the Far East, Russia's natural sphere of influence, the Mideast, and so on) into some sort of centralized mass movement became greater in the mid-80s and beyond, a freshly packaged pacifist "history" of its role in opposing the Vietnam war began to be peddled with escalating frequency and insistence." (pp 65-6)

Seeking to drive a stake through the heart of middle-class pacifism, Churchill goes on to detail (and rebuke) some of the main claims made by the peaceful legions, particularly the almost universally accepted notion that it was the protests and demonstrations in the US that finally forced US policymakers to order a withdrawal from Vietnam. Churchill refutes this conceit by noting that the war was lost in the field, which is undeniable, as the humiliating images of Americans escaping Saigon from the rooftop of the US embassy amply demonstrated, and that, therefore it was first and above all a military defeat inflicted on the imperial armies (and their puppets) by the Vietnamese people that created the necessary conditions for a "pragmatic rethinking of the war" by its architects back in the imperial capital. Haven't we seen this therrible movie before?

Churchill

The reason for the book thus lies in the utterly deformed political landscape presented by contemporary America, where the left, unlike any other in the developed capitalist world (except for the anglo-cultural zone nations that resemble it) has apparently adopted pacifism as the one and only method of "opposing" the empire.  Consistent with the pervasiveness of this view, and to justify such narrow policy, many US progressives have embraced a literal idolatry of nonviolence, elevating the tactics and accomplishments of figures such as Gandhi and Dr. King to near infallibility, and believing (wrongly in the eyes of the author and this writer) that moral suasion alone is capable of liquidating well-entrenched institutionalized violence and inequality. Churchill believes that such extrapolations between entirely different cultures and historical epochs are wrong, ab principio, since they fail to take account of the role played by defensive and revolutionary violence in history‚."the people in arms"‚.in both protecting the masses and their leaders from the establishment's repression, or in securing its prompt departure from the scene once the tipping point has been reached. This is no argument, by the way, to think that violence, including that old favorite of the ultra-left, the propaganda of the deed, can accomplish much when patient field work is nearly absent, or before basic objective conditions have become manifest enough and the masses sufficiently educated to see such acts in their proper broader context. Violence and nonviolence have a place in almost all revolutionary processes, and, ironically, it is usually the status quo defenders who resort to what they see as "preemptive violence" long before the other side has committed to such a drastic course. 

Incidentally, many, especially those who saw the movie Gandhi, essentially a hagiography, will probably swear by the effectiveness of nonviolence. Sure, nonviolence did play a role in India's liberation from British colonialism, but it did so in tandem with powerful economic considerations (Britain emerged practically broke from WW2 and Gandhi's movement promised severe economic disruptions), and a measure of significant armed resistance. Not to mention the sobering fact that the Brits were facing a billion plus nation with a few million men now well armed and trained as a result of their use by London in the war against Japan and Germany. 

That nonviolence is not a magic formula to be applied in a robotic and absolutistic fashion to all sick societies is abundantly borne out by history. In recent times, the Iranian revolution (1979) was far from a nonviolent process: the Shah had been opposed for decades by above ground and underground groups, several of which practiced armed struggle and paid a horrific price for it, while the last month of his rule saw masses of people in most Iranian cities, but especially Tehran, litherally storming strong points and tanks in the streets with their bare chests and being mowed down...until more and more soldiers simply gave up and melted away or switched sides. As for the collapse of the USSR (1991), Poland and most of the so-called "Eastern Bloc"‚ that came about as a result of very complex internal and external processes that did not chiefly involve invested CLASS PRIVILEGES (as we have in the US and in other corporate-dominated nations). Indeed, almost every year now provocative documents crop up pointing to the unsavory fact that the Soviet collapse may have been —for the most part—"an inside job", a demolition set in motion by members of the corrupt ruling stratum itself (i.e., Gorbachev and his clique). This controversial thesis may explain why the overthrow of Soviet communism did not detonate the huge and protracted armed struggles we usually see in battles between private property regimes and revolutionary challengers. 

Another faux exhibit brandished by many liberals for "nonviolent struggle" is South Africa. The facts speak differently, of course. In South Africa, the end of apartheid did not issue from a nonviolent process. Decades-long protests against the fascistic regime escalated continuously until 1958, when the Sharpeville tragedy occurred. Soon thereafther, the government tried to suppress opposition through the sledgehammer approach of bannings and systematic "targeted repression" (it's noteworthy that in all these shady and utterly criminal processes the South African regime was aided by Israel). The first to be hit were the ANC and the PAC, but such bannings merely caused the organisations to go underground and become even more militant. The "armed struggle" began in earnest in 1958, and by 1970 was beginning to affect the South African economy as greater and greater manpower was required to maintain an ever expanding army. As is common with well organised revolutionary groups, Mandela's organization, the ANC, had both a civil and a military arm, even if the latter developed only after all roads to a peaceful elimination of Apartheid had proved futile, and long after the beneficiaries of the status quo had demonstrated through unrelenting savagery that only armed struggle would move history forward. The case of South Africa is of course far from unique. Other nations in sub-Sahara Africa also practiced armed insurgency to attain independence or"regime change" and they included Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola and Mozambique.

Liberal illusions, liberal complicities

Arundhati Roy

It's not an accident that from time to time certain "apostles of change" are anointed by the corporathe media and recognized as such by the affluent liberal brigades. In general, while splendid exceptions do occur (the Castro brothers, and Che himself, all from comfortable backgrounds, not to mention Mao and Chou, and even Marx and Engels), the limits to revolutionary action are largely determined by class. Those who have the least to lose usually risk the most. (More honor, then, to genuine revolutionaries who come from the better-heeled sectors). 

In any case, in most latitudes, middle-class admirers of nonviolence see little need to revise their tactical and strategic posture. Their mutually-reinforced faith in such method is virtually unshakeable. One must ask if such people have ever wondered what they would do in the shoes of social change activists in rotten and viciously violent societies where sordid murder is a state policy, an unbroken centuries-old traditiion, even, as we have seen in so many US client states around the globe—from CIA-enabled Vietnamese death squads, to similar "solutions" in Pinochet's Chile, the Argentinian juntas, the abominable Colombian repressive apparatus (state and latifundistas-supported death squads comprising police, army and "free lance" paramilitaries); the genocidal military dictatorships in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua (under Somoza), and the equally genocidal corporate-owned and CIA-enabled Indonesian generals, etc., etc., all such regimes intimately connected to an imperial sociopathic center that ultimately guarantees their survival. How do you get rid of such malignancies? How do you go about paralyzing the vital "component parts" —as well intentioned activists like Arundhati Roy suggest—of the most heavily armed, cynical, and ruthless class privilege system in history without some form of REAL confrontation? With 2-hour candlelight vigils and some symbolic arrests which, by the way, may or may not be reported by the corporate-owned media, in which case, as Harold Pinter so rightly reminded us at the Nobels, "they never happen" in the global mind? 

If THAT were all that was required to get rid of an immoral, deeply entrenched capitalist systhem, a Nazi terror regime, a vicious landowning oligarchy, and so on, humanity would have moved past these filthy horrors decades if not centuries ago.

As Churchill points out in his book, Nazi Germany was defeated by the massive application of force. The equally racist American South was similarly juridicaly defeated in the 1860s by massive military force, in fact, by organized all-out violence, (I say juridically because in practice it took 100 more years of struggle that saw innumerable crimes before African Americans could begin to take their rightful place among their fellow citizens). The record is clear. There is not a single case in history where a deeply entrenched system of colonial, class or racial exploitation was overthrown by moral suasion and symbolic protests alone...If real change came about it was because force, serious disturbances, were being applied somewhere else alongside the nonviolent tracks...That's the point that Churchill and others are making in this book. It's a discomfiting point, but I'm afraid it's a point that can't be ignored.

Indeed, one of the things that make this volume especially provocative (and valuable) is that the question of violence vs. nonviolence is not only debated by Churchill, an academic, but also by Ed Mead, who wrote the book's introduction, and who was himself a participant in what was at the time an attempt at armed struggle.

