http://tasteandpower.wordpress.com/2008/07/14/adam-curtis-blows-minds/

The most remarkable aspect is that they provide counter-thesis to Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, and individualism. More specifically, it discusses our society of individuals who are increasingly selfish, isolated, and materialistic and the lack of community and purpose.

Personally, I have been very materialistic in my past. I eventually shrugged materialism on the face of materialism. In the process, I shrugged responsibility to take care of myself, which is negative-aspect of this process.

In interesting event in my experience was on 9/11. I was engaged to be married. She cancelled the marriage two months before 9/11. I received a phone call from her on 9/11. While her thoughts were temporary, she was engaged in a process of rethinking her cancellation of the marriage through a greater sense of purpose.

I guess we can learn that the neocons achieved the noble aspects of their agenda but only on a very temporary level. The lies and evil overwhelm any noble objective. The counter-thesis embraced by the neocons are without a doubt even more insane and invalid than the theory thrust by Karl Marx, as shown in George Orwell's 1984.

Later, I found a sense of community and purpose to fight the neocons, which ironically, as presented in these videos, seek to provide false sense of community and purpose in the institution of the Cold War and the War on Terror, among other issues.

The Vietnam War did lead to a rejection of materialism and a community of sense and purpose within the hippy culture. It wasn't communism they were fighting. They were fighting a neocon agenda. Again, the consequences were ironic.

Our recent history is filled with such movements that have rose against the neocon agenda, such as gay and lesbian movements as well as the 9/11 truth movement. Then, there is the Ron Paul rEVOLution movement and the more subtle rise of the Democratic Party, which has a camp of true liberals who are outraged by party leaders when they go along with the neocon agenda.

I'm personally suspect of the man-made CO2 aspects and proposed solutions of the global warming movement. While I don't deny global warming, I am cautious about the political involvement that can corrupt the science. It is as if a true enemy is being transformed into a false enemy by big corporations and big politicians--the War on Carbon and the carbon tax.

I've been loosely aligned with the Republicans in my past even though I rejected the Christian Coalition, which caused me to vote Democrat on the local level.

I was also tightly aligned with Libertarians but sought to separate myself from it. I like to keep myself free of propaganda so I can seek a better truth. I justified my involvement in that I was fighting fo a small and powerless movement. However, I saw myself becoming a monster and felt I would be best to distant myself from it and focus on my own life. 

I must admit I have concerns that I have fallen for propaganda in my current battle. However, I believe unpopular ideas are safe so long the underlying idea has truth to be learned. Maybe I will distance myself from the fight and focus on my own life, especially if the truth behind it isn't as severe as I suspect.

Fundamentally, power corrupts and breeds tyranny. We may forever be in a battle with a sense of community and purpose to fight the abuse of power, whether that is on the level of a village or a global government.

There is a middle ground to be found. The libertarian movement has truth in that it places the sense of community and purpose on the individual level. The utilitarian movement has truth to be found in it's battle to fight the flaws and tyranny at the individual and smaller communities. My Left Libertarian platform seeks to find that middle ground.

--jeepndesert

On January 12, 1951, President Truman sent his economic recommendations based on the findings of NSC-68 to Congress.

The preamble spoke of a dire existential threat:

We face enormously greater economic problems, as I transmit this fifth annual Economic Report, than at any time since the end of World War II. Although our economic strength is now greater than ever before, very large new burdens of long duration are now being imposed upon it.

The United States is pledged and determined, along with other free peoples, to cheek aggression and to advance freedom. Arrayed against the free world are large and menacing forces. The great manpower under the control of Soviet communism is being driven with fanatic zeal to build up military and industrial strength. We invite disaster if we underestimate the forces working against us.

To respond to the alleged threat posed by the Soviet Union, Truman call for, "a large and very rapid increase in our armed strength, while helping to strengthen our allies. This means more trained men in uniform, and more planes, tanks, ships, and other military supplies."

To support this massive expansion, Truman outlined an immediate plan to divert the nation's economic output from increasing consumer goods, to building "as rapidly as possible, an expansion of our capacity for producing military supplies. This must be substantially greater than would be required to achieve our present targets for armed strength; it must be large enough to enable us to swing rapidly into full-scale war production if necessity should require."

Truman pushed to permanently enshrine "growth" as the fundamental economic policy of the nation. Such growth would be essential if the United States were to sustain a high rate of military expansion for a indefinite period of time, yet, continue to improve the living standards of Americans.

Truman demanded that Americans be required work a forty hours week, indefinitely, to sustain an equally indefinite military cordon around the Soviet Union.

But, given the requirements of the containment effort Truman proposed, even with an unnecessarily long 40 hour workweek the projected labor force in 1950 would be unequal to the task. The pool of available workers had to be expanded:

In terms of manpower, our present defense targets will require an increase of nearly one million men and women in the armed forces within a few months, and probably not less than four million more in defense production by the end of the year. This means that an additional 8 percent of our labor force, and possibly much more, will be required by direct defense needs by the end of the year.

These manpower needs will call both for increasing our labor force by reducing unemployment and drawing in women and older workers, and for lengthening hours of work in essential industries. These manpower requirements can be met. There will be manpower shortages, but they can be solved.

Although, in his own words, the economic strength of the nation had never been stronger - this coming on the heels of World War II when the United States had been able to divert 50 percent of its GDP to the war effort, causing what amounted to an inconvenience to American's consumption standards - by the standards of what was being proposed by Truman even this massive economic power was insufficient! The nation would be required to maintain a similar, though substantially less intense, effort for decades if necessary.

Domestically, under the Truman Doctrine, the economy was no longer the means by which Americans satisfied their basic needs, it was being converted to the mere logistical tail of a newly emerging military empire.

For the fiscal years 1951 and 1952 combined, new obligational authority enacted or anticipated for our primary national security programs--for our military forces, for economic and military aid to other free nations, for atomic energy and stockpiling, and for related purposes--will probably total more than 140 billion dollars. Actual expenditures on these programs in the fiscal year 1950, the last full year before the Korean outbreak, totaled about 18 billion dollars. At the present time, they are running at an annual rate of somewhat more than 20 billion dollars. By the end of this calendar year, they should attain an annual rate between 45 and 55 billion dollars, or from 25 to 35 billion dollars above the present rate. The actions we are taking should enable us within twelve months, to expand this rate of expenditure very rapidly if necessity should require.

Current expenditures for these now represent about 7 percent of our total national output. By the end of this year, this proportion may rise to as much as 18 percent. This compares with the roughly 45 percent of our total output that we were devoting to defense during the peak year of World War II. While the present program is thus very substantially short of the requirements imposed by full-scale war, it nonetheless requires a major diversion of effort. Furthermore, there will be a much more severe drain on some particular supply lines. By the end of the year, our expanding defense programs, including stockpiling, may be absorbing up to a third or more of the total supply of some of our basic commodities, such as copper, aluminum, and natural rubber. While direct defense requirements for steel may not total more than 10 percent of total output, the needed expansion of our essential industrial capacity will require a much greater diversion of steel from ordinary civilian uses.

Longer term, Truman envisioned sufficient excess industrial capacity to produce 50,000 planes and 35,000 tanks a year. Diversion of civilian industrial capacity would be replaced by facilities devoted primarily to military output, such as was built during World War II. Additional capacity would be needed to ramp up production of steel, copper, power, and other basic material, without, "the necessity for irksome controls extending over a long period."

