offguardian--2020-09-19--From Smedley Butler to “7 Days in May”…to Trump Today?

From FDR to JFK , the US Deep State has a long history of attempting to overthrow the POTUS .
At this week ’ s Labor Day conference , President Trump threw down the gauntlet in opposition to the Anglo American military industrial complex when both inspired hope in many onlookers that the age of America ’ s “ endless wars ” might finally come to an end , but also fear that an emergence Military Coup danger was nigh .
This danger was enunciated by State Senator Richard Black ( a former Colonel and intelligence officer ) during a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ speech which won the ire of top Pentagon brass , Trump called for finally bringing America ’ s troops home , and ending the “ endless wars ” saying : For those devout Trump haters who are unwilling to accept the possibility that there has been an active coup run against the President for the past 3.5 years , or that the oncoming economic meltdown ( unleashed under the cover of COVID-19 ) and general civil war danger within the USA might usher in a coup d ’ etat…think again .
The fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many think to total military dictatorship under Wall Street/London controls on more than one occasion , and unless the lessons of history are quickly internalized , then not only will this happen again , but it will accompany a new world war from which very few lives rich or poor would be spared .
1932-1934 was a period of history that saw the world torn down into a deep depression which the people of Europe and America were told by their media , could only be solved by the “ economic miracle solution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ known as “ fascism ” .
This “ fascist economic solution ” took hold in Europe with the quick rise of Nazism , Franco and Mussolini ’ s Corporatism as well what later became Vichy France .
In English Canada , the League for Social Reconstruction was ready to take power in 1932 and French-speaking Canada was quickly embracing the Nazi-inspired political party of Adrien Arcand .
The British governing class , led by the royal family were fully backing Nazism , and Sir Oswald Mosley ’ s British Union of Fascists was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these movements came in different flavors but were united under a cold utilitarian philosophy of government , a devout love for eugenics ( the racist “ science ” of population control ) and addiction to City of London/Wall Street money .
In the United States however , things weren ’ t going as smoothly .
Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier , the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution .
During FDR ’ s famous 100 Days , an all-out war was declared on the “ economic royalists ” that had taken over the nation .
Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission , and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America ’ s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor .
Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4 , 1933 inauguration , Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later .
Within days of the mayor ’ s death @ @ @ @ @ @ @ labelled a “ lone gunman ” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections .
This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year .
This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler .
Born in 1881 to a family of patriotic Quakers , Smedley Butler quickly rose through the ranks of the military becoming the most decorated military figure of US History- a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ multiple medals of honor , an Army distinguished service medal and Marine Corps Bruvet medal ( to name just a few ) .
By the end of the British-orchestrated meat grinder known as WWI , the General had become an activist patriot giving speeches across America in denunciation of the private financiers steering America ’ s war-driven economy .
Speaking to veterans in August 1933 , the general said : In spite of his outspoken criticism of crony capitalism , Wall Street ’ s elite simply presumed all men had their price , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he was never given a big enough piece of pie .
These financiers needed someone like Butler to channel the rage of the striking veterans of WWI across America who had been fighting for the bonus pay promised them years earlier but which didn ’ t exist due to the 1929 collapse .
A force of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled seasoned soldiers was exactly what was needed to overthrow Roosevelt , but leadership was sorely lacking , and General Butler was their man for the job .
He was a war hero @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the veterans .
He was perfect .
Under the guiding hand of JP Morgan ’ s Grayson Prevost Murphy , two representatives of the American Legion ( Commander Bill Doyle and bond salesman Gerald MacGuire ) approached Butler in July 1933 for the job of rallying the Legion ’ s veterans and began dropping hints of a larger coup plot .
Butler became suspicious , but continued playing along with the plan to see how far this went up the ladder of power .
Over the course of the next several months @ @ @ @ @ @ @ financial elite centered around John Pierpont Morgan Jr. , the Harrimans , the Melons , Warburgs , Rockefellers and Duponts were at the heart of the plot .
These men used their agents such as Gerald MacGuire a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman , Democratic Party controllers John W. Davis and Thomas Lamont ( both occupying directorships in the House of Morgan ) , Robert Sterling Clark ( heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune ) , Grayson Prevost Murphy and Harriman Family investment banker Prescott Bush .
All of these characters had become well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , owned the biggest media platforms including Fortune and Time Magazine ( both of which promoted Mussolini extensively for years ) , and controlled the levers of industry .
Luckily , the 1932-1934 Pecora Commission exposed these forces publicly as the architects of the great depression , making their ability to acquire popular support and sympathy more than a little difficult .
When the time was right , Butler blew the whistle by approaching the Special Committee on Un-American Activities ( the McCormack-Dickstein Committee ) which began an investigation on November 20 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Activities which made its reputation destroying patriotic lives under the communist witch hunt of McCarthyism , this earlier version was aligned to FDR and dedicated solely to identifying Nazi activity in America .
At first sceptical of the general ’ s claims , the committee soon substantiated everything over the course of a month-long investigation and made their findings public to FDR and congress on December 29 , 1934 .
An invaluable part of the hearings were the testimonies of journalist Paul Comly French whom Butler recruited to act as the general ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told the committee that MacGuire stated it “ wouldn ’ t take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official , somebody to take over the details of the office—to take them off the President ’ s shoulders ” and that “ we ’ d do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy ” .
When French asked MacGuire how the coup would help solve unemployment , MacGuire responded : Although the full transcripts were not made public , Butler did get the message to the population by giving his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and recorded a message to the people in 1935 which should be listened to in full .
The Aftermath of the Exposure This exposure , alongside the Pecora Commission findings , and earlier failed assassination attempt gave FDR the ammunition he needed to force America ’ s deep state into submission ( at least for a while ) .
As I outlined in my recent paper , FDR ’ s fight to stop a central bankers ’ dictatorship started from the earliest days of his presidency to his dying breath on April 14 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sanitized and redacted 1934 report was published , the committee was disbanded ( to be reformed later under a fascist mandate ) , and the thousands of pages of transcripts were buried for years- only officially made public in the 21st century- the contents of which can be found here with censored testimony in red .
The coup plotters lost no time forming a new organization on August 22 , 1934 called the American Liberty League which spent the next decade sabotaging FDR ’ s New Deal .
This group made every effort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ powers ( until 1941 ’ s Pearl Harbor attack ) , widely financed eugenics , and after FDR died , acted as the driving force behind the McCarthyite police state in America during the Cold War .
This deep state coup in America overthrew the FDR/Wallace vision for a post-war anti colonial world order founded upon a US-Russia-China strategic alliance which I illustrated in a recent seminar : This Anglo-American fascist organization also gave birth to such think tanks as the American Enterprise Association , Heritage Foundation and CATO institute which incrementally made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American right .
Anyone wishing to understand what created the Frankenstein Monster called “ neo-conservativism ” during the last 60 years would not get very far without understanding the role of the American Liberty League and its hell spawn .
In the early years of the Cold War , certain elder statesmen of WWII still held power and rallied to educate an incoming young President Kennedy who was about to show a short but valiant resistance to this cancerous imperial growth within America .
The danger of World War and a military coup @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of John F. Kennedy who found himself locked in a life or death struggle not with Russia , but with the Military Industrial Complex that had become dominated by the many Dr. Strangeloves of the Joint Chief of Staff and CIA who fanatically believed that America could win a nuclear war with Russia .
Kennedy ’ s valiant efforts to achieve dialogue with his Soviet counterparts , move towards peace in Vietnam , support of colonial liberation , promotion of space exploration and advocacy of a Nuclear Test Ban treaty made him a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time .
