HISTORY

The Rise of the Victims’-Rights Movement [Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, May 14, 2018]  

“This is not theatre,” Judge Richard Matsch announced on the first day of the trial of twenty-nine-year-old Timothy McVeigh in the daffodil spring of 1997. “This is a trial.”

McVeigh, charged with bombing the Alfred  P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City, two years earlier, stood accused of taking the lives of a hundred and sixty-eight people and injuring some seven hundred more in the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history. The blast demolished nearly half of the nine-story building, shattering its glass front and shearing off its north face. Rescue workers who raced to the scene could hear people moaning and crying, pinned beneath concrete slabs, impaled with steel girders, suffocating from dust. Jerry Flowers, an Oklahoma policeman, dug through rubble at what became known as the pit, near where, earlier that morning, there had been a day-care center. Someone handed him a small body, wrapped in a blanket. Flowers unwrapped the blanket. “He was a little boy, about five, six years old, and he had a Teddy bear on his shirt,” Flowers later said. “His face was gone.”

Many bodies were recovered in pieces. Kathleen Treanor’s elderly in-laws were taking care of her four-year-old daughter, Ashley, that day, and they’d stopped at the Murrah building for an appointment at the Social Security office. They were all killed. Months later, after a funeral with a closed casket, Treanor got a phone call from the medical examiner’s office.

“We have recovered a portion of Ashley’s hand,” the voice at the other end of the line said. “And we wanted to know if you wanted that buried in the mass grave, or if you would like to have it to do with what you need to do.”

“Of course I want it,” Treanor said. “It’s part of her and I need to have it where I know it is.”

The Oklahoma City bombing produced an unprecedented number of victims: thousands. Under terms established by the victims’-rights movement, that number included not only the dead and wounded but also grieving family members and devastated rescue workers. They had lost; they had suffered; they were haunted.

The victims’-rights movement, which began decades ago, has lately reached new heights. In November, voters in five states will decide on ballot-initiated victims’-rights amendments; activists hope, one day soon, to amend the U.S. Constitution. McVeigh’s trial marked the movement’s turning point. Many of the victims wanted to speak at the trial. The government fully expected a conviction, and decided to seek the death penalty, but hoped to avoid a trial like O.  J. Simpson’s, with its bloody footprints, its leather gloves, its preening attorneys—a media circus, a legal travesty. Matsch, sixty-six, wore cowboy boots beneath his robes. He kept a portrait of George Patton in his office. He had a Burt Reynolds mustache. He was known to be stern, efficient, and decisive. “Lance Ito he’s not,” the Washington Post reported.

The Simpson trial had blundered along for eight months; McVeigh’s, once it started, was over in six weeks. Matsch, spurning theatre, attempted to limit the victims’ role in the proceedings. He made it difficult for them to attend or watch the trial; he declared some of their evidence inadmissible and cautioned the jury about what are known as victim-impact statements, deeming them too emotional. He prohibited anyone involved in the trial from speaking to the press. At one point, when a prosecutor told the jury there would be included, in his evidence, several of the victims’ wedding photographs, Matsch cut him off: “No, there won’t.”

Few of the limits that Matsch imposed two decades ago would be imposed today, or could be, given changes in state and federal law. This winter, in a camera-cluttered courtroom in Michigan, during the sentencing of the former Olympics gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, convicted of sexual assault, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina allowed a hundred and fifty-six women to make victim-impact statements. In her court, Nassar, fifty-four, had been convicted of sexually assaulting only seven women. He had also already been sentenced to sixty years in prison on child-pornography charges. Nevertheless, nearly a hundred and fifty women spoke of the harm Nassar had done to them in committing crimes for which he had never been charged, delivering heartrending statements, broadcast live, over seven days. “I can’t imagine a punishment great enough for you,” the former gymnast Kamerin Moore told Nassar. Anna Ludes, a former Michigan State rower, said, “Because of Nassar, I have to spend the rest of my life trying to heal, and I want nothing more for him than to spend the rest of his life behind bars.” The women cried, and the Judge cried.

“I know that the world is watching,” Aquilina said, the day she sentenced Nassar to up to a hundred and seventy-five years in prison. She said she’d been gratified by the reaction to the televised and live-streamed proceedings on Twitter and Facebook. She congratulated the press. “I respect all of the media outlets, you have just done a fabulous job here.” She congratulated herself. “I give everybody a voice,” she said. “I give defendants a voice, their families when they’re here, I give victims a voice.”

Matsch spurned theatre; Aquilina turned her courtroom into a stage. American justice has been remade. Some of what happened in the Nassar trial is as new as #MeToo. Much of it is as old as stoning.

On February 20, 1996, Matsch had ruled that McVeigh’s trial would be moved from Oklahoma City to Denver, to insure an impartial jury. That made attending impossible for many victims, but Matsch’s ruling also presented the victims’-rights movement with an unparalleled opportunity. “When you have the Oklahoma bombing victims as your illustration, you have access to Congress,” the University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell told me. Cassell led a legal team advocating for the victims. At their urging, Congress, which was then considering an Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, added a provision requiring that if a trial is moved more than three hundred and fifty miles from the scene of a crime the federal courts (from which cameras are banned) have to make closed-circuit broadcast available to the victims. Matsch entertained arguments concerning the constitutionality of the provision. In the age of “Oprah,” which placed trauma at the center of American popular culture, both sides rested their arguments less on legal claims than on psychological ones. The prosecution insisted that the victims needed to attend the trial for purposes of therapy: “Part of their recovery depends on their seeing—first hand, if possible—our system of justice at work.” The defense suggested that the presence of the victims, or even of cameras, would unsettle jurors, subjecting them to “enormous psychological pressure” by reminding them that “a large, faceless group of grievously injured persons are depending on the jury to return the only verdict (guilty) and sentence (death) this group will find acceptable.”

Matsch grudgingly allowed the installation of a single camera, mounted at the back of the Denver courtroom, which captured a fixed-focus shot of the bench, the witness box, and the tables at which the defense and the prosecution sat. Twelve hundred people requested credentials to watch; eight hundred and thirty-two were allowed, taking turns occupying a three-hundred-and-twenty-seat auditorium in Oklahoma City.

Those seats were provided by the victims’-rights movement, the child of an unlikely marriage of conservatism and feminism. The movement usually dates its origins to 1975, when, with the aid of the Heritage Foundation, a lawyer named Frank  G. Carrington published a book called “The Victims.” But the movement really began in 1966, when Carrington founded Americans for Effective Law Enforcement, to protest what’s known as the due-process revolution. Between 1961 and 1966, the Warren Court issued a series of decisions that protected the rights of defendants, producing the Exclusionary Rule, which deems evidence obtained without a search warrant inadmissible; the requirement that police notify suspects of their rights; and the provision of court-appointed attorneys for defendants who can’t afford them. Carrington and other law-and-order conservatives, led by the California governor Ronald Reagan, argued that liberals on the Supreme Court, on judges’ benches, and in the legal academy were soft on crime. “For Law and Order” became a slogan of Richard Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign. “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” Nixon said, accepting the Republican nomination. “We hear sirens in the night.”

Against the noisiness of a (criminal) minority, Nixon posited the silent, victimized majority, a note his Administration sounded over and over. The minority had more rights than the majority; a balance had been lost. This led to talk of victims, whose voices needed to be heard. In 1970, Spiro Agnew complained that “the rights of the accused have become more important than the rights of victims in our courtrooms.” In 1971, Lewis Powell, whom Nixon had nominated to the Supreme Court, wrote that “the victims of crime have become the forgotten men of our society.” By 1972, when the Warren Court ruled the death penalty to be essentially unconstitutional, Carrington had coined the term “victims’ rights.” His book “The Victims” amounted to a manifesto against the Warren Court. William  F. Buckley’s brother James, a U.S. senator, supplied a foreword, which called for the restoration of the death penalty and complained about “a severe imbalance in favor of the rights of those accused of crime over the rights of those victimized by crime and of the public at large.”

This historical, restore-the-balance argument—the central tenet of the victims’-rights movement—is both superficially right and profoundly wrong. For centuries, criminal trials were, like civil ones, contests between individual parties: Victim  v. Defendant. By the early modern era, the state had become the prosecuting party in criminal trials, which then took the form of Crown  v. Defendant (and, in the United States, of State  v. Defendant). As John Locke pointed out, this change was foundational to civil society, in which, “all private judgment of every particular member being excluded, the community comes to be umpire, by settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties.” Wherever people yield to public authority the judgment and punishment of crime, Locke wrote, “there and there only is a political, or civil society.”

During the centuries when victims were gradually excluded from criminal proceedings, defendants didn’t have much of a role, either. Generally, defendants were not allowed counsel before the eighteenth century and could not offer sworn testimony before the end of the nineteenth century; most trials, in any case, lasted only about twenty minutes. Against the fearsome power of the state, defendants are nearly powerless, which is why most rules of evidence are designed to protect them, a principle central to the founding of the United States and embodied in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments and, later, in the Fourteenth. The rights of defendants are protections against the state, not harms done to victims.

At a pretrial hearing in October, 1996, Matsch attempted to explain this principle. Many victims who wanted to watch the trial also hoped to speak at the sentencing; Matsch was inclined to rule that they could not do both, and would have to make a choice, because watching the trial would have an effect on them, tainting their testimony. “I don’t see any way in which you can cabin that kind of emotion,” Matsch said. This struck a lot of victims as both heartless and senseless. “I have a hole in my head that’s covered with titanium,” a man who lost an eye in the blast said. “I think about it every minute of the day.” But when the prosecution complained that Matsch was favoring the rights of the defendant over the rights of the victims, Matsch objected to this formulation. “We’re not talking about defendants’ rights as such,” he answered. “We’re talking about the integrity of the process by which defendants are judged and the evidence is judged. And that’s the responsibility of a judge, and that’s the responsibility I’m attempting to meet by what seems as a very hard-hearted rule.” Matsch stuck with his decision.

“Nobody has said a good word about that ruling,” Cassell told me. “And it appeared to be in contravention of federal law.” Cassell helped the victims file an appeal with the Tenth Circuit, arguing that “the law should not be construed to thrust this terrible choice on victims, who have already suffered far too much.” While they waited for the appeals court’s final decision, the victims went, once again, to Washington.

Removing victims from criminal prosecutions had been the work of centuries; putting them back in has been the work of decades. In 1981, Reagan’s Justice Department appointed Carrington to a Task Force on Violent Crime and, in 1982, to the President’s Task Force on the Victims of Crime. Disavowing legal reasoning—“You cannot appreciate the victim problem if you approach it solely with your intellect” —the Task Force on the Victims of Crime recommended introducing victim-impact statements into sentencing and parole hearings. That year, a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee prepared a report called “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms,” establishing another means by which potential victims of crime could assert their rights: the subcommittee claimed to have discovered “clear—and long-lost—proof that the Second Amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.”

While gun-rights arguments met with objections, victims’-rights arguments generally did not. Many of the movement’s reforms—like requiring that courts notify victims of trial dates and allow them to attend—seemed sensible. Also, Carrington’s interests aligned with those of many feminists. For all the stability of the State  v. Defendant regime, the courts had for centuries slighted crimes against women, whose powerlessness before the state—in the form of an all-male bench and bar—really did rival that of criminal defendants. At the time, most prosecutors and judges appear to have believed that marital rape was not rape, domestic violence was a family affair, and sexual harassment was part of life. Rape convictions were extremely difficult to obtain. Both law-and-order conservatives and women’s-rights activists sought more aggressive prosecutions of and stricter sentences for rape and sexual assault, along with broad protections for victims, by deploying the language of victims’ rights. In New York, for instance, the campaign for victims’ rights was led by the longtime civil-rights activist Elizabeth Holtzman. As a member of Congress, Holtzman introduced a bill in 1976 to protect rape victims from cross-examination about their sexual history, and a Victims of Crime Act in 1979. Later, as a district attorney, she established a crime-victims counselling unit and introduced victim-impact statements at sentencing hearings. “For too long, the criminal-justice system ignored or mistreated victims,” Holtzman said in a speech before the New York City Task Force on Sexual Assault in 1987.

Because victims’ rights is a marriage of feminism and conservatism, the logic behind its signal victory, the victim-impact statement, rests on both the therapeutic, speak-your-truth commitment of a trauma-centered feminism and the punitive, lock-them-up imperative of law-and-order conservatism. Arguably, this has been a bad marriage.

The rise of victim-impact evidence can’t be understood apart from Reagan’s efforts to establish federal sentencing guidelines, and, more broadly, to refashion the federal judiciary. In the nineteen-eighties, when liberals dominated both the federal bench and the Supreme Court, Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, was determined to rid the courts of liberal justices and liberal jurisprudence. In the long term, that meant appointing new judges, but, in the short term, it meant constraining the power of old judges. In the first two years of Reagan’s first term, Congress considered more than two dozen bills limiting the authority of federal judges. In 1982, the Task Force on the Victims of Crime had recommended legislation “to abolish parole and limit judicial discretion in sentencing.” Two years later, Congress established a federal Sentencing Commission, which was supposed to figure out appropriate minimum and maximum sentences for certain crimes, but, even before receiving the commission’s recommendations, Congress went on a criminal-penalty binge, passing stricter and stricter sentencing laws: mandatory minimums. At least one federal judge resigned rather than comply. Bill Clinton, though, did not contest the sentencing guidelines. Instead, he joined the war on crime by signing an omnibus Crime Bill, which both expanded the number of crimes punishable by death and provided federal funding to fight violence against women.

The 1994 Crime Bill also included a ban on assault weapons. Timothy McVeigh, enthralled by the new interpretation of the Second Amendment, used the language of both the gun-rights and the victims’-rights movement to justify his crime. He blew up the Murrah building on the second anniversary of the A.T.F.’s assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in which seventy-six people were killed. Convinced that the American government was trying to disarm the American people, he also believed rumors of “Waco-style raids scheduled for the spring of 1995 to confiscate firearms.” He said that he bombed the Murrah building because the government, in declining to prosecute federal and state agents involved in Waco, had “failed the victims who died during that siege.”

After the reeling, gut-punch horror of Oklahoma City, no one in Clinton’s Administration had a word to say against the victims’-rights movement. Feeling other people’s pain, after all, was Clinton’s trademark. “You are my heroes and heroines,” Attorney General Janet Reno said at a victims’-rights conference in August, 1996. “You are but little lower than angels.” That fall, the more Matsch limited the role played by victims in the McVeigh trial, the more traction the movement gained with the public. Eight states joined nineteen others on Election Day in 1996 in adding victims’-rights provisions to their state constitutions. With Reno’s support, Bill Clinton, standing in the Rose Garden, endorsed a victims’-rights amendment to the Constitution, jointly proposed by the California senator Dianne Feinstein and the Arizona senator Jon Kyl. “When a judge balances the rights of the accused and the rights of the victim,” Clinton said, “we want the rights of the victim to get equal weight.” He might have been Spiro Agnew.

On March 11, 1997, the Tenth Circuit upheld Matsch’s ruling that victims who wanted to watch the trial could not also speak at the sentencing. Eight days later, Congress essentially overruled the circuit court by passing the Victim Rights Clarification Act, decreeing that no district court could order victims to make such a choice. Clinton signed the bill on March 20th. Matsch largely ignored it, not least because it was by no means clear that Congress had the power to tell him how to run a trial.

Jury selection began on March 31, 1997. On June 2nd, after deliberating for nearly twenty-four hours, the jury found McVeigh guilty. Many of the victims shed tears of relief. Robbin Huff was almost eight months pregnant with her first child when she was murdered by McVeigh. “It would have taken members of many victims’ families 10 seconds to reach the verdict,” Huff’s uncle wrote, “which is why we would have made terrible jurors.”

On June 4th, the first day of the trial’s sentencing phase, the victims began to speak. Other victims had spoken during the guilt phase of the trial, as eyewitnesses. These victims, though, spoke about harm, in statements the jury would consider to be aggravating evidence, as against the mitigating evidence presented by the defense. (McVeigh’s family pleaded for his life to be spared, and his attorneys introduced family snapshots.) The lead attorney for the prosecution, Patrick Ryan, gathered the victims at the back of the courtroom, where they all held hands. Then he turned to the jury. “We present this information on behalf of the United States not to evoke your sympathy,” he said. “The victims of this crime have had all of the sympathy they can stand in the last two years.”

The state brought victims to address the jury at McVeigh’s sentencing and to support its request for the death penalty, which, though all but abolished in 1972, had been reinstated by the Supreme Court four years later, in Gregg  v. Georgia. Still, recognizing that “death is different,” Gregg required that the sentencing phase of a capital trial be separated from the determination of guilt or innocence. Once a jury reaches a verdict, the rules of evidence change, in the sense that most of them no longer apply. There is no cross-examination, for instance, and there are no prohibitions on evidence about character or past misconduct. Also, the standard of evidence drops from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to a “preponderance of evidence.” Post-Gregg, the courts require what is sometimes called “super due process” in death-penalty cases, given the gravity of the punishment.

For a long time, as the Court tried to hammer all this out, victim-impact evidence was inadmissible in death-penalty cases, an exclusion that the Court had twice upheld. In 1987, in Booth  v. Maryland, the Court ruled victim-impact evidence in a capital trial to be unconstitutional, a violation of the Eighth Amendment. After John Booth was convicted of murdering an elderly couple, the couple’s son, daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter talked about their grief. Booth’s attorney tried to have the evidence suppressed, calling it “both irrelevant and unduly inflammatory.” In a 5–4 ruling, the Court agreed, and suggested that its introduction could turn the sentencing phase of a capital trial into “a ‘mini-trial’ on the victim’s character.” Antonin Scalia, a Reagan appointee who had only just joined the Court (Cassell had clerked for him from 1984 to 1985, when Scalia was a judge for the D.C. Circuit), wrote a blistering dissent:

Many citizens have found one-sided and hence unjust the criminal trial in which a parade of witnesses comes forth to testify to the pressures beyond normal human experience that drove the defendant to commit his crime, with no one to lay before the sentencing authority the full reality of human suffering the defendant has produced.

Two years later, the Court upheld this decision, 5–4. Then, in 1991, in Payne  v. Tennessee, the Court reversed itself.

Pervis Tyrone Payne murdered Charisse Christopher and her two-year-old daughter, Lacie. During sentencing, Charisse’s mother delivered a heartbreaking victim-impact statement, and the jury sentenced Payne to death. In a 6–3 opinion, written by Chief Justice Rehnquist, the Court deemed victim-impact evidence “simply another form or method of informing the sentencing authority about the specific harm caused by the crime in question.” A victim should not be a “faceless stranger,” Rehnquist insisted. To right the balance in the sentencing phase of a capital criminal trial, courts should admit a “quick glimpse of the life the defendant chose to extinguish” and let prosecutors convey “the loss to the victim’s family and to society which has resulted from the defendant’s homicide.”

It was Thurgood Marshall’s turn to dissent. The Court, he noted, did not ordinarily reverse course so quickly. What changed was “neither the law nor the facts” but “only the personnel of this Court.” In his view, victim-impact evidence draws “the jury’s attention away from the character of the defendant and the circumstances of the crime to such illicit considerations as the eloquence with which family members express their grief and the status of the victim in the community.” Legal scholars tended to agree. A leading critic, the DePaul law professor Susan Bandes, wrote that victim-impact statements “appeal to hatred, the desire for undifferentiated vengeance, and even bigotry,” and “may block the sentencer’s ability to perceive the essential humanity of the defendant.” Moreover, she argued, “in their insistence on evaluating the worth of the victims,” victim-impact statements “offend the dignity of the victim as well.”

In both capital and non-capital cases, victim-impact evidence has been shown to affect sentencing: that’s why prosecutors introduce it. Research also suggests that, though victims of violent crime are disproportionately poor and nonwhite, white victims are twice as likely as black victims to make victim-impact statements. Where jurors identify victims as “respectable,” they tend to identify with them (finding their lives to be similar to their own), while they rarely identify with defendants (whose lives tend to be very different from theirs). Jurors also report being less compelled by victim-impact statements made by black victims than by those made by white victims. And victim-impact evidence appears to amplify the commonly held prejudice that people with darker skin are more “deathworthy.” Finally, Bandes explains, the statements leave judges wondering whether, for example, they are supposed to mete out a more severe punishment on behalf of the rape victim who gives a more compelling statement.

Plainly, Matsch was worried. “We have to guard this hearing to ensure that the ultimate result and the jury’s decision is truly a moral response to appropriate information rather than an emotional response,” he warned. He wanted a verdict and a sentence that would stick. He attempted to follow the test established in Payne: victim-impact evidence can be admitted in a capital case unless it is so “unduly prejudicial that it renders the trial fundamentally unfair.” But, as Bandes and Jessica Salerno, a psychologist at Arizona State, have argued, it’s hard to say what lies between probative value and prejudicial force: “If the probative purpose of the evidence is to evoke the life lost with vividness and particularity, what is the measure of undue prejudice?” Isn’t the whole point of this kind of evidence to stir the emotions?

Nor have clear guidelines been established about the form, quantity, or use of victim-impact evidence. Some of the things admitted as victim-impact evidence, including testimony that the victim was an excellent piano player, was “good honest hardworking God fearing people,” was a “smart person with higher IQ than others in her family” or had “a 3.8 grade point average,” would appear to advance the fundamentally anti-democratic notion that the lives of the eloquent, the intelligent, the beautiful, the cherished are more worthy of the full protection of the law than others.

How much evidence is enough, or too much? Challenges in some states have sought to limit admissible victim-impact witnesses to numbers that range from three to eleven, but, effectively, the number is limitless. What kind of evidence is allowed? Courts have admitted poems, “handcrafted items made by the victim,” “letters children wrote to their murdered mother,” and “photographs of the stillborn child victim dressed in clothes that the victim-mother had intended him to wear home from the hospital.” Judges often report that they themselves find it difficult to recover their emotional equilibrium after hearing victim-impact statements. Sorrow knows no bottom.

Matsch struggled to draw a line. He questioned people who had attended the trial, one by one, before allowing them to give victim-impact evidence. “A penalty-phase hearing cannot be turned into some kind of a lynching,” he announced, explaining that he would exclude testimony that would inflame “the passions of the jury with respect to vengeance or the passions of the jury with respect to empathy for grief.” He agreed to let a ten-year-old boy testify about the loss of his mother, but only after being assured that the boy would not cry. He ruled as inadmissible poems, wedding photographs, and memorial videos, and “a photograph of a mother releasing a dove, in lieu of a funeral, because her child’s body was not yet found.” He did allow a video of a day in the life of Brandon Denny, who was three when the bomb went off. A ceiling tile had pierced the child’s skull and, at the time of the trial, he had undergone seven brain surgeries.

Memorial videos, initially a product of the funeral industry, have proved particularly controversial. In Hicks  v. State (1997), the prosecution introduced a fourteen-minute montage of a hundred and sixty photographs spanning the victims’ life from infancy. The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld its admission. In Salazar  v. State (2002), the prosecution, in a Texas case, introduced a seventeen-minute video of a hundred and forty photographs (almost half of which depicted the victim in infancy or early childhood, including with a puppy), set to music, including Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” Both the trial and the appeals courts deemed it admissible; a higher-level state appeals court did not. In Kelly  v. California (2008), the prosecution introduced a twenty-two-minute video about the life of Sara Nokomis Weir, who, at age nineteen, was murdered by a personal trainer who worked at the gym she frequented. The montage of stills and video footage is mostly narrated by Weir’s mother; the soundtrack includes recordings of Enya. The trial court admitted the video, and the California Supreme Court upheld the decision, noting that the video illustrated the victim’s pleasing “demeanor”: “Sara appears at all times to be reserved, modest, and shy—sometimes shunning the camera.” Although the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review this and another case, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer both disagreed with the decision. “The videos added nothing relevant to the jury’s deliberations and invited a verdict based on sentiment, rather than reasoned judgment,” Stevens wrote.

The use of such videos has led not only to the “mini-trial” on the victim’s character that the Court had warned about but also to a mini film festival. Offenders make videos, too. Sentencing-mitigation videos are the product of a for-profit industry. For about twenty thousand dollars, a filmmaker will pull together family photographs, home videos, narration, and music, in an attempt to paint the offender in a sympathetic light. “Our job is to make judges suffer,” one filmmaker says. In one recent sentencing-mitigation video, a friend of a convicted kidnapper says, “Joseph as a person, exempting this one situation, is an outstanding person, and outstanding friend, son, and outstanding pillar for his family. When you think about that word, ‘kidnapping,’ and you think about what it entailed, it doesn’t fit Joseph at all.” Videos from opposing sides can look uncannily alike. In State  v. Leon (2006), the prosecution introduced a four-and-a-half-minute video of Angie Leon, who was murdered by her husband, Abel Leon. Most of the images and footage showed Angie and her three young children, often with their father. The video was meant to chronicle the children’s loss of their mother, and the Idaho Court of Appeals allowed it on these grounds. But, if their father was sentenced to death, they would lose him, too. As the University of Pennsylvania law professor Regina Austin has pointed out, either side could have used the film to equal effect. There are concerns, too, about new forms of digital evidence—PowerPoint slides, a Facebook time line, a digitally enhanced reconstruction of the crime, an augmented-reality program in which jurors endure the suffering of the victim of a violent crime, and more. The lack of rules leads to a technologically enhanced battle for the court’s sympathy. Cassell finds this objection specious. He asks, “If the defendant gets to use augmented reality, why can’t I? The point from the victims’ perspective is an equality point. If this is too emotional and too overpowering and too glossy and slick to go into our court system, then make that point, but don’t make it only about victim evidence.” Still, judges struggle with the problem of how to prepare jurors for what they’re about to see and hear. In 2003, after Gary Sampson was convicted of three premeditated murders in Massachusetts, the judge warned jurors, as the sentencing phase began, not to “permit the victims’ families’ testimony to overwhelm your ability to follow the law,” even as he instructed a clerk to hand out Kleenex.

In 1997, at McVeigh’s sentencing, Matsch addressed the jurors. “We’re not here to seek revenge on Timothy McVeigh,” he told them. “We’re here to consider these lives, what’s happened to these people.” Thirty-eight victims made their statements. They had lost; they had suffered; they were haunted.

“I feel like my heart looks like that building,” Diane Leonard said, about the death of her husband, Donald  R. Leonard, a Secret Service agent. Kathleen Treanor told the story about Ashley, and the phone call, and the tiny hand; Jerry Flowers remembered unwrapping a blanket to find a child without a face. David Klaus talked about the loss of his daughter, Kimberly Burgess, twenty-nine, who worked in the credit union on the third floor of the Murrah building. “There is just this huge hole in my heart that is never going to get filled up,” he said. “I think about her first thing in the morning, and the last thing I think about at night is Kim and the fact I’m never going to see her again.” Mathilda Westberry, whose husband, F.B.I. Special Agent Robert Glenn Westberry, fifty-seven, had been killed, talked about her four-year-old grandson, David, who could not understand what happened to Papa. Laura Sue Kennedy had lost her only son; he was eighteen months old. “Blake was my life,” she said. Alan Prokop, an Oklahoma City police officer, described holding the hand of a woman who died pinned beneath a slab of concrete. It was Prokop who had found little Brandon Denny. “He had a brick sticking out of his forehead,” Prokop said, and “was holding a little green block.”

The witnesses cried, the jury cried, the Judge cried. “We have to be careful and not let ourselves be overly stimulated by some of the testimony that we’ve heard here,” Matsch told the jury. Before calling the first witness, Ryan, the prosecutor, told them, “It would be easy for you as a jury to think of this as one mass murder. Don’t. There are a hundred and sixty-eight people, all unique, all individuals, all had families, all had friends, and they’re different. They went to church, they coached Little League, they designed highways, they liked to watch their children dance, they tried to prevent disease, they played on their beds with their kids.”

On June 13, 1997, the jury sentenced Timothy McVeigh to death. Outside the Murrah building, where victims and family members had gathered by a chain-link fence next to the rubble, they sang “God Bless America.”

In a national conversation about criminal-justice reform, the Reagan-to-Clinton-era guidelines for federal sentencing have been questioned, but the gains of the victims’-rights movement are generally taken for granted. Thirty-two states have passed victims’-rights amendments; five more ballot initiatives may pass in November. Once enough states have acted, activists will again press for a federal amendment. The last time the measure reached Congress, one of the prosecutors in the Oklahoma City bombing case argued against it (victims had tried to prevent one of McVeigh’s associates from signing a plea agreement in exchange for his testimony against McVeigh, which proved crucial in the trial). Cassell believes that there is much more work to be done. The movement’s latest campaigns would expand the range of victim-impact evidence allowed in both capital and non-capital cases, and more strictly enforce victims’ rights that are already on the books. In the age of #MeToo, victims’ rights are making remarkable political headway, for many of the same reasons they did after the Oklahoma City bombing. Tragedy is a fierce tailwind. And, as Susan Bandes puts it, “Nobody really wants to have to tell victims, or survivors of violent crime, that they cannot be heard.”

Critics remain. Nancy Gertner, a former district-court judge from Massachusetts, is among those who have questioned Judge Aquilina’s conduct at Larry Nassar’s sentencing. Gertner told me, “The question is whether the victims needed that, as bloodletting, and the question is should the justice system allow that? Or is it a throwback to public hanging?” Scott Sundby, a former prosecutor who studies capital juries, told me that the Nassar sentencing reminded him of Biblical punishments. “Hey, we all get to pick up a rock and throw it at this person!”

Sundby says that victim-impact evidence has changed how juries think about the death penalty. In jury rooms, they ask, “How can we go out and look the mother in the eye unless we give a death penalty?” Among the achievements of the victims’-rights movement is the fact that victim-impact evidence is no longer much questioned. Sundby thinks that’s because people gave up trying to argue that the courts are wholly rational. He says, “The legal system has cried ‘Uncle.’  ”

Such critics are careful to note the important reforms ushered in by the victims’-rights movement (which generally fall under the heading of victims’ services). “When this movement was first starting, I was a prosecutor,” Sundby told me, “and all of a sudden it made me much more cognizant that there are people who have a stake in this case and justice needs to be done.”

