Thursday, December 24, 2009

A Message of Possibility in the Season of Perpetual Hope

I hadn’t thought this blog would be the most difficult one I’d have to write since beginning dontfearyourfreedom last Easter, but it’s stumped me for days. In October, a year-and-a-half after I lost my beloved Huckleberry to advanced kidney disease secondary to thread worm infestation and feline AIDS for which he had no risk factor (other than repeated vaccination) that, curiously, no veterinarian would diagnose properly, I lost another beautiful little soul to very similar diseases under the exact same circumstance. Huck’s little brother was repeatedly bioassaulted, just as was Huck, even after I treated him for roundworm when his vet refused to acknowledge his moth-eaten coat was abnormal, telling me his bald patches were because of his bristle tongue, which prompted me to wonder why all cats weren’t bald. A gang of veterinarians aided in the murder of these darling spirits, as unique as any individual person – and more so. It’s been a difficult few months, to say the least, and I find little reason to anticipate a different type of holiday, or 2010. But perhaps I am mistaken.

As is my yearly Christmas custom, I’ve been re-reading and thinking about the Sermon on the Mount, the most famous of Jesus’ homilies – the one in which he gave us a prescription for creating the Kingdom of G_d – and I realized once again that the magic of Christmas is that each of us can redeem ourselves by following his instruction to love G_d with all our minds, hearts and bodies (so we have maximum opportunity to realize that G_d is most assuredly not some paternalistic idol in the sky whose domain is outer space, or the afterlife, but actually, right here, right now) and to treat each other as we, ourselves, each wish to be treated. So the theme of my blog today, Christmas eve, is this: instead of forcing your, what is by nature, limited understanding of God down the throats of others and denigrating them because they don’t belong to the same religious gang that you do; instead of padding your Christmas savings club with graft you receive by informing on your neighbors like a Third Reich SS; instead of coveting your new Andersen windows and aluminum siding more than the freedom and dignity of neighbors about whom you concoct slander that makes her the subject of the FBI’s TIPS investigation and surveillance by your so-called neighborhood watch; instead of treating other human beings as a means to your ends, remember that it is these very sins for which Jesus died – the slander, contempt and dispassion in which the general public then held the prophet and for which they said, when Pontius Pilate asked them which prisoner would receive amnesty from crucifixion, ‘not Jesus.’

What a Christmas miracle it would be if those of you who’ve been running around spending your bribes on mind-numbing, soul-killing, violent video games for your kids -- to anesthetize them to the horror that is the fascism in which our country now exists and delude them into believing that distraction is better than conscious action that changes the status quo so that some day they may not be the slaves we all are today – stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus’ message was truly the antithesis of, and cure for, fascism. That you do so on more than just one day a year – which is something Jesus himself believed was truly within the power of each of us to do – is my sincerest wish today. May the light of a thousand blessed stars of Bethlehem inspire in you the courage to act as that babe in the manger would wish you to act each and every day for the rest of your life.

Merry Christmas.


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Thursday, December 10, 2009

Barack Obama is the Commander-in-Chief of a Military that has for Decades Persecuted American Political Dissidents, Declassified Gov't. Documents Show

Awarding the Nobel Prize for Peace to him when so many Americans languish in wall-less prisons designed to isolate them and prevent them from influencing society is an hypocrisy of the worst type.

Millions of American -- and, indeed, world -- citizens live in the once merely prophesied Orwellian condition of continuous state-sponsored monitoring, tracking and repression. The tracking and undermining of political dissidents began in American in the 1950s, with the CIAs now well-known development of mind-control technologies, code-named COINTELPRO, which centered on the social extermination of legitimate activists through sophisticated slander campaigns, and MK-ULTRA, which technologies now include the use of electromagnetic, radar and microwave radiation to adversely affect human behavior, causing, among other effects, false diagnoses of mental illness. Attorney Brian Glick details the FBI’s use of these tactics and technologies on American political activists from the once diverse field of political activism that included the American Indian Movement, the Women’s movement, the nuclear disarmament movement (all now dead or so impotent they may as well be) in his 1989 pamphlet, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It (South End Press). American industry, sponsored by the American government and working collaboratively with the Department of Defense, has, for decades, developed these technologies to aid governments in tracking those the state fears will oppose its policies. They represent the world’s leaders in surreptitious, freedom-crushing, wall-less prison technology.

Legacy consumer products of these technologies include Ambient Technology’s “voiceless” telephone, which allows persons paralyzed by diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to send brain waves to a computer to record their “speech,” or even make a telephone call. Though the device used in Ambient’s demonstration uses a neck collar, smaller, “nanotech” devices that do the same thing can be implanted anywhere in the body near nerve centers, including surreptitiously during routine dental work, should the state wish to implant a dissident. All that is required is a sufficiently incentivized dentist. No thought of the recipient of such an implant can be private.

