Category Archives: Social Control

America’s “War on Drugs” Has Triggered a “Humanitarian Crisis” in Central American. Children Converging at the US Border

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war-on-drugs

By Joachim Hagopian

Source: Global Research

Since 2011 the US has not only continued “losing” its war on drugs while militarizing so called anti-drug police forces throughout Central America (not unlike the secret dirty wars of yesteryear), during this exact same time period murderous violence in Central America has skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, since 2011 simultaneous effects from US foreign policy in the region have only promoted more drug trafficking as well as child trafficking in the form of the massive proliferation of children from Central America (currently 73% from Central America while just 25% are now coming from Mexico) crossing the Mexican border into the US unaccompanied by adults. Just five years ago these percentages were nearly reversed when only 17% of unaccompanied minors originated in Central America and 82% were from Mexico. These four co-occurring developments, the US militarization of the region, nonstop increasing flow of drugs into US, the intensifying, out of control drug cartel-gang violence and influx of young children pouring into the US are all interconnected and intentionally driven by US foreign policy. Either by calculated design or minimally by complicity, America has thousands and thousands of children crossing our border. 

None of these phenomena deviate in the least from the oligarch-US-EU-NATO global agenda to destabilize all nations throughout every region on earth through a unified, consistent policy of militarization and globalization that in turn lead directly to political destabilization, racial and class warfare, economic impoverishment, increased violence, war, civil breakdown and ultimate societal and national collapse. This then further creates undermining crises conditions ripe for predatory world bank-IMF loans that cause national bankruptcy and extreme economic hardship accompanied by a full frontal assault unimpeded by transnational corporations to systematically move in for the kill, raping, pillaging, plundering and privatizing every nation on the planet.

The agenda to “balkanize” as in the West’s 1990’s model of breaking up Yugoslavia into 13 small ineffectual, defenseless pieces is currently being executed in Iraq with the formation of three separate states controlled by the Kurds in the north and the Sunni and Shiite sections dividing the rest of the country. Again, this formulaic divide and conquer strategy has proven 100% effective in weakening each nation and region’s sovereignty and autonomy that in turn facilitate and maximize exploitation, ensuring ultimate materialization of the oligarchs’ New World Order agenda.

This parallel process is unfolding in both Latin America and the US. The CIA controls and manages global drug smuggling from the Afghan poppy fields to the coca plantations run by Central-South American-Mexican drug cartels that supply and feed the constant demand for illicit drugs into both North America as well as Europe. Worldwide drug distribution operates under the convenient cover of the tax funded US war on drugs just like the tax funded US war on terror. They are designed to continue on indefinitely as the long as the US government is able to persist in getting away with this global theft, death and destruction on such an unparalleled, unprecedented, monumental scale.

Ever since the Iran-Contra Affair of the 1980’s when CIA got caught red-handed running drugs for guns during the Reagan years, and financing, arming, and training death squad commandos throughout Central America, the US government has always played an integral and active role in covert drug smuggling operations generating over the decades trillions in drug money revenue laundered through the central banking cabal. San Jose Mercury journalist Gary Webb exposed their “Dark Alliance” operations and paid for it with his life in December 2004. That is how powerful and heavily invested the US government is through its CIA cover in the international drug trade.

The fact remains that to this day, the CIA meets regularly with informants and representatives from selected Latin American drug cartels, making deals to gain incriminating information on rival cartels while assuring favored ones a free pass of drugs entering North America (an example is using the Sinaloa cartel to get to the Juarez cartel). Numerous inside US government officials including current Secretary of State (then Senator) John Kerry, and both CIA as well as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) whistleblowers, corroborated further by various Mexican government officials and high ranking cartel players all admit how the CIA manages the highly lucrative international drug smuggling business. In fact, El Universal reports that more than 2,000 US officials that include Border Patrol agents, police officers among other agency officials are currently being investigated this year for their ties to organized crime, proving widespread grand scale corruption. Thus, despite common knowledge that the so called war on drugs is a complete and utter failure as defined by its abysmal record in actual interdiction and cutoff of any drug flow into America, with inside US assistance, the prolonged war on drugs has only steadily increased the narco supply during the four plus decades since Nixon declared war on drugs way back in 1971.

That is why President Obama calling upon Congress last week to implement the same policy toward unaccompanied children from Central America as those from Mexico is a hypocritically disingenuous way to sweep what he himself calls “a humanitarian crisis” swiftly and conveniently under the rug by making their deportation instantaneous after a brief Border Patrol interview. Obama knows full well why since last October 52,000 kids mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have been showing up at our doorstep in droves in recent months. In a joint press conference with the Costa Rican president during a brief visit to the Central American country in May 2013, President Obama made the statement:

 

“But we also have to recognize that problems like narco-trafficking arise in part when a country is vulnerable because of poverty, because of institutions that are not working for the people, because young people don’t see a brighter future ahead.”

Obama understands the plain and simple truth very well – Central America’s weak and corrupt governments that the US supports cannot protect the children from the rampant murder and rape that befall this young, most defenseless population. Desperate parents wanting to protect their children from death are sending them to seek political asylum even in such poor neighboring nations as Nicaragua as well as Belize, Mexico, Panama and Costa Rica also in record numbers (rising by 712 percent). The spiked violence in their own countries has them not just swarming to the US but seeking safety in any and all surrounding nations throughout the region. Their arrival in America has nothing to do with sponging off US social services or gaining an economic advantage as some would have the American public believe.

With 52,000 already in the US, a projected 90,000 children are expected for the fiscal 2014 year. Because the bulk of the migrant kids have been apprehended at the eastern Mexico-Texas Rio Grande border, quickly overwhelming the facilities there, busloads and planeloads of thousands of children have been transported to Arizona and most recently California. Initial reports from the facility in Nogales, Arizona raised humanitarian issues of overcrowding. The Border Patrol has not allowed media inside the facility. Vehement protests in Murrieta, California where the three California planeloads were originally scheduled had to be re-routed to San Diego. Many of the children in these groups now in San Diego already have adult sponsors or family members. Others will need local housing.