During this period , this effort was led from the top by JFK ’ s two most powerful American opponents : Allan Dulles ( director of the CIA ) and General Lyman Lemnitzer ( head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ) , both of whom were proponents of pre-emptive nuclear war , architects of the Bay of Pigs regime change trap and advocates of Operation Northwoods ( an ultimate “ inside job ” precursor to 9/11 which JFK subverted ) .
This plot was detailed in a quasi-fictional book written @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bailey published in 1962 entitled Seven Days in May and swiftly made into a famous film with unprecedented support by JFK himself who gave the film crew and director John Frankenheimer full access to the White House , advisors and materials for the film which he believed every American should see .
In the story , a patriotic lieutenant discovers the plans for the coup which is scheduled to take place during a vast military drill whereby a President who is close to finalizing a de-armament treaty with Russia will be incapacitated in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over America .
Tragically , where the lieutenant is able to expose the plot and save the nation in the story , by the time of the film ’ s 1964 release , JFK had been deposed by other means .
Now 56 years later , history has begun to repeat itself with distinctly 21st century characteristics… and a viral twist .
Today , a new systemic meltdown of a $ 1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has similarities to the 1929 crash and other similarities to the 1923 hyperinflation of Weimar .
While the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to trigger this new blowout , one thing is certain : a new fascist coup should be taken more seriously than ever .
President Trump ’ s repeated calls to revive the policies of Abraham Lincoln , end regime change operations and endless wars abroad and work with other sovereign nation states in opposition to world government ideologues is more important than most people realize .
So rather than stressing about who might be on the 2020 ballot , it is wiser to ask the question : Where are the General Butlers today @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk , and has authored 3 volumes of ‘ Untold History of Canada ’ book series .
In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation

From FDR to JFK, the US Deep State has a long history of attempting to overthrow the POTUS.
Matthew Ehret
At this week’s Labor Day conference, President Trump threw down the gauntlet in opposition to the Anglo American military industrial complex. Inspiring both hope in many onlookers that the age of America’s “endless wars” might finally come to an end, but also fear that an emergency Military Coup was nigh.
This danger was enunciated by State Senator Richard Black (a former Colonel and intelligence officer) during a September 5 conference.
In his powerful speech which won the ire of top Pentagon brass, Trump called for finally bringing America’s troops home, and ending the “endless wars” saying:
I’m not saying the military is in love with me; the soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t, because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs, and make the planes, and make everything else, stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars…Let’s bring our soldiers back home.”
For those devout Trump haters who are unwilling to accept the possibility that there has been an active coup run against the President for the past 3.5 years, or that the oncoming economic meltdown (unleashed under the cover of COVID-19) and general civil war danger within the USA might usher in a coup d’etat…think again.
The fact is that America has come closer than many think to total military dictatorship under Wall Street/London controls on more than one occasion, and unless the lessons of history are quickly internalized, then not only will this happen again, but it will accompany a new world war from which very few lives rich or poor would be spared.
The Fascist Economic Miracle Solution of 1932
1932-1934 was a period of history that saw the world torn down into a deep depression which the people of Europe and America were told by their media, could only be solved by the “economic miracle solution” of a new system of governance known as “fascism”.
This “fascist economic solution” took hold in Europe with the quick rise of Nazism, Franco and Mussolini’s Corporatism as well what later became Vichy France.
In English Canada, the League for Social Reconstruction was ready to take power in 1932 and French-speaking Canada was quickly embracing the Nazi-inspired political party of Adrien Arcand.
The British governing class, led by the royal family were fully backing Nazism, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was rising faster than ever.
All of these movements came in different flavors but were united under a cold utilitarian philosophy of government, a devout love for eugenics (the racist “science” of population control) and addiction to City of London/Wall Street money.
In the United States however, things weren’t going as smoothly.
The Rise of Franklin Roosevelt
Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier, the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them it was.
Instead, the people voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution.
In his March 4, 1933 inaugural address FDR stated:
Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
During FDR’s famous 100 Days, an all-out war was declared on the “economic royalists” that had taken over the nation. Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission, and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while speculation was reined in under Glass-Steagall.
Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America’s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor.
Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4, 1933 inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later.
Within days of the mayor’s death, the assassin Giuseppe Zingara was speedily labelled a “lone gunman” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections.
This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year. This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler.
Who was General Butler?
Born in 1881 to a family of patriotic Quakers, Smedley Butler quickly rose through the ranks of the military becoming the most decorated military figure of US History- a record he holds to this day with multiple medals of honor, an Army distinguished service medal and Marine Corps Bruvet medal (to name just a few).
By the end of the British-orchestrated meat grinder known as WWI, the General had become an activist patriot giving speeches across America in denunciation of the private financiers steering America’s war-driven economy. Speaking to veterans in August 1933, the general said:
I have spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism…I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested…I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents…”
In spite of his outspoken criticism of crony capitalism, Wall Street’s elite simply presumed all men had their price, and Butler was probably just indignant because he was never given a big enough piece of pie.
The Wall Street Putsch is Launched
These financiers needed someone like Butler to channel the rage of the striking veterans of WWI across America who had been fighting for the bonus pay promised them years earlier but which didn’t exist due to the 1929 collapse.
A force of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled seasoned soldiers was exactly what was needed to overthrow Roosevelt, but leadership was sorely lacking, and General Butler was their man for the job. He was a war hero who was seen as honest and loved by the veterans. He was perfect.
Under the guiding hand of JP Morgan’s Grayson Prevost Murphy, two representatives of the American Legion (Commander Bill Doyle and bond salesman Gerald MacGuire) approached Butler in July 1933 for the job of rallying the Legion’s veterans and began dropping hints of a larger coup plot. Butler became suspicious, but continued playing along with the plan to see how far this went up the ladder of power.
Over the course of the next several months, Butler discovered that America’s financial elite centered around John Pierpont Morgan Jr., the Harrimans, the Melons, Warburgs, Rockefellers and Duponts were at the heart of the plot. These men used their agents such as Gerald MacGuire a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman, Democratic Party controllers John W. Davis and Thomas Lamont (both occupying directorships in the House of Morgan), Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), Grayson Prevost Murphy and Harriman Family investment banker Prescott Bush.
All of these characters had become well known “investors” in European fascism, owned the biggest media platforms including Fortune and Time Magazine (both of which promoted Mussolini extensively for years), and controlled the levers of industry.
Luckily, the 1932-1934 Pecora Commission exposed these forces publicly as the architects of the great depression, making their ability to acquire popular support and sympathy more than a little difficult.
Outlining his Committee’s findings Pecora had written publicly:
Undoubtedly, this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the USA.”
Butler Blows the Whistle
When the time was right, Butler blew the whistle by approaching the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the McCormack-Dickstein Committee) which began an investigation on November 20, 1934.
Unlike the Committee on Un-American Activities which made its reputation destroying patriotic lives under the communist witch hunt of McCarthyism, this earlier version was aligned to FDR and dedicated solely to identifying Nazi activity in America.
At first sceptical of the general’s claims, the committee soon substantiated everything over the course of a month-long investigation and made their findings public to FDR and congress on December 29, 1934.
An invaluable part of the hearings were the testimonies of journalist Paul Comly French whom Butler recruited to act as the general’s intermediary with the bankers.
Butler told the committee that MacGuire stated it “wouldn’t take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office—to take them off the President’s shoulders” and that “we’d do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy”.
When French asked MacGuire how the coup would help solve unemployment, MacGuire responded:
We need a fascist government to save the nation from the Communists…It was the plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight.”
Although the full transcripts were not made public, Butler did get the message to the population by giving his story to as many journalists as possible and recorded a message to the people in 1935 which should be listened to in full.