Dr. Caroline Lucas, MEP for Southeast England, warned in Parliament of the dangers inherent in electromagnetic weapons, one of which is designed to subtly influence human behavior using inaudible speech above range of hearing.
“Silent Sound” works as a Pavlovian trigger, suggesting to the receiver whatever behavior the entity controlling the technology wishes to embed. “Electro-magnetic (EM) weapons are one of the newest and most serious military developments in the world today. Enormous secrecy surrounds their development. . . . Unless this development is stopped, we are entering an Orwellian ‘1984’ type scenario, which could potentially permanently transfer enormous power to those in control of the technology.”

The U.S. leads the world in another industry critical to its promotion of U.S. business interests throughout the world: public relations. Anyone reading this post will rightly be skeptical of even the most obvious and provable fact related above supporting the thesis that the U.S. government is the leading terrorist organization in the world simply because his or her government has likely been roped into its “war on terror,” believing in good faith exactly what the U.S. has told them about the threat of terrorists to itself and its allies. ‘Why,’ they might reasonably wonder, ‘have we such a problem with terrorists if this spy and mind control technology exists? Surely, if it is being used to control political dissidents, can’t it be used to control terrorists as well?’

Yes. Those are the questions. And their answers lie in the many, many, many charges and exposés of empire building and cupidity leveled at conservative-run benefactors of the invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. From pre-invasion security analysis widely published in the New York Times and elsewhere, to documentaries such as those produced by Michael Moore, 9/11truth.org and David Earnhardt, to the more recent documentation provided by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, the world has had a steady diet of facts proving factually, anecdotally and circumstantially that the U.S. government has, indeed, undertaken a mission to conquer the world for corrupt business interests, and to do it militarily. One such military weapon they have had at their disposal is the ability to create many “Manchurian candidates,” assassins programmed to commit whatever act of terrorism enables the U.S. government to initiate its “war on terror” using Silent Sound technology. The power to create America’s own Reichstag Fire incident is one the U.S. government has had for a long time.

There is no doubt that the flying of commercial airplanes into the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon and tragically, a field in Pennsylvania, was a military operation. But exactly whose military operation it was remains as much a mystery to the world today as it was that bright Tuesday morning in September of 2001. The world has been told that the terrorists who hijacked these planes had no other objective except a “symbolic” attack on the United States. Does that sound reasonable? The alleged mastermind behind the attacks is still free, roaming the world, and menacing no other similarly fortified American dominion or American-allied country; the few furtive attacks in places such as Mumbai attributed to terrorists alleged to be loosely connected with him have been equally as futile, though just as devastating and evocative of terror, and this is a man whose personal fortune, never mind the religious zeal by which we’ve been told he is motivated, is so great he could personally fund the establishment of conventional, not guerilla, armies in every alleged terrorist backwater in the Middle East, North Africa and Indonesia. Even so, these attacks do not a war make -- certainly not a war that anyone with the power to evade the terrorist surveillance matrix that was already well-established on 9/11 would wage, were he serious about waging any war. The citizens of Spain understood that and quickly rejected their government’s calls for the same type of security state in which Americans now live after the ETA attacks in Madrid in 2004. Why not Americans? If Silent Sound can be used to condition individuals and discrete groups of people, why not large swaths of the population for whom panem et circenses is ineffective, too? All they need is the airwaves.

The further and further history travels from the events of 9/11 and its aftermath, the easier and easier it becomes to see that the “war on terror” is really just a “war for terror,” sponsored by the very people who claimed to be its first victims: the U.S. government. That’s what good PR does -- it manipulates the perceptions of its targets and then offers explanations for those perceptions. Almost nothing about the official U.S. government explanation of the 9/11 attacks has been demonstrated to be reasonable, verifiable, complete, or accurate, supporting the claim by many that those attacks were, if not orchestrated by the U.S. government, then permitted for its use as an opportunity to promote U.S. business expansion in crucial middle eastern regions.

These facts are without doubt: (1) the U.S. government has turned from a country of, by and for the people, to one in which “law and order” is indiscriminately applied by an increasingly repressive state mechanism operating throughout the federal, state and local levels, who apply their law and order more brutally and injudiciously to opponents of their empire-building raison d’étre; and (2) the people who have engineered this turn are the same types of people who have done the same things in other countries: they are fascists. They’re not corporatists. They’re not free marketeers. They’re not conservatives. They’re fascists. Those industrialists who were proved through Congressional investigation to have been behind the failed fascist coup in 1933 that General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, refused to lead against Roosevelt’s administration have finally succeeded.

