We Americans aren’t terribly good students of history. We are, in fact, more enamored with the myth of our country, and now, with the digital and artificial worlds of internet, movies and television, than we are with the actual history of our nation.
“America the beautiful; America, the land of opportunity; Anybody can grow up to be President; If you work hard and do good for others, you’ll rise to the top….”
Does anyone feel this dream is still alive? Did George W. Bush work hard and do good for others? He certainly did rise – or was pulled – to the top. What does that say about our actual nation? If a former addict, drop-out, and mass-executioner is the one chosen to “lead the country,” then we can dispel with the myth of “America the honest and just.” We have to examine the sources of power, and the history hidden just beneath the surface.
The actual history of the country is available, in plain sight, to anyone who wants to look. So much that is shocking is on the record, and so much more brought to the record through the Freedom of Information Act, that it’s a wonder we turn to The Bachelorette for entertainment. The history of our government is far more interesting.
We are, like the ancient Romans, fed “bread and circuses,” to distract us from reality. So-called “reality television” is, in fact, a distraction from that unseemly history that awaits the curious researcher. And here it is:
We’re not run by a government, so much as by a secret government. We call it many things – the national security state, the intelligence community, the corporate internationalists… but it began with one agency – The CIA.
It took less than six years from the CIA’s creation in 1947, (emerging from the wartime information gathering service, the OSS), to its toppling of its first sovereign foreign government – Iran – in 1953. The CIA ousted the elected leader, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, put it a royal puppet, The Shah, who set up a repressive police state, which tortured and murdered dissidents. Why? Because Iran wanted to nationalize its oil fields, and take them out of the hands of the Western oil barons.
Guatemala was next, in 1954. The CIA took that country apart, and fed it to murderous dictators, leaving a hundred thousand citizens murdered over 30 years. All because Guatemala’s leadership wanted to keep the fruit production in the hands of the people of Guatemala. CIA director Allen Dulles was on the board of the United Fruit Company, which was having its profit margin threatened by an independent Guatemala. And, with the sound of bombs falling on the capital, the CIA was there to say “no” to independence.
Southeast Asia followed, then the Congo in ’60, and Cuba in ’61 and on. In 1963, President John Kennedy had his head blown off on his parade route in Dallas, supposedly by a “lone gunman.” But examine the history.
Was Lee Harvey Oswald a lone nut? Or an ex-military, with military training in Russian, who was allowed to defect to Russia, marry the niece of a KGB colonel, then return to the US, to work in a map-making outfit that contracted with the US Army? He returned to New Orleans, where he spent his time working with known FBI and CIA agents and handlers – Guy Bannister, George de Mohrenschildt, Clay Shaw and David Ferrie.
So much for “lone nut.”
And who changed the parade route to go under tall buildings with open windows? Who was the Mayor of Dallas? It was Earle Caball – the brother of General Charles Caball, deputy director of the CIA – who was forced by Kennedy to resign, along with his superiors, Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell. Kennedy removed these top CIA men after the “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba. Kennedy said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
Kennedy was also pulling troops out of Vietnam, and wanted to end the war by 1965. What would that do to the hundreds of millions in weapons sales? What would that do to Pentagon budgets? We never got to find out…
We can trace the rise of today’s secret government power-brokers, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, through the seventies, and into the eighties, as the Iran-Contra CIA guns and drugs “scandal” was breaking in the press and the White House. Colonel Oliver North played the sacrificial lamb, with a twist – he sold many Americans on the notion that secret wars were alright, as long as the President wanted them to exist. Many today still buy this rhetoric.
We can fast forward to a day in September, when everything seemed to go wrong at once, and ask ourselves if there were not, indeed, any warnings, or if there shouldn’t have been any way to stop the planes that were tracked, long before they hit their intended targets. As Norman Mineta said, quoting Dick Cheney, as the plane got closer and closer to the Pentagon, and as the information was relayed to the V.P.: “Of course the orders still stand!”
The order to what? We’re not allowed to ask this question. We’re not permitted to ask why steel buildings can disintegrate outward and downward, like a pyroclastic volcanic flow, at free-fall speed, because of office fires. If we do, we’re labeled, “conspiracy theorists.”
But people who use this label aren’t interested in reality; they don’t want to forward investigation, discussion or understanding. Their goal is to suppress all of that. And so, we have to be more than conspiracy “theorists.” We must be conspiracy realists. Because conspiracy is real, it is how the world very often works. We know it from history; we know it from the hidden histories available to anyone who wants to look. Or, to quote Carroll Quigley, “Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.”
Let’s be conspiracy realists. The world demands it.