Domestic supplies of the material were not enough, so the United States had to rely on and secure, "imported supplies. Expansion of domestic plants for treating low-grade ores, and of ore production facilities in Labrador and Venezuela, together with related transportation facilities..."

Unlike World War II, Truman's Cordon Militaire would not be a crash effort, so building in the necessary production capacity could be stretched over decades:

If we were now engaged in full-scale war, we could not afford to devote manpower and materials to these longer-range programs. But to fall to do so under present circumstances would be short-sighted and potentially costly. Action now is essential, to make us stronger year by year in all of the components which enter into any military strength that we may need in future.

As Truman envisioned it, the steady and substantial involuntary contribution of unnecessary working time by tens of millions in the labor force, and ten of millions more identified to be drawn into the labor force over the succeeding decades, would be essential.

Truman's economic recommendations were the poignant moment in the flowering of the Gospel of Full Employment - a full employment which aimed not at making sure every worker had a job, but at ensuring the productive capacity of the nation could be fully employed by successive administration in the task of building and maintaining the Empire.

To be continued

Obama’nın son söylemleri Amerikan seçmenini derinden etkilediği gibi içerdiği mesajlar bakımından da haklı olarak dünya kamuoyunun bütün ilgisinin bu söylem üzerinde yoğunlaşmasına neden oldu. Zira söylemde öne çıkan unsur; Marshall ve Truman doktrinlerine atıf yapıyordu. Bu doktrinler Amerika’nın “soğuk savaş” adıyla bilinen dönemlerde Sovyetler Birliği’nin özellikle Avrupa ülkeleri başta olmak üzere dünya devletleri üzerinde izlediği yayılmacı politikaların önünü kesmek amacıyla geliştirilmiş doktrinlerdi.

Bunlardan Truman doktrini ise Yunanistan ve Türkiye’ye askeri yardımların yapılarak konumlarının güçlendirilmesi amacını taşıması bakımından bizim için özel bir öneme sahip olmalıdır. Çünkü o dönemlerin Amerikan beklentilerinin önünde en büyük rakip olan Rusya’ya coğrafi yakınlığımız, doğal olarak bizi ve komşumuzu Rusya’nın açık bir hedefi haline getiriyordu.

Büyük bir dünya savaşının hemen ardından dünya üzerinde baş gösteren sıkıntı ve yoksulluk, söylemlerini bu kitle psikolojisine uyarlamış olan Rus ideolojisinin zorlanmadan kabul görmesine neden oluyordu. Amerika, Avrupa devletleri arasında yayılıp benimsenmeye başlayan bu ideolojinin önünü alabilmek için Avrupa ülkelerine o dönemde milyarlarca dolar yardım yapar. Bir süre sonra bakar ki karşılıksız olarak yapılan bu yardımların ardı arkası kesilmiyor, bu, bu şekilde sürdürülebilecek bir politika olmayacak. Bunun üzerine çok ince bir diplomasiye dayanan o meşhur Marshall doktrinini geliştirir. 5 Haziran 1947 tarihinde Amerikan Dışişleri Bakanı George Marshall’ın Harvard Üniversitesi’nde verdiği söylemde esasları açıklanmış olan bu doktrine göre Avrupa ülkelerinin kendi aralarında ekonomik bir işbirliğine girişmeleri öngörülüyor, herhangi bir şekilde bu işbirliğinin ekonomik açıdan vereceği maddi açıkların ise Amerika tarafından kapatılması prensibine dayanıyordu.

Marshall Planı adını alan teklif, 27 Haziran 1947 tarihinde Paris’te yapılan bir toplantıyla görüşüldü. Ardından, 12 Temmuzda 16’lar konferansı adı verilen ve İngiltere, Fransa, Belçika, İtalya, Portekiz, İrlanda, Yunanistan, Türkiye, Hollanda, Luksenburg, İsviçre, İzlanda, Avusturya, Norveç, Danimarka, İsveç’in katılımıyla değerlendirilen teklif, “Avrupa Ekonomik Kalkınma Programı” adı altında toplantıya katılan devletlerin bu teklifi kabul ettiğinin onayı anlamına gelen bir rapor olarak aynı yılın 22 Eylülünde Amerika’ya sunulur.  

Bu rapor üzerine Amerika, 3 Nisan 1948’de Dış Yardım Kanunu çıkararak aynı yıl içerisinde bu 16’lara 6 milyar dolarlık yardım eder ve bu yıllar boyunca devam eder.

Obama Amerikan seçmeni üzerinden sanırım dünya kamuoyu’na da bir mesaj vermektedir. Verilen mesaj ne olabilir? Amerika’nın son yıllarda izlediği bu şiddet politikalarından artık vazgeçeceği mi? Onca yıkım ve felaketin ardından, kontrol altına alınmış petrol ve enerji kaynaklarından elde edilen imkânların, bu politikaları destekleyen ve desteklemeyi sürdürecek olan ülkelerle kısmen paylaşılabileceğinin mesajı mıdır bu? Yoksa, tehdit algılamasının hala Rusya üzerinde yoğunlaştığının mı!

Petrol ve enerji kaynaklarını ellerinde bulundurmasına rağmen bunları kontrol etme imkanına hiçbir zaman sahip olmamış  Ortadoğu halkının elinden bunların alınmasından sonra o büyütülen fobi algılamasının bir hata olduğu söylemi  mi!

Dünya kamuoyu nezdinde günah çıkarma teşebbüsünüz ne kadar inandırıcı olacaktır! Olacaktır eminim, zira oyunun bir parçası haline gelmeye hazır kabiller hiç eksik olmamış yeryüzünde.

Author: Aydın AKDENİZ

aakdeniz1965@hotmail.com

http://blog.milliyet.com.tr/Blogger.aspx?UyeNo=772664

Called me paranoid, but when I read Steve Casey's afore-mentioned passage:

As [then Secretary of State Dean] Acheson noted in one discussion on how to sell NSC-68, “speeches alone would not do it, that people read and heard what was said and then turned their attention to other matters.” What was vital was an incident, a crisis in one of the many flash points of the Cold War. Seen in this light, the start of the Korean War on June 24, 1950, was a godsend.

It immediately calls to mind another passage of more recent vintage:

Any serious effort at transformation must occur within the larger framework of U.S. national security strategy, military missions and defense budgets. The United States cannot simply declare a “strategic pause” while experimenting with new technologies and operational concepts. Nor can it choose to pursue a transformation strategy that would decouple American and allied interests. A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy goals and would trouble American allies.
Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions.

If you are well read, you will note this latter quote is from the document, REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century.

It styled itself as "A Report of The Project for the New American Century," and was published, September 2000.

One year later, the twin towers fell.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. -- K. Marx

To be continued

Pop quiz:

It's 1950, you're Harry S. Truman, thirty-third President of the United States, and new CEO of America Inc., and you want to prepare for a long Cold War.

So, you're going to need a lot of stuff, like copper, steel, bauxite, petroleum, enriched uranium, etc., for both your immediate military needs and as stockpiles in case of actual conflict.

You're also going to want to add lots of new soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, so you will need lots of stuff to intake, process, train, house, outfit, and feed kids just out of high school (who are not exactly born with enough common sense to know which end of a rifle to hold, and have appetites the size of a small African village.)

You will need a lot of new whiz bang flash boom stuff, preferably loaded on shiny new rockets, and in shiny new bombers, capable of striking deep into Soviet territory.