The bottom line? The fascist battle cry is, ‘Markets must be protected.’ They oppress all those who interfere with their mission to use the world and its resources -- natural, human or other -- to make themselves rich through unjust “laissez-faire” economic policies in creating and developing these markets. Their policies create destruction and misery for the most vulnerable people in the world, misery so unfathomable legions of other human beings devote their lives to trying to negotiate with these fascists to get them to change those policies, and they do whatever they can to dominate those legions, their opponents. Whatever they can. Today’s award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama was just another one of their ploys to make you believe all is right with the current world order. But the Nobel Prize for Peace Committee has long distinguished itself as a pawn of these fascists, and so their ludicrous ceremony today should surprise no one. They are rightly subject to suspicion. Henry Kissinger, the man who, as investigative reporter Christopher Hitchins demonstrated, prolonged the Vietnam war only to surrender eventually under the same terms as had been proposed in Versailles four years previous to the surrender, was a recipient of their esteem, and there have been others just as, or more, dubious -- while legitimate peacemakers such as Oasis of Peace, the planned Jewish-Arab community in Israel, has been nominated more than a dozen times in the last 25 years and routinely rebuffed.

The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to the head of America’s fascist government is yet one more example of that government’s overweening influence in a world too terrified to confront it, the biggest and worst terrorist organization the world has ever seen. It’s time to stop cowering, open our eyes and see it for what it is: Hitler’s wet dream. Those who continue to implore us not to do so -- to deify the very warmongers who’ve ushered in the destruction of humanity through the destruction of the human mind and the ideals it alone can conceive, ideals such as freedom -- should be shunned, no matter the color of their skin, or the depth of their pockets. Conciliation didn’t work in World War II to make anyone either more secure or more free, it hasn’t worked since then. It won’t work now.

I know these things because I am one such targeted dissident of the U.S. government, an “uppity” bioslave of the Pentagon’s programs to create the many forms of AIDS decimating and enslaving large portions of resource-rich countries -- just exactly according to the widely published plans they made in the 1960s to do so, and because I choose not to ignore the obvious. Finally, I can only repeat the words of Elie Wiesel’s Moshe, the Beadle, from his autobiographical story, Night, when the Beadle pleaded with his fellow villagers for their attention after being taken to a concentration camp and escaping:

“ . . . listen to me. It’s all I ask of you. I don’t want money or pity.
Only listen to me.”


The Beadle perished, along with most of the rest of his villagers, in the Holocaust.

www.multistalkervictims.org

www.thehiddenevil.com

www.freedomfchs.org

www.mobbing-usa.com
www.artificialtelepathy.blogspot.com

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

World AIDS Day

Ah, another World AIDS Day, another day living in Dante's 7th level of hell.

But first, for those of you who are wondering how Kristallnacht was in my neighborhood -- two! Two non-street-legal vehicles racing up and down Mass. Ave. (in front of the fire station, no less) just before midnight (as well as other vehicles), which raises the question, "How many fascists should we entertain?"

World AIDS Day. That reminds me of the time I went to get my vaccinations updated and then got, over the course of 7 or so years, the type of AIDS no one is allowed to talk about, non-HIV/AIDS, also known as "Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome," (so named because, in addition to it being a cover for this type of AIDS, just as "bad blood" was a cover for the syphilis the U.S. government gave black residents of Macon County, Alabama in the 1940s, the cancer, Burkitt's lymphoma, which researchers have turned into AIDS make you extremely 'fatigued;' no wonder David Baltimore and Jerome Groopman's research careers began in cancer and ended up in AIDS). See my prior posts, particularly the one about bioslavery, for more about non-HIV/AIDS.

Today also reminds me about the time I went away for the weekend and was bioassaulted in the motel in which I was staying at night, while I slept, and awoke with a localized vaccination injury -- and then never needed the antiviral that saved my life (that's right -- you read that correctly -- the ANTIVIRAL, because, as we all know, retroviruses, such as the HTLV-II with which I have lived all my life as well as the group of retroviruses dubbed 'HIV,' must have another virus in order to propagate, such as the herpes virus (HHV-6) seen in all persons with non-HIV/AIDS and the HHV-8 that causes Kaposi's sarcoma in gay men, and the hepatitis virus that works the same way in Africans and African-Americans). But all you hear people talk about is, 'We need more money for research for a vaccine.' Can't ride an MBTA train in Cambridge without seeing pleas by Harvard/Mass General for healthy, HIV- gay men to test the vaccines -- which, of course, promise they won't get AIDS. Go figure that one out.

