2023.04.20 From Transparent Conspiracy to In-Your-Face Fascism

[This was published at OpEdNews.com on April 19, 2023 and at morrissey.substack.com on April 20, 2023. German translation here.]

When I was in the 9th grade there was a guy whose name I can't remember, so I'll call him Lindsey, after Lindsey Graham, for the reason that will become apparent when I tell you the only thing I do remember about him. The school was on the post grounds at Fort Richardson, Alaska, and behind the school were some woods. (I awoke more than once to see a moose in the backyard of our quarters.) One day at lunchtime Lindsey invited me and a couple of other boys to accompany him into those woods because he had something "cool" to show us. I didn't know the other boys either. I think he just picked us at random. He was carrying a wire cage with mice in it. Where he got them I don't know. When we were just far enough into the woods not to be seen from the school, Lindsey dug a hole in the ground with a garden spade and dumped the mice in it. Then he started pelting them with rocks. He urged us to join in the fun, but none of us did. What sticks in my memory is the look on Lindsey's face as he slaughtered the mice. It's a strange sort of memory, because it's not of the face itself but of the feeling it conveyed. It was glee.

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I realize that I am talking about mice, not men. But they could have been men. Or women. Or  children. We have all seen pictures of grown-up Lindseys with rifles standing over trenches filled with corpses. It may be hard to see in photos, but I'm sure that same glee is in at least some of those faces. There are other words (bloodlust, sadism, Schadenfreude), but none of them fit as well as a word that I would be reluctant to use had I not read David Ray Griffin on process theodicy. The word is evil. The meaning, lest anyone assume it is "only" theological, is amply elaborated in Griffin's last book, America on the Brink: How US Foreign Policy Led to the War in Ukraine (to be published in May), which is a sequel to The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? (2018). 

This should explain why I have named the mouse-slaughtering specter in my memory after Lindsey Graham, representative of all the repulsive politicos, not only in America, who have been urging us to "stand with Ukraine," "as long as it takes," etc., while the death and destruction from a war that could have been easily avoided, by the US, Germany or any other NATO member, rises to hundreds of thousands of casualties and hundreds of billions of dollars. If this is not evil, there is no evil.

Unlike the traditional Christian belief in an omnipotent deity, which Griffin calls "Gawd," God will not make it all right, in the end or at any other time, because he/she/it does not exist. God is on our side, but not available for miracles. Evolution has produced creatures (us) that are equally capable of great good and great evil. You can't have one without the other. But – and herein lies all hope – the fact that this evolution has taken place, and that we are still here, as a species, is evidence that God is on our side – not like a thumb on the scale, but more like a persuasive (not coercive) breath. 

Which brings us to the war in Ukraine. There have been plenty of other wars, most of them since WW2 perpetrated by the United States, as Griffin shows, in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, William Blum and others. But the current proxy war with Russia is not only extremely dangerous as what appears more and more to be the final battle of the US hegemon against the "threat" of a multipolar world. It is also a stark demonstration of the degree to which the fate of the world hangs on the outcome of a larger underlying information war. 

I am puzzled, therefore, why in a recent article Jacob Siegel describes brilliantly how the initial hope (of the 1990s) that the internet would be "a technology for maximizing human potential and spreading democracy" has proved to be just the opposite, and therefore the "hoax of the century," but doesn't mention the war at all. He deals at length with the hype and propaganda surrounding Russophobia and Russiagate, which is essential for understanding the current war hysteria, but mentions Ukraine only once, in reference to the "Origins of Contemporary 'Disinformation'": 

The foundations of the current information war were laid in response to a sequence of events that took place in 2014. First Russia tried to suppress the U.S.-backed Euromaidan movement in Ukraine; a few months later Russia invaded Crimea…

This is the first I have read about a Russian attempt to "suppress" the Euromaidan movement. Wikipedia, which is my go-to resource for CIA-approved "facts," says in its article on the "Revolution of Dignity":

The next day [after the duly elected pro-Russian leader Yanukovich fled the city], 22 February, the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from office by 328 to 0 (about 73% of the parliament's 450 members). Yanukovych claimed this vote was illegal and asked Russia for help. Russia condemned the events as a "coup". Pro-Russian, counter-revolutionary protests erupted in southern and eastern Ukraine. Russia occupied and then annexed Crimea, while armed pro-Russian separatists seized government buildings and proclaimed the independent states of Donetsk and Luhansk, sparking the Donbas war.