Raphael Ginsberg, who runs a prison-education program through the University of North Carolina and has written a history of the victims’-rights movement, takes a darker view. He sees the movement as part of a larger conservative attack on expertise and on the notion of a public good. It’s as if it came down to this: Don’t trust the mainstream media, don’t trust intellectuals, don’t trust judges: protect yourself and your family and your freedoms; buy a gun; speak your truth.

Not everyone finds relief in a courtroom, but many people who have endured a violent crime or lost someone they loved report feeling tremendous catharsis after having the chance to describe their suffering in court. Those who worry about the practice say that there should at least be better, fairer, and more clearly enforced rules about doing it. “If we really do think it’s important for victims in a courtroom to be able to do this,” Bandes says, “let’s take it seriously, and figure out how to get courts to do it right.”

Something was buried beneath the rubble in Oklahoma City, and it has never been found. Parkland is the next population of victims poised to mount the witness stand, in another unprecedented slaughter. So far, they’ve been mounting other sorts of podiums. The students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School hardly ever talk about the shooter, at least in public. They don’t seem particularly eager to attend his trial, if there is a trial. Maybe they’ll leave it to the state to conduct a prosecution. Meanwhile, they’re having their say, in their own way. They are asking for an end to a set of arrangements under which what was once civil society has become a state of war.  

Perverted Justice - Sex offender laws represent the triumph of outrage over reason. [Jacob Sullum, Reason, June. 14, 2011]

“If we had been aware of his record,” says Maureen Kanka, “my daughter would be alive today.” She is referring, in a statement on the website of an anti-crime group she founded, to Jesse Timmendequas, a neighbor in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, who raped and murdered her 7-year-old daughter, Megan, in 1994. Three months later, the state legislature enacted Megan’s Law, which created a publicly accessible registry of sex offenders.

“Without the registry,” says Shirley Turner, “he would still be alive today.” She is referring, in a 2006 interview with Human Rights Watch, to her 24-year-old son, William Elliot. He was murdered that year by a pedophile-hunting Canadian gunman who found his name and address in Maine’s online database of sex offenders. Elliot’s crime: When he was 19, he had sex with his girlfriend, who was three weeks shy of 16, the age of consent in Maine.

The panic that followed Megan Kanka’s murder produced an alarm system that often fails to distinguish between dangerous predators like Timmendequas, who had a record of assaulting little girls, and nonviolent lawbreakers like Elliot, who posed no discernible threat to the general public. They are all mixed together in the online registries of sex offenders that every state is required to maintain as a condition of receiving federal law enforcement funding—a mandate imposed by another Megan’s Law, enacted by Congress in 1996.

Registration only rarely leads to murder, but it routinely ruins relationships, triggers ostracism and harassment, and impedes education and employment. These burdens are compounded by state and local laws that ban sex offenders from living near schools, parks, day care centers, and other locations where children congregate. Such restrictions, which often apply even if an offender’s crime had nothing to do with children, can be so extensive that entire cities are effectively off limits. In Miami local residence restrictions have given rise to a colony of more than 70 sex offenders who live under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, a bridge that crosses Biscayne Bay.

Some sex offenders, including nonviolent ones, will not live to see the underside of a bridge because they receive sentences that keep them behind bars until they die. Two decades of ever-more-punitive legislation have produced sentencing rules so bizarre and byzantine that the punishment for possessing images of sexually abused children can be more severe than the punishment for sexually abusing them. And even prisoners  who complete their sentences may not go free, since the federal government and about half of the states have laws authorizing the indefinite civil commitment of sex offenders who would otherwise be released.

American policies regarding sex offenders mark them as a special category of criminals for whom no stigma is too crippling, no regulations are too restrictive, and no penalty is too severe. This attitude, driven by fear and outrage, is fundamentally irrational, and so are its results, which make little sense in terms of justice or public safety. Like the lustful predators of their nightmares, Americans pondering the right way to deal with sex offenders seem captive to their passions.

‘I Am on the Registry for Having Premarital Sex’

The public branding of sex offenders through online registries is a reaction to horrible, highly publicized crimes, such as Megan Kanka’s murder, in which strangers abduct, rape, and kill children. But this sort of crime is exceedingly rare. Data from the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey indicate that more than 90 percent of sexually abused minors are assaulted by relatives or acquaintances—people they trust. (According to the same survey, strangers commit just one in four sexual assaults on adults. They commit only 14 percent of sexual assaults reported to police.) Furthermore, according to a 1997 Justice Department study, nearly nine out of 10 people arrested for sex offenses have no prior convictions for this category of crime, so they would not show up in sex offender registries.

Meanwhile, the people on sex offender lists may pose little or no threat. A 2007 report by Human Rights Watch found that “at least 28 states require registration as a sex offender for someone convicted of having consensual sex with another teenager, if the offender was either age 17 or two years older than the other party.” Eleven states set no minimum age difference. “It’s one thing if you are a 40-year-old having sex with a 13-year-old,” says the report’s co-author and editor, Jamie Fellner, senior adviser to the U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch. “It’s another thing if you’re a 17-year-old boy having sex with your 16-year-old or 15-year-old girlfriend. Registration as a sex offender is just completely inappropriate there, does nothing to promote public safety, but ruins lives.”

A man who was convicted of statutory rape when he was 16 for having consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend told Human Rights Watch: “We were in love. And now we are married. So it’s like I am on the registry for having premarital sex. Does having premarital sex make me a danger to society? My wife doesn’t think so.”

The Human Rights Watch report also found that at least five states required registration for offenses related to adult prostitution, at least 13 required registration for public urination, and at least 32 required registration for exposing one’s genitals in public. And from the information given in a registry, which typically is limited to a vague legal description of the offense, it is often hard to tell what someone did to end up there. “Without any further information, it is difficult to provide reasonable steps that people can take to help keep themselves safe,” says Maia Christopher, executive director of the Association for Treatment of Sexual Abusers. “Just knowing that there is someone living next door to you who’s committed a sexual offense doesn’t necessarily give you enough information to know what you’re supposed to do about it.” In fact, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Connecticut’s sex offender registry in 2003, it did so partly because the state expressly disavowed any claims about the “current dangerousness” of the people in its electronic pillory, which meant they did not have a due process right to a hearing on that question.  

Consider the case of Tony Washington, a promising college football player whose professional career was derailed by a conversation-stopping offense he committed almost a decade ago: At the age of 16, he had consensual sex with his 15-year-old sister. A 2010 profile of Washington in ESPN magazine explained the context of this forbidden liaison: a troubled, dispiriting childhood in the rougher sections of New Orleans, where Washington was constantly threatened by violence and had few sources of emotional support. Although he overcame a deprived background to become a star player at Abilene Christian University in Texas, his taboo-breaking transgression has deterred professional teams from drafting him and will mark him until the day he dies.

If you search for Washington’s name in the Texas sex offender registry or the U.S. Justice Department’s nationwide database, you will see photographs, a physical description, his date of birth, and his home address. His offense is listed as “prohibited sexual conduct,” which most people, given the context, will assume refers to some sort of predatory crime. Few people will bother to look up the Texas statute explaining that consensual sex with several different kinds of relatives, including adopted siblings and first cousins, qualifies for this label, triggering the same lifelong registration requirement that applies to rapists and child molesters. (On its face, the law even covers sex between first cousins who were legally married in one of the 25 states that allow such unions.) Whatever you may think of Washington’s crime, it hardly marks him as a public menace whom women and children should fear, let alone as someone who will be a danger to others even when he is old and infirm.

Washington’s case illustrates another way in which the legal treatment of sex offenders is unusual. Although the records of juvenile offenses typically are sealed, sex registration is public, and it applies even to people who, like Washington, committed their offenses as teenagers or children. According to The Dallas Morning News, the sex offender registry in Texas, where Washington lives, includes about 4,000 people who were minors when they committed their crimes, a quarter of whom were under 14. Human Rights Watch interviewed the father of a 10-year-old boy accused of touching his 5-year-old cousin’s genitals. “My son doesn’t really understand what sex is,” he told the group, “so it’s hard to help him understand why he has to register as a sex offender.” This policy of tarring minors as sex offenders undermines a central aim of the juvenile justice system by burdening people with the mistakes of their youth for the rest of their lives.  

‘No Area in Town Is Available to Live In’

Like registration, residence restrictions are ostensibly aimed at protecting potential victims from known sex offenders, in this case by creating a geographical buffer. But the logic of these rules, which have been adopted by more than 20 states and hundreds of municipalities, is hard to understand. “I don’t know of any research that suggests the residency restrictions are effective,” says Christopher. “People don’t necessarily offend where they live.”

In 2005 Iowa banned people convicted of sex offenses involving minors from living within 2,000 feet of a school or day care center. Almost immediately, the ban prompted complaints from police and prosecutors, who worried that the residence restrictions were so burdensome that they discouraged sex offenders from pleading guilty and from registering after conviction, making them impossible to track. In a 2006 statement, the Iowa County Attorneys Association said the law “does not provide the protection that was originally intended” and called for its repeal, citing “the cost of enforcing the requirement and the unintended effects on families of offenders.” After the law took effect, the number of sex offenders whose whereabouts were unknown more than doubled. The prosecutors reported that “the residency restriction is causing offenders to become homeless, to change residences without notifying authorities of their new locations, to register false addresses or to simply disappear.”

Jerry Behn, the Republican state senator who introduced the law, conceded that he might have gotten carried away. “If you draw a map, pretty soon you can make it so no area in town is available to live in,” Behn told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2006. “It would have been better if we had put it at 1,000 feet.” In 2009 the legislature replaced the 2,000-foot rule with a law prohibiting anyone convicted of “a sex offense against a minor” from working at a school or day care center, visiting an elementary school or day care center without permission, or loitering within 300 feet of a facility intended primarily for use by children.

Iowa’s unhappy experience with residence restrictions did not deter Georgia legislators from enacting an even more onerous set of rules in 2006. Their law, which extended existing residence restrictions, banned all registered sex offenders (not just those who had committed crimes against children) from living, working, or loitering within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, child care facilities, or other places where minors congregate, including parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, skating rinks, and school bus stops. Even a sex offender who did not currently live within one of these exclusion zones could be forced to move in the future, depending on how his neighbors decided to use their property. For the law’s sponsors, its indiscriminate breadth was a feature, not a bug. Georgia House Majority Leader Jerry Keen (R-St. Simons) said he hoped sex offenders “will want to move to another state.”

Under the 2006 law, all 490 registered sex offenders in DeKalb County, most of them men who as teenagers had consensual sex with younger girls, were required to move because their residences were within 1,000 feet of a covered location. The law applied even to sex offenders dying in nursing homes. One Georgia woman, labeled a sex offender because she performed fellatio on a 15-year-old boy when she was 17, had to move in 2005 because she was too close to a day care center. When the legislature added school bus stops to the list of prohibited locations in 2006, her new home became illegal as well.

In 2007 the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the residence restrictions, citing the perpetual insecurity they created. The court was responding to a lawsuit by Anthony Mann, who in 2002 was sentenced to four months in jail and five years of probation for flashing two minors during a business trip to North Carolina. In 2003 Mann married and bought a house in Hampton, Georgia. At the time, it was a legal location. But then a day care center opened nearby, rendering his residence illegal. “Under the terms of that statute,” the state Supreme Court noted, “there is no place in Georgia where a registered sex offender can live without being continually at risk of being ejected.” Concluding that the law “precludes appellant from having any reasonable investment-backed expectation in any property purchased as his private residence,” the court unanimously ruled that it violated the Fifth Amendment’s ban on uncompensated takings of private property.

The Georgia law also prevented Mann from working at a barbecue restaurant in Lovejoy that he co-owned, since it was within 1,000 feet of a day care center that opened after the restaurant was established. But because Mann did not present enough evidence of economic harm, the Georgia Supreme Court did not overturn the law’s work restrictions.

‘A 90 Percent Likelihood of Recidivism’

Constitutional issues aside, closing off employment opportunities for sex offenders, who are already handicapped by criminal records and public registration, does not seem like an effective way of encouraging them to put their lives in order. Neither does forcing ex-convicts to cluster in the boondocks, far from jobs, family, churches, and treatment programs.

“Once someone is zoned out that far, a lot of the resources that help reduce the risk to reoffend are taken away,” says Maia Christopher. “People who are coming out of prison, who have whatever deficits and risk factors they have, are put into situations that really high-functioning people would find very challenging. I don’t think anybody finds it particularly easy to be living under a bridge. When you have someone who’s already got a lot of issues, part of what we’re doing is increasing that challenge. Once you make the restrictions so broad, you tend to take away a lot of the resources that we know help keep people safe, such as community stability, employment, family services, spiritual support—the relationships that help people stay crime-free.”

Human Rights Watch’s Jamie Fellner likewise argues that the rules aimed at discouraging sex offenders from committing new crimes can produce the opposite effect. “One of the most powerful things that keep people from breaking the law is a sense of what they will lose if they do,” she says. “If you’re treating someone like a cur, a dog that is being kicked out of the village, how are you strengthening that person’s desire or ability to follow the law?”

Politicians who push ever-harsher laws routinely argue that sex offenders are almost certain to commit new offenses anyway. “The rate of recidivism for these crimes is astronomical because these people are compulsive,” said Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.) in 1994, making the case for the federal Megan’s Law. In 2005 Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), later notorious for sending sexually suggestive email messages to teenage pages, claimed: “There is a 90 percent likelihood of recidivism for sexual crimes against children. Ninety percent. That is the standard. That is their record. That is the likelihood. Ninety percent.” His source may have been California Assemblyman Bill Hoge (R-Pasadena), who in 1996 told The New York Times that child molesters, upon being released from prison, “will immediately commit this crime again at least 90 percent of the time.”

There is no basis for these numbers. “Though often thought of as the most persistent and dangerous criminals, sex offenders are among the least likely criminals to recidivate,” write Florida Institute of Technology psychologist Timothy Fortney and three co-authors in a 2007 article published by the journal Sexual Offender Treatment. A 2003 Justice Department study of 9,700 sex offenders found that 5 percent were arrested for new sex crimes within three years of being released from prison. (By comparison, 23 percent of burglars were arrested for new burglaries, and 22 percent of people who had served time for nonsexual assault were arrested for new assaults.) Studies that cover longer periods find higher recidivism rates for sex offenders, but still nothing like those claimed by panic-promoting politicians. Two meta-analyses of studies involving a total of 29,000 sex offenders, published by the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1998 and 2005, found a recidivism rate of 14 percent after four to six years. A study of 4,700 sex offenders, published by Public Safety Canada in 2004, found that 24 percent were charged with a new sex crime over a period of 15 years.

Since the National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that most sex crimes go unreported, these numbers do not tell the whole story. But Karl Hanson, a senior research officer at Public Safety Canada who co-authored many of the recidivism studies, believes the unreported sex crimes largely fall into two broad categories: those deemed too minor to bother calling the police (such as a drunken groping at a party) and those involving relatives or trusted members of the victim’s social network—neither of which fit the pattern that legislators have in mind when they argue that registration, public notification, and residence restrictions can help protect children and women from attacks by strangers.

The research on recidivism helped change the mind of at least one prominent advocate of sex offender registries. In 1989 Patty Wetterling’s 11-year-old son, Jacob, was kidnapped by a masked gunman while riding his bike home from a convenience store in St. Joseph, Minnesota. He has not been seen since. The crime inspired the 1994 Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act, the federal law that created the state registries that Megan’s Law made publicly accessible two years later. “The high recidivism rates I assumed to be true do not exist,” Patty Wetterling told Human Rights Watch in 2007. “It has made me rethink the value of broad-based community notification laws, which operate on the assumption that most sex offenders are high-risk dangers to the community they are released into.”

Looking vs. Touching

People convicted of molesting children have demonstrated a dangerous proclivity, even if they are less likely to repeat the crime than is popularly believed. But what about people who are convicted of possessing child pornography? Although conventional wisdom assumes child-porn consumers are undiscovered or future molesters, that assumption is also wrong.

This year Michael Seto, a psychologist who advises the Integrated Forensic Program of the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, published a study of this question, co-authored by Karl Hanson and Kelly M. Babchishin of Public Safety Canada, in the journal Sexual Abuse. Seto, Hanson, and Babchishin performed meta-analyses of 24 studies that looked at the criminal histories of “online offenders” (mainly consumers of child pornography) and eight studies that calculated their recidivism rates. They found that one in eight had an official record of committing a contact offense. In the six studies that included self-report data (drawn from treatment sessions and polygraph examinations), one in two child pornography offenders admitted to having sexual contact with children.  

Looking forward, Seto says, “C.P. offenders are relatively unlikely to commit contact offenses in the studies that have followed them.” Over all, the recidivism studies indicate that only 2 percent of child pornography offenders committed a sexual offense involving physical contact during the follow-up period, which ranged from 18 months to six years. In short, says Hanson, “there does exist a distinct group of offenders who are Internet-only and do not present a significant risk for hands-on sex offending.”  

Why would anyone look at this horrible stuff if he was not inclined to imitate it? Troy Stabenow, an assistant federal public defender in Missouri who is a prominent critic of child pornography sentencing policies, put it this way in a 2009 interview with ABA Journal: “People who watch movies like Saw and Friday the 13th are being titillated by the act of torture and murder. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to go out and commit torture and murder.”

Dean Boland, an Ohio defense attorney specializing in child pornography cases, says a substantial share of defendants were themselves victims of sexual abuse as children and look at these images as a way of working through the trauma. He recalls one client, a 65-year-old former pastor who received a sentence of more than 17 years, saying, “When I’m looking at these images, I’m not envisioning myself as the adult. I’m envisioning myself as the kid.”

Yet the legal treatment of people caught with child pornography is so harsh that they can end up serving longer sentences than people who actually abuse children. Under federal law, receiving child pornography, which could mean downloading a single image, triggers a mandatory minimum sentence of five years—the same as the penalty for distributing it. Merely looking at a picture can qualify someone for the same charge, assuming he does so deliberately and is aware that Web browsers automatically make copies of visited sites. In practice, since the Internet is almost always the source of child pornography, this means that viewing and possession can be treated the same as trafficking. The maximum penalty for receiving or distributing child porn is 20 years, and federal sentencing guidelines recommend stiff enhancements based on factors that are extremely common in these cases, such as using a computer, possessing more than 600 images (with each video clip counted as 75 images), and exchanging photos for something of value, including other photos.

In a devastating 2008 critique of these sentencing policies, available on his office’s website, Stabenow shows that Congress ratcheted the penalties for looking at child pornography upward through a series of ill-considered, undebated dictates driven by little more than public outrage and disgust. The upshot: Between 1997 and 2007, the number of people sent to federal prison for possessing, receiving, or distributing (but not producing) child pornography quintupled, from 238 to 1,170, while the average sentence more than quadrupled, from 21 to 91 months. Among the baffling results of these policies: A defendant with no prior criminal record and no history of abusing children would qualify for a sentence of 15 to 20 years based on a small collection of child pornography and one photo swap, while a 50-year-old man who encountered a 13-year-old girl online and lured her into a sexual relationship would get no more than four years. The comparison, Stabenow writes, “demonstrates the absurdity of the system.”

The absurdity has not gone unnoticed by the judiciary. In a 2010 survey by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 70 percent of federal judges said the recommended penalties for possessing or receiving child pornography are unreasonable. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that the guidelines are only advisory and not mandatory, judges still must justify deviations in written explanations that are subject to review by appeals courts. Many have not been shy in expressing their opinions about the fairness and wisdom of the penalties they are asked to impose.  

In a 2008 child pornography case, Robert Pratt, a U.S. district judge in Des Moines, gave the defendant a sentence of seven years instead of the recommended 18. The guidelines “do not appear to be based on any sort of empirical data,” Pratt said, “and the Court has been unable to locate any particular rationale for them beyond the general revulsion that is associated with child exploitation-related offenses.”

The following year, Lynn Adelman, a U.S. district judge in Milwaukee, cited Stabenow’s critique of the sentencing guidelines when he gave a middle-aged funeral director who was caught swapping child pornography a six-year sentence instead of the 18 years sought by prosecutors. “The flaws identified by Stabenow were certainly evident in this case,” Adelman wrote in his sentencing memorandum. “I could not conclude that under the circumstances of this case, given all of the flaws in the guideline discussed above, that the range deserved deference.”

Jack Weinstein, a U.S. district judge in Brooklyn, has been fighting for years, sometimes through rulings of questionable legality, to spare a married father of five not only the 11-to-14-year sentence recommended by the guidelines but the five-year statutory minimum for receiving child pornography. “Imprisonment of at least five years for this defendant is cruel,” Weinstein wrote in a 2008 opinion.

State penalties for possessing child pornography can be even harsher. In Arizona, one count of possessing child pornography carries a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence, each image qualifies as a separate count, and the sentences must be served consecutively. That’s how Morton Berger, a former high school teacher with no criminal record, ended up with a 200-year sentence in 2003.

In 2006 the Arizona Supreme Court upheld Berger’s sentence, rejecting his argument that it violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Writing in dissent, Vice Chief Justice Rebecca Berch noted that “Arizona’s sentence for this crime is by far the longest in the nation and is more severe than sentences imposed in Arizona for arguably more serious and violent crimes.” For example, “the minimum sentence for possession of an image of child pornography is longer than the presumptive sentence for rape or aggravated assault. A presumptive sentence for possession of two images of child pornography…is harsher than the sentences for second degree murder or sexual assault of a child under twelve.…For molesting a child, one might receive the same sentence that Berger has received for possessing one picture.”

It is hard to make any sense out of such a sentencing scheme. Ostensibly, the law punishes people for possessing child pornography because their demand for this material encourages its production, which necessarily involves the abuse of children. That is the main rationale cited in Osborne v. Ohio, the 1990 Supreme Court decision that said mere possession of child pornography can be banned without violating the First Amendment. But the minimal, indirect role that any one consumer of child pornography plays in creating a market for the stuff can hardly justify sending him to prison for years or decades, and this argument has little relevance now that people who look at child pornography typically get it online for free. “They are not protecting a single child,” says Dean Boland, the defense attorney. “They are throwing people in prison for having dirty thoughts and looking at dirty pictures.” The harsh treatment of people who like to look at child pornography seems to rest on the mistaken premise that they are equivalent to child molesters. In essence, they are being punished for the crimes they are expected to commit.

Preventive Detention

The same could be said of sex offenders who are confined indefinitely to mental institutions after they have completed their prison sentences. In the 1997 case Kansas v. Hendricks, the Supreme Court upheld this policy of post-sentence detention, ruling that a state law authorizing civil commitment of “sexually violent predators” was not punitive and therefore did not violate the Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause or its ban on ex post facto laws. The Court also concluded that the criteria for commitment satisfied the requirements of substantive due process.

Under the Kansas law, an offender can be committed if a jury decides he is likely to engage in “predatory acts of sexual violence” due to a “mental abnormality” or “personality disorder.” The law defines “mental abnormality” as “a congenital or acquired condition affecting the emotional or volitional capacity which predisposes the person to commit sexually violent offenses in a degree constituting such person a menace to the health and safety of others.” Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said these criteria “serve to limit involuntary civil confinement to those who suffer from a volitional impairment rendering them dangerous beyond their control.” Thomas added that the “lack of volitional control, coupled with a prediction of future dangerousness, adequately distinguishes [sexually violent predators] from other dangerous persons who are perhaps more properly dealt with exclusively through criminal proceedings.”

The thing is, the child molester who brought this case, Leroy Hendricks, did go through criminal proceedings, a fundamental premise of which was that he was able to control his behavior and could have chosen to act differently. Based on that premise, he was convicted of “taking indecent liberties” with two 13-year-old boys and served a 10-year sentence, whereupon the state declared that Hendricks could not go free because he was unable to control his behavior.

That was not the only apparent contradiction in the case. The Court ruled that indefinite commitment was not tantamount to a life sentence because the prisoner-cum-patient is “permitted immediate release upon a showing that the individual is no longer dangerous or mentally impaired.” At the same time, the Court said the state is not constitutionally required to provide treatment that might help eliminate the danger. Indeed, the state legislature suggested that sex offenders covered by the law cannot be successfully treated. The preamble to the statute called them “a small but extremely dangerous group of sexually violent predators…who do not have a mental disease or defect that renders them appropriate for involuntary treatment” under the state’s general civil commitment statute. These offenders, the law said, “generally have anti social personality features which are unamenable to existing mental illness treatment modalities.”

Predictably, offenders confined under sexually violent predator laws after completing their prison sentences are almost never declared well enough to release. In 2007 the Washington State Institute for Public Policy counted discharges by the 20 states that had implemented such laws at the time. Of the 4,534 offenders who had been committed since the first such law was passed in 1990, 188 (about 4 percent) had been released based on a “program staff recommendation.” According to 2011 legislative testimony by Rob Siedlecki, acting secretary of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, only two out of 247 prisoner/patients (less than 1 percent) have successfully completed that state’s Sexual Offender Treatment Program since it was created in 1994. Taxpayers are paying a pretty penny for these dismal results. The Washington state study found that committing a sex offender cost an average of $97,000 annually, compared to $26,000 for a year of prison, a gap that a 2007 investigation by The New York Times attributed to “higher costs for programs, treatment and supervised freedoms.”

Contrary to the beliefs of legislators, there is not much evidence that psychiatrists or psychologists can predict which individuals will commit sex crimes. While sex offenders can be sorted into high-risk and low-risk groups based on their criminal histories, says Karl Hanson, the Public Safety Canada researcher, “the best that we can do for identifying high-risk offenders is identifying groups that have approximately 50 percent observed recidivism rates.”

What’s theoretically possible, of course, is not necessarily what government agencies actually achieve. A 2006 report from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy concluded that the methods used by the state to classify registered sex offenders by risk had “little or no accuracy in predicting sex offender recidivism.” By contrast, a 2004 study by Lynn University psychologist Jill Levenson, reported in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, found that sex offenders recommended for commitment in Florida “scored significantly higher on actuarial risk assessment instruments” and were more likely to have “other risk factors that have been empirically correlated with sexual recidivism” than sex offenders who were recommended for release.

Even when evaluators do the best they can, per Hanson’s estimate, the most they can say is that half the offenders who meet certain criteria will commit new offenses if they are released, which means half will not. Such probabilistic assessments, even for crimes that have already occurred, are not usually considered sufficient grounds for depriving people of their liberty. “This is prison,” says Jamie Fellner. “We shouldn’t pretend otherwise. Basically, this is a form of preventive detention.”

When you strip away the quasi-medical language, what states are really saying when they indefinitely commit odious individuals like Leroy Hendricks to mental hospitals is this: “Whoops. We should have given this guy a longer sentence.” But it is no mere formalistic quibble to point out that a defendant’s sentence should be imposed at the time of his conviction as determined by a judge within the parameters set by statute. These are basic requirements of due process and the rule of law, and we make exceptions to them at our peril. Clarence Thomas may be confident that preventive detention won’t be extended to “other dangerous persons,” but I am not. It seems to me that all it would take is a new law attached to a new scientific-sounding label invented by legislators or grabbed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. How many convicted criminals could qualify for a diagnosis of, say, anti-social personality disorder?

In a 2004 Criminal Law Bulletin article, William Mitchell College of Law professor Eric Janus argued that “sexual predator laws provide a model for undercutting…constitutional protections.” The process, Janus said, starts with a universally despised group of people who, like suspected terrorists, attract no public sympathy. He warned that “we are at risk of becoming a ‘preventive state,’ in which the paradigm of governmental social control has shifted from solving and punishing crimes that have been committed to identifying ‘dangerous’ people and depriving them of their liberty before they can do harm.” To most Americans, I fear, this prospect is not nearly as scary as the possibility that a sex offender lives down the street.  

The Secret History of Guns [Adam Winkler, The Atlantic, September 2011]        

The eighth-grade students  gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must

take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.

It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.

* * *

The text of the Second Amendment is maddeningly ambiguous. It merely says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Yet to each side in the gun debate, those words are absolutely clear.

Gun-rights supporters believe the amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms and outlaws most gun control. Hard-line gun-rights advocates portray even modest gun laws as infringements on that right and oppose widely popular proposals—such as background checks for all gun purchasers—on the ground that any gun-control measure, no matter how seemingly reasonable, puts us on the slippery slope toward total civilian disarmament.

This attitude was displayed on the side of the National Rifle Association’s former headquarters: THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. The first clause of the Second Amendment, the part about “a well regulated Militia,” was conveniently omitted. To the gun lobby, the Second Amendment is all rights and no regulation.

Although decades of electoral defeats have moderated the gun-control movement’s stated goals, advocates still deny that individual Americans have any constitutional right to own guns. The Second Amendment, in their view, protects only state militias. Too politically weak to force disarmament on the nation, gun-control hard-liners support any new law that has a chance to be enacted, however unlikely that law is to reduce gun violence. For them, the Second Amendment is all regulation and no rights.

While the two sides disagree on the meaning of the Second Amendment, they share a similar view of the right to bear arms: both see such a right as fundamentally inconsistent with gun control, and believe we must choose one or the other. Gun rights and gun control, however, have lived together since the birth of the country. Americans have always had the right to keep and bear arms as a matter of state constitutional law. Today, 43 of the 50 state constitutions clearly protect an individual’s right to own guns, apart from militia service.

Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

* * *

Opposition to gun control was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.

Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”

Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.

Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.

Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.

The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.

Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.

* * *

The Panthers’ methods provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the “most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed.” Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.

A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”

Political will in Congress reached the critical point around this time. In April of 1968, James Earl Ray, a virulent racist, used a Remington Gamemaster deer rifle to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. King’s assassination—and the sniper fire faced by police trying to quell the resulting riots—gave gun-control advocates a vivid argument. Two months later, a man wielding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver shot Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. The very next day, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.

Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which people—including anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minors—were not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of “Saturday Night Specials”—the small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation “was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

* * *

Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans. The South had long prohibited blacks, both slave and free, from owning guns. In the North, however, at the end of the Civil War, the Union army allowed soldiers of any color to take home their rifles. Even blacks who hadn’t served could buy guns in the North, amid the glut of firearms produced for the war. President Lincoln had promised a “new birth of freedom,” but many blacks knew that white Southerners were not going to go along easily with such a vision. As one freedman in Louisiana recalled, “I would say to every colored soldier, ‘Bring your gun home.’”

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper’s Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had “seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen” in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

* * *

In response to the Black Codes and the mounting atrocities against blacks in the former Confederacy, the North sought to reaffirm the freedmen’s constitutional rights, including their right to possess guns. General Daniel E. Sickles, the commanding Union officer enforcing Reconstruction in South Carolina, ordered in January 1866 that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well-disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.” When South Carolinians ignored Sickles’s order and others like it, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of July 1866, which assured ex-slaves the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty … including the constitutional right to bear arms.”

That same year, Congress passed the nation’s first Civil Rights Act, which defined the freedmen as United States citizens and made it a federal offense to deprive them of their rights on the basis of race. Senator James Nye, a supporter of both laws, told his colleagues that the freedmen now had an “equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.” President Andrew Johnson vetoed both laws. Congress overrode the vetoes and eventually made Johnson the first president to be impeached.

One prosecutor in the impeachment trial, Representative John Bingham of Ohio, thought that the only way to protect the freedmen’s rights was to amend the Constitution. Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights, he said, were turning the Constitution—“a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.” In December of 1865, Bingham had proposed what would become the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Among its provisions was a guarantee that all citizens would be secure in their fundamental rights:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The key phrase, in Bingham’s view, was privileges or immunities of citizens—and those “privileges or immunities,” he said, were “chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution.” Jacob Howard of Michigan, the principal sponsor of Bingham’s amendment in the Senate, reminded his colleagues that these amendments guaranteed “the freedom of speech and of the press,” “the right to be exempt from unreasonable searches and seizures,” and “the right to keep and bear arms.”

Whether or not the Founding Fathers thought the Second Amendment was primarily about state militias, the men behind the Fourteenth Amendment—America’s most sacred and significant civil-rights law—clearly believed that the right of individuals to have guns for self-defense was an essential element of citizenship. As the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has observed, “Between 1775 and 1866 the poster boy of arms morphed from the Concord minuteman to the Carolina freedman.”

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

* * *

Today, the NRA is the unquestioned leader in the fight against gun control. Yet the organization didn’t always oppose gun regulation. Founded in 1871 by George Wingate and William Church—the latter a former reporter for a newspaper now known for hostility to gun rights, The New York Times—the group first set out to improve American soldiers’ marksmanship. Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. The new measure imposed more order—and, in most cases, far more restrictions.)

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.” According to Frederick, the NRA “sponsored” the Uniform Firearms Act and promoted it nationwide. Highlighting the political strength of the NRA even back then, a 1932 Virginia Law Review article reported that laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon were already “in effect in practically every jurisdiction.”

When Congress was considering the first significant federal gun law of the 20th century—the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a steep tax and registration requirements on “gangster guns” like machine guns and sawed-off shotguns—the NRA endorsed the law. Karl Frederick and the NRA did not blindly support gun control; indeed, they successfully pushed to have similar prohibitive taxes on handguns stripped from the final bill, arguing that people needed such weapons to protect their homes. Yet the organization stood firmly behind what Frederick called “reasonable, sensible, and fair legislation.”

One thing conspicuously missing from Frederick’s comments about gun control was the Second Amendment. When asked during his testimony on the National Firearms Act whether the proposed law violated “any constitutional provision,” he responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” In other words, the president of the NRA hadn’t even considered whether the most far-reaching federal gun-control legislation in history conflicted with the Second Amendment. Preserving the ability of law-abiding people to have guns, Frederick would write elsewhere, “lies in an enlightened public sentiment and in intelligent legislative action. It is not to be found in the Constitution.”

In the 1960s, the NRA once again supported the push for new federal gun laws. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” Orth and the NRA didn’t favor stricter proposals, like national gun registration, but when the final version of the Gun Control Act was adopted in 1968, Orth stood behind the legislation. While certain features of the law, he said, “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

* * *

A growing group of rank-and-file NRA members disagreed. In an era of rising crime rates, fewer people were buying guns for hunting, and more were buying them for protection. The NRA leadership didn’t fully grasp the importance of this shift. In 1976, Maxwell Rich, the executive vice president, announced that the NRA would sell its building in Washington, D.C., and relocate the headquarters to Colorado Springs, retreating from political lobbying and expanding its outdoor and environmental activities.

Rich’s plan sparked outrage among the new breed of staunch, hard-line gun-rights advocates. The dissidents were led by a bald, blue-eyed bulldog of a man named Harlon Carter, who ran the NRA’s recently formed lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.

The new NRA was not only responding to the wave of gun-control laws enacted to disarm black radicals; it also shared some of the Panthers’ views about firearms. Both groups valued guns primarily as a means of self-defense. Both thought people had a right to carry guns in public places, where a person was easily victimized, and not just in the privacy of the home. They also shared a profound mistrust of law enforcement. (For years, the NRA has demonized government agents, like those in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal agency that enforces gun laws, as “jack-booted government thugs.” Wayne LaPierre, the current executive vice president, warned members in 1995 that anyone who wears a badge has “the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.”) For both the Panthers in 1967 and the new NRA after 1977, law-enforcement officers were too often representatives of an uncaring government bent on disarming ordinary citizens.

A sign of the NRA’s new determination to influence electoral politics was the 1980 decision to endorse, for the first time in the organization’s 100 years, a presidential candidate. Their chosen candidate was none other than Ronald Reagan, who more than a decade earlier had endorsed Don Mulford’s law to disarm the Black Panthers—a law that had helped give Reagan’s California one of the strictest gun-control regimes in the nation. Reagan’s views had changed considerably since then, and the NRA evidently had forgiven his previous support of vigorous gun control.

* * *

In 2008, in a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.

So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.

The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from the Heller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, should

be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

Dangerous Trends in Feminism [John Lauritsen 1976]

    The early homosexual rights movement and the women's emancipation movement were both part of a broader sexual reform movement in the first three decades of the 20th century; they were regarded as comrade struggles. This was also true in the gay liberation phase of our movement, from the fall of 1969 onwards. I believe this is correct, and that every progressive person should endorse the basic goals of both movements — though to be sure, neither movement is a systematic body of doctrine, and both movements have internal disagreements.
    Unfortunately, some very serious problems have arisen. Self-proclaimed feminists have acted in ways that were harmful to both gay liberation and women's liberation, and reactionary ideas have been advanced under the banner of feminism. I do not say these things were characteristic of the women's movement as a whole; rather, they can be attributed to a small, but highly publicized, minority.
    Although criticism of male homosexuality and gay liberation has issued freely from the feminist camp, there has been almost no reciprocal criticism from gay men, not even in self defence. It has become almost taboo to criticize anyone who identifies herself as a “feminist”.
    Why have feminists enjoyed this virtual immunity from criticism? For a number of reasons: Because most gay men really do support the women's movement, and are therefore hesitant to attack a women's liberationist. Because of a mood of guilt. Because feminists have so often demanded that things they disagree with be censored, and have so often gotten their way, that some men frankly are afraid of them. There is also an element of traditional male gallantry. And finally, there is a particular ideology which justifies the privileged status that feminists enjoy within the Gay Academic Union and other gay groups.

According to this ideology, the most basic division in society is not between class and class, but between male and female; distinctions according to gender are seen as far more important than distinctions based on wealth and power. According to this ideology, there is a hierarchy of oppression, with the oppression of women being the worst of all. It is an oppression so profound, so mysterious, and so ineffable, that it cannot even be described in concrete terms, as might other, lesser forms of oppression.

 According to this ideology the oppression of homosexuals derives from “sexism”, the foundation of which is male supremacy. Homosexuals are oppressed because they, not being seen as “real men and women”, violate the “sex-roles” which sexism comprises. It follows that the oppression of male homosexuals is essentially a by-product of female oppression, and that the liberation of gay men must tail after the liberation of women. In effect, the gay liberation movement becomes the fag end of the women's movement.

 According to this ideology, lesbians are doubly oppressed — both as homosexuals and as women — where homosexual males are merely singly oppressed. Gay men still enjoy a “male privilege” because, according to a central dictum of radical feminism: ALL MEN BENEFIT FROM THE OPPRESSION OF ALL WOMEN. So it would seem that gay men are not really so badly off, and perhaps it would be better if they did not devote their energies to repealing sodomy statutes and fighting discrimination, because these goals if realized would simply give them equality with straight men, thus objectively increasing the oppression of women. Instead, gay men should spend their time “dealing with their sexism”, which they acquired from having been born male, and in learning how to “give up their male privilege”.

 According to this ideology, the best things gay men can do is to act as a “men's auxiliary” for women's liberation, taking their cues from feminists. And since men are the enemy, gay men should be willing to enlist as agents in the fight against males and against maleness.

    Enough of this ideology! Perhaps some of you thought I was just making this up or being satirical. I assure you that the only original formulation in my description was the term, “fag end”; everything else was taken from current extreme feminist arguments. There may be elements of truth in this ideology, but most of it is clearly mistaken, and it would be fatal for the gay liberation movement to adopt it. Certainly it is false to say that the oppression of homosexual males is a trivial matter. It is false to say that a perceived violation of sex-roles provides the explanation for our oppression; there have been many societies, before and outside of Judeo-Christendom, including male supremacist societies with rigidly defined sex-roles, which nevertheless did not place a taboo on sex between males.
    At any rate, I am not convinced that feminists should be exempted from critical judgment. I shall deal with three main areas of contention: the first concerned with disruptions and diversions, the second with censorship, and the third with feminist bigotry against male homosexuality.

Disruptions and Diversions
    I remember a number of such episodes in the early days of the Gay Liberation Front, in the fall of 1969. Women we had never seen before would come in and deliver tirades against the GLF men; they would say that not only were gay men more sexist or more male chauvinist than straight men, but men in GLF were among the worst of all. These charges were unfair and untrue, for GLF had always been in solidarity with women's liberation, and women had played leading roles in GLF from the beginning — but such charges had a certain demoralizing effect. Some of the men felt that rather than acting against our oppressors — for example, picketing the Village Voice — or publishing the first gay liberation paper, Come Out! — instead we should turn our attention inward to confront the enemy which was: Ourselves!
    At the first gay conference at Rutgers in 1970, the major panel on the last day was disrupted by a group of women who demanded that all proceedings come to a halt. They charged that the panel was “elitist” and “sexist” (although half of the panelists were women); their main ostensible grievance was that on a table in the hall, provided for leaflets and free literature, were copies of Gay newspaper, in which they had found a reproduction of a beautiful, lush, reclining female nude, painted in the style of classic romanticism. This, they charged, was designed to titillate men, and was degrading to women. Overlooked was the fact that the picture illustrated an article written by a lesbian, and that it was unlikely the editors of Gay had intended to convert their male readers to heterosexuality.
    The conference organizers were cruelly attacked, apparently for the sin of not having policed and censored the free literature table. It was a senseless, abusive, and thuggish disruption; the main organizer of the conference was reduced to tears, and the women as well as the men on the panel were moved to call the disrupters “fascists”, an epithet that was not unjustified. For the most specious of reasons, a beautiful and mellow gay conference — one of the very first — had been turned into a nightmare.
    One could go on and on. I imagine most of the people in this room have witnessed or read accounts of similar disruptions. There was the first international gay liberation conference in Edinburgh, where women discovered evidence of “sexism” and demanded that the conference change its focus from legislative reform to “confronting sexism”. Laws, they argued, only affected men, and therefore it was sexist to concentrate upon things like repealing sodomy statutes. A majority of the men went along with this demand, and that was the end of an internationally coordinated campaign to change the laws. It's amazing it should be considered trivial that after two millennia, homosexual men are still criminals.
    A certain pattern emerges. The people in power do not like movements for social change. When such movements are in their infancy, they will try to destroy or divert them. When movements have grown large and viable, then they will try to render them innocuous through co-optation.
    It would have been inept for the ruling class to send someone into an antiwar conference who would say: “Look here, folks, I'm from the Council on Foreign Relations, and we don't like what you're doing. The Vietnamese people are giving us a hard enough time over there, and we don't want trouble on the home front. So forget about this mobilization. Why don't you just break into small groups and discuss patriotism?”
    That speech would not have been well received.
    However, what could be done was to send in representatives of “oppressed groups” — including blacks, women, and gay liberationists — to charge the antiwar movement with being white, male, middle class, racist, sexist, elitist, etc., and to demand that it deal with these issues rather than trying to stop the war in Southeast Asia.
    I don't think we should get paranoid over disruptions, for there exist sincerely motivated disrupters — although I do feel that if one has something to say, and is given an opportunity to say it, then it is at least poor tactics to disrupt. My point is simply that we should not let ourselves be diverted from the struggle, and that we should evaluate people's ideas and actions on their merits, granting no privileged status on the basis of membership in an “oppressed group”.
    So far as “silencings” are concerned — disruptions designed only to prevent someone from speaking — I am categorically opposed to them, and this leads me to my second problem area: Censorship.

Censorship
    Throughout its history, the sexual reform movement has had to wage a fierce battle against censorship. So it is especially disturbing to see demands for censorship advanced by a sector of the movement.
    The situation is serious. The new censorship, advanced under the banner of feminism, poses a threat to the gay liberation movement, the women's liberation movement itself, and all other progressive movements. I am convinced that the feminist movement is being used as a cat's-paw for taking away our civil liberties. The immediate target for ostensibly feminist censorship seems to be pornography — but pornography is a stalking horse, behind which is political repression. And repression is very much on the horizon in the United States. The Nixon Supreme Court has steadily whittled away civil liberties; the death penalty has been restored, and may soon claim its first victim for almost a decade; the Senate bill, S-1, which would virtually repeal the Bill of Rights, is waiting in the wings; new waves of censorship have swept across the country; and everywhere the Ministry of Propaganda is creating an atmosphere of violence and fear, which would justify imposing emergency Law & Order measures. Things like this always occur in a period of severe political and economic crisis, when the custodians of the system perceive it may be in jeopardy.
    Now, it would be unfair to blame the women's movement as a whole for the censorship problem. Only a relatively small number of “feminists” have been proponents and practitioners of censorship, and it would be naive to assume that all of these women were motivated by an honest commitment to feminism, especially in light of recent disclosures of such secret police programs as the FBI's “Cointelpro”.
    A leading exponent of censorious feminism is Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. In tribute to her, I have coined the term, “Brownmillerism”, which I define as the use of sexual hysteria, in particular rape-fear, as a justification for repression. The main characteristics of Brownmillerism are prudery, intolerance, and irrationality. The immediate goals of Brownmillerism are censoring pornography and reducing the legal rights of defendants in rape cases, but it extends far beyond this. Brownmillerism helps to set up the machinery of repression and to create an atmosphere favorable to repression.
    Brownmiller's book, Against Our Will (AOW) has enjoyed an amazing success. Promoted to the hilt by the establishment media, it became a Book of the Month Club selection and a best seller. Nevertheless, AOW is a shoddy piece of work: ludicrously inaccurate, patently reactionary, dishonest, and vulgarly written.
    Brownmiller portrays rape as an omnipresent danger to women, whereas in fact it is a comparatively rare event; she argues that rape laws are too lenient, whereas in fact the penalties for rape are second only to those for murder in most states; she calls for reducing the evidentiary requirements for conviction, even though many innocent men have been executed after being falsely accused of rape. By special pleading, falsification, and atrocity-mongering, Brownmiller strives to create an atmosphere of hysteria and misinformation conducive to assaults upon civil liberties, as well as to diverting the women's movement from its rational priorities (according to the New York Times, rape has now become the number one issue of the feminist movement, eclipsing such former concerns as legal abortion and equal pay for equal work).
    A long essay-review of mine on AOW and the rape question appeared in the Gay Liberator (Detroit, Spring 1976); I have copies of the review here, so I'll not go further into AOW now.
    What is disturbing is the virtual absence of criticism. Two leading gay papers, Gay Community News and the Advocate, not only reviewed AOW favorably, but featured Susan Brownmiller's photograph on their front covers — this in spite of the fact that AOW contains obvious antihomosexual bigotry.
    Critical reviews of AOW, all written by women, did appear in Esquire, Nation, the Militant, People's World, the Daily World, Women and Revolution, and the Libertarian Review, but these were a tiny minority compared to the accolades cranked out in the establishment press.
    So far as I know, not a peep of criticism of AOW appeared in the feminist press — a sad commentary on the feminist movement's politics or its capacity to criticize a self-appointed spokeswoman.
    A striking instance of Brownmillerism in action occurred in New York City last February — an episode I'll call “The Snuff Hoax”.
    What happened was that a rumor began circulating, according to which there existed a genre of movies known as “snuff” movies. “Snuff” movies, so the rumor went, were produced for the titillation of depraved men; they featured the actual torture, dismemberment, and murder of unsuspecting actresses.
    Then a movie opened in New York City, entitled “Snuff”, and advertising itself as “made in South America, where life is cheap.”  By this time, the rumor about “snuff” movies had already been exposed as a hoax in the pages of Variety, Screw, and the Village Voice. Nevertheless, a group of feminists began to organize protests against the movie, claiming that the actress in it had actually been dismembered and murdered. The rumor was fed on all sides. A synthetically illiterate leaflet was passed out which began thus:

 “Snuff is a film made in Argentina where no less than 18 murders are committed. Not acted out but in reality. Murders. People are actually killed for profit.”

    Karla Jay, in the Villager (26 February 1976), first protested that she was a “‘hard core’ civil libertarian”, and then wrote: “So what did it take to make me help organize a protest, hit the barricades, and demand that a movie be shut down? Literally murder. Yes, real women have been dismembered, killed, and disemboweled....”
    Deluded into believing that real murder had taken place, and that therefore no First Amendment issue was involved, many New York liberals signed a telegram sent to Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; it read as follows:

 “We the undersigned citizens call upon you as District Attorney of Manhattan to prosecute and to prevent presentation, distribution, and advertising of the film “Snuff” now being shown at the National Theatre in New York City. The film exhibits the violent dismemberment and murder of a woman for the purpose of arousing sexual interest. As citizens we demand the immediate investigation, prosecution and removal of this barbaric film from our community.”

    One might have expected a better written telegram from the New York intelligentsia, but the thrust is clear; it calls for official censorship, for strengthening the repressive apparatus of the State.
    An article in Gay Community News (GCN) gloated that the list of signers of the telegram read like a list of “Who's Who” of the women's and gay communities in New York. The first name on the list was Susan Brownmiller.
    To his credit, DA Robert Morgenthau refused to prosecute the film, insisting, correctly, that there was no legal basis for doing so. There were a few other voices of sanity. The American Civil Liberties Union refused to go along with the erst-while-liberal censors, and in consequence, the ACLU itself came in for attack. Bella Abzug sent a letter to the protest organizers, in which she said she would favor picketing and so on, but “could not support a legal suppression of the movie.”  “I would not go along with official censorship”, Abzug wrote, “because I think once it is established, we in the women's movement or any other movement of dissent will find ourselves victimized.”
    Noe Goldwasser, writing in the Village Voice, continued to expose the “Snuff delusion”, but to little avail. Goldwasser wrote: “the so-called actual murder film is a cheap-jack Manson take-off that had been in the can for three years ... you can see more gore in ‘Taxi Driver’ and more sex in ‘Gidget Goes Hawaiian’.”
    The protest organizers escalated their demands. Since there was no legal basis for prosecuting “Snuff”, they claimed that women in NYC were defenceless. What was needed were some new censorship laws which would protect the lives of women. They agitated accordingly.
    For many weeks GCN treated the “Snuff” protests as the number one gay action; it gave front page coverage to the rantings of people like Lea Fritz, who strongly attacked the ACLU, and who said such things as: “We don't think the big money creeps should be able to foist their sick eroticism on the rest of us!”
    A temporary madness swept through the gay community, affecting particularly those who considered themselves “radicals”. The “Snuff” protests were the cause of the moment, and to criticize them meant ostracism. Everyone seemed to know a friend of a friend who had seen “Snuff” and vouched that the dismemberment and murder was real. They insisted I had no right to speak until I had paid $4 and seen the film for myself. This, fortunately, was not necessary; it was perfectly obvious from looking at the stills outside the theatre that nothing but crude special effects had been employed. What was supposed to be a dismembered hand looked hardly more real than a pair of rubber gloves from the dime store. And yet more than a thousand deluded protesters had filed past these stills without perceiving the obvious.
    The rumor died hard. Long after he should have known better, Allen Young, writing in GCN, described “Snuff” as a movie “in which a women is murdered in order to create a film of erotic entertainment.”
    Eventually reality broke through. Robert Morgenthau, under pressure, located the actress who had allegedly been dismembered in “Snuff”. He found her in good spirits and, as he put it, “in possession of all her appendages.”
    Majority Report, which had helped feed the real-murder rumor, was forced to eat crow. A long article by Mary Lou Fox (MR 6-20 March 1976) exposed the hoax, placing the blame for the rumor-mongering on almost everyone except the protest organizers. The “Snuff” movie, she informed her readers, had been made in Buenos Aires four years ago, for a mere $33,000, and by a husband and wife team! The three minute dismemberment scene was tacked on afterwards.
    One sentence in Fox's article struck me as poignant: “The truth of the snuff-movie story seemed indisputable coming from so many sources at once.”
    A. Nolder Gay entered a dissenting opinion in GCN; he summed the affair up: “Is ‘Snuff’ a gay issue? No, but censorship is ... and twisting the bill of Rights in the winds of immediate passion is, and increasing the powers of D.A.s is.”
    There's no doubt that “Snuff” was a truly vile movie, and offensive to women (though even more offensive movies were probably playing at the same time). I think women should protest against anti-woman bigotry — but succumbing to rumor-mongering and hysteria, and calling for official censorship, is playing the game of the enemy. If one is opposed to censorship, then one is opposed to censoring even that which one finds vile and offensive.
    Perhaps history will group the “Snuff” hoax along with such episodes as the Flying Saucer delusion or the War of the Words panic; perhaps, if one accepts, as I do, a more sinister interpretation, history will class it with such fabrications as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, or the attribution of the Reichstag fire to the Communists.
    A glimpse of where Brownmillerism and snuff-type hysteria lead was provided only a few weeks later, in Chicago. On May 26, a new censorship board was set up there to deal, at least in the beginning, with movies of violence. The immediate inspiration for Mayor Daley's antiviolence law, according to an article in the Guardian, was the public outcry against “Snuff”. Members of the new censorship board are all appointed by the Mayor, they average over 67 years of age, and their main qualification seems to be that they are widows of Democratic Party machine politicians.
    The Guardian article makes it clear that it is political radicalism, rather than violence, that Daley is concerned with censoring, and that the board, if unchecked, may be expected to extend its mandate. “Mayor Daley himself told reporters the kind of film he had in mind when proposing the ordinance was ‘Medium Cool’, Haskell Wexler's fictional feature that included on-the-scene footage of [Daley's] police beating demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.”
    Censorious feminism has also played a role within the gay liberation movement itself. I have already described the incident at the first Rutgers conference.
    In the Gay Academic Union, some feminists have demanded that panels on S&M, pederasty, and transvestitism not be allowed at conferences, and more often than not, their demands have been acceded to. A scholarly presentation on the Marquis de Sade was censored last year — feminists felt it would advocate sadism, and that that must not be permitted.
    This kind of censorship — the censorship of ideas — is offensive to every person of integrity. If we are opposed to someone's ideas, then if anything we should wish to draw him into debate, so we can counter his ideas with our own — assuming we have something to say. This is known as dialogue, and it is through dialogue that truth emerges.
    This year in the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, a few women (speaking for all women) laid down a series of demands. First, women would march at the head of the parade, to offset what they called “lesbian invisibility”. Second, half of the marshals and speakers would have to be women (actually, this had always been the case). Third, all floats and speakers would have to be approved by a committee, which would censor anything it found guilty of “sexism”, “racism”, “classism” (whatever that is), and perhaps some other “ism”. The main fear of these women was that female impersonators would be allowed, either on floats or as speakers.

    For several years now, drag queans have been special targets of feminist wrath. We gay men have been forcefully told that if we support women's liberation, we must denounce and repudiate everyone and everything connected with drag. The censorious feminists claim that drag oppresses women — that it is a mockery of women, misogyny, and a form of bigotry. If anyone feels I am exaggerating the feminist position, then I urge him to read an article in GCN (20 November 1976) by Karen Lindsey. Lindsey, who identifies herself as a “straight woman”, delivers a vicious attack against drag queans, and in the process engages in some coy anti-male-
homosexual bigotry. She compares wearing drag to “sexual harassment”, pimping, rape, and wife-beating.
    I am fascinated by one sentence of hers; she writes: “But when men dress in spike heels, rhinestones, sheer stockings, and evening gowns fitted with bustdarts, there is no room for doubt — or for tolerance.”
    I have two questions for Ms. Lindsey. Number one: “You say that there in no room for tolerance. May we know specifically what forms of intolerance you would advocate?”  Number two: “Do you believe that Woman, the eternal feminine or whatever, comprises such things spike heels and rhinestones?”
    The time has come to defend transvestites. On the level of personal freedom, I say that if women have the right to dress like drag queans, then drag queans should have the right to dress like women. Many states and communities still have laws prohibiting “cross-dressing”, and little enough has been done to get rid of these medieval absurdities. Beyond this, I think we must question whether there be any justification for the current feminist vendetta against drag queans.
    Now, the transvestite issue is not a simple one. Superficially it is true that most transvestites are straight; it is also true that the vast majority of gay men have no desire to put on women's clothes, and are at least as “virile” as the average, exclusively heterosexual man (though perhaps less rigidly “masculine”).
    On the other hand, it is also true that drag has long been a part of the gay subculture. When gay men get together for a really fun and special occasion — now, as in the 19th or 18th centuries — costumes and drag may well be a part of the festivities. Drag and drag queans are a part of the gay world, whether one likes it or not. One may believe that the gay world as we know it now is part of our oppression, and I agree up to a point. But I suggest that in drawing up a blueprint for a liberated future, there is a danger of falling into puritanism in the present.
    Why drag? Well, gay men have a sense of humor, a unique sense of humor, known as “camp”; it is part of our heritage. And at the heart of camp is a mockery of the situation we find ourselves in, our predicament as homosexuals. And so camp, among other things, includes a mockery of sex-roles, a mockery of taboos, a mockery of danger, a mockery of condemnation.
    If gay men have survived the worst oppression that Christendom had to offer, we owe something to camp. For most of the Christian era, the Church and State have not recognized our right to live — not even our right to exist. And yet the gay men who escaped the Executioner often came out strong and more creative than the straights. I would like to believe that even in the dungeons of the Inquisition, men were camping. I would like to believe that even in Nazi concentration camps, the men with the pink triangle gave each other courage by camping.
    Drag is considered to be a form of camp, and it is. Drag is the most extreme mockery of sex-roles, the most extreme exposé of how arbitrary most of the real-man/real-woman divisions are. To be sure, there is high as well as low camp, and good as well as bad camp. But at its best, drag is very good camp indeed.
    Feminist claims to the contrary, what a drag quean parodies is not women, but culturally dictated sex-roles — sex-roles which are themselves oppressive to women. In anything, by demonstrating the arbitrariness and absurdity of traditional sex-roles, female impersonators, far from being oppressive to women, may actually serve as consciousness raisers aiding the liberation of women.
    I think some of the feminist rage against transvestites can be explained by a denial of the element of self-oppression involved in playing traditional sex-roles. So far, gay liberationists have been more willing than feminists to analyze the ways we contribute to our own oppression; immediately Carl Wittman's Gay Manifesto and Andrew Hodges's and David Hutter's With Downcast Gays come to mind. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and the protests at the Miss America Pageant seemed to promise a women's analysis of self-oppression, but lately the feminist movement has opted for a men-are-the-enemy-period sort of pseudo-radicalism.
    Karen Lindsey in the GCN article claims that women adopt traditional sex-roles, and dress the way they do, only because they are forced to do so by men; in her words: “It is men who determine what is fit apparel for men and women, reserving to themselves what is functional and assigning to women styles that conform to male fantasy and power needs.”
    I find this hard to believe. Surely women have some responsibility for their actions. Do men really force women to wear rhinestones? Spike heels? It seems to me that any woman who is determined can walk into a store and buy a comfortable pair of shoes. Who forces them to buy spike heels? Do men really enjoy walking with a woman who has to totter along like a cripple? Similarly, if a woman is oppressed by cosmetics, then I suggest that liberation lies no further away than the nearest sink, with the aid of a little soap and water.
    Now, who is supposed to be hurt by drag queans? Women? How many women have ever even seen a drag quean? If they did see one, what would happen? Would they suffer? The only group of transvestites that really do harm others are ecclesiastical transvestites — that is to say, priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes — but so far the feminists have shown no inclination to attack ecclesiastical transvestitism.
    If anybody at all is hurt by drag queans, it would surely be gay men, or so I believed at one time. Since the stereotyped image of a homosexual man is a man who wants to act and look like a woman, I believed that drag queans tended to reinforce the stereotype.
    I have changed my opinion. If, to use Mencken's term, “Boobus Americanus” wishes to believe in the stereotype, they I'm sure he will do so, with or without the aid of transvestites. I now believe that transvestites should not merely be tolerated, but actually encouraged to do as they please. If they want to dress up and carry on, then why not? We only live once.
    In the very early days of the Gay Liberation Front, we made the decision that transvestites would be as welcome as anyone else. Unlike the “homophile” movement, we were not so concerned with respectability that we would turn away any of our gay brothers and sisters.
    When I entered the gay world, many years ago in Boston, I had a hard enough time of it, though I had certain advantages. It was drag queans in a seedy Boston cafeteria, the “Bick”, who first let me laugh at things which had been the torment of adolescence. I laughed till I cried — and after that it was easier. I would expand the Nietzschean aphorism to say: “Oh my brothers: Camp! and be hard!”
    I have also known sensitive young men who did not have my advantages — who had run away from fathers who beat them and mothers who cursed them — who were not intellectuals — who had no assets other than a sudden will to be themselves. They did not know what it meant to be “gay”, so they plucked their eyebrows, or set their hair; they wore an earring, or a necklace; they sullied their complexion with makeup; or they wore something that put them beyond the pale of masculine normalcy. They were naive.
    Usually the phase passed, especially if they were fortunate enough to acquire a friend or lover who accepted them as they essentially were, without the extreme role-playing or accoutrements of either butch or femme.
    It frightens me to think that such a young man, assailed by doubts and fears, facing pitfalls and dangers on every side, might be subjected to further cruelty from gay men who have been influenced by the censorious feminists. We must be firm. Not only must we reject without qualification the claim that drag queans oppress women, we must also make sure than none of our brothers are hurt through malice instigated by the censorious feminists. Our lifestyle is none of their business.
    At this point I'm sure we are sick of censorship. What is really disgusting about the censorious feminists is that they trample on the memory of the many women in the freethought and sexual reform movements who courageously battled against censorship over the last century. One thinks of women like Annie Besant, Margaret Sanger, Martha Ruben-Wolfe, Emma Goldman. How appalled they would be to see the things now being done under the banner of feminism!
    Prohibiting and censoring will be the death of our movement. Our struggle is to get out our own ideas, not to suppress the ideas of others. I share the faith of Thomas Paine, who concluded his Age of Reason by saying: “When opinions are free, either in matters of government or religion, truth will finally and powerfully prevail.”