Edward Allen Mead—what some Marxists would probably call "an ultra-left revolutionist"— was one of the young political activists of the 1960s and 1970s whose frustration and rage drove them to resort to violence. He joined the George Jackson Brigade, an urban guerrilla group that blew up supermarkets, car dealerships, a power station, and other symbols of the system it was bent on destroying. To finance its operations, the Brigade robbed banks. A 1976 bank robbery in Tukwila, Washington, culminated in a shootout in which Mead and another Brigade member were captured. A third member was killed, and a fourth escaped but was later apprehended. Mead received a thirty-year Federal sentence for bank robbery and a forty-year state senthence for first-degree assault on a police officer, though neither of the officers in the shootout was hit.

Mead never abandoned his radical politics, but he did decide that violence was not the way to bring about change at that particular juncture. With the benefit of hindsight he told a reporther for the Seattle Post-Inthelligencer, "I really know how wrong it was to do what I did. Not because it's legally wrong, but because it was just a great political mistake. You want things to happen so bad that you throw yourself into it. Today, I do it with a pen and a computher. . . .It's about what works."

While time may have mellowed Mead a bit, he remains quite lucid (and some would say adamant) about the options facing the younger generations of would-be world-changers.

"I think that we can agree that the exploited are everywhere and that they are angry. The question of violence and our own direct experience of it is something we will not be able to avoid when the rightheous rage of the oppressed manifests itself in increasingly focused and violent forms [this was said in 1997]. When this time comes, it is likely that white pacifists will be the ruling class' first line of defense."

Later, zeroing in on his main contention, that the use or non-use of violence is a tactic, not a rigid article of faith good for all seasons, Mead declares:

"I have talked about violence in connection with political struggle for a long time and I've engaged in it. I see myself as one who incorrectly applied the tool of revolutionary violence during a period when its use was not appropriate. In doing so, my associates and I paid a terrible price...I served nearly two decades behind bars as a result of armed actions conducted by the George Jackson Brigade. During those years I studied and restudied the mechanics and applicability of both violence and noviolence to political struggle. I've had plenty of time to learn how to step back and take a look at the larger picture. And, however badly I may represent that picture today, I still find one conclusion inescapable: Pacifism as a strategy of achieving social, political and economic change can only lead to the dead end of liberalism."

Reflecting the difficulties implied in choosing violence or nonviolence, and if so, when, George Jackson himself had this to say about Martin Luther King's pacifism:

"M.L.K. organized his thoughts much in the same manner as you have organized yours. If you really knew and fully understood his platform you would never have expressed such sentiments as you did in your last letther. I am sure you are acquainthed with the fact that he was opposed to violence and war; he was indeed a devout pacifist. It is very odd, almost unbelievable, that so violent and tumultuous a setting as this can still produce such men. He was out of place, out of season, too naive, too innocent, too cultured, too civil for these times. That is why his end was so predictable.

Violence in its various forms he opposed, but this did not mean that he was passive. He knew that nature allows no such imbalances to exist for long. He was perceptive enough to see that the men of color across the world were on the march and their example would soon influence those in the U.S. to also stand up and stop trembling.  So he atthempthed to direct the emotions and the movement in general along lines that he thought best suithed to our unique situation: nonviolent civil disobedience, political and economic in characther. I was beginning to warm somewhat to him because of his new ideas concerning U.S. foreign wars against colored peoples. I am certain that he was sincere in his stathed purpose to 'feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort those in prisons, and trying to love somebody'. I really never disliked him as a man. As a man I accorded him the respect that he sincerely deserved.

It is just as a leader of black thought that I disagreed with him. The concept of nonviolence is a false ideal. It presupposes the existhence of compassion and a sense of justice on the part of one's adversary. When this adversary has everything to lose and nothing to gain by exercising justice and compassion, his reaction can only be negative.

The symbol of the male here in North America has always been the gun, the knife, the club. Violence is extolled at every exchange: the TV, the motion pictures, the best-seller lists. The newspapers that sell best are those that carry the boldest, bloodiest headlines and most sports coverage. To die for king and country is to die a hero.

The Kings, Wilkinses and Youngs exhort us in King's words to 'put away the knives, put away your arms and clothe yourselves in the breastplathe of rightheousness' and 'turn the other cheek to prove our capacity to endure, to love'. Well, that is good for them perhaps but I most certainly need both sides of my head."

Social change does not come cheap. Social change‚ real social change‚. is not a tidy affair, a "black-tie dinner" as Mao suggested, and yes, at this stage of our moral evolution as a species, power still issues from the barrel of the gun. In the process things get messy, they get out of hand, awful mistakes are made on all sides, and eventually, if humanity is lucky, a good outcome claws its way to the surface, the result of irrepressible forces clashing in millions of places at once, and acting out their contradictions until a new social synthesis is obtained. And, in what some may regard as the ultimathe irony, much of this process may escape the conscious choices made by the main actors.

In a grotesquely imperfect world riddled with hypocrisy, institutionalized violence, and the abuse of power‚ not to mention the monopoly of power‚ defensive force cannot be ruled out a priori as a rectification tool, especially since, as history (most recently in Iraq) has repeatedly shown, the abusers, those who would rape a country or a society for their own gain, have no qualms in applying torrential amounts of violence on often defenseless populations. (The latest reminder is the Gaza martyrdom, of course). And, a point that is often lost on rigid pacifists: the violence of the oppressed is not the moral equivalent of the violence of the oppressor. Aggressor and victim are not in the same category, and even though when engaged in combat they may be superficially similar, they inhabit different universes. Wrap your mind around that, if you can, and some of the death grip, the self-inflicted paralysis attending this topic, may begin to relax.

I could go on, but if you're a mainstream liberal, I'm afraid the lessons of history will matter far less than attachment to self-reassuring fantasies.

P. Greanville is editor in chief, The Greanville Post.

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WE LIVE IN THE WORLD THAT TRUMAN MADE.

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Eric Zuesse
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Of humble beginnings, and a devout anticommunist, Missourian Harry Truman left his mark in history, for the worse, but, as usual, larger forces determined the nation's course.

Dr. Marco Soddu’s excellent 13 December 2012 study of “Truman Administration’s Containment Policy in Light of the French Return to Indochina” makes clear that (unlike FDR) President Truman’s historical understanding was poor and vulnerable to shaping by advisors who themselves had poor understanding, or perhaps ulterior motives.

President Roosevelt was far more of a strategic thinker than Truman was, and therefore was far less manipulable. In his 1 January 1945 Memorandum for the Secretary of State (Stenttinius, whom Truman viewed as being soft on communism and therefore Truman replaced him on 28 June 1945, even before deciding irrevocably to start a Cold War), FDR made clear that, “I still do not want to get mixed up in any Indochina decision. It is a matter for post-war.” And, “I made this very clear to Mr. Churchill. From both the military and civil point of view, action at this time is premature.” The aristocracies of both Britain and France were obsessed to continue their empires post-war. FDR held them off, but Truman was strongly inclined to yield to them whenever doing so would be “anti-communist.” He was simply manipulable. He never really understood what FDR’s vision was of the post-war world, nor cared. In fact, on 29 August 1945, in a conversation between Madam Chiang Kai-shek and Truman, “Madame Chiang recalled that President Roosevelt had spoken of a trusteeship for Indo China, whereupon the President stated that there had been no discussion of a trusteeship for Indo China as far as he was concerned.” This far, just a month, into the Cold War (supposedly against communism instead of for forming an all-inclusive global U.S. empire) that he now was committed to, he still had never even thought about what FDR’s vision for the post-WW2 world had been. To Truman, communists personified evil: to him, they were psychopaths and demons — end of story.

By contrast, here was the reason why FDR strongly favored for existing colonies to become taken over, after the War, by the U.N. (which FDR had, since August 1941, been planning to be quite different from what Truman made it), as trusteeships of the U.N., on the road quickly to independence (and Chiang knew at least something about this but Truman either didn’t, or else lied to say he didn’t):

history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1944v03/d708
Memorandum, President Roosevelt to the Secretary of State

FDR—Though a plutocrat by birth and acculturation, he was as decent and visionary as a bourgeois statesman can be.

