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PART I: UNDERSTANDING THE F-WORD
1. Who Are You Calling a Fascist?
2. Fascism Deconstructed
4. Bringing Out the Big Guns
5. Impeachment, or Prelude to War?
6. Fascism Reconstructed
7. World War II, Through the Looking Glass
8. World War II, By the Numbers
9. Coming to Terms With the F-Word
PART II: A CENTURY OF ILLUSIONS: THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY, 1901-2001
11. Teddy's Alter Ego, 1909-1913
12. The Scholar Spook, 1913-1921
13. The Short-Timer, 1921-1923
14. The Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1923-1929
15. The Man From Nowhere, 1929-1933
16. The Return of the Boy-King, 1933-1945
17. The Return of the Man From Nowhere, 1945-1953
20. The General’s General, 1953-1961
21. The Killing of the Boy-King, 1961-1963
20. The Enforcer, 1963-1969
21. The Sacrificial Lamb, 1969-1974
22. The Manchurian President, 1974-1977
23. The Country Bumpkin, 1977-1981
24. The Acting President, 1981-1989
25. The Fortunate Son, 1989-1993
26. The Boy-King from Nowhere, 1993-2001
PART III: FURTHER ADVENTURES IN THE POLITICS OF ILLUSION
27. A Slice of Hidden History
28. Lies My Psychology Professors Taught Me
30. Genocide, by Natural Causes
AFTERWORD: Understanding the F-Word: A Brief Return
APPENDIX I: World War II Casualty Estimates
CHAPTER 3The One-Party State?
The commercial press, in another of its brazen hypocritical proclamations, points with pride to the fact that it is free because it upholds a free system in which there are two political parties. But there is probably not one member of the A.N.P.A. (American Newspaper Publishers Association) who does not know that the Republican and Democratic parties both feed out of the same bag provided by the monied system, and that the same persons frequently subscribe funds to both major parties … They know this very well, and they also know very well that the press has never given honest news coverage to the formation, platform and campaign of any third party which was independent enough not to feed on the same money.
George Seldes, Facts and Fascism, 1943First of all, we all know that America is not a one-party state; it’s a two-party state. Or maybe three, if you count Ross Perot’s Reform Party, though precisely what it is about the current system that they intend to ‘reform’ is not exactly clear.
What should be abundantly clear to any rational-minded American by this time is that there is absolutely no substantive difference between the two major political parties in this country. This has been noted with increasing frequency by various writers, who have dubbed the emerging one-size-fits-all party the Republicrats.
It is my belief, in fact, that the Republican and Democratic Parties do not actually exist. And the notion that the U.S. federal government operates as some sort of give-and-take between the Democratic/liberal agenda, and the Republican/conservative agenda, is pure fantasy.
This is not to suggest that among the people in this nation who consider themselves Democrats or Republicans there are no legitimate differences of opinion. Most certainly there are. But I am suggesting that at the highest levels of government, where the agenda setting power lies, there is no such thing as a Democratic agenda and a Republican agenda - there is only the agenda, and the only debate is over how rapidly that agenda can be implemented while still maintaining the illusion of democracy.
And make no mistake about it, maintaining the illusion is of paramount importance. That is why it is essential that prominent men with virtually identical ideologies must pretend to be political rivals and to deeply despise one another. The bitter bipartisanship that ripples through Washington on a regular basis assures us that differing viewpoints are being heard, and that at least some of those in Washington represent our point of view.
Indeed, were it not for the relentless attacks upon Bill Clinton by the rabid right-wingers that have dogged him since his taking office, how would we even know that Clinton was a liberal? You would certainly be hard-pressed to ascertain that fact from the record of his administration.
Oh sure, he fooled us at first. We all saw how hip he was blowing his sax on Arsenio’s late night show and dancing to Fleetwood Mac at his inauguration. We all heard him deny that he had inhaled, though of course we all knew that he had. And we all heard about how he had protested the Vietnam War -- on foreign soil no less. Hell, this guy was so liberal he was practically guilty of treason.
And we had hope in the early days of his administration as he set about as though he was going to reform health care and address the issue of gays in the military. But then a funny thing happened. After faltering on both of those issues, the Clinton administration quickly set about implementing the most reactionary agenda of any president in modern history.
In fact, Clinton has instituted ‘reforms’ that remained mere wet dreams for his Republican predecessors, including the decimation of the welfare system. He has done more to militarize the nation's police forces than any president in history. By the time he leaves office, the number of Americans incarcerated will have nearly doubled during his time in office.
The use of the death penalty has skyrocketed during his tenure, with its use expanded to cover more crimes, and with appeals of death penalty cases severely limited. His time in office has also seen the country increasingly execute juvenile offenders, and increasingly incarcerate minors as adults.
Privatization of prisons, a movement that was just taking baby steps under the Reagan and Bush administrations, has flourished under Clinton. So too has the use of inmate labor by private corporations as a form of ersatz slave labor.
The sales of arms to foreign regimes - already at a high level during the Bush administration - doubled in Clinton's first year in office alone. And the militarization of foreign policy has far surpassed what the belligerent Bush team was able to achieve. In one seven month period, the Clinton White House conducted aerial bombing and/or cruise missile assaults against no fewer than four sovereign nations: Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and the Sudan. All of these were conducted in rather flagrant disregard for international law.
Clinton has also - aside from conducting a full scale war of his own in Yugoslavia - continued George Bush's punitive war against Iraq. By the time he leaves office, well over a million Iraqis will have died on his watch, considerably more than were killed in the initial air war by his predecessor.
In Haiti and Somalia as well, Clinton has shown a willingness, an eagerness even, to use military force. He has also presided over an unprecedented erosion of the judicial system and a vast undermining of privacy rights. Social spending has become almost non-existent and the Dow Jones has become the only relevant economic indicator.
Clinton has also been an unapologetic backer of ‘globalization.’ Whether it’s NAFTA or GATT or the WTO, this administration has never met a ‘free trade’ bill or organization it didn't like. Wealth has been concentrated during Clinton's tenure on a scale never before seen in history, as the gap between rich and poor widens with each passing week.
As for the enforcement of anti-trust legislation, forget it. The show trial of Microsoft notwithstanding, this administration has allowed the biggest mergers in history, with each year continuing to set new records -- most recently with the joining of Time-Warner and AOL. Environmental protections? None to be seen. Labor standards and protections? Not likely.
The truth about the record of this administration is that any Republican on earth would be delighted to leave office with such a legacy. Clinton has without a doubt been the best friend in Washington that the ‘conservatives’ could have ever hoped for, which brings up the obvious question of why so many of them have such an apparent disdain for the man.
The first answer which came to mind when pondering this question was that they were just jealous of Bill for being a better Republican than they are. And then, as if suddenly struck by a divine insight, it came to me. I now know the answer to the question of why the conservatives in Washington hate Bill Clinton.
The answer is that there is no answer to that question because it is not a valid question, due to the fact that it is based on a false premise. For the dirty little secret is that the right-wingers don’t hate Bill Clinton. They love the guy. And why shouldn't they? He has, after all, pursued ‘their’ agenda, and done so with nary a whimper of protest from the American left.
But why then, the question is begged, has the Republican Right done everything in its power to discredit, embarrass, and bring about the early demise of this administration? Because, strange as it may initially sound, that is precisely why Clinton has been so successful in pursuing such a reactionary agenda.
The truth of the matter is that without the constant broadsides launched at the White House, Clinton would have long ago ceased to pass for anything remotely resembling a liberal. Those on the political left who initially supported the new administration would have quickly abandoned the course it chose to follow. The only reason that Clinton has held the support of these factions, as well as of more mainstream Democrats for that matter, is precisely because of the constant attacks.
After all, the reasoning goes, if he is so thoroughly despised by the most intolerant right-wing extremists on Capitol Hill, then surely he must be a liberal. At the very least, one is left to conclude, he is the lesser of two evils, and any enemy of those guys must surely be an ally of mine.
And so this president has held the support of centrists and leftists alike, even as he has waged acts of war around the world, gutted domestic spending, given no more than lip service to social issues, and facilitated the rise of the prosecutorial police state. Even those who seriously question the policies of Clinton have surmised that things could only be worse with a Republican in the White House.
This may well be a false notion. The truth could very well be that we have fared considerably worse with a ‘Democrat,’ for it is precisely because Clinton is perceived as such that he has ‘succeeded’ in areas in which his Republican predecessors had failed. A Republican president, for instance, would not have been able to destroy the welfare state without invoking the wrath of the American people.
Neither would he be able to routinely wage acts of war, seemingly on a whim. Lefties are instinctively on alert for such shenanigans by Republican presidents. But when a ‘liberal’ embarks on such missions, we tend to give him the benefit of the doubt, even when that liberal is actually a conservative Republican.
In retrospect, we should have known something was amiss right away. A rather odd, but seemingly trivial aspect of the 1992 presidential campaign that brought Clinton to power should have signaled to the people that something wasn't quite right about the American political landscape.
The event referred to actually occurred after the close of the campaign, when the bright lights were mostly turned away. That was when Clinton's campaign manager, James Carville, and Bush's campaign manager, Mary Matalin - who had just conducted a no-holds barred, anything goes, win-at-all-costs mudfest - decided to cap off the campaign by getting married.
Nothing unusual about that, right? We all know that opposites attract. Even when those opposites have just devoted a considerable amount of energy to, by appearances anyway, completely destroying the reputations and careers of the other's candidate and campaign team. Even when those opposites are allegedly fiercely opposed to the other's ideology and have absolutely no respect for the integrity of the other's mission.
It does seem just a bit odd, however, that two such opposites would even have the opportunity to attract one another in the course of such a vicious campaign. How is it even possible that they could have interacted on a level that would have fostered a personal, let alone an intimate, relationship?
Unless, that is, the adversarial nature of this particular campaign, and of political campaigns in general, was largely an illusion -- a sham foisted on the people to foster the perception that the American political system is based on deep divisions between competing political parties and ideologies.
This is precisely why nearly all political campaigns for major office in this country quickly degenerate into mud-slinging contests. In truth, this is the only way that the illusion of diversity can be maintained. The real issues are rarely discussed because, quite frankly, there is nothing to discuss.
All of the ‘major party’ candidates are in agreement on all the issues of any real significance. They cannot differentiate between themselves and create the illusion of a meaningful choice to voters by discussing issues on which they all agree, and so they agree to disagree on a few largely inconsequential issues, and throw up a smokescreen of salacious allegations.
In this way, it is hoped, the voting public will be deceived into believing that they are being offered a legitimate choice between competing ideologies. For surely there must be marked differences between these men, or why else would they hate each other so?
The truth is that they hate one another only in the sense that ‘professional’ wrestlers hate their rivals. I hate to be the one to pull the curtain back on the wizard, but it’s all for show, folks. When the lights go up and the curtain drops down, they're all friends again.