There is nothing about Russia "suppressing" anything here. Is Siegel confusing "pro-Russian separatists" with Russians? 

Siegel wants to call the "state-corporate censorship regime" by its proper name, i.e., the "synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism," but he shies away from the word. "Anyone who spends time in America," he says, "and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country." 

I am not sure what Siegel means by "brainwashed zealot," but I think he doth protest too much. When you have a "totalitarian system," a "mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule" whose "underlying philosophy" is that "You cannot be trusted with your own mind," what else can you call it? He concludes:

The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason. 

You don't have to be a "brainwashed zealot" (of what?) to call this fascism. All that's missing is the soldiers with machine guns on the streets and the Hitlerian dictator (an image we reserve for designated enemies – but watch out for Trump). Mattias Desmet, in The Psychology of Totalitarianism, makes much the same case as Siegel and also eschews the f-word, preferring to call the digitization and dehumanization of modern life "mass formation," a pre-stage of "totalitarianism." Does that make it sound any better?

I agree with Siegel: 

In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”

So let's not waste time. This is fascism. If the situation that Siegel and Desmet  describe doesn't seem violent and bloody and brutal enough to fit the word, consider the millions who have died in the coronavirus pandemic, which many will agree has been greatly exacerbated by the "state-corporate censorship regime." Desmet's book came out in early 2022, in time to make full use of the pandemic in elaborating his theory of "mass formation," but too soon to deal with the war in Ukraine. He only mentions World War 2, following the seminal work of Hannah Arendt on The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Still, the number of people killed in US wars since WW2 has been estimated at 12 to 20 million, and since 9/11 at 900,000 to 6 million. The lies and propaganda employed to implement the earlier wars obviously pre-date the internet, but the methods are basically the same (which is Desmet's point).

If you want violence, what about Julian Assange? How can one see what the US and its vassal states are doing to him as anything other than fascist brutality – torturing a man for years on end for the "crime" of publishing the truth? Do you really need a mustachioed dictator screaming for his head to call that fascist? Neither Desmet (2022) nor Siegel (2023) mention Assange.

Much as I appreciate Siegel's work, I am also surprised to find only three names (in a 3,300-word article) of real journalists (Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Lee Fang). Yes, the number is tiny, compared to the armies engaged in the "counter-disinformation" (disinformation disinformation) war, but there are quite a bit more than three, and they need to be mentioned at every opportunity. This is the only way to get them past precisely the "public-private censorship machinery" that Siegel describes. I have mentioned Assange, the most important example, but there are others, from Noam Chomsky (old but still kicking), Chris Hedges, and even (in the mainstream) Tucker Carlson and (semi-mainstream, e.g. via Carlson) Tulsi Gabbard, to brave souls like Scott Ritter, Douglas Macgregor, Jeffrey Sachs, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, John Mearsheimer, Michael Hudson, Stephen Cohen (RIP), Phil Giraldi, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, Caitlin Johnstone, Jimmy Dore, Michael Tracey, and sites like TheGrayZone.com, MintPressNews.com, CovertActionMagazine.com, W(orld)S(ocialist)W(ebsite).com, AntiWar.com, and bloggers like Andrew Napolitano (Judging Freedom), Clayton and Natalie Morris (Redacted), Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris (The Duran), Jackson Hinkle (The Dive), Brian Berletic (The New Atlas), and Richard Medhurst. There are others, probably many more, but we don't hear about them and that is the point. Calling attention to them is a way of fighting back.

Without information you cannot make a reasonable choice between good and evil. The Ukraine war has made those of us who bother to inform ourselves acutely aware of how intense, uniform and effective the pro-war ("stand with Ukraine") propaganda is. It divides friends and relatives, as well as society as a whole. This was true during the Vietnam war too, but today, thanks to the fascist collusion of government agencies and big tech companies in weaponizing the social media as well as traditional print and television "news" coverage, the propaganda seems even more intrusive and pervasive, and the social barriers created thereby even stronger. 