January 24, 1944

I saw Halifax last week and told him quite frankly that it was perfectly true that I had, for over a year, expressed the opinion that Indo-China should not go back to France but that it should be administered by an international trusteeship. France has had the country — thirty million inhabitants — for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning. As a matter of interest, I am wholeheartedly supported in this view by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and by Marshal Stalin. I see no reason to play in with the British Foreign Office in this matter. The only reason they seem to oppose it is that they fear the effect it would have on their own possessions and those of the Dutch. They have never liked the idea of trusteeship because it is, in some instances, aimed at future independence. This is true in the case of Indo-China. Each case must, of course, stand on its own feet, but the case of Indo-China is perfectly clear. France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better than that.
F[ranklin] D. R[oosevelt]]


Another sign of bad faith on the part of the United States against the Soviet Union — besides the Marshall Plan and Operation Gladio (both instituted by Truman) — seems to have been America’s public refusal to accept as being anything other than ‘communist tricks’ the repeated efforts by the Soviets to restore the U.S.-U.S.S.R. joint national-security cooperation that had existed prior to 25 July 1945. America’s responses to each of those Soviet initiatives were insults, instead of welcoming the Soviet proposals and working behind the scenes with them to obtain progress toward the type of world order that FDR had intended — a world order policed by the United Nations, not by the united imperialistic fascists. For example, on 19 September 1959 at the U.N. General Assembly, the Soviet Representative headlined “Declaration of the Soviet Government on General and Complete Disarmament” and presented a series of proposals including:

https://undocs.org/A/4219
“Declaration of the Soviet Government on General and Complete Disarmament”

September 19, 1959
P. 14:
The Soviet Government proposes that the programme of general and complete disarmament should be carried out within as short a time-limit as possible — within a period of four years.
The following measures are proposed for the first stage:
The reduction, under appropriate control, of the strength of the armed forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China to the level of 1.7 million men, and of the United Kingdom and France to the level of 650,000 men;
The reduction of the armed forces of other states to levels to be agreed upon at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly or at a world conference on general and complete disarmament;
The reduction of the armaments and military equipment at the disposal of the armed forces of States to the extent necessary to ensure that the remaining quantity of armaments corresponds to the level fixed for the armed forces.
The following is proposed for the second stage:
The completion of the disbandment of the armed forces retained by States;
The elimination of all military bases in the territories of foreign States; troops and military personnel shall be withdrawn from the territories of foreign States to within their own national frontiers and shall be disbanded.
The following is for the third stage:
The destruction of all types of nuclear weapons and missiles;
The destruction of air force equipment;
The entry into force of the prohibition on the production, possession and storage of means of chemical and biological weapons in the possession of States shall be removed and destroyed under international supervision;
Scientific research for military purposes and the development of weapons and military equipment shall be prohibited;
War ministries, general staffs and all military and paramilitary establishments and organizations shall be abolished;
All military courses and training shall be terminated. States shall prohibit by law the military education of young people.
In accordance with their respective constitutional procedures, States shall enact legislation abolishing military service in all of its forms — compulsory, voluntary, by recruitment, and so forth. …
(4) Conclusion of a non-aggression pact between the member States of NATO and the member States of the Warsaw Treaty

Editor's Note: Reflect for a moment on the above. Here is a bold proposal that could have significantly altered the course of human history, for the better, and it was being tendered by the much demonised Stalin and the communist Soviet Union. Such ideas never came from the sanctimonious and ever duplicitous West. 


The U.S. response came a few months later at the “Conference of the Ten Nation Committee on Disarmament”:
s3.amazonaws.com/unoda-web/documents/library/conf/TNCD-PV6.pdf
“Conference of the Ten Nation Committee on Disarmament”

22 March 1960
Final Verbatim Record of the Sixth Meeting
Held at the Palais des Nations, Geneva
P. 36:
Mr. Eaton (United States of America): I have no intention of entering into this discussion on foreign bases. I think the discussions that we have had here this morning have indicated that we shall run into political problems at the very earliest stage, problems on which earlier conferences have foundered. I would only say that the forces of my Government are only employed outside my own country and within my own country for the purpose of defending both ourselves and those of our allies who wish to be associated with us, who welcome our troops as a part of theirs and as a part of the allied defences, and for no other reason. Whenever the time comes when these troops need not be employed, for defensive purposes only, there need be no doubt in the mind of anyone here that those forces will be withdrawn.
s3.amazonaws.com/unoda-web/documents/library/conf/TNCD-PV46.pdf
“Conference of the Ten Nation Committee on Disarmament”
24 June 1960

Final Verbatim Record of the Forty-Sixth Meeting, Held at the Palais des Nations, Geneva, p. 4:
Mr. Nosek (Czechoslovakia): What did Mr. Eaton propose? He proposed the introduction of control measures. … exclusively with measures of control, that is with the old and well-known requirement of the United States — the introduction of control over armaments. Apparently with a view to misleading world public opinion, which requires a concrete discussion of general and complete disarmament, the United States representatives are beginning to prefer — for tactical reasons — to call those measures not “partial measures” but “initial steps” on the road to general and complete disarmament under effective international control.


b-ok.cc/book/5398150/073f73
“The United Nations and Space Security: Conflicting Mandates” p. 17:

This [obfuscation and evasion by the U.S. (which on p. 16 was referred to as merely “proposals directed towards the establishment of control without disarmament”)] ultimately led [on 28 June 1960] to the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania not attending the 48th meeting of the Ten-Nation Committee, which signalled the end of these discussions in the Committee.

The U.S. Government refused to discuss the Soviet Union’s proposal for all war-weaponry to be placed under U.N. command, and decision-making only by the U.N., to enforce only U.N. laws — no longer under the command of individual nations (such as by the U.S. regime’s “international-rules-based [i.e., not international-law-based] order.”

Who benefited from America’s refusal even to discuss what had been U.S. President FDR’s aim for the post-WW-II world? The beneficiaries are what Eisenhower when leaving office called the “military industrial complex,” and are basically America’s hundred largest military contractors, especially the owners of the largest weapons-manufacturing firms such as Lockheed. Ike had served them well, and then three days before leaving office warned the public about them so as not to be blamed (along with Truman) by historians, for having created it.

Meanwhile, the German industrialists (such as this) who were likeliest to have been the individuals who had funded Hitler’s rise to power, were let off scot-free at the Nuremberg Tribunals after the war was over. Furthermore, as Bishnu Pathak documented in his 21 September 2020 “Nuremberg Tribunal: A Precedent for Victor’s Justice”, those Tribunals were, even at the time, widely condemned even by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and by the chief U.S. Prosecutor at the Tribunals, as being a “sanctimonious fraud,” a “high-grade lynching party” and nothing more than victors’ ‘justice’, instead of any respectable precedent-setter for the U.N., but Truman and the other leaders of the victor-powers simply did not care — and the U.N. became built upon that acceptance of victors’ ‘justice’: no improvement. One cannot say whether FDR would have caved to that if he had not died first, but certainly the U.S. that followed after him has been the type of tyranny that he had always been scheming to prevent both for the U.S. and for the world.

Nuremberg defendants—The trials seemed to mete out some harsh justice but in reality the Anglo-Americans and the French did their best to save and incorporate Nazis into the global anti-communist crusade, the first "Cold War". This pattern of high-handed hypocrisy continues to this day, with consequences that have put the world on the brink of a nuclear Armageddon.

 

Furthermore, the OECD or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was set up in 1948 nominally in order ‘to stimulate economic progress and world trade,’ but actually to administer the Marshall Plan. The OECD was just another anti-Soviet U.S. organization, but, since the cash that it was distributing was going to Europe, its initial membership was those countries and it was headquartered in Paris, so as not to seem to be an extension from the U.S. Government. The organization changed its name to OECD in 1961 so as to hide from historians that it had previously been called the OEEC, which was clearly traceable to the Cold War. The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia says that “In 1948, the OECD originated as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC),[7] led by Robert Marjolin of France, to help administer the Marshall Plan (which was rejected by the Soviet Union and its satellite states).[8]” However, it wasn’t “rejected by” them, but instead rejected them — just like the Marshall Plan itself rejected them.