Finally, since that stuff requires a lot of different scientists, engineers, and English majors - just who do you think gets to be the office manager - you'll need to add capacity at the nation's colleges and
universities.

How much is all this stuff going to cost you?

Your choices are:

1. As much as a liberal Democrat can tax and spend during a lifetime of "public service!"
2. As much as a conservative Republican can borrow (from the Social Security Trust Fund, China and Japan) and spend during a lifetime of denouncing "Socialized Medicine!"
3. More money than God. So have the Treasury get out the printing presses now!

If you answered 1, 2, or 3, shame on you!

You weren't paying attention.

If you think this is all about money, you're engaging in magical thinking, and I can prove it.

Do this for me:

Take a hundred dollar bill from your wallet. (If you are so impoverished you don't have a hundred dollar bill, a ten dollar bill will do.) Set it on the table in front of you. Now, tell it to change itself into one hundred dollars (or ten dollars) worth of enriched uranium.

What did it do?

If your money is like my money, very little - it just sort of...laid there in front of you, with the picture of some dead historical figure staring vacantly into the middle distance. Dollars are like that - pretty pathetic when it comes to transforming themselves into instruments of murderous outrage, or 42 inch wide screen, high definition plasma televisions.

That's why money is called an inanimate object.

People, on the other hand, are constantly turning one thing into another - give them some steel, silicon, rubber, chobham armor, titanium, textiles, and depleted uranium, some classroom training, and, a little time and effort, and they will give you a fully functioning M1 Abrams tank squad.

The key thing here, of course, is that last bit - "a little time and effort."

If you eventually want to make hundreds of M1 Abrams tank squads, it will take - I'm guessing here - hundreds of times more time and effort.

And, if you want to make all those tank squads, plus MIRVed ICBMs, SLBMs, stealth bombers, six or seven fleets of naval armadas, a fully functioning military satellite communications network, while fighting at least three major wars, countless little ones, and God knows how many mini incursions, commissioning Mafia-contracted hits on foreign leaders, as you construct a dense network of military outposts encircling the globe, well that just might take the time and effort of tens of millions of people with a lot of time they don't need to spend making real shit.

*************************************

This is, more or less, what Leon Keyserling, told the real President Truman in 1950 - although, of course, being an economist, he so completely couches it in ‘economese' that you may not at first notice he is actually proposing you, your parents, and your kids, and Americans in general, literally be forced to work an unnecessarily longer workweek for decades!

According to Sourcewatch, Keyserling became chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) in 1950, under Truman's administration.

He came to Truman's attention because, with the country facing a deep recession in 1949:

Keyserling proposed a threefold increase in nonmilitary federal spending, basing this approach on his experience with the economics of World War II. Because the growth of federal spending during the war seemingly had validated the ideas put forward by John Maynard Keynes in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)...

Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but, we are told, around this very time Paul Nitze, who had just been named Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, was looking for a way to fund an aggressive new containment policy  directed at the Soviet Union, and, as fortune would have it, ran into Leon on the golf course.

We made up the part about the golf course, but it does seem to be a strange intersection of history that brought these two men together - Nitze, who based on his experience as chief of the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare, and then as director of the Foreign Procurement and Development Branch of the Foreign Economic Administration, both during World War II; and, Keyserling, who had helped write the draft version of the unconstitutional National Industrial Recovery Act - along with the heads of General Electric and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Uh...er.

Oh, yeah. That is probably not so strange after all - fascism was all the rage during this period, however much it became something of a scandal following the discovery of Auschwitz.

In any case, we are told:

Eventually Paul Nitze, head of policy planning for the State Department, began to look for an economic argument for a significant increase in cold war military spending. He and Keyserling cooperated on developing such an argument in a top-secret National Security Council memorandum, NSC-68.

Keyserling wrote an assessment of the economic impact of a long term military containment of the Soviet Union which stated in part massive military power could be achieved by simply maintaing and extending the social work day of Americans:

These broad estimates are based on the assumption that working hours and the proportion of the population drawn into the active labor force would increase considerably above recent levels, although not approaching the peaks of World War II. With greater increases in labor effort than assumed in these estimates, a substantially greater increase in total output could be achieved.

This could provide the basis for a greater military production even while still maintaining the consumption standards outlined above....Given a major labor effort over the next two years, and given a substantial investment in basic productive facilities, there can be no doubt that the force targets presented in the report could, from the standpoint of our manpower and other resources, be maintained indefinitely...

NSC-68 carried this idea one step further:

With a high level of economic activity, the United States could soon attain a gross national product of $300 billion per year, as was pointed out in the President's Economic Report (January 1950). Progress in this direction would permit, and might itself be aided by, a build-up of the economic and military strength of the United States and the free world; furthermore, if a dynamic expansion of the economy were achieved, the necessary build-up could be accomplished without a decrease in the national standard of living because the required resources could be obtained by siphoning off a part of the annual increment in the gross national product.

So, from now on, when Barack Obama or John McCain - or any other politician in Washington - trumpets a plan for more economic growth, you will know the exact purpose of this growth - to make you and your family work longer hours to support aircraft carriers prowling the Indian Ocean.

This, in fact may be how you would like to spend your spare time, but at least you now know why.

Of course, highlighting the above, we probably will be accused of being hysterical, and silly - speaking of NSC-68 with conspiratorial overtone, and charaterizing the leaders of this country as men and women with with dark and malevolent intentions.

However, there is this very small point provided by Steven Casey, whose work we cited earlier:

As [then Secretary of State Dean] Acheson noted in one discussion on how to sell NSC-68, “speeches alone would not do it, that people read and heard what was said and then turned their attention to other matters.” What was vital was an incident, a crisis in one of the many flash points of the Cold War. Seen in this light, the start of the Korean War on June 24, 1950, was a godsend.

Indeed, as the Wiki explains:

While there was little support for this program in Congress and at the Defense Department, the Korean War, which broke out in June 1950, in effect put the military Keynesianism of NSC-68 to work.

The first year of the Korean War produced a surplus in the federal budget as previously unemployed wage earners went back to work and paid taxes. It also produced the Federal Reserve-Treasury Accord of March 1951, which returned the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve system to its pre-World War II activist role, despite Keyserling's opposition. In contrast to the situation after World War II, there was little increase in the national debt or evidence of pent-up demand after the Korean War. In fact, prices fell after the removal of wartime price controls during the administration of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.

NSC-68 was off and running.

To be continued

Continued from here:

Kennan's Long Telegram was succeeded by an extended article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published, according to Wikipedia, in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. Kennan predicted the demise, and/or moderation of the Soviet Union, owing to a long accumulation of unresolved, and chronic internal problems - including badly unbalanced economic development, totalitarian methods of governance, and generational changes which would eventually have expression with the Communist Party structure itself.

His article was warmly received in the United States, and he became something of a celebrity in all the right circles. His celebrity status even showered notice on his daughter, who was in college at the time.

According to Wikipedia, "His oldest daughter Grace ... recalls fellow students calling her 'Miss X' in college. 'He went from a normal, nice father to the father who wrote the X article,' recalls Grace. 'It was a big shock to discover that my dad, who had been just my dad, suddenly became public property.'"

Kennan felt the United States could, with adequate determination, and subtle, sophisticated pressure, contain the Soviet Union until such time as its internal conflicts would lead to its demise, or, drastic change. His policy of containment, formed the over-arching objective for NSC-68.