Well, this day reminds me of a bunch of other things, too, but, as you can see from my last post, it's dangerous to talk about these things, even though the truth would save a lot of lives. But lives are not what the U.S. government, or any of its minions, cares to save, after all. It just wants to kill populations that get in the way of its rapacious quest for world empire.


I wonder why she doesn't call it what it is -- fascism? (Nah -- just kidding. I know why. If she calls the practice 'corporatism,' no one will fight it, but if she calls it fascism, probably everyone will, and we can't have that, now can we?)

What a world, what a world.
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Monday, November 2, 2009

Kristallnacht and American Fascism

Next Monday is the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when Hitler Youth, the Gestapo, the SS and the SA waged an anti-Jewish pogrom in Germany and Austria. I'm a little apprehensive about the day since the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland, September 3rd, was celebrated in my neighborhood of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, with midnight drag racing up and down Mass. Ave. I knew about this celebration, as anyone in my neighborhood would, because the vehicles participating in it were clearly not "street legal" -- that is to say, they had been modified to make the loudest noise possible, as though they were competing in a monster truck rally at the Worcester Centrum. And the local police just let them have their fun, as they always have.

I know you don’t want to hear this about your community.
And I don’t want to be the one to tell you (just so you know) -- because it’s dangerous
to do so.
But if no one tells you now about what is happening to your neighbors,
to people like me,
soon it will be happening to you.
This is not a joke. I wish it were.

Your fellow Americans are being stalked by gangs sanctioned by the local police, the FBI and the Pentagon according to insiders who wish to remain anonymous. And your city's agents know about this terror and do nothing about it. So does the ACLU. Nine years ago -- long before the Iraq invasion and the passage of the so-called Patriot Act -- I was assaulted in the Cambridge Savings Bank, in front of a Cambridge police officer and bank security guard. The man who assaulted me leisurely conducted his bank business and when he was finished, I asked the teller who waited on him for his name and address. With this information, I sought the help of the police officer, a woman, who lied about having witnessed the very loud and long fracas. She asked me to step outside the bank and then told me there was nothing she could do; that I should call the Cambridge Women’s Commission the following week (this happened on a Saturday morning). When I called the Women’s Commission as she suggested, and asked to speak with the person she told me to speak with, I was told there was nothing the Women’s Commission could do for me since I hadn’t filed a police report. I hadn’t told her I hadn’t filed a police report on the incident, but somehow, she knew I hadn’t. I tried to get help from the ACLU for this and other things done to me by Cambridge police officers and others employed by the city of Cambridge, but the ACLU told me they couldn’t assist individuals, though their website is replete with case histories of individuals they’ve assisted.


Most disturbing of all was the fact that when I sought the help of the police officer in the bank that day, I overheard her telling the security guard, “It’s just not worth it to get involved; they only come after you.”

New York University Professor and Attorney Brian Glick uncovered these gangs’ practices when he represented American citizens and organizations such as The American Friends Service Committee, after they had been terrorized by the FBI for protesting our military’s involvement in the wars in Central America in the 1980s and were subsequently denied their civil rights to protection against unwarranted search and seizure, security of person, free speech and free association. Like Glick’s clients, I, too, am a law-abiding activist, trying to dispel myths about the type of AIDS I have been given and cured of. I am not an elder/child/animal abuser; a thief; a drug dealer or user; a prostitute; or any other type of antisocial person, including a terrorist or a “witch.” Whether you want to hear or learn about my activism or not, my right to speak freely has been taken away from me, and if you believe you live in a country where that doesn’t happen frequently, you are badly misinformed. Congress assured Americans that the secret surveillance and social extermination practices developed by the CIA in programs called COINTELPRO and MK-Utra, which the FBI has used against activists since the 1960s, had been decommissioned in the 1970s, but Glick found they had lied. Evidence of their widespread use of COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra on American citizens was in the FBI files he obtained through FOIA requests in the late 1980s.

Glick published his findings in the 1989 book, War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It. In it are reproductions of the declassified FBI documents he received. Agents -- and their subcontractors, such as today’s Neighborhood Watch groups and those recruited in the FBI’s TIPS program -- used these tactics extensively to discredit and isolate legitimate activists, and to make them unemployable and ruin them.

Many of the “vigilantes” who conduct today’s terror campaigns were recruited by the FBI on their website, for three months, in their TIPS program. These “Special Surveillance Groups,” ordinary individuals from all walks of life who work together in teams, were profiled in a National Public Radio Weekend Edition report on July 5th, 2008. They work for the MBTA, the Post Office, your grocery store. They work in your schools and, yes, your local government agencies. They work with undercover agents long embedded in the community who pose as homeless people and peace activists disabled by mental illnesses because these profiles are the ones most accepted by members of the community as harmless. You would never suspect their true identities. This trust gives them maximum effectiveness to destroy legitimate activists. All of them are this country’s Stazzi, employed to create “wall-less prisons,” today’s concentration camps, around FBI targets.