The Aftermath of the Exposure
This exposure, alongside the Pecora Commission findings, and earlier failed assassination attempt gave FDR the ammunition he needed to force America’s deep state into submission (at least for a while). As I outlined in my recent paper, FDR’s fight to stop a central bankers’ dictatorship started from the earliest days of his presidency to his dying breath on April 14, 1945.
Incredibly, after the sanitized and redacted 1934 report was published, the committee was disbanded (to be reformed later under a fascist mandate), and the thousands of pages of transcripts were buried for years- only officially made public in the 21st century- the contents of which can be found here with censored testimony in red.
The coup plotters lost no time forming a new organization on August 22, 1934 called the American Liberty League which spent the next decade sabotaging FDR’s New Deal. This group made every effort to promote an American alliance with Axis powers (until 1941’s Pearl Harbor attack), widely financed eugenics, and after FDR died, acted as the driving force behind the McCarthyite police state in America during the Cold War.
This deep state coup in America overthrew the FDR/Wallace vision for a post-war anti colonial world order founded upon a US-Russia-China strategic alliance which I illustrated in a recent seminar:
This Anglo-American fascist organization also gave birth to such think tanks as the American Enterprise Association, Heritage Foundation and CATO institute which incrementally made Austrian school economics a part of the American right. Anyone wishing to understand what created the Frankenstein Monster called “neo-conservativism” during the last 60 years would not get very far without understanding the role of the American Liberty League and its hell spawn.
In the early years of the Cold War, certain elder statesmen of WWII still held power and rallied to educate an incoming young President Kennedy who was about to show a short but valiant resistance to this cancerous imperial growth within America.
The Deep State Plot Against JFK
The danger of World War and a military coup arose again during the short lived administration of John F. Kennedy who found himself locked in a life or death struggle not with Russia, but with the Military Industrial Complex that had become dominated by the many Dr. Strangeloves of the Joint Chief of Staff and CIA who fanatically believed that America could win a nuclear war with Russia. Kennedy’s valiant efforts to achieve dialogue with his Soviet counterparts, move towards peace in Vietnam, support of colonial liberation, promotion of space exploration and advocacy of a Nuclear Test Ban treaty made him a target of the Deep State of his time. During this period, this effort was led from the top by JFK’s two most powerful American opponents: Allan Dulles (director of the CIA) and General Lyman Lemnitzer (head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), both of whom were proponents of pre-emptive nuclear war, architects of the Bay of Pigs regime change trap and advocates of Operation Northwoods (an ultimate “inside job” precursor to 9/11 which JFK subverted).
As historian Anton Chaitkin recently reported:
Lemnitzer had displayed what his faction viewed as his qualifications for this role back in August 1960, when, as Army chief of staff, he announced that the Army was all ready to “restore order” in the United States after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union—to bring back normalcy just as the military does after a flood or a riot.”
This plot was detailed in a quasi-fictional book written by investigative journalists Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey published in 1962 entitled Seven Days in May and swiftly made into a famous film with unprecedented support by JFK himself who gave the film crew and director John Frankenheimer full access to the White House, advisors and materials for the film which he believed every American should see.
In the story, a patriotic lieutenant discovers the plans for the coup which is scheduled to take place during a vast military drill whereby a President who is close to finalizing a de-armament treaty with Russia will be incapacitated in a bunker while a military regime takes over America.
Tragically, where the lieutenant is able to expose the plot and save the nation in the story, by the time of the film’s 1964 release, JFK had been deposed by other means. Now 56 years later, history has begun to repeat itself with distinctly 21st century characteristics… and a viral twist.
Today, a new systemic meltdown of a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has similarities to the 1929 crash and other similarities to the 1923 hyperinflation of Weimar. While the coronavirus may or may not be used to trigger this new blowout, one thing is certain: a new fascist coup should be taken more seriously than ever. President Trump’s repeated calls to revive the policies of Abraham Lincoln, end regime change operations and endless wars abroad and work with other sovereign nation states in opposition to world government ideologues is more important than most people realize.
So rather than stressing about who might be on the 2020 ballot, it is wiser to ask the question: Where are the General Butlers today?
Originally published by The Saker


Nothing Ever Happened

Some books demand slower reading than others .
Ed Curtin ’ s new book is such a case .
But then this assemblage of essays , many published elsewhere , is a corrective to the growing intoxication with technology , with the surveillance and the policing it is being used for , and to what Jonathan Crary wrote about in 24/7 , a world where an artificial speed ( or hurriedness ) is layered over daily life : “ Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.
” A corrective to the de-humanizing assault @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that draws attention to what Curtin references ( via James Douglass ) as the *unspeakable* — the US capitalist order of crimes , from assassination to the continuing assault on the poor and marginalized .
It is appropriate that the first chapter begins with a quote from Harold Pinter ’ s Noble Prize speech .
This book is the unpacking of the delusion ridden world of contemporary America .
And running through the pages of Curtin ’ s book is the metaphor of plague .
Of course today is barely metaphorical at all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even more resonance .
In that same first chapter Curtin writes… One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free .
This process has been ongoing for at least forty years .
After the Church Committee ’ s revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies , including its mind-control programs that left everyone appalled at the epiphany , a different tactic was added .
Now we have “ experts , ” social , psychological , and biological “ scientists , ” who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind ; it is an illusion , and the residence of all intellect is the brain .
This is a particularly astute paragraph .
And it dovetails with much of my recent writing .
The trend toward mechanistic , instrumental , and technologically modeled versions and explanations of reality is now not just the received wisdom , but it is increasingly etched in stone , and not to be questioned .
The current Covid kabuki spectacle is testimony to the truth of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the long range implications for this sort of thinking .
The human as a machine , and this delusion is reflected in Hollywood nearly every week .
In our current dystopia the appeal of being a robot in the making must have a great appeal , a promise to an end of humanness — something that currently feels as if it only brings pain and suffering with it .
In another related piece the poet Galway Kinnell is quoted from a poem titled “ The Fundamental Project of Technology ” : There is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ silence in our modern world .
A chapter devoted to the spiritual properties of the pencil .
These are wonderful and beautiful reflections .
( Most poets and playwrights I know have an almost fetishistic connection to the pencil so I was glad to see it given such a full treatment . )
In this sense , Curtin is a bit like America ’ s Gaston Bachelard .
Curtin catalogues the madness all around us , from the lies surrounding 9/11 to the lies sedimented in seventy years of deceit regarding the JFK @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of grotesque charade , such as the appointment of Gina Haspel to head the CIA… Curtin is , in the best sense , a public intellectual .
In many respects his work reminds me of everyone from Gore Vidal to Garry Wills to the writers of old Partisan Review .
Russell Jacoby wrote “ we face the rise of a new intellectual class using a new scholasticism accessible only to the mandarins , who have turned their back on public life and letters.
” And he added “ The danger is that we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and instant commenting.
” One recognizes just how denuded the intellectual landscape really is when one is nostalgic about Edmund Wilson .
Ed Curtin is a throwback in that sense , and I mean that as a compliment .
But I also see Curtin as a voice not divorced from writers like James Baldwin .
Over the last , say , four decades the professionalization of opinion is in the hands of *influencers* and not really thinkers .
And I see this all the time .
People on social media will literally blather @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about which they quite literally know nothing .
Curtin is also angry .
And the anodyne professional academic is allergic to anger .
So this is a wonderful antidote to the usual TED talk circuit .
There is a timely piece on NBA star Kevin Love and his admission to struggling with anxiety .
Curtin makes this into a rather profound meditation on American masculinity .
Perhaps my favorite chapter , though , is devoted to Hillary Clinton .