This is remarkable considering that neither Americans nor Western Europeans have skin (blood) in the game, at least not officially. In fact, the proxy nature of this war, our armchair distance from it, seems to exacerbate the self-righteous and bloodthirsty feelings on the pro-war side. In Vietnam days the gung-ho crowd at least had to stop and think for a second about "their own boys" who were getting killed and maimed. Now there is no such restraint, from blithering idiot politicos like Joe Biden and Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio on down to the next-door neighbor who has no idea what happened in Ukraine before Feb. 24, 2022 or on the geopolitical stage since the 1990s.  The armchair chickenhawks are always the loudest warmongers, and as mere spectators to the current carnage they can sit back, grab a beer and enjoy the horror show – if they are so inclined, which I'm afraid they are. That was the point of my little story about Lindsey the Mouse Killer. Evil exists. It's part of the evolutionary package. And we have to fight against it. 

I can hear the howls of protest. "Yes, but it's Putin who is evil! That's why we stand with Ukraine!" These are people who will not read Griffin's last book, or Ben Abelow's How the West Brought War to Ukraine: Understanding How U.S. and NATO Policies Led to Crisis, War, and the Risk of Nuclear Catastrophe, or listen to or read the sources named above. They won't be reading this, either. But for those who are, I want to add a more personal comment about how my world view has changed in the past 17 years or so. It may ring true to some.

When I first started writing about 9/11, in 2006, those essays (later published as a book) elaborated on an idea – transparent conspiracy – that made sense to me at the time, and still does. But it needs some updating. So I will tell you first, briefly, how I came to this idea, and then say what has changed. 

I did not "come of age" politically until 1988 (see here), when a TV documentary about the JFK assassination turned my head around. By 1990 I had begun what turned out to be an intensive correspondence with Noam Chomsky and Fletcher Prouty, and I also exchanged a few letters with Harold Weisberg. In October 1990 I wrote to Weisberg:

In fact, in retrospect, the entire assassination and coverup seem so crudely done that I wonder if the crudeness wasn’t intentional. What better way to let us know, without admitting it outright, that they had (and have) us by the balls? Maybe they were saying: "Look what we can do. We blew his brains out in broad daylight, created a fairy tale, and got away with it. You can be as suspicious as you like, but we’re in total control, and there’s nothing you can do about it."

After all, they could have just dropped a pill in his coffee. CIA and their friends certainly had the techniques for causing "natural" deaths in 1963 just as they do now. 

After joining Vincent Salandria's correspondence circle in June 1993 I discovered that Vince had had the same idea 22 years earlier, first elaborated in an unlikely journal otherwise dedicated to "developments of computer technology and software" (Computers and Automation 1950-1972). In this brilliant analysis Vince was far ahead of his time: 

Lone Assassin Myth Suggests Governmental Guilt

Let us examine this thesis of a transparent conspiracy. (This thesis was in large part inspired by and formulated with the invaluable assistance of my friend, Professor Thomas Katen of Philadelphia.) Anyone who has seen the Zapruder film knows that it provides powerful evidence to support a hit on the President by an assassin positioned in front of Kennedy and not behind him, where Oswald was at the time of the shooting. Anyone who studies this film more carefully learns that the strike on Governor John B. Connally of Texas was accomplished by a separate bullet from any which impacted on the President. Even more careful analysis of the Zapruder film reveals four separate (and horrible) bullet strikes on Kennedy. Now, the federal government was in possession of that film on the day of the assassination. The federal government was in a better position than you or I to know what the film revealed. Yet, despite this evidence and other most impressive data indicating a conspiracy, the government seized upon Oswald and declared him to be the lone assassin. At the official public level the government, in its adherence to the lone-assassin cover story, strained logic. The federal government even refused to take seriously the Newtonian laws of motion and forces. But, at a more sophisticated level, the same government knew that anyone who accepted the Newtonian laws of motion would eventually have to conclude that President Kennedy was killed by a multi-assassin ambush.

Where evidence of a conspiracy with respect to the Kennedy assassination surfaced — and much did — thanks in the main to the government’s disclosures, that same government from the very first and continuously to date has publicly refused to act on that evidence. Wherever any data appeared to be thoroughly ludicrous and incredible — and much of the lone-assassin evidence did violence to common sense — the federal government publicly and solemnly declared those data veracious. The unvarying governmental pattern of consistently and publicly supporting the lone-assassin myth, and equally uniformly rejecting the irrefutable conspiracy evidence, was too studied to be the function of mere bureaucratic stupidity or accident. I propose the thesis that this uniform governmental pattern did not speak to official innocence or ignorance but rather to the guilt of the government at the very highest echelons.