Glick’s book is one every activist should read and use with his or her fellow activists in order to be certain we are all working together, but curiously, no Boston-area peace or justice group uses it. It is the first defense against government coopting of a group and the only tool available to liberate an activist community from these state-sponsored terrorists.

Not convinced yet your society is a closed one?

Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America (2007), claims everything is in place for the closing of American society, which can happen in any federal emergency where Blackwater is called in, though Blackwater is clearly unnecessary. Did you know that President Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno, gave advanced technology developed by the CIA, FBI and Pentagon to local law enforcement agencies in 1993 for “crowd control,” including handheld microwave guns such as the dazzler, currently in use in Iraq? Deaths of innocent civilians through excessive force by police and FBI have increased in the last 16 years and include the death of Emerson College student Victoria Snelgrove, who was shot in the eye with a pepper spray bullet by a Boston police officer after the Red Sox 2004 pennant victory. Brattleboro, VT, police were exonerated in 2002 by then Gov. Howard Dean’s attorney general of the cold-blooded murder of peace activist Robert "Woody" Woodward, shot in the back 5 times – once, as he lay unarmed, face down on the floor of a church -- Sunday, 12/02/02, after seeking sanctuary there from the FBI. Ronald Reagan gave all of the branches of the military the power to conduct intelligence work and now that the military controls local law enforcement, it is easy to see how COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra have become widespread in all our communities. Woodward claimed to have been a target of the FBI, yet, the local police in their control used deadly force on this unarmed man instead of the less-than-lethal weapons they had at their disposal.

On 10/18/07 at a book signing at the Harvard Coop Ms. Wolf suggested the idea of the FBI using tradesmen as informants was ludicrous. Could it be that Ms. Wolf was just unaware of the FBI’s use of COINTELPRO and MKULTRA to suppress activists? She’s a Yale graduate and an award-winning journalist. You’d think she’d be able to do a little better research. Anne Frank and millions like her are dead because of government informants. Governments always use informants to oppress their opponents -- even the American government. Ever heard of Watergate? Informants, spies and state-sponsored terrorism are real and they’re here. But Ms. Wolf’s job with this opus is to give you the most irrelevant bit of truth embedded into an entire fiction that's designed to make you merely suspicious something might happen in America in the future to its citizens' freedoms, when, in fact, those freedoms quite literally don't exist today -- because she's a disinformation specialist.  Her mission is to make you believe that if you question whether your society is open or closed now, it’s really still open though “everything is in place” for the government to close it.  It’s also the job of those of your leaders who deny these things, those who make you think that because you can talk about what’s troubling you about your country by walking into a carefully planned, sporadic meeting sponsored by a very insulated, closely monitored and tightly controlled group, or blogging in an online community like facebook, that you’re free. DO NOT ASSIGN your responsibility to be diligent about your freedom to Naomi Wolf, or others like her -- especially those of your leaders who limit the scope of topics that are permissible to discuss and who refuse to talk about this fascist government in which we all now live. 

Howard Zinn is right when he says this government, like every other government, is not on your side.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Disinformation works. When the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq, many liberals called for impeachment -- not of the Congresspersons who voted for it, the actual ones that put us in Iraq, but of Dick Cheney, whom liberals were told had to be removed first before anyone would consider removing Bush since to remove Bust would have made Cheney the actual leader of the “free world” and not just the titular one. The campaign was doomed from the start as ineffectual and unrealistic. Massive recalls of Congress should have taken place instead. Security advisors and others were publishing in The New York Times and elsewhere their findings that Iraq was not a threat and Bush was merely beating the war drums because his father, sitting in the Oval Office for only one term, hadn’t finished colonizing that country. Congress had access to the same information as these advisers and we, their readers, did, but they voted for invasion anyway. Recalls didn’t happen. No one has stood up to these tools, toadies and functionaries before. That’s why we live in Stazzi-controlled communities today.

