Henry Kissinger The Pseudo Intellectual & War Criminal - Christopher Hitchens

I can never quite square Hitchen's subsequent support for the NeoCons bombing of Iraq. I sometimes wonder if the intelligence spooks had something on him and press ganged his support. He wouldn't be the first. I also  think Tariq Ali's inability to call out 911 as an inside job is suspect. However it's worth listening to Hitch take the gloves off on a war criminal who still flies the globe while people like Julian Assange are seeking asylum.

Chalmers Johnson - Kinda Like Kissinger Without The War Crimes

Not so long back I came across a link to an obituary for the late Chalmer's Johnson. I read it and was a bit surprised that the spelling was as bad as mine in places, though I was most curious about the claim that Chalmers was the intellectual equal if not superior to Henry Kissinger. Unlike a lot of people who try to get into Kissinger debates I've had the good fortune to read 'Years of Upheaval' which is part two of his autobiographical trilogy.

It's an amazing read not because Kissinger writes well but because of it's comprehensive detail and let's face it, sheer chronological historical narrative. This is the guy who invented shuttle diplomacy. A German Jew flitting back and forth between Tel Aviv, Cairo, Riyadh, Damascus and Jordan. Then there's the Paris peace accord with Vietnam, Soviet détente, and secret trips to Peking in preparation for Nixon's visit, the oil crisis and so on and so forth. Truly remarkable times.

I disagreed with the obituary though I've had to change my mind. If there's one video worth watching from this weekends political bender this is the one. It's all there and most troubling for me, an emerging understanding of why the Euro is plummeting against the dollar as the empire makes it's last gasp efforts to hold on to the past. I urge you to watch this. Chalmers Johnson is in a different intellectual league to Kissinger. A man able to delineate between the expedient thing and the right thing. Something Kissinger isn't qualified to comment on. 

RIP Mr Johnson you were a great American patriot.

A Different Approach

I discovered this little book just published for free on the net as it mentioned Kissinger's role in the UFO issue and as Heinz (Henry after the name change) has more dirt on him then any living political figure it's unusual to find fresh leads but sure enough he's on form again. 

Tony Brunt the author has quite a cerebral writing style on occasions but what makes his book most interesting is rather than try to prove the existence of ET/UFO it lays out comprehensive evidence of the ongoing cover up, including these juicy quotes and anecdotes I've not encountered before.

This is the tawdry vaudeville waiting to happen inside the chamber of secrets, a place where a decent US Senator cannot make it to first base in the quest for the truth while a five-pack-a-day comedian with a Rob Roy cocktail in his hand schmoozes his way to a home run. 

Einstein physics was still oven-fresh when the modern flying saucer era began and no one had an alternative recipe that could explain how the aliens got here. Therefore they weren't here 

Fermi then embarked on a series of mental calculations on the probability of Earth-like planets, the probability of intelligent life on those, and the likely rise and duration of high technology. “He concluded on the basis of such calculations that we ought to have been visited long ago and many times over,” recalled Herbert York.

Perhaps Barack Obama got wind of a lot of iffy R & D when he entered the White House in 2009. Early on in his presidency he released an interesting policy statement, titled “Scientific Integrity,” that implied, in veiled language, that the practitioners of secret science needed to watch their step.

Meier‘s contacts warned him force-fully and repeatedly about a whole range of burgeoning environmental problems, including the hole in the ozone layer which they said (in February 1975) had been degraded by bromine gases over their 60-year study period by an average of 6.38%.

McDonald visited Blue Book a few weeks later to pore through its files again. He found an embarrassing oversight – a report of a 1953 meeting that the CIA had convened, the Robertson Panel, that recommended that the UFO subject should be demystified and debunked under an official media programme. 

Rich Men Dream of Electric Sheep

Most people, even university educated degree holders can't explain why Europe went to war in 1914. They might remember it was Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, but they could tell you nothing of who and why that assassination was planned. An example is the number plates of the car match the date of Versaille and Remembrance Sunday. It's both a fact and a little known intel point on who really runs the show.

The Second World War was an extension of the first (Taleb - Black Swan). Hitler was originally a military spy who infiltrated the proto Nazi group and reported back to his superiors that there were only a handful of them but that his superiors would like them. Time and time again secretive elites plan war. That's how the top tier private banks make money through lending to both sides, who are willing to pay anything for their very survival. If you haven't understood that yet you're a sheep and there's only one thing better than a sheep. 

An electric sheep controlled by joystick.