A Warning to Opponents

This systematic behavioral pattern persisted in by the government in a reckless and apparently unskeptical manner, I believe, was meant to communicate a message to the citizens: (1) about what really happened to their President; (2) about what was in store for any quixotic citizens who saw fit to oppose the new rulers of our land. ["The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: A Model of Explanation," in Computers and Automation, Volume 20, No. 12, December 1971, pp. 32-40.]

If you substitute references to the assassination with "9/11" and (elsewhere) the Warren Report with the 9/11 Commission Report, the same analysis applies. At least this is what I thought after I read David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor in 2004, on Vince's recommendation. We were no longer corresponding regularly by then, but although we disagreed on some aspects (such as what hit the Pentagon), we agreed that transparency theory applied to 9/11 as well as to the assassination – even more conspicuously in my opinion.

Neither Vince nor I was able to gain much traction for this theory, although it seemed to me to become ever more plausible as an explanation for government behavior that is simply too stupid and too vile (not to overwork the word "evil") to be understood any other way. Julian Assange is a perfect case in point. The so-called "case" against him is so flimsy and so obviously contrived to persecute, prosecute and torture Julian as long as possible in order to intimidate anyone tempted to follow his courageous example, daring to expose the truth about US state crimes, that it is impossible to see this as anything but a transparent (and international) conspiracy. 

There is a point, however, at which the conspiracy is so transparent, as in the case of Julian, that one has to wonder if the perpetrators have simply decided to drop the facade of "legitimacy" altogether, as if they don't care anymore if anyone believes the cover story or not. The number of people who believed, and maybe still believe, the cover story about JFK (the Warren Report) is dwindling, likewise (though less so) the story about the 19 Arabs performing unimaginable (and impossible) feats on 9/11 (the 9/11 Commission Report). But now? 

How many people actually believe the lies about Ukraine, despite the unprecedented propaganda campaign? The latest trove of leaked documents will come as a surprise to no one but the most brainwashed zealots (to use Siegel's phrase more accurately) of the mass media. Giving away hundreds of billions of tax dollars to Western arms industries to help a hopelessly corrupt comedian in a T-shirt billed as the "new Churchill" to send hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to their deaths in a war that is not and has never been winnable, and always easily avoidable, blowing up Nordstream and blaming it on a "lone nut" sailing yacht despite all logic and first-hand evidence,  a virus that has killed millions of people leaked from the Chinese lab that made it (with American help), arresting a former president for misdemeanors because he has threatened to run for office again? How many of these things qualify even as "transparent" conspiracies? 

It looks to me like now the gloves are completely off. Enough with the subtleties, the cover-ups, the fig leaves. They don't need them anymore. They have us in the digital juggernaut that Siegel and Desmet describe. 

This is Armageddon. I don't think that is an exaggeration. We are facing either the end of US global hegemony or the end of the world (nuclear war). The forces of evil have been waging this battle from the 1990s, and they have always known what they want – which gives them a considerable advantage. They want to control the world. "Full-spectrum dominance" has been US military doctrine since 2001, and the neo-cons have been pursuing this bad dream since the fall of the Soviet Union. This is what the Ukraine war is really about. It is no coincidence that the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century think tank, Robert Kagan, is married to Ukraine war queen Victoria (F*ck the EU") Nuland. 

Another neo-con, George Friedman, spelled out clearly in April 2015 why the United States is so determined to "stand with Ukraine," even to the point of sabotaging the infrastructure (Nordstream) of its major European ally. (Partial transcript here and here.)

… the primordial interest of the United States over which for centuries we have fought wars, the first, second and cold war has been the relationship between Germany and Russia. Because united they are the only force that could threaten us, and to make sure that that doesn’t happen. If you are a Ukrainian, it is essentially to reach out to the only country that will help you, which is the United States. Last week, about ten days ago, [when] General Hodges, commander of the US Army Europe, visited Ukraine, he announced that US trainers would now be officially coming, not just unofficially coming. He actually pinned medals on Ukrainian fighters, which by protocol of the military actually is not the way, foreigners don’t get to pin on medals, but he did. Showing that this was his army, he then left and in the Baltics announced that the United States would be prepositioning: armor, artillery, and other equipment in the Baltics, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria…

… yesterday the United States announced that it will be sending weapons. Tonight of course they denied it, but they are, weapons will go. In all of this the United States has acted outside of the context of NATO. Because NATO has to have a hundred percent vote and any one country can veto anything. And the Turks will veto it just for "giggles." The point is that the United States is prepared to create a "cordon sanitaire" around Russia, and Russia knows it. Russia believes that the United States intends to break the Russian Federation.