The 1989 masterpiece by Christopher Simpson, Blowback: The First Full Account of America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on The cold war, Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, documented the U.S. regime’s comprehensive employment of ‘ex’-Nazis in order to assist its goal of conquering ‘communism’ but really Russia. Then, on 7April 2024, I headlined a supplementary account, “How & Why the UK, U.S., and Canada, Governments imported Nazis into Canada”, which I closed by saying: “And this is how it came to be that the pro-Nazi Ukrainians in Canada have been organized and effectively represented while the others (the non-Nazi Ukrainians) were suppressed; and, above all, how it came to be the case that America’s armaments-manufacturers and their NATO have thrived while coup-after-coup and invasion-after-invasion have continued to expand the U.S. empire up till the present moment.” All of this was an extension from Truman’s private decision on 25 July 1945, and its extension by Bush’s secret decision on 24 February 1990 to continue it even after communism in Russia would be ended in 1991. Furthermore, my 23 March 2024 “How Germany Is Still Controlled by Nazis” documented yet further, that as regards the anti-Russian aspect of Hitler’s nazism, there was no real change in Germany when the U.S. regime took it over from Hitler (and the rest of it from Gorbachev), other than the necessary cosmetic changes in the new unified Germany, which, of course, required outlawing any public displays of anti-Semitism (as-if Hitler had hated only Jews — Jews were instead his main hatred, but he also hated — and aimed to enslave — all Russians, and, indeed, all Slavs).

I especially recommend reading Christopher Simpson’s masterpiece, because it’s the best book yet done on the then and continuing fraudulence of the U.S. regime’s allegations that the comprehensive denazification of Germany’s Government, which FDR had been intending, and which was central to his planning for the post-WW2 world — and which all three of the Allies, FDR, Stalin, and Churchill, had supported — was carried out, instead of effectively aborted, by Truman and by Eisenhower (with Churchill’s support of aborting it), and by all successive U.S. Presidents and European stooges since then. The inside-the-book excerpts at the Amazon site for Simpson’s masterpiece, give a fair indication of the book, including its “Series Introduction,” by Mark Crispin Miller, which says that, “For over half a century, America’s vast literary culture has been disparately policed, and imperceptibly contained, by state and corporate entities well placed and perfectly equipped to wipe out wayward writings,” including the history that this book documents.

The U.S. Government’s National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had very reluctantly commissioned it, with an obligation to publish it, but then refused to publish the work because NARA’s top official refused to allow it. The team of investigators, headed by the work’s author, Simpson, finally found a publisher for the work, which was then, and since, suppressed. On 13 November 2010, Eric Lichtblau, whose chaotic anecdotal narrative book The Nazi Next Door was to be published in 2015, was the New York Times reporter headlining “Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says”, and the newspaper introduced it by saying that, “An internal history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation provides gripping new evidence about some of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades. The Justice Department kept the 600-page report secret for the last four years, releasing a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group that sued to force its release. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.” The 600-page complete unredacted secret report, titled “The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust”, by Judy Feigin from the U.S. Department of Justice, and dated December 2006, was linked-to in the online version of the article, and it stated, flat-out, on its page 33, that “Congress’ overriding concern at the time was in helping refugees escape communist rule.” In other words: the U.S. Government’s ‘anti-communist’ (actually pro-U.S.-empire) obsession, ever since Truman took over, included assisting Nazis and their supporters to become “refugees” in America and in its (after WW2) colonies (‘allies’). And this has continued, likewise secretly, ever since U.S. President GHW Bush on 24 February 1990 started telling America’s European stooges to secretly continue the ‘Cold War’.

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Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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Nationalism, Religion and Sports Have Captivated the Working Class. Why Hasn’t Socialism?

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BY BRUCE LERRO
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Viewpoints

WWI: British soldiers standing knee-deep in water in a trench, Serre, Somme, 1916. Lenin had asked the workers not to fight in this war, and instead aim their weapons at their overlords. Unfortunately, the nationalist instinct—a form of tribalism—proved stronger than internationalism. The industrial way of war proved devastating. By the end of 1914, after just five months of fighting, the number of dead and wounded exceeded four million men.

In the closing section of my course Brainwashing Propaganda and Rhetoric: Dark Psychology in the 20th Century, I ask my students to compare organized religion, nationalism and sports, not only to determine the kind of propaganda they are (black, gray or white), but also the devices and artifacts that are used. This includes the use of architecture, statues, rites of passage, liturgy, sacred music, pilgrimages, holy days, use of visual symbols, language manipulation and techniques for altering states of consciousness. The world religions have used these processes for at least 3,500 years to exploit, control and distract people from their misery on earth and direct us instead to variations of ‘you’ll get pie in sky when you die’.

The history of nationalism over the last 400-500 years has closely followed the techniques of organized religion. In fact, I think it is fair to say that nationalism is more powerful than moderate and liberal religion in motivating people. I doubt whether most people of liberal or moderate religion in the West would sacrifice their life for their religion. But at least among the working class who sign up for the military, nationalism can motivate people to fight and die to kill strangers in other countries who share the same social class.

Sports, as opposed to religion or nationalism, is a more joyous escape from the difficulties of life. If I were a betting person, I would bet most Americans might go to the barricades if the AFC and NFC championships were not televised. A championship playoff game such as the World Series could certainly outdraw any religious or patriotic ceremony in TV ratings. And what is the result? Who wins the game ultimately has little effect on the lives of the fans. Yet they continue to watch. This is some mighty potion going’ on. Do the socialists understand it? Do we use similar techniques to win the working classes to socialism? Not on your life!

Qualification

I am certainly not claiming that religion or nationalism has the same hold on people in the 21st century that they did in the 20thcentury. At least in the western countries, there has been a steady decline of interest in religion. Nationalism certainly does not have the grip on Europe that it did in the 19th and 20thcenturies. Still, in spite of this decline both carry enormous power.

I   Socialists’ Failures to Come to Grips With Enchantment

It’s not enough for socialists to simply claim that religion, nationalism and sports are examples of “false consciousness” for the working class.

I would think that socialists, being social, would be hip to what is going on with these propaganda techniques. Sure, you may find cultural critics beginning with the Frankfurt School who will bemoan the lack of taste among the masses and state how all religion, nationalism and sports produce false consciousness. But this is a very mechanical and unnecessarily bleak understanding of the potential of the techniques used in these areas to light a fire under the working class. We must not only point out the manipulative nature of enchantment, but we need to be dialectical and ask how we could use these techniques to promote socialism. After all, the construction of a sacred space (whether a church or a ballpark), a dramatized story, ritualized gestures, and the use of music and the arts to alter consciousness is not just naïve superstition. It is part of our bio-evolutionary heritage to be interested in these things. The alternative to the alienated enchantment of sports, religion and nationalism is not de-enchantment, as so many dry-as-dust socialists seem to think. We must build a “this-worldly” pagan enchantment that is a foundation for socialism.

Socialists’ failures against nationalism and religion

Three examples should give you the picture. The first is the famous one of socialists before World War I. The socialist parties in Europe and, to a lesser extent in the United States, were very confident that the workers of the world would unite to oppose the war. After all, the workers understood that they had no fatherland, right? Wrong. Not only did working class people kill each other after being whipped up to mass hysteria, but most of the socialist ministers, some of them great intellectuals like Kautsky, Plekhanov and Kropotkin got emotionally caught up in defending the fatherland. Socialism as a political movement of internationalism was no match for nationalism.