In the case of the aforementioned 1992 election contest between George Bush and Bill Clinton, for example, abundant evidence has been presented by researchers that suggests that the two bitter ‘rivals’ had a rather cozy relationship extending back to Clinton's days as governor of Arkansas.
It seems that the good governor was considerate enough to allow his state to be used as a base for George and Ollie’s illegal Contra operations. From an airfield in Mena, Arkansas, weapons were flown out of the country and drugs were flown back in. This, of course, required the full knowledge and protection of the governor's office, especially when the Contra team began flying recruits in for training in a covert training camp.
These types of operations tend to involve a lot of cash, and this one was no exception. Some of this naturally found its way into the hands of the governor. Luckily the Rose Law Firm, where his wife and good friends Web Hubbell and Vince Foster happened to work, was very good at laundering these types of soiled profits.
But Bill Clinton earned more than just some extra cash from his complicity in this sordid affair. More importantly, he also gained important connections to George Bush and his inner circle, and very likely earned the right to pose as the Democratic candidate in the 1992 election.
Bill Clinton's role in that election campaign, essentially, was as an insurance policy for the Bush camp. Clinton was propped up as the ‘Democratic’ alternative to Bush in the event that the electorate sought a more ‘liberal’ alternative to the then-current administration.
In reality, the choice faced by voters in the 1992 election was between the real George Bush, and the George Bush surrogate named Bill Clinton. The only change in the agenda seems to have been an acceleration in the erosion of democratic rights under the cover of a ‘liberal’ administration.
I am not suggesting here, mind you, that the 1992 election was unusual, in the sense that there was something that set it apart from other presidential elections, or from most gubernatorial and Congressional elections, for that matter. I’m actually suggesting that they are all pretty much of a sham.
That's why it shouldn't have surprised anyone to see President Clinton, following his 2000 State of the Union address, walking arm-in-arm with former Klansman Strom Thurmond and glad-handing some of the most openly fascistic elements of the U.S. government, men who had just the year before been all but calling for his public execution.
And it also shouldn't surprise anyone when the losers in any given primary campaign predictably endorse and embrace the candidacy of the party front-runner, even when those same losers had previously denounced their party rival as the spawn of Satan. They all know that it’s just a game and that all will be forgiven.
Of course the press will feign amazement over how quickly the bitter divisions have been mended, but they too know how the game is played; they just don’t want to spoil the fun for the rest of us. So they play along, and try to paint as stark a contrast between the opposing candidates as they can.
World War II, Through the Looking Glass
Once lead people into war, and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policemen on the beat, the man in the street.
Frank L. Cobb of the New York World, 1917World War II is much like any other significant event in US history in that it is cloaked in mythology. It is unlike other historical events though, in that even those who condemn virtually all other past uses of US military power tend to romanticize this particular war as a shining example of America ‘doing the right thing.’
Our schools and our media - both news and entertainment - paint a picture of a heroic America saving the day by altruistically coming to the aid of an embattled Europe. But how much of this is historical truth and how much is historical revisionism? Much of what we ‘know’ about World War II, it turns out, falls into the latter category.
The purpose of this chapter, then, will be to examine some of the major myths surrounding WWII that have come to be almost universally accepted as historical facts. We shall begin with one of the more fanciful notions about the war:
Myth #1: Some European nations, despite being surrounded by combatants, managed to remain neutral throughout the war.
Sweden and Switzerland are almost universally believed to be two such nations. In truth though, both of these countries performed services vital to the Third Reich throughout the war, a fact that was well known to US officials – who nevertheless allowed the illusion of neutrality to stand, and continue to this day to do so.
Swiss banks handled much of the Reich’s sordid financial affairs, as has been fairly widely reported. Much of the gold looted by Germany, including tons of dental gold scavenged from the corpses of concentration camp inmates, was laundered through an intricate network of Swiss bank accounts. To this day, the banks have resisted paying compensation for their complicity in these crimes against humanity.
Less well known is the key role played by Sweden in keeping the German war machine in operation. One thing that a modern mechanized army needed to run was a steady supply of ball-bearings. Without them, planes would not fly, jeeps and tanks would not run, and artillery pieces would not operate.
Luckily for the Nazi regime, it had a rather cozy relationship with SKF, the Swedish ball-bearing trust that was in part an arm of the Swedish government. SKF was the world’s largest manufacturer of ball-bearings, controlling 80% of the European market alone. During the war, fully 60% of SKF’s total worldwide output was dedicated to the needs of the Reich.
This is not really surprising, given the cast of characters involved. The SKF story, though just one piece of a much larger puzzle, provides a good glimpse of the degree of collusion that existed between US and German industrialists and financiers during World War II.
One of the directors of SKF was Hugo van Rosen, a cousin of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering. Another was William L. Batt, who was also the president of American Bosch, a subsidiary of the I.G. Farben cartel. Both of these entities, along with a variety of other Nazi front companies, were represented and protected by John Foster Dulles of Wall Street’s Sullivan & Cromwell.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) Batt’s extensive connections to the Nazi cartels, he was appointed vice chairman of the War Productions Board by President Roosevelt. Batt was also an associate of Bush business partner Averell Harriman. At the end of the war, he popped up in Germany to pay a visit to the military ‘decartelization’ branch in Berlin.
The chief financier of SKF was Sweden’s Enskilda Bank, a correspondent bank of Germany’s Reichsbank. A major investor in the Enskilda Bank was ‘Colonel’ Sosthenes Behn, head of ITT – a longtime US intelligence front. ITT supplied the Reich with invaluable communications and missile guidance technology throughout the war.
And on and on the connections go. The main point here, though, is that Sweden was far from being a neutral bystander during the war. The country’s corporate and financial infrastructure was actively and aggressively pro-Nazi, as was the case in Switzerland as well. This was not only known to the heads of corporate America, it was wholeheartedly encouraged.
Myth #2: The Axis forces had not originally planned to invade the USSR. Hitler made the decision on something of a whim, believing that Russia could be quickly overrun, after which the westward push would resume. This proved to be a strategically unsound decision, requiring Hitler to redirect his forces to the Eastern Front.
This notion is completely unsupported by the historical facts. Every indication is that the Soviet Union was the primary target of the Axis European powers from the outset of the war. In fact, virtually every action taken by Germany’s military forces prior to attacking the USSR was intended to gain strategic advantage to facilitate the attack on the ultimate target – the Soviet Union.
The initial problem for Germany was that they had no front on which to attack the great Red menace. There happened to be a number of other nations in the way, including, from north to south: Norway, Finland, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.
The most direct path to the Soviet Union’s western frontier was through Poland and Czechoslovakia. Notably, these were the first nations to be plundered by the Reich - in March and September of 1939 - following the voluntary annexation of Austria in March of 1938.
Modern accounts of the war tell us that the brutal assault on Poland was a joint venture of Germany and the USSR, planned and coordinated in advance. At the time, however, the Soviets heatedly denied these reports - which were issued from Berlin - as Nazi propaganda, and contemporary Western news reports seconded that notion.
Soviet Premier Josef Stalin maintained that he was not informed of the planned invasion and that Soviet troops were sent in as a defensive measure to stop the Nazi advance and secure a buffer zone on the Soviet western frontier, which is indeed what appears to have occurred.
The German troops entered Poland on September 1 with blitzkrieg force, cutting a wide path of destruction across western Poland. The Soviet troops did not enter until September 17, and thereafter advanced quickly across the eastern half of Poland, meeting the German troops midway just two days later.
In other words, the Soviets encountered little resistance and covered nearly the same amount of ground in two days that the Germans covered in nineteen, which could well indicate that the Red Army entered in defense of Poland. It could also indicate simply that the vast majority of Poland’s forces were deployed in the west, and there was nobody left to resist the Soviet advance.
What is not in doubt is that Germany now had the beginnings of a front with the USSR. Also not in doubt is that news accounts at the time told of tens of thousands of Poles fleeing the German-occupied zone into the relative safety of the Soviet-occupied zone to escape the massive repression and bloodshed inflicted by the Nazis.
The Soviets by this time, no doubt, knew exactly what the long-term German goal was, so they immediately set out to buffer their northwestern front. Less than a month after entering Poland, the Soviets occupied the Baltics and began negotiations with Finland, aimed primarily at buffering the city of Stalingrad, which lay within easy artillery range of the Finnish border.
When these talks broke down, the Soviets invaded, ultimately forcing an armistice which ceded them what they wanted. The Soviets were widely and loudly denounced for these actions - and even expelled from the League of Nations - though they insisted that the only actions taken were those necessary for the defense of the USSR.
The Soviet Union, it should be noted here, had already seen the original version of this film - called World War I - and so had a pretty good idea of what the script called for. There is every reason to believe that they knew exactly what was coming. And they didn’t have to wait long.
Six months later, in April of 1940, Germany invaded Norway by way of Denmark, though neither really put up much of a fight. It was pretty much over before it even began, as was the occupation the very next month of the Netherlands and Belgium.
Next to fall was France - in June of 1940 - which provided Germany with valuable strategic assets, including France’s formidable armaments and entire Atlantic coastline. And it didn’t require much of a fight either. Paris, for instance, was declared an ‘open city’ and fell without a fight at all, the first European capital to do so.
By November of 1940, Hungary and Romania had been occupied as well, extending the Russo/German Front to the south of Poland. In Romania, however, as in Poland, Soviet forces rolled in to cut off the Axis troops, seizing strategically valuable oilfields and cutting off direct access to Bulgaria.
The Germans nonetheless proceeded to plunder forth into Bulgaria by way of Yugoslavia and Greece, and by February of 1941, Bulgaria was an occupied nation, followed quickly by Yugoslavia in April and Greece in May. The Third Reich now had a solid Eastern Front and a stable rear extending all the way from Norway in the north to Bulgaria in the south.
The very next month, on June 22, 1941, the Germans attacked along this entire 1,800 mile front with the largest military mobilization of manpower in history – three million troops. The Germans were joined in the north by Finnish troops, in the south by Romanian troops, and along the center by Hungarian troops. Also joining in would be large contingents of Italian and Spanish troops. It was hardly an action taken on a whim.
For the next three years, virtually all the fighting in Europe was on the Eastern Front. The only offensive action taken by the Axis powers in Western Europe for the duration of the war was the bombing of England (to be discussed later). The US, of course, had yet to enter the war, though over a dozen formerly sovereign nations had been occupied.
The US continued to remain disinterested through the summer and fall as Nazi troops plundered deep into Soviet territory. They took notice only on December 6/7, 1941. December 6, it will be recalled, was the day the Soviets did something they weren’t supposed to do – rallied a massive counterattack that began to push the German forces back.
And December 7, as everyone knows, was the morning that Pearl Harbor was bombed, bringing America quickly into the war. Which brings us to the next myth about WWII:
Myth #3: The bombing of Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack.
A number of researchers and historians over the years have presented evidence indicating that the US was aware of the impending attack and chose to feign shock and surprise, in order to lead a reluctant citizenry into what was, at the time, an unpopular war.