But there, at least in Kennan's view, the similarities ended.

Kennan long rejected association with policies of the Cold War that came to be connected with his advocacy of containment. According to Wikipedia, Kennan saw containment as a political and economic policy, involving, of course, such adoption of means as were exemplified by the Central Intelligence Agency, but also economic assistance to rebuild and stabilize friendly countries.

NSC-68 was not about creative diplomacy and black bag operations. It was a less a reflective contemplation of the character of the Soviet system than it was a militant call to arms which would have the practical effect not only of virtually ensuring decades of American-Soviet conflict, but would entail something that was unthinkable until then: permanent American military expansion powered by an equally expansionist economic policy.

The picture drawn of Soviet capabilities by the authors of NSC-68 was stark, terrifying, and graphically described:

In present circumstances the capabilities of the USSR to threaten U.S. security by the use of armed forces, are dangerous and immediate:

a. The USSR, while not capable of sustained and decisive direct military attack against U.S. territory or the Western Hemisphere, is capable of serious submarine warfare and of a limited number of one-way bomber sorties.

b. Present intelligence estimates attribute to Soviet armed forces the capability of overrunning in about six months all of Continental Europe and the Near East as far as Cairo, while simultaneously occupying important continental points in the Far East. Meanwhile, Great Britain could be subjected to severe air and missile bombardment.

c. Russian seizure of these areas would ultimately enhance the Soviet war potential, if

sufficient time were allowed and Soviet leaders were able to consolidate Russian control and to integrate Europe into the Soviet system, this would permit an eventual concentration of hostile power which would pose an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States.

In six months, according to the authors of NSC-68, the American democracy could be surrounded by a sea of Soviet puppet states threatening it from all sides. Worse, according to the authors:

... by no later than 1955 the USSR will probably be capable of serious air attacks against the United States with atomic, biological and chemical weapons, of more extensive submarine operations (including the launching of short-range guided missiles), and of airborne operations to seize advance bases.

These words were written against a backdrop of great upheaval in the immediate postwar period:

In India, Great Britain was watching its colonial system unravel under the persistent resolve of determined nationalists - as Britons drove the Winston Churchill government out of power. In short order, anti-colonial war erupted against all the colonial powers.

In France, Communists appeared poised on the verge of victory in national elections, with France mired in its Dirty War, in Vietnam.

And, in China, these ugly predictions came against the backdrop of the victory of the Chinese Communist Party over the forces of China's Kuomintang Party - bringing the number of people under non-capitalist governance to more than a quarter of the human race.

Uncle Sam's club was open, but it was quite unclear it would have any customers:

The USSR has already engaged the United States in a struggle for power. While it cannot be predicted with certainty whether, or when, the present political warfare will involve armed conllict, nevertheless there exists a continuing danger of war at any time.

To assure its security, the authors proposed the United States undertake a permanent expansion, "of military readiness which can be maintained as long as necessary as a deterrent to Soviet aggression, as indispensable support to our political attitude toward the USSR, as a source of encouragement to nations resisting Soviet political aggression, and as an adequate basis for immediate military commitments and for rapid mobilization should war prove unavoidable."

Domestically, the government should, "Assure the internal security of the United States against dangers of sabotage, subversion, and espionage."

The over-riding goal of economic policy was not to be assuring the improvement in the standard of living of Americans, but to, "Maximize our economic potential, including the strengthening of our peace-time economy and the establishment of essential reserves readily available in the event of war."

Finally, the government would need to mount an aggressive propaganda campaign to, "Keep the U.S. public fully informed and cognizant of the threats to our national security so that it will be prepared to support the measures which we must accordingly adopt."

Of course, in the fine print of the report was this disclaimer: "Soviet military capabilities as set forth in this paper, while constituting potential threats to U.S. security which must be recognized, do not represent an evaluated estimate of Soviet intentions to utilize these capabilities..."

In other words, "So far as we know, the Soviet Union has no intentions of doing any of the things we have outlined, but: BOO!"

Given our own experience in the course of the events leading to this present war in Iraq, however, this footnote is a chilling reminder of the lengths to which Washington deliberately embarked on a strategy of wrapping its adversaries up in the very cloth of its own intentions.

The parallel with the present war is both astonishing for its brazen regurgitation of the earlier arguments, and disappointing in their lack of originality.

To be continued

To really understand National Security Council Report No. 68 (NSC-68 ) you have to understand something about yourself.

You are more or less educated, thoughtful, compassionate, empathetic, and humane.

At least, that is how you imagine yourself. That is how you want to be known. Those are the words you want on your gravestone.

But, we know better, don't we?

We know, in fact, you are capricious, unstable, irresponsible, ignorant, untutored, incapable of understanding any concept which can't be written on a bumper-sticker, volatile, apathetic, moody, hysterical, withdrawn, complacent, lethargic, superficial, over-reactive, violent, panicky, and. above all, dangerous to human beings and pets.

Yeah, like a book - like a god-damned book, we can read you!

Insulted?

Tough.

Because, that is just how the people who developed and enshrined NSC-68 as national policy saw you; and, since that policy has remained more or less in force for 60 years, it is pretty obvious they were on to something - they captured that thing in you so repulsive you cannot admit its existence to yourself.

In fact, every time you hear a Washington politician address, "My Fellow Americans," that is to whom he is talking: an ignorant, uncultured nation of boobs, who can be led around by the nose, and ordered to jump through hoops on command.

Do you imagine I am lying about all this?

Prove me a liar: simply download, and read this document, by Steven Casey, which describes in detail how you are seen by Washington, and how, based on that analysis of your weak-minded personality, they created a campaign to have you foot the bill for an unlimited decades-long buildup of American military force, at the expense of your hopes and dreams, and those of your family.

According to Casey:

Inside the foreign-policy establishment there was a widely held conviction that the public’s ignorance about foreign-policy issues, rather than always leading to apathy, often resulted in volatile oscillations, as the popular mood shifted rapidly between complacency and hysteria, withdrawal and engagement...the popular mood was highly unstable, often characterized by “sudden shifts of interest or preference.” As Almond succinctly put it, “the superficiality and instability of public attitudes toward foreign affairs creates the danger of under- and over-reaction to changes in the world political situation.”

Because the popular mood was highly susceptible to such violent mood swings, leaders had tread carefully, tailoring their message to suit current conditions. On occasion, this might well entail overselling, perhaps even exaggerating the importance of an international incident, in order to jolt the populace out of its torpor. But at the same time, clear dangers lurked in going too far in this direction, for such activity might also create an overreaction, perhaps even sparking a widespread popular hysteria. As a result, the goal of any information campaign was to generate interest in times of apathy, but without creating a panic when the mood swiftly began to shift.

In short, they played you like a fine violin.

Just as the Moron has played you in our present conflicts, exaggerating the threat posed by cave dwellers in the most inhospitable regions of western Pakistan to make you surrender your most basic constitutional rights, and celebrate the slaughter of 1.2 million Iraqis and Afghans.

To continue:

Wikipedia has this to say about NSC-68:

NSC-68 or National Security Council Report 68 was a 58 page classified report issued April 14, 1950 during the presidency of Harry Truman. Written in the formative stages of the Cold War, it has become one of the classic historical documents of the Cold War. NSC-68 would shape government actions in the Cold War for the next 20 years and has subsequently been labeled its "blueprint." Truman officially signed NSC-68 on September 30, 1950. It was declassified in 1977.