I applaud Switzerland for producing Dominque Baettig. At least one mainstream political leader has the stones to go up against the Bilderberg Group who are  meeting in secret session, in his country and like their blessing of approval for Tony Blair in the 90's, are mapping out the  future through arch weasels like Kissinger, Mandelson, George Osborne, owner of Publicis group Maurice Levy and wealthy European Royalty. 

Sunlight is the best disinfectant and if you haven't learned that from our collective history of senseless but manipulated war or recent WIkileaks your intellectual atrophy is self evident only from the outside.

Nixon & Complexity

Prior to George W Bush the most reviled president by pretty much unanimous opinion in recent American history was Richard Nixon. However, after a few years of listening to my early American baby boomer friends or non octogenarian civil rights supporters trash the name of Richard S Nixon I took the time to read into this complex figure who in my eyes is pretty much inseparable from Kissinger as they both dominated the political stage that extended from a year before my birth in 1969 to 1974 when Nixon was ceremoniously (sic) squeezed out of the Whitehouse while walking across the Rose Garden lawn towards the helicopters with one final wave to the cameras before a life of relative obscurity.

There's something about seminal helicopter shots in U.S. history such as the last line of South Vietnamese people desperate to bail out of Vietnam before the Viet Cong triumphed with the fall of Saigon. Yeah, helicopters and history is something I'll always associate with the Americans in much the same way that the Chinese will forever be associated with Tanks and squares.

 

 Incidentally this famous photograph of the fall of Saigon was taken by Dutch photojournalist Hugh Van Es who died just under a month ago here in Hong Kong. It is all connected you know even if it's largely some illusory Black Swan post rationalised causality.

Traditionally the view of Nixon is one of mendacity, vulgarity and sneaky subterfuge, and yet, it is one I can reconcile with the other side that I want to talk about because let's face it, the problems don't lie with our politicians, they lie with the electorate and our complete inability to handle the truth or even discuss it in an adult manner. That doesn't mean I'm not surprised by the sheer scale of human fallibility over on the other side of the Atlantic with the MP's expense claims which are surely not that far morally from those who claim income support while having an income from work. Benefit cheats sounds so much more dramatic and I'm surprised the press haven't dreamed up a more sticky label for the "right dishonourable members of the Parliament". I digress.

 Clearly the thorniest role that confronted Nixon was Vietnam and there's no denying that in order to extricate the United States from that holy fuck up of ideological warfare in proxy countries that a lot of nasty, ugly and criminal decisions were taken such as the bombing and warfare that took place across the Ho Chi Minh trail which veered into Laos (the most bombed country in the history of the world) and Cambodia thus compromising the lives of millions of their own inhabitants. I'm on record as being hugely fond of the Laotians and the Khmer because of the inexplicable and retarded snobbery they face from other developing world candidates such as Thailand who exercise the rule of marginal superiority acted out from deeply evident insecurity in the manner of the arriviste nouveaux riche against old money while more than aware that side by side with the Benz and it's logocentric Star, is the sticky steamed rice, the stink bean and the ubiquitous calloused hands from pre-school tilling of the paddy fields of Isaan, more often than not controlled by the plutocratic Siamese Chinese families as indeed they do across South East Asia.

 But back to Vietnam because despite the claims of denial by Kissinger  (Nixon is now gone) there can be little ground for conceding that nobody knew what was going on in the Mekong Delta and it's a crime against humanity that only the land of the free are obliged to defend themselves against. However we all know that 95% Americans don't even know the difference between Taiwan and Thailand because as long as the milk and honey is flowing in the lands where territorial transgressions are the sticky issues there's little need to have an empathy for what is known as 'the other'. When it's always about two sides isn't it?

 Which brings me on to the nature of this post because I'm of the opinion that the duality of binary classification is no longer a simplistic luxury we can afford and it's time if you haven't started to look, for the complexity and infinite shades of grey that exist between the polar states of good and bad, black and white, north and south or up and down.

 Life isn't some post war halcyon consumer years of rosy cheeked goodness and evil empire badness, though of course that latter term was Reagan's contribution to political history, yet we now see Obama introducing the nuance of different types of Islam between Cairo and Jakarta and which it would be wise to pay attention to (if taking a look at Islamic country birth demographics for example).