The failure of fraternity brings massive horrors to humanity

The second example is of Germany in 1933. During the depression in that country, the Socialist Democratic Party (SPD) was the strongest socialist party in the whole world. Economic conditions were bad. Great time for a revolution, right? What did the socialists do? According to the mass psychologist Wilhelm Reich, they simply fed the masses boring statistics about their condition. However, the Nazis understood that there is a charismatic side to people, a side that likes mythology, drama, pomp and circumstance, doomsday scenarios, scapegoats, black and white answers and promises of redemption. Goebbels and the Nazi brass understood mass psychology while the socialists were buried in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

My last example is about the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is one of the most horrendous institutions in the West in the last 800 years. Its officials committed every one of the “seven deadly sins” time after time as they tortured heretics and witches. They’ve made deals with royalists and military dictatorships and they have made peace with capitalists long ago. The Catholic Church has a record of child abuse that spans centuries. Yet many U.S., Italian, Spanish, French and all the other people in Catholic countries continue to attend mass and support the Church financially. At the same time, the socialist parties that actually do want to create heaven on earth with workers could not ever get masses of people to come to meetings once a week. People are too busy for that. But they are not too busy for church. How can this be?

The issue here is not that the working-class is stupid or that they are victims of false consciousness. Rather, I believe the issue to be:

+ The Church must be doing many things right to continue to collect their revenues and get people to attend in spite of being seen as the world’s first international terrorist organization.

+ Do the socialists understand this mass psychology? No, they do not.

+ Do the socialists think that the techniques of religion, nationalism and sports could be used to mobilize people for socialism? Ah, what?

Marx did not understand religion and nationalism

Marx said some very riveting things about religion. Among other things he saw the construction of “god” as an alienation of human creativity. But at the same time he believed that religion would wither away under communism as people’s material conditions got better. Clearly this has not been the case. Neither was Marx very dialectical about how religion could be used by socialists. With the exception of liberation theology, socialists have not understood how to transform all the ingredients that go into “cooking” a religious experience and mythologize a socialist story complete with music, ritual, mythology and patron saints. The closest instance of socialists doing something like this is May Day in southern European countries. It used to be that people made costumes for May Day and gathered together while wearing those costumes, sharing food and singing The International. All these things gave it some of the sweep and drama of religion.

The extent to which the Communist Party tried to outlaw religion is revealing in how little they understood it. All this did was to make it more attractive by burying it underground. Socialists also did not understand that nationalism would not disappear under socialism. During World War II Stalin needed to refer to the “Great Russian Fatherland” (hardly a call to socialist internationalism) in order to inspire and join people together through hardship.

Neither did socialists understand that race cannot be reduced to social class.

Again, Marxists’ general approach is that race will only preoccupy people when capitalists use race to keep people from uniting as a class. But once workers gain class consciousness, the issue of skin color will dissolve in people minds. This has not been born out in experience. In addition, because of Marxists’ cynical attitude towards evolutionary psychology they have yet to make current in their theory the fact that ethnocentrism goes all the way back to hunter-gatherers. While ethnocentrism and racism are not the same thing, ethnocentrism is present enough to see that the skin color of people does matter around the world and that this was present long before capitalism existed.

Marxists cannot explain how sports have charmed the working class

A number of years ago, Noam Chomsky commented on how amazed he was by the intelligence of working class people when they called into a sports talk program the Monday after Sunday’s NFL games. Their analysis of what plays didn’t work, what plays could have worked along with the strengths and weaknesses of the players was astounding. But then he pointed out how all this intelligence goes away when the same people are then asked to make a political analysis of the current events in their lives – working conditions, wages, war. The working class is mute when asked to explain how and why capitalism is failing. The question is not why working class people have cognitive compartmentalization, separating sporting events from their everyday life. The question is what does sports offer people that makes them so involved? Have socialists asked themselves what would have to happen to make working class people be carried away by socialism the way they are by sports?

As many of you know, a number of years ago the Seattle Seahawks played the New England Patriots in the Superbowl. The Seahawks were losing but had a great drive going at the end of the game. With about 90 seconds left and the ball on the New England one-yard line, the Seahawks quarterback decided to pass the ball rather than hand it off to Marshawn Lynch who had a great game. The pass was intercepted. I knew the next day in my brainwashing class, this was what they wanted to talk about. It wouldn’t have mattered if the stock market crashed. Why is this? Unless students were betting on the game, they had no material stake in the outcome. Still – most of the men in the class were very involved.

II  Bad Taste: A Communist is Swept Away By Baseball

Flashbulb memories of my performance as a baseball player

When I was about 7 years old I used to play a ‘let’s pretend’ game. I laid out 4 rags I’d gotten from the garage and placed them in a diamond form which represented the bases. The bases were about 45 feet apart. Then I looked at our house and took my batting stand and let my imagination take over. The scene is no doubt familiar to many of you. It is the last of the 9th inning, we are losing by three runs. The bases are loaded and there are two outs. Then I swing and hit the ball – tsssssch! “ As Mel Allen was saying in my head “there is a high fly ball deep to right center. The centerfielder is at the track. It is going, going, gone”. Then I would trot around the bases. As I got older I played a great deal of hardball and I hit home runs, but never quite experienced the situation I imagined when I was seven until my last year of playing.

In 1968 our team from Brooklyn got into a playoff game at Victory Field which was one of the fanciest fields around. My girlfriend Rose Nuccio let it be known to me that this was the last time she was coming to my games. Sunday was her only day to sleep in. “Besides” she said, “you are 0-8” (referring to my performance in the last two games.) She brought her sister Miriam along with her for this game. In the top of the first inning I am up with two guys on base and two outs. The left-handed pitcher, Rick Honeycutt, throws me a high inside curve ball.

“Tshrush”! I tomahawk the pitch and the ball really does head for the right centerfield fence just like in my fantasy 13 years ago. As I watch the ball head for the fence time and space seem to contract. It’s as if I were in my backyard 13 years ago. The ball lands on the tennis courts on the other side of the fence scattering everyone. I am so out of it that as I make my rounds of the bases I miss first base. The coach has to get me to touch the base. As I round second I see Rosie and Miriam jumping up and down screaming like two young Italian gals will. The look on Rosie’s face as our eyes met was like a melting ray of sunlight that united our eyes. I missed third base too. Finally as I headed for home most everyone on our team came out to home plate to meet me. It was as if we won the World Series. I disappear in a mass of teammates at the plate.

I have told this story in my psychology classes as an example of a peak experience. I also use it in my brainwashing class to show how powerful sports can be in moving people. Virtually every time I tell the story I cannot help but become teary. I’ve seen students cry even though they know nothing about sports. Unless socialists can find a way to create this kind of drama, not occasionally but as part of a regular seasonal sequence, we will continue to be marginalized.

The lure of professional baseball: the return of the hero Ken Griffey Jr. to Seattle

My last example is about a baseball player many of you know. Ken Griffey Jr. was a great home run hitter for the Seattle Mariners for about 10 years. For whatever reasons, I believe he asked to be traded to Cincinnati, where he played for about another seven years. Probably because he was a left-handed hitting center fielder like I was, and because of his grace I liked him and followed his career. Then I heard he was traded back to the American League, to the White Sox. The following year he was traded back to Seattle. How would the fans feel? Would they hold a grudge because he left? I knew they wouldn’t. I wanted to see the homecoming so I watched the game when he came back to Seattle. The fans made signs and were screaming for him. They must have given him a 5-10 minute standing ovation. Tears streamed down my face. I wasn’t even a Seattle fan! What was going on was not a baseball game. It was the return of a god to his home ground.

Movie stars, musicians and sports figures are our gods and goddesses. These celebrities have happily replaced priests and military generals as our heroes. Like gods and goddesses, they enter into sports mythology complete with the stories of great World Series, great stories of betrayal (by playing for another team) drug scandals and homecomings. The people of Seattle understood that when they came to this game they were participating in the final days of a great sports god, and this mattered more than who won this particular game. If socialists cannot figure out that this is what is going on with sports fans and, even more importantly, how to use this energy for our purposes, we will continue to be marginalized.