This document, which was withheld from you for 27 years, and basically ignored for the last 30, had a profound impact on your life, the lives of your parents, and grandparents, and the lives of your children, who, even as I am writing this, are adding to the mountain of Iraqi corpses steadily accumulating in the Garden of Eden.

Which is not to say, had you, or your parents, or your grandparents been aware of this document at the time, things would have turned out differently. At the time it was written, America was flush with triumphalist spirit – the Axis powers had been defeated, and the rest of the planet was laid waste with massive damage to the infrastructure, and governments of many nations. Aside from Pearl Harbor, however, the United States had suffered no damage on its territory.

Still, an estimated 70 percent of Americans were prepared to raise their own taxes to boost military spending!

The impetus behind NSC-68 was obvious: seventy-two million people were dead, and we were the only operating concern open for business. It was as if Hurricane Katrina had wiped out all of New Orleans, yet, spared all the Wal-Marts. People needed everything from bread, to diapers, to matches and cigarettes, and 'Uncle Sam's' Club was the only place to get them.

Given that the United States had for years been devoting half of its output to war, and had withdrawn 12 million men in the prime of their productive working years for the same period and applied them to the task of generating huge numbers of corpses in such place as Dresden, Normandy, and Hiroshima, you might expect that, with the end of hostilities, Americans might be entitled to a 'peace dividend'.

It might have been fair to expect that as much as 50 percent of the workweek could have been shaved off without causing undue economic dislocation.

But, there were all those people who needed bread, and diapers, and matches and cigarettes. And, it seems, they were willing to agree to just about any terms the Truman administration dictated to get them. Americans had the opportunity to gather all the poker chips from the table, and everyone seemed willing to let them do it, in return for easy credit.

That is, everyone except the Soviet Union, which, in the eyes of the Truman administration, wasn't playing nice.

Curious at this obstinacy, the administration sent a series of questions to the American embassy in Moscow, and received a detailed reply by none other than George F. Kennan. That answer, the so-called, Long Telegram, described the Soviet Union as:

...a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far-flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendentiously to bolster an outlook already preconceived.”

Kennan drew a picture of Soviet Union as an ominously resource wealthy people who were fanatical, hostile, subversive, jingoistic, unreasonable, delusional, and unable to separate reality from their dogmas.

Now, if this characterization of the Russian poeple sounds familiar to you, it should.

It was pretty much how the authors of NSC-68 described you!

To be continued

Sixty million dead bodies and we went to war with Iraq partly due to 300,000 dead innocents found in a mass grave.

Sixty million dead bodies of innocent babies because lazy, irresponsible, evil Americans found their existence inconvenient.

Sixty million dead bodies and its not even on the radar as a topic of discussion in an election year.

Sixty million dead bodies and most of us are more concerned about the price of gas.

Sixty million dead bodies of little children and we imagine that God is not concerned and will not hold us as a nation responsible. We imagine that what we have done is honorable. We imagine that God will continue to give us divine protection from all that mean us harm. We imagine that He will let us into his heaven with this innocent blood on our hands.

Sixty million dead bodies......some with their brains sucked out by a vacuum just before their head left their mothers' birth canal ............and we even imagine that we are a Christian (Christ-like) nation.

Estava eu lá a esperar o ônibus quando me aparece o Ulisses. Segundo dia consecutivo que o encontro pelo bairro e ele tem feito questão de parar, me abraçar ¬¬ e conversar longamente comigo... Antes ele só me cumprimentava e eu já tinha um certo medo! =P Ele é daquelas figuras beeeem excêntricas, acredito que o cara mais conhecido aqui da região, tem comunidade pra ele no Orkut com quase 600 pessoas e muitas histórias bizarras... Dizem que ele é onipresente porque não importa em que lugar você esteja, ele está lá! Tem 32 anos, pelo que me disse hoje (mas aparenta bem mais), algum problema de atrofiamento no braço e na perna e uma fisionomia bem peculiar e anda aqui pelas redondezas fazendo jogos do bicho e bebendo pelos bares...

Ontem, quando o encontrei, ele me disse de uma menina da V. California que fazia Letras na PUC por quem ele estava apaixonado. Disse que ela era linda e blablabla! Depois me abraçou, disse que gostava muito de mim, como se eu sempre tivesse sido a melhor amiga dele, e foi embora. Hoje, voltou a falar da menina... Disse que ela não ligava pra ele, que só queria ve-lo morto dentro de um caixão e que não entendia porquê ela o tratava mal, mesmo ele sendo um cara bacana cujo sonho é se casar com ela e ter uma filhinha... E começou a chorar! E eu o_O, sem reação, só conseguia pensar "passa logo ônibus maldito, passa!!!!".

Que situação bizarra! Tá, não sou insensível assim... Tentei consola-lo, disse que essas coisas de amor são assim mesmo, que não tem quem não tenha sofrido com isso... Falei que se ela não queria nada, o melhor mesmo era esquecer, partir pra outra, curtir a vida, porque isso de relacionamento depende de duas partes, uma só não basta... E ele lá, lágrima nos olhos, me dizendo que não dava, que só conseguia pensar nela... "Ai meu Deus, faz esse ônibus passar!!!".

Mas Deus fez melhor ainda... ¬¬ Ao invés de um ônibus, colocou um bêbado (mais bêbado que o Ulisses, desses travadinhos) no meu caminho. E o bêbado olhou para minha cara e cismou que eu estava rindo dele... E o Ulisses, desgraçado, se despediu rapidinho e me largou lá! Pois é, sempre tem como piorar... ¬¬ E o bêbado começou a perguntar por que eu estava rindo, se eu sabia quem tinha tacado a bomba em Hiro*?*? (acho que ele queria dizer Hiroshima, mas disse um negócio enrolado que não entendi), "os americanos!", ele mesmo respondia, todo enrolado, e quem tinha matado Saddam Hussein?, "os americanos!"... E eu não conseguia segurar o riso contido dentro de mim, porque só podia ser pegadinha aquilo! E o bêbado ficou nervoso porque eu não o estava levando muito a sério, disse com raiva que eu não devia saber nem assinar o nome dele aqui ó e apontava pra palma suja da sua mão. E eu só balançava a cabeça, pensando que eu devo ter uma espécie de imã pra coisas bizarras assim! Aí depois de insinuar que eu sou burra e analfabeta e falar que ele era sei lá o que do Exército, me perguntou se eu sabia o que era uma palavra enrolada que segundo ele era Japonês... Eu disse que não com a cabeça e ele: "vai tomar no cu", e saiu andando! Será que "vai tomar no cu" era o significado da palavra?? Bom, achei mais sensato não perguntar... Coloquei os fones e voltei a escutar Muse, rindo absurdamente por dentro! Será karma? No Japão não tinha esse problema... Até porque eu não entendia o que me falavam! XD

...

Muse . Starlight

Far away

The ship is taking me far away

Far away from the memories

Of the people who care if I live or die

Starlight

I will be chasing the starlight

Until the end of my life

I don't know if it's worth it anymore

Hold you in my arms

I just wanted to hold

you in my arms

My life

You electrify my life

Lets conspire to ignite

All the cells that would die just to feel alive

But I'll never let you go

If you promised not to fade away

never fade away

Our hopes and expectations

Black holes and revelations

Our hopes and expectations

Black holes and revelations

Foi um dos momentos mais tensos da Guerra Fria. Depois que Stalin decidiu fechar a única estrada que ligava Berlim - à época ocupada por americanos, ingleses, franceses e soviéticos - à região ocidental da Alemanha, o presidente Truman bolou uma "ponte-aérea" para abastecer a cidade, um dos pontos nevrálgicos da então recém-nascida disputa bipolar. Há 60 anos.