What you can do

Since COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra programs have never been decommissioned, and since much of what Glick writes about is happening to scores of citizens across the country today, thanks to laws passed by every administration since Reagan’s, it is past the time we talk about them. Those laws need to be repealed. Since our City’s government allows COINTELPRO and MK-Ultra programs to be conducted here, and since some of its agents even participate in them, it is past the time we do something about them here. Any rhetoric about change is not going to do anything because it’s just that – rhetoric – so long as you have no place to turn for help when you need it, no Congress, no city council, no state rep. If your “progressive” or peace organization is not equipping its members with information on and tactics to oppose these fascists and the terrorists they create, they’ve been co-opted. If you’re terrorized in your own community, your own home, because you speak out and you look around and find the only people talking about what’s happening are those that have been marginalized in similar fashion, you know your marginalization, your inability to operate freely as a “partner” with any government administration, is not a myth, or a coincidence. www.thehiddenevil.com. www.multistalkervictims.org. www.stopspying.us. www.mobbing-usa.com. If your peace/justice organization, or Barack Obama group, or church’s social concerns committee, or temple’s outreach program, or school’s community service initiatives are not talking and learning about and planning ways to de-institutionalize gangstalking, and decommission the FBI, the NSA, the new secret surveillance organizations, and defund these Pentagon programs, they are not serving your best interests because you are not fighting the true terrorists -- the fascists among us. I don’t care if you belong to the AFSC; they probably feel exactly the way that Cambridge police officer who refused to help me in the Cambridge Savings Bank felt, having once been targets themselves. They do nothing to help targets, and if they’re not working on this issue -- the issue of “informants” among us and a government that subsidizes them -- they are part of the problem, not the solution. You need to create your own groups and do whatever it takes to make sure they remain free of government interference and free to associate so we can protect each other. And then you need to pressure your local, state and federal representatives to defund secret agency work in our community and to criminalize gangstalking, COINTELPRO and MKULTRA, OR GET RID OF THE REPRESENTATIVES THAT ACT LIKE OBSTACLES TO YOUR FREEDOM. And you need to offer sanctuary to targets. Even though demanding your liberty may come with a price -- your temporary civil and human rights -- your silence is complicity, and those will be taken away from you soon anyway. No one else is going to do this work for you, and while you may not regret ignoring this warning today, when they come after you -- and they will come after you eventually -- you may find yourself saying,


“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” (Attributed to Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, imprisoned in Moabit prison during the Holocaust for opposing the policies of the Third Reich.)
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Saturday, October 3, 2009

NPR: America’s TASS


On Friday, September 4th, 2009, Morning Edition aired a report by Jon Hamilton (“In Future, Science Could Erase Traumatic Memories”) about scientific research into the role played by the protective molecular sheath around the brain cells of the amygdala in the creation of traumatic memory. Scientists have developed a drug they can use to dissolve this sheath and erase painful memories thereby. Hamilton notes this research promises a pharmaceutical cure for people who suffer from psychological disorders involving traumatic memories, such as those with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. What Hamilton doesn’t say is that without traumatic memories human culture would be a wasteland and humanity, itself, a thing of the past.

Forget Che T-shirts showing up on the backs of foreign youths in YouTube vids from the Czech Republic. Forget long hours at the library reading and studying The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet or The Tragedie of King Lear. Strike the works of Marcel Proust from all your library catalogues, your college curricula, your book stores, book club offerings and your amazon.com wish lists; you’ll have no need to understand the relationship between thought and memory and its importance to identity because you’ll have no identity, once your memories – traumatic, or other – are wiped. You’ll be a clean, empty consuming machine, thanks to the scientists manipulating your amygdala, the last step – not the first – in the state control of mass and individual consciousness.


Ernesto Che Guevara’s grand vision to unite the countries of South America to fight 20th century colonization by industrialists came from genuine pain he experienced when he toured the continent and saw the needless, grinding poverty in which people lived, the exploitation of miners and valuable land, the preventable or treatable diseases – not just leprosy – from which he saw children dying. His pain was deep and it was real and it was transformative – just not in the way the powers that be approved. Guevara possessed that ability which is the basis of morality; he was empathic, and that ability to feel the pain others feel is the one that enables us to create ethical relationships and societies based on them – to create just laws, not merely indiscriminately applied law-and-order. It is this legacy of morality that is the thing that makes us human. Without it, we’re merely Homo sapiens. In the painful memory-free future Hamilton giddily introduces to us, there will be no need for revolutionary, or counter-, culture because there will be no revolutionaries, and no voices to counter the messages which the state sanctions, such as those we hear on NPR about how great it is for technocrats to erase parts of our brains. No more Che T-shirts – because there will be no more Ches. No civil society either. Forget the freedom of the individual, which once upon a time included the right to informed consent. New York University’s Joseph LeDoux, whom Hamilton features in his report, claims the potential human subjects with whom he’s discussed his treatment for PTSD are perfectly willing to get rid of a few normal brain cells to be rid of their traumatic memories. To him, this equates with “consent.” But is it?