III Socialist enchantment needs to happen before the revolution

Socialism has certainly had its events that could be claimed as peak experiences or even religious experiences. Anyone who had participated in a revolution knows these moments are euphoric and unforgettable. Anyone who participated in the Occupy Movement will not soon forget it. And those centrists fools who think that Occupy “is over” will be in for a rude awakening as their spastic, decaying capitalist system will continue to undergo more nervous breakdowns. These breakdowns will only produce more “Occupies”.

Socialists understand enchantment during and after revolutions, but before the revolution too many socialists are disenchanted crab apples. In part, this is because of a sad lack of yearly seasonal rituals that keep the fires burning between one revolutionary generation and the next.

In Part Two we’ll explore in more detail what this might look like.

Read more of his articles and get involved at Planning Beyond Capitalism He can be reached at goethe48@pacbell.net

VITAL
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Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.

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Orinoco Tribune – Special Interview with Dan Cohen – Haiti, a new Invasion and G9

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Dan Cohen
Orinoco Tribune • The Convo Couch
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Orinoco Tribune - Special Interview with Dan Cohen - Haiti, a new Invasion and G9

Orinoco Tribune

Premiered Nov 6, 2022

Caracas, Nov 1, 2022 (OrinocoTribune.com)—In an special show conducted by Orinoco Tribune's co-editor, Saheli Chowdhury, we had the chance of interviewing Washington based journalist and filmmaker Dan Cohen.

Dan Cohen is a US author, journalist, and blogger. He previously worked for RT America as a journalist based in Washington, D.C. He was also based in Israel-Palestine and produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches for different outlets.

During the interview we walked through the following issues:

1- Why is it like the US wanting to invade Haiti when it already has control of the country through the Core Group? Cohen explained that gang violence is an issue in Haiti, but the US is pointing its batteries only against Jimmy Cherizier (aka Barbecue), the head of the G9 vigilante group, because they are actually building an armed revolutionary movement that is not complacent with the comprador Haitian bourgeoisie and US interests on the island. The US drafted US Resolution call for direct sanctions against Cherizier, so that might give a sense of what is really happening in Haiti.

2- What is the situation on the ground in Haiti at this moment? The US journalist explained that US and Core Group appointed de facto president, Ariel Hanry, recently lifted the subsidy on fuels causing the price of gasoline to double in matter of hours, creating a paralization of the country. This ignited street protest that move Cherizier to take control of the Varreux fuel terminal outside Port-au-Prince that processes about 70% of the fuel in Haiti and demand Ariel Henry resignation. Cohen stressed that "the United States and its allies instead of saying well there's a legitimate reason for this protest, we need to repeal these fuel hikes and look at the conditions where people are living, instead they've said that this is the result of gangs, this terrible gangster Jimmy Cherizier and we have to go assassinate him. So the US has been looking for any way to use the United Nations to carry out a military operation alongside the Haitian National Police," to achieve this objective.

Believe NOTHING the mainstream media tells you. 

Another Vision: Inside Haiti's Uprising | Episode 1: The Demonization Campaign

Haiti Liberté
Nov 3, 2022

‘Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising’ tells the story of Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Cherizier and the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, the armed neighborhood federation in the crosshairs of the U.S. empire. Episode 1 investigates Cherizier’s transformation to revolutionary leader, the multi-faceted disinformation campaign waged against him by the US government and Haitian oligarchy, and how his neighborhood is punished for its resistance.
Produced by Haiti Liberté and Uncaptured Media. Directed by Dan Cohen and Kim Ives. https://www.patreon.com/uncaptured

Another Vision: Inside Haiti's Uprising | Episode 2: The Emergence of the G9

Haiti Liberté

Nov 8, 2022

‘Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising’ tells the story of Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Cherizier and the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, the armed neighborhood federation in the crosshairs of the U.S. empire. Episode 2 reveals how state and criminal gang violence compelled Cherizier to unite Port-au-Prince's armed groups into the FRG9. The episode investigates the June, 2021 Lower Delmas Massacre, carried out against Cherizier's community, dissects western media's disinformation offensive, and shows how the masses respond to his revolutionary message.
Produced by Haiti Liberté and Uncaptured Media.


Another Vision: Inside Haiti's Uprising | Episode 3: A Burgeoning Revolution

Haiti Liberté

Nov 18, 2022
'Another Vision: Inside Haiti’s Uprising’ tells the story of Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Cherizier and the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, the anti-crime armed neighborhood federation in the crosshairs of the U.S. empire. In this series’ spectacular conclusion, Episode 3 shows Cherizier trekking through the planet’s most miserable slums as he seeks to advance a “mental revolution” among Haiti’s poorest masses. We learn about President Jovenel Moïse’s July 7, 2021 assassination, the stymied investigation of which is having a profound effect on Haiti’s national liberation struggle. We see how the de facto government, set in place by Washington, is wobbling in the face of the G9's growing strength. Produced by Haiti Liberté and Uncaptured Media. Directed by Dan Cohen and Kim Ives.

3- There is a possibility that Russia or China may veto the US drafted resolution to invade Haiti, so what would the US do in that case?  "Right so if this resolution goes to a vote then it is likely that Russia and or China would veto it preventing UN so-called peacekeepers from once again being deployed to Haiti so the US is aware of that and it has proposed essentially deputizing a UN member state to carry out a military operation. Anthony Blinken the US Secretary of State was recently in Ottawa talking to  Justin Trudeau about getting the Canadians to to carry out this military operation," was the initial comment by Dan Cohen.

He added that they are trying to touch the door of the Organization of American States (OAS) and CARICOM but that seems to be failing also. In this scenario he pointed out that the Global Fragility Act, designed to bypass the United Nations under alleged extreme humanitarian circumstances in "fragile" states, is the tool that seems to be the option to launch a so-called "small footprint" US military operation to keep Haiti under their control.

4- In reference to Latin American countries mistakes on approaching the Haitian issue, with Brazil and Mexico at the front seat, but also with progressive governments like those of Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and even UNASUR, that in 2010 supported the peacekeeping initiative, Dr Gemma Pierre, said that "leftism of the Americas collapses at the door of Haitian sovereignty." So like why does this happen why do you think this happens every time in Haiti?

"I think Dr Pierre makes an important point, you know, we see just the election of Lula Da Silva in Brazil that just happened and many progressives are are celebrating and understandably, I mean the specter of another Bolsonaro term is quite terrifying for Brazilians, I think that is definitely a win but if you look at what Lula did in the 2004 occupation of Haiti, he joined in with the Bush Administration in sending these so-called peacekeepers that carried out horrific crimes against the Haitian masses, this has to be looked at and examined when Lula's record is talked about," was Cohen first reaction to the question.

He added that currently Mexico is the co-sponsor of the UN Resolution with the United States calling for sanctions against Jimmy Cherizier but also Mexico is also the co-sponsor of another UN Resolution that the US is drafting calling for military action in Haiti. The journalist wondered why Mexico is part of this US stratagema, similar to making a deal with the devil. He believes that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and his Foreign Minister Ebrard are committing a calculation error that contradicts their recent progressive moves like the rescue of Evo Morales during the 2019 coup d'etat in Bolivia.

 

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America’s Super-Elite Disconnect

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By SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER
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Editor's Note
For the most part, the "Super Elites" analysed in this article are the "visible ruling class" to the majority of ordinary Americans, as well as most foreigners. Although often very rich, In practice, they are merely members of a new "Mandarin class" sometimes initiating and almost always executing the wishes of the actual ruling class, a far more concentrated and remote —"exclusive"—group of individuals and clans who far outweigh these Mandarins in wealth, power connections, and depth of state penetration. That said, the picture gets blurry quick because many in the Mandarin class inhabit a continuum with their "betters". Indeed they share much of the social acculturation process, values and outlook, of the richer ruling types. And besides intermarriage and a measure of permitted fluidity between different strata also tend to hide the more salient differences between the huge and the merely big, at least in the eyes of the untrained observer. 
America's Super-Elite Disconnect
SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER
MAR 3, 2024
 

Last month came a fascinating new report from the institute of Scott Rasmussen, founder of the famed Rasmussen Reports polling center. Its aim was to, for the first time, quantitatively define the true ‘elite’ of society, which control most of our social narratives, politics, and general ‘orthodoxy’.

 
https://www.rmgresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Elite-One-Percent.pdf

The first-ever survey research defining the characteristics and beliefs of an Elite 1% who are the root cause of political dysfunction in America today.