Meanwhile, during the last decade that the US has funded the militarization of Latin American security forces, violence in Mexico and Central America has increased exponentially, at times committed by the security forces themselves, not just by the criminal thugs from drug cartels. Human rights violations perpetrated by both the cartels as well as the government security forces are reminiscent of the dirty secret civil wars of the 1980’s. In short, US funded militarization dating back to the Bush regime has only inflicted substantial collateral damage on the civilian populations and neither diminished the drug cartel empires nor diminished the flow of drug trafficking into the US. Under Obama’s watch, well over $2.5 billion US tax dollars were allocated for beefing up Latin American security forces. The bottom line is that the corrupt governments from Mexico and Central America are too often colluding with the drug cartels, which in turn do business covertly with various US governmental agencies. The result – enormous US tax waste, financial malfeasance, increasingly unsafe drug war zones in Latin America and uninterrupted drug flow passage into North America.

Incredibly in the face of glaring evidence of policy failure and the bloodbath spillage of increasing violence and terror in Mexico and Central America that is the direct result, the State Department’s head of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, William Brownfield, recently told the Associated Press that “the bloodshed tends to occur and increase when these trafficking organizations…come under some degree of pressure.” More boldface government lies in a feeble and vain effort to justify US caused death and destruction.

Current immigration laws distinguish between the policy for handling unaccompanied Mexican children at the US border and unaccompanied children from other nations. Standing protocol has children from Mexico interviewed by a Border Patrol agent to discern if grounds for potential political asylum are present. If the interviewer concludes that conditions are not met, the child is then deported back to Mexico immediately. Last week Obama requested that Congress make the policy for handling the children from Central America the same as Mexico’s, which would rescind current existing laws voted into place during the Bush administration specifically designed to protect potential asylum seeking youth from other countries. After taking lots of flack and criticism for his rigidly harsh and hypocritical stand all week, today Obama backed down away from that hard-line position. Instead, the White House announced today that the current children in federal custody from Central America will be processed under existing law and given due process that ensures the children will be granted opportunity for an immigration hearing that might lead to legal asylum. However in a seemingly hollow, face saving gesture, it was also announced today that “most of the children will be deported.” And Obama aims still to expedite legislation for removal of all future undocumented children at the border regardless of their national origin or danger at home.

Also $2 billion in additional emergency funding was requested this week to deal with the growing crisis. The funding will be allocated for more immigration judges along with legal aid and detainment facilities to provide adequate housing and care for the children.

Public announcements in Central America are already being aired on television in attempt to dissuade parents from sending their children to the US. Yet that may be a hard sell when parents observe their children already in the US being allowed to stay in America, especially when other family members already are living in America.

Many Americans who have never experienced the dangerously dire conditions that families in Central American nations face every single day cannot possibly grasp how parents can be so “coldhearted” as to ship their children away. But it is all relative. Their option of trying to keep their kids safe in their own country is simply weaker than the calculated risk involved in sending them 1500 miles or more north to America to face an unknown, uncertain future there.

Two reputable investigations found that a high percentage of the children meet the necessary criteria to qualify for political asylum. The United Nations agency, the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), assessed 404 young people who left Latin America and found that 58 percent of the minors were seeking international asylum because their own nations failed to protect them. A 2012 report from the Vera Institute determined that at least 40 percent warranted consideration for asylum. With the worsening conditions in Central America just in the last two years, that percentage would undoubtedly be higher now. A look at current life conditions in the children’s homelands of these three “Northern Triangle” Central American nations might shed light to explain why parents in desperation are so willing to send their offspring to far away foreign lands.

Displacement of families in Central America due to systematic criminal violence and extortion by drug cartels and local gangs are extremely commonplace. So is murder. The murder rates in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have skyrocketed, largely due to oppressive national security forces as well as highly organized street gangs and very powerful drug cartels. All are murdering innocent people at will. In Mexico alone since 2006, the war on drugs has killed150,000 people. Known as the murder capital of the world, Honduras has 85 to 91 killings per 100,000 people and a daily rate of 19 murders a day. Out of the 52,000 unaccompanied children at the border since last October, over 15,000 are from Honduras.

After the military coup in 2009, trafficking gangs diverted their weapons and narco-routes from South America through Honduras into Mexico. An estimated three-quarters of all US-bound cocaine passes through Honduras. Two out of three people in the country live in poverty. The two transnational gangs imported from California prisons – Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs compete in turf wars and control the cities. Gang members recruit children as young as kindergarteners. They will kill those young people who refuse to become members and will target “girlfriends” that are customarily raped by one or more members. Because 40% of the Honduran population is under 15 years of age, they are extremely vulnerable to being forced into violent and destructive gang life. This is the primary reason why parents send their children away seeking refuge in other safer countries.

El Salvador suffered from a US induced civil war from 1980 to 1992. Infamous death squads financed, armed and trained by US Special Operations forces murdered nearly 40,000 people. As a result, two million Salvadorans reside in the US, the third largest Hispanic group behind Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. This is another reason many families in El Salvador with relatives in the US are sending their children to America. And with the US policy re-militarizing El Salvador’s national security forces ostensibly to fight drug cartels and gangs, a reactivation of the ruthless killing of citizens en masse once again has become the norm. Elizabeth Kennedy, a Fulbright researcher working in the country, has stated that the current homicide rates are even more than during the civil war, and that assault, rape, disappearance and extortion are at higher rates than ever before. El Salvador murder rate ranks at number two in the world behind Honduras. Nearly 11,500 youth from El Salvador comprise the 52,000 children apprehended at the border.

Guatemala sustained a civil war from 1960 to 1996. For multiple generations war, violence and rape are all Guatemalans have known. Ethnic cleansing of Mayan Indians and mass murder over such a prolonged period has given rise to a lawless drug trafficking operation that is an organized crime syndicate. In 2012 this small nation incurred nearly 100 murders a week. Rape and teenage pregnancy are among the highest in the Northern Triangle. Nearly 13,000 of the 52,000 migrant children are from Guatemala.