It is , along with Diana Johnstone ’ s full-length study of the psychopathic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ portrait of this quintessentially American ghoul , and the suffering to be laid at her feet .
She was fully aware of developments in Libya from the start ; knew that the rebels were Islamic militants armed and trained by the U.S. , Britain , France , Egypt , Saudi Arabia , and UAE ; knew that they summarily executed anyone they considered their enemies ; knew that this war of lies was aimed at preventing Gaddafi from fulfilling his goal of economic independence , not just for Libya , but for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gold dinar into Africa as common currency ; knew , in short , that Libya had to be raped , its Central Bank destroyed , for its exploitation by western globalists .
Thus her boss , Obama , in August 2011 , confiscated $ 30 billion from Libya ’ s Central Bank that Gaddafi had planned to use for the establishment of the African IMF and African Central Bank .
This is what Clinton termed “ smart power at its best.
” Under the pretext of “ humanitarian intervention , ” Clinton supported @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the destruction of an independent country to serve her masters .
Paolo Sensini characterizes the Democratic presidential nominee perfectly : ‘ Mrs .
Clinton ’ s joyous exclamation on hearing the news of Gaddafi ’ s death sums up the recklessness and irresponsibility of an entire political class—an unrepentant class that has wreaked havoc around the world on a truly unprecedented scale ’ .
Ed Curtin is also a man who cares about culture .
This is increasingly rare .
I don ’ t even agree with all of his tastes ( Terrance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appreciate there is someone out there writing about this stuff .
I am happy to read someone WITH taste…especially when writing from a place of erudition and seriousness .
There is an excellent piece on Frank Serpico .
A piece that also forensically takes apart the troubling implications of modern manhood in the West .
There are essays on the cell phone and on suicide .
On cyberspace and on the CIA .
And Curtin draws on sources as diverse as Norman O .
Brown , Gaston Bachelard , Lewis Carroll , Albert @ @ @ @ @ @ @ D.H. Lawrence .
There is a splendid valentine to Bob Dylan , too .
Most of all , and in nearly every piece , there is Curtin ’ s distillation of contemporary experience under the aegis of our new dystopia .
This is a rare and uplifting book despite the litany of catastrophes Curtin addresses .
Curtin is always clear that the problem is Capitalism , in the short form .
The dissolution of the USSR created the hole in intellectual energy that has been filled with a suffocating banality and marketed coercion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only those who reject institutional religion can provide .
And I believe this book is so valuable because of the love Curtin has for genuine art and radical thought .
Culture matters in these pages , and that is something increasingly rare today .
It is not possible to recommend this book highly enough .
Seeking Truth in A Country of Lies by Edward Curtin is published by Clarity Press is available through their website and most major book sellers .

John Steppling
Some books demand slower reading than others. Ed Curtin’s new book is such a case. But then this assemblage of essays, many published elsewhere, is a corrective to the growing intoxication with technology, with the surveillance and the policing it is being used for, and to what Jonathan Crary wrote about in 24/7, a world where an artificial speed (or hurriedness) is layered over daily life: “Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.” A corrective to the de-humanizing assault of capitalism.
This is a book that draws attention to what Curtin references (via James Douglass) as the *unspeakable* — the US capitalist order of crimes, from assassination to the continuing assault on the poor and marginalized. It is appropriate that the first chapter begins with a quote from Harold Pinter’s Noble Prize speech.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”
This book is the unpacking of the delusion ridden world of contemporary America. And running through the pages of Curtin’s book is the metaphor of plague. Of course today is barely metaphorical at all. And so, the symbol carries even more resonance.
In that same first chapter Curtin writes…
One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This process has been ongoing for at least forty years. After the Church Committee’s revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control programs that left everyone appalled at the epiphany, a different tactic was added. Now we have “experts,” social, psychological, and biological “scientists,” who repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and the residence of all intellect is the brain.
This is a particularly astute paragraph. And it dovetails with much of my recent writing. The trend toward mechanistic, instrumental, and technologically modeled versions and explanations of reality is now not just the received wisdom, but it is increasingly etched in stone, and not to be questioned.
Curtin adds:
We have been interminably told that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie in more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the US government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and more significantly, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The current Covid kabuki spectacle is testimony to the truth of what Curtain is describing, and to the long range implications for this sort of thinking. The human as a machine, and this delusion is reflected in Hollywood nearly every week.
In our current dystopia the appeal of being a robot in the making must have a great appeal, a promise to an end of humanness — something that currently feels as if it only brings pain and suffering with it.
In another related piece the poet Galway Kinnell is quoted from a poem titled “The Fundamental Project of Technology”:
To de-animalize human mentality, to purge it of obsolete,
evolutionary characteristics, in particular of death,
which foreknowledge terrorizes the content of skulls with,
is the fundamental project of technology;
There is a chapter devoted to the disappearance of silence in our modern world. A chapter devoted to the spiritual properties of the pencil. These are wonderful and beautiful reflections. (Most poets and playwrights I know have an almost fetishistic connection to the pencil so I was glad to see it given such a full treatment.) In this sense, Curtin is a bit like America’s Gaston Bachelard.
Curtin catalogues the madness all around us, from the lies surrounding 9/11 to the lies sedimented in seventy years of deceit regarding the JFK assassination. He touches on current bits of grotesque charade, such as the appointment of Gina Haspel to head the CIA…
Thinking here in Rome of the Haspel vote, I am reminded of the “ratlines” organized by ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles and long-time Chief of Counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton. These were escape routes for Nazi and fascist killers and torturers, so many of whom were brought to the United States and other countries after World War II through Italy to help the newly formed CIA torture the truth out of detainees and assassinate opponents. Our post September 11 torture is nothing new. Is this what Haspel meant by “American values”? Many victims would attest to that.
Curtin is, in the best sense, a public intellectual. In many respects his work reminds me of everyone from Gore Vidal to Garry Wills to the writers of old Partisan Review.
Russell Jacoby wrote “we face the rise of a new intellectual class using a new scholasticism accessible only to the mandarins, who have turned their back on public life and letters.” And he added “The danger is that we have entered the era of one-stop thinking and instant commenting.”
One recognizes just how denuded the intellectual landscape really is when one is nostalgic about Edmund Wilson. Ed Curtin is a throwback in that sense, and I mean that as a compliment. But I also see Curtin as a voice not divorced from writers like James Baldwin.
Over the last, say, four decades the professionalization of opinion is in the hands of *influencers* and not really thinkers. And I see this all the time. People on social media will literally blather away in gibberish, heatedly debating topics about which they quite literally know nothing.
Curtin is also angry. And the anodyne professional academic is allergic to anger. So this is a wonderful antidote to the usual TED talk circuit.
There is a timely piece on NBA star Kevin Love and his admission to struggling with anxiety. Curtin makes this into a rather profound meditation on American masculinity.
Perhaps my favorite chapter, though, is devoted to Hillary Clinton.
Following the bidding of her oligarchic backers in the hidden government, she has always been fervently eager to lend her immoral authority to the massacre of foreign peoples and the destruction of their central governments. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Serbia, etc. — the list is as long as her moral turpitude is deep. But as the Queen of Heartless is crowned and feted in the City of Brotherly Love, it is crucially important that we recall her role five years ago in the destruction of the African country that had the highest living standard on the continent, excellent health care, free education, good social services, etc. — Libya.
It is, along with Diana Johnstone’s full-length study of the psychopathic former secretary of state, the best portrait of this quintessentially American ghoul, and the suffering to be laid at her feet.