Prior to the unexpected Soviet counteroffensive, a fierce battle had been waged to steer public opinion away from supporting US entry into the war. This effort was led by such notables as Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, and Henry Ford, and organizations such as America First. The net result was that a major event was required to swing the pendulum of public opinion in the other direction – and quickly.
The timing of the attack then, is suggestive not just of US awareness, but quite likely of US complicity. In any event, the sequence of events leading up to, and on the day of, the attack certainly doesn’t suggest that it came as much of a surprise. From a mainstream account written at the time , here is what occurred:
Late August, 1941 – Kichisaburo Nomura was dispatched to Washington to begin US/Japanese talks.
September 21 – The talks reportedly reached a deadlock.
November 15 – Talks resumed with negotiator Saburo Kurusu having been added to the Japanese team.
December 3 – Negotiations again reportedly reached a deadlock.
December 7 – Kurusu and Nomura resumed talks with US Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington. Meanwhile, at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a US Navy supply ship spotted a Japanese sub at 6:30 AM and ordered an air-strike on the location, but the crew did not sound an alarm. At 7:02 AM, Corporal Joseph Lockard - manning Pearl Harbor’s aircraft detection system - spotted a large fleet of Japanese aircraft just 130 miles northeast of Oahu. His superiors inexplicably dismissed the fleet as US planes.
At 7:45 AM, another Japanese sub was spotted, this one having penetrated the submarine nets protecting the base. There was no US response. Ten minutes later, even as meetings were being held in Washington, the first bombs struck the naval base in a sustained attack allegedly intended to disable the Pacific Fleet. Strangely though, shore installations and oil storage facilities were not targeted. And conveniently, all three US aircraft carriers - far and away the most valuable assets in the fleet - were out to sea.
Three-and-a-half hours after the initial attack, a second ‘surprise’ attack occurred at 11:29 AM, followed by another at 11:59 AM. These were followed by further ‘surprise’ attacks at 12:22 PM, 7:15 PM, and 9:10 PM, although - after awhile - the surprise factor must surely have been wearing a bit thin. Most of these later attacks seemed more concerned with bombing civilian centers and strafing the streets with machine-gun fire than with inflicting further damage on the naval base.
This obviously served no military purpose, but did serve to enrage the American people. In the end, the damage to the Pacific Fleet was relatively minimal. Six of eight battleships survived, along with - as previously noted - all three aircraft carriers and virtually all the shore installations vital to keeping the ships operational, leaving America very well-equipped to enter the war.
Myth #4: The United States entered the war primarily to check Nazi aggression in Europe. The parallel war in the Pacific was of secondary concern.
That's not quite the script that was followed. It is absolutely true that America entered the war with the stated goal of ‘Europe First.’ But in truth, despite repeated promises to Soviet leader Stalin to open a Western Front in Europe, it would be two-and-a-half years before this came to pass. In the meantime, the vast majority of US forces were deployed in the Pacific theater of operations.
With the exception of a ridiculously feeble attempt to establish a Southern Front in Italy in mid-1943 - which proved to be of no strategic significance (though it was part of the covert game plan, as explained later) - American troops stayed away from Europe until D-Day, 1944. Meanwhile, Soviet troops fought for those same two-and-a-half years to halt the waves of Nazi invaders and reclaim their country.
These invaders included - in addition to the regular army troops of Germany and her allies - the so-called Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommando units, which were essentially mobile genocide squads. These units were activated in conjunction with the invasion of the Soviet Union, following behind the regular army forces to perform mass executions of anyone posing a ‘threat’ to the Reich. Following behind them were Waffen SS and Gestapo units, performing further acts of genocide.
In opposition to this formidable killing machine, the Soviets stood largely alone. And ultimately prevailed. By March 25, 1944, Soviet troops stood - for the first time in three years - on a portion of the pre-war border. By June, the entire Nazi Eastern Front was being pushed back and the defeat of Germany was inevitable; this is precisely when the US made its much heralded D-Day invasion of Normandy Beach on June 6.
Prior to this, as previously stated, America had been quite busy in the Pacific, conducting an island-hopping campaign to reclaim numerous island chains which had been occupied by fascist Japanese forces. Which brings up another myth:
Myth #5: Though the Axis powers conducted themselves in the most brutal and abominable fashion imaginable, America behaved admirably throughout the war.
This is not, of course, a myth that is specific to this war. The enemy is always vilified and America is always portrayed as heroic, though this is rarely - if ever - the case. In World War II though, the ‘enemies’ did indeed conduct themselves in a most vile manner. But America was certainly a contender in the Atrocity Bowl as well.
Take, for example, the island of Iwo Jima, which is but a mere speck in the ocean with a total land area of just eight square miles. Prior to any troops being landed at Iwo Jima, it was bombed continuously for 72 days. Longer, that is, than the entire nation of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War.
Following that, a naval force of several hundred ships and landing vessels was sent to encircle and shell the island around the clock for 72 hours, while bombers continued to drop napalm and explosives from above. Only then did troops set foot on Iwo Jima, to clear out any resistance burrowed into trenches and bunkers.
To aid in this task, the US had introduced some new weaponry to its arsenal – hand-held and tank-mounted flame-throwers. The intent was to literally burn the enemy alive in their fortified locations. And they worked great. Also brought in was the Marine War Dogs Division – canines specially trained to root out and attack the enemy. In the end, only a hundred prisoners were taken alive on the entire island.
Any number of other islands were taken in a similar fashion. A war correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly gave readers a taste of the brutality of US forces in the Pacific Islands when he reported: "We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."
Time magazine later justified the brutal battle for Iwo Jima thusly: "The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing …. indicates it." In 1944, Life magazine ran a "full page photograph of an attractive blonde posing with a Japanese skull she had been sent by her fiancé in the Pacific." Time also gleefully proclaimed that: "properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves."
That did, in fact, prove to be the case. In the final year of the war, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kure, Yokohama and sixty other so-called ‘death-list’ cities were carpet-bombed by US B-29 Superfortresses. The death toll was staggering. In Tokyo alone, as many as 85,000 Japanese lost their lives in a single night on March 9/10, 1945, when 1,665 tons of incendiary weapons were dropped.
By the end of the war, over 40% of the surface area in the death-list cites had been destroyed. On July 3, 1945, Tokyo reported that nearly five million Japanese had been left dead, wounded, or homeless by the relentless bombing raids. General Curtis LeMay, who led the air campaign, acknowledged its savagery when he noted that: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal."
And, lest we forget, it was the United States that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – on a country whose navy and air force were destroyed, and which was blockaded by sea and air and essentially defeated at the time. This brings up another myth about the war, which will be addressed after first noting that American brutality was certainly not confined to the Pacific theater.
US and British air power wreaked considerable havoc in Europe as well. While our modern accounts of the war emphasize the recurrent attacks on England by Luftwaffe bombers, the official casualty figures for the war turn up a rather curious anomaly. If these figures are to be believed, then about 60,000 civilians lost their lives in the UK throughout the course of the war. This is surely not an insignificant loss of life.
But consider that a single sustained incendiary bombing attack on the city of Dresden, Germany by the US and the UK left 130,000 dead. In other words, twice as many German civilians were killed in a single city in just one weekend than were British civilians throughout all the years of the war. Another 50,000 were similarly incinerated in Hamburg, Germany. And so on.
This is not to say that the Luftwaffe didn’t actively participate in the mass execution of civilians, or that German troops didn’t commit the most heinous of war crimes. Most certainly they did, as did Japanese forces in the Pacific. But that certainly does not excuse America’s behavior in the war, which was far from honorable.
Myth #6: The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led directly to the Japanese surrender and thereby saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
There are in fact numerous interwoven myths that need to be addressed here. What is needed first, however, is a very brief review of the war in the Pacific that led up to the bombings, in order to provide some context for this seminal event in world history.
Japan fired the opening salvos of World War II when it invaded Manchuria in 1931, an area in which it had vast financial holdings. The US completely ignored this illegal act of aggression. From there, Japanese troops showed every intention of proceeding on into Soviet territory – until Red Army forces were mobilized at the border, prompting the Japanese forces to wisely reconsider.
By the next year, 1932, the US was sending 13,000 tons of scrap iron annually to Japanese munitions factories to craft explosives. Japan was, at the time, led by a ‘secret’ occult order dubbed the ‘Society of the Black Dragon,’ a not-so-secret fact at the time, though discussion of such topics today is considered to be ‘conspiracy theorizing.’ The Society used assassination as a primary political tool, and controlled over 100 smaller organizations and the majority of the nation’s politicians and military leaders.
By the next year, 1933, US shipments of scrap iron had increased more than ten-fold, to 142,000 tons. Hitler, meanwhile, took power in Germany and immediately began preparing the nation to attack the Soviet Union. In 1936, Germany and Japan signed the anti-Comintern treaty. In December of the following year, Japanese fighter planes attacked and sunk the US gunship Panay, and followed that up by machine-gunning the crew as they desperately struggled to get ashore in life rafts. The US essentially ignored the brutal attack.
In 1938, Japan was again engaging in border skirmishes with the USSR, and getting consistently crushed by the Red Army. By the following year, The US had increased its shipments of scrap iron to 607,000 tons, and was shipping high-octane aviation fuel as well, to assist with the delivery of the armaments it was helping to create.
Besides jousting with the Soviets, Japan was also attacking and occupying every other nation and island chain in sight. Along the way, it built a number of state-of-the-art military airfields, which would later be occupied and utilized by the US. These airfields would play a vital role in the fire-bombing of the death-list cities.
In September of 1940, the infamous Pact of Berlin was signed by Germany, Italy and Japan. Seven months later, Japan signed a neutrality agreement with the Soviets, mirroring the non-aggression pact offered to Stalin by the Nazis in August of 1939 – which had been a rather transparent effort by the fascist powers to falsely reassure the Soviets.
December of 1941, of course, saw America’s entry into the war and the beginning of a long and bloody battle for control of the Pacific. By June of 1944, Japan had relinquished virtually all of its newly acquired territories to the US, and bombings of Japanese civilian centers began. In November, the bombings were stepped up dramatically.
August 6, 1945 marked the first offensive use of an atomic weapon as a uranium bomb was unleashed by the United States on the unsuspecting citizens of Hiroshima at 9:15 AM. 68,000 buildings and more than a hundred thousand men, women and children instantaneously ceased to exist.
Two days later, the USSR - which had agreed to stay out of the Pacific war for a period of ninety days following VE Day - declared war on Japan and entered Manchuria and Korea. On that same day, Soviet Foreign Commissar Molotov revealed that Tokyo had made a peace bid before the Potsdam Conference held the previous month.
The following day, a slightly different version of America’s new weapon - a plutonium bomb - was dropped on Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands more Japanese civilians. Five days later, Japan surrendered, though fighting with the Soviets continued for another week, with the USSR seizing some 500,000 square miles of Manchuria as a buffer.