Another high risk for children in central America is falling victims to human trafficking, prostitution, and child slavery that have become a major global problem. The regional crime syndicates not only traffic drugs but humans as well. Just from all these horrific, highly disturbing Central American statistics, young family members seeking safety and escape in other countries appears not only understandable but a prudent decision as well.

Extracted from the UN Commissioner report, 17-year old Alfonso offers the following compelling testimony:

“The problem was that where I studied there were lots of M-18 gang members, and where I lived was under control of the other gang, the MS-13. The M-18 gang thought I belonged to the MS-13. They had killed the two police officers who protected our school. They waited for me outside the school. It was a Friday, the week before Easter, and I was headed home. The gang told me that if I returned to school, I wouldn’t make it home alive. The gang had killed two kids I went to school with, and I thought I might be the next one. After that, I couldn’t even leave my neighborhood. They prohibited me. I know someone whom the gangs threatened this way. He didn’t take their threats seriously. They killed him in the park. He was wearing his school uniform. If I hadn’t had these problems, I wouldn’t have come here.”

Unfortunately the issue of so many children converging at the US border has been politicized (like everything else in Washington) and used as a hot potato weapon against any chance of passing much needed, long overdue immigration reform. And during an election year when politicians play it safe and focus exclusively on getting reelected, what to do with unwanted kids at the border has put the nail in the coffin. No attempt to even deal with such a volatile and divisive issue will be forthcoming from Congress and status quo inactivity only buys more time of business as usual deportations that continue breaking up thousands of immigrant families.

Since 2009 Obama, Homeland Security and the Border Patrol have teamed up with local law enforcement agencies throughout the US and began an accelerated and unprecedented campaign of deporting parents as undocumented immigrants, ruthlessly ripping families apart, creating orphans of their children as legal US born citizens. Obama removes illegal immigrants at nine times the rate of just twenty years ago, far more than any other president. Two million of the undocumented have in fact been removed already. Regardless of how long a person may be residing in America, and regardless of having a family here, being a law biding, productive citizen, it makes no difference. Victims of the US militarized police state are only being sent back to militarized Latin American police states funded and largely created by the US where the deported are frequently persecuted, tortured and murdered. The hardship and tragedy brought down on so many hardworking, taxpaying families are anything but humane and compassionate. But then American Empire aggression has never been humane and compassionate.

Another oligarch plan is to homogenize all regions of the earth through massive migrant immigration globally. This systematic leveling of the so called playing field between the developed Western world (North America and Europe) and the developing Third World is simply part of the plan leading to the New World Order. Hence, the globalized aggressive attack and disintegration of the middle class around the world is designed to lower the standard of living in the West, homogenizing a destabilized worldwide lower standard of living that will facilitate maximum control over a desperate, struggling global population. With this bigger picture in mind, current policies promoting mass migrant immigration perceived by the likely majority in the host nation as unwanted guests and an additional burden, in effect stirs up tension and conflict between ethnicities and classes, acting as more evidence of the divide and conquer tactic. By design, the present humanitarian crisis at the US border is US made.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.

 

Related Podcast: Peter Dale Scott covers CIA drug trafficking and the Deep State on “Guns and Butter” (7/9/14):

http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20140709-Wed1300.mp3

The Untold Story Behind Why I Am a Narco News Journalist

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GaryWebb2003SAJ

By Bill Conroy

Source: Narco News

“Authenticity Is Not the Easiest Path … But It’s The Only Path That Leads Forward” — Al Giordano

Narco News on July 9 will celebrate its fourteenth anniversary at a bash in the Big Apple. For me, it also will be a tenth anniversary fiesta. I started reporting and writing for Narco News in 2004.

Until now, though, I have never been able to tell fully the story of why I hooked up with Al Giordano and Narco News in the first place, because I was employed by a company that I felt would not appreciate the story being told in real time, as it really happened.

Recently, I stepped down from my position as editor-in-chief for one of the business newspapers owned by that company, American City Business Journals, for reasons I outlined in a past story I penned for Narco News, which can be found here.

Given I no longer work for ACBJ, and am no longer dependent on a paycheck from them to help feed young children — since my four kids now ten years later are adults — I am finally at liberty to tell the story without fear of job-ending retaliation from an employer.

And it’s an important story, I feel, one that needs to be in the public record for journalists who might decide to pursue an authentic path and need to understand the consequences — and the far more substantial benefits.

It all started with a story about an FBI agent who went undercover, posing as a “businessman” in a successful effort to infiltrate Chinese crime syndicates. Those criminal organizations, as it turns out, can be a path into the highest reaches of government power. In this case, they gave the FBI spy access to China’s intelligence apparatus, allowing him to gather intel and cultivate human assets for U.S. intelligence agencies.

It was an extremely dangerous, deep-cover assignment for the FBI agent, named Lok Lau, who was required to exist inside the criminal underworld for years.

Once Lau had completed his mission, however, the US government ignored his resulting Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] and difficulty in re-entering normal society. Consequently, the FBI eventually fired Lau for poor performance, prompting him to file a lawsuit in federal court in California alleging wrongful termination and discrimination.

From a declaration filed by Lau in his civil rights case:

The assignment was extraordinarily dangerous and stressful. I was cut off from my family and friends, and the [FBI] “handlers” did not remain constant. I later learned I was not treated as other undercover agents were treated and should have been provided support, emotional, financial and human to ease my stress and anxiety. I was literally on guard 24 hours a day, and I knew my death could come at anytime. The outside world, including my family, knew nothing of what I did or how. In fact, even though I was an FBI Agent, my badge was kept at the field office and I could not even see it or my FBI credentials.

From an amicus curiae brief filed in Lau’s case:

… From a reading of the record, it is not difficult to discern that Lau was involved in espionage activities, kidnappings, trading in human slavery, illegal immigration, murder, torture, kidnapping, extortion, hostage taking and any number of other criminal activities that involved crimes against humanity, then and now, in his undercover work. Lau “penetrated” the Chinese Triads, the Tong and other Chinese Organized Crime Organizations that trade in all of these things as a way of life. There is no way that Lau could have performed his undercover so well that he received awards and other forms of recognition were that not so.