Keep visiting: www.lifechums.com/ more Celebrities featuring Shortly .............

Para quem desconhece, é um filme Peter Weir, cujo protagonista é interpretado por Jim Carrey. Sim, sim sim, Jim Carrey não é um nome que desperta muita confiança, aliás a maior parte das pessoas detesta seu estilo, ainda assim, insisto que o filme merece atenção.

O enredo nos conta a história de um homem que, desde o ventre de sua mãe, teve a vida toda transmitida ao vivo para o mundo inteiro 24h por dia 7 dias por semana, sem que ele jamais soubesse. (Uma espécie de sátira dos reality shows, o mais interessante é que o filme foi lançado um ano antes do primeiro programa deste gênero. Neste sentido, é um pouco difícil determinar se ele de certa forma previu o aparecimento dos reality shows ou deu-lhes causa.) Para fazer com que ele não descobrisse que sua vida na verdade era uma farsa, foi construído um estúdio gigantesco no qual se inseria uma ilha com uma cidade cercada pelo mar e uma floresta. Todas as pessoas com as quais Carrey convive são na verdade atores, incluindo sua mãe, pai, melhor amigo e esposa.

Não é preciso dizer mais, o filme narra o esforço de Carrey para conseguir sair deste mundo no qual está preso e ao final como ele finalmente consegue fazê-lo.

A partir disto inúmeras interpretações são possíveis. A primeira, mais evidente, mas também mais insossa, muito provavelmente é a de cunho religioso/cristão. O roteirista, idealizador e responsável último pelo show é um homem chamado Christof, evidente referência ao messias, com um certo sarcasmo, vez que pode ser escrito como Christ off.

As aparições desta personagem certamente são alusões diretas ao cristianismo, o que se vê pela própria postura adotada pela personagem que, em todos os momentos, não obstante as críticas que a ela são feitas por estar manipulando uma vida, fazendo desta um joguete, um objeto de lucro, continua firme em sua posição de que ela na verdade faz um bem para Carrey. Em vários momentos ela inclusive arroga a si uma postura de criador, pai, daquele que zela pelo bem estar deste. Ela chega a dizer expressamente que "ninguém conhece Carrey tão bem quanto ele", e que ela "criou este mundo em que Carrey vive somente para este e criou perfeito para que fosse feliz". A partir disto o paralelismo com o ideário cristão parece ser forçoso, ainda mais quando somado à incessante vigilância exercida sobre a vida de Carrey.

Outras formas de interpretação, contudo, incomodam mais do que a já tão velha crítica à religião cristã.

Por exemplo, o viés filosófico que pode ser encontrado no filme. A libertação, a separação com o mundo, a formação de uma identidade individual foram sempre questões intimamente ligadas com a postura ético-filosófica. Neste sentido, o filme, de uma forma certamente forçada e absurda, mostra como nós somos propensos a aceitar o mundo como ele nos é apresentado, como nossos conceitos e opiniões, não obstante o possessivo, não são tão nossos quando acreditamos serem, como nossas balizas são estreitas.

Pense bem. A hipótese do filme parece ridícula. Um homem que jamais saiu da cidade em que nasceu e não percebe estar dentro de um estúdio? Como isto seria possível? Contudo, quão maior é a extensão do mundo que conhecemos? É óbvio que são muitíssimo raros os casos de pessoas que nunca saíram da cidade em que nasceram, mas expandindo um pouco a linha de raciocínio, quantas pessoas existem que nunca deixaram seu estado, seu país, seu continente? Mesmo dentre aquelas que são "muito viajadas", costuma-se dizer no retorno: "conheci a França, a Holanda e a Dinamarca". Será? Quantas cidades em cada um desses países você conheceu? Quantos metros quadrados de cada uma dessas cidades? Quão longe você se afastou do mundo metropolitano que é o mesmo em qualquer metrópole?

A distância percorrida em quilômetros implica muito pouco. Comer um Big Mac e pagar com MasterCard é a mesma coisa aqui, em Madrid, em Berlim, em Tokio ou em Boston. A distância mais importante encontra-se naquilo que poderíamos chamar de distância cultural ou distância real. Um rico que vá visitar uma favela ou um pobre que vá visitar uma mansão vão ambos se sentir muito mais alheios nestas situações do que caso viagem 1000 quilômetros e cheguem em lugares com situações sociais semelhantes, não obstante as diferenças climáticas ou o idioma.

Mas não apenas isto. Rico e pobre ainda são uma alusão tosca ao que chamei acima de distância cultural, pois, no fim das contas, ambos estão submissos a um mesmo rol discursivo a uma mesma cultura, ainda que os reflexos e a interiorização desta cultura ocorram de maneiras diferenciadas em um ou noutro. Maiores distâncias podem ser encontradas em diferentes discursos éticos e comportamentais de distintos pontos no espaço tempo. O bushido ou caminho do samurai, por exemplo, encontra-se muitíssimo distante de nossa realidade cultural. Quando nos deparamos com este tipo de distância, a primeira reação é a de superioridade. Formas de subjetividade muito distintas da nossa sempre tendem a apresentar-se como ilógicas, absurdas.

Entretanto, o quando de nossa individualidade é resultado de nossa personalidade, nossos impulsos, nossa racionalidade e o quanto é resultado de um trabalho de modelagem que o outro, os outros, nos forçaram? As idéias deterministas são inevitáveis. Qual o limite de autodeterminação de um sujeito? Se é que se pode falar em liberdade de vontade e julgamento.

Certamente, parece ridículo o comportamento dos atores no filme, como todos fazem uma pressão ridícula de normalização em Carrey. Porém, por mais ridículo que seja o exemplo, ele toma por base uma verdade muito concreta. Christof ainda faz uma observação interessante, quando, em dado momento do filme, ele diz que não está obrigando o Truman a nada, haja vista que se este de fato desejasse a liberdade, nada poderia resistir à força desta vontade e ele poderia escapar facilmente do estúdio e concluí dizendo que ele apenas continua no estúdio porque no fundo ele tem medo de sair, acha confortável ficar.

Esta cena dá asas a uma outra forma de enxergar o filme, remetendo às pressões sociais que interiorizamos e que nos castram o comportamento. É certo que estas pressões são inevitáveis em qualquer convívio grupal, mas o que é interessante é que nem sempre as pessoas têm imediata consciência da alteridade destas pressões. Algumas delas encontram-se tão presas em nossa própria persona que não as conseguimos distinguir daquelas motivações que nos são próprias.

Ainda é possível discutir o filme com base em outras formas de interpretação interessantes, como a de que ele faz uma crítica à alienação que a sociedade midiática produz. Em vários momentos do filme, o diretor fez questão de mostrar-nos os telespectadores que acompanham o show. Impossível deixar de notar a miséria existencial de todos eles: dois seguranças de estacionamento que passam o dia comendo e vendo o show; duas senhoras que estão sempre ao sofá agarradas em almofadas com o rosto do Truman, atendentes de um bar que sempre que podem abandonam o balcão para acompanhar o show; um homem que passar horas na banheira assistindo tv.