What then, through all of this, are we to make of the bombings? It seems fairly clear that the resort to atomic weaponry was not necessary to end the war. As previously noted, it was revealed several days before the bombing of Hiroshima that the US had successfully sown mines in all of Japan’s ports, and that Japan’s air force and navy were in shambles. The nation was, in other words, physically isolated and militarily disabled.
But did the bombings hasten the end of the war? This doesn’t seem likely either. While the new weapon of war certainly wreaked massive destruction, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not fare much worse, in the final analysis, than did any of the other death-list cities. America had already proven repeatedly that it could inflict appalling levels of property damage and rack-up mind-boggling body counts without resort to atomic bombs.
The first bombing did not in fact bring an immediate surrender from the Japanese, though that is not likely the reason for the dropping of the second bomb. It appears as though America wanted to compare the effectiveness of the two different weapons. And even the second bombing did not elicit an immediate response from Japan. The most likely reason for the surrender was the entry into the war of the Soviet Union, a fact acknowledged by more thoughtful historians, and one that was conceded in a top-secret US study conducted just a year after the war.
As for the myth that the bombings saved countless lives, that is a blatantly absurd notion. Statements by President Truman and others over the years have put forth claims that as many as a million US lives were saved by avoiding an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Considering that this would represent nearly four times the number of American lives lost throughout the war, such claims appear rather specious.
In any event, any claims that promote the notion that deploying weaponry specifically designed to snuff out tens of thousands of lives somehow constitutes an effort to save lives are too ridiculous to merit comment. Returning then to the D-Day invasion of France: it is June of 1944, and the United States is finally opening up the long promised Western Front. Which brings us to the next myth:
Myth #7: The opening of the Western Front was the event that turned the tide of the war and played an essential role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Not quite. By D-Day it was abundantly clear that Germany was facing near imminent defeat with or without us. By July of 1944, with the Allies yet to break out of their secure beachhead to form the Western Front, the USSR had reclaimed all its pre-war borders and made clear that it wasn't going to stop there.
Having been subjected to two massive invasions from the West in the preceding twenty-five years, they fully intended to create a permanent buffer zone and to fully dismantle the German war machine. Already, they had begun penetrations into Poland and Lithuania.
This was precisely the time when the aforementioned coup attempt was made that would have replaced Hitler. Knowing that Germany could not stop the Red Army from rolling on through Eastern Europe, the goal was to seek a negotiated peace by pasting a new face on the fascist regime.
US intelligence services were fully complicit in this attempt to preserve the Reich. America’s premier spymaster - Allen Dulles - working through his post as OSS chief in Bern, Switzerland, had brokered the deal with the Nazis. Dulles believed, correctly no doubt, that Western public opinion would not support a negotiated peace leaving Hitler in power.
At around this same time, Dulles was involved in other secret negotiations with the SS, dubbed Operation Sunrise, aimed at achieving a German surrender in northern Italy – which would have allowed the Allies to advance to the port city of Trieste. From there, Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia could all have been quickly penetrated in advance of the Red Army.
Had the coup proven successful, that could conceivably have ended the war before the Western Front was even formed, and with Eastern Europe securely in Axis hands. It’s quite possible - indeed quite likely - that the USSR would have rejected this ‘peace.’ It is also possible that the Allies could have at that time joined with the Axis in waging war on the Soviets – who could have been painted as the aggressors for failing to accept the armistice.
But we will never know since the coup attempt failed, and five days later - on July 25 - the Allies broke out from their beachhead and the fabled Western Front was born. The Red army was at that time less than 100 miles from Warsaw and pushing on. Fully eighty percent of Germany’s troops were engaged on the Eastern Front.
The war in Europe would be over in just nine months. From there on out, it became essentially a race for Berlin, a race that the Allies on the Western Front would ultimately lose. Interrupting their westward push somewhat, the Soviets also sent troops in to occupy and fortify the Baltics, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Hungary.
The battle lines of the Cold War were being drawn – battle lines that would almost overnight see the United States and Britain embrace the European Axis powers of Italy and Germany as allies in opposition to their former ally in the east. Sound confusing? Not really. In truth, the Cold War battle lines weren’t so very different from the battle lines of World War II, or of World War I for that matter. Which brings up the final myth:
Myth #8: World War II was primarily a war against European Jewry.
This is, alas, a most sensitive subject. There is always the danger of being labeled an anti-Semite, or worse yet, a Holocaust denier. I do not intend here, however, to cast any aspersions on the Jewish religion, or to deny - in any way - that some six million Jews were brutally murdered during World War II.
There is no doubt that that is indeed the case. But it is also the case that those six million deaths constituted only about ten percent, perhaps even less, of the total death toll directly attributable to WWII. And by focusing on those six million to the exclusion of the other sixty million lives lost, we blind ourselves to what the war was really about.
For what World War II really was, in the simplest possible terms, was a war against leftism – whether labeled as communism, socialism, or liberalism. In a broader sense, it was a war against the people: a war to exert the right of a relatively few powerful monopoly capitalists to oppress, exploit, and - if necessary - kill the people of the world for financial gain.
Thirteen-and-a-half million of those people killed were Chinese. And an astounding twenty-five million of them were Soviets. Another eight or nine million of them were Poles. Yet another five to eight million were German or Austrian. While it is true that many of those killed in Poland, Germany/Austria and the Soviet Union were Jewish, the vast majority of them were not.
And very few of those killed in China were likely of the Jewish faith. And yet we never talk of the Chinese Holocaust, to honor the memory of the millions slaughtered there. Nor is their any mention of the Russian Holocaust, or the Polish Holocaust.
Everyone, however, is aware of the Jewish Holocaust, or as we know it, The Holocaust. And it is this notion, the idea that the genocide of European Jews was an event unique to history, to which I object. In truth, it wasn't even an event unique to the war in which it occurred.
Genocide was the order of the day. But again, the primary targets were those on the political left, or at least those living in countries that adopted an overtly leftist political ideology. A good number of those people happened to be Jewish. But twice as many happened to be Chinese. And four times as many happened to be non-Jewish Russians.
This is not to suggest that Jews were targeted only for their political beliefs. There is no doubt that Jews were persecuted specifically as an ethnic group. But the point is that they were not the primary target, but a secondary one that fulfilled a need of the fascist state to identify false enemies (for reasons which will be explained in chapter 9).
The primary purpose of World War II was to wipe out any and all pockets of leftist resistance to the Reich’s plans. Though that fact is difficult to discern from modern histories of the war, the officially accepted casualty figures tell a story all their own.
The Boy-King, 1901-1909
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. was born on October 27th, 1858, from the union of two extremely wealthy and politically prominent families. His mother was Martha Bulloch (you may have heard of their stores) and his father was Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., a descendant of Claes Martenssen van Rosenvelt, who had come to America from Holland in 1649. Teddy, Sr. served as an ‘advisor’ to Union troops on missions to the front lines during the Civil War.
Young Teddy went missing for awhile beginning in 1872, a fairly common occurrence with future presidents in their early years and nothing to be concerned about. He is said to have stayed with a family in - of all places - Germany. Teddy was back in time though to attend Harvard University, from where he graduated in 1880.
Just one year after graduation, Teddy won his first election - to the New York state assembly - and was immediately made the Republican minority leader. He was twenty-three years old. By 1884, however, Teddy had had enough of politics and declined to run for a second term, opting instead to spend some time as a cowboy and rancher.
Five years later, President Benjamin Harrison plucked young Theo off the ranch (or wherever he really was) and appointed him the U.S. Civil Service Commissioner. In 1895, he became the president of the New York City police board, where he waged a very public - but largely illusory - war on police corruption.
In 1897, at the ripe old age of thirty-eight, Teddy became the Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President William McKinley. This raises the obvious question of what exactly a cowboy knows about running the U.S. Navy. Apparently quite a bit, as it turns out, and Teddy wouldn’t wait long to prove the prowess of American naval power.
On February 25th, 1898 - performing in the capacity of Acting Secretary of the Navy while the boss was out of town - Teddy cabled Commodore George Dewey and instructed him to sail for Hong Kong to prepare to take actions against Spain. McKinley shortly thereafter asked Congress to appropriate $50 million for the U.S. military to prepare for war.
On April 30th, Dewey began offensive operations by attacking the Spanish Fleet in Manila Bay, thus beginning the so-called Spanish-American War, though this is largely a misnomer given that Americans actually did very little fighting against the Spanish.
The war had its origins in a Cuban uprising against Spanish rule that began in February of 1895, provoked largely by Cubans who had been living in America. By late 1897, the Cuban insurgents were close to defeating the Spanish, overthrowing some four hundred years of colonial rule. In December of that year, the battleship Maine was sent to the port of Havana, allegedly to protect U.S. interests.
By that time, the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were shamelessly propagandizing for America to enter the war, allegedly to end Spanish barbarism and liberate her colonies. By January 24th, the Maine had dropped anchor at Havana; three weeks later, it exploded, killing at least 260 American servicemen. The sinking of the ship was immediately blamed on Spanish saboteurs, though decades later it would be acknowledged that the explosion was internal in origin.
At McKinley’s request, Congress drafted a resolution calling for Spain’s withdrawal from Cuba, which the president approved on April 20th. Two days later, McKinley ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, prompting a declaration of war from Spain. The U.S. Congress followed suit the next day, declaring war on Spain.
The much lauded Spanish fleet was quickly dispatched by Dewey’s naval assault. Within twenty-four hours, the fleet was in tatters and control of Manila Bay had transferred to the Americans, with no loss of life and only seven men wounded. By August, the Spanish had been driven completely out of the Philippines.
In May, Roosevelt resigned his post and organized a ‘civilian’ army known in American mythology as the Rough Riders, allegedly made up of other ‘cowboys,’ though the group was in fact largely composed of Ivy League aristocrats, the forerunners of the pre-OSS ‘Old Boys’ network. Teddy served with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
On June 14th, Teddy’s ‘civilian’ troops departed for Cuba from a staging area in Tampa, Florida, along with thousands of non-civilian troops. Many of these were regiments of African-American and other dark-skinned ethnic peoples, dubbed ‘Immunes’ because it was said that they were more resistant to yellow fever and malaria, which were likely to be encountered.
A more accurate name for these divisions would have been ‘expendables.’ They were used by Teddy as cannon-fodder to lead the charge, including the fabled ascent of San Juan Hill, with explicit warnings having been given the men that cowards and deserters would be summarily executed.
The fighting was over in less than a month, the formal surrender of Santiago coming on July 17th. The Stars and Stripes ceremoniously replaced the Spanish flag which had flown for centuries; the Cuban flag, as well as representatives of the insurgency, were nowhere to be seen.
Prior to this time, Roosevelt had been known by the more formal ‘Theodore,’ but now he began to be regularly referred to as ‘Teddy’ in newspaper articles and cartoons, his exploits shamelessly romanticized by Hearst and others.