As part of that lawsuit, Lau put into the public record in 2003 certain pleadings that the US government — then controlled by President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft — deemed not fit for public consumption, because they revealed too much detail about Lau’s spying mission on China, which remains to this day a highly classified operation.

Unfortunately for me, I had already obtained and made public the details of Lau’s court pleadings in a newspaper article for the San Antonio Business Journal. The US government attorneys handling Lau’s lawsuit found out about my story, and what I knew, because I did the proper journalistic thing and called them for comment.

And so, on the Friday that my Texas-based newspaper was published (after going to press two days earlier, on Wednesday), the Assistant US Attorney defending the Department of Justice against Lau’s charges of discrimination and wrongful termination filed pleadings with a federal court in California asking the judge in the case to retroactively classify portions of Lau’s pleadings. The government attorney in her motion also asked the judge to order that all copies of those pleadings in existence be returned to the FBI — going so far as to demand that “an FBI computer specialist be permitted to remove the specific files containing classified information from [any] unauthorized computer.”

Needless to say, ACBJ (the parent company of my San Antonio newspaper) was not happy about that, since if the judge issued the requested order, then the government could have seized not only my computer, but also any computer in ACBJ’s 40-newspaper chain that they thought might be housing the documents — potentially shutting down the company for a time. That wouldn’t be good for business, nor is crossing the Department of Justice and FBI, in general, good for career security in corporate America, even in the journalism world.

So I was about to get thrown under the bus by my employer, and likely the Bush administration, as I saw it, and the lawyering around the matter behind the scenes led me to believe that would be the result as well.

So I turned to two people I respected to help me out: Gary Webb, author of the Dark Alliance newspaper series that exposed US-sponsored drug-trafficking; and Al Giordano, whose Narco News online investigative publication, then only a bit more than three years old, had exposed the executive of a major bank as a drug trafficker — and emerged victorious in the resulting legal challenge waged by his bank to suppress that information.

I figured these two authentic journalists — whom I had only to that point corresponded with via email (and an occasional phone call in Webb’s case) — would have a trick or two up their sleeves when confronted with a challenge from corrupt power.

And they did.

Each asked me to email to them the court pleadings the US government attorneys and FBI were seeking to classify and remove from my computer. At that point, the documents were still technically in the public record because the judge had not yet ruled on the DOJ attorney’s motion to classify and purge Lok Lau’s pleadings.

I complied with Webb and Giordano’s requests, and within hours of me sending them the court documents via email, the pleadings were spread around the world via the Internet.

As a result, the judge in the case, in an Oct. 15, 2003, ruling, determined that he did not have the power to seize all copies of Lok Lau’s pleadings existing outside of the “court’s possession” (which included the copies on my computers, and now thousands of computers worldwide). In other words, the judge knew, to paraphrase an old nursery rhyme, that “Humpty Dumpty had a great fall”, via the Internet, and his court did not have the power to put “Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

So, in the end, authentic journalism won — well, sort of that is.

After the dust had settled, I received word through my boss that ACBJ’s corporate brass wanted me to cease and desist all investigative reporting at the San Antonio Business Journal.

Following is an excerpt from an email I sent to Webb and Giordano in early December 2003 — a few weeks after publishing what turned out to be the final investigative story in the Business Journal on the Lok Lau case:

My corporate office in Charlotte came calling. They’ve shut me down — from the highest level of the company.

I’m to do no more investigative reporting on the feds. I can only speculate on the real reason, but the one put forward is that the stories aren’t business reporting, in essence. (This is curious as I’ve been writing these stories — Customs, FBI, DEA, Homeland Security — for 4 years now and have won numerous “that ‘a boy” awards, including two from my own company.)

… I suspect the recent Lau FBI spy stuff, and the threat to take our computers, put the corporate blue bloods over the top.

… I expect I’ll be down for a bit, but will resurface somehow, somewhere. So keep in touch.

As it turned out, I did find a loophole. I still had the option of pursuing stories on a freelance basis, something allowed for in company policy. But my investigative-reporting days for the San Antonio Business Journal were done — if I wanted to keep my job and feed my four kids, still all in grade school or high school at that point.

In response to my email, Webb wrote the following:

Fuck. I’m sorry. Wish I could say this is unheard of, but you and I both know it’s not. It’s sad that investigative journalism is the only field whose practitioners are routinely punished for doing their jobs too well. You, obviously, were doing it exceptionally well to draw the attentions of the pinheads in chief.

… Believe me, I know this doesn’t help much when something like this happens but there is a certain honor in being ordered not to write about something. It’s like a dueling scar or a Purple Heart. You’ve been wounded in combat. Many reporters go through an entire career without getting near enough to the power structure to get a scratch. (Plus, you got away with punching the feds in the eye for four years.)

… So you can’t write about this topic any longer (at least not while you’re at your current esteemed organ). Any orders against freelancing future fed whistleblower stories?

… It’s not the end of the world. Who knows, this might set you off on a trail you never would have gone down before. Happened to me.

Giordano, in an email response to me at the time, wrote the following:

Welcome to the club. You can wear that shutdown like a badge of pride… Like Jim Morrison who, after singing censored lyrics was told “You’ll never do the Ed Sullivan show again,” replied: “Man, I just DID the Ed Sullivan show!”

Authenticity is not the easiest path, Bill… but it’s the only path that leads forward. If I can help you in any way, and I’m sure Gary [Webb] feels the same way, let me know. Ya done good.

And so, that’s how I came to Narco News. Giordano opened that door for me some 10 years ago, and I continued to live a double life since that time — serving as editor of a conservative, even stuffy, business weekly during the day; and by night pursuing investigative reporting on the drug war, pro bono, for Narco News.

That double life ended this past May, when I stepped down from my editor position at the Business Journal.

With this story, comes the proof, including the US government’s motion and judge’s order, which I’m putting online for the first time for everyone to see.

Enjoy the reading, and if you’re in the neighborhood next week, make sure to stop by Narco News’ fourteenth anniversary celebration at MV Studios in Long Island City, Queens, on Wednesday, July 9, starting at 7 pm. Directions and other details can be found at this link to the Facebook page for the event.