Feminist Bigotry Against Male Homosexuality
    To continue the story of this year's Christopher Street Liberation Day: every one of the women's demands was agreed to. Women were at the head of the Gay Pride march, and women with bullhorns cleared the area of male interlopers. In this contingent, two women marched with a banner proclaiming: “Cocksucking Causes Cancer!”  Despite the vaunted concern with censoring “sexism”, apparently none of the other women in the contingent suggested to these sisters that they were marching in the wrong parade.
    The phrase, “cocksucking causes cancer”, is from a poem entitled “Cut the cock”, which appeared in the quarterly journal, Dyke (“To be sold to and shared by women only!”). Here are some lines from “Cut the Cock”:

        Cocksucking can cause cancer
        cockclimbers better watch their step
        on the ladder to suck-cess-pool
        cause the cockclock is running out of ticktock
        and when the woman revolution comes
        there ain't gonna be no pawn shop
        where an old cocksucker can hock a cock...

    No comment on the poem, but I do find it reprehensible that the gay press has hidden its head in the sand and pretended that the poem never was published.
    Recently I have been reading and rereading many of the major feminist writings, and have come across much prejudice against male homosexuality. Sometimes feminist bigotry against male homosexuals is obvious and crude, as in the poem; usually it is more subtle. Basically, the feminist writers deny the validity of male love; they insist on treating it as the product of misogyny, rejection or fear of women.
    (Some of the feminist works I criticize have merit, despite their prejudice against male homosexuality. Specifically, Phyllis Chessler's Women and Madness is moving and informative; the Redstockings anthology, Feminist Revolution, is valuable for its accounts of how the women's movement has been diverted and coopted, as well as for its principled exposé of Gloria Steinem's links to the CIA; and there are things to be learned from Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex and even Kate Millett's much overrated Sexual Politics.)
    A blatant example is provided by Leslie B. Tanner, in her article, “On Being Natural”, which appeared in the popular anthology, Voices From Women's Liberation. Tanner writes about male fear of women, and she works up to these two sentences:

 “The Christian tradition — based on male anxiety from the Hebrew tradition — takes the fear of the female to even greater extremes. During the Middle Ages celibacy (which is related to rear of the female) produced such strong anxieties that both self-castration and sodomy existed.”

    This is clear enough: if it were not for a pathological fear of women, a terrible thing like sodomy would never happen. Tanner is also conveying the impression that sodomy is a form of emasculation.
    Of course the notion that male homosexuality is caused by a fear of women is a stock-in-trade of such psychiatric quacks as Drs. Bergler, Bieber, Kardiner et al. — but then these people are men, so we've been allowed to criticize them.
    What feminist writers seem totally unable to comprehend is the validity of all-male attachments — the great desire and need men have for the companionship, friendship, and love of other men. The feminists cannot see male fellowship as a positive thing; to them it can only be misogyny, a rejection and exclusion of women, a form of segregation.
    Whereas a gay liberationist would say that men in our culture are alienated in their affection for each other, some feminists believe that men are too close to each other already.
    I am not exaggerating the feminist position, and urge everyone to read Carol Hanisch's article, “Men's Liberation”, from the Redstockings anthology, Feminist Revolution; it is most instructive. Hanisch writes in a very clear, succinct, and straightforward manner; there is never any doubt what she is saying. The essence of her argument is that men's liberation groups are a reactionary development; that it is absurd to imagine that men are oppressed by the prevailing sex-roles, because all men profit from the oppression of all women; that therefore men have nothing to be liberated from. When she gets to homosexuality, Hanisch has this to say:

 “Men's liberationists always bring up ‘confronting their own feelings about men’ by which they mean homosexuality. Male homosexuality is an extension of the reactionary club) meaning both group and weapon). The growth of gay liberation carries contempt for women to the ultimate: total segregation. The desire of men to ‘explore their homosexuality’ really means encouraging the possibility of homosexuality as a reaction against feminist demands. This is the reason the movement for “gay rights” received much more support only after women's liberation became a mass movement.”

    The prejudice against male homosexuality contained in Kate Millett's highly influential book, Sexual Politics, is worse than that in Carol Hanisch's article, but it is more insidious. Millett's style is muddled and affected, and her bigotry emerges more in little digs and innuendoes than in direct statement.
    To Millett, there is nothing positive about male relationships; they are simply power relationships. Either more powerful males exert dominance over weaker males, degrading them to the status of females, and deriving a peculiar satisfaction from bullyism; or males gang together to consolidate their power over women.
    In Millett's world, men do not really like each other; it is only the sexual politics of the patriarchy that makes them spend so much time together.
    Millett extends the term, “men's house culture”, referring to an institution in some primitive societies, to apply to all men's associations. She tosses in the Nazis, underworld thugs, Norman Mailer's U.S. Army, and some primitive sadism, in such a way as to imply that all men's groups are somehow fascistic in character.
    Describing the men's house institution in Melanesia, Millett writes: “They reek of physical exertion, violence, the aura of the kill, and the throb of homosexual sentiment.”  And then later: “Untried youths become the erotic interest of their elders and betters, a relationship also encountered in the Samurai order, in oriental priesthoods, and in the Greek gymnasium.”  And again: “The tone and ethos of men's house culture is sadistic, power-oriented, and latently [sic] homosexual....”
    When things get lumped together this way, a lot gets lost. How can one equate Greek pederasty with the crude sadism of a primitive people? — Greek pederasty with its pedagogical relationship, its concern with the imparting of knowledge and wisdom, its noble code of ethics.
    To Millett, the sexual activity that takes place in the “men's house” is not quite real: it is either sadism or a sort of surrogate heterosexuality. She writes:

“Considerable sexual activity does take place in the men's house, all of it, needless to say, homosexual. But the taboo against homosexual behavior (at least among equals) is almost universally of far stronger force than the impulse and tends to effect a rechannelling of the libido into violence.”

    In reading Millett, it is sometimes necessary to stop and disentangle the things she has mixed together. Notice how she slipped in the assertion that the taboo on all-male sex is almost universal. This is certainly not true, in historical perspective; if the taboo on male homosexuality were indeed a universal, then we might reasonably infer there must be something wrong about it.
    Millett gets to her point, that “men's house” homosexuality doesn't really count as homosexuality. Her writing is an extreme muddle here — very, very tricky:

“The negative and militaristic coloring of such men's house homosexuality as does exist, is of course by no means the whole character of homosexual sensibility. [Thanks for nothing!]  Indeed, the warrior caste [sic] of mind with its ultravirility, is more incipiently homosexual, in its exclusively male orientation, than it is overtly homosexual. (The Nazi experience is an extreme case in point here.)  And the heterosexual role-playing indulged in, and still more persuasively, the contempt in which the younger, softer, or more ‘feminine’ members are held, is proof that the actual ethos is misogynist, or perversely rather than positively heterosexual. The true inspiration of men's house association therefore comes from the patriarchal situation rather than from any circumstances inherent in the homo-amorous relationship.”

    A real mess, wasn't it, with Nazism thrown in and everything jumbled together? But we get the thrust of her argument: Men's house attachments occur only because of misogyny, only because of heterosexual default. It is a camouflaged version of the old notion that male homosexuality equals a rejection of women. It is also close to the “pseudohomosexuality” theories of such psychiatric charlatans as Lionel Ovesy.
    It is especially regrettable that Millett links Nazism to homosexuality, since we in gay liberation have worked so hard to undo the “fascist perversion” myth — the notion that homosexuality and Nazism go together — a myth that is the opposite of the truth.
    Millett is distinctly hostile to the possibility of genuine male friendship. She writes:

“Much of the glamorization of masculine comradery in warfare originates in what one might designate as ‘the men's house sensibility’. Its sadistic and brutalizing aspects are disguised in military glory and a particularly cloying species of masculine sentimentality. A great deal of our culture partakes of this tradition, and one might locate its first statement in Western literature in the heroic intimacy of Patroclus and Achilles.”

    We note the phrase, “particularly cloying species of masculine sentimentality”. Millet's language really gives here away here. Was the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus really “cloying” or “sentimental”? For that matter, is there a single line in the Iliad that is either cloying or sentimental? Frankly, I resent Millett's snide attacks on male friendship, of which there are many.
    Millett's hostility towards male friendship comes out most clearly in her chapter on D.H. Lawrence, a treatment that can fairly be described as vicious. The tenderest moments in Lawrence's novels, his attempts to describe the need men have for deep male friendship and male love, receive only ridicule and contempt from her pen. Her plot synopses are grotesque, both for their inaccuracies and for the animus that pervades them. If anyone thinks I am being overly harsh, I suggest a simple test. Read her chapter on D.H. Lawrence, especially her synopsis of Women in Love. Read Women in Love — a wonderful novel — and then draw your own conclusions.
    At this point, to go through more feminist writers would involve mostly repetition, for the same themes occur over and over. Phyllis Chessler, in her book, Women and Madness, also puts forward the thesis that male homosexuality is an expression of misogyny. She also links male homosexuality to militarism and ridicules the “‘glorious’ tradition” of male homosexuality.
    Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will blurs together voluntary homosexual acts and homosexual rape; it appears that to her, both are equally horrible.
    Shulamith Firestone's book, The Dialectic of Sex, contains many nasty little digs against male homosexuality. Firestone accepts the Freudian Oedipal complex theory on the aetiology of male homosexuality. She also holds the extraordinary notion that men cannot be erotic objects, and that the female body is intrinsically more aesthetic.
    Actually, some of the very worst bigotry has come from men claiming to represent feminism. In this camp are the handful of men who call themselves “effeminists” and publish the expensively produced and synthetically pathological magazine, Double-F. Another male feminist is John Stoltenberg, whose article, “Toward Gender Justice”, appeared in WIN magazine (20 March 1975). Stoltenberg attacks all of the goals of the gay liberation movement, claiming that if realized they would only give gay men equality with straight men; he puts forward the propositions that males concerned with “gender justice” should embrace “a total repudiation of masculinity” (including a repudiation of erections and pelvic thrusts during sex), and a total repudiation of male relationships. Stoltenberg posits a “patriarchal taboo against unbonding”, which is insidiously counter to the truth: what is tabooed in our culture is precisely the desublimation of the male bond; the taboo is on fully realizing eros between males. Stoltenberg deserves only our contempt when he dismisses the yearning men have for male affection by writing: “...all he was ever programmed to long for in relationship with men connects at its center to a process that keeps women oppressed.”
    A curious double standard exists whereby feminists see all-female groups, publications, etc. as a necessary part of their movement, but would deny men a similar privilege. Again we are grateful to Carol Hanisch for providing us with a clear rationale for this double standard. According to Hanisch, men's groups exist in order for men to consolidate their power over women. She writes: “They are a breading ground for updating male supremacist theory and strategy for ‘handling’ the growing feminist movement.” Hanisch justifies the feminist double standard with this remarkable sentence: “All-male groups are more of the same segregation that women's liberation all-female groups exist to put an end to.”
    Some — though not all — of the feminist writers are so bent on eliminating what they see as “segregation”, that they would abolish one-sex groupings altogether, as well as all sexual divisions. If they had their way, there would not exist any one-sex spheres whatever. Needless to say, this would mean the eradication of homosexuality. An extreme representative of this viewpoint is Shulamith Firestone, who looks forward to a future where every institution segregating the sexes would be destroyed, and even the gestation of human embryos would take place in machines rather than in the wombs of women. Everything would be homogenized. There would be total and uniform heterosociality; if homosexual couplings did occur, it would be on a random and arbitrary basis.
    This is not my view of the future. I think that we are still animals, like it or not, and that it is entirely fitting for the female of our species to give birth to the young. I think that men must learn to love men, and women to love women. No doubt under conditions of freedom, the evolved men and women of the future will make their own decisions, but I feel certain there will be some areas of life where both men and women will prefer to be in the company of their own kind.

Conclusion
    Despite all of the sorry particulars I have related, I still believe that women's liberation and gay liberation should be seen as comrade struggles.
    I think the women should take a hard and critical look at the extreme feminist wing of their movement; parts of it have become the worst enemy of women's liberation. I think women should fight for full economic, political, and sexual equality with men, and that they should take action against anti-woman bigotry. There is a time to demonstrate, to picket, to march; there is a time to raise hell — but prudery, intolerance, and censorship have no place in any progressive movement.
    The rest of my conclusion I address to the men:

Brothers: We have work to do for our own liberation, and we must not be diverted from the struggle.

We must not let our historic oppression be trivialized. We were stoned to death by the Jews; put to the sword, castrated, and tortured by the Christians; burned at the stake by the Inquisition. We were the men with the pink triangle. We are the ones being persecuted right now in Chile, in Argentina, in cuba, and in the United States. It is male love that has been under the most powerful taboo of all Judeo-Christian culture: an offence worse than murder, the “abominable crime”, the “unspeakable crime”, the “sin so horrible it is not to be mentioned among Christians”.

We must affirm the validity and beauty of male companionship, male friendship, and male love. We must defend our heritage.

We must recognize our enemies wherever we find them. Nobody's ideas and nobody's actions should be exempted from criticism.

    If men and women cannot work together in the gay liberation movement in a comradely fashion, then it would be better to work separately. This would be a shame, but the lesbian movement has already become largely autonomous, and perhaps they are right.

 The Trajectory of Political Policing in the United States, 1870 to the Present [Ward Churchill]

By 1940 [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover was the country's leading law enforcement officer. Much of what Hoover had done for the public and the police, however, had been done earlier by Allan Pinkerton and his two sons. Murray Kempton believed that Allan Pinkerton had invented most of the devices used by Hoover. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation "found the tablets already engraved; no further exercise was demanded of him except some tracing at the edges."

—Frank Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps

On 26 october 2001, president george w. bush signed the so-called USA PATRIOT Act—the title is actually an acronym standing for "Uniting and Strengthening of America by Providing Appropriate Tools to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism"—thereby initiating what has been called "the most sweeping revocation of constitutional rights [and] civil liberties in the history of the United States."¹ Usually referred to simply as "the Patriot Act," [End Page 1] the new law has been subjected to a range of substantive and often bitter critiques, most of them centering on the premise that, while it offers little by way of securing the country against the ravages of genuine terrorism, it provides a veritable carte blanche to domestic elites avid to preserve their own positions of power and privilege through the placement of arbitrary and generally severe constraints upon the range of activities/expression allowed dissident or "unruly" sectors of the body politic.²

Given that one of the better means of apprehending the implications inherent to a current phenomenon is to view it through the lens presented by analogous historical contexts, it is entirely appropriate that significant time and energy has been devoted to exploring the evolution of the Patriot Act out of what has come to be known as the "COINTELPRO Era" of FBI political repression during the period 1956-1971.³ By the same token, of course, it is appropriate to peel the onion further, examining the antecedents of COINTELPRO, demonstrating its foundation in the post-World War II "Second Red Scare" period,⁴ for instance, and, earlier still, the post-World War I Red Scare, which gave rise to such little-remembered horrors as the Palmer Raids,⁵ the IWW trials,⁶ and the then-nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation's campaign to destroy Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA; still the largest African American organization in U.S. history).⁷

A central conclusion drawn in every serious study that has sought to trace the trajectory at issue has been that the FBI, while by no means comprising the whole, has been at or very near the center of all that has proven most antidemocratic in American life during the past 90 years or more.⁸ The purpose of this essay is to push the timeline back further still, to the beginning, sketching the template upon which the Bureau was itself constructed, and thereby situating the origin of the repressive trend to which the Patriot Act presently serves as capstone, not in the fifth or even the second decade of the twentieth century, but rather in the mid-nineteenth.⁹ The ramifications of taking this longer view are, to be sure, profound: Given that the existence of an official/quasiofficial political police apparatus can be seen as defining the opposite of democratic order¹⁰ —a proposition with which all but a handful of commentators would agree¹¹ —and insofar as such an [End Page 2] apparatus has been demonstrably present in the United States for all but the most formative years of its existence, basic logic requires that the very term "American Democracy" be understood as, at best, an oxymoron.

Democracy for Americans thereby becomes, in any but the most vulgarly rhetorical/propagandistic sense, not something that has been/is being "eroded" or "lost" by passage of legislation like the Patriot Act and the concomitant functioning of agencies like the FBI. Instead, it must be viewed as something that, as a society—or, more accurately, as a multiplicity of societies—we've to all intents and purposes never experienced, but to which we might yet aspire. In no respect can the difference in perspectives thus described be considered of merely academic interest. To the contrary, it stands in very tangible ways not only to shape all that we might reasonably set out to achieve, socially and politically, but, perhaps more importantly, how it is we must ultimately go about achieving it.¹²

The Beginnings

The roots of what eventually became the FBI may be located in the post- Civil War setting. In 1871, Congress appropriated the sum of $50,000 to allow the newly created Department of Justice to form a component within itself devoted to "the detection and prosecution of those guilty of violating federal law."¹³ Finding the amount insufficient to fashion an integral investigating unit of its own, the department opted to contract for such services in the private sector. Although there were several established concerns to select from—Cyrus Bradley's Chicago Detecting and Collecting Agency, for example—the government determined that the firm most suited to its purposes would be the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, founded by a Scottish immigrant, Allan Pinkerton.¹⁴

The choice is instructive. Although Pinkerton had come to America in 1842 largely to avoid the legal consequences of a youthful radicalism manifested in an engagement with the Chartist Movement in his homeland, he had by the mid-1860s evolved into something of a reactionary.¹⁵ Rather impoverished during his first years in the United States, he began to take jobs in law enforcement, first in Kane County, Illinois (1847-1851), then in [End Page 3] nearby Cook County (1853-1854), meanwhile moonlighting as a private detective.¹⁶ Two years later, Pinkerton's freelance activities translated themselves into the opening of a private agency, an enterprise that was, from its first moments, designed specifically to meet the needs of major business interests: "By the mid-1850s a few businessmen saw the need for greater control over their employees; their solution was to sponsor a private detective system. In February 1855, Allan Pinkerton, after consulting with six midwestern railroads, created such an agency in Chicago."¹⁷

Tellingly, at the same time that he began to form his cadre of "cinder dicks," as Pinkerton's railroad detectives came to be known, he was given his first federal appointment, as a special agent of the Chicago post office.¹⁸ By January 1861, the agency's reputation for results had solidified within both the private and public sectors to the point that Pinkerton obtained his first contract outside the Midwest—with Samuel Morse Felton's Pennsylvania, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad—even as his personnel were employed in "protecting" president-elect Abraham Lincoln while he traveled to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration.¹⁹ The latter activity, conducted in an environment of flashpoint hostility between Northern unionists and secessionist Southerners, put Pinkerton in the national limelight for the first time.

Pinkerton placed a number of key operatives in Baltimore. . . . He assumed the identity of John H. Hutchinson, a stockbroker, and went to Maryland also. Aware of the hostile feelings in that city, Pinkerton was not surprised when a letter came from William Stearns, master machinist of Felton's railroad, disclosing a plot to kill Lincoln in Baltimore. Operatives Timothy Webster and Joseph Howard infiltrated some secessionist societies and confirmed Stearn's [sic] fears that a Baltimore barber named Captain Fernandina was behind a conspiracy to cause a street riot when the president-elect arrived, commit the murder during the confusion, and then speed away to the South.²⁰

Moving swiftly, Pinkerton convinced Lincoln to alter his schedule, "disguised the president as an old lady, placed special agents along the route, cut the telegraph wires, and allowed no other trains to travel the line until Lincoln's safe arrival."²¹ The only problem with such heroics is that a congressional [End Page 4] investigation, conducted shortly afterwards, concluded that no conspiracy to assassinate the president had existed,²² an opinion shared by John Wentworth of the Chicago Democrat and a number of other northern editors.²³ This viewpoint is reinforced by the fact that none of the alleged conspirators were ever arrested, much less tried and convicted.²⁴

Whether or not there was a genuine threat to Lincoln, Pinkerton was able to parlay his "brilliant" response to it into a Secret Service commission for himself and a lucrative sequence of contracts for his agency during the Civil War, conducting espionage, counterespionage, and other security work for the military. Between September 1861 and November 1862 alone, such work garnered him profits of $38,567.²⁵ It also enabled him to acquire a long list of powerful connections, such as General George A. McClellan, commander of all union forces during much of the period. By war's end, he was very well positioned to capitalize upon his experiences.

After the war, Pinkerton was a private businessman with two new offices in New York and Philadelphia. He had been a member of the government police system for about two years and had considerable exposure to the elite network of business leaders who became military leaders, and military leaders who became postwar business leaders. In both cases, his fortunes moved along due to acquaintance with these interlocking elite systems.²⁶

Indeed, by 1866, "in the United States and parts of Europe, the name Pinkerton was . . . synonymous with the protection of business and utilities by private police."²⁷ This was perhaps in some part due to Pinkerton's mounting proficiency in propagandizing himself through ghostwriters, mainly via publication of a dozen-and-a-half sensationalized accounts of his exploits, real or imagined, in "dime novel" format.²⁸ Much more importantly, the agency's prestige had to do with its creation of a "French-style" nationwide network of informants—augmented by the use of infiltrators when warranted—available to the highest bidder, and without even the pretense of those safeguards supposedly associated with governmental oversight.

Concern over government's role in the life of private citizens also touched the detective issue. Fears and expectations were colored by the obvious [End Page 5]differences between French detectives (highly secret and effective [and] frequently used by the state to suppress civil liberties) and the English detectives, who were more visible and ineffective investigators in the 1870s and 1880s. In fact, many people in England, it was revealed in 1884, went to "private inquiry offices," the English equivalent to America's private detective agency, because London [police] detectives failed so often. William Pinkerton, looking for European models that best exemplified the main thrust of his father's business, declared a kinship with the French police. . . . To Pinkerton management, the public police detective in America resembled most nearly the English model, while the country's largest private police detective agency resembled and respected the French model.²⁹

The dichotomy portrayed here is, of course, a bit too neat. Even as the Pinkertons were drawing such distinctions, key personnel like New York agency superintendent George H. Bangs were following the lead of Allan Pinkerton himself, securing positions in major police departments and other governmental investigative entities, thereby busily interlocking the ostensibly separate spheres of private and public detective work.³⁰ Most important of all, the agency's blossoming reputation was grounded in an increasing reputation among the emergent transatlantic corporate elite that it would go to virtually any length in satisfying the desires of its major business clientele. In this respect, two examples drawn from the 1860s and 1870s—those focusing upon the Reno and James/Younger gangs—perhaps emblematize better than most others the kinds of techniques the Pinkertons were developing for such purposes. Insofar as the methods involved were often highly publicized, there can be little question but that the Justice Department, when it elected to retain Pinkerton as its primary investigative vehicle, were in effect not only condoning but rewarding their utilization.

The Reno Case

On 6 October 1866, an Indiana gang headed by the brothers John, Frank, Simeon, and William Reno became the first in American history to rob a train.³¹ Although the Renos appear to have possessed no political motivation [End Page 6] —this holdup, along with the many that followed, seems to have been prompted by sheer pecuniary interest—there are indications that their action was received rather sympathetically by much of the local populace, discontented as it was with federal land impoundments and other policies designed to subsidize privately owned railroads at public expense.³² In any event, local authorities proving unable or unwilling to pursue the matter, the Adams Express Company, which had lost $15,000 in the robbery, in collaboration with the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, which had been hauling the safe containing the cash, retained the Pinkertons to "bring the gang to justice."³³

Accepting the case, Pinkerton employed his favorite theory of "detection": that "a criminal enterprise could be successfully broken by infiltration."³⁴ Used for this task was an operative named Dick Winscott, who shortly opened a saloon in the Renos' hometown of Seymore, hinting that he might be inclined to participate in activities a bit more profitable and exciting than selling drinks across the bar. Another operative, whose identity is not recorded, meanwhile set up shop as a gambler in the saloon and began dropping the same sorts of hints.³⁵ The gang was not long in taking the bait.

The outcome was that Winscott was able to provide photographs of gang members to the agency and, in late 1867, set up John Reno for arrest.³⁶ Tried and convicted, the bandit was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment. With their primary leader now on his way to prison, the rest of the gang became more canny, relocating their headquarters to Windsor, Canada. Still, acting on information provided by Winscott, the Pinkertons were able to nab three more gang members—Frank Sparks, Henry Jerrell, and John J. Moore—soon after a train robbery committed near Terre Haute on 2 May 1868. The prisoners were taken aboard a Ohio & Mississippi train under Pinkerton escort, supposedly for transportation to the jail in Seymore.³⁷

They never made it, however. Having somehow "missed their connection" in Indianapolis, the Pinkerton men hired a wagon to complete the journey. En route, they were intercepted by a group of vigilantes who demanded that the shackled prisoners divulge the whereabouts of all remaining members of the gang. Once they'd complied, they were lynched, their Pinkerton guards having abandoned them to their fate. Afterwards, the agency, acting upon information thus obtained, was able to arrest William and Simeon [End Page 7] Reno on 22 July, causing them eventually to be lodged in the jail at New Albany, Indiana. There they were joined in early October by Frank Reno and several other gang members, apprehended a month earlier in Windsor through the services of another Pinkerton infiltrator named Patrick O'Neil. (Their arrival in Indiana had been delayed by extradition proceedings, during which Allan Pinkerton had personally guaranteed their safety.)³⁸

On the night of 12 December 1868, another mob of vigilantes appeared at the door of the jail, where they were handed the keys. All three of the Renos, along with an associate named Charlie Anderson, were then taken from their cells and hanged in the corridor.³⁹ There was "a token investigation of the lynching [in which the Pinkertons did not participate], but nothing came of it. Secretly, state and county officials breathed a sigh of relief,"⁴⁰ while the agency, its "message" to those who would threaten the property interests of the rich and powerful loudly amplified, smugly closed its books on the matter. It was left to others, not U.S. officials and civic leaders, to be outraged over what had occurred.