One of these was famed author Stephen Crane, who accompanied the Rough Riders as a ‘journalist’ to document their adventures. Thomas Edison sent camera crews to film the war, though the teams only filmed the troops preparing for battle. The actual battles were shot as ‘reenactments’ back home in New Jersey.
When Teddy returned to the states as the conquering hero, he quickly became the governor of New York. That didn’t last long though, as the very next year he became the vice-presidential running-mate of President McKinley, who was facing a re-election campaign.
McKinley had opted to replace his first vice-president, Garret Hobart, a move that has been known to shorten the life expectancy of sitting presidents. McKinley was re-elected, and in March of 1901 Teddy became the new vice-president. That was to be a temporary position, however.
On September 6, McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, allegedly by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. One bullet grazed the president’s ribs and another struck his abdomen, though neither proved to be fatal. Nevertheless, McKinley died eight days later, allegedly of gangrene, and the boy-king became the 26th President of the United States. Within two months, Czolgosz was permanently silenced, having been tried, convicted, sentenced and executed.
Roosevelt’s administration actively encouraged and incited a revolt on November 3rd, 1903, in the state of Panama, at the time a part of the nation of Columbia. American naval power prevented a suppression of the revolt, and just three days later, on November 6th, the United States formally recognized the new nation of Panama. Work was immediately begun on constructing the Panama Canal.
In 1904, vying for a second term, Roosevelt was opposed for the Republican nomination by Mark Hanna of Ohio, who had been McKinley’s principal backer and financier during his gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. This could have posed a problem for Teddy, but luckily Hanna died before the Republican National Convention and Roosevelt clinched the nomination.
During his second term, Teddy ordered the ‘Great White Fleet’ on a world tour as a show of U.S. naval superiority -- and American belligerence. Around this same time, he sent John Watson Foster, who had served as Secretary of State under President Harrison, to the Hague Conference to represent a Chinese government badly fractured by the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War. Foster brought along his young grandson, John Foster Dulles, who served as the delegation’s recording secretary.
John Watson Foster had previously distinguished himself by encouraging an uprising against Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii in 1893. American businessmen - with an assist from U.S. troops - overthrew the Queen, setting the stage for the annexation of the islands. More U.S. troops were deployed to support the illegitimate provisional government of Sanford B. Dole.
Lies My Psychology Professors Taught Me
[New] technologies are conditioning a growing segment of the society to regard all deviance as sickness and to accept increasingly narrow standards of acceptable behavior as scientifically normative ... Together the new programs and technologies are part of a burgeoning establishment involving welfare institutions, universities, hospitals, the drug industry, government at all levels, and organized psychiatry (itself in large part a creation of government) ... The ideal, in the view of the behaviorists, is the paranoid's dream, a method so smooth that no one will know his behavior is being manipulated and against which no resistance is therefore possible ... There is no longer a set of impositions which he can regard as unjust or capricious and against which he can dream of rebelling. To entertain such dreams would be madness. Gradually, even the ability to imagine alternatives begins to fade. This is, after all, not only the best of all possible worlds; it is the only one.
Peter Schrag Mind Control, Pantheon, 1978I have a degree in psychology from UCLA. I don't know exactly where it is, though I'm sure it's safely filed away somewhere. It's not really worth much though. I don't mean that it doesn't have much value in the job market, though that is surely the case. No, it isn't worth much because it was awarded to me on the supposition that I had gained a substantial level of knowledge about the field of psychology, which in hindsight was clearly a faulty premise.
It's not that I didn't try to learn. I actually did a very good job of regurgitating back the information that was presented to me, even graduating with honors. No, the problem was that - despite the exalted reputation of the UCLA psychology department - none of my professors seemed to be particularly interested in teaching me what psychology is really about.
I have a much better understanding now, though I had to fill in many of the gaps in my education on my own. Doing so, by the way, took considerably less time than the four years I spent being spoon-fed pseudo-knowledge at college. Society doesn't place any value on the acquisition of such knowledge however, so I don't have any kind of degree for my post-college education. Nevertheless, I thought I'd pass along some of the information that I wasn't formally taught, for whatever it's worth.
One thing I was taught was that John Watson is a much revered figure in the field of psychology, considered the father of 'behaviorism.' Watson, who began his career in 1908 as a professor of psychology and the director of the psychological laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, was perhaps most notable for venturing into the field of infant study in 1918 - at the time a largely unexplored area of research.
Watson conditioned a fear response in an infant identified only as 'Little Albert,' afterwards triumphantly declaring that "men are built, not born." Ten years later, Watson penned what was at the time considered the bible of child-rearing, Psychological Care of Infant and Child, assuming the mantle that would later be worn by Dr. Spock.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of elements of this story that seem to have been omitted from my textbooks, one of which is that Little Albert was not just some random infant; he was, in fact, the illegitimate son of the good doctor himself. And how did the reigning expert on childcare fare as a father? Not too well, it seems: Albert Watson was so traumatized by his upbringing at the hands of his father that he committed suicide shortly after reaching adulthood.
Watson had long since left his position at Johns Hopkins amidst a nasty divorce from his first wife, presumably precipitated by her displeasure with the revelation that Watson's experiments had included impregnating his nurse and torturing their resultant offspring. In 1921, Watson headed for Madison Avenue where he put the behavior modification expertise he had acquired by traumatizing infants to work on a society-wide level, ushering in the era of modern propaganda (oops, I meant to say advertising). Along the way, he would find U.S. intelligence services to be an excellent source of funding, as would all the characters in this sordid tale.
Following closely in the footsteps of Dr. Watson was B.F. Skinner, the other revered figure in the behaviorist school of psychology. Skinner - who had received a defense grant during World War II to study the training of pigeons for use as part of an early missile guidance system (I don't just make this shit up) - invented what he termed the 'Air Crib' in 1945, which was essentially a sensory deprivation chamber built specifically for infants.
Like Watson, he used his own child as a human guinea pig, raising her in the thermostatically controlled, sound-proof isolation chamber for the first two years of her life, cut off from human contact. Skinner ultimately followed a bit too closely in the footsteps of his mentor; Debby Skinner, like Albert Watson, committed suicide in her twenties.
In 1948, Skinner joined the faculty of Harvard, putting him in the company of such luminaries as Dr. Martin Orne, the head of the Office of Naval Research’s Committee on Hypnosis and later a prominent member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Skinner and Orne - as well as numerous others at Harvard, including Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert - received heavy funding from both the CIA and the U.S. Army.
In 1971, Skinner published an unabashedly fascistic diatribe entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity, advocating a dystopian society in which freedom and dignity were outmoded concepts. It earned him a cover story in Time magazine and the honor of having his work named the most important book of the year by the New York Times.
Also on board at Harvard at the time was Dr. Henry Murray, overseeing the work of Leary's Psychedelic Drug Research Program and various other CIA-funded projects. So deified was this man during my years at UCLA that an entire undergraduate course focused almost exclusively on his supposedly brilliant work. Yet during that course, no mention was ever made of the fact that Murray was a fully owned asset of the intelligence community. Recruited during World War II by none other than Wild Bill Donovan, Murray was put to work running the Personality Assessments section of the OSS.
Murray's best known contribution to the field of personality assessment - the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) - was in fact developed as a tool of the U.S. military/intelligence complex. After the war, Murray was one of the key players in the CIA's MK-ULTRA projects, studying various methods of achieving control of the human mind. One of his best research subjects during his days at Harvard was a young undergraduate by the name of Theodore Kaczynski.
Perhaps even more revered than Murray was Dr. Louis Jolyon West, the head of the UCLA Psychiatry Department and the director of the prestigious UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Dr. West was another prominent participant in the MK-ULTRA program who would eventually wind up on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. His work with the military/intelligence community began at least as far back as 1958, when he conducted studies funded by the U.S. Air Force in surviving torture as a prisoner-of-war.
If you're wondering how it is possible to study the conditioning of soldiers to survive torture without inflicting that very same torture in the process, the answer is simple: it isn't. A few years later, West achieved a moment of fame when he injected a beloved elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo with a massive 300,00 microgram dose of LSD to observe how it would react; Tusko's reaction was to promptly drop dead.
In 1964, West was called upon to evaluate the 'mental state' of a man by the name of Jack Ruby, at the time being held pending trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. West quickly determined that Ruby was delusional, based on his obviously absurd belief that there was some sort of fascist conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy. Dr. Jolly, as he was known to colleagues, ordered Ruby drugged with 'happy pills.' Ruby subsequently died of cancer, which he maintained he had been deliberately infected with. Having finished up that assignment, the doctor soon after found himself a crash-pad in the Haight where he could 'observe' the acid subculture in its native environment by drugging unwitting 'subjects.'
West is probably most notorious for proposing in 1972 to then California Governor Ronald Reagan the creation of a Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, to be built on a remote abandoned missile test site in the Santa Monica Mountains. Among his earliest recruits were Leonard Rubenstein, formerly a top aide to Dr. David Ewen Cameron, as well as two South American doctors who had also worked for Cameron - one to run the shock room and the other to run the psychosurgery suite.
At the time, the two were employed at 'detention centers' in Paraguay and Chile, which is a nice way of saying that they were working at torture/interrogation centers run by Nazi exile communities (many of these detention centers - including the notorious Colonia Dignidad in Chile - still exist to this day).
Also recruited by West was Dr. Frank Ervin, one of a trio of Harvard psychosurgeons who had not long before proposed lobotomy as the solution to urban 'rioting'. The center was to work in conjunction with California law enforcement and had secured large grants from the U.S. Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and the National Institute of Mental Health. These two organizations had forged a close alliance in 1970 with the encouragement of the Nixon Administration, with both of them heavily involved in funding MK-ULTRA projects. There were to be psychologists, physicians and sociologists on board - mostly recruited from among West's disciples at the Neuropsychiatric Institute - as well as lawyers, police officers, probation officers and clergymen.
The goal of the center was to identify 'predelinquents' and treat them before their 'deviance' and supposed propensity for violence could be manifest. The team believed that predelinquents could be identified on the basis of several factors: socioeconomic status (poor), age (young), ethnicity (black), and sex (males). Treatments under consideration included electroshock, chemical castration, experimental drug therapy, and psychosurgery -- better known as lobotomy (the 'surgical' destruction of the frontal lobes of the brain).
Lobotomy was, curiously enough, developed in fascist Portugal in 1935 by Dr. Egaz Moniz as a tool of social control. It was introduced to America the following year by James Watts and Walter Freeman, the latter of whom would later boast of having personally performed over 4,000 lobotomies in the United States, for all of the following 'conditions': apprehension, anxiety, depression, compulsions, obsessions, drug addiction, and sexual deviance.
By the post-war years, lobotomy was big business, warmly embraced by the Veteran's Administration and heartily recommended for vets suffering from combat-related 'disorders.' Moniz's procedure did not prove too popular with his patients however. In 1939 he was shot and partially paralyzed by a former patient. Sixteen years later, another former patient finished the job, beating Nobel laureate Moniz to death.