Gary Webb (1953-2004), who’s David vs. Goliath story will be told in the major motion picture Killing the Messenger, played by Jeremy Renner this October, sadly, isn’t alive to attend. But Giordano will be there, I’ll be there, and more than a few of the younger journalists who have come out of the School of Authentic Journalism’s eleven sessions since 2003 will also be there. We all hope to meet you there, too.

Proof of Authenticity

• The US government’s motion that called for seizing Lau’s pleadings, which was broad enough to include my computer

• The judge’s ruling in response to the government’s motion

• FBI agent Lok Lau’s uncensored pleadings

• My San Antonio Business Journal series on Lok Lau

Lawyers, civil rights group claim government turning up the heat in Lau spy case

Media’s computers are on FBI’s radar screen in Lau spy case

Judge orders previously public court records sealed in case of former FBI agent

Former federal agents’ spy story opens Pandora’s box for FBI

• An investigative story advancing the Lok Lau saga further, written for the Asian Times by Gary Webb

The spy who was left out in the cold

Carlyle Group’s Latest Acquisition: the JFK Library (!)

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By Russ Baker

Source: WhoWhatWhy

Some things you truly cannot make up. Like this: the museum and archives celebrating and exploring the life (if not really wanting to investigate the death) of John F. Kennedy is getting a facelift—courtesy of….the Carlyle Group.

This development was noted, without much fanfare, in a variety of major media. If there was a smidgen of irony, I missed it.

Yet, consider this: The ultimate globe-girdling corporation is playing a major role in preserving the memory of a president who at the time of his death was engaged in what may be described as mortal combat with outfits not unlike Carlyle—if smaller and less global. (I write about this in my book Family of Secrets but you can learn a lot more about JFK versus the corporations in Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency.)

Kennedy was locked in grim battle with oil and steel and banking interests, hated by mining giants and soda pop companies, resisting pressures from the burgeoning defense industry, and on and on. The list of the offending and the aggrieved was endless. Executives were taking out ads to excoriate him, and even showing up at the White House to practically spit in his face.

“Those robbing bastards,” JFK told Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, when Heller mentioned the oil and gas industry. “I’m going to murder them.”—as cited in Family of Secrets, from audiotape held by John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

***

Why is the museum getting a facelift? Apparently, it is to “enhance the visual and interactive offerings.”

Does none of it have to do with the still-mysterious fire that broke out at the museum complex in Boston at approximately the same time as the bombings of the Boston Marathon? Initial news reports suggested that the fire might somehow be linked to the bombings, an event that led to the precedent-setting lockdown of a major American city in a military-style operation.

As with, well, practically everything about that day, we have since been assured that there was in fact no deeper mystery regarding the museum fire—that its cause was accidental and its timing a coincidence. And of course it may well have been, though I (a past user of the archives’ services) was struck by what seemed like a sheepish lack of openness on the part of library personnel when I made inquiries. Call it a reporter’s instincts.

JFK World vs Carlyle World

JFK, who entered the White House as outgoing president Eisenhower warned about the dangerous growth of a “military-industrial complex,” battled constantly with the same forces that today virtually reign supreme. He was an enthusiast of attempts in the mass media to draw attention to threats to freedom here at home, as seen in such movies as Seven Days in May, about a military coup against the U.S. government, and The Manchurian Candidate, about the subversion of our democratic system through mind control.

Times have certainly changed. The CEO of Carlyle, it should be noted, is a Democrat. He worked for Jimmy Carter. Other figures in the Carlyle orbit over the years have been Republicans—including George H.W. Bush, former Secretary of State James Baker III, and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci—and high-profile foreigners, including British Prime Minister John Major and members of the bin Laden family.

Carlyle itself is one of the increasing ranks of strange companies that seem to come out of nowhere and are suddenly everywhere and into everything. (You really must treat yourself to a review of its holdings; even in the constrained precincts of Wikipedia, it’s still a wonder to behold—if you just drill down one level, from the military contractors to the pipeline companies, many of which it bought undervalued, reinvigorated with new government funding, and then sold off at great profit.)

As Carlyle puts it on their site:

We are one of the world’s largest and most diversified alternative asset management firms. We manage 120 distinct funds and 133 fund of funds vehicles that invest across four segments, 11 core industries and six continents. Our global size, scale and brand enable us to access opportunities in virtually every market around the world.

Carlyle is the kind of massive, opaque entity that draws its breath and its profits from knowing the right information and having the right connections. As such, it attracts almost no public attention…except when it chooses to do something philanthropic to “enhance” its public image.

We have every right to be amazed that the directors of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum decided they needed money so badly that they would take it from the likes of Carlyle. Even more amazing is that they thought, correctly as it turns out, there would be no criticism of this decision and no consequences.

But really—why be amazed? The world has changed a great deal since John F. Kennedy was precipitously removed from the picture after rousing the ire of the very selfsame kinds of interests that today rule the roost.

George Carlin, Bill Hicks, and Doug Stanhope on Nationalism

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Patriotism

Just in time for the  4th of July, here’s a compilation of classic material from three of the funniest American social critics reminding us of what nationalism is all about:

Bonus Doug Stanhope clip:

The U.S. Elite Run a Ukrainian Genocide While American Public Are Ignorant of It

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Washington’s Blog

On Wednesday, July 2nd, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko resumed unlimited war against the residents of southeastern Ukraine, whom he calls “terrorists” for their wanting not to be killed by his troops. European leaders (especially Merkel of Germany, Hollande of France, and Putin of Russia) urged him not to resume his bombing campaign against the southeast, but the U.S. (specifically President Obama) supports the bombings, and that’s enough for Poroshenko; so, he did it. As the U.S. State Department said, “he has a right to defend his country.” Reuters reports that Poroshenko gave as his reason for the resumption, “to rid Ukraine of ‘parasites’.”  Adolf Hitler had given the same reason for ethnically cleansing his country.