Esta crítica parece ser mais importante no filme do que aquela mais imediata sobre o direcionamento intelectual das indústrias da mídia. Muito mais do que atacar os produtores do show, o diretor também faz um ataque direto ao público, que, contudo, é difícil medir a eficácia, dada a capacidade do público de identificar-se com o herói, ignorando sua própria condição quando retratada em uma história.

É interessante notar, ainda, a crítica ao american way of life, que atualmente está mais para general way of life. O filme mostra de forma evidente a ironia castradora e o alto custo da incessante busca por segurança, tranqüilidade e felicidade na sociedade capitalista. As formas de subjetivação em nossa sociedade são cada vez mais pobres, frágeis, mesquinhas; por detrás de todo o conforto está um sujeito patético.

Como em qualquer outra história, também é possível fazer uma interpretação psicológica do filme, retratando o amadurecimento da personalidade quando esta se desvincula da persona e vai em busca de um eu verdadeiro. Pode-se, ainda, analisar o vouyerismo geral da sociedade, um verdadeiro "goza com o pau dos outros" que encontra-se altamente difundido em nosso mundo contemporâneo. As pessoas satisfazem-se em assistir a vida de outros, vibrar com vitórias de outros ou com a derrota dos outros (pra turminha do sadismo).

Nisto inclui-se a angústia com o futebol a que me referi no post anterior. É triste ver como acostumamo-nos a nos identificar com coisas que na verdade nos são completamente alheias. Não que se condene o ato de assistir e torcer. Este ato é semelhante a qualquer outro ato contemplativo, o que está longe de ser condenável. Não há porque condenar quem se envolve com uma boa música ou com uma brisa no rosto ao assistir ao pôr do sol. Todavia a partir do momento em que este ato contemplativo, este prazer sensível passa a tomar conta do eu a ponto de moldar sua personalidade, seus comportamentos, trazendo-lhe tristezas, angústias e raiva, toda a situação perde o sentido.

Uma pena este filme ter recebido tão pouca atenção, ainda mais em meio ao mar de produções de péssima qualidade que estamos acostumados a receber empacotados para aquela hora e meia de distração.

In the beginning were Truman and McCarthy, collectively the ‘Father’ of Cold War. The Father ‘breathed’ out from His inner recesses, and off came a-birthing the new being called the Cold War. Mighty and dreadful, this being unleashed destructive forces of such unparalleled beauty in the eyes of the Father, and so, on the 7^th day, the Father slept, fulfilled that his mighty Dragon of destruction has been doing its job well.

So mighty was this Dragon of Destruction that in my beloved nation, the new Philippine republic, everything that looked like a demon (read: patriot) must be staked alive in the town plaza, and upon the expiration of last breath, the demons must be paraded around town. Communists, socialists, nationalists, civil libertarians all appeared as ‘birds of the same feather’ and are, per the Pavlovian stock of knowledge of this hungry dragon, of equal demonic quality as the witches of Salem. Kill them whenever you see them in sight!

Fellows, the Father is long dead, his two heads (Truman, McCarthy) long gone, but many of us still think, both consciously and unconsciously, like the sons and daughters of the Father. We perceive and stigmatize those patriots inside our backyards, whose mindsets remain outside our perceptive perimeters of accepted political forces, as non-human witches worth our termination en masse.

The Cold War mindset has been responsible for the rabid witch-hunt perceptions of insurgent groups. Never mind if the insurgents are not exactly those terrorists that were largely creations of the CIA (Al Quada, Abu Sayyaf) and British Intelligence (Muslim Brotherhood offshoots), insurgents that lay claim to legitimacy of their agenda and relative civility of their methods and tactics. They are sorcerers, they must be hunted and terminated like deadly wolves, show them no mercy, and so name every plethora of denigration and demonization one can think of about any social or political group.

Fellows, when you have patriotic groups around, such as our Muslim and Left rebels here in the Philippines, please treat them as your siblings. Shed off that Cold War mindset, accept them, embrace them, integrate their cadres into the mainstream. And, ipso facto, integrate their armies into your state’s army and national police. Take off that distrust, condescension, arrogance and hubris, period. Accept them without precondition.

The end of Manila’s war with the Moro National Liberation Front or MNLF proves to be a very instructive case. As part of the negotiated settlement, troops of the Bangsa Moro Army or BMA, military wing of the MNLF, must be integrated into the army and national police. 7,000 troops were then screened from the guerilla ranks, received training, re-orientation and indoctrination, and voila! They proved they were equal to the task of being a soldier or cop for the Philippine state!

Please note that we have a history in the islands of deep distrust towards Muslims. The Muslim ethnicities never ever bowed to Western colonial authority for the whole period of 400 years of colonization, they always waged military campaigns against the Spaniards, and were pacified only after bloody integration campaigns by the American forces. “A good Muslim is a dead Muslim,” so goes this rather demented aphorism that I grew up with as a young boy in the 1960s.

Who would ever trust Muslim troops within the army in the 1970s at the peak of the Mindanao war? Or the ceasefire days of the 1980s? No, Sir, nobody could trust Muslims as they fell within the ambit of Cold War discourse and the demented, bigoted perception about them by the majority Westernized peoples.

But the 1990s was a different context. The Philippine state booted out American GIs and re-acquired the U.S. military base lands here, independent foreign policy was championed, the Cold War was eroding fast. The Christian Democrats, who were catapulted to power (President Ramos was among its top leaders), were very open in coalitioning with radical forces, the Left most specially. And so when President Ramos became president, it was among his top agenda to conclude all insurgencies here via the carrot way of negotiated settlement: the ‘win/win’ solution to age-old rebellions.

The military rebels (RAM-YOU, RAM = Reform the Armed Forces, YOU = Young Officers Union or YOU) finally agreed to a settlement and be integrated into the mainstream and the army/police. Likewise did the MNLF agree to a settlement, the top MNLF leaders were elected to the top posts of the Autonomous Region of Mindanao or ARMM, the BMA troops got integrated into the army and national police.

We simply shed off our Cold War mindset right then, and were so euphoric at the fulfilling results of the peace talks. Being a nationalist and socialist, my own Cold War antipathies towards our soldiers and cops eroded, my trust for them quite returned. I had always been under the surveillance of the state intelligence groups here, for nigh three (3) decades, and till these days my dossiers are still in the files of the said groups even if, by 2004-05, I served government as a bureau official.

Albeit I’d reserve my most euphoric moment, with tons of tears of happiness shed, when our other insurgencies will be concluded and their armies likewise integrated into our police and army. Never mind about nauseated rationalizations such as those questions of competency, mental orientation, and other Cold War hubris, they belong to the dirtiest dustbins. Integrate the insurgents at all cost and full acceptance, without preconditions.

[Writ 10 June 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]

Think Progress: In an interview with GQ magazine yesterday, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich compared Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) effort to rally support around his indefinite commitment to staying in Iraq to “what Lincoln had to do in the Civil War“:

QUESTION: How does your background in history influence your political ideas?

GINGRICH: If you think about the current situation, it helps to remember Harry Truman running in 1948, or even Sarkozy in France. Sarkozy distanced himself from Chirac without being hostile. That’s what McCain has to do with Bush. And what McCain is trying to achieve by explaining the dangers of the world to the public is like what Lincoln had to do in the Civil War.