She was fully aware of developments in Libya from the start; knew that the rebels were Islamic militants armed and trained by the U.S., Britain, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and UAE; knew that they summarily executed anyone they considered their enemies; knew that this war of lies was aimed at preventing Gaddafi from fulfilling his goal of economic independence, not just for Libya, but for the entire continent of Africa by introducing the gold dinar into Africa as common currency; knew, in short, that Libya had to be raped, its Central Bank destroyed, for its exploitation by western globalists. Thus her boss, Obama, in August 2011, confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank that Gaddafi had planned to use for the establishment of the African IMF and African Central Bank. This is what Clinton termed “smart power at its best.” Under the pretext of “humanitarian intervention,” Clinton supported the killing of tens of thousands and the destruction of an independent country to serve her masters. Paolo Sensini characterizes the Democratic presidential nominee perfectly: ‘Mrs. Clinton’s joyous exclamation on hearing the news of Gaddafi’s death sums up the recklessness and irresponsibility of an entire political class—an unrepentant class that has wreaked havoc around the world on a truly unprecedented scale’.
Ed Curtin is also a man who cares about culture. This is increasingly rare. I don’t even agree with all of his tastes (Terrance Malick for example) but I certainly appreciate there is someone out there writing about this stuff. I am happy to read someone WITH taste…especially when writing from a place of erudition and seriousness.
There is an excellent piece on Frank Serpico. A piece that also forensically takes apart the troubling implications of modern manhood in the West. There are essays on the cell phone and on suicide. On cyberspace and on the CIA. And Curtin draws on sources as diverse as Norman O. Brown, Gaston Bachelard, Lewis Carroll, Albert Camus, Rollo May, Marcuse and D.H. Lawrence.
There is a splendid valentine to Bob Dylan, too. Most of all, and in nearly every piece, there is Curtin’s distillation of contemporary experience under the aegis of our new dystopia.
Speed and panic go hand-in-hand in today’s fabricated world of engineered emergencies and digital alerts. “We have no time” is today’s mantra — “We are running out of time” — and while this mood of urgency has come to grip most people’s minds, deep thinking about why this is so and who benefits is in short supply. I believe most people sense this to be true but don’t know how to extract themselves from the addictive nature of speed long enough to grasp how deeply they have been propagandized, and why.
This is a rare and uplifting book despite the litany of catastrophes Curtin addresses. Curtin is always clear that the problem is Capitalism, in the short form. The dissolution of the USSR created the hole in intellectual energy that has been filled with a suffocating banality and marketed coercion.
The spiritual herein is the kind only those who reject institutional religion can provide. And I believe this book is so valuable because of the love Curtin has for genuine art and radical thought. Culture matters in these pages, and that is something increasingly rare today.
It is not possible to recommend this book highly enough.
Seeking Truth in A Country of Lies by Edward Curtin is published by Clarity Press is available through their website and most major book sellers.


offguardian--2020-09-20--The End of Reality?

The End of Reality?

In 1888 , the year before he went insane , Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols : So , if you feel you also may be going insane in the present climate of digital screen life , where real is unreal but realer than real , the apparent is cryptic , and up is down , true is false , and what you see you don ’ t , it has a history .
One hundred and thirty-two years ago , Nietzsche added that “ something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bloody butcher ’ s bench known as the twentieth century was the result .
Nihilism stepped onto center stage and has been the star of the show ever since , straight through to 2020 .
Roberto Calasso puts it this way in Literature and the Gods : Obviously , we haven ’ t gotten our bearings .
We are far more adrift today on a stormy electronic sea where the analogical circle of life has been replaced by the digital , and “ truths ” like numbers click into place continuously to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The trap is almost closed .
Of course , Nietzsche did not have the Internet , but he lived at the dawn of the electric era , when space-time transformations were occurring at a rapid pace .
Inventions such as photography , the phonograph , the telephone , electricity , etc .
were contracting space and time and a disembodied “ reality ” was being born .
With today ’ s Internet and digital screen life , the baby is full-grown and completely disembodied .
It does nothing but look at its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lifeless void , whose lost gaze can ’ t figure out what it ’ s seeing .
Take , for example , the phonograph , invented by Thomas Edison in 1878 .
If you could record a person ’ s voice , and if that person died , were you then listening to the voice of a living person or one who was dead ?
If the person whose voice was recorded was alive and was miles away , you had also compressed earthly space .
The phonograph suppressed absence , conjured ghosts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ death as it captured the flow of time in sound .
It allowed a disembodied human voice to inhabit a machine , an early example of downloading .
“ Two ruling ambitions in modern technology , ” writes John Durham Peters in his wonderful book , Speaking into the Air , “ appear in the phonograph : the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead.
” Many people started to hear voices , and these people were not called deluded .
Soon , with the arrival of cinema , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , speaking ghosts are everywhere , hiding in hand-held devices .
It ’ s Halloween all year round as we are surrounded by electronic zombies in a screen culture .
This technological annihilation of space and time that was happening at a frenetic pace was the material background to Nietzsche ’ s thought .
His philosophical and epistemological analyses emerged from German intellectual life of his time as well , where theologians and philosophers were discovering that knowledge was relative and had to be understood in situ , i.e.
, within its historical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going into abstruse philosophical issues here , suffice it to say , Nietzsche was suggesting that not only was God dead because people killed him , but that knowledge was a fiction that changed over time and was a human construction .
All knowledge , not just science , had to be taken “ as if ” it were true .
This was a consoling mental trick but falsely reassuring , for most people could not accept this , since “ knowledge ” was a protection racket from pain and insanity .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not only had people murdered God , but they had slain absolutes as well .
This left them in the lurch , not knowing if what they knew and believed were really true , or sort of true – maybe , perhaps .
The worm of uncertainty had entered modern thought through modern thought .
While the average person did not delve into these revolutionary ideas , they did , through the inventions that were entering their lives , and the news about Darwin , science , religion , etc.
, realize , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and dramatic was underway .
Life was passing from substance to shadow because of human ingenuity .
It is similar to what so many feel today : that reality and truth are moving beyond their grasp as technological forces that they voluntarily embrace push everyday life towards some spectral denouement .
An inhuman , trans-human , on-line electronic life where everything is a parody of everything that preceded it , like an Andy Warhol copy of a copy of a Campbell ’ s soup can with a canned mocking laugh track that keeps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the nineteenth-century relativization of knowledge , or what at least was taken as such , for to say all knowledge is relative is an absolute statement .
That contradiction goes to the heart of our present dilemma .
This old feeling of lostness is perhaps best summarized in a few lines from Mathew Arnold ’ s 19th century poem , “ Dover Beach ” : But that was then .
Today , the Joker ’ s sardonic laughter would suffice .
I am sitting outside as I write , sipping a glass of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fall weather is approaching , a nasty mosquito is buzzing around my head .
I hear it .
I am in killer mode since these bastards love to bite me .
This is real life .
If I went into the house and connected to the Internet on the computer screen – news , social media , anything – I would be entering another dimension .
Screen life , not real life .
The society of the spectacle .
No real mosquitoes , no wine , no trees swaying in the evening breeze @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Also Rises , written between Nietzsche ’ s time and now , Ernest Hemingway , a man who surely lived in the physical world , writes of how Robert Cohn , the boxing champion from Princeton University , wants Jake Barnes , the book ’ s protagonist , to take a trip with him to South America .
As they sit and talk in Paris , Barnes says no , and tells Cohn , “ All countries look just like the moving pictures.
” Whether Hemingway was being ironic or not , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ know .
For in the 1920s , before passports and widespread tourism , there were many places you could only see if you traveled to them and they would never appear in moving pictures , while today there is almost no place that is not available to view beforehand on the internet or television .
So why go anywhere if you ’ ve already seen it all on a screen ?
