This is the interview I just did
with authors,
Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, who have
written a definitive 4-part article
on the origins and the
history of the Neocon movement.
The influence of the
Neoconservatives has been
catastrophic to the American
government - and to much of
the world, yet as they point out,
it never seems to end. The
authors describe it as an elitist
cult; a rabid ideology which
doesn't rely on facts to justify
itself.
Senator J. William Fulbright
identified the Neocons'
irrational system for making
endless war in Vietnam 45
years ago, in a New Yorker
article titled Reflections in
Thrall to Fear: "Cold War
psychology is the totally illogical
transfer of the burden of proof
from those who make charges to
those who question them", leading
to "The ultimate illogic: war is the
course of prudence and sobriety
until the case for peace is proved
under impossible rules of evidence
[or never] - or until the enemy
surrenders. Rational men cannot
deal with each other on this basis...
But these were not rational men
and their need to further their
irrational quest only increased
with the loss of the Vietnam
War."
This same ideology drove the failed
War in Iraq - and now, they're at it
again, with their foolhardy saber-
rattling towards Russia.
The birth of the Neocon movement
grew out of what had previously
been known within the Eastern
Establishment as "Team B", in which
official policies were tested by
"competitive analysis". The first
Team B was created by George H.
W. Bush, while he was Director of
the CIA. This brought together very
unlikely bedfellows, such as the ex-
Trotskyite, James Burnham and
Right Wing business interests, all
of whom lobbied heavily for big
military budgets, advanced
weapons systems and aggressive
action to confront Soviet
Communism.
This Team B/Neocon doomsday cult
managed to weather the defeat of
the Vietnam War and their non-fact-
based analyses continue to
maintain a stranglehold on US
policy.
James Burnham's nihilist, elitist
vision was criticized by George
Orwell in his 1946 essay, Second
Thoughts on James Burnham, in
which he wrote, "What Burnham is
mainly concerned to show [in the
latter's book, The Machiavellians]
is that a democratic society has
never existed and, so far as we can
see, never will exist. Society is of
its nature oligarchical, and the
power of the oligarchy always rests
upon force and fraud... Power can
sometimes be won and maintained
without violence, but never without
fraud." In fact, George Orwell's
classic book, 1984 was based on
Burnham's vision of the coming
totalitarian state, which he
described as "A new kind of
society, neither Capitalist nor
Socialist, and probably based
upon slavery."
There are many well-known
godfathers of the Neoconservative
agenda of "Endless War", the guiding
principle of America's foreign
policymakers today but Gould and
Fitzgerald identify James Burnham as
by far its most important figure,
although he is little-known today.
Burnham was born in Chicago, the
son of an English immigrant father.
He attended Princeton University and
later Oxford University's Balliol College.
He briefly became a close advisor to
Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky,
from whom he learned the tactics and
strategies of infiltration, political
subversion and dirty tricks. Gould and
Fitzgerald note that the Right Wing
Neocon cult of "Endless War" is
ironically rooted in Trotsky's
permanent "Communist Revolution"
and they describe how James Burnham
helped to turn this into the permanent
battle plan for a global Anglo-American
empire. They write, "All that was
needed to complete Burnham's
dialectic was a permanent enemy and
that would require a sophisticated
psychological campaign to keep the
hatred of Russia alive for generations."
In 1941, Burnham renounced his
allegiance to Trotsky and Marxist
idealism and he moved towards a cruel
realism, with his belief in the inevitable
failure of democracy and the rise of the
oligarch. During the following years, he
wrote several books and memos,
predicting the rise of a technocratic elite.
By 1947, Burnham's transformation from
Communist radical to New World Order
American Conservative was complete,
landing him smack into the loving arms
of America's Right Wing defense
establishment during and after World
War II.
In my own writings, I've noted that the
use of the word "Freedom" by the US
Government, whether it be "Freedom
Fries", "Operation Iraqi Freedom" or
"They hate us for our freedom," has
completely mangled the significance of
this F-word, certainly from a
Constitutional perspective. Gould and
Fitzgerald trace the bastardization of
this word to James Burnham:
"Burnham's Freedom only applied to
those intellectuals (the Machiavellians)
willing to tell people the hard truth
about the unpopular political realities
they faced. These were the realities
that would usher in a brave new world
of the managerial class who would set
about denying Americans the very
Democracy they thought they already
owned. As Orwell observed about
Burnham's Machiavellian beliefs, in his
1946 Second Thoughts, 'Power can
sometimes be won or maintained without
violence, but never without fraud,
because it is necessary to use the
masses.'"