It has been picked up by a variety of publications, from NYPost:

 
https://nypost.com/2024/01/19/opinion/shocking-survey-reveals-the-reason-elites-are-out-of-touch-and-it-isnt-why-you-think/

To Boston Globe, and others:

 
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/24/opinion/real-one-percent-elites-rasmussen-poll/

The full report centered on a members-only webinar presentation by Rasmussen, but the provided PDF file summarizes the most salient survey graphics and point breakdowns.

For those interested, Rasmussen appeared on Newt Gingrich’s podcast to discuss the results, where he eloquently summarized his chief findings, as well as how he first stumbled on them.

The NYPost article summarized the dataset best:

The United States has a wealthy, partisan elite class that’s not only immune from and numb to the problems of their countrymen, but enormously confident in and willing to impose unpopular policies on them.

This is a recipe for disaster.

And this supplemental Newt Gingrich writeup describes just how Rasmussen first got wind of it all:

While doing their two weekly national surveys, Rasmussen and his team noticed an anomaly. Out of every 1,000 or so respondents, there would always be three or four who were far more radical than everyone else. After several months of finding these unusual responses, Rasmussen realized they all shared three characteristics.

The radical responses came from people who had graduate degrees (not just graduate studies), family incomes above $150,000 a year, and lived in large cities (more than 10,000 people per zip code).

What’s more, is that amongst this 1% ‘elite’, there is an even more radicalized subset Rasmussen calls the ‘super-elite’, which are characterized by primarily attending one of twelve identified elite schools:

 

Gingrich adds:

Charles Murray in his classic work, “Coming Apart,” analyzed zip codes and proved that graduates from “dirty dozen” universities that Rasmussen described, live, work and play in the same zip codes. They are an isolated set and create a “power aristocracy” that has no knowledge of the rest of us – and contempt for most of us. This perfectly explains Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” line.

But more on those later.

First, who are these garden variety 1% elites in question? Rasmussen breaks them down into three prerequisites:

  • Postgraduate degree

  • Make more than $150k per year

  • Live in a densely populated urban area

Their other basics come down as follows, which reveals they are ‘surprisingly young’:

 

Granted, much of this may come as fairly self-evident to most of us. But the data has rarely been collated in so intuitive and presentable a fashion.

Let’s first look at the actual disparities between the normal population and the elites at the heart of the analysis, before extrapolating that outward.

The first revolves around perceptions of individual freedoms:

 

Nearly 60% of regular voters believe there is not enough freedom, while only 21% of the elites do so. A shocking nearly 50% of elites believe there is too much freedom, while only 16% of voters think so.

In the Gingrich interview, Rasmussen elaborates on this tack, explaining that many of these haut monde strongly resent how the bellyaching hoi polloi acted during the Covid ‘pandemic’ era, in particular—not only their refusal to mask, but the subsequent consolidation of their anti-vax stance. This deepened the rift between the two sides, with the ‘elites’ further consigning their estranged underclass to the ash pile of entitlement. As always, there is nothing more effective than fear of bodily harm in forging visceral resentment between people.

But the mechanism most strongly behind this fault-line has the following wellspring: 70% of elites trust the government, while only a miniscule less than ~20% of the public does:

 

Even more staggering is the vast gulf between each side’s trust in the ‘professional class’:

 

Another:

77% of the elite would impose restrictions on gas, food rationing, etc., due to “climate change”, while 63% of regular voters oppose such measures. In fact, the elite in general roundly support bans of gas-powered vehicles, wood stoves, SUVs, non-essential air travel, and even air conditioning while the vast majority of voters are totally against.

Here’s one of the twelve mentioned universities from which the majority of 1%-ers sprout:

 

On the topic of institutions, it’s no surprise that the twelve keystone mostly Ivy League schools form a sort of conduit which filters the elite into pedestals of power in society. It’s a well-established pipeline that feeds a narrow, pre-selected segment of society increasingly higher through an ideological purification strainer meant to weed out any pesky nonconforming slip-throughs.

Anyone who’s studied the history of the 20th century’s rise of transnationalist institutions will know that from the early 1900s, cohorts like that of Milner and Rhodes established various programs and fellowships like the ‘Rhodes Scholarship’ precisely for this purpose. Such ‘pipelines’ have pullulated throughout the Western world, and include the modern day grooming lab known as the ‘Young Global Leaders’, of Klaus Schwab’s extraction.

"The CFR article is a burlesque travesty of hypocrisy: it belabors the point about Russia and China’s putative ‘aggression’ and ‘illiberal’ policies—like the Ukraine ‘invasion’—while cretinously ignoring U.S.’ own far more numerous transgressions, invasions, and occupations of various sovereign states, not to mention the current facilitation of full-blown unmitigated genocide in Gaza, for which the U.S. just delivered another huge batch of bombs to Israel as of this writing..."


These institutional programs serve as a winnowing mechanism for the global financial elite to distinguish the candidates with the right genteel pedigrees, sociopathic leanings, philistine and transnationalist compositions in order to find groom-able candidates for future leadership appointments. Take a look at the bonafides of any top globalist leader or policymaker—whether they’re from financial institutions like the ECB, IMF, Federal Reserve, or security organizations like NATO—and you will invariably find longstanding membership or distinctions from the handful of established ‘Old Order’ programs. The unelected cronies, which are in fact hand-selected and appointed by the nameless nomenklatura above, almost always originate from the same small clique.

It’s well known that the top economists, hedge fund directors—for firms like Goldman Sachs, for instance—constitutional lawyers, etc., all originate from this exiguous collective of schools, like Harvard. This is designed to allow the elites to precisely control the small pool of vetted loyalists before inducting them into their rarefied and closely-guarded ranks. It’s a closed loop system, and is central to the regulation of the upper strata which serves as the fabric of the elite’s control mechanism.

When it comes to Rasmussen’s report, it’s clear that the ‘super elite’ serve to become pillars of influence-making in society, acting as the enforcement guardrails to further manage and regulate the interests of the most exclusive managerial class, tied to the old banking families. In short: it’s a well-oiled, highly-selective pipeline which continually funnels the “right people”—ambitious, but malleable and servile to globalist interests—to the top.

Rasmussen’s survey reveals just how out of touch they are with regular society. Given that their milieu remains their own closeted cohort, these people never truly intermingle nor experience the cares or frustrations of the average worker in the street. They exist solely in a parallel simulated reality, which is reinforced for them on a daily basis through the confirmation bias generating engines of leftist social media, and liberal-controlled-and-dominated big tech corporations, which filter society for them like a pair of AR glasses.

The extremes of their out-of-touch stations are witnessed daily, e.g.:

 

The one seeming contradiction is that these elites predominantly “live in zipcodes exceeding a population density of 10,000 people per square mile.” This misleading implies they live in large cities like New York, where they would in fact be forced to endure daily commingling with the peasantry. In reality, we know they sit entrenched in highly sequestered aristocrats’ quarters within these cities—like the Upper East Side in Manhattan, or Kalorama in D.C. Being shuttled in swank car service to and fro, they rarely deign to cross paths with the commoners for whom they have nothing but contempt, apart from some token quick-grab at the corner coffee-and-bun kiosk to reassure themselves that they’re ‘in touch’ with the slipstream of society.

No better representation of this class has been put to film in recent times than the DeLillo-adapted, Cronenberg-directed Cosmopolis.

 

In many respects, this is an age-old problem: elites have always existed in parallel societies. However, the advent of digital and social media technologies have allowed them to encase themselves in an ever-impermeable confirmation bias bubble like never before. Listen to interviews with top Washington policymakers, corporate bigwigs, etc., and note how they exclusively mainline the most mainstream corporate publications like WaPo, NYTimes, etc. It becomes its own hermetic self-referencing feedback loop increasingly shut-off from the real outside world of human experience.