To bring anything to the advertising planning table is the ability to embrace complexity and distance oneself from the relentlessly overly simplistic reductionist role of account planning which is one part science to two parts art and not the other way round.  Particularly now we know that homo economicus is forever dead. And so with that mental perspective in mind I want to reverse back, full speed and with screeching tires (distant sound of police siren in the background) into Nixon's career because it was his role with the Plumbers and the repeated and subsequently scandalous 'break ins' of the Democrat National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate office complex and now forever preserved in political history and it's meme like propensity to term any scandal with the suffix of 'gate' and which first came to light when on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate Complex, noticed tape covering the locks on several doors in the complex. He took the tape off, and thought nothing of it. An hour later, he discovered that someone had retaped the locks. The scandal revealed the existence of a White House dirty tricks squad but to my mind, the democrats could have played a smarter game with what they left out for the uninvited breaking and entering squad.

More to the point is that the labeling of Nixon as  monolithic-bad doesn't do justice to one of the more contradictory and paradoxically subtle minds of the post-war Whitehouse. Here we have a president as in the above video playing his own Piano Concerto.

Furthermore once we distance ourselves from the morally repugnant Indochina actions and the break ins that subsequently required extensive lying, we have a figure who was easily one of the most intellectually qualified of his era, and a character who was responsible for the detente that was fostered in partnership with the Soviet Union (unthinkable really given the postwar context) and most markedly became the first president to visit Chairman Mao and extend the hand of tentative friendship with the Communist China.

 One only has to think of the McCarthy era to understand the deeply Pavlovian response of the American peoples to anything of a socialist nature despite the recent global socialization of the banking system from the efforts of their last GOP president.

Nixon was also responsible for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "clean air, clean water, open spaces" and so we have a complex figure with both the vulgarity of a Bronx bare-fist fighter and the intellectual subtle fingered sensitivity of  a concert pianist, the diplomacy skills of the long term thinker and player as well as the DNA of a progressive environmentalist. Arguably the only game in town as we observe the decline of the American empire.

So in summary embrace complexity and only settle on reductionist simplicity once the really hard work of weeding out the immortally terrible and the infinitely unworkable.


A lot more difficult than one might think.

(I'll come back and try get the formatting right but it's still a mess in draft blogger)

Ernest Bevin

I'm reading Alan Bullocks' Ernest Bevin at the moment. It's certainly the most comprehensive biography on Ernie Bevin, but its in some ways a disappointing book. So far I've read one sentence on his marriage and one on his daughter after 300 pages, which is a poor show. We're all a product of the people around us, and I feel that his depth has been stripped by focusing on Bevin's ascent from Trades Union Leader to Minister of Labour, by Churchill's invitation in the coalition government during the second world war. No, its not a great political history book and frankly the British never do quite get it right when trying to paint a picture of our politicians. Its generally either overblown puff pieces or pedestrian led tours of duty-to-detail like the late Roy Jenkins biography on Churchill.

Our cousins in the United States however seem to excel in this department. Maybe its because they have a bigger stage like say in Caro's biographical trilogy of LBJ or for a real left field choice, Edmund Morris' biography on Reagan: 'Dutch'. But for the real master of writing history there probably is no greater insight into power corruption and lies, than by writing your own history, as Kissinger memorably did with his autobiographical trilogy, peaking in the craft of non fiction writing with his second book (for his doctoral dissertation) 'Years of Upheaval' which saw shuttle diplomacy invented, not to mention Vietnam, oil shocks and China to mention a few.

That isn't to say the Bevin biography doesn't shine in parts. In the passage below, we find that he is under pressure in the artificial (for him) habitat as a socialist minister in the house of commons, with criticism all round when the Conservative Churchill steps up and soaks up the punishment in his defence from his own 'side' so to speak.

"To abuse the minister of Labour. He is a working man, a trade union leader. He is taunted with being an unskilled labourer representing an unskilled union. I daresay he gives offence in some quarters; he has his own methods of speech and action. He has a frightful load to carry; he has a job to do which none would envy. He makes mistakes, like I do, though not so many or so serious - he has not got the same opportunities. At any rate he is producing, at this moment, though perhaps on rather expensive terms, a vast and steady volume of faithful effort, the like of which has not been seen before. And if you tell me that the results he produces do not compare with those of totalitarian systems of government and society, I reply by saying 'We shall know more about that when we get to the end of the story'

Time and again Bevin struggles to persuade people that the British worker is motivated most when free to choose their own destiny and less commited when compelled. Only Bevin understood this and fought tooth and nail to gain their permission for anything he subsequently requested from them. This is a logic that totalitarianism never grasps.