Evil in Fact and Fiction

Recently by Ira Katz: A Letter From Vienna

Last Sunday evening in prime time the major French network France2 aired the recent Roman Polanski film The Ghost Writer. I doubt a similar airing would occur on an American TV network because of the negative view of Polanski in the U.S. and the theme of this film. It is the second point that is the topic of this article.

The Ghost Writer begins with a ferry arriving on the Massachusetts coast from an offshore island (a fictional version of Martha's Vineyard) with vehicles passing around an apparently abandoned SUV. The next image is of a body washed up on the island. The corpse was of the ghost writer for the memoirs of an ex-Prime Minister of the U.K. After this accident/suicide another ghost writer is recruited. The trouble begins even before the new writer arrives back at his apartment in London after receiving a copy of the manuscript, as it is purposely stolen. Polanski builds the suspense as the writer goes to the island compound to work on the book. The Blair-like ex-Prime Minister is holed up in the U.S. because he is being accused of war crimes associated with torturing suspected terrorists. As this is not a movie review, I will directly give away key plot points to introduce the subject of this article. There are several murders, including the ghost writer and the ex-prime minister, all to cover up the fact that this prime minister was controlled by the CIA through his wife. She was controlled and recruited into the agency by a Harvard professor who had made contacts with the English elite as a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University after graduating from Yale. It seems Polanski and Robert Harris, the co-author of the screen play, had been reading Carroll Quigley; or at least LRC.

Twenty, perhaps even ten-years-ago, I would have dismissed such a plot as unrealistic, where a conspiratorial clique within the government commits the highest crimes without second thoughts and with seeming impunity. Now I believe it is the most likely scenario to explain how the government really works. Consider the following recent posts on LRC.

An absolute must view is the presentation by Jesse Trentadue on the death of his brother Kenneth at the hands of the Federal authorities after the Oklahoma City bombing, the cover up of this murder, and his 17-year battle against the utterly corrupt and ill named Justice Department. What could only have been accomplished through sheer will power of epic proportions, Trentadue has uncovered the story of vast conspiracies within several government agencies that goes well beyond the case of mistaken identity that cost his brother his life. It also becomes clear how unimaginative are the minds of the bureaucrats that rule us, as they always use the same lame excuse of a prison suicide for so many convenient (for them) prison deaths.

Dr. Donald Miller discusses with Lew on a podcast the Kennedy assassinations; JFK, RFK, and even JFK Jr. The sheer mendacity of the whitewashing of facts and crimes is astounding; or would be if not for my years of reading LRC and other internet sites that now document these atrocities.

Another recent item that you could not makeup concerns military experiments uncovered by a professor at a St. Louis community college. It seems that in the 50s during the height of the cold war, army scientists secretly sprayed St. Louis with ‘radioactive’ particles for years to test chemical warfare technology. They chose as their primary guinea pigs the residents of a government housing project. The poor residents should have known that they were the subjects of a cruel social science experiment, even if they would not discover until decades later, if they survived, of the cruel military experiment.

I really liked this clip of a Washington policy wonk giving a short history of American enabling incidents; i.e., false-flag incidents or policies invoked to induce a response as an excuse for war. His message, these dishonest, unconstitutional, and immoral tactics really work, they have been applied to virtually all American wars, and we should now apply them to Iran.

Any and all of the alphabet soup of agencies can and will abuse power, from the obvious gross evils of the CIA, FBI, ATF, TSA, and IRS, to say nothing of the Pentagon; but I am sure if investigated properly one could find murder at all levels and departments. Look at how the Department of Agriculture raids farmers with the temerity to sell unpasteurized milk. In his imitable fashion Will Grigg recently described how the Forest Service was involved in the murder of a California man 20 years ago to gain control of his land. Have they been purchasing hollow point bullets like the rest of the agencies in the Federal bureaucracy? And of course it goes on through the state and local level governments. As Grigg regularly documents and as Peter Hitchens has eloquently stated, the police now serve the state, and not the people.

What to take away from this litany in fact and fiction, set any group in society apart to perform a function, with powers predicated on violence, and it will eventually lead to the type of abuses recounted here. In other words, always beware of the state, don't believe their lies.

The Best of Ira Katz