Here are videos and photos of the Obama Administration’s sponsored ethnic cleansing to reduce the population in the areas of Ukraine that had voted overwhelmingly “the wrong way” in Ukraine’s final nationwide election, in 2010:  the areas of Ukraine that overwhelmingly chose as Ukraine’s President the man whom Obama’s coup overthrew in February 2014. After this ethnic cleansing, maybe Ukraine can have another nationwide election, which will produce the type of outcome that the U.S. Government likes. But on 25 May 2014, we held in Ukraine an election where people voted only in the pro-American portion of Ukraine, and only leaders who were acceptable to the U.S. White House were allowed onto the ballot.

America’s “news” media are not reporting on America’s ethnic-cleansing program in Ukraine. It’s happening in the dark, as far as the American public are concerned: they don’t know about it. But, here it is: this, is what they are hiding from you.

Washington’s people do not call this ethnic cleansing operation what it is; they instead call it Ukraine’s “Anti Terrorist Operation,” or “ATO” for short. The people we’re massacring are “Terrorists.” What they actually  are is simply the residents in the parts of Ukraine that had voted overwhelmingly for Viktor Yanukovych on 7 February 2010 to become President, the final nationwide election in Ukraine. And here these millions of “Terrorists” are now, being bombed by us, and fleeing to refuge in Russia (you can see it, and hear it happening, right there: those “Terrorists,” fleeing our bombs) — it’s part of our ethnic-cleansing operation, not of any Anti Terrorist Operation, at all. Because it is we, the United States itself, that are terrorizing them, to flee. And “we” — our Government, as if they  really represented us (which they obviously do not) — are therefore mass-murdering them. This is what the U.S. “news” media have been hiding from us, by stenographically reporting Obama’s lies, as if those lies represented truths instead of lies — just like Bush’s lies about “Saddam’s WMD” did, and the U.S. media did, before we invaded Iraq on 19 March 2003.

And the Government that Obama put in place in Kiev, which is a government by Ukrainian oligarchs whom Obama’s agent Victoria Nuland selected and placed in control, is now advertising on the television stations that those oligarchs own, advertising that the people who live in Ukraine’s southeast are destroying the country and must therefore be destroyed by patriotic Ukrainians. The government’s Defense Minister announces publicly that concentration camps are being established in order to deal with any who don’t flee. The message to those “Terrorists” is clear: flee, or else die. The government has even announced that the military volunteers who go to the southeast to do the killing are patriots, whose reward will be that they will receive the properties of everyone they kill.

A google-search of “Ukraine” at a typical U.S. news site yields little — and nothing at all about this slaughter that our Government is financing and put into place there. For example, at Huffington Post, the search produces articles about supposed “aggression” by Russia for its accepting Crimea back into the Russian Federation after all public opinion polls and a public referendum in that region, which had been Russian until 1954, showed massive public support there for rejoining Russia. (And a recent Gallup poll of Crimeans confirmed that they craved to rejoin Russia and are now delighted that they did.) HuffPo has only news-wire reports about Ukraine, mainly AP and Reuters, and typical headlines there are like “Russia Resumes Military Buildup Near Ukraine Border,” and “Ukraine Vows To Punish Rebels Who Downed Plane.” There’s nothing about the genocide. For example, there’s no mention that this “plane” had been carrying 49 troops to murder civilians in the southeast where a genocide is taking place to clear the land and terrify the residents to flee into Russia. It’s a classic ethnic-cleansing campaign, and Obama put it into place. Americans don’t know.

One article is a March 3rd poll, which showed “Few Americans want the United States getting involved in policing the political turmoil in Ukraine.” The presumption there was that “we” shouldn’t fix “their” problems.” Who knew that “we,” our own President, is the mastermind behind that “turmoil,” and of this actual ethnic cleansing campaign?

Similarly, http://www.pollingreport.com/ukraine.htm has many such poll-results, all showing a widespread public assumption that Russia initiated the “turmoil” and that the U.S. are just nice guys regarding Ukraine.

To see what a lie that impression is — a deception of the U.S. public by not only the “news” media but by the U.S. Government that’s behind this “turmoil” — click here and here and here and here and here, because you will then learn a great deal about this made-in-America horror story, which will only grow as the years roll by, just as is already happening in Iraq.

Remember Iraq? This one will be vastly worse. You’ll see. Just click on those links. You’ll see.

Because, if the American public doesn’t start investigating this now, then the results for all of us will be far worse, especially because this one could end in a nuclear war. And here is a video exposing the lies of the Obama Administration and its stooge-regime in Kiev about the May 3rd massacre in Odessa that sparked Ukraine’s civil war — our ethnic cleansing of the people who live in Ukraine’s southeast.

Barack Obama’s Ukrainian gambit is the most evil and worst part of his entire Presidency, and you will be shocked to learn about it, and how evil it is. Because the American press hasn’t told you about it. But it’s not too late for you to find out. (If you already know about it, please pass this article along to any of your friends who might not, and otherwise get the word out, by distributing this article far and wide, so that maybe this horror can be stopped if enough people learn of it.)

 

War is Our Business and Business Looks Good

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By Edward S. Herman

Source: Z Magazine

It is enlightening to see how pugnacious the U.S. establishment, led by a Peace Laureate, has been in dealing with the Ukraine crisis. The crisis arguably began when the Yanukovich government rejected an EU bailout program in favor of one offered by Russia. The mainstream media (MSM) have virtually suppressed the fact that the EU proposal was not only less generous than the one offered by Russia, but that, whereas the Russian plan did not preclude further Ukrainian deals with the EU, the EU plan would have required a cut-off of further Russian arrangements. And whereas the Russian deal had no military clauses, that of the EU required that Ukraine affiliate with NATO. Insofar as the MSM dealt with this set of offers, they not only suppressed the exclusionary and militarized character of the EU offer, they tended to view the Russian deal as an improper use of economic leverage, “bludgeoning,” but the EU proposal was “constructive and reasonable” (Ed., NYT, November 20, 2014). Double standards seem to be fully internalized within the U.S. establishment. The protests that ensued in Ukraine were surely based in part on real grievances against a corrupt government, but they were also pushed along by right-wing groups and by U.S. and allied encouragement and support that increasingly had an anti-Russian and pro-accelerated regime change flavor. They also increased in level of violence. The sniper killings of police and protesters in Maidan on February 21, 2014 brought the crisis to a new head. This violence overlapped with, and eventually terminated, a negotiated settlement of the struggle brokered by EU members that would have ended the violence, created an interim government, and required elections by December. The accelerated violence ended this transitional plan, which was replaced by a coup takeover along with the forced flight of Victor Yanukovich.