England, through the Governor-General of Canada, demanded an apology for the "shocking and indefensible lynching." Diplomatic relations were strained, while legal experts predicted that England would eliminate the extradition clause [from its treaty of peace and friendship with the United States].⁴¹

While federal diplomats scurried about containing the potential damages of the Reno murders, Pinkerton set himself to reaping the rewards accruing from his detectives' participation in orchestrating their summary executions: "After the Agency's 'war' with the Renos, the Pinkertons were retained to solve three major bank robberies: Those at the National Village Bank in Bowdoinham, Massachusetts; the Beneficial Savings Fund of America, Philadelphia; and the Walpole, New Hampshire, Savings Bank."⁴² In 1874, the Pinkertons' performance against the Renos paid off even more handsomely when the agency was hired by the Rock Island, Union Pacific, and Kansas Pacific railroads, as well as a consortium of banks, to conduct a similar war, this time against the James/Younger gang operating in Missouri.⁴³ [End Page 8]

That the Pinkertons orchestrated the vigilante actions against the Renos was tacitly confirmed by Allan Pinkerton himself. In an 1874 series of letters to his subordinate, George Bangs, he discussed the fact that a former employee was participating in a plan to blackmail him to the tune of $500,000 because of his role in the lynchings.⁴⁴ Although the blackmail plot appears to have been aborted by one or another means, the threat that his and his detectives' conduct in Indiana might be fully exposed was "obviously very disturbing" to Pinkerton, according to even his most sympathetic biographer.⁴⁵

The James/Younger Case

In contrast to the Renos, the James/Younger gang exhibited discernible political characteristics. During the Civil War, its principal members had served in William Quantrill's Confederate guerrilla unit in the Kansas-Missouri region, and as even so harsh a chronicler as Paul Wellman was later to concede, they suffered postwar persecution as a result.⁴⁶

Some elements of the victorious Union party were vengeful and vindictive. Men who had served with or sympathized with the "Sesesh" were not infrequently called to their doors at night and shot down by masked gangs of men who called themselves "Regulators." Ex-guerrillas were particular targets of hatred. The general amnesty given Confederate soldiers after the war did not extend to Quantrill's men, who had been officially declared outlaws.⁴⁷

The James brothers, Jesse and Frank—as well as their cousins the Youngers (Cole, Jim, Bob and John)—responded to the situation by banding together in a sort of mutual defense group, rapidly incorporating as many as 20 other former Quantrill men. Almost as rapidly, their home territory of Clay County, Missouri, became relatively clear of unionist terrorism, a matter that endeared them to much of the local populace. With their base secure, the gang shortly shifted from a defensive to an offensive posture, staging the nation's first bank robbery in the Clay County town of Liberty on 14 February 1866. Three bank jobs later, in May of 1868, the Pinkertons were first called upon.⁴⁸ [End Page 9]

The agency soon learned, to its dismay, that the James/Younger group was a far tougher opponent than the Renos. Extremely clannish and well-entrenched in their community, the gang proved impossible to infiltrate, and the Pinkertons gave the matter up after about a year. In 1871, after it was retained by an Iowa bank that had been robbed in June, the agency returned briefly to the fray, but with equally poor results.⁴⁹ The bank robberies continued, and by 1873, the gang began to branch out, robbing a Rock Island Line train on 21 July, and a stagecoach on 15 January 1874. This was followed, on 31 January, by the robbery of an Iron Mountain train, and the Pinkertons were hired again, this time on terms that caused them to remain involved for the duration.⁵⁰

This was to be a long while, however, as Pinkerton's usual tactics fared no better during the second round than they had during the first. An attempt in March 1874 to insert three detectives into Clay County as "cattle buyers" left two of them—Louis J. Lull and James Wright—dead of gunshot wounds inflicted by Jim and John Younger (the latter also died as a result of the exchange, but this was unknown to the agency for some time).⁵¹ On 5 January 1875, Pinkerton tried an outright assault on the James brothers' mother's home, where they were wrongly presumed to be visiting, sending a large group of armed men for the purpose. The attackers hurled an incendiary device through a window, supposedly intended only to "smoke out" the building's occupants. It exploded with sufficient force to kill eight-year-old Archie Samuel, the Jameses' half-brother, and to sever their mother's arm.⁵²

The blast in the Samuel home ended the usefulness of the Pinkertons. Public opinion swung violently against them. Newspapers, not only in Missouri but in other states, denounced the "night of blood" with furious editorial invective. . . . The Pinkerton Agency still remained on the railroad and bank association payrolls, and kept men going to every new point where a robbery was reported, but where before they had received public co-operation, they now found it difficult to get.⁵³

Despite the gang's suffering a disaster—it attempted to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, on 7 September 1876, was ambushed and virtually [End Page 10]shot to pieces by an alerted citizenry, with all the surviving Younger brothers being captured and eventually imprisoned for a quarter-century apiece—the Pinkertons were unable to run the Jameses to earth.⁵⁴ Five years later, in 1881, they were still operating with a certain abandon, robbing two trains, a bank, and a stagecoach between March and September. In some desperation, Pinkerton finally garnered success by advising Missouri governor Thomas Crittenden to pay the brothers Bob and Charley Ford, prospective gang members, the sum of $10,000 to assassinate Jesse James. This was accomplished on 3 April 1882, after the Fords enjoyed dinner in their victim's home, when Bob Ford fired a bullet into the base of the outlaw leader's skull from less than five feet away. A few months later, Frank James surrendered under what amounted to a guarantee of no prison time, and the agency was able to mark another case closed.⁵⁵

The War Against Organized Labor

While the Pinkertons' campaigns against train robbers, especially the James/ Younger gang, brought it a certain fame—or notoriety, depending on one's point of view—the agency's bread-and-butter work became ever more centered in performing other, more critical tasks for big business. Primarily, this involved the undertaking of operations designed to thwart unionization of the labor force, allowing owners to maintain an artificially low wage structure in the face of rising prices, as well as institutions such as the twelve-hour workday and six-day workweek, and, in many cases, to avoid investing in even the most rudimentary measures to preserve worker health and on-the-job safety.⁵⁶

The extent of company power over workers included outright ownership of the towns in which they lived, a matter enabling employers to garner additional profits by imposing exorbitant rates of rent, prices for subsistence commodities, tools, and such health care as was available. Conditions in these "company towns" were such that, by 1915, the Commission on Industrial Relations was led to observe that they displayed "every aspect of feudalism except the recognition of special duties on the part of the employer."⁵⁷ The job of the Pinkertons—first for the railroads, then more generally—was [End Page 11] to prevent workers from organizing in a manner that might enable them to improve their own circumstances, thus reducing corporate profits.

The agency remained largely a railroad police, but to the detectives' spying was added the watchmen's guarding of railroad property. A decade of contention and controversy occurred due to labor strife, and in the 1880s and early 1890s, Pinkerton's became an industrial police. Many railroads, taking cues from the monopolistic policies of notable industrial leaders like John D. Rockefeller, owned coal fields and ironworks. Appropriately enough, as industrial owners and managers increasingly equated crime and disorder with collective bargaining and work stoppages, Pinkerton's opportunities enlarged.⁵⁸

In this, the agency was directly assisted by government. "The personnel," as has been observed elsewhere, "got their police power from the state legislature but were recruited, paid, and controlled by the company."⁵⁹

Beginning in 1865, the Pennsylvania legislature allowed state railroads to endow some employees with police power. Massachusetts provided for a railroad police in 1871, as did Maryland in 1880, and New York in 1890. Others followed, and by 1896, the Railway Association of Special Agents of the United States and Canada organized to encourage cooperation among the diverse railway police systems. These railway policemen were increasingly identified as enemies of labor.⁶⁰

It was during this same span of time that "all of the various techniques used to repress labor were gradually developed and institutionalized by business and governmental elites . . . [notably] the use of private police, private arsenals and private detectives, the deputization of private police [and] the manipulation of governmental police agencies."⁶¹ In this, the Pinkertons quickly assumed a status as an elite in their own right, coming to the fore by the early 1870s—i.e., during the same period in which the Justice Department began, for its own purposes, to avail itself of the agency's unique talents—as the premier instrument of labor repression in the country. Here, one [End Page 12] example, that of the Molly Maguires, speaks volumes about the nature of the expertise sought by the U.S. attorney general.

The Molly Maguire Case

The Molly Maguires were a secret society established in early-nineteenth-century Ireland to battle British landowners.⁶² A number of them, forced to flee their homeland because of the mid-century famine, or because of charges brought against them by colonial authorities, found themselves in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal fields, living under conditions as bad as or worse than those they thought they'd left behind.

Miners . . . went underground to hack out coal under primitive conditions. There was no local or federal legislation to protect them. In 1871, 112 men were killed in the anthracite mines, and 332 permanently injured. In seven years, 556 men had been killed and 1,565 maimed or crippled for life. Out of 22,000 miners, more than 5,000 were sixteen years of age or under. . . . Take-home pay was uncertain; deductions were often arbitrary or at the whim of the owners by means of what they called the "bobtail check." A typical week's wages for a miner at the time of the Molly Mcguires was $35; expenses, including rent, groceries, and a new drill, came to $35.03.⁶³

Confronted by these circumstances, and finding no other avenue of redress available to them, the former Mollies reconstituted themselves to confront their new foe: the mine owners and their subordinates. After a wave of violent responses during the mid-1860s—arson, bombings, and the murder of several especially offensive mine officials—the group appears to have largely committed itself to achieving constructive change through the Workingman's Benevolent Association (WBA), a more conventional sort of union. After the so-called "Long Strike" of the early 1870s, during which the mine owners were able to destroy the WBA by "starving out" its membership, the Mollies returned to their earlier approach. Hence, in 1873, the Pinkertons were hired to destroy the group, and perhaps unionism in the coal fields more generally.⁶⁴ [End Page 13]

The main contractor for the agency's services was Franklin Benjamin Gowen, a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer who had served briefly as a county prosecutor and as head of the legal department of the Reading Railroad before being named president of the line. Under his leadership, the railroad had acquired over 100,000 acres of coal land (more than double the acreage held by any other mining company), and a legally mandated monopoly on coal haulage from the entire Pennsylvania anthracite field.⁶⁵ On Gowen's behalf, Pinkerton launched his usual program of infiltration.

On October 27, 1873, [Pinkerton operative] James McParlan, posing as James McKenna, a fugitive from a murder charge in Buffalo, set out for the Pennsylvania coal fields. He hadn't shaved for ten days. A dirty reddish stubble covered his jaws and chin. He wore stained old clothes, carried a worn carpet bag, and smoked a clay cutty pipe. For two and a half years he would be engaged in an undertaking that, as J. Walter Coleman sums up in his history of the Molly Mcguires, "was of such a nature that even the most calm recital of his deeds has all the aspects of the wildest fiction."⁶⁶

At issue is the fact that McParlan was not only able to work his way into the Mollies, ultimately becoming rather close to the organization's nominal head, Jack "Black Jack" Kehoe, but seems to have functioned in the manner of a classic agent provocateur. At least, he revealed a willingness to participate in, among other things, several murders while engaged in his stint of "undercover detection."⁶⁷ Ultimately, he was able to parlay his performance into a position as star witness during a series of trials that decimated the Mollies' leadership; but in the interim his employer became impatient, calling for a resumption of the technique that had liquidated the Renos a few years earlier. In a letter to George Bangs dated 29 August 1875, Allan Pinkerton offered the following instruction:

The only way to pursue [the Molly Maguires] as I see it is to treat them as the Renos were treated in Seymore, Indiana. After they were done away with the people improved wonderfully and Seymore is a quiet town. Let [Pinkerton operative Robert] Linden get up a vigilante committee. It will not [End Page 14] do to get many men, but let him get those who are prepared to take a fearful revenge on the M.M.'s. I think it would open the eyes of all the people and then the M.M.'s would meet with their just deserts. It is awful to see men doomed to death, it is horrible. Now, there is but one thing to be done, and that is, get up an organization if possible, and when ready for action pounce upon the M.M.'s when they are at full blast, take the fearful responsibility and disperse. . . . Place all confidence in Mr. Linden, he is a good man, and he understands what to do. . . . If you think it advisable, bring the matter before Mr. Gowen but none other than him. . . . In case of failure, bail may be required. Mr. Gowen will furnish it by his understanding it.⁶⁸

Pinkerton's vigilance campaign seems to have commenced in the predawn of 10 December 1875, when a group of men burst into the home of Margaret O'Donnell, widow of a miner; her sons, James and Charles; and her daughter and son-in-law, Ellen and Charles McAllister. All three men were presumed to be active in the Mollies. Mrs. O'Donnell was pistol-whipped, Charles McAllister badly wounded, and Charles O'Donnell shot "at least fifteen times" in the head. More of the same was perhaps averted only by a determination that an airtight case was now ready for presentation against key Molly leaders.⁶⁹

During April 1876, a posse headed by Robert Linden effected wholesale arrests, and on 6 May, McParlan made his first appearance on the witness stand, with Gowan himself rather than a state official serving as prosecutor. The outcome was a foregone conclusion: "In the winter of 1877, Jack Kehoe, 'King of the Mollies,' was found guilty. On April 16th, he was sentenced to be hanged. In June, 1877, nineteen of the Mollies went to the gallows; ten were hanged at one time."⁷⁰ Harold Aurand has summed up certain implications of the travesty as amounting to "one of the most astounding surrenders of sovereignty in American history. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency; a private police force arrested the offenders; the coal company attorneys prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the hangman."⁷¹

There is a distinct possibility that at least some of the convicted Mollies were innocent of the charges against them, and that the group as a whole [End Page 15] might not have committed many of the acts of which it was accused. Certainly, the performance of infiltrator/provocateur McParlan in the Steunenberg case three decades later lends credence to the idea that he was not averse to fabricating evidence to obtain convictions.⁷² Similarly, the conclusion of a 1947 study that Gowen and other "coal operators had instigated some of the attacks on the mines that were later attributed to the Mollies to provide an excuse for crushing both the Mollies and the WBA" suggests the wrong parties went to the gallows.⁷³

In any event, as noted labor historian Joseph Rayback has concluded, "Whoever was responsible for the Molly Maguire [violence], labor was their victim. . . . The trial temporarily destroyed the last vestiges of labor unionism in the anthracite area. More important, it gave the public impression that miners in general inclined to riot, sabotage, arson, pillage, assault, robbery and murder. . . . The impression became the foundation of the anti-labor attitude held by a large portion of the nation to the present day."⁷⁴ Whatever else may be said, this was an outcome of which the government, big business, and their Pinkerton employees were self-evidently most desirous.

The Broader Antilabor Campaign

The dimension of labor strife in the United States during the last third of the nineteenth century is to some extent evident in the fact that business was disrupted, usually by strikes, on 22,793 occasions between 1875 and 1900.⁷⁵ In 47 of these instances, beginning with the Chicago "labor riots" (actually, the Chicago component of the national railroad strike) of August 1877, the National Guard was dispatched to protect the interests of business against those of unionized (or unionizing) workers.⁷⁶ On at least 70 occasions, beginning with the September 1866 coal strike in Braidwood, Illinois, the Pinkertons were called in to serve as a special corps of strikebreakers, while in hundreds of other instances they were utilized as a guard force to secure company property against "vandalism" by the workforce.⁷⁷ Most of all, the agency was retained by major corporations or corporate consortia to function as labor spies and provocateurs.⁷⁸

So pervasive was the latter activity that by the early twentieth century, [End Page 16] an investigating committee headed by Wisconsin's Senator Robert LaFollette was led to observe how the infiltration and disruption of labor unions was a "common, almost universal practice in American industry."⁷⁹ The purpose was to allow "private corporations [to] dominate their employees, deny them their constitutional rights, [and] 'promote disorder and disharmony.'"⁸⁰ So effective was this technique that in 1888, for example, two Pinkerton detectives were able to have themselves elected as voting delegates of the Reading, Pennsylvania, local of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and in that capacity attended the union's annual convention, providing "elaborate reports on the issues and discussions" immediately thereafter.⁸¹ In another instance, reported by the LaFollette Committee, a "union organization" consisted of "five officers and no members, with the officers all Pinkerton detectives."⁸² By 1929, it was officially estimated that as many as 200,000 labor spies of various sorts were employed by corporate America.⁸³ While most of these were undoubtedly amateurs of one type or another, during the mid-1930s, General Motors alone was spending some $400,000 per year for the services of professionals.⁸⁴

Pinkerton's was [by far] the largest detective agency involved with union spying. . . . By 1935 Pinkerton's had twenty-seven offices and grossed over $2 million annually. There were 300 clients for whom Pinkerton did industrial work, the largest in the 1930s being General Motors. Between 1933 and 1935 the agency had 1,228 operatives, or "ops" as they were known in the business, in practically every union in the country. Five were in the United Mine Workers, nine in the United Rubber Workers, and seventeen in the United Textile Workers. Fifty-two members of the United Auto Workers were Pinkerton spies who reported on unionization in General Motors. . . . One spy was even the national vice president of one union. At least one hundred Pinkerton operatives held positions of importance in various unions. . . . One Pinkerton, Sam Brady, had been a spy for thirty years.⁸⁵

This was during a period when, in the view of the committee, the "fear of incurring [additional] notoriety restricted Pinkerton's" in its antilabor activities.⁸⁶ Yet the committee also concluded that its increasing revenues—from [End Page 17] $1.4 million in 1933 to $2.3 million in 1935—derived primarily from labor spying, and that such activities were not designed to prevent "violence fostered by communists and other radicals in the union movement," as Pinkerton officials claimed (Pinkerton spymaster Joseph Littlejohn having been forced to admit that his personnel had never ferreted out a single individual meeting such specifications).⁸⁷ Rather, the committee concluded, labor "spying... was simply an excuse to wreck unions."⁸⁸

The question of labor violence raises the issue of the "sharp end" of the Pinkertons' antilabor campaign. While there is no suggestion that agency personnel were killed by union members prior to 1892, the record shows the reverse to have been true in numerous places. At least as early as the autumn of 1866, a Pinkerton guard—one of 800 deployed in the city at the time—shot and killed an innocent bystander during the Chicago stockyard strike.⁸⁹ The number of such indiscriminate shootings increased steadily over the next 20 years. In January 1887, to give another example, a guard killed a young boy during a demonstration attending the Jersey City coal wharfs strike.⁹⁰ In 1890, during the massive Pennsylvania coal strike, "Pinkertons, hundreds of sheriff's deputies and the Pennsylvania militia occupied the strike area for two months, beating the strike, and in the words of the governor, 'had a very salutary effect on turbulent strikers,'" three of whom died at the hands of Pinkerton guards.⁹¹ At about the same time, Pinkertons killed five people during a strike on the New York Central Railroad.⁹²

"It was indicative of the general power relationship that existed in the United States during the late nineteenth century," one analyst has noted, "that during this period the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the most notorious private police force available for hire, had more men than did the U.S. Army."⁹³ The "Pinkerton guard was drilled and trained with military precision," and aside from whatever personal weaponry was owned by individual members—and by all indications it was considerable—the agency maintained arsenals in each of its branch offices: 250 rifles and 500 revolvers in Chicago alone.⁹⁴ Such firepower was, in turn, augmented by arsenals provided by the corporations contracting Pinkerton enforcers. By the 1930s, the four major American steel corporations each owned more tear-gas equipment than any law-enforcement agency in the country; Republic Steel [End Page 18] maintained an inventory of 143 gas guns, more than 4,000 gas projectiles, and 2,700 gas grenades, as well as 500 revolvers, 64 rifles, and 245 shotguns.⁹⁵ There has never been a serious suggestion that any union in the United States was comparably equipped to dispense violence.

Strikebreaking, in the meantime, had become an increasingly prominent Pinkerton technique since the agency first experimented with the provision of substitutes ("scabs") for striking workers during the 1874 Braidwood lockout.⁹⁶ By 1888, the method had been perfected to the point that it was successfully employed to thwart a major strike of the Burlington Railroad, the agency using its guards to import 35 engineers and 93 switchmen to replace union personnel, and its detectives to arrest union members who responded by dynamiting railroad property in Aurora, Illinois.⁹⁷ Often, the Pinkertons' use of scabs to break strikes created the conditions for extreme violence, albeit of the sort perpetrated by parties other than themselves. A prime example occurred in Chicago on 3 May 1886, during the McCormick Harvester strike, when "police fired on a crowd of strikers who had attacked strikebreakers leaving the plant. Police gunfire killed one striker and seriously wounded five or six others."⁹⁸

This last led to what appears to have been one of the most sophisticated and lethal antilabor/antiradical actions of the nineteenth century. On 4 May, the 7,000-member International Working People's Association (IWPA), a militant anarchist spinoff from Daniel DeLeon's Socialist Labor Party (SLP), scheduled a rally at Chicago's Haymarket Square to protest the police shootings of the McCormick strikers, as well as the killings of several others by Pinkerton guards.⁹⁹ Although the assembly was completely peaceful, a contingent of 180 police appeared just as things were wrapping up, and ordered the few hundred people remaining in the square to disperse. A bomb was then tossed into the police ranks and gunfire broke out. The toll came to seven police and as many as a dozen civilians dead, about 70 police and an undetermined number of civilians wounded.¹⁰⁰

The aftermath of the bombing was a wave of hysteria directed against labor and radicals that convulsed the country. Without any evidence whatsoever, the press throughout the country identified the IWPA as the villains, and [End Page 19]screamed for revenge. Police in Chicago opened up a reign of terror against radicals, making mass raids and arrests. . . . Meanwhile, a general roundup of anarchists and suspected anarchist followers was undertaken throughout the country. . . . Ultimately thirty-one persons [all IWPA leaders] were indicted in connection with the bombing, although only eight were tried, on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. . . . The trial was a judicial farce, with persons admittedly prejudiced against the defendants placed on the jury and the judge [Joseph E. Gary] displaying flagrant bias against the defendants throughout the case. No credible evidence was ever introduced linking the defendants to the bombing [but all of them] were found guilty and sentenced to hang, with the exception of one man [Oscar Neebe] who was given fifteen years.¹⁰¹

Four of those convicted—Albert Parsons, George Engel, August Spies, and Adolph Fischer—were executed on 11 November 1887. Another, Louis Lingg, had already committed suicide by exploding a dynamite cap in his mouth. Two others, Michael Schwab and Samuel Fielden, had appealed for executive clemency, and Illinois governor Richard Oglesby had commuted their sentences to life imprisonment.¹⁰² Along with Neebe, the seven have come to be known as the "Haymarket Martyrs" in anarchist and labor histories, remembered by Spies's final words: "There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today."¹⁰³

In the prototypical "Red Scare" following hard on the heels of the Haymarket bombing, "the heavily immigrant composition of the IWPA . . . strengthened public identification with radicalism and violence" to the extent that it has been described as "the single most important incident in late nineteenth century nativism."¹⁰⁴ It also seemed to confirm the impression in "respectable" circles, fostered by the Molly Maguire episode a decade earlier, that unionists were "inherently criminal in character, inclined to riot, arson, pillage, assault and murder."¹⁰⁵ The only problems were that it turned out the Chicago police had fabricated such evidence as was introduced during the trial suggesting that anarchists—much less the defendants—had been responsible for the carnage, and that it had most likely been a Pinkerton provocateur who had hurled the deadly device.¹⁰⁶ [End Page 20]

Hence, in 1893, Governor John Altgeld finally pardoned the surviving defendants, observing in the process that he considered the "widespread and uncontrolled use of Pinkerton operatives by Chicago employers" and the city's failure "to bring the murderers to justice" to have been the causes underlying the bombing.¹⁰⁷ But by then, the damage had long since been done, the "net impact of the public reaction to Haymarket and . . . government repression [having] severely damaged the anarchist and radical labor movement in the U.S. and . . . set back the labor movement in general for about ten to fifteen years."¹⁰⁸ Perhaps ironically, it was not the anarchists and other radicals who suffered most heavily from the whole affair. Instead, the much more moderate (and more powerful) Knights of Labor experienced the sharpest decline in membership, from more than 729,000 members in 1886 to about 220,000 members three years later.¹⁰⁹

According to analyst Daniel Bell, the Haymarket bombing "did more to induce the rank and file of trade unions to reject all associations with revolutionary ideas than perhaps all other things together."¹¹⁰ In any event, "strike activity fell drastically in the last years of the 1880s, as did labor militancy. The Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the bomb 'abruptly ended' the eight-hour movement. . . . Similarly, the Wisconsin Bureau of Labor observed in 1887 that 'everywhere the life and spirit of 1886 have departed.' . . . It was not until 1889 that the [Illinois State Federation of Labor] deemed it politic to publicly declare that the [Haymarket defendants] had not received a fair trial."¹¹¹

Under such conditions, the Knights, the first genuine mass-membership union in U.S. history—which for that reason had probably been the real target of the corporations, and consequently, the Pinkertons—had by the turn of the century declined to the point of ineffectuality.¹¹² In most respects, it had been supplanted by an even more conservative rival, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and was soon to be confronted on the other flank by an altogether more radical challenger, the IWW.¹¹³ For its part, the Pinkerton Agency simply continued in its well-subsidized and quasi-official drive to abolish organized labor as a viable force in American society. Its very success was, however, to cause the agency to indulge itself in an overconfidence that brought about an interruption in its mode of operation in 1892. [End Page 21]

Homestead and After

In the early 1890s, Homestead, Pennsylvania, was a small town of about ten thousand, located seven miles east of Pittsburgh, which provided the labor force for the local Carnegie, Phipps steel mill. In 1889, a strike for higher wages by the AFL's Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers (AAISTW) resulted in a battle between a mass of irate workers and around a hundred sheriff's deputies. The latter were routed and the strikers got their raise. Hence, when a new strike materialized in 1892, the plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, "bypassed local police authority altogether and hired Pinkerton guards," 376 of whom were assigned the job by the agency's Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia offices.¹¹⁴ The group assembled in Youngstown, Ohio, and from there debarked for Homestead on 5 July. The following day, they were at last met with the sort of "authority" they were used to dispensing.

On July 6, strikers confronted three hundred Pinkertons who tried to land from barges on the Monongahela River in order to act as a strikebreaking force. During an ensuing gunfight . . . nine strikers and seven [Pinkertons] were killed, scores were shot, and nearly all the [guards] beaten . . . after they had surrendered to the strikers.¹¹⁵

The smoke had barely cleared from the debacle before, on 18 July, warrants were issued at the request of Carnegie, Phipps for the arrest of seven strike leaders on charges of murdering the Pinkertons, who had supposedly been acting in the capacity of deputy sheriffs.¹¹⁶ By 22 September, the list had been extended to 167 union organizers on charges "ranging from murder to aggravated riot."¹¹⁷ On 30 September, a grand jury selected by the company added the charge of treason against 35 union members, including the entire strike committee. The jailing of virtually the entire AAISTW leadership pending trial had the effect not only of breaking the strike, but the union itself, and "destroyed unionism in the steel industry for nearly fifty years."¹¹⁸

The combined cases collapsed, however, when it was disclosed that the Pinkertons had never been officially deputized by Pennsylvania authorities, and had therefore themselves been in violation of state law when they [End Page 22] entered Pennsylvania bearing weapons.¹¹⁹ When, predictably, there "were no indictments against the steel company or the Pinkertons" as a result of this and other illegalities that readily revealed themselves at trial, a certain negative public sentiment set in.¹²⁰ "The Pinkerton invasion of Pennsylvania looked," as the New York Times put it, "like the work of a mercenary army."¹²¹ Before long, the agency found itself "denounced in a barrage of editorials" in most leading newspapers.¹²²

Fears of standing armies, an old standby in nineteenth century political rhetoric, were aired once more. References were made to Aaron Burr's military activities at the beginning of the century, as were remarks equating Pinkerton's to the Hessian mercenaries of the American Revolution. For those of an even more historical bent, Robert Pinkerton [nominal head of the agency, along with his brother, William, since the death of their father in 1884] resembled a medieval baron with an army for hire.¹²³

Given such publicity, and the sheer clumsiness of what had happened, it was necessary for Congress to quell public outrage by convening an inquiry, not just into the disaster at Homestead, but with regard to the operations of private detective agencies more generally. In addition to Pinkerton's, smaller imitations like the Thiel Detective Agency, Illinois Detective Agency, U.S. Detective Agency, and Mooney and Boland's Detective Agency were taken under investigation by both the Senate and the House.¹²⁴ The result was a charade.

The House committee began its investigations in July, spending all its time in Pittsburgh. The Senate waited until November, and traveled to Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York. In both cases Congress seemed to be playing a political game. The hearings were filled with anti-Pinkerton rhetoric, but the final reports gave only conservative recommendations.¹²⁵

When the committees' findings were released in February 1893, they merely passed the buck, acknowledging that "many problems" attended the activities of the Pinkertons and other such agencies, but concluding that [End Page 23]"any attempts at mitigating the evils of the private detection system had to come from the states and not the federal government."¹²⁶ The latter then moved fairly swiftly to provide the appearance of having taken charge of the situation, following the lead established by Montana and Wyoming, each of which had "made constitutional provisions forbidding the importation of nonresidents for police work" in 1889.¹²⁷ Missouri had passed legislation to the same effect the same year, and Georgia had followed suit in 1890. In 1891, New Mexico, Washington, Minnesota, and Kentucky had joined in, while "New York and Massachusetts passed kindred laws in 1892, shortly before the Homestead violence."¹²⁸

In response to the congressional investigations, a flurry of anti-Pinkerton bills appeared and became law. On February 25 and 28, 1893, West Virginia and North Carolina passed laws forbidding armed [guards] from entering their states. On March 4, South Dakota passed a similar law, and the day before the District of Columbia stopped the federal government's policy of hiring private detectives. In April, both Nebraska and Wisconsin passed anti-Pinkerton legislation, as did Texas and Pennsylvania in May, and Illinois in June. By 1899, six more states followed, and a total of twenty-four states plus the District of Columbia forbade armed guards from entering their jurisdiction.¹²⁹

Although much was made of the notion that such legislation put the Pinkertons "in their place," all that really happened was that state governments had rationalized an otherwise awkward situation, lending a veneer of legitimacy to the Pinkertons by ensuring that the agency would establish a permanent operational presence within their respective jurisdictions. The new structure, which "applied only to the guard," did little to "restrict the plain-clothed detective. Only Maine, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts attempted to regulate the detective by licensing laws by 1895."¹³⁰ Moreover, it facilitated coordination and cross-pollination with local police, and entrenched the agency much more deeply than ever before in the very communities it was intended to repress.

Small wonder that, while the agency did de-emphasize its guard and scab-provision activities to some degree after Homestead (although by no [End Page 24] means entirely; the Pinkertons provided 176 scabs to break a strike against the Allis-Chalmers Corporation in 1902, for example, and it was the agency's importation of scabs during a United Mine Workers [UMW] strike in Ludlow, Colorado, that provoked the confrontation resulting in the state militia's massacring 16 people there on 20 April 1914), the Pinkertons continued to engage in antilabor activities with a very high degree of intensity, and "labor contracts were an important source of [their] income" well into the twentieth century.¹³¹

So much of this was done directly under the mantle of the states in which the agency operated that, ten years after Homestead, it "was not uncommon for the heads of foreign police systems to regard Pinkertons as America's official detective force."¹³² In Pennsylvania, for example, at "the request of business leaders the governor could issue special commissions conferring police power on persons employed by the various iron and coal companies. In 1901, the governor of Pennsylvania issued 570 such commissions. The following year he gave out 4,512 such commissions as strikes increased in the Pennsylvania coal fields. Railroad cars filled with company policemen [many of them provided by Pinkerton's] and mounted with Gatling guns visited mining towns to control worker discontent."¹³³

If there are any particular distinctions to be noted between the pre- and post-Homestead periods, they are that the locus of antilabor operations shifted primarily to the western states, and reliance upon infiltrators was greatly accentuated. In both respects, the Pinkerton office in Denver, Colorado—headed by James McParlan, of Molly Maguire fame—figured prominently.