Why travel to nowhere or to where you have already been ?
Déjà vu all over again , as Yogi Berra put @ @ @ @ @ @ @ laugh is on us .
This is neither an argument nor a story .
It ’ s real .
I am trying to get my bearings in a disorienting situation .
Call it a compass , a weather-vane , a prayer .
You can call me Al or Ishmael .
Call me crazy .
Perhaps this writing is just an “ as if.
” About fifteen years ago , I was teaching at a college where most communication was done via email .
I was , as they say , out of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ email .
I was often asked why I didn ’ t , and I would repeatedly reply , like Melville ’ s Bartleby , because “ I prefer not to.
” Finally , in order to keep my job , I succumbed and with the laptop computer they provided me , I went “ on-line.
” There were 6,954.7 emails in my in-box from the past three years .
In those three years , I had performed all my duties scrupulously and hadn ’ t missed a beat .
Someone showed me how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did without reading any , but I had entered the labyrinth .
I went electronic .
My reality changed .
I am still searching for Ariadne ’ s thread .
But I am not yet a machine and refuse the invitation to become one .
It ’ s a very insistent invitation , almost an order .
Neil Postman ( Oh such a rich surname ! )
sums it up well in Technopoly : The Surrender of Culture to Technology : Postman wrote that in 1992 , before the computer and the internet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had become de rigueur – before it was being shoved down our throats as it is today under the cover of COVID-19 .
There is little doubt that we are being pushed to embrace what Klaus Schwab , the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum ( WEF ) , calls COVID-19 : The Great Reset , that involves a total acceptance of the electronic , on-line life .
On-line learning , on-line news , on-line everything – only an idiot ( from Greek idiotes , a private person who pays no attention @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see what is being promoted .
And who controls the electronic life and internet ?
Not you , not I , but the powers that be , the intelligence agencies and the power elites .
Goodbye body , goodbye blood – “ I don ’ t think we should ever shake hands ever again , to be honest with you , ” said Dr. Anthony Fauci , the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases ( NIAID ) in support of human estrangement .
Peter Koenig , one of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , puts it this way : Like everything , of course , this push to place life under the aegis of cyberspace has a history , one that deifies the machine and attempts to convince people that they too are machines without existential freedom .
Thus the ongoing meme pumped out for the past three decades has been that we are controlled by our brains and that the brain is a computer and vice versa .
Brain research has received massive government funding .
Drugs have been offered as the solution to every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been created through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM ) and matched to pharmaceutical drugs ( or the revers ) for scandalous profits .
And the mind has been reduced to a figment of deluded imaginations .
People are machines ; that ’ s the story , marvelous machines .
They have no freedom .
If one wishes an example of techno-fascism , there is one from the art world .
Back in the 1920s and 1930s there was an art movement known as Futurism .
Its leader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Mussolini , Filippo Tommaso Marinetti .
The futurists claimed that all life revolves around the machine , that the machine was god , that it was beyond human control and had to be obeyed .
They extolled war and speed and claimed that humans were no more significant than stones .
Patriotism , militarism , strength , method , and the kingdom of experts were their blueprint for a corporate fascist state .
The human eye and mind would be re-educated to automatically obey the machine ’ s dictates .
Now we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the internet , an exponential extension of the machine world of the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini , Fascism , and Hitler .
That this online world is being pushed as the new and future normal by trans-national elite forces should not be surprising .
If human communication becomes primarily digitally controlled on-line and on screens , those who control the machines will have achieved the most powerful means of mind control ever invented .
That will be MKULTRA on a vast scale .
Surveillance will be complete .
Yes , there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is and will be told , such as this site where you are reading this ; but as we can see from today ’ s growing censorship across the web , those power elites and intelligence forces who control the companies that do their bidding will narrow the options for dissenting voices .
Such censorship starts slowly , and then when one looks again , it is a fait accompli .
The frog in the pan of slowly heating cold water never realizes it is being killed until it is too late .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Censorship is widespread .
The purpose of so much internet propaganda is to confuse , obsess , depress , and then repress the population .
The overlords accomplish this by the “ peculiar linking together of opposites – knowledge with ignorance , cynicism with fanaticism – [ which ] is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society , ” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four .
“ The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them.
” One look into one ’ s life will suffice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people against each other .
It ’ s a classic tactic .
Divide and conquer .
Trump vs. Biden , Democrats vs. Republicans , whites vs. blacks , liberals vs. conservatives .
Pure mind games .
Contradictions every day to create social disorientation .
Orwell describes Doublethink as follows [ author ’ s emphasis ] : Nietzsche said that along with the real world we have done away with the apparent as well .
Digital online life has accomplished that .
It has allowed the rulers – through the media who are the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ counterfeit news and doctored videos at will , to present diametrically opposed points of view within the same paragraph , and to push breaking news items so fast that no one half-way sane could keep up with their magic shows .
Nietzsche obviously didn ’ t foresee this technology , but he sensed the madness that the relativity of knowledge and the technology of his day would usher in .
The popular 1990s term “ Information Superhighway , ” meaning the internet and all digital telecommunications , was the perfect term to describe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and go as fast as you can while trying to catch the meaning of all the information flashing past you as you speed to nowhere .
For not only does censorship , propaganda , disinformation , mixed messages , and contradictions line the road you are traveling , but contextless information overload is so heavy that even if you were stopped in a traffic jam , there is too much information to comprehend .
And if you think this Superhighway is a freeway , think again , for the cost is high .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ asks you to pay up ; but the more you travel down this road you ’ ll notice you are missing a bit of flesh here and some blood there .
And without a speed pass , you are considered road kill .
To make matters much worse , they say we need 5G to go much faster .
Paul Virilio , who has devoted himself to the study of speed ( dromology ) , puts it this way in Open Sky : And yet I don ’ t have a simple answer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reading it on-line and I am posting it there .
It is very convenient and quick .
Can we just walk away from it ?
Maybe .
Perhaps like those few who , in Ursula K. Le Guin ’ s excruciating story , “ The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas , ” we may decide the price for our conveniences and so-called happiness is too high and that there are hidden victims that this techno-scientific “ progress ” creates beneath its veneer of efficiency .
Others , us , our children , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not for speed and machines , but for the human touch that the on-line propagandists hope to destroy .
In Le Guin ’ s story , the price nearly all the citizens of Omelas are willing to pay for their happiness and comfort is the imprisonment of a single child .
Perhaps we should consider what we are doing to all the world ’ s children and their futures .
My friend Gary recently sent me this letter .
I believe it sums up what many people feel .
There is a vast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ analog life .
How to live it – the question hangs in the air as the artificial intelligence/digital controllers try to reduce us to machines .
Although apparently it isn ’ t clear if Twain ever said this , it ’ s still a great quote : “ If you don ’ t read the newspaper , you ’ re uninformed .
If you do , you ’ re misinformed.
” To which “ amen ” is the only appropriate response .
I continue to daily stay abreast of events through the web @ @ @ @ @ @ @ passed for “ progressive media ” simply regurgitates the covid madness as if it had been delivered on stone tablets – rather than by the same MSM that lie to us daily about literally ANYTHING of any importance .
There are days I wonder “ why ” I continue to bother to follow the unfolding madness as if it made some “ difference.
” I could certainly play guitar more , and I might even get it together to write a few pieces on the nature of our collective madness , for which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I really don ’ t need any more information or examples – I think I have things covered on that front .
Instead I find myself daily doing the little dance we ’ re all familiar with – uncomfortable with being “ uninformed ” – yet at almost every turn finding myself being routinely – “ misinformed ” – and so having to sift through the endless debris to have any chance at developing any coherent understanding of the world .