Electro-shock therapy was likewise an import from fascist Europe, developed by Ugo Cerletti in Italy in 1938. Appropriately enough, this 'medical advance' was based on Cerletti's observation of cattle being jolted into submission as they were being led to slaughter. Another form of shock therapy - insulin shock - was introduced by Sakel in fascist Austria just a few years earlier.
One name that never came up in my years at UCLA was that of the aforementioned Dr. David Ewen Cameron. Considering that Cameron is probably the most honored North American psychiatrist of the last half-century, this appears in retrospect a rather remarkable omission. During his career, Cameron founded the Canadian Mental Health Association and served as chairman of the Canadian Scientific Planning Committee, president of the American Psychiatric Association, president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the first president of the World Association of Psychiatrists. He was also the psychiatrist most thoroughly co-opted by U.S. intelligence services in all of North America.
His intelligence career began at least as early as 1941, when he was sent by Allen Dulles to England on behalf of the OSS to 'ascertain the state of mind' of Rudolph Hess, Hitler's right-hand man who had supposedly 'defected' to the UK. Cameron was during this time a member of the Military Mobilization Committee of the American Psychiatric Association, in which capacity he also worked closely with Dulles.
By 1943, Cameron had founded the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal with a generous grant from (where else?) the Rockefeller Foundation. The institute continued to receive lavish support from the Rockefellers for at least the next decade, as well as the generous support of the CIA through various funding conduits.
In 1946, Cameron helped craft the Nuremberg Code on medical research, setting ethical guidelines for human research that were perhaps nowhere more flagrantly ignored than at his own Institute. Cameron's MK-ULTRA operation conducted what were undoubtedly among the most appalling of the CIA-funded mind control experiments (those that are well documented, anyway), utilizing what he euphemistically termed 'depatterning' and 'psychic driving.'
During the depatterning phase, the objective was to completely obliterate the existing personality. This was done by restraining the victims (oops, I meant patients) for weeks on end and subjecting them to massive doses of drugs and repeated electroshock treatments. Cameron preferred the Page-Russell electroshock technique - controversial even among the shock docs of the time - which employed six consecutive shocks rather than just one big jolt. This wasn't quite enough for Cameron though, so he cranked up the power to as much as twenty times the normal strength, and administered the 'treatment' two or three times a day. Concurrently given three times a day were drug cocktails containing every combination of incapacitating and mind-altering drug imaginable.
Following some two months of this medical torture, patients were then subjected to psychic driving, during which they were again incapacitated by drugs - including curare, a paralyzing agent which can be lethal - while taped messages were played continuously through speakers placed in pillows or in helmets the unfortunate victims were forced to wear. This also went on for weeks on end, with the subjects remaining drug-addled throughout the process. Cameron experimented with other techniques as well, including psychosurgery and the extensive use of LSD; one woman was kept locked in a small box for thirty-five consecutive days.
In 1960, Cameron was asked by Allen Dulles to evaluate the mental state of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers upon his return from the Soviet Union. So impressed was Dulles with Cameron’s assessment of Powers that he next had him draft a psychological profile of Patrice Lumumba - the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo - to determine what the most efficient means of assassinating him might be.
Premier spymaster William Buckley took the agency’s file on Lumumba to Montreal for Cameron's review; by January of the following year, Lumumba was dead, his body dissolved in acid after enduring a month of barbaric torture. As for Buckley, he would later be present at both the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul and the successful assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, whose security forces he had personally trained.
Working with Cameron on his experiments - some of which are believed by some researchers to have been terminal - were Leonard Rubenstein, an Englishman and former member of the British Army’s Royal Signal Corp, and Jan Zielinski, a Polish-born engineer who knew only limited English and rarely spoke. These two built a 'grid room' and an isolation chamber in the basement of Allan Memorial and were given unlimited access to patients, despite the fact that neither had any formal medical training or qualifications. Also on board was Dr. Hassam Azima - rumored to be a blood relative of the U.S.-installed Shah of Iran - and Dr. Wilder Penfield, a prominent neurologist.
Penfield was one of the pioneers in the field of electromagnetic control of the brain in the 1960's. Most prominent in this area of research was Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado, who made the front page of the New York Times when one of his remote-controlled brain implants stopped a charging bull dead in its tracks. Delgado - who brought his ideas here from fascist Spain and was heavily funded by the CIA - was an open advocate of a psychologically controlled totalitarian society. Probably nowhere can the true nature of psychology be better discerned than from the words of this Dr. Strangelove.
In his Orwellian titled book, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, Delgado wrote that "the integration of neurophysiological and psychological principles [would lead] to a more intelligent education, starting from the moment of birth and continuing throughout life, with the preconceived plan of escaping from the blind forces of chance and of influencing cerebral mechanisms and mental structure in order to create a future man with greater personal freedom and originality, a member of a psychocivilized society, happier, less destructive, and better balanced than present man."
He supported the mass drugging of America with "tranquilizers, energizers, and other psychoactive drugs," which he claimed were "highly beneficial both for patients and for relatively normal persons who need pharmacological help to cope with the pressures of civilized life." Lobotomy was proposed as the answer to crime: "the possibility of surgical rehabilitation of criminals has been considered by several scientists as more humane, more promising, and less damaging for the individual than his incarceration for life."
Delgado also made the rather remarkable observation that: "In some old plantations slaves behaved very well, worked hard, were submissive to their masters, and were probably happier than some of the free blacks in modern ghettos." Ahh, the good old days. Delgado next noted that: "In several dictatorial countries the general population is skillful, productive, well behaved, and perhaps as happy as those in more democratic societies."
Five years after penning his manifesto, Delgado appeared before the U.S. Congress and proclaimed: "We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated ... The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective ... Man does not have the right to develop his own mind." Such talk earned Delgado funding from the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Aero-Medical Research Laboratory, and the Public Health Foundation of Boston.What has been covered here barely scratches the surface of the lies and omissions that characterized my education in the field of psychology. There is considerably more that could be said on the subject. I could mention, for instance, that two of the most widely referenced psychological studies - Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment and Stanley Milgram's obedience studies - were funded by, and performed at the request of, U.S. military and intelligence services. ********************
I could also mention that the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) - created in 1946 by the congressional National Mental Health Act - was borne of the combined efforts of Robert H. Felix (head of the military's Division of Mental Hygiene during World War II), General Lewis Hershey (director of the Selective Service System), and the chief psychiatrists of the Army and the Navy. In fact, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - the bible of modern psychiatry - was also an invention of the military/intelligence complex, developed during World War II by Brigadier General William Menninger to codify 'deviant' behavior, and later institutionalized by the APA.
And of course I would be remiss were I not to note that the twin pillars of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, were both fascist sympathizers. In 1933 - the year that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party ascended to power - Germany’s influential Journal of Psychotherapy published an article by Dr. M.H. Goering, a cousin of Hermann Goering, urging psychotherapists to make "a serious scientific study of Adolf Hitler’s fundamental work Mein Kampf, and to recognize it as a basic work." The editor of the journal openly calling for the Nazification of psychotherapy was Dr. Carl Gustav Jung.
Sigmund Freud had close ties to the Reich as well, particularly to a man named George Viereck - the illegitimate grandson of the Kaiser who had ties to SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler and was perhaps the most avid supporter of Nazism in America. Viereck ran an extensive pro-Hitler propaganda operation that included having a U.S. Senator on his payroll - Ernest Lundeen from Minnesota - whose hastily scheduled flight out of Washington following the revelation of his connection to Viereck conveniently crashed on August 31, 1940, as such flights are prone to do.
In 1926, Viereck interviewed Freud - whom he had known for many years - on the subject of anti-Semitism, and in 1930 published that interview in a collection entitled Glimpses of the Great. Freud would later state that: "I can highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone." And since wherever Nazis congregate, U.S. intelligence is never far away, it's not surprising that Freud had impressive connections to the 'Old Boys' network as well. Particularly close was William Bullit, who spent several months working with Freud in Vienna and personally escorted the doctor out of the country.
What then is this thing we call 'psychology'? Put in the simplest possible terms, it is just another appendage of the national security infrastructure designed to attain social control and enforce conformity to the fascist state. It in fact is nearly indistinguishable from the American criminal justice/penal system. There is at least one major difference though - the psychiatrist is allowed to serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in seeking the involuntary confinement of 'deviants' in mental institutions that are indiscernible in form and function from America's rapidly growing prison complex.
The harsh reality is that psychology has little to do with bettering the human condition and alleviating suffering, and everything to do with lending legitimacy to the corporate capitalist state and justifying as individual failings the ever increasing levels of suffering inflicted by the state onto society. As Frederick Winslow Taylor - the exalted father of 'scientific management,' an early euphemism for the deskilling of labor and the reduction of the American labor force to interchangeable, easily exploited automatons - so succinctly stated many decades ago: "in the past the man had been first; in the future the system must be first."
Not long ago, my teenage daughter asked me why it was that so many people she has met in her life suffer from low self-esteem. Why indeed? The answer, it turns out, is quite simple: we are all victims of one of the big lies of American society - the one that says that if we educate ourselves, work hard, and apply our talents, there is absolutely nothing we cannot achieve.
We are taught from birth that anyone in this great country can rise up to the highest strata of society if they so choose, that if we have the drive and ability, nothing can hold us back. George W. Bush articulated this very message from the campaign trail recently when he said: "One of the wonderful things about America is, it doesn't matter who you are or where you're from. If you work hard, dream big, the notion of owning your own business applies to everybody."
Conversely, if we should fail we have no one but ourselves to blame, for we must not be smart enough, talented enough, or educated enough - or we just didn't try hard enough. The brutal reality though is that in the real world, the sons of the rich and powerful will assume their fathers' seats in the boardrooms of America regardless of their qualifications (George, Jr. being a prime example), while the most talented of kids from America's 'inner cities' will live and die without ever seeing the world beyond the confines of their neighborhoods.
That is the reality for the majority of Americans. And yet we are encouraged, in fact required, to set goals for ourselves that are impossible to attain, to buy into the Big Lie. When we inevitably fail to achieve these goals, which the social structure has deliberately put out of our reach, we are required to blame only ourselves. The system has not failed you, you have failed because you are a fucking loser. You're too fucking lazy to succeed. You're too fucking stupid to succeed. So stop looking for scapegoats and accept the fact that you determine your own fate.
That is what the system would have you believe. And it is, in the final analysis, the psychologist's primary job to reinforce that message. That is why it is that the nation that heralds itself as the truest form of 'democracy' is home to more psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, counselors, social workers, and psychic friends than any nation in the world. Not coincidentally, that same nation is also home to the world's largest penal system. That, apparently, is the price we pay for 'freedom' in this country, a peculiar kind of freedom that does not include the right to engage in any sort of 'deviant' behavior.