In 1974 – the same year Sen. Ted Kennedy called for an investigation into the CIA’s programs to destroy people’s minds in order to replace their personalities with psychically-driven messaging – the social engineering work of Dr. José Delgado of Yale University was presented to Congress (U.S. Doc. 506: "Congressional Record Vol. 118, Part 5," 92nd Congress 2nd Session, February 23, 1972 to March 1, 1972, pp. 5567-5577), with his advice for billion-dollar funding of corporations and institutions to produce mass broadcast media aimed at virtual brainwashing. He recommended that children be normalized to this brainwashing beginning in elementary school. His work grew out of the CIA’s program in actual shock treatment and brainwashing techniques, of “shock therapy” -- principally, the program created by Canada’s Dr. Ewen Cameron, who had been under contract to the CIA and was one of the subjects of Sen. Kennedy’s investigation.

Delgado offered Congress some nifty tips on how to get the public to go along with the ‘cultural revolution’ he had designed to erase independent thinking by erasing the self, which he said was a phenomenon that has no basis in either ancient history, or in neurophysiology. He seems to have forgotten, or have been ignorant of the facts, that ancient Rome first conceptualized the ideal of the citizen as a thinking, free individual and that millennia of moral evolution has more or less always come down on the side of individual freedom, which is why so many people around the world have waged revolutions in order to attain it (including, once upon a time, even Americans), giving people such as he the opportunity to make careers out of undermining it.

Now, we see the fruition of Delgado’s recommendation that “mass media” be engaged in producing “informative and entertaining programs” to indoctrinate the masses to the benefits of mind control in TV programs such as
Survivor, which reinforces the anti-humanistic notion that we are all nothing more than animals, capable only of following the most wily of leaders who entreat us to dispose of others in order to ensure our survival; and the Sci-Fi Channel’s Mind Control with Derren Brown, which shows how fun it is to ‘play’ people by turning their minds against them – making a person bend over five times in a row by dropping five, dollar coins on the sidewalk ahead of them, for example. The proliferation of “reality” TV, which depicts only the most base behavior of H. sapiens.


To this very incomplete list we may now also add Morning Edition’s report about the purported advancement of science in the treatment of wholly man-made psychic problems, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, not by doing away with the actual events that create the psychic trauma (war) but by erasing the memory of the traumatic event in the mind of its victim – by a new form of “brain” washing – by disabling the amygdala.  In LeDoux’s “advanced,” pain-free future, you’ll have only that identity which the state has given you – the one the state wants you to have so you can go around the world, or perhaps just next door, and oppress and kill other human beings (because you’ve been messaged persistently through mass media culture to believe we’re all animals anyway and this is what animals do; they kill each other) without the messy side-effect of a troubled conscience. You won’t need to know how emotions and the memories they provoke humanize and inform socially-supportive decision-making and behavior because all your behavioral decisions will be made for you (‘Be all you can be -- join the Army!’), and, as is the goal of all brainwashing, you will be told what your perceptions mean to you (‘This isn’t a flour-paste wafer and wine; it’s flesh and blood!’ And, ‘These two planes we inadvertently and coincidentally failed to acknowledge as threats knocked over the impact-resistant twin towers!’). You won’t have to understand proverbs such as, “Pride goeth before a fall” because character, too, will be superfluous, and you won’t have any need for the succor scripture offers when facing moral dilemmas – because you’ll have none. By then, morality and the wisdom about it contained in all cultures’ religious texts will be anachronistic, “Let my people go” replaced with chants of “Let my people go . . . to the mall.”

I bet if Hamilton could track down LeDoux’s alleged group of compliant patients and tell them the actual history of our government’s hand in the programming of our minds on both individual and mass levels they’d be a whole lot more reluctant to hand over their brain cells to people like LeDoux. But that would be informed consent – once, the international standard for participation in medical experiments according to the Common Rule, which has never been adopted by the U.S. Another principle I am sure Dr. LeDoux is aware does not constrain his inhumane research is one also developed at Nuremberg but never adopted here in the United States – the one that dictates a researcher be willing to be his own guinea pig, or refrain from conducting any research in which he is not.