So yes , I totally get the draw of just saying to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of shifting through the endless propaganda operations our generation has been subject too , I have no doubt you and I see through most the nonsense for what it is before we even have the proof in hand .
Once the rose-colored glasses of ‘ American exceptionalism ’ are off , one can almost sense and see through the lies in real-time even as they are being uttered .
Reading Gary ’ s words reminded me of those of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton ’ s definition of the Unspeakable : Yes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we do our little dances .
Can we do our little dances and preserve reality ?
I ’ m not sure .
Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely .
He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts .
His website is http : //edwardcurtin.com/ .
He is the author of the new book Seeking Truth in A Country of Lies

Edward Curtin
In 1888, the year before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols:
We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well.
So, if you feel you also may be going insane in the present climate of digital screen life, where real is unreal but realer than real, the apparent is cryptic, and up is down, true is false, and what you see you don’t, it has a history.
One hundred and thirty-two years ago, Nietzsche added that “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.” We know it did, and the bloody butcher’s bench known as the twentieth century was the result. Nihilism stepped onto center stage and has been the star of the show ever since, straight through to 2020.
Roberto Calasso puts it this way in Literature and the Gods:
Here we are, announces Nietzsche, and it would be hard not to hear a mocking ring in his voice. We thought we were living in a world where the fog had lifted, a disenchanted, ascertainable, verifiable world. And instead everything has gone back to being a ‘fable’ again. How are we to get our bearings […] This is the paralysis, the peculiar uncertainty of modern times, a paralysis that all since have experienced.
Obviously, we haven’t gotten our bearings. We are far more adrift today on a stormy electronic sea where the analogical circle of life has been replaced by the digital, and “truths” like numbers click into place continuously to lead us in wrong, algorithm-controlled directions.
The trap is almost closed.
Of course, Nietzsche did not have the Internet, but he lived at the dawn of the electric era, when space-time transformations were occurring at a rapid pace. Inventions such as photography, the phonograph, the telephone, electricity, etc. were contracting space and time and a disembodied “reality” was being born.
With today’s Internet and digital screen life, the baby is full-grown and completely disembodied. It does nothing but look at its image that is looking back into a lifeless void, whose lost gaze can’t figure out what it’s seeing.
Take, for example, the phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1878. If you could record a person’s voice, and if that person died, were you then listening to the voice of a living person or one who was dead? If the person whose voice was recorded was alive and was miles away, you had also compressed earthly space.
The phonograph suppressed absence, conjured ghosts, and seemed to overcome time and death as it captured the flow of time in sound. It allowed a disembodied human voice to inhabit a machine, an early example of downloading.
“Two ruling ambitions in modern technology,” writes John Durham Peters in his wonderful book, Speaking into the Air, “appear in the phonograph: the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead.”
Many people started to hear voices, and these people were not called deluded. Soon, with the arrival of cinema, they would see ghosts as well.
Today, speaking ghosts are everywhere, hiding in hand-held devices. It’s Halloween all year round as we are surrounded by electronic zombies in a screen culture.
This technological annihilation of space and time that was happening at a frenetic pace was the material background to Nietzsche’s thought. His philosophical and epistemological analyses emerged from German intellectual life of his time as well, where theologians and philosophers were discovering that knowledge was relative and had to be understood in situ, i.e., within its historical and social place or context.
Without going into abstruse philosophical issues here, suffice it to say, Nietzsche was suggesting that not only was God dead because people killed him, but that knowledge was a fiction that changed over time and was a human construction.
All knowledge, not just science, had to be taken “as if” it were true. This was a consoling mental trick but falsely reassuring, for most people could not accept this, since “knowledge” was a protection racket from pain and insanity. It still is.
In other words, not only had people murdered God, but they had slain absolutes as well. This left them in the lurch, not knowing if what they knew and believed were really true, or sort of true – maybe, perhaps. The worm of uncertainty had entered modern thought through modern thought.
While the average person did not delve into these revolutionary ideas, they did, through the inventions that were entering their lives, and the news about Darwin, science, religion, etc., realize, however vaguely, that something very strange and dramatic was underway. Life was passing from substance to shadow because of human ingenuity.
It is similar to what so many feel today: that reality and truth are moving beyond their grasp as technological forces that they voluntarily embrace push everyday life towards some spectral denouement.
An inhuman, trans-human, on-line electronic life where everything is a parody of everything that preceded it, like an Andy Warhol copy of a copy of a Campbell’s soup can with a canned mocking laugh track that keeps repeating itself.
All this follows from the nineteenth-century relativization of knowledge, or what at least was taken as such, for to say all knowledge is relative is an absolute statement. That contradiction goes to the heart of our present dilemma.
This old feeling of lostness is perhaps best summarized in a few lines from Mathew Arnold’s 19th century poem, “Dover Beach”:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
But that was then. Today, the Joker’s sardonic laughter would suffice.
*
I am sitting outside as I write, sipping a glass of wine before dinner. Although New England fall weather is approaching, a nasty mosquito is buzzing around my head. I hear it. I am in killer mode since these bastards love to bite me. This is real life. If I went into the house and connected to the Internet on the computer screen – news, social media, anything – I would be entering another dimension.
Screen life, not real life. The society of the spectacle. No real mosquitoes, no wine, no trees swaying in the evening breeze.
In his novel, The Sun Also Rises, written between Nietzsche’s time and now, Ernest Hemingway, a man who surely lived in the physical world, writes of how Robert Cohn, the boxing champion from Princeton University, wants Jake Barnes, the book’s protagonist, to take a trip with him to South America.
As they sit and talk in Paris, Barnes says no, and tells Cohn, “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”
Whether Hemingway was being ironic or not, or simply visionary, I don’t know. For in the 1920s, before passports and widespread tourism, there were many places you could only see if you traveled to them and they would never appear in moving pictures, while today there is almost no place that is not available to view beforehand on the internet or television.
So why go anywhere if you’ve already seen it all on a screen? Why travel to nowhere or to where you have already been?
Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra put it and everyone laughed. Now the laugh is on us.
*
This is neither an argument nor a story. It’s real. I am trying to get my bearings in a disorienting situation. Call it a compass, a weather-vane, a prayer. You can call me Al or Ishmael. Call me crazy. Perhaps this writing is just an “as if.”
*
About fifteen years ago, I was teaching at a college where most communication was done via email. I was, as they say, out of the loop since I didn’t do email. I was often asked why I didn’t, and I would repeatedly reply, like Melville’s Bartleby, because “I prefer not to.”
Finally, in order to keep my job, I succumbed and with the laptop computer they provided me, I went “on-line.” There were 6,954.7 emails in my in-box from the past three years. In those three years, I had performed all my duties scrupulously and hadn’t missed a beat.
Someone showed me how to delete the emails, which I did without reading any, but I had entered the labyrinth. I went electronic. My reality changed. I am still searching for Ariadne’s thread.
*
But I am not yet a machine and refuse the invitation to become one. It’s a very insistent invitation, almost an order. Neil Postman (Oh such a rich surname!) sums it up well in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:
The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines – thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near-perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it ‘thinks’ better than we can…John McCarthy, the inventor of the term ‘artificial intelligence’…claims that ‘even machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs… What is significant about this response is that it has redefined the meaning of the word ‘belief’…rejects the view that humans have internal states of mind that are the…foundation of belief and argues instead that ‘belief’ means only what someone or something does…rejects the idea that the mind is a biological phenomenon…In other words, what we have here is a case of metaphor gone mad.
Postman wrote that in 1992, before the computer and the internet became ubiquitous and longer before on-line living had become de rigueur – before it was being shoved down our throats as it is today under the cover of COVID-19.