Freedom of that type, it seems, could conceivably pose a threat to the powers that be, lest too many people begin to question the 'right' of the wealthy and powerful to maintain their positions at the top of the food chain at the expense of the psychologically enslaved masses whose labors serve to fatten their investment portfolios. Better that we remain, in the words of George Orwell, in a state of "controlled insanity" -- for nothing could pose a greater threat to the system than a sane population fighting for survival in an insane world.
Genomes and Eugenics
Anyone who interprets National Socialism merely as a political movement knows almost nothing about it. It is more than religion; it is the determination to create a new man.
Adolf HitlerOn June 26th of 2000, the successful completion of the mapping of the human genome was triumphantly announced. The media were nearly universal in heaping praise on this alleged scientific milestone. This was just as true for the 'progressive' press as it was for the more mainstream media outlets. For instance, the World Socialist Web Site - allegedly one of the most uncompromisingly leftist of news sources - gushed that:
"The publication of the rough draft of the completed sequence of the human genome on June 26 was an outstanding scientific achievement, the outcome of an international collaboration spanning a decade and involving hundreds of scientists. The researchers used the most advanced sequencing machines and analysed the resulting data with the aid of powerful computers ...
"The elaboration of the human genome sequence is a major step in demystifying the evolution of the human species and the workings of the human body. Aided by technology, such scientific discoveries puncture the clouds of superstition that surround human existence and weaken the grip of religion over the minds of men and women."
Seemingly the only critical voice among the mindless back-slappers of the U.S. media belonged to Robert Lederman, columnist for the Greenwich Village Gazette. In an insightful column featured on the Konformist web site, Lederman noted that:
"Probably the single greatest irony in the human genome issue is the idea being marketed to the public that this scientific advance will lead to the average person enjoying a much longer and healthier life. In light of governmental resistance to preventing corporate pollution of the environment, developing renewable sources of energy, banning the use of toxic chemicals and insecticides or protecting the food supply from contamination, can we really expect that this technology will be used to extend human life generally?
"Politicians claim there is an imminent crisis facing the social security system right now. How much worse will that crisis be if tens of millions of Americans who might otherwise have died in their sixties and seventies from chronic disease live into their nineties and beyond? Be assured that those in control have no intention of allowing this to happen.
"The far likelier scenario is that for the very wealthy there will indeed be new and miraculous medical treatments to prolong and enhance life. For the vast majority however, this new technology will only be used to further limit their freedom and privacy while creating a caste system based on genetics that fundamentally changes the way society is structured."
Lederman's concerns are well founded. What the rest of the media seem to have overlooked, deliberately or out of ignorance, is that the Human Genome Project did not arise in a vacuum. Rather, it is but the latest step in a 'scientific' progression spanning at least the last 150 years. The aforementioned World Socialist Web Site appeared to acknowledge this in their coverage of the much-heralded event:
"In 1838 Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann discovered the cell as the fundamental unit of life. In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which elaborated a mechanism of evolution and set a coherent framework for all the biological sciences. In 1865 the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel developed the foundations of modern genetics. T.H. Morgan in 1910 determined that genes are organised along chromosomes. In 1942 researchers established that genes are made of DNA, a chemical found in the cell nucleus. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick elaborated the structure of DNA. In 1973 Stanley Cohen and Herbert Brown invented genetic engineering by transplanting a gene between bacteria, and in 1990 the Human Genome Project began."
The only problem with this capsule history of the events leading up to the cracking of the genetic code is that it is woefully incomplete. So incomplete, in fact, that it thoroughly obscures the goals being pursued by those who would claim to be working for the betterment of human civilization. This is to be expected of course when the coverage is coming from the corporate mass-media, though one expects a little better from the 'alternative' press. To see just how far off the mark this historical narrative actually is, it is instructive to review a few key events that do not appear in the timeline above.
In 1869, British psychologist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, published the first major document of the modern eugenics movement - Hereditary Genius - in which he made the observation that: "The average intellectual standard of the negro is some two grades below our own." Galton proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would ultimately yield a 'gifted' race.
He based this theory on the observation that the most prominent members of British society tended to also have prominent parents (no shit, Frank? Did you figure that out all by yourself?). Two years later, the exalted Charles Darwin published Descent of Man - his follow-up to Origin of Species - in which he frequently quoted from his cousin's racist screed.
Charles Darwin had not, by the way, coined the term 'survival of the fittest' in his earlier work. That concept was first proposed by Thomas Malthus as a purely economic principal, and one that was designed - not coincidentally - to justify the rise of the capitalist state. Darwin had taken that principal and transformed it into an irrefutable natural law, justifying decades later the victory of a flabby, naked minion of Satan on the TV 'game' show Survivor.
As Engels put it: "The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of ... the bourgeois doctrine of competition together with Malthus' theory of population ... the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved."
In 1875, "coolies, convicts, and prostitutes" were declared "undesirable" aliens and excluded by newly drafted laws from immigrating to the shores of America. The next year, John Harvey Kellogg became the superintendent of the Western Health Reform Institute, changing its name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Nearly fifty years later, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. would spend time at the sanitarium after suffering a ‘nervous breakdown.’
Under Kellogg's directorship, the sanitarium began experimenting with ‘health foods,’ closely paralleling the Lebensreform movement in Germany. Lebensreform sanitariums promoted a back-to-nature ideology that espoused health foods, vegetarianism, abstention from alcohol and tobacco, and homeopathy. Kellogg would remain at Battle Creek as director until 1943, a span of sixty-seven years.
In 1882, "lunatics and idiots" joined "coolies, convicts, and prostitutes" on the list of unwanted immigrants, though numerous lunatics and idiots already living here were allowed to stay and retain their positions within the U.S. government. The following year, Galton published his next manifesto - Human Faculty - in which he introduced to the world the term "eugenics." In 1895, Dr. Alfred Ploetz - an esteemed German eugenics researcher - published The Excellence of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak, which not surprisingly was far more concerned with the extermination of the weak than with their protection.
Six years later, in 1901, John D. Rockefeller founded the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, which quickly became a funding conduit for eugenics research. Two years later, the list of undesirable immigrants became a little longer as "epileptics and insane persons" were added. The next year, The Carnegie Institution of Washington established a research center under the directorship of Harvard-educated eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport, with additional funding from Mary Harriman - the widow of railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman.
Meanwhile, Davenport's counterpart in Germany - Dr. Ploetz - founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene and a 'scientific' journal - the Archive for Racial and Social Biology. Davenport would serve as the director of genetics for the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Springs Harbor on Long Island, New York until 1934. Edward Harriman was, by the way, a monopolist closely tied to the Rockefellers and was the father of Averell and Roland Harriman. In 1898, he had gained control of the Union Pacific Railroad with credit arranged by William Rockefeller, who was, like Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, a son of William Avery "Devil Bill" Rockefeller.
In 1906, the city of San Francisco ordered the segregation of all Japanese, Chinese, and Korean children in a separate school, where they could be kept a safe distance from the genetically superior white children. Elsewhere in the world, Cyril Burt - a future leading light of the eugenics movement - graduated from Oxford University and traveled to Germany to complete his studies. The next year, the state of Indiana passed the world’s first compulsory sterilization laws, applicable to all "confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles" in state institutions. Meanwhile, "imbeciles and feeble-minded persons" were added to the still-growing list of persons excluded under U.S. immigration laws. It obviously wasn't a good year for imbeciles.
1910 proved to be a busy year for the eugenics crowd. The Harriman family financed the building of the Eugenics Record Office as a branch of London’s Galton National Laboratory, with additional financial assistance coming from John D. Rockefeller; Davenport was appointed director. That same year, reputed anti-fascist Winston Churchill was appointed Home Secretary of the UK and secretly proposed the sterilization of 100,000 "mental degenerates." Cyril Burt busied himself with revising U.S. IQ tests for use in the UK, while John Kellogg began delivering speeches on "race degeneracy."
The next year, Davenport published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. In the UK, Galton died and a Eugenics Chair was established at the University of London as per his will. In 1912, the University of London hosted the First International Congress of Eugenics, presided over by Major Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles; vice-presidents prominently in attendance included Winston Churchill, Dr. Alfred Ploetz, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, and Alexander Graham Bell.
Meanwhile, eminent psychologist Henry Goddard was having a busy year: he published The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble Mindedness, and also administered IQ tests to immigrants at Ellis Island and found that 83% of Jews, 80% of Hungarians, 79% of Italians, and 87% of the Russians wanting to enter the country were feeble minded. There's no telling how many of them were coolies or imbeciles.
Professor Goddard also believed that criminals could be identified by certain physical characteristics, and that the solution was "to sterilize them, allow them to perform only lowly jobs, confine them to ghettos, discourage them from marrying outside their race, and create a pure, American, superior intelligence to control them." His ideas would later have a profound influence on Dr. David Ewen Cameron.
In 1913, Rockefeller established the Rockefeller Foundation, which would serve as yet another source of funding for the eugenics movement. By this time, twelve U.S. states had compulsory sterilization laws on the books. The next year, Battle Creek, Michigan hosted the First National Congress on Race Betterment - sponsored by John Harvey Kellogg - which proposed that 5.76 million Americans be sterilized.
Eugenics was by then being taught at Universities around the country, including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Clark. In 1915, Michigan hosted the Second National Conference on Race Betterment, again sponsored by John Harvey Kellogg. The next year, Stanford University professor of psychology Lewis M. Terman published the Stanford-Binet IQ tests, while declaring that: "If we would preserve our state for a class of people worthy to possess it, we would prevent, as far as possible, the propagation of mental degenerates."
In 1920, Alfred Hoche and Karl Binding published The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value, advocating "euthanasia" for mentally defective and mentally ill persons. By this time, twenty-four other states had joined Indiana in passing compulsory sterilization laws. In 1921, New York hosted the Second International Congress of Eugenics, sponsored by a committee that included Herbert Hoover and the presidents of Clark University, Smith College and the Carnegie Institution.
Also that year, president Warren G. Harding approved the Immigration Restriction Act, establishing a quota system, and Margaret Sanger published an article entitled "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda" in the journal Birth Control Review. Sanger was concerned that "the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over fertility of the mentally and physically defective."
The next year, H.H. Laughlin published the "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law," declaring all of the following categories of persons as being subject to mandatory sterilization: feeble-minded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind and seriously vision impaired, deformed and crippled, and dependent (orphans, homeless persons, tramps, and paupers). This law would serve as the blueprint for several U.S. state sterilization laws as well as for Nazi Germany's infamous 1933 eugenics law. That same year, the American Eugenics Society was founded on the proposition that the wealth and social position of the upper classes was justified by their superior genetic endowment.
In 1923, Carl Brigham - a key figure in the development of IQ tests and the driving force behind the SAT - published The Study of American Intelligence, declaring that: "our figures, then, would rather tend to disprove the popular belief that the Jew is intelligent," and "The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups owing to the presence here of the Negro." In Germany, Adolf Hitler allegedly dictated - from a jail cell - the first draft of the virulently racist and anti-Semitic Mein Kampf, which singled out Henry Ford for praise.