I think that as Peter Lory put it, “we don’t want to kill you, we just want to sort of hurt you a little bit." Either way, we are back at the old game, and… if I were Ukrainian, I would do exactly what they are doing, try to draw the Americans in.

The US goal in Ukraine is indeed, as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austen admitted, "to see Russia weakened," but not for the reason he gave ([so that Russia] can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine”). The real reason is not military but economic, and has more to do with Germany than with Ukraine, as Michael Hudson has argued (here and here). Friedman continues:

For the United States, the primordial fear is German technology and German capital and Russian natural resources and Russian manpower. This is the only combination that has for centuries scared the hell out of the United States.

The Russian concerns, on the other hand, are not economic but military. 

For Russia, the status of Ukraine is an existential threat, and the Russians cannot let go.

This had been perfectly clear to the US leadership long before Friedman spoke in 2015. Putin spelled it out very clearly in his famous speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, and just in case Washington wasn't listening (as usual), the US ambassador, William Burns (now CIA director), told them again in his "Nyet means nyet" cable of February 1, 2008. 

George W. Bush's reaction to this was to declare that "both post-Soviet Ukraine and Georgia should be allowed to join the [NATO] alliance – despite vehement objections from Russia," and precisely this was proposed a few days later at the 2008 Bucharest summit. Fortunately, France and Germany had enough sense at that time (no longer perceptible now) to veto membership for Georgia and Ukraine, but Albania and Croatia were allowed to join within a year (2009), and later Montenegro (2017), North Macedonia (2020) and Finland (2023), bringing to a total of 15 the number of states added since 1990, when the Soviets allowed Germany not only to reunite but to join NATO on Washington's assurance, in the words of Secretary of State Baker, that NATO would not expand "one inch to the east." This was not just a casual promise, as many have tried to argue, but an agreement with "iron-clad guarantees" (Baker), as official documents declassified in 2017 prove.

Instead of seizing the opportunity presented by the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War to wage peace instead of war, Bush 1 promptly launched (orchestrated) the first war against Saddam Hussein in 1990 and 

proclaimed the Wolfowitz/Bush doctrine in 1992 which held that the US was the only remaining superpower and should thus project its dominance over any region in the world.

Senator Edward Kennedy described the doctrine as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.” [Blake Fleetwood, "'Not One Inch Eastward:' How the War in Ukraine Could Have Been Prevented Decades Ago"]

The more rabidly hawkish aspects of the doctrine calling for "unilateralism" and "preemption" were opposed even by Bush 1 himself and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, but by the time it segued into Bush 2's version, after 9/11, those elements had been reinstated, along with "regime change."

We can laugh about President Joe Biden being stupid enough to declare "regime change" on Putin (“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” March 26, 2022), and to pre-announce the destruction of Nordstream, just as Victoria Nuland had done 20 days earlier, and just as Blinken and Nuland were stupid enough to proclaim their satisfaction with the deed afterward (here and here). But tempting as it is to believe this about Biden, I have never been a fan of stupidity theory. It's not that I am determined to find a method in all madness, or to give "intelligence" agencies more credit than they deserve, but I cannot swallow the notion that people smart and powerful – and evil – enough to kill JFK (and others) and disguise the reason for it (see "Vietnam: How They Played Us"), and then keep it all "secret" (more or less), or people capable of pulling off 9/11 (forget the 19 Arabs) and keeping this "secret" too, could have been stupid enough to leave such an obvious trail of self-incriminating evidence in both cases. (See Griffin's many books on 9/11.) 

But this more recent stuff – Julian, the pandemic, Ukraine – forces me to modify transparency theory from "they want us to know" to "they know we know." In other words, full frontal in-your-face fascism. The emperor knows we know he is butt-naked and is more confident than ever. It's not a pretty sight and we have to change things.