The Denver office, under the leadership of McParlan . . . became [quite] active as labor problems grew in the early twentieth century. Secret operatives began to eclipse regular operatives as they infiltrated the Colorado, Montana, and Idaho mining areas. A. H. Crane was a member of a union in Colorado City in 1902. Operatives J. H. Cummins, Philander Bailey, and George Riddell, did much the same. The unexpressed expectations were that they might duplicate the exploits of their divisional leader, McParlan. The man who came closest to McParlan's Molly Maguire episode was A. W. Gratias. Gratias [End Page 25] had joined the Western Federation of Miners [WFM] in 1902 and the following year was made chairman of the union relief committee. In 1904 Gratias was elected president of his local union and even went as a delegate to the annual convention.¹³⁴

Actually, such activities had begun at least as early as 1892, shortly after McParlan was named superintendent in Denver, when an operative named Charles Siringo was assigned to infiltrate the WFM at about the same time it was founded in northern Idaho.¹³⁵ The WFM, "the first strong, militant and realistic . . . anticapitalist union in American history," was the major target of McParlan and his men by 1894 at the latest, when Pinkertons comprised the core of "a large force of deputies [used] to protect the re-opening of mines" closed by a strike in Cripple Creek, Colorado.¹³⁶ Two years later, McParlan arranged for the importation of scabs to break a WFM strike at Leadville, Colorado, while he conspired with the governor "to remove the local pro-union sheriff and replace him" with a Pinkerton appointee.¹³⁷

In 1899, the Denver office organized a company of guards, behind which the Bunker Hill & Sullivan mine in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, enforced "yellow dog" contracts—i.e., refusing to hire union labor—in defiance of state law. When Idaho authorities did nothing to correct the situation, the WFM and/or Pinkerton provocateurs responded by dynamiting and burning Bunker Hill & Sullivan property. This, in turn, was used as the pretext upon which federal troops were sent in to destroy the union and local radicalism more generally.¹³⁸

Martial law was proclaimed, and virtually any male remaining in the district became subject to arbitrary arrest and incarceration in boxcars or bullpens. [WFM president Edward] Boyce himself was arrested, along with a large number of Populist party leaders, including a local deputy sheriff. The Populist county sheriff and three Populist county commissioners were removed from office. No miner was allowed to return to work in the area unless he agreed to renounce allegiance to the WFM. While hundreds of miners were arrested, only fourteen were ever convicted of any crime. The repression of the strike broke the WFM in the area, and unionism remained insignificant in the area for years.¹³⁹ [End Page 26]

The union leaders convicted included the WFM's Idaho head, George Pettibone. Their imprisonment was obtained largely on the basis of testimony provided by Pinkerton infiltrator Siringo, who was thereafter so disgusted with McParlan's and his own performance that he declined a promotion to head up an office of his own because, "I know my conscience would not allow me to act as a superintendent of the Agency . . . where so much dirty work would be expected of me."¹⁴⁰ Eventually, he drifted away from the Pinkertons altogether and wrote a rather contradictory volume of memoirs, in which he sought to expose what he felt was wrong with the agency's antilabor tactics while still justifying his personal role in them.¹⁴¹

Contrary to McParlan's expectations, the WFM did not fold up after Coeur d'Alene. Instead, it continued to grow in both numbers and militancy. From 1899 to 1903, the organization made rapid gains, reaching perhaps fifty thousand members.¹⁴² Hence, in 1901, when the Pinkertons again attempted to use scabs to break a WFM strike in Telluride, Colorado, miners were prepared to engage in pitched gun battles with both detectives and local police, seize the mine, and force the scabs to leave.¹⁴³ At that point, Colorado's reactionary governor, James Peabody, along with the state's mining interests and the Pinkertons, declared outright war on the WFM; over the next two years, among many other things, more than four hundred key union organizers were forcibly deported from Colorado by the militia, while hundreds of others were beaten, shot, and confined to bullpens for weeks at a time.¹⁴⁴ Rather than causing it to disband, the onslaught led the WFM to seek allies, assuming a leading role in the establishment of the IWW in June 1905.¹⁴⁵

War Against the Wobblies

In many ways, the Industrial Workers of the World, otherwise known as the IWW or "Wobblies," was the most radical union of significant size ever formed in the United States (it is estimated that more than a million workers, a very high proportion of them non-Anglo immigrants, blacks, or members of other groups marginalized by conventional American unions, held IWW membership cards at some point between its founding and its demise as a viable entity in 1924).¹⁴⁶ The Wobblies' plan, in simplest terms, was to [End Page 27] combine the American working class, and eventually workers all over the world, into one big trade union with an industrial basis, a syndicalist philosophy, and a revolutionary aim. Its industrial departments were to act as syndicalist shadows of American capitalism, so that after the revolution they could quickly step in and help govern the workers' commonwealth. The revolution was to be achieved by a series of strikes, leading to a general strike that would force the capitalists to capitulate. Thus, "the IWW was to be both the embryo of the new society and the revolutionary instrument for achieving it."¹⁴⁷

Although the union was always officially headquartered in Chicago, its initial energy center was Denver, operational base of its first president, WFM leader William "Big Bill" Haywood.¹⁴⁸ This geographical disposition, as well as Haywood's reputation for effectiveness and unrelenting militancy, caused "considerable fear [among governmental and business elites] that labor in Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain states would be radicalized."¹⁴⁹ Into the breach, to head off just such an eventuality, stepped the Denver office of the Pinkertons.

The IWW was hardly organized before it was dealt a crushing blow. On December 30, 1905, Frank Steunenberg, who had been governor of Idaho during the crushing of the Coeur d'Alene strike, was killed by a bomb explosion in Caldwell, Idaho. Subsequently, a man named Harry Orchard was arrested, and the state of Idaho hired Pinkerton detective James McPharland [sic] for the purpose of linking him to the WFM-IWW. After talking to Orchard at length, suggesting to him that the WFM was responsible for the crime and telling Orchard the story of how one person in the Maguire trials had gone free after turning state's evidence, [McParlan] obtained a statement from Orchard that implicated the WFM in virtually every major incident of labor violence in the West, including over twenty murders.¹⁵⁰

In reality, McParlan had applied both the carrot and the stick to Orchard, a relative small fry who may have been an occasional Pinkerton operative as well, subjecting him to "third-degree methods" for extended periods, even while promising to allow him to escape the noose.¹⁵¹ This allowed McParlan [End Page 28] to establish an "evidentiary basis" by which to arrest the three primary IWW leaders in Denver—Haywood, Pettibone, and WFM president Charles Moyer—for conspiracy to murder Steunenberg. He then arranged for their transport to Idaho without benefit of extradition (kidnapping), and assisted state prosecutor William E. Borah in assembling the case against them, in which Orchard's testimony was key.¹⁵²

Although Orchard stuck to his story throughout the trials, and supplied many corroborating details about his confessed acts, his trial testimony also included confessions to acts of violence he could not have committed, and demonstrated that at least once in his long career of arson, theft, bigamy and murder he had worked as an agent provocateur of the Pinkerton Agency. In fact, the only incident of mysterious "labor" violence in Colorado that appears to have been solved [as a result of his testimony] was attributable to the mining companies.¹⁵³

Haywood, Pettibone, and Moyer, ably defended by socialist attorney Clarence Darrow, were acquitted; but, coming hard on the heels of Colorado's war on the WFM and right after the formation of the Wobblies, "the Steunenberg trial had a shattering effect on both the WFM and the IWW."¹⁵⁴ The former never recovered, while the latter found its growth potential permanently impaired.¹⁵⁵ Meanwhile, the manner in which McParlan and his operatives had contrived to trump up the Haywood-Pettibone-Moyer case had so appalled the stenographer in the Pinkerton Denver office, Morris Friedman, that he resigned in protest and wrote a scathing exposé, entitled The Pinkerton Labor Spy, in which he detailed the methods of the agency's antilabor operations.¹⁵⁶

Friedman's book, like so many muckraking books of the first decade of the century, described in detail the organization and operation of the Pinkerton business. Specifically he concentrated on the Denver office, but the general implication was aimed at the entire Pinkerton empire. . . . Numerous operatives reports were reproduced, lending authority to his work. Pinkerton involvement in the Cripple Creek and Telluride strikes and the Haywood trial [End Page 29] were recounted. . . . McParlan was accused of fabricating stories of union conspiracies to win new contracts. Never before had an employee so exposed the inner workings of Pinkerton operations. The agency was stunned into silence.¹⁵⁷

The Pinkertons were more than usually quiet, perhaps, but hardly inactive. If anything, the agency's anti-IWW operations escalated after the publication of Friedman's book in 1907, pacing the union's efforts to expand to national proportions. And, after the death of his brother Robert in that year, William Pinkerton commenced a campaign of increasingly vituperative and ill-researched public denunciations of the Wobblies, including the contrivance of a number of catchy "meanings" for the union's acronym; over the next decade, the agency's owner was to make it fashionable in some circles to refer to the IWW as the "I Won't Work," the "I Want Whisky," the "International Wonder Workers," the "Irresponsible Wholesale Wreckers," and, during America's participation in World War I, "Imperial Wilhelm's Warriors."¹⁵⁸

By 1910-11, the agency was up to many of its older tricks, organizing "vigilance" committees to visit summary punishment upon IWW organizers, providing large complements of guards and scabs to companies struck by the union, infiltrating informers and provocateurs wherever possible. In most of this, as well as antilabor activities of all types, it continued to enjoy much active complicity by state and local officials and police. Not the least indication of this was the enactment of state "criminal anarchy" or "criminal syndicalism" statutes, banning the very philosophies espoused by the Wobblies and other radical organizations.¹⁵⁹

[Four] states passed legislation to outlaw the advocacy of anarchy in 1902 and 1903. The New York law, passed in April 1902, later became the model for criminal syndicalism laws passed to outlaw the Industrial Workers of the World . . . in 1917-20. The law defined criminal anarchy as the doctrine that organized government should be "overthrown by force or violence or by assassination of the executive head or of any of the executive officials of government, or by any unlawful means." Persons who advocated such doctrines [End Page 30] orally or in writing, who helped disseminate such doctrines, or who organized, joined or "voluntarily" assembled with any group advocating such doctrines faced up to ten years in jail and a fine of $5000. Also, any assemblage of two or more persons for the purpose of advocating such doctrines was outlawed, and any person knowingly allowing such meetings on their property, including janitors, also faced arrest.¹⁶⁰

The laws were ostensibly a response to the assassination of President William McKinley by a self-described anarchist named Leon Czolgosz on 6 September 1901, but were always aimed in practice mainly against radical labor organizers.¹⁶¹ In their implementation, the criminal anarchy statutes were coupled to literally thousands of county and municipal ordinances, which began to proliferate around 1905, prohibiting agitation by radicals, especially IWW organizers, within city or county limits.¹⁶² It was in the enforcement of these local ordinances that the Pinkertons, local authorities, and other reactionary social elements often established tidy working arrangements. On 27 November 1911, for instance, Pinkertons were among those deputized as "citizen police" by the mayor of Aberdeen, Washington, and sent to put a stop to IWW organizing among area lumberjacks; they then "blocked the entrance to a scheduled IWW meeting, raided and ransacked the IWW hall, arrested forty men, including all the local IWW leaders, and escorted the arrested Wobblies out of town."¹⁶³

In San Diego, IWW activity was dispensed with on the night of 5 April 1912, when the chief of police turned over nearly two hundred union members he'd jailed for making public speeches to a Pinkerton-organized vigilante mob "who escorted the Wobblies to the county line, beat them with pickaxes and sent them on their way."¹⁶⁴ Over a hundred Pinkerton detectives were also sent to break a 1912 lumber strike in Granbow, Louisiana, when the mostly Afro-American local of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers (BTW) voted to affiliate with the IWW; the strike was broken when, after "company personnel"—probably Pinkertons—fired on a workers' meeting, killing four and wounding forty, 65 BTW-IWW members were indicted. Although all were eventually acquitted or released, "the trial paralyzed the organization for months, drained its treasury and exhausted its resources."¹⁶⁵ [End Page 31] A follow-up strike by the BTW-IWW at Merryville, Louisiana, was broken in February 1913, when "a mob of townspeople and company gunmen [again including Pinkertons] raided and wrecked union buildings, and created such a reign of terror that most strikers were forced to flee for their lives. That was the end of the BTW and the southern lumber drive."¹⁶⁶

During the much larger 1912 IWW strike of some twenty thousand immigrant workers against the American Woolen Company, Atlantic Mill, and other textile manufacturers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Pinkertons deployed several hundred guards, as well as detectives. All of their activities were closely coordinated with local police officials and, after dynamite bombs were discovered in three locations, militia commanders.¹⁶⁷ On 29 January, a woman named Anna LoPezzi was shot to death by police during an attempt to halt a parade in support of the strikers. The following day, "a militiaman bayoneted to death a fifteen-year-old [Syrian immigrant named John Rami], and martial law was declared, making all public meetings illegal."¹⁶⁸ When the strikers then attempted to evacuate their children from Lawrence, this too was declared unlawful. A group of police, augmented by Pinkertons, stopped an attempt to load children aboard a train, "clubbed the children and their mothers, arrested over thirty persons for 'congregation,' and had fourteen children committed by the courts to the city farm."¹⁶⁹

By the time the strike was successfully concluded in March (public outrage over the treatment of the women and children had been such that the companies were forced to capitulate), 355 strikers had been arrested, 54 of whom were sentenced to jail terms; a "group of 34 strikers was given a year in jail each after five to ten minute trials. Although their sentences were later commuted to small fines on appeal, the IWW had to raise $27,000 for bail."¹⁷⁰ Much worse was the situation of IWW organizers Arturo Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor, who had—although they had been three miles away at the time Mrs. LoPezzi was killed—been charged with complicity in her death by virtue of having called for the parade during which she was shot. They were held in jail without bail for ten months.¹⁷¹

When the trial of Ettor and Giovannitti began in late September the two defendants were kept in metal cages in the courtroom; protesting strikers [End Page 32]were brutally clubbed by police outside the [courthouse]. Massachusetts authorities indicted the entire defense committee on charges of conspiring to intimidate workers. Ettor and Giovannitti were acquitted in November.¹⁷²

Before the trial ended, yet another telling illustration of the Pinkertons' operational methods had been revealed. It turned out that the dynamite bombs that had been falsely attributed to "IWW radicals" by the police—and thus used as a pretext to bring in the National Guard, escalating the official violence that claimed the lives of both LoPezzi and Rami—were actually planted by John Breen, a member of the Lawrence school board. Breen admitted he'd acted on the instruction of William N. Wood, president of American Woolen, and in concert with two other men: Frederick H. Atteaux, a Boston businessman, and D. J. Collins, a sometime Pinkerton operative. Unlike Ettor and Giovannitti, Breen and Collins, who were eventually convicted of their offenses, were allowed low bail and were not caged in the courtroom. Each was fined $500 for their offense. The jury hung on Atteaux, and he was released. Wood was acquitted despite being implicated in the conspiracy by both Breen and Ernest Pittman, the man who provided the dynamite.¹⁷³

Once again, public exposure of its covert techniques did little to slow the agency's anti-Wobbly campaign. During the 1913 textile strike in Patterson, New Jersey, in which the IWW once again displayed its ability to galvanize large numbers of immigrant workers, Pinkerton detectives engaged in all manner of provocation—including the killing of two strikers—in concert with the police and other authorities.¹⁷⁴ The U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations concluded, in a belated investigation, that "the police authority of the state was, in effect, turned over to the mill owners [who] trespassed every natural right and constitutional guarantee" of the strikers.¹⁷⁵

At the same time, during an IWW strike of rubber workers in Akron, Ohio, police and Pinkerton-organized "vigilante groups broke the strike by attacking, beating and arresting scores of strikers. The strike defeat ended attempts to organize the Akron rubber workers until the 1930s."¹⁷⁶ Similarly, an "IWW loggers' strike in Coos Bay, Oregon, in May, 1913, was defeated by vigilante raids, beatings, arrests and deportations."¹⁷⁷ Elsewhere, "local [End Page 33] police and sheriff's deputies killed two strikers and wounded many others by firing into picket lines at Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Rankin, Pennsylvania, while private [Pinkerton] guards killed five and wounded many by firing into a group of strikers at Metuchen, New Jersey."¹⁷⁸ In 1914, in Stockton, California, Pinkerton "strikebreakers armed with guns and blackjacks were deputized during labor strife, while Stockton employers tried to plant dynamite to implicate [IWW] members."¹⁷⁹ And the hammer blows kept falling.

During June, 1915, 6 strikers at the Standard Oil plant at Bayonne, New Jersey were shot and killed by private [Pinkerton] guards. . . . A year later at the same plant, police and "deputies" swept through workers' residential areas after six police and strikebreakers were wounded by gunfire during a strike, killing four persons as they clubbed and shot at strikers and wrecked strikers' saloons.... Riots broke out at East Youngstown, Ohio, and at Braddock, Pennsylvania, during 1916 when private guards fired at strikers, killing four and wounding many. In both cases state troops had to be called in to restore order. During the same year, Pennsylvania state troops [acting on information provided by a Pinkerton detective] broke up a strike of IWW coal miners by the simple technique of raiding a union meeting and arresting all 250 miners present.¹⁸⁰

During the massive strike of immigrant mine laborers in Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range during 1916, the IWW demonstrated for a third time its capacity to organize large numbers of strikers under extremely adverse conditions. This was met with another ferocious response by the agency and its employers.

Four hundred mine guards [many of them Pinkertons] were deputized even after they had shot and killed one striker and wounded two others. The deputized guards dispersed parading strikers, arrested IWW organizers without cause, and generally established a reign of terror in the area. The climax of the Mesabi violence came when several of the deputized guards forced themselves without warrant into the home of a miner, allegedly to make an arrest on a liquor violation; in the subsequent melee a deputy was killed along with [End Page 34] a nearby soft drink peddler. All the miners present were jailed on charges of first degree murder, along with IWW leaders who had not even been in the area. Eventually, a settlement was reached in which the IWW leaders were released, while three miners pled guilty to manslaughter. . . . [Governmental] investigating agencies placed the major share of blame on the mining companies and the police [including the Pinkerton deputies]. A report of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations found that the miners endured the "abuse and violence of beating up, shooting and terrorizing." The Mesabi strike eventually collapsed due to the miners' exhaustion.¹⁸¹

Then there was the Everett Massacre of 4 November 1916, in some ways a mirror image of the battle at Homestead 24 years earlier. Beginning in July, efforts by the IWW to organize workers at a sawmill in Everett, Washington, were met by "repeated arrests, brutal beatings and deportations" by the local sheriff and a growing number of "deputized members of the business community," including numerous Pinkertons.¹⁸²

During October, 1916 alone about five hundred Wobblies trying to enter the city were deported by local police. On October 30, forty-one Wobblies trying to enter Everett were beaten by deputies with saps, clubs, rifles and fists. . . . The climax of the Everett affair came on November 4 when two hundred fifty Wobblies trying to land by boat were met at the dock by armed, and, in many cases, drunken deputies who tried to prevent their disembarkation. During a subsequent gun battle five Wobblies and two deputies were killed and scores wounded. Although the source of the first shot was never determined, seventy-four Wobblies were arrested. No action was ever taken against the deputies, although it seems likely that most of the deputies' casualties resulted from gunfire from other deputies. The arrested Wobblies were all released after the first man was acquitted.¹⁸³

After 1916, the Pinkertons' reliance upon vigilantism, already pronounced against the Wobblies, appears to have increased substantially. During the summer of 1917, the Anaconda Mining Company retained the agency to break an IWW strike at its facility in Butte, Montana. In response, the union [End Page 35] sent Frank Little, one of its best, most dynamic, and militant organizers. What happened next harkened back to the Reno and Molly Maguire cases of the 1860s and 1870s.

Following a speech at the ball park in Butte on July 31, 1917, Little went to his room at the Finn Hotel. That night, six masked and armed men broke into his room, beat him, and dragged him by a rope behind their automobile to a Milwaukee Railroad trestle on the outskirts of Butte. There he was hung. On his coat was pinned a card: "First and last warning! 3-7-77. D-D-C-S-S-W." It was said that the numbers referred to the measurements for a grave and the initials corresponded to the first letters of the names of other strike leaders in Butte, thereby warning them of similar treatment if their strike activities were not stopped.¹⁸⁴

It is generally conceded that the "vigilantes" who lynched Little were in fact "agents of the copper corporation," a description that strongly implies Pinkerton personnel.¹⁸⁵ Indeed, Pinkerton operative Dashiell Hammett (later to win fame as a writer of detective fiction) is believed to have served as lookout for those who did the actual killing.¹⁸⁶ Be that as it may, local authorities plainly shielded the perpetrators from incurring any penalties as a result of their deed: the "police kept up a pretense of looking for the man they called their prime suspect, a mentally deranged drug addict from the Western underworld, but no serious attempt was made to bring Little's killers to justice."¹⁸⁷

After 1917, the federal government assumed overall responsibility for destroying the Wobblies,¹⁸⁸ although the Pinkertons and the vigilante organizations they facilitated continued to figure prominently in violence directed against the union. A prime example concerns the case of Wesley Everest, an IWW organizer and much-decorated First World War hero, who was murdered while wearing his uniform by a mob of self-proclaimed "patriots" in November 1919.

On November 11, the so-called "Centralia Massacre" occurred. The IWW had been driven out of Centralia, Washington, by a mob attack in March, 1918, but [End Page 36] had re-established a hall there in September, 1919. During [an] armistice parade, a group of American Legion members attacked the hall, and were fired upon by Wobblies who had armed themselves as a result of widespread rumors of impending assault. Three legionnaires were killed in the battle; an IWW named Wesley Everest who was arrested was turned over to a mob by jail guards that night and lynched. The Centralia incident set off a true reign of terror in Washington; hysterical mobs assaulted Wobblies, and ransacked IWW headquarters, while police arrested at least one thousand alleged IWWs. The "white terror" decimated what was left of the IWW in the state. When the Seattle Union Record asked that judgment be suspended until the facts about Centralia became known, federal agents seized the press plant, banned the issue from the mails and arrested several of the editors [for "sedition"].¹⁸⁹

Describing what happened to Everest as a "lynching" is actually a bit too sanguine. The fate visited upon him by the American Legion—that squalid equivalent to the protofascist Freikorps movement that was simultaneously rampaging in Germany—was to smash his teeth with a rifle butt, castrate him, hang him three times in three separate locations, and then riddle his corpse with bullets before disposing of the remains in an unmarked grave. The official coroner's report listed the victim's cause of death as "suicide."¹⁹⁰

Afterwards, "eleven Wobblies were tried for the incident in a courtroom packed with legionnaires and with federal troops stationed on the courthouse lawn. Two defense witnesses were arrested for perjury during the trial, and the judge ruled out arguments for self-defense. Seven defendants were sentenced to twenty-five to forty years in prison, with the last not released until 1939. No effort was made to find the lynchers of Everest."¹⁹¹

The Modern Agency

After the death of William Pinkerton in December 1923, the agency's chief-executive slot was taken by Robert's son, Allan Pinkerton II. When he died in 1930, his son, Robert Pinkerton II, took over the job.¹⁹² Despite these changes in leadership, and the ever-increasing role assumed by federal agents in repressing labor radicalism, the Pinkertons remained consistent [End Page 37]for some time in peddling their wares as a business instrument against labor: "In the 1920s and early 1930s the Agency provided operatives for use in large industrial plants to report on union activities. . . . By 1936, 30 percent of the firm's business was made up of its industrial services, aside from providing uniformed guards and criminal investigation."¹⁹³

To be fair, the agency was hardly alone in this. A number of other private firms, following the Pinkertons' pioneering record of profitability, were also specializing in antilabor activities by the early twentieth century. In fact, the William Burns International Detective Agency, the Pinkertons' main competitor, "made a concerted effort to specialize in guard services" as well as industrial espionage, taking up most of the slack the agency left in these fields.¹⁹⁴ Other "industrial contractors" included the Archer, Baldwin-Felts, Waddell-Mahon, John Sherman, and Gus Thiel agencies.¹⁹⁵ In addition, there were enterprises that excelled exclusively in strikebreaking.¹⁹⁶

Jack Whitehead was the first to specialize in this activity in the early 1890s when he maintained an army of forty men solely to break strikes. The practice, however, was formalized by Jim Farley, "King of the Strikebreakers," at the turn of the century. As a New York detective, Farley saw the chaos resulting when several different detective agencies provided scabs for the same strike. A centralized force of workers that could be mobilized and moved quickly by a strikebreaker general was needed, he believed. In 1895 Farley gave up any pretense of detective work and specialized in strike services. It was rumored he earned nearly a million dollars from one strike in San Francisco. After ten years of specializing, Farley retired, noting that he had not lost any of his thirty-five strike jobs. Others, like Pearl L. Bergoff, followed Farley's example. Between 1910 and 1922 Bergoff was idle only a few months a year as strikebreaking became a profitable business. He charged the Erie Railroad two million dollars to smash the switchmen's walkout in the 1920s. The government did nothing to restrict these activities, and the number of agencies offering extensive strikebreaking services grew to sixty by the 1930s, when [the Wagner Act] was passed forbidding the mass transportation of scabs.¹⁹⁷ [End Page 38]

Initially, the Pinkertons' antilabor operations survived passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 relatively unscathed. On 8 April 1937, however, in the wake of an extremely negative finding by the LaFollette Committee after its investigation of private-sector industrial-espionage activities, Pinkerton's finally acknowledged the handwriting on the wall. In their own words, the firm's board of directors "recognized the change in recent years in the field of employer and employee relations and that the public sentiment generally was condemning of such practices that had been in effect for a long time."¹⁹⁸ It was then resolved by the board "that management be authorized and instructed to take such steps as the management may feel necessary that this Agency in the future not furnish information to anyone concerning the lawful attempts of labor unions or employees to organize and bargain collectively."¹⁹⁹ As Robert Pinkerton II later put it in the New York Times, "That is a phase of our business that we are not particularly proud of and we're delighted we're out of it. However, there was nothing illegal about it at the time."²⁰⁰

The change was partly real, partly subterfuge. In 1938, a year after the resolution was taken, the agency's income dipped to $1,244,661, its lowest ebb since 1921.²⁰¹ It was, nonetheless, simply attempting to repackage itself for operation in the post-Wagner Act world, in which thoroughly co-opted unions such as the AFL had been federally legitimated.²⁰² Rather than strikebreaking and industrial espionage, the agency sought, with considerable success, to trade in industrial "security" services. In this, it was greatly assisted both by the Second World War and by the subsequent period of sweeping repression usually (and rather misleadingly) referred to as the "McCarthy Era."²⁰³

The Agency's business and profits increased sharply during the war years when the Pinkertons supplied protection for war plants. The top year, 1944, saw the gross income from war-plant operations come to $1,748,584 of the Agency's total of $4,089,969. As national business became more security conscious in the postwar years, the Agency's income continued to rise. In 1946, it was $5,309,772, and in the following year slightly under that figure.²⁰⁴ [End Page 39]

Another lucrative area of endeavor, police consulting, dovetailed handily with the agency's new profile. This had begun at least as early as 1893, when both Robert and William Pinkerton, taking the lead set by their father's and assistant director George Bangs's holding of official federal and local police-detective positions earlier in the century, accepted appointments as honorary members to the newly formed National Association of Chiefs of Police (NACP).²⁰⁵ In this capacity, William took a leading role in establishing a committee—on which he served until 1923—to lobby for congressional funding to establish a "Central Bureau of Identification."²⁰⁶ He also arranged a publisher for the National Association's official periodical, Detective, in 1896.²⁰⁷

With respect to identification, what Pinkerton originally had in mind was the adoption by police departments nationally of the French system of Bertillonage (recording a complex series of physical measurements theoretically unique to each individual). A National Bertillon Identification Center was actually established near Pinkerton's Chicago office in 1897; it employed a French expert named George Porteous as director, and had 39 subscribing police departments by 1900. The initiative was undone in 1903, however, when it was discovered that two prisoners in the federal facility at Leavenworth, both named William West, exhibited precisely the same bodily measurements.²⁰⁸ Pinkerton thereupon abandoned the notion of Bertillonage and formed a new three-person subcommittee—including himself and W. G. Baldwin of the Baldwin Railroad Detective Agency—to explore fingerprinting methods, which were more-or-less universally adopted after they were accepted by a court as conclusive evidence in the 1911Caesar Calla case.²⁰⁹

Despite his obviously self-serving and somewhat bumbling approach, Pinkerton's efforts at creating a centralized criminal-identification center, in combination with a series of keynote addresses he delivered each year at the annual NACP conventions (the organization was renamed the International Association of Police Chiefs [IAPC] in 1902), established him and his agency as the preeminent examples of scientifically efficient crime fighting.²¹⁰ By 1900, "the Pinkerton agency was [also] widely applauded for its sophisticated managerial style," and served as a model for reorganizing a number of police departments around the country.²¹¹ The payoff in terms of interlock between the agency and the police was readily apparent. [End Page 40]

Robert Linden, superintendent of the Philadelphia Pinkerton office in the 1880s, became the head of the Philadelphia police department in the late 1890s. Linden, personally or through his protégés, continued to influence that police department well into the twentieth century. After twenty-three years with Pinkertons, George Dougherty became the deputy commissioner and chief of detectives for the New York city police department in 1911. Dougherty later joined the faculty of the New York School for Detectives and led several crusades for the adoption of a comprehensive fingerprinting system in America. Allan Pinkerton II . . . turned down an invitation to be the police commissioner of New York City in 1913. Other members of Pinkerton management [also] split off and . . . became police officials . . . creating a network of proselytizers for Pinkerton's brand of private policing.²¹²