There is credible evidence that the sniper shootings of both protesters and police were carried out by a segment of the protesters in a false-flag operation that worked exceedingly well, “government” violence serving as one ground for the ouster of Yanukovich. Most telling was the intercepted phone message between Estonia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Urmas Paet, and EU Foreign Policy chief Catherine Upton, in which Paet regretfully reported compelling evidence that the shots killing both police and protesters came from a segment of the protesters. This account was almost entirely suppressed in the MSM. For example, the New York Times never mentioned it once through the following two months. It is also enlightening that the protesters at Maidan were never called “militants” in the MSM, although a major and effective segment was armed and violent—that term was reserved for protesters in Eastern Ukraine, who were commonly designated “pro-Russian” as well as militants (for details see the tabulation in Herman and Peterson, “The Ukraine Crisis and the Propaganda System in Overdrive,” in Stephen Lendman, ed,, Flashpoint in Ukraine). There is also every reason to believe that the coup and establishment of a right-wing and anti-Russian government were encouraged and actively supported by U.S. officials.

Victoria Nuland’s intercepted “fuck the EU” words express her hostility to a group that, while generally compliant and subservient, departed from neocon plans for a proper government in Kiev headed by somebody like “Yats.” So she would surely have been pleased when the EU-supported February compromise plan was ended by the violence and coup. The U.S. support of the coup government has been enthusiastic and unqualified. Whereas Kerry and company delayed recognition of the elected government of Maduro in Venezuela,and have strongly urged him to dialogue and negotiate with the Venezuelan protesters—in fact, threatening him if he doesn’t—Kerry and company have not done the same in Ukraine where the Kiev government forces have slowly escalated their attacks on the Eastern Ukraine, but not on “protesters,” only on “militants.”

The Kiev government’s military is now using jets and helicopters to bomb targets in the East and heavy artillery and mortars in its ground operations. Its targets have included hospitals and schools. As of June 8, civilian casualties have been in the hundreds. A dramatic massacre of 40 or more pro-Russian protesters in Odessa on May 2 by a well-organized cadre of neo-Nazi supporters, possibly agents of the Kiev government, was an early high point in this pacification campaign. No investigation of this slaughter has been mounted by the Kiev government or “international community” and it has not interfered in the slightest with Western support of Kiev. In parallel, the MSM have treated it in very low key. (The New York Times buried this incident in a back page continuation of a story on “Deadly Clashes Erupt in Ukraine,” May 5, which succeeds in covering up the affiliation of the killers). Kerry has been silent, though we may imagine his certain frenzy if Maduro’s agents had carried out a similar action in Venezuela. Recall the “Racak massacre,” where the deaths of 40 alleged victims of the Serb military created an international frenzy. But in that case the United States needed a casus belli, whereas in the Odessa case there is a pacification war already in process by a U.S. client, so MSM silence is in order.

It is an interesting feature of media coverage of the Ukraine crisis that there is a regular focus on alleged or possible Russian aid, control of and participation in the actions of the protesters/militants/insurgents in Eastern Ukraine. This was evident in the Times’s gullible acceptance of a claim that photos of insurgents included a Russian pictured in Russia, later acknowledged to be problematic (Andrew Higgins, Michael Gordon, and Andrew Kramer, “Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia,” NYT, April 20, 2014) and another lead article, which was almost entirely speculation (Sabrina Tavernise, “In Ukraine Kremlin Leaves No Fingerprints,” NYT, June 1, 2014). But this interest in foreign intrusion in Ukraine affairs, with the implication of wrongdoing, does not extend to evidence of U.S. and other NATO power aid and control. Visits by Biden, Cain, Nuland and intelligence and Pentagon figures are sometimes mentioned, but the scope and character of aid and advice, of U.S. “fingerprints,” is not discussed and seems to be of little interest. It is in fact normalized so that, as with the aid plans in which Russian, proposals are “bludgeons” but U.S.- EU plans are “constructive and reasonable” the double standard is in good working order here as well.

Isn’t there a danger that Russia will enter this war on behalf of the pro-Russian majority of the eastern part of Ukraine now under assault? Possibly, but not likely, as Putin is well aware that the Obama-neocon-military-industrial complex crowd would welcome this and would use it, at minimum, as a means of further dividing Russia from the EU powers, further militarizing U.S. clients and allies, and firming up the MIC’s command of the U.S. national budget. Certainly there are important forces in this country that would love to see a war with Russia and it is notable how common are political comments, criticisms, and regrets at Obama’s weak response to Russian “aggression” (e.g., David Sanger, “Obama Policy Is put to Test: Global Crises Challenge a Strategy of Caution,” NYT, March 17, 2014). But so far Putin refuses to bite.

In response to this pressure from the powerful war-loving and war-making U.S. constituencies, Obama has been furiously denouncing Russia and has hastened to exclude it from the G-8, impose sanctions and penalties on the villain state, increase U.S. troops and press military aid on the near-Russia states allegedly terrified at the Russian threat, carry out training exercises, and maneuvers with these allies and clients, assure them of the sacredness of our commitment to their security, and press these states and major allies to increase their military budgets. One thing he hasn’t done is to restrain his Kiev client in dealing with the insurgents in eastern Ukraine. Another is engaging Putin in an attempt at a settlement. Putin has stressed the importance of a constitutional formation of a Ukraine federation in which a still intact Ukraine would allow significant autonomy to the Eastern provinces. There was a Geneva meeting and joint statement on April 17 in which all sides pledged a de-escalation effort, disarming irregulars, and constitutional reform. But it was weak, without enforcement mechanisms, and had no effect. The most important requirement for de-escalation would be the termination of what is clearly a Kiev pacification program for Eastern Ukraine. That is not happening, because Obama doesn’t want it to happen. In fact, he takes the position that it is up to Russia to curb the separatists in East Ukraine and he has gotten his G-7 puppies to agree to give Russia one month to do this or face more severe penalties.