With the CIA's 1950 founding of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF),
Gould and Fitzgerald write,
"By its
own admission, the CIA's strategy
of promoting the non-Communist
Left would become the theoretical
foundation of the Agency's political
operations against Communism over
the next two decades."Today, it appears that this strategy has
been a smashing success, where we see
the so-called Left in the US playing the
role of fulminating, pro-Establishment
Statists, a behavior formerly relegated
to the Right. Never, in my wildest
dreams would I have imagined the
"tolerant Left" behaving like an army
of
Phyllis Schlaflys!
Prior to the catastrophe that was the
Vietnam War, the Right was the
establishment. The factual defeat of
the ideals which drove this war was
instrumental to the rise of the 1960s
Counterculture movement, which was
an even bigger disaster for the Neocons
than losing the war. The Counterculture
needed to be co-opted by any means
necessary and I believe this has been
successfully achieved.
Gould and Fitzgerald write that,
"CIA's control over the non-
Communist Left and the West's
'free' intellectuals [enabled] the
CIA to secretly disenfranchise
Europeans and Americans from
their own political culture in such
a way they would never really
know it."
Gould and Fitzgerald cite historian
Christopher Lasch, who wrote in 1969
of the CIA's co-optation of the American
Left: "The modern state... is an engine
of propaganda, alternately manufacturing
crises and claiming to be the only
instrument that can effectively deal with
them. This propaganda, in order to be
successful, demands the cooperation of
writers, teachers, and artists, not as
paid propagandists or state-censored
time-servers but as 'free' intellectuals
capable of policing their own
jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable
standards of responsibility within the
various intellectual professions."
We see this very much today, in the
Late Night comedy of Stephen Colbert,
Trevor Noah and SNL, the staff writers
of which are largely hand-picked from
the Harvard Lampoon, where young
comedians are trained in a particular
brand of comedy that deftly implants a
fascist philosophy of extreme elitism
and which fuses the ideals of the old
Trotskyist left together with those of
the right-wing Anglo-American elite,
aka the Deep State.
The product of this fusion is called
"Neoconservatism" - or its sneaky twin,
"Neoliberalism". The overt mission of
this ideology is to roll back Russian
influence everywhere. The covert
mission is to reassert British cultural
dominance over the Anglo-American
Empire, maintained through
propaganda. Traditionally, comedy
has been used as a form of social and
political criticism. Today, it cows the
hapless consumer into submission to
the hegemony.
Gould and Fitzgerald then inform us
about the secret Information Research
Department of the British and
Commonwealth Foreign Office known
as the IRD, which was funded by the
CIA and served as a covert anti-
Communist propaganda unit from
1946 until 1977. Gould and Fitzgerald
cite Paul Lashmar and James Oliver,
authors of Britain's Secret Propaganda
War, which describes how the IRD
spread ceaseless disinformational
propaganda (a mixture of lies and
distorted facts) among top-ranking
journalists working for major news
agencies, including Reuters and the
BBC and all other available channels.
This was but one of many similar
initiatives launched by the CIA's
Psychological Strategy Board, including
Project Mockingbird and the
abovementioned Congress for
Cultural Freedom.
The mind is the ultimate battlefield.
In my next talk with Gould and
Fitzgerald, we will go into how the
Deep State has designs on our dream
life, in such figures as Robert Moss,
a former assassin who now gives
New Age workshops on "Active Dreaming."
(Incidentally, the New Age Movement
was a CIA subproject of MK Ultra mind
control programs). The soon-to-be-
released 5G network will enable Virtual
Reality, as predicted by Gould and
Fitzgerald's book,
'The Voice: An Encrypted Monologue', which takes
the reader through the process of
reclaiming one's own narrative from
the "noize" of the unrelenting
psychological warfare that saturates
our environment.