QUESTION: McCain doesn’t exactly have Lincoln’s rhetorical skills.

GINGRICH: In style he’s closer to Truman, who did not have the rhetorical skills, but had passion.

Gingrich, along with a long list of conservatives, have long sought to cast President Bush as Lincoln-like. Now, with Bush heading out of office, they are trying to do the same with McCain.

Il 4 aprile 1949 a Washigton era stato firmato il documento che sanciva la nascita della NATO, ed il presidente degli Stati Uniti Harry Truman, con i segretari di Stato alla difesa Louis Johnson ed alla politica estera Dean Acheson, aveva offerto una cena alla Casa Bianca per i ministri degli Esteri dei Paesi membri.
Come testimonia un fonogramma delle conversazioni svoltesi a tavola, Truman aveva aperto la serata con una minaccia falsa, dicendo agli ospiti europei che era ormai imminente l’invasione sovietica dell’Europa occidentale. Per ridurre al silenzio ogni richiamo alla superiorità militare degli Occidentali, basata sul possesso allora esclusivo delle bombe atomiche, Truman disse ai suoi interlocutori di non illudersi: “… per non parlare poi della necessità di doverla eventualmente usare contro i nostri alleati dell’Europa occidentale quando fossero occupati.”
Nessuno dei ministri europei presenti ebbe la prontezza (o il coraggio) di chiedere perché le bombe atomiche non potessero essere usate contro i centri militari del nemico nel primo giorno dell’invasione piuttosto che dopo la disfatta, ad occupazione conclusa, contro le città degli alleati. In verità, una possibilità di aiuto militare statunitense, Truman l’aveva fatta balenare dopo, ma sotto certe condizioni: “… il sacrificio di alcuni tradizionali obiettivi economici e di sicurezza: ciò potrebbe rendere l’accettazione non particolarmente auspicabile da parte vostra”.
Dopo di lui, presero la parola i segretari di Stato per chiarire agli ospiti europei che avrebbero dovuto sacrificare le colonie. L’unico ad esprimere ciò che pensava fu l’olandese Dirk Stikker: “Siamo preoccupati che gli Stati Uniti subentrino agli interessi olandesi nelle Indie per lo sfruttamento della ricchezza economica dell’area”. Gli altri rappresentanti pensavano probabilmente alla stessa maniera circa il ricatto statunitense, ma non seppero contraddire Truman e soci: fecero finta di non capire, di essere stupidi.
Così è cominciato – ufficialmente e storicamente – il processo di istupidimento delle (pseudo) élites europee: dalla recitazione mimetica fino al completo immedesimarsi con l’idiota.

Objectivity and Neutrality

Ideally, the journalism ethos consists of objectivity and neutrality, but as both books for this week’s class reveal this ideal is hard to obtain in reality. According to Karabel (2000), in 1948 the reporters regarded themselves as “the Fourth Estate,” and they expected to play a role in the presidential campaign. “Reporters believed they served a vital purpose. They believed…..they had the power and responsibility to ‘mediate’ the election” (p.93). This mediation was not always objective and neutral, but the reporters saw their role as necessary for the democracy and the American voters that reporters expressed their opinions. The pundit Walter Lippmann put it this way in an interview in 1959: “We make it our business to find out what is going on under the surface and beyond the horizon, to infer, to deduce, to imagine, and to guess what is going on inside, what this meant yesterday and what it could mean tomorrow. In this we do what every sovereign citizen is supposed to do but has not the time or the interest to do for himself” (p.92).

I see also see this trend of pundits in Crouse’s description of The Heavies (chapter IV and VI); the handful of reporters who dominated the pack. The description of Johnny Apple from the New York Times gave me the impression that he was closer to the ideal of objectivity than David Broder, Washington Post or Evans and Novak from the Washington Post. It might be too ambitious to analyze reporting through a rigid ideal type (Max Weber) of objectivism and neutrality. They are reporting in real time, and as Karabel and Crouse both described, the reporters missed important factors in 1948 as well in 1972. In 1972, the press corps did not hold Nixon accountable and took his "stage-managed" campaign at "face value" (Crouse, 2000,p.186).

Pack Journalism

One explanation could be herd mentality. Crouse realized early in the 1972-campaign, covering the campaign for Rolling Stone, that political reporters are like herds or a part of pack journalism: “They all feed from the same pool report, the same daily handout, the same speech by the candidate; the whole pack was isolated in the same mobile village. After a while, they began to believe the same rumors, subscribe to the same theories, and write the same stories” (Crouse, 2003, p.8). And as a reporter, there was no way to escape the group pressure - you had to join the herd.

But this holds also true in the Truman-Dewey-Wallace-Thurmond Campaign. In 1948, the press had climbed into the power elite and became a respected profession. The pundits ran in the same circles and lived in the nice Georgetown neighborhood in Washington DC, next door to senators, congressmen and other notable figures in the administration. (Karabel, 200, p.91). During the primaries in the spring 1948, the press did not favor Truman as a person or as president which the press coverage reflected. But the coverage changed during the fall, when reporters covered Truman from the train. The polls captured the first trend but not the second. (But that is another story of polling. Pollsters thought that voters decided much earlier and did not take undecided voters into account). The pack mentality was evident in 1972 as Crouse described it, for instance the “screening committees” or clubs of Washington reporters, who did not believe in McGovern as the Democratic presidential candidate.

The Difference in Press Coverage in 1948 and 1972

TV changed our lives and of course it changed the presidential campaigns. TV was a business - I guess print and radio media in the 1940s considered itself to be more about public service than business. As a business, TV relies on ratings and ads, and the news has to condense long speeches and complex issues to simple sound bites and visuals. Crouse described the making of a news story from the Democratic Convention in Miami (chapter VII), and it illustrated very well that there is not much time or room for complex or lofty discussions. TV was good for drama, style, and media events with photo opportunities. Besides the differences of style and substance, TV reached out to the masses and a national audience in 1972 that it had no chance of doing in 1948. ABC, NBC, and CBS were national media. You can argue that the wire-services had reached out to a national audience as long as the services had existed but not to a degree as TV reached the Americans.

In the End, Dewey Defeated Truman

Truman was certainly the comeback-kid in 1948 making history with his straight-talk and hard work on the whistle-stop campaign throughout the country (except to the South). The campaign stood in stark contrast to Dewey’s - packaged messages, presidential appearance, and ‘positive’ campaigning. Truman stages himself as a simple honest man from Independence (MI) and Dewey as a calculating New Yorker. This was the impression the voters got from the press coverage, but in reality Truman was just as calculating as Dewey. But he was better at selling his image to the press. The reporters did not feel they knew Dewey, not even after covering him for months on the campaign trail. Playing poker and hanging out with reporters on the train, “Truman let the reporters in” and attacked his opponent in a way that has never been seen since.

Karable argues Dewey was ahead of his time, and his way of campaigning has been the rule ever since. TV and the packaged message and the positive campaign go hand in hand.

The description of Dewey in Karabel’s word matches to a certain extend Crouses’s description of the Nixon PR campaign in 1972: “The cool, detached Dewey, the packaged candidate who ran so not to lose, who steered clear of controversy (not Nixon in 1972 because of Watergate), and who made a good show of appearing presidential” (Karabel, 2000, p.266).

...But Don't Expect One Tomorrow

Harry S Truman
Faked his eye exam
Signed up for combat duty
No time for chickens

posted by Rena Silverman