Such de facto integration of private and public police-detective capacities allowed Pinkerton's to position itself favorably against potential competitors, and thus to become the sole agency retained by the Jewelers Protective Alliance from its founding in 1883, and the American Bankers Association beginning in 1894.²¹³ When added to police consulting and industrial security, commercial security and investigation activities added up to a tidy package. Following the trajectory thus defined by 1945 enabled the agency to expand its personnel roster to 13,000 full-time and more than 9,000 part-time employees, and its gross revenues to more than $71,000,000 by the mid-1960s.²¹⁴ Under the leadership of Edward J. Bednarz, who replaced Robert Pinkerton II as CEO in 1967, Pinkerton's, Inc. (as the agency began to call itself in 1956) also moved full-tilt into the design, manufacture, installation, and maintenance of electronic security, monitoring, and surveillance systems, and into the formal training of governmental security personnel.²¹⁵

Bednarz has played a key part in creating a more sophisticated image for the Agency. He established a research department to study new techniques in industrial security and a school for the study of sophisticated electronic devices. The school was selected by the State Department as the only private agency included in the training program of State's Agency for International Development [AID] for Security Officials sent to the United States by other [End Page 41] world governments. In 1962, Bednarz arranged for the purchase of a New England company, manufacturing space alarms along radar principles. This subsidiary of the Agency, Pinkerton-Elector Security Company, is now marketing an anti-intrusion device for industry and homes known as Radar-Eye.... It was also Bednarz who gained for the Agency membership in the Ligue Internationale des Sociétés de Surveillance, with headquarters in London. This international group extends membership to only one security agency in each country. Pinkerton's represents both the United States and Canada.²¹⁶

While Pinkerton's, which by the 1980s remained the largest firm of its type in North America,²¹⁷ has long claimed to have gotten completely out of the kind of politically repressive work that so indelibly marked its earlier history, it should be noted that the AID's training program for foreign security personnel was a primary mechanism by which the death-squad apparatus that has been used so extensively against leftists and labor organizers in Latin America and other Third-World localities was assembled and perfected.²¹⁸ It is also worth mentioning that the Ligue Internationale des Sociétés de Surveillance has always evidenced a decidedly antiradical, antilabor cant. In addition, the facts that the agency has at this point reversed the flow of personnel from itself to various police agencies, and finds one of its own major recruitment pools to be composed of former FBI agents, and that by 1980 it was known to have compiled more than four million dossiers on the activities of "suspect" individuals tend to speak for themselves.²¹⁹

There is also the matter of clones. The Florida-based Wackenhut Corporation, for example, employs upwards of 3,500 personnel—many of them ex-FBI men—making it the third-largest private detection/security firm in the United States, right behind Pinkerton and Burns. The corporation was established in the late 1950s by George R. Wackenhut, a John Birch Society member and former FBI agent, and, until their deaths in the late seventies and mid-eighties respectively, included on its board Orange County Birchite attorney Lloyd Wright and former FBI assistant director Stanley J. Tracy.²²⁰ Even more straightforward is Fidelifacts, a 22-office operation that promotes itself as being "The National Organization of Ex-FBI Agents" and includes [End Page 42] on its staff over 200 former Bureau men.²²¹ Still another Pinkerton-style detection and security outfit is Dale Simpson & Associates, of Dallas, also run by men who learned their trade in the FBI.²²²

All of these "private" concerns feed information on the political activities of American citizens directly into the FBI data banks—and receive classified information in return—if the murky operation once run by retired Military Intelligence chief Ralph H. Van Deman is any indication. In early 1971, it was accidentally discovered that the former major general, for a quarter-century after he left service, had been compiling tens of thousands of dossiers on the people and groups he considered "subversive" (Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, for instance, and the actress Joan Crawford, as well as political figures such as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Wayne Morse).²²³ He was at least partially funded in this enterprise by the U.S. Army, and his files included thousands of pages of supposedly confidential material provided by the FBI.²²⁴

It was established during a preliminary investigation by the Senate that over the years, Van Deman had freely provided the results of this "entrepreneurial intelligence gathering" not only to the military and the Bureau, but to the House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the Tenny Committee in California.²²⁵ Further revelations were avoided by the army, which—when it appeared that the files would be subpoenaed by Senator Sam Ervin's Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights—quickly turned them over instead to the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, headed by archreactionary James O. Eastland, who promptly clamped a permanent "National Security" classification over the entire lot. Consequently, at present, more than a quarter-century later, the full dimension of Van Deman's operation and the disposition of much of the information he collected remains unknown.²²⁶

Pinkerton Influences on the FBI

It is important that the impact of the Pinkerton mode of repressing labor radicalism upon the U.S. polity be understood from the vantage point of its having no counterpart anywhere in the industrialized world. As Val R. [End Page 43] Lorwin has observed, "American workers had to fight bloodier industrial battles than the French for the right of unions to exist and to function. . . . [The] rail strikes of 1877, the pitched battle of Homestead, the Ludlow massacre were far bloodier than Fourmies and Draveil and Villeneuve-Sainte-Georges [sic]. The 1919 steel strike was more brutally suppressed than the French general strike of 1920. 'Bloody Harlan' had no rival in the coal country of France. France had nothing like the private armies, factory arsenals and industrial espionage services exposed by the LaFollette Committee...."²²⁷

Or, as Stuart Jamieson has remarked with respect to the evolution of unionism in Canada, "The use of professional strike-breakers, labor spies, 'goon squads,' 'vigilante' groups, armed militia and other spectacular features of industrial warfare in the United States . . . have been absent from the Canadian scene."²²⁸ The same can be said of Great Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, even Germany. Indeed, in no other ostensibly democratic country "have employers been so much aided in their opposition to unions by the civil authorities, the armed forces of government and their courts."²²⁹ The level and forms of repression manifested during the period of "Pinkertonism" is all the more remarkable when it is considered that—with the exceptions of the IWW, WFM, and a few fringe groups like the IWPA—the American labor movement has been the least ideologically developed of any on the planet.

The rate of industrial violence in America is striking in light of the fact that no major American organization [including the IWW] has ever advocated violence as a policy, that extremely militant class conflict philosophies have not prevailed here, and that the percentage of the American labor force organized in unions has always been (and is now) lower than in most advanced industrial countries. With a minimum of ideologically motivated class conflict, the United States has somehow had a maximum of industrial violence.²³⁰

In addressing the question of industrial violence in the United States, it is thus inappropriate to ask, as orthodox analysts insist upon doing, whether [End Page 44]and to what extent labor precipitated or "provoked" it. Rather, the sole relevant question is why American government at all levels not only acquiesced in but often vigorously supported big-business usage of the Pinkertons and their counterparts to visit such unparalleled barbarity upon persons, citizens and noncitizens alike, who, for the most part, never asked more than a living wage, decent working conditions, and perhaps a brighter future for their children. To this, Robert Justin Goldstein provides the only reasonable response:

The fundamental explanation for the government-business alliance against labor . . . lies in the fact of business' tremendous power [and consequent utility to government]. . . . Just as the amalgamation of church and state in colonial America made religious dissent in effect a political challenge to state authority, calling for state repression, so during most of the 1837-1937 period did the challenge posed to American capitalism by labor become transformed by the state-business amalgamation into a challenge to the ruling orthodoxy of the state.²³¹

It was to preserve this status quo that the Pinkertons were unleashed with such sustained ferocity. In this sense, it is rather academic to ask whether the creation of an official entity to assume those functions performed by the Pinkerton Agency for the U.S. Department of Justice from 1871 to 1892 might not tend to reflect or even replicate the Pinkertons' tactics and priorities in the process.²³² This is all the more true when it is considered that many of the personnel staffing the Justice Department's "detection unit" in its early days had learned their trade while working as Pinkerton detectives. The only question, then, is not whether the agency left an imprint upon its federal successor, but by which methods and to what degree.

Some things, identification methodologies for example, are fairly straightforward. At its inception, the Justice Department's investigative bureau utilized the Bertillon System favored by William Pinkerton, and then shifted to a reliance upon fingerprinting when the Pinkerton chief switched preferences.²³³ Pinkerton reciprocated by seeing to it that the IACP provided the new bureau with duplicates of both its Bertillon and fingerprint records, and, [End Page 45] in 1924, the Bureau's recently appointed acting director, J. Edgar Hoover, was finally able to convince Congress to allocate funds for purposes of establishing the national identification center Pinkerton had long sought: "The importance of William Pinkerton's plan in the 1890s to centralize Bertillon and photographic records within a national bureau of criminal identification—later the basis for the present FBI's enormous files—is obvious."²³⁴

Actually, it appears that Hoover may have gone well beyond anything Pinkerton had in mind, creating "a Division of Identification and Information [DII] within the Bureau that would include the fingerprints of law abiding citizens as well as criminals."²³⁵ By 1993, the DII database would include cards on some 196 million people—a total estimated to have since grown at a rate of nine million per year—only 107 million of them classified as "criminals" by some definition or another. (The FBI's National Crime Information Center [NCIC] also maintains an estimated 23 million additional "items of interest to law enforcement.")²³⁶ In any event, the division, by now the largest in the Bureau, functions very much as Pinkerton originally envisioned, with state and local police "subscribers"—a term now encompassing virtually every police agency in the country—continuously feeding in data, and the identification center continuously disseminating it.²³⁷

Hoover plainly followed Pinkertonian tradition in developing other interlocks with the police, offloading personnel to serve as chiefs, commissioners, and heads of detective divisions in major city departments, as well as county sheriffs and even district attorneys. Agent Joseph I. Woods, for example, left the FBI in 1961 to become sheriff in Cook County, Illinois, while Peter J. Pitchess, Los Angeles County sheriff during the 1960s, was also an FBI alumnus, as was L.A. district attorney Evelle J. Younger.²³⁸ Similarly, Dade County (Florida) sheriff E. Wilson Purdy was a former FBI man, while the "late Arthur Cornelius, Jr., once [head agent] in Albany, was named superintendent of the New York state police in 1959 and brought with him a large contingent of Bureau alumni, including former Assistant Director John J. McGuire."²³⁹ The list of such situations could be extended for pages.

In 1960, former FBI assistant director Quinn Tamm became executive director of the IACP; among the more important members during his tenure were Kansas City police chief Clarence Kelley, still another former agent (and [End Page 46] future FBI director).²⁴⁰ As to the IACP itself, Hoover and his Bureau picked up exactly where William Pinkerton left off.

The Washington-based International Association of Chiefs of Police claimed more than sixty-two hundred members as of 1970. Police officials from the rank of captain up were eligible, as were industrial security men, many of whom were former FBI agents. . . . For years the IACP-FBI relationship was incestuous. On Hoover and Associate director Clyde Tolson was bestowed the honorific title of life member. Year after year, in ritual symbolism, special resolutions—usually written by FBI personnel and approved by the Director—lavishly praised the FBI chief and were unanimously passed. Hoover's nod or frown could make or break proposals under consideration. At the conventions, FBI officials were invited as keynote speakers. . . . [In 1969, Santa Ana, California, police chief Edward J.] Allen "flatly asserted that the FBI . . . controls the IACP."²⁴¹

Aside from infusion of FBI personnel into the higher ranks of public and private police forces, one means to the desired end has been the Bureau's production and distribution of "professional" publications such as the Law Enforcement Bulletin, "a monthly slick mailed to some fifty-seven thousand police officers, sheriffs and prosecuting attorneys."²⁴² Another has been the provision, free of charge, of some five thousand training sessions each year for local police departments around the country on such topics as arrest techniques, firearms, and defensive tactics.²⁴³ In 1935, the FBI once again surpassed the Pinkertons' record in cultivating such handy cross-pollination, this time by establishing a by-invitation-only "National Police Academy" through which to inculcate not merely the Bureau's investigative techniques, but its "perspective" among state and local police personnel.²⁴⁴

Once an officer has been through the academy, he is automatically thought, by the FBI and usually by himself and others, to be a member of the select (although larger all the time) fraternity of Bureau men among the nation's estimated four hundred thousand law enforcement personnel. If he is in a big city, he is invited to special events by the local FBI office. In a small town, he [End Page 47] is the first person consulted by a Bureau agent who is a stranger and has come looking for information. . . . He is invited to regional "retraining" sessions where Bureau agents dispatched from Washington lecture on a current problem in law enforcement and present the FBI's ideas for a solution. And he is almost sure to be a member of the FBI National Academy Association complete with blazer patches, coasters, and festive reunions and conventions. . . . Because of the status and honor attached to the National Academy, local police departments and the officers within them often compete to be chosen.²⁴⁵

Small wonder that by 1948, FBI assistant director Hugh N. Clegg, while delivering a keynote address at the annual IACP convention, could assert—to considerable applause from those assembled—that the "ideal" police chief was one "who cooperates with the FBI in such a generous manner that he has earned our undying gratitude," consistently sending in fingerprints and "laboratory problems," and having his men trained to Bureau specifications.²⁴⁶ As this intimate FBI/police relationship was being forged, the same was being done with the security forces maintained by private corporations. In 1923, for example, H. C. Ruch, a close friend and assistant to Hoover, left the Bureau to head up a labor-espionage operation for the H. C. Frick Coal Company.²⁴⁷ By the 1980s, the "security chiefs of Texas Instruments of Dallas, Lockheed at Sunnyvale, California, the giant Wynn-Dixie supermarket chain, and Reynolds Metals, to name only a few, were former Hoover minions."²⁴⁸ During the 1990s, Richard Wallace Held, a ranking specialist in COINTELPRO-style operations and head of the FBI's San Francisco field office, took early retirement from the Bureau to become chief of security for Visa Corp.²⁴⁹ Again, the list could be extended to great length.

Such carefully calculated placements of its personnel allowed the FBI to avoid the appearance of direct involvement in certain of the more unsavory aspects of antilabor activity, even while exerting a steadily increasing degree of indirect control over them. Nor did Hoover neglect the cultivation of personal relationships with the rich and powerful. Following the pattern set forth by Allan Pinkerton's "friendship" with McClellan, the FBI director ingratiated himself with a cast of characters that included politicos like [End Page 48]Wisconsin's red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy, California's Richard Nixon, and Texas liberal Lyndon Johnson, as well as right-wing billionaires such as Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson.²⁵⁰

There are also more than a few Pinkertonesque elements embodied in Hoover's propensity to popularize himself and his Bureau by writing—or causing to be written under his byline—a lengthy stream of material glamorizing and mythologizing his version of the "craft of detection." Unmistakably, this activity on the part of the Bureau and its director, complete with the 1935 creation of an internal propaganda mill euphemistically dubbed the "Crime Records Division" (CRD), found its roots in the literary efforts of Allan Pinkerton and his prose hacks in the 1800s.²⁵¹

Allan Pinkerton, the most famous real-life detective of the nineteenth century, probably was more famous for the eighteen volumes of casebooks his ghost writers turned out from 1873 until 1886 than anything he did as a detective. When Hoover began issuing his own ghost-written casebooks (Persons in Hiding in 1938, Masters of Deceit in 1958, along with scores of magazine articles and several movies), these literary performances seemed incongruous to many, but only because his critics did not know the popular tradition of the "great detective" who has always been a storyteller as well as a hero.²⁵²

In the same vein, the FBI, like the Pinkerton Agency before it, was packaged as the nation's premier crime-fighting force, when in fact the preponderance of its resources and attention were always devoted to antiradicalism, pure and simple. While the Pinkertons made much of their campaigns against the Renos and James/Youngers—and later, the apprehension (twice) of Willie Sutton, a notorious bank robber of the 1920s—there is no indication that the agency made any effort at all to confront such precursors of twentieth-century organized crime as the Whyos and other New York gangs.²⁵³ Meanwhile, as was shown above, the agency specialized in deploying literally thousands of employees to break strikes, infiltrate labor unions, and disrupt anarchist and other radical political activities, regardless of their legality. [End Page 49]

By the same token, the FBI hyped itself as being composed of "gang busters," after a series of easy successes during the mid-1930s against such smalltime rural hoodlums as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Alvin Karpis, and the Barker family.²⁵⁴ At the same time, it did absolutely nothing to interfere with the rise of syndicated crime in the United States, with Director Hoover even going so far as to state publicly, repeatedly, and officially that, so far as his Bureau knew, organized crime as such "did not exist."²⁵⁵ Yet, while allegedly being too short-handed to discover the operations of urban crime bosses like Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia, Tony Acardo, and Vito Genovese,²⁵⁶ the FBI always had sufficient resources to blanket labor radicals like Harry Bridges, maintain a 50-year vendetta against the American Communist Party, and so on.²⁵⁷

In other words, the Bureau unquestionably inherited its predecessor's tendency to veil its true identity and priorities, masquerading as society's main defense against rampant crime while largely ignoring major criminal enterprises in favor of a steadily increasing concentration on the repression of radical political activity.²⁵⁸ Even when he was willing to come out of the closet with regard to his Bureau's real priorities, the stilted concepts and rhetoric used by Hoover in such books as Masters of Deceit and A Study of Communism to describe the "subversive menace" he assigned his agents to combat bears more than passing resemblance to those used early on by Allan Pinkerton in his The Molly Maguires and the Detectives and Strikers, Communists, Tramps and the Detectives, as well as Robert Pinkerton's 1901 essay, "Detective Surveillance of Anarchists."²⁵⁹ As Hoover biographer Richard Gid Powers has observed:

Hoover's performance [from 1919 onward] might be interpreted as a variation on a technique developed by the Pinkerton Agency in the nineteenth century: "Every group was assumed to be led by a tight inner circle of conspirators whose program and tactics were closely held secrets. These insiders were, in theory, surrounded by an outer ring of followers, many of them unaware of the criminal purposes of the leaders."²⁶⁰ [End Page 50]

Administrative, propagandistic, and ideological similitude aside, however, a genuine question might still be posed as to the extent to which the FBI assimilated the Pinkertons' vernacular of utterly illegal tactics in waging its own, more official campaigns against radicalism. Here, we again encounter a veritable point-by-point correspondence, beginning with the use of "Big Lie" techniques—such as those evident in Allan Pinkerton's 1861 "Lincoln Assassination Plot" fable—in order to garner from those in power an extra measure of support at critical moments. There have been a number of instances in which the Bureau has clearly resorted to such stratagems, perhaps most notably when Hoover testified before a congressional subcommittee in 1970, while seeking increased funding, that his agents had uncovered a plot by a group of pacifist Roman Catholic clergy, nominally headed by the priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, to sabotage Washington, D.C., and assassinate presidential assistant Henry Kissinger. It took months before the sheer falsity of the director's assertions became apparent, but by then his purpose(s) had long since been accomplished.²⁶¹

As concerns the orchestration and/or organization of vigilante groups to neutralize targets—à la the Pinkertons' performances against the Renos, Molly Maguires, and IWW—the FBI's record is also imbued with many counterparts, especially during the First World War, and again in the 1960s and early-to-mid-1970s.²⁶² One example drawn from the latter period, that of the so-called "Secret Army Organization" (SAO) in southern California, should be sufficient to illustrate the point. Among other things, the SAO was responsible for the attempted murder, in San Diego, California, of radical economist Peter G. Bohmer on 9 January 1972, and the firebombing of the Guild Theater, also in San Diego, on 19 June the same year.²⁶³

An ex-FBI informer, Nanda Zocchino, recounted in the January 26, 1976, editorial of the Los Angeles Times how the Bureau had created and financed this "crypto-fascist" group in San Diego during 1969-70. During the early 1970s the SAO engaged in a range of activities including burglary, mail thefts, bombings, kidnappings, assassination plots and attempted murder. . . . A second informant to the San Diego FBI office, Howard Berry Godfrey, has substantially [End Page 51]corroborated Zocchino's story. . . . According to the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee (CRIC), the SAO was established specifically to "use violence against radicals" and, at its peak, had cadres in eleven western states.²⁶⁴

The record is also replete with examples of the FBI utilizing agents provocateurs in essentially the same role as was played by the Pinkertons' James McParlan against the Molly Maguires. Notable in this regard was the Bureau's insertion of at least 30 operatives into the Black Panther Party during the late 1960s,²⁶⁵ but this hardly exhausts the list of possible illustrations. Consider the following, taken from the chronicle of FBI provocation within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the same period.

Probably the most well-known agent provocateur was Thomas Tongyai, known as Tommy the Traveler. Tongyai, who was paid by both the FBI and local police, spent over two years traveling among the colleges in western New York State, urging students to kill police, make bombs and blow up buildings. . . . Tongyai constantly talked of violence, carried a grenade in his car, showed students how to use an M-1 rifle and offered advice on how to carry out bombings. After some students at Hobart College apparently took his advice and bombed the Hobart ROTC building, and Tongyai's cover was exposed, the local sheriff commented, "There's a lot of difference between showing how to build a bomb and building one." As a result of disturbances connected with Tongyai's activities on the Hobart campus, nine students and faculty faced criminal charges.²⁶⁶

Another FBI-sponsored provocateur, Charles Grimm, maintaining that he acted on instructions of the Bureau, openly admitted to the burning of Dressler Hall, on the campus of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, on 7 May 1970.²⁶⁷ Still another, Horace L. Packer, who became the government's star witness during the "Seattle Eight" conspiracy trial, conceded to having supplied all manner of illegal weapons, explosives, and drugs to the defendants and their associates.²⁶⁸ [End Page 52]

Probably the most incredible provocation incident involved an FBI and Seattle police informer, Alfred Burnett, who lured Larry Eugene Ward into planting a bomb at a Seattle real estate office on the morning of May 15, 1970, by paying Ward $75, providing him with the bomb and giving him transportation to the bombing scene. Ward, a twenty-two year old veteran who had been twice wounded and decorated three times for service in Vietnam, was shot and killed by waiting Seattle police as he allegedly fled after the bombing attempt, although he was unarmed, on foot, and boxed in by police cars. . . . Burnett, the FBI informer, was a twice-convicted felon who had been released from jail as a result of FBI statements to the Seattle police . . . ²⁶⁹

By and large, the FBI seems not to have manifested the Pinkertons' proclivity to engage directly in the murder of targeted individuals, preferring instead to manipulate vigilantes, rival political organizations, or local police into such lethal pursuits. An example of the Bureau's deliberate provocation of interorganizational violence for purposes of physically neutralizing members of one or both groups concerns the 1969 "war" precipitated at least in part by the FBI's dissemination of forged cartoons attributed to the Black Panther Party and defaming the United Slaves (US), a black cultural nationalist organization. By the FBI's own tally, six members of the party died at the hands of US gunmen as a result.²⁷⁰ The assassinations of Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on 4 December 1969 is probably the best-known instance of police being used by the Bureau in much the same manner.²⁷¹

There have, of course, been exceptions to such indirect approaches to mayhem, as when agents cold-bloodedly gunned down bank-robber John Dillinger in a Chicago alley on the night of 22 July 1934, and their execution, in what amounted to firing-squad fashion, of another minor desperado, Pretty Boy Floyd, on 21 October the same year.²⁷² In other instances, the Bureau appears to have utilized "non-agent personnel" to infiltrate targeted organizations with express instructions to assassinate selected political leaders. Such is the case with provocateur Louis Tackwood, who insists—and passed a polygraph to punctuate his point—that he was assigned by his FBI [End Page 53] handlers to murder Black Panther field marshal George Jackson inside San Quentin, the California maximum security prison, in 1970.²⁷³ Where one should look to find a clearer repetition of the Pinkertons' end-game move against Jesse James is difficult to imagine.

As concerns usurpation of the judicial system for purposes of staging the sort of "trial" inflicted by the Pinkertons and their cohorts upon the Molly Maguires and the Haymarket defendants, no shortage of counterparts can also be drawn from the FBI's subsequent performance. Probably the most spectacular have been the mass trials of IWW leaders/organizers in 1918 and the so-called "Chicago Eight" conspiracy trial of 1969-1970.²⁷⁴ Another is the above-mentioned trial of the Seattle Eight, growing out of a February 1970 demonstration in that city.

Although the demonstration—called to protest contempt sentences handed down in the Chicago case—had been planned only ten days before it occurred, four of the defendants were charged with crossing state lines the previous December with intent to incite riot; another defendant (a visiting photography professor at the University of Washington) was charged with using interstate telephone lines with intent to incite riot as a result of a long distance call placed a week before the demonstration. . . . The judge, George H. Boldt, declared a mistrial when the defendants protested his refusal to give any kind of shelter in the entire courtroom building to spectators who were waiting outside in the rain to gain entrance to the trial. He then sentenced five defendants to a year in jail for contempt and two to six months for contempt (one defendant had gone underground and never shown up), based on the "totality" of their behavior during the trial. . . . ²⁷⁵

Boldt then denied bail on the contempt convictions even after an appeals court instructed him to grant it. In March 1973, the government finally dismissed the original charges, but by then, the defendants had all served jail time as a result of their malicious prosecution. Moreover, "the once thriving radical movement in Seattle," of which they were key organizers, "had been made a shambles."²⁷⁶ [End Page 54]

Much the same pattern self-evidently prevailed in the so-called Wounded Knee Trials pursued against the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the same period. Although the FBI caused a total of 562 felony charges to be filed against AIM members and supporters following a protracted 1973 confrontation on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a total of only 15 convictions resulted, all for minor offenses.²⁷⁷ The purpose of the prosecutorial onslaught had been far from the obtaining of guilty verdicts, however. During the more than two years in which the trials occurred, almost the entire roster of AIM's key leaders and organizers were continuously tied up in the struggle to defend themselves in court against a seemingly unending stream of baseless allegations, their out-of-court activities constrained by conditions attached to the posting of their usually excessive bails, their organization ultimately bankrupted by its ever-mounting legal expenses.²⁷⁸

Worst of all have been the cases in which extralegal manipulation of the judicial process by "law-enforcement officials" has resulted in imprisonment of those falsely accused. Among the more striking examples is that of Dhoruba bin Wahad (Richard Moore), a New York Black Panther leader who served 19 years in a maximum-security prison before being released in 1990, after it was conclusively established that the FBI had not only fabricated evidence leading to his conviction on charges of attempting to murder police, but to have withheld evidence that would have exonerated him.²⁷⁹ Another is that of Geronimo ji Jaga (Elmer Gerard Pratt), a one-time leader of the Los Angeles Panther chapter, released from prison in 1996 after serving 27 years on a murder conviction engineered in much the same fashion as bin Wahad's.²⁸⁰ Still another is that of AIM member Leonard Peltier, now in his 27th year of maximum-security incarceration, despite formal acknowledgement by the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals as long ago as 1986 that the evidence used to obtain his conviction was utterly invalid.²⁸¹

These and myriad other examples demonstrate conclusively that the essence of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Pinkertonism has infected the FBI from the moment of its birth through the present day.²⁸² Moreover, insofar as the Bureau has continued to evolve and refine the criminal techniques of political repression pioneered by the Pinkertons, to have [End Page 55]broadened their application to include a span of targets vastly wider than the labor radicalism that preoccupied its "private" predecessor, and to have fully institutionalized the result, the FBI must be seen as having accomplished things far worse than anything even the most malignantly visionary of the Pinkertons might ever have conceived. Far from diminishing as the country has matured, the unique terms of American class warfare remarked on above by Lorwin, Jamieson, and others must therefore be understood as having become ever more pronounced over the past nine decades. We must calculate the nature of our own actions accordingly.

Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) is a professor of American Indian studies and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Among his more than twenty books are Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of Native Americans (2 d ed.; City Lights, 1998); Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America (with Mike Ryan; Arbeiter Ring, 1998); Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader (Routledge, 2002); and Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Anglo-American Law (City Lights, 2003). With Jim Vander Wall, he has written Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (South End Classics, 2002); and The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (South End Classics, 2002).

Endnotes

1. David Cole, excerpt from a presentation made at Princeton University, aired on radio station KGNU, Boulder, Colo., March 2003.

2. See, as examples, David Cole and James X. Dempsey, Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing CivilLiberties in the Name of National Security (New York: New Press, 2002); Cynthia Brown, ed., Lost Liberties:Ashcroft and the Assault on Personal Freedom (New York: New Press, 2003); James Bovard, Terrorism andTyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

3. Also see, e.g., David Cole, "The Course of Least Resistance: Repeating History in the War on Terrorism," in Brown, Lost Liberties, 13-32.

4. Probably the best overview remains David Caute's The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge UnderTruman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). Also see Athan Theoharis, Seeds ofRepression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971).

5. An excellent examination is provided in Robert W. Dunn, ed., The Palmer Raids (New York: International, 1948). For further background, see Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

6. The centerpiece of this juridical offensive was the mass trial—by far the largest in U.S. history (bleachers had to be installed in the courtroom to seat the defendants)—of 113 IWW leaders on an average of 100 charges each, all devolving upon the notion of "sedition" and "seditious conspiracy." Beginning on 1 April 1918, the trial lasted until 31 August when, after having convicted them en masse, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis sentenced 15 of the accused to twenty years imprisonment, 33 to ten years, and 35 to five years. More-or-less simultaneously, mass trials of IWW organizers also occurred in [End Page 56] Wichita, Kansas, and Sacramento, California. In Wichita, 34 persons were tried, and 27 convicted and sentenced to serve from one to nine years imprisonment; in Sacramento, where there were 46 defendants, all were convicted and received sentences of up to ten years. For one of the best treatments of these proceedings, see Philip A. Taft, "The Federal Trials of the IWW," LaborHistory 3 (winter 1962).

7. On Garvey and UNIA, see Robert A. Hill Jr., "The Foremost Radical of His Race: Marcus Garvey and the Black Scare, 1918-1920," Prologue 16 (winter 1984). More broadly, see Theodore Kornweibel Jr., Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

8. This is a point I've made elsewhere and repeatedly. See, e.g., my "'To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy': The FBI's Secret War Against the Black Panther Party," in Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2001), 78-79; "The FBI's Secret War Against the Black Panther Party: A Case Study in Repression," in Curtis Stokes, Theresa Meléndez, and Genice Rhodes-Reed, eds., Race in the Twenty-first Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001), 268.

9. In terms of legislation, there are of course much earlier examples, notably the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798-1800. Nonetheless, I locate the point of departure in the juncture at which the apparatus of enforcement of such ideologically repressive statutes is formally established, if not as a component integral to the central government itself, then through the regularized employment of surrogate entities retained for this specific purpose. On the early legislation, see John C. Miller, Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1951).