This situation calls to mind Gareth Porter’s analysis of the “perils of dominance,” where he argued that the Vietnam war occurred and became a very large one because U.S. officials thought that, with their overwhelming military superiority North Vietnam and its allies in the south would surrender and accept U.S. terms—most importantly a U.S.-controlled South Vietnam—as military escalation took place and a growing toll was imposed on the Vietnamese (see his Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam). It didn’t work. In the Ukraine context, the United States once again has a militarily dominant position. On its own and through its NATO arm it has encircled Russia with satellites established in violation of the 1990 promise of James Baker and Hans-Dietrch Genscher to Mikhail Gorbachev to not move eastward “one inch,” and it has placed anti-missile weapons right on Russia’s borders. And now it has engineered a coup in Ukraine that empowered a government openly hostile to Russia, threatening both the well-being of Russian-speaking Ukrainians and the control of the major Russian naval base in Crimea. Putin’s action in reincorporating Crimea into Russia was an inevitable defensive reaction to a serious threat to Russian national security. But it may have surprised the Obama team, just as the Vietnamese refusal to accept surrender terms may have surprised the Johnson administration. Continuing to push the Vietnamese by escalation didn’t work, although it did kill and injure millions and ended the Vietnamese alternative way. Continuing and escalating actions against Russia in 2014 may involve a higher risk for the real aggressor and for the world, but there are real spinoff benefits to Lockheed and other members of the MIC.

Podcast Roundup

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6/25: On the C-Realm podcast, KMO interviews Ed Whitfield, Hannah Jones and Gar Alperovitz, covering topics ranging from appropriate and inappropriate uses of private property, responsible investing and social progress. The podcast concludes with a conversation with Alixa and Naima of Climbing Poetree, who critique the Drug War and deliver a couple of excellent poems.

http://www.c-realm.com/wp-content/uploads/420_Just_Transition.mp3

6/25: Catherine Austin Fitts discusses a wide array of issues (including: The Financial Coup d’Etat; Missing Money; Black Budget Funding of Private Corporate Projects; History and Organization of the Financial System since World War II; the Exchange Stabilization Fund Managed by the New York Fed; Digital Currencies and the Shadow Government) on the latest episode of Guns and Butter.

http://archives.kpfa.org/data/20140625-Wed1300.mp3

6/25: The author of “Confessions Of An Economic Hitman”, John Perkins, joins The Higherside Chats to talk about his newest book, “Hoodwinked” which traces how the tactics described in his earlier book has evolved since the 70′s and offers practical solutions to get society back on track.

http://thehighersidechats.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/115-John-Perkins.mp3

6/25: On Red Ice Radio, host Henrik Palmgren has a conversation with David McGowan, author of “Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream”. They discuss the dark underbelly of the California counterculture scene of the late 60’s and early 70’s.

http://rediceradio.net/radio/2014/RIR-140625-davidmcgowan-hr1.mp3

George Orwell on the Atomic Bomb

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On this day in 1903, Eric Blair (who later adopted the pen name George Orwell) was born in Bihar, India. He’s best known as the author of  “1984”, one of the greatest dystopian novels and a major influence on countless novels and films (and unfortunately, seemingly a prophetic manual for authoritarian surveillance states around the world). Anyone who hasn’t read 1984 by now should definitely read it as soon as possible because it’s more relevant than ever. Many of Orwell’s socio-political predictions of the novel are shockingly accurate though descriptions of some technologies may be dated. As Robert Montgomerie noted in a recent OpEdNew.com article, 1984 also describes different stages many working within a system may experience as they come to terms with its fascist nature: apathy, cognitive dissonance, awakening, passive aggressive rebellion, and salvation through confession.

On October 19, 1945, two months after atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (a holocaust which many are only now realizing was not morally defensible), he wrote the following essay which hints at some of the themes covered in greater detail in the novel 1984 which was published in 1949:

 

You and the Atomic Bomb

By George Orwell

Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected. The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb ‘ought to be put under international control.’ But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: ‘How difficult are these things to manufacture?’

Such information as we — that is, the big public — possess on this subject has come to us in a rather indirect way, apropos of President Truman’s decision not to hand over certain secrets to the USSR. Some months ago, when the bomb was still only a rumour, there was a widespread belief that splitting the atom was merely a problem for the physicists, and that when they had solved it a new and devastating weapon would be within reach of almost everybody. (At any moment, so the rumour went, some lonely lunatic in a laboratory might blow civilisation to smithereens, as easily as touching off a firework.)

Had that been true, the whole trend of history would have been abruptly altered. The distinction between great states and small states would have been wiped out, and the power of the State over the individual would have been greatly weakened. However, it appears from President Truman’s remarks, and various comments that have been made on them, that the bomb is fantastically expensive and that its manufacture demands an enormous industrial effort, such as only three or four countries in the world are capable of making. This point is of cardinal importance, because it may mean that the discovery of the atomic bomb, so far from reversing history, will simply intensify the trends which have been apparent for a dozen years past.

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans — even Tibetans — could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only three — ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weapon — or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fighting — not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant.

From various symptoms one can infer that the Russians do not yet possess the secret of making the atomic bomb; on the other hand, the consensus of opinion seems to be that they will possess it within a few years. So we have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose — and really this the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless.

When James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution it seemed probable to many Americans that the Germans would win the European end of the war, and it was therefore natural to assume that Germany and not Russia would dominate the Eurasian land mass, while Japan would remain master of East Asia. This was a miscalculation, but it does not affect the main argument. For Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires, each self-contained and cut off from contact with the outer world, and each ruled, under one disguise or another, by a self-elected oligarchy. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than actual. But the general drift is unmistakable, and every scientific discovery of recent years has accelerated it.

We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.