The following year, the Johnson-Reed act (aka the Immigration Act of 1924) eliminated Asian immigration and set stringent quotas on Southern and Eastern European immigration. In 1925, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes - writing the majority opinion in Buck v. Bell - stated: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind," language that closely mirrored that of Hitler's Mein Kampf. In the UK that same year, Cyril Burt - who specialized in twin studies (first suggested by Galton) and who would later become one of the founding fathers of Mensa - published The Young Delinquent.
In 1928, Battle Creek, Michigan hosted the Third National Conference on Race Betterment, once again sponsored by John Harvey Kellogg. In 1930, the director of the Department of Heredity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography - Dr. Ernst Rudin - visited the United States, where he was warmly received. Rudin walked away with a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to finance his research, which would occupy an entire floor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Elsewhere, W.K. Kellogg established the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to provide funding for efforts at "social improvement."
By 1931, twenty-seven U.S. states had sterilization laws, and John Kellogg had opened the Miami-Battle Creek Sanitarium in Miami Springs, Florida with himself appointed as medical director. That year also saw an indeterminate number of Puerto Ricans deliberately infected with cancer by the Rockefeller Institute, killing thirteen. Pathologist Cornelius Rhoades, who ran the study, was later placed in charge of two chemical warfare projects and granted a seat on the Atomic Energy Commission.
1932 saw New York's American Museum of Natural History host the Third International Congress of Eugenics, at which the sterilization of fourteen million Americans was called for. The gathering was dedicated to Mary Harriman. The Hamburg-Amerika Shipping Line - one of the subsidiaries of Brown Brothers/Harriman seized in 1942 by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian - provided transportation to America for a sizable number of Nazis to attend the conference. Included among them was Dr. Rudin, who was unanimously elected president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies.
The following year, Hitler enacted the Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity, drafted by Dr. Rudin and patterned directly after H.H. Laughlin’s 1922 model. In 1935, Nazi Germany instituted the Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the German People, which mandated medical examinations prior to marriage. Also begun that year was a selective human breeding program known as Lebensborn - under the direction of Hitler's rabidly fascist SS Chief, Heinrich Himmler - which all SS men were obligated to join. By 1946, some 11,000 of 'Hitler's Children' were created on breeding farms. In nearby England, Cyril Burt published The Subnormal Mind.
On the distant shores of America, Dr. Alexis Carrel - a Nobel laureate and a close associate of Charles Lindbergh (the two had worked together on a ‘research project’ at the Rockefeller Institute laboratory in 1934) - published Man, the Unknown, declaring: "There remains the unsolved problem of the immense number of defectives and criminals. They are an enormous burden for the part of the population that has remained normal … In Germany, the government has taken energetic measures against the multiplication of inferior types, the insane and criminals … Perhaps prisons should be abolished. They could be replaced by smaller and less expensive institutions. The conditioning of petty criminals with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have [committed more serious crimes] should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied with proper gasses. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts. Modern society should not hesitate to organize itself with reference to the normal individual."
In 1937, Cyril Burt published yet another eugenically minded tome, which he titled The Backward Child. This year was also notable for the establishment of the Pioneer Fund, yet another thinly veiled cover for the funding of eugenics research. As late as 1989, the organization would still state in its (revised) charter that its express purpose was to finance "study into the problems of human race betterment."
With the outbreak of World War II, the genocidal agenda behind the rapidly proliferating eugenics foundations was revealed to the world, and the movement had to temporarily retreat to the fetid swamps and sewers from which it had emerged. It wasn't dead, however, but was merely "forced to reinvent itself under various fronts," as columnist Robert Lederman has noted.
After the war, psychiatrist Edwin Katzen-ellenbogen - a former member of the faculty at Harvard - was convicted of war crimes that he had committed as a 'doctor' at Buchenwald concentration camp; during his trial in Dachau, he proudly testified that he had drafted the sterilization law for the governor of New Jersey.
Around 1948, Mensa was formed - the first international organization for the intellectually 'gifted.' Its first president was preeminent eugenicist Cyril Burt, who had been named the president of the British Psychological Society in 1942 and had become the first psychologist to be knighted in 1946. Another founding father was Victor Serebriakoff, a White Russian émigré recruited by British and American intelligence services who was credited with greatly expanding membership in the organization, instituting the IQ test as a prerequisite of membership, and establishing American Mensa. Yet another founder, and the man who claimed to have come up with the idea for Mensa, was Dr. Lance Ware, a biochemist who had worked during World War II at Porton Down, Britain's ultra-secret biological and chemical warfare facility.
1948 was also the year that Franz Kallman, who had been an associate of Ernst Rudin, founded a new eugenics institute, dubbed the American Society of Human Genetics. Around that same time, Dr. Otmar von Verschuer, who had served as the mentor of the notorious Josef Mengele, founded the Institute of Human Genetics in Munster. The next year, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oats company fed a group of 'retarded' boys in Massachusetts radioactive cereal; John Kellogg would have been proud.
In 1950, Cyril Burt published the results of some of his twin studies, purportedly showing data that supported his eugenics views. His studies claimed to prove that poverty was due to the intellectual inferiority of the working class. In 1952, John Foster Dulles established the Population Council in conjunction with John D. Rockefeller III. Tens of millions of dollars of Rockefeller grant money were pumped in as the American Eugenics Society moved its headquarters into the offices of - and assumed the name of - the newly created Population Council.
In 1960, Reginald Gates, a member of the American Eugenics Society, began publishing Mankind Quarterly, a fountain of thinly veiled racist propaganda. On the Advisory Council of the periodical sat none other than Charles Galton Darwin -- a grandson of Charles who had written the eugenically minded tome The Next Million Years in 1952.. Another advisor, as well as a member of the Eugenics Society, was Dr. von Verschuer.
By 1967, Nobel prize winner William Shockley was rewriting history with his conclusion that: "The lesson to be drawn from Nazi history is the value of free speech, not that eugenics is intolerable." Also that year, three psychosurgeons - Vernon H. Marks, Frank R. Ervin, and William H. Sweet - published a letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which they theorized that brain disease was responsible for rising levels of urban violence and the black uprisings that were rocking America’s cities.
The National Institute of Mental Health promptly awarded the trio $500,000 to investigate the use of psychosurgery on violence prone individuals. The next year, James Dewey Watson - co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA - began serving as the director of the Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology. Twenty years later, he would lend his expertise to the Human Genome Project.
1972 found Shockley delivering an address before the American Psychological Association in which he called for a program in which welfare recipients would be paid $1,000 for each IQ point below 100 if they would submit to voluntary sterilization. In 1976, Cyril Burt’s research was denounced and declared to be fraudulent. London’s Sunday Times reported that his two 'field investigators' and 'co-authors' were complete fabrications; Burt himself had authored articles for fifteen years under assumed names praising his own work and attacking his critics. He was posthumously declared guilty of fraud by the British Psychological Society.
In 1978, another eugenically minded foundation - the Manhattan Institute - was founded by future CIA Director William Casey, who sixteen years prior had co-founded another New York City 'think tank' with Prescott Bush. The primary corporate sponsor was the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank; others included Citicorp, Time Warner, Proctor & Gamble, Bristol-Meyers, Squibb, CIGNA and Lilly.
The next year, the Repository for Germinal Choice was set up in Escondido, California to make available the sperm of Nobel prize winners and other 'intelligent' people for selective breeding. Ads were run in Mensa publications and Shockley became one of the first donors. 1982 saw the first of the new breed of Hitler's Children spawned from sperm obtained from the Repository for Germinal Choice.
In 1989, George Bush became the 41st president of the United States. The very next year, the Human Genome Project was launched by James Watson at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. In 1993, a new manifesto for the modern-day eugenics crowd was published: The Bell Curve. The book was sponsored by the Pioneer Fund, a major supporter and source of funding for the Manhattan Institute; the Institute itself held a luncheon to honor the book and its authors.
In November of 2000, Watson delivered a speech at the University of California at Berkeley that outraged many of those in attendance. Among other undocumented claims, Watson suggested that there exist biochemical links between skin color and sexual activity. And so it goes as the eugenics movement continues to flourish under cover of scientific jargon.
That the Human Genome Project (HGP) is in fact yet another front for the eugenics movement can be easily discerned from a visit to the program's web site. There you will find that the hauntingly familiar goals of the project include "earlier detection of genetic predisposition to disease" and "reduc(ing) the likelihood of heritable mutations." In other words, one goal is the systematic elimination of all the 'bad' genes that have slipped into the national pool.
Another goal of the project is the creation of "pharmacogenomics 'custom drugs'." Translated into English, this means drugs that are specifically tailored to differentially affect various genetic (racial) types; drugs, that is, that could easily be wielded as ethnically specific biowarfare agents. The development of such weapons has been an explicit goal of the U.S. military for at least a quarter-century. In 1975, an American military manual candidly noted that:
"It is theoretically possible to develop so-called 'ethnic chemical weapons,' which would be designed to exploit naturally occurring differences in vulnerability among specific population groups. Thus, such a weapon would be capable of incapacitating or killing a selected enemy population to a significantly greater extent than the population of friendly forces."
Strangely enough, in the years since those words were written "at least 30 previously unknown disease agents have been identified," according to our very own Central Intelligence Agency. Many of these - including AIDS, Ebola, and the Four Corners Virus - without question show a distinct preference for certain ethnic groups that have long been targets of depopulation campaigns.
Interestingly, the HGP touts as another of its benefits the potential for "protection from biological and chemical warfare." Of course, as the U.S. government itself has acknowledged on numerous occasions, research into protection from biowarfare requires concomitant research into the conductance of biowarfare; the two are, in practice, inseparable.
Meanwhile, Mensa - which claims disingenuously to hold no opinions and promote no agenda - continues by all appearances to function as an intelligence front, including serving at times as a mouthpiece for the eugenics movement. One of the organization's ‘Special Interest Groups’ is titled, simply enough, Eugenics, and the pages of various Mensa publications are known to this day to host 'intellectual' discussions of the benefits of eugenics policies.From their beginnings the movements overlapped. Scientific management, intelligence testing, applied psychology, mental hygiene, and eugenics became fashionable together and were often espoused by the same people ... Throughout the West, the erosion of older structures of class and authority, and the claims and challenges of new classes and ethnic groups, stimulated the work of the phrenologists, the testers of intelligence, the eugenicists, and the analysts of deviance - Lombroso, Binet, Madison Grant, and, in the first half of the twentieth century, Cyril Burt, Edward L. Thorndike, H.M. Goddard, Lewis M. Terman, and Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck; but it was in America - necessarily in America, that most democratic, 'classless,' and ethnically pluralistic society - where they became most influential.
Peter Schrag Mind Control, Pantheon, 1978