Every time a government – any government -- develops a new, more inhumane, more surreptitious technology to control groups of people or to kill them (incrementally or outright), it does so to use it. Why do you think the world is on pins and needles over every contract North Korea has with a manufacturer whose products have the potential to be used as nuclear components? Everyone tacitly acknowledges this universal truth. Our government didn’t make the atom bomb to not use it. It didn’t develop mind control techniques and technologies to not use them to oppress its citizens, as a review of attorney Brian Glick’s 1989 War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It demonstrates. It hasn’t spent billions of dollars to create the behavior-modifying mass media tools it so clearly has developed to not use them. Hamilton adds a perfunctory note that the brain dissolving technology has detractors who fear misuse by governments and others, as if that fear isn’t more than adequately justified, and to him, perhaps they’re not. Perhaps he’s too young to know the U.S.’s history of persecution of its activists, of its development of biological weapons that include those which destroy the human mind as well as brain. It’s a little difficult to believe, though, that mere age has blinded him so that he cannot even do a little critical thinking and investigating. NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling said in a recent AIR program regarding his story about an immigrant who died in administrative custody in New Jersey that the truth isn’t objective (something I.F. Stone said repeatedly throughout his career). Consequently, it also is not innocuous – something else of which Mr. Hamilton seems to be blissfully unaware. The truth about the ways in which American government scientists have been socially engineering American society is that they’ve been doing it on both individual and mass scales, and for quite some time, to weed out revolutionary voices, facts about which there is more than ample evidence – much of it, as attorney Glick shows us, in the government’s very own words. Perhaps Mr. Hamilton needs to spend some time as Mr. Zwerdling’s protégé and learn how to recognize the truth – or at least learn how to investigate a subject to uncover it. A little education in the humanities couldn’t hurt him, either. I’m not talking about science fiction; I’m talking about a survey of literature, history and philosophy: Lord of the Flies and War and Peace, the Federalist Papers and A People’s History of the United States, Kant and Buber. And don’t, for heaven’s sake, forget the Proust. Advocates of any technology should understand the consequences of their advocacy given the fact such technology is always misapplied by governments. At the very least, Hamilton needs to visit a federal depository for congressional records and start reading up on the truly heinous “science” our government has funded over the last 60 years, if he’s going to report on science issues truthfully.  As for LeDoux, if an amoral person such as the one LeDoux proposes scientists create were writing this rebuttal, this would be the point at which the author would suggest that a brain such as his be the first to be destroyed. Since such a person is not writing this rebuttal, I can only pray LeDoux’s paymasters have no more monstrous projects in which to engage his vapid intellect -- not for the sake of his own immortal soul, but for the sake of his children’s and grandchildren’s imperiled future. More amoral people the world does not need; no one remains untouched by them.

I’ve suspected for a while now that National Public Radio is truly just the mouthpiece of our fascist government ever since it began airing sympathetic coverage of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which it persistently and inaccurately labels a “war,” thereby obscuring the true empire-building raison d’étre of our military missions and the designs for world domination of our government leaders who promote those missions, two facts more than well established through decades of research by academics, activists and former insiders such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and John Perkins, respectively. I dismissed NPR as utterly irrelevant when it aired a story by a talk radio host and southern college professor who claimed some virtue to the demands she made on her husband for remuneration with expensive jewelry after she’d had his baby. Diane Rehme, with her “push presents!” Once upon a time, a crude sector of middle-class white America routinely charged poor African-American women with creating children solely to procure welfare “benefits,” which justified Congress’s whittling of those benefits until Bill Clinton did away with them entirely. From a moral standpoint, in what way is Ms. Rehme’s behavior any different? A caller from Virginia on a mid-morning talk show has prominent airtime to voice his opinion that the aid about which Congress was then voting to send to Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded Iraq was unjustified because, according to him, all the Afghans knew how to do was to have children they couldn’t afford, and the host neither countered that Afghanistan has one of the most persistently high infant mortality rates of any country, nor challenged the man to confine his opinions to the topic under discussion (which was whether the U.S. should essentially offer the Afghans this bribe for the use of their country to wage overt war in Iraq and covert war there). I think now, though, it would be a mistake to write off NPR as either irrelevant, or harmless, or inept because with its airing of its “science” report September 4th it’s clear “National Public” radio is neither of national benefit, nor public, but merely a state tool run by mindless, uncritical bureaucrats in the employ of the fascists that run our country; bureaucrats paid to prosecute inhumane and anti-American mind-control programs such as those proposed by Dr. Delgado. It is as reliable a source of truthful reporting as was TASS and exists only to validate whatever propaganda the U.S. government wishes to inculcate in the minds of Americans.

Freedom cannot exist if it doesn't exist at least in the human mind as an ideal to which humans may aspire.  When all the revolutionary voices have been chemically altered not to respond to genuine tragedy appropriately by questing towards ideals such as freedom, the revolutionaries will be gone for good, and so, too, will all freedom.  Our society will be a mawkish morass of culture perpetuated by tragicomic innocents such as those depicted in David Byrne's True Stories.  Nice people -- but not the folks you want fighting dictators that chemically alter human minds. The bureaucrats who run NPR should be ashamed of themselves, but perhaps they can’t be. Perhaps they’ve already had fatal exposure to the LeDouxs of this world.


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