10. Again, this is a theme I've elsewhere developed more fully. See, e.g., my preface to the recent Classics Edition of my and Jim Vander Wall's The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2002), xxv-lxxxviii.

11. For penetrating analysis of the broader reality within which this seeming consensus is embedded, see Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies (Boston: South End Press, 1989).

12. For explication, see the essay titled "Acts of Rebellion: Notes on the Interaction of History and Justice," which serves as the introduction to my Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), esp. xi-xvii.

13. U.S. Congress, Appropriations to the Budget of the United States of America, 1872, section 7, United States Department of Justice (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1872).

14. Max Lowenthal, The Federal Bureau of Investigation (New York: William Sloan Assoc., 1950), 6-10.

15. Frank Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 19-20, 52; Sigmund A. Lavine, [End Page 57] Allan Pinkerton: America's First Private Eye (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1963), 18-22. More generally, see Ray Boston, The British Chartist Movement in America, 1839-1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971).

16. Morn, Eye, 21-23.

17. Ibid., 18.

18. Ibid., 93, 23.

19. Ibid., 39.

20. Ibid., 39-40. For Pinkerton's own account of this episode, see his The Spy of the Rebellion, Being a True History of the Spy System of the United States Army during the Late Rebellion (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1888), 46, 54-56, 62, 68. Also see his self-published History and Evidence of the Passage of Abraham Lincoln from Harrisburg, Pa. to Washington, D.C. on 22d and 23d of February, 1861 (Chicago: Pinkerton National Detective Agency, 1861).

21. Morn, Eye, 40.

22. U.S. House of Representatives, Reports of the Committees of the House of Representatives, vol. 2, no. 79, Alleged Hostile Organization Against the Government Within the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: 36th Cong., 2d sess., 1861), 2.

23. "There was no conspiracy at all, save in the brain of the Chicago detective [Pinkerton]"; Chicago Democrat, 5 March 1861.

24. Morn, Eye, 41.

25. Ibid., 45.

26. Ibid., 46.

27. James D. Horan, The Pinkertons: The Detective Dynasty That Made History (New York: Crown Publishers, 1967), 238. Also see, generally, Richard Wilmer Rowan, The Pinkertons: A Detective Dynasty (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931).

28. Pinkerton's bibliography of potboilers is extensive. Aside from Spy of the Rebellion and History and Evidence, he also authored, among many other tomes, General Principles of Pinkerton's Police Agency (Chicago: Church, Goodman, and Donnelley, 1869); The Expressman and the Detectives (Chicago: W. B. Keen, Cooke & Co., 1875); The Model Town and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1876); The Molly Mcguires and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1877); The Spiritualists and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1877); Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1878); Mississippi Outlaws and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1879); The Gypsies and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1879); Professional Thieves and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1880); The Railroad Forger and the Detectives (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1881); Bank Robbers and Detectives (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1882); and Thirty Years a Detective (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1884).

29. Morn, Eye, 68-69.

30. Ibid., 50. [End Page 58]

31. Wilgus Wade Hogg, The First Train Robbery (Medford, N.J.: Plexus, 1978).

32. For a succinct explanation, see Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 213-15.

33. Cleveland Moffett, True Detective Tales of the Pinkertons (New York: Sharp, 1897), 164.

34. Horan, Pinkertons, 162.

35. Ibid.

36. John Reno, John Reno: Life and Career (New York: self-published, 1887).

37. Frederick Volland,"The Reno Boys of Seymore" (master's thesis, University of Indiana, 1959; on file in the Pinkerton Archives, Chicago).

38. Ibid.; Horan, Pinkertons, 168-73.

39. Ibid., 176-78.

40. Ibid., 178.

41. Ibid., 179.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 191-96.

44. See, e.g., Allan Pinkerton to George Bangs, 1 November 1874, Pinkerton Archives.

45. Horan, Pinkertons, 234.

46. Perhaps the best book on Quantrill remains William Elsey Connelly's Quantrill and the Border Wars (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Books, 1910; reprinted by Pageant Books, New York, 1956). Also see Charles W. Breihan, Quantrill and His Civil War Guerrillas (Denver: Sage Books, 1959).

47. Paul I. Wellman, A Dynasty of Western Outlaws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 65.

48. Ibid., 68-79.

49. Ibid., 69; Horan, Pinkertons, 191-92.

50. The James/Younger group was falsely accused of many things, including the commission of two bank robberies 400 miles apart on the same day. The robberies and dating used here are taken from a "clarifying list" provided by gang member Dick Liddil after he turned state's evidence in exchange for clemency in 1881; it is included in full in Wellman, Dynasty of Outlaws, 120-21.

51. Ibid., 87-94. Also see William A. Settle, Jesse James Was His Name (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966).

52. The attackers were operating on the basis of erroneous information provided by an operative named Jack Ladd. The remains of the "smoker" thrown by the Pinkertons into the Samuel residence are consistent with being a Civil War-vintage iron hand grenade; Wellman, Dynasty of Outlaws, 96-97.

53. Ibid., 97-98.

54. Augustus C. Appler, The Younger Brothers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955); Carl W. Breihan, The Outlaw Brothers: The True Story of Missouri's Younger Brothers (San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor, 1961). [End Page 59]

55. Frank James underwent a pro forma trial for his role in a single train robbery, but was quickly acquitted after Gov. Crittenden took the stand to testify in his behalf. All state charges were then dropped, and Missouri authorities refused to honor extradition requests from Minnesota in connection with the Northfield raid; T. J. Styles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 379-81.

56. Analyses of these dynamics are legion. Two of the best are Paul M. Sweezy and Paul Baran, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), and Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).

57. Quoted in Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The LaFollette Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 15.

58. Morn, Eye, 93.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., 94.

61. Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America, 1870 to the Present (Cambridge/New York: Schenkman/Two Continents, 1978), 23.

62. Wayne G. Broehl Jr., The Molly Mcguires (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 93.

63. Horan, Pinkertons, 206.

64. Goldstein, Political Repression, 29. Also see Arthur H. Lewis, Lament for the Molly Maguires (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964).

65. Horan, Pinkertons, 207-8.

66. Ibid., 209. The book referred to is J. Walter Coleman, The Molly Maguire Riots (Richmond: Garrett & Massie, 1936).

67. Broehl, Molly Maguires, 230-31.

68. Quoted in Horan, Pinkertons, 224.

69. Ibid., 225-26.

70. Ibid., 236.

71. Harold W. Aurand, From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971), 25.

72. Vernon H. Jensen, Heritage of Conflict (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950) 192-218.

73. Joseph Rayback, A History of American Labor (New York: The Free Press, 1966), 133; Goldstein, Political Repression, 28.

74. Rayback, History of Labor, 133.

75. U.S. Department of Labor, Sixteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1901 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901), 803-6.

76. Morn, Eye, 97; National Guard Association Annual Convention Proceedings, 1881, 13-14.

77. U.S. Senate, Report on an Investigation of Labor Troubles at Homestead, Pennsylvania (Washington, D.C.: S. Rept. 1280, 52d Cong., 2d sess., 1893), 242; Herbert G. Gutman, [End Page 60] "The Braidwood Lockout of 1874," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 53, no. 1 (1960).

78. See, generally, Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy Racket (New York: Modern Age Books, 1937).

79. Quoted in Auerbach, Labor and Liberty, 101.

80. Ibid., 99.

81. Morn, Eye, 98; Pinkerton Reports of the Annual Convention of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, Burlington Papers, Newberry Library (Chicago).

82. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty, 97-99.

83. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: Workers in an Unbalanced Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 149.

84. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty, 99.

85. Morn, Eye, 187-88.

86. U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor: Strikebreaking Services (Washington, D.C.: S. Rept. 6, pt. 1, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939), 23.

87. U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor: Industrial Espionage (Washington, D.C.: S. Rept. 46, no. 3, 75th Cong., 2d sess., 1938), 9-10, 12-15, 17, 21, 24, 26, 28, 53, 58-59, 63.

88. Ibid., 53.

89. Harry J. Carman, Henry David, and Paul N. Guthrie, eds., The Path I Trod: The Autobiography of Terrence V. Powderly (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 149, 154.

90. Morn, Eye, 100.

91. Leon Wolff, Lockout! The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1892 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 70; also see William Serrin, Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

92. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 89.

93. Goldstein, Political Repression, 12.

94. Morn, Eye, 104; U.S. House of Representatives, Employment of Pinkerton Detectives During the Homestead Mining Strike, Pennsylvania (Washington, D.C.: 52d Cong., 2d sess., 1893), 213.

95. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty, 101.

96. Morn, Eye, 101; also see Gutman, "Braidwood Lockout."

97. Donald L. McMurry, The Great Burlington Strike of 1888: A Case History in Labor-Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 192-204, 287.

98. Goldstein, Political Repression, 38.

99. On the IWPA, SLP, and related matters, see Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (New York: Collier, 1963); on the Pinkerton shootings, see John Altgeld, Live Questions (Chicago: George S. Bowen, 1899), 385-87, 391; on Daniel DeLeon, a major [End Page 61] figure in American socialist history, see his autobiographical The American Anarchist: Reflections on Indigenous Radicalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

100. Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 63-75; Samuel Yellin, American Labor Struggles (New York: Monad Press, 1974), 39-71.

101. Goldstein, Political Repression, 39-40.

102. Lens, Labor Wars, 75.

103. See, e.g., Lucy E. Parsons, Life of Albert Parsons with a Brief History of the Labor Movement in America (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1889).

104. Maldwyn Jones, American Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 252-53; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 54.

105. Rayback, History of Labor, 168.

106. On the police, see David, History of the Haymarket Affair, 191; on the Pinkerton provocateur, see Morn, Eye, 99.

107. Quoted in Norman J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860-1895: A Study in Democracy (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1929), 359.

108. Goldstein, Political Repression, 41.

109. Harold Dick, Labor and Socialism in America: The Gompers Era (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1972), 16; Goldstein, Political Repression, 43.

110. Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 39-40.

111. Goldstein, Political Repression, 43.

112. Dick, Labor and Socialism, 16; Ware, Labor Movement, 316.

113. On the accommodationist posture of the AFL, even during the earliest phases of its development, see David, Labor and Socialism, 343; Ware, Labor Movement, 182.

114. Morn, Eye, 103. Also see, generally, Wolff, Lockout!

115. Goldstein, Political Repression, 46; Lens, Labor Wars, 76-88; also see Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Press, 1972), 53-63.

116. Wolff, Lockout!, 164: Yellin, American Labor Struggles, 72-100.

117. Goldstein, Political Repression, 46.

118. Horan, Pinkertons, 358; Henry David, "Upheaval at Homestead," in Daniel Aaron, ed., America in Crisis (1952; reprint, New York: Shoe String Press, 1971), 133-70.

119. Wolff, Lockout!, 164-65.

120. Goldstein, Political Repression, 46.

121. New York Times, 19 November 1892.

122. Horan, Pinkertons, 350.

123. Morn, Eye, 104; Horan, Pinkertons, 35.

124. Morn, Eye, 103; Labor Troubles at Homestead, 121-25.

125. Morn, Eye, 103; Horan, Pinkertons, 350-58.

126. Horan, Pinkertons, 107; Investigation of Labor Troubles at Homestead and Employment [End Page 62] of Pinkerton Detectives. Also see William Oates, "The Homestead Strike: A Congressional View," North American Review 155 (September 1892).

127. Morn, Eye, 107.

128. Ibid.

129. Ibid. For further analysis, see J. Bernard Hogg, "Public Reaction to Pinkertonism and the Labor Question," Pennsylvania History, vol. 2 (July 1944).

130. Morn, Eye, 107; Henry Warrum, Peace Officers and Detectives: The Law of Sheriffs, Constables, Marshals, Municipal Police and Detectives (Greenfield, Ind.: William Mitchell, 1895), 106, 108-9, 112-13.

131. Morn, Eye, 165-66; on the Ludlow Massacre, see Goldstein, Political Repression, 92.

132. Morn, Eye, 164; Jurgen Thorwald, The Twentieth Century Detective (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), 91.

133. Morn, Eye, 168. Also see, generally, Jeremiah Patrick Swallow, Private Police: With Special Reference to Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1933).

134. Morn, Eye; Morris Friedman, The Pinkerton Labor Spy (New York: Wilshire Books, 1907), 30-40, 51-64.

135. Morn, Eye, 156, 160.

136. Goldstein, Political Repression, 51; Jensen, Heritage of Conflict, 38-53.

137. Dubofsky, "The Leadville Strike of 1896-1897," Mid-America, no. 48, (April 1966).

138. William J. Gaboury, "From State House to Bull Pen: Idaho Populism and the Coeur d'Alene Troubles of the 1890s," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 58 (January 1967), 18-22; Jensen, Heritage of Conflict, 72-87.

139. Goldstein, Political Repression, 71.

140. Charles A. Siringo, Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism (Chicago: self-published, 1915), 93.

141. Ibid.

142. Melvyn Dubofsky, "Origins of Western Working Class Radicalism," Labor History 7 (spring 1966), 152.

143. George C. Suggs, Colorado's War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972), 20-22.

144. Ibid.; Jensen, Heritage of Conflict, 130-31; Lens, Labor Wars, 148.

145. Perhaps the best account of the role of the WFM in founding the IWW—especially with regards to the preliminary "secret meeting" conducted in Chicago in January 1905—remains Paul Brissenden's The I.W.W.: A Study of American Syndicalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1920).

146. John S. Gambs, The Decline of the IWW (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 164-69.

147. Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Storyof Syndicalism in the United States (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), 22. [End Page 63]

148. The first office was at 146 West Madison St.; ibid., 92.

149. Morn, Eye, 167.

150. Goldstein, Political Repression, 73; Jensen, Heritage of Conflict, 192-218; David H. Grover, Debaters and Dynamiters: The Story of the Haywood Trial (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1964); Stewart H. Holbrook, The Rocky Mountain Revolution (New York: Holt, 1956).

151. Morn, Eye, 158.

152. Grover, Debaters and Dynamiters, 53, 98-105.

153. Goldstein, Political Repression, 73; Jensen, Heritage of Conflict, 134-35. The conclusion is entirely in line with that drawn by Suggs (191-92) in his definitive study of the 1903-04 Colorado Labor War that "At no time did the WFM engage in armed resistance against constituted authorities even when their extreme harassment and provocation might have justified it."

154. Goldstein, Political Repression, 73.

155. Finally intimidated by the concerted repression directed against it, the WFM adopted the formulation of Moyer, its president, that "if to be conservative meant to stay out of prison, he was going to be conservative." Moyer withdrew from the IWW in 1908 and rejoined the AFL. This, of course, severely reduced the IWW's early membership, especially with regard to experienced organizers; Jensen, Heritage of Conflict, 236-44; Melvin Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), 105.

156. Morn, Eye, 158; also see Friedman, Pinkerton Labor Spy.

157. Morn, Eye, 158-59; for contextualization, see Louis Filler, Crusades for American Liberalism: The Story of the Muckrakers (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 214, 216-17.

158. Renshaw, Wobblies, 22.

159. A good assessment will be found in Leonard Whipple, The Story of Civil Liberty in the United States (New York: Vanguard, 1927), 304.

160. Goldstein, Political Repression, 68.

161. Sidney Fine, "Anarchism and the Assassination of McKinley," American Historical Review vol. 60, no. 4 (July 1955).

162. This precipitated what the Wobblies called the "Free Speech Fight," resulting in about 30 major confrontations, mostly along the West Coast, from 1907 to 1916; Renshaw, Wobblies, 120.

163. Goldstein, Political Repression, 86-87; on this and other confrontations in Washington and Oregon, see Robert L. Tyler, Rebels of the Woods: The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1967).

164. Goldstein, Political Repression, 87.

165. Ibid.; Ronald Radosh, American Labor and Foreign Policy (New York: Vintage, 1970), 17.

166. Goldstein, Political Repression, 88.

167. Lens, Labor Wars, 203.

168. Goldstein, Political Repression, 88-89; Renshaw, Wobblies, 139-40. [End Page 64]

169. Goldstein, Political Repression, 89.

170. Ibid.; U.S. House of Representatives, Report on the Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Mass. (Washington, D.C.: 62d Cong., 2d sess., 1913), 19.

171. Goldstein, Political Repression, 89.

172. Ibid.

173. Renshaw, Wobblies, 140-41.

174. Morris Schonbach, Radicals and Visionaries: A History of Dissent in New Jersey (Princeton, N.J.: Von Nostram, 1964), 62-65; Joyce L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 197-226.

175. Quoted in Philip S. Foner, The History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International, 1965), 4:370-71.

176. Goldstein, Political Repression, 90; Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 4:373-90.

177. Goldstein, Political Repression, 90; Foner, History of the Labor Movement, 4:224-5.

178. Goldstein, Political Repression, 95; Philip Taft and Philip Ross, "American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character and Outcome," in Hugh D. Graham and Ted R. Gurr, eds., Violence in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 326-27.

179. Goldstein, Political Repression, 95; Richard H. Frost, The Mooney Case (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968), 56-61.

180. Goldstein, Political Repression, 95; Taft and Ross, "American Labor Violence," 326-27; Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 292.

181. Goldstein, Political Repression, 96; Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 321-22; Neil Betten, "Riot, Revolution and Repression in the Iron Range Strike of 1916," Minnesota History 41 (summer 1968).

182. Goldstein, Political Repression, 97; Norman H. Clark, "Everett, 1916, and After," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 57 (April 1966).

183. Goldstein, Political Repression, 97-98; Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 98; Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 337-42.

184. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices, 306.

185. John Steuben, The Truth About Butte (1940; reprint, Butte, Mont.: Old Butte Publishing, 2003 [original attributed to Mike Byrnes]).

186. Correspondence from independent researcher Bobby Greene, 13 May 1986.

187. Renshaw, Wobblies, 208.

188. See note 10.

189. Goldstein, Political Repression, 155-56; Robert L. Tyler, "Violence at Centralia," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 45 (October 1954).

190. Jules Archer, Bullets, Strikes and Bombs: Big Bill Haywood and the IWW (New York: Julian Messner, 1972), 169. On the Freikorps, see Robert G. L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany, 1918-1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952).

191. Goldstein, Political Repression, 601; Dubofsky, We Shall Be All, 455-56. [End Page 65]

192. Horan, Pinkertons, 502, 507.

193. Ibid., 507.

194. Morn, Eye, 184.

195. Ibid., 166.

196. See F. B. McQuiston, "The Strike Breakers," The Independent, 17 October 1901; John H. Craige, "The Professional Strike-Breaker," Colliers Weekly, 3 December 1910.

197. Morn, Eye, 166; Leroy Scott, "Strikebreaking as a New Occupation," World's Work, no. 10 (May 1905); William Brown Melony, "Strikebreaking as a Profession," Public Opinion, 25 March 1905; Edward Levinson, I Break Strikes! The Technique of Pearl L. Bergoff (New York: Robert McBride, 1935); Auerbach, Labor and Liberty, 97-107.

198. Quoted in Horan, Pinkertons, 509.

199. Quoted in Horan, Pinkertons, 509.

200. Quoted in Horan, Pinkertons, 509.

201. Horan, Pinkertons, 510.

202. On the Wagner Act and its implications, see Broadus Mitchell, Depression Decade: From New Era Through New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 277-83; Foster Rhea Dulles, Labor in America (New York: Crowell, 1966), 264-76.

203. See Caute, Great Fear. Also see Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of theHouse Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968).

204. Horan, Pinkertons, 511.

205. Brian S. Boyd, "The Founding of the I.A.C.P., 1893," Police Chief, no. 38 (May 1971); they were nominated by Milwaukee police chief J. T. Janssen, a one-time Pinkerton and private policeman for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. Actually, such consulting, sometimes pro bono, probably began much earlier. In 1871, for example, Allan Pinkerton delivered a paper entitled "The Character and Duties of a Detective Police Force" to a national police convention organized by St. Louis police chief James MacDonough; Morn, Eye, 123.

206. Ibid., 124.

207. On Pinkerton's role in originating the publication, see Detective, no. 20 (January 1905), 2.

208. John L. Thompson, "National Identification Bureau's I.C.A.P. Pioneer's Legacy," Police Chief (January 1968): 15, 17.

209. Berthold Laufer, "History of the Finger-Print System," Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1912 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1912); Jürgen Thorwald, Century of the Detective (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), 94, 98, 100-101.

210. Samples of Pinkerton's NACP lectures include "The Yeggman" (1904), "Forgery" (1905), "The Professional Sneak Thief" (1906) and "The Porch Climbers" (1907); Morn, Eye, 127.

211. Morn, Eye, 151; Friedman, Pinkerton Labor Spy, 4. [End Page 66]

212. Morn, Eye, 165-66; on Linden, see George Barton, The True Stories of Celebrated Crimes: Adventures of the World's Greatest Detectives (New York: McKinlay Stone & Mackenzie, 1909), 159; on George S. Dougherty, see his The Criminal as Human Being (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1924), 3, 8-9, 14-15; on the offer to Pinkerton, see the New York Times, 14 December 1913.

213. Tom Duggan, The History of the Jewelers Security Alliance of the United States, 1883-1950 (New York: The Alliance, 1958), 5, 20-22, 35; W. Espey Albig, "The Origin of the American Bankers' Association," Banking, no. 35 (September 1942).

214. Horan, Pinkertons, 512-13.

215. Ibid., 513-14.

216. Ibid., 514.

217. Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 17 n.

218. See, e.g., A. J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

219. Pinkertons, 514; Hougan, Spooks, 71.

220. William W. Turner, Hoover's F.B.I., 2d ed. (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993), 305-6; among many other things, the corporation was hired by Florida governor Claude Kirk to serve as a "private gestapo" in that state. It also publishes the Wackenhut Security Review, which purports to expose "the threat of communism" in areas as diverse as civil rights and environmental protection legislation, opposition to Latin American oligarchies, and domestic educational reform.

221. Ibid., 207; a hint of the agency's operational emphasis is offered in the fact that one of its detectives, former FBI man Vincent W. Gillen, admitted to a congressional committee in 1966 that he had been retained by General Motors to spy on consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

222. Ibid.; Simpson Associates performs "specialized security and detection work" for several major oil companies known to underwrite extreme right-wing causes.

223. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 706.

224. See the series of articles on the Van Deman files written by Richard Halloran and published in the New York Times in September 1971.

225. Gentry, Hoover, 706-7.

226. Halloran, NYT (see note 224).

227. Val R. Lorwin, "Reflections on the History of the French and American Labor Movements," Journal of Economic History 17 (March 1957), 37.

228. Quoted in Arthur M. Ross and Paul T. Hartman, Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict (New York: John Wiley, 1960), 165.

229. Lewis Lorwin, The American Federation of Labor (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1933), 355. [End Page 67]

230. Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, "Perspectives," in Hofstadter and Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1971), 19.

231. Goldstein, Political Repression, 5.

232. From the point in 1892 when Congress banned employment of Pinkerton operatives by the government until its own bureau of investigation was formed, the Justice Department's "investigative services were usually performed by federal bank examiners and agents discretely borrowed from the Customs Bureau, the Interior Department, and the Treasury Department's Secret Service"; Sanford J. Ungar, FBI: An Uncensored Look Behind the Walls (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1976), 39.

233. Ibid., 55.

234. Horan, Pinkertons, 515.

235. Ungar, FBI, 55.

236. Ronald Kessler, The FBI (New York: Pocket Books, 1993), 216; on the NCIC specifically, see Turner, Hoover'sF.B.I., 315.

237. Thompson, "National Identification Bureau," 16-17; Kessler, FBI, 216-17.

238. Turner, Hoover'sF.B.I., xii, xiii.

239. Ibid., 304.

240. Ibid., 222; Ungar, FBI, 578-80.

241. Turner, Hoover'sF.B.I., 220, 222.

242. Ibid., 210.

243. For a range of views on these relationships, see Ovid DeMaris, The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Harpers, 1975).

244. Overall, see Ungar, FBI, 20-22, 31-34, 428-34, 437-41.

245. Ibid., 329-30.

246. Quoted in Turner, Hoover'sF.B.I., 220.

247. Gentry, Hoover, 81.

248. Turner, Hoover'sF.B.I., 306.

249. It should be noted that Richard Wallace Held is the son of COINTELPRO architect Richard G. Held. Among other things, the father, while serving simultaneously as head of the Bureau's Internal Security Section and as special-agent-in-charge of the Chicago field office, presided over the cover-up of the Bureau's role in the 1969 Hampton-Clark assassinations (see note 271), before being appointed FBI assistant director. The younger Held got his start working on the "Panther Squad" of the Los Angeles field office, where he was instrumental in concocting a "shooting war" between the Panthers and the US organization (see note 270), as well as framing L.A. Panther leader Geronimo ji Jaga (see note 281). After a stint on the Pine Ridge Reservation working under his father's command against the American Indian Movement (see note 277), he was assigned to head up the San Juan field office, where he coordinated repression of the Puerto Rican independence movement. Posted next to San Francisco, he retired shortly after it was revealed that agents working under his supervision had been involved in [End Page 68] the attempted assassination of Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney on 24 May 1990. For further details, see my "COINTELPRO as a Family Business: The Strange Case of the FBI's Two Richard Helds," Z Magazine, March 1989; "The FBI Targets Judi Bari: A Case Study in Domestic Counterinsurgency," Covert Action Quarterly, no. 47 (winter 1993-1994).

250. On Hoover's personal relationships, see Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free Press, 1987): Nixon, 315, 440; Murchison and Richardson, 315; McCarthy, 320; Johnson, 393-94.

251. As Ungar puts it in FBI, the CRD functions as not merely "a typical public relations office but rather [as] a part of the bureaucracy responsible for calculating and acting aggressively upon the Bureau's best interest at any given moment" (383). Concerning Pinkerton's impact on the genre, see Frank Smyth and Miles Ludwig, The Detectives: Crime and Detection in Fact and Fiction (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1978); also see Jurgen Thorwald, The Century of the Detective (New York: Harcourt, 1964).

252. Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover's FBI in Popular Culture (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 91-92.

253. See Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927); there is not so much as an index reference to the Pinkertons.

254. On the Bureau's PR effort attending its 1930s "War on Crime," see Gid Powers, G-Men, 33-50. For good surveys of the reality involved, see John Toland, The Dillinger Days (New York: Random House, 1967); Steven J. Nickel and William J. Helmer, Baby Face Nelson: Portrait of a Public Enemy (Nashville, Tenn.: Cumberland House, 2002); Michael Wallis, Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992); Alvin Karpis with Bill Trent, The Alvin Karpis Story (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971).

255. Quoted in Ungar, FBI, 392.

256. Contrary to FBI-fostered mythology, the Bureau had nothing to do with the imprisonment of Chicago mob kingpin Al Capone in 1932. That, instead, was the work of a team of IRS auditors; see John Kobler, Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971), 323-54; also see Robert J. Schoenberg, Mr. Capone: The Real—And Complete—Story of Al Capone (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 287-325. More broadly, there are a number of good histories of organized crime in America, several of them written well before the FBI formally acknowledged the existence of such an enterprise. See, e.g., Fred A. Pasley, Al Capone: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishing Co., 1930); Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder, Murder, Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate (1951; reprint, New York: De Capo Press, 1992); Ed Reid, Mafia: The History of the Ruthless Gang that Runs the Nationwide Crime Syndicate (New York: Random House, 1952); Frederick Sondern Jr., Brotherhood of Evil: The Mafia (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1959). For a reasonably accurate recent effort, see [End Page 69] William Balsamo and George Carpozi Jr., Crime Incorporated: The Inside Story of the Mafia's First Hundred Years (Far Hills, N.J.: New Horizon Press, 1991).

257. See, e.g., Charles P. Larrowe, Harry Bridges: The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1972).

258. This is a standard ploy; see Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). Also see Chomsky, Necessary Illusions; Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, ManufacturingConsent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

259. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (New York: Holt, 1958); J. Edgar Hoover, A Study of Communism (New York: Holt, 1962); Allan Pinkerton, The Molly Maguires and the Detectives; Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps and the Detectives; Robert A. Pinkerton, "Detective Surveillance of Anarchists," North American Review, no. 173 (November 1901). Also see J. Edgar Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover on Communism (New York: Random House, 1967).

260. Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power, 91.

261. Jack Nelson and Ronald J. Ostrow, The FBI and the Berrigans: The Making of a Conspiracy (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972).

262. Aside from the American Legion, the classic example is that of the American Protective League, a quarter-million-member vigilante group founded in 1916 by Chicago advertising executive A. M. Briggs and financed by a range of corporations. In 1917, the APL was endorsed as a "patriotic organization" by U.S. Attorney General Thomas W. Gregory and A. Bruce Bielaski, director of the department's budding investigative bureau (then known as the BoI). Thereafter, every APL thug was provided with a police-style badge bearing the inscription, "American Protective League, Auxiliary to the U.S. Department of Justice"; Ungar, FBI, 42. Thus "deputized," APL goon squads were employed by the BoI to execute a range of tasks, not least the conducting of raids on IWW headquarters in 24 cities on 17 September 1917—at that point the single most spectacular antiradical action in U.S. history—seizing the union's books, minutes, financial records, correspondence, and memberships in preparation for the mass trials discussed in note 6; Gentry, Hoover, 71.

263. Everett R. Holles, "A.C.L.U. Says F.B.I. Funded 'Army' to Terrorize Antiwar Protestors," New York Times, 27 June 1975; Nanda Zoccino, "Ex-FBI Informer Describes Terrorist Role," Los Angeles Times, 26 January 1976.

264. See my and Jim Vander Wall's Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, [Classics Edition] 2002), 182. Also see Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), 24.

265. For details, see Citizens Research and Investigation Committee and Louis E. Tackwood, The Glass House Tapes: The Story of an Agent Provocateur and the New Police-Intelligence Complex (