As the earlier NYPost article described:

If America is to avoid a tailspin into this toxic feedback loop, its elites will need to step outside their bubble, stop conforming in an effort to blend in with their myopic peers and start addressing the legitimate grievances of their fellow Americans.

This explains such things as the elites’ obsession with climate change, as that is one issue that exists solely ‘on paper’—as an abstraction—and is not realistically felt in the common quarters. The aristos who repeatedly reflect their own shrill echochamber alarmism on this issue get increasingly radicalized, particularly given that—as reported earlier—they put far more store in institutions of authority than the average prole. This results in the calcification of their blind belief in specters like climate change, despite their paying only lip service to it, and not acting accordingly in light of such an existential ‘threat’.

The problem is exacerbated by social ills which create divisions along gender lines, disproportionately giving weight to female-centric concerns, as per the Longhouse theory:

The Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior.

Women are naturally wired to be more sympathetic—and thus suggestible—to the social engineering imperatives co-opting the current narrative. Men are being increasingly pushed out from higher education, which means that even among the elites funnelled upward, the stances skew increasingly to the ‘Longhouse’:

 

 

 

 

 

This feminization of the managerial class can be seen from a variety of vantage points:

 

 

As everyone is now aware, unmarried women by far make the most disproportionate jump into Democrat Land, as well as increasingly radicalized hyperliberal policies—which reflects in other interesting ways:

 

As an aside, one X user had a topically cogent comment about the screenshot below:

 

Most of the bluecheck unpacking of the collapsing male college enrollment story focuses on how worrisome it is that these men won't espouse elite political opinions

But one of the most revealing disparities in the Rasmussen survey showed just how out of touch the elites are specifically to economic issues which affect the plebs most—as opposed to the airy abstractions of fringe intellectual culture war issues:

 

Here you can see that a whopping 82% of elites believe Biden is succeeding on jobs—which by extension means approval of the economy. Only 41% of voters think so.

This is particularly revealing because jobs and the economy are the one lifeblood issue directly felt by regular voters first hand. The elites have little connection to it, as no matter how big or small the unemployment numbers get, they remain secure in their entrenched upper-strata affluent lives.

The last area which Rasmussen says shocked even him, was the question surrounding the elites’ amorality. He found that nearly 70% of the super-elites would be fine with their candidate cheating rather than losing an election. Only a tiny 7% of regular voters harbored such amoral predilections:

Rasmussen said that this project has revealed the scariest single polling number he has seen in nearly 35 years of studying popular opinion. According to his data, 35 percent of the elite 1 percent (and 69 percent of the politically obsessed elite 1 percent) said they would rather cheat than lose a close election. Among average Americans, 93 percent reject cheating and accept defeat in an honest election. Only 7 percent reported they would cheat. -source

This is most stunning if only for the reason that it presents by far the widest margin of difference of any of the other questions. It alone explains many of society’s ills, including how readily the influence-wielding elite were already proven to use their considerable wealth and reach to put a ‘thumb on the scales’ of the 2020 election.

It’s not surprising, then, that this pervasive culture of amorality reflects in all the current narratives leading to the 2024 election:

 

 
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/age-amorality-liberal-brands

The above article from Foreign Affairs—the official journal of the Council on Foreign Relations—is particularly emblematic in this regard, specifically because the CFR in many respects represents the 1% super-elite totem pole under discussion. The conclave is made out of not just one particular class—like world leaders—but seeks to network and uniformize the entire fabric of the upper echelon, from business elite, bureaucratic royalty, and even top pop culture influencers like Angelina Jolie, who’s held membership for years.

The article is a testament to exactly the types of hypocrisies inherent to much of the ruling class. They speak of ‘worthy goals’ being pursued via ‘unworthy means’ for the sake of ‘liberal’ and democratic objectives, but the problem is: who decides on these ‘worthy goals’? According to their estimate, toppling a variety of unsavory, or simply ‘incompatible’, leaders around the world was a ‘worthy goal’. But inherent to ‘democracy’ and the very liberal ideals they claim to champion is the citizenry’s democratic approval of such policymaking directions.

In the ‘liberal’ West this tiny consort of elites pass off their own self-serving agendas with phony euphemisms couched as ‘democratic ideals’, when in reality the people have no say in any of it. That’s why this version of ‘liberal democracy’ is nothing more than a counterfeit guise to carry out geopolitical objectives necessary for the continued dominance of the world banking and financial elite.

 

The article is a burlesque travesty of hypocrisy: it belabors the point about Russia and China’s putative ‘aggression’ and ‘illiberal’ policies—like the Ukraine ‘invasion’—while cretinously ignoring U.S.’ own far more numerous transgressions, invasions, and occupations of various sovereign states, not to mention the current facilitation of full-blown unmitigated genocide in Gaza, for which the U.S. just delivered another huge batch of bombs to Israel as of this writing. China and Russia’s elections too have proven far more democratic and ‘liberal’ than that of the phony U.S. electoral ‘production’, which saw an obvious stolen ‘victory’ for a reviled candidate in 2020, or even that of today’s charade of the coordinated invasion of millions of illegals for the purpose of upending another “democratic” election in 2024. The breathless jeremiads of establishment footsoldiers are nothing more than desperate backstops meant to levee and dike the crumbling edifice of their superannuated Old Order.

Just behold the ideals of ‘liberal democracy’ the elites so steadfastly preen about:

 

 

Who knew Democracy was so complicated?

And ‘liberal’ ideals, which were supposed to stand for personal freedom, are all the rage these days:

 

 

In reality, all of these terms and concepts are merely the artifacts of the shibbolethic facade erected to serve the elites’ control paradigm. It all ties back to the subject at hand: the 1% class from Rasmussen’s poll have created a suprapositioned tier of institutions which serve as the The System’s dominance preservation gearwork. The self-referential design is a purposeful ideological enforcement mechanism meant to flue the ‘correct people’ to the top of the pyramid structure, while gate-keeping undesirables not blue-blooded enough for the exclusive soiree.

Ultimately, the author of the Foreign Affairs piece on amorality above, Hal Brands, is a fitting example of this very pipeline. A glimpse of his wiki shows he not only bears the ‘distinguishing’ mark of some Henry A. Kissinger plaudit—precisely the type of Rhodes Scholar pipeline-for-the-elites I spoke of—but that he even attended not one, but two of the 12 ‘chosen’ institutions singled out by Rasmussen:

 

That makes Mr. Brands the poster child of this insulated elite class. Sitting on their endless plush NGO stipends and sinecures, figures like Brands hack away their lives penning screed after dishonest screed pushing the most radical of globalist agendas for their Olympian coevals, all distantly detached from the lowly concerns of commoners beneath the clouds.

For another exemplary showcase of the disconnect, look no further than this new MSNBC clip about the upcoming barn burner titled White Rural Rage:

For another exemplary showcase of the disconnect, look no further than this new MSNBC clip about the upcoming barn burner titled White Rural Rage:

Naturally, the authors are representative of Rasmussen’s intellectual and affluent beau monde—one of them a political science professor at University of Maryland, the other a WaPo writer and fellow at some beltway NGO-linked ‘foundation’ which incubates precisely the type of establishment flacks in question.

Unfortunately, there is no solution for the societal split. Institutions receiving corporate funding of any kind can be deemed captured, as there are always strings attached. This leaves the only way forward as to shun, desecrate, and vilify any and all institutions so that the break can eventually resolve into a total decoupling from original and authentic society. Once a parallel system is developed, the empty ‘institutions’ of former consequence should desiccate and shrivel into flaky carapaces, to be trampled underfoot like locust crusts.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Simplicius The Thinker is the nom de guerre of an slavonic geopolitical and conflict analyst of great depth and insight, "with a dash of the sardonic.  You can support him by pledging here or tipping him at: http://www.buymeacoffee.com/Simplicius
@simplicius76

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