There is little doubt that we are being pushed to embrace what Klaus Schwab, the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), calls COVID-19:The Great Reset, that involves a total acceptance of the electronic, on-line life.
On-line learning, on-line news, on-line everything – only an idiot (from Greek idiotes, a private person who pays no attention to public affairs) would fail to see what is being promoted. And who controls the electronic life and internet? Not you, not I, but the powers that be, the intelligence agencies and the power elites.
Goodbye body, goodbye blood – “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in support of human estrangement.
Peter Koenig, one of the most astute investigators of this propaganda effort, puts it this way:
The panacea of the future will be crowned by the Pearl of the Fourth Industrialization – Artificial intelligence (AI). It will be made possible by a 5G electromagnetic field, allowing the Internet of Things (IoT). Schwab and Malleret [Schwab’s co-author] won’t say, beware, there is opposition. 5G could still be blocked. The 5G existence and further development is necessary for surveillance and control of humanity, by digitizing everything, including human identity and money. It will be so simple, no more cash, just electronic, digital money – that is way beyond the control of the owner, the truthful earner of the money, as it can be accessed by the Global Government and withheld and / or used for pressuring misbehaving citizens into obeying the norms imposed from above. You don’t behave according to our norms, no money to buy food, shelter and health services, we let you starve. No more travel. No more attending public events. You’ll be put gradually in your own solitary confinement. The dictatorial and tyrannical global commandeering by digital control of everything is the essence of the 4th Age of Industrialization – highly promoted by the WEF’s Great Reset.
*
Like everything, of course, this push to place life under the aegis of cyberspace has a history, one that deifies the machine and attempts to convince people that they too are machines without existential freedom.
Thus the ongoing meme pumped out for the past three decades has been that we are controlled by our brains and that the brain is a computer and vice versa. Brain research has received massive government funding. Drugs have been offered as the solution to every human problem.
So-called diseases and disorders have been created through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and matched to pharmaceutical drugs (or the revers) for scandalous profits. And the mind has been reduced to a figment of deluded imaginations. People are machines; that’s the story, marvelous machines. They have no freedom.
If one wishes an example of techno-fascism, there is one from the art world. Back in the 1920s and 1930s there was an art movement known as Futurism. Its leader proponent was an Italian Fascist, friend of Mussolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
The futurists claimed that all life revolves around the machine, that the machine was god, that it was beyond human control and had to be obeyed. They extolled war and speed and claimed that humans were no more significant than stones.
Patriotism, militarism, strength, method, and the kingdom of experts were their blueprint for a corporate fascist state. The human eye and mind would be re-educated to automatically obey the machine’s dictates.
Now we have cyberspace, digital machines, and the internet, an exponential extension of the machine world of the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini, Fascism, and Hitler. That this online world is being pushed as the new and future normal by trans-national elite forces should not be surprising.
If human communication becomes primarily digitally controlled on-line and on screens, those who control the machines will have achieved the most powerful means of mind control ever invented. That will be MKULTRA on a vast scale. Surveillance will be complete.
Yes, there are places on the internet where truth is and will be told, such as this site where you are reading this; but as we can see from today’s growing censorship across the web, those power elites and intelligence forces who control the companies that do their bidding will narrow the options for dissenting voices.
Such censorship starts slowly, and then when one looks again, it is a fait accompli. The frog in the pan of slowly heating cold water never realizes it is being killed until it is too late. Free speech is now being strangled. Censorship is widespread.
The purpose of so much internet propaganda is to confuse, obsess, depress, and then repress the population. The overlords accomplish this by the “peculiar linking together of opposites – knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism – [which] is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society,” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them.” One look into one’s life will suffice to see how the overlords have set people against each other.
It’s a classic tactic. Divide and conquer. Trump vs. Biden, Democrats vs. Republicans, whites vs. blacks, liberals vs. conservatives. Pure mind games. Contradictions every day to create social disorientation. Orwell describes Doublethink as follows [author’s emphasis]:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary…If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.
Nietzsche said that along with the real world we have done away with the apparent as well. Digital online life has accomplished that. It has allowed the rulers – through the media who are the magicians who serve them – to create counterfeit news and doctored videos at will, to present diametrically opposed points of view within the same paragraph, and to push breaking news items so fast that no one half-way sane could keep up with their magic shows.
Nietzsche obviously didn’t foresee this technology, but he sensed the madness that the relativity of knowledge and the technology of his day would usher in.
*
The popular 1990s term “Information Superhighway,” meaning the internet and all digital telecommunications, was the perfect term to describe this lunacy. Get on that highway and go as fast as you can while trying to catch the meaning of all the information flashing past you as you speed to nowhere.
For not only does censorship, propaganda, disinformation, mixed messages, and contradictions line the road you are traveling, but contextless information overload is so heavy that even if you were stopped in a traffic jam, there is too much information to comprehend.
And if you think this Superhighway is a freeway, think again, for the cost is high. No one puts out their hand and asks you to pay up; but the more you travel down this road you’ll notice you are missing a bit of flesh here and some blood there. And without a speed pass, you are considered road kill.
To make matters much worse, they say we need 5G to go much faster.
Paul Virilio, who has devoted himself to the study of speed (dromology), puts it this way in Open Sky:
The speed of the new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes the final void (the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world’s very extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanishes.
*
And yet I don’t have a simple answer to the internet dilemma. You are reading it on-line and I am posting it there. It is very convenient and quick.
And yet…and yet…
Can we just walk away from it? Maybe. Perhaps like those few who, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excruciating story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” we may decide the price for our conveniences and so-called happiness is too high and that there are hidden victims that this techno-scientific “progress” creates beneath its veneer of efficiency.
Others, us, our children, all children, who are reaching out not for speed and machines, but for the human touch that the on-line propagandists hope to destroy.
In Le Guin’s story, the price nearly all the citizens of Omelas are willing to pay for their happiness and comfort is the imprisonment of a single child. Perhaps we should consider what we are doing to all the world’s children and their futures.
My friend Gary recently sent me this letter. I believe it sums up what many people feel. There is a vast hunger for reality and truth. The analog life. How to live it – the question hangs in the air as the artificial intelligence/digital controllers try to reduce us to machines.
Although apparently it isn’t clear if Twain ever said this, it’s still a great quote: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.” To which “amen” is the only appropriate response. I continue to daily stay abreast of events through the web, and these days much of what passed for “progressive media” simply regurgitates the covid madness as if it had been delivered on stone tablets – rather than by the same MSM that lie to us daily about literally ANYTHING of any importance. There are days I wonder “why” I continue to bother to follow the unfolding madness as if it made some “difference.” I could certainly play guitar more, and I might even get it together to write a few pieces on the nature of our collective madness, for which I have studiously assembled copious notes. I really don’t need any more information or examples – I think I have things covered on that front. Instead I find myself daily doing the little dance we’re all familiar with – uncomfortable with being “uninformed” – yet at almost every turn finding myself being routinely – “misinformed” – and so having to sift through the endless debris to have any chance at developing any coherent understanding of the world. So yes, I totally get the draw of just saying to hell with the internet. After years of shifting through the endless propaganda operations our generation has been subject too, I have no doubt you and I see through most the nonsense for what it is before we even have the proof in hand. Once the rose-colored glasses of ‘American exceptionalism’ are off, one can almost sense and see through the lies in real-time even as they are being uttered.
Reading Gary’s words reminded me of those of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s definition of the Unspeakable:
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said, the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…
Yes, real time, real life – as we do our little dances.
Can we do our little dances and preserve reality? I’m not sure.
Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/. He is the author of the new book Seeking Truth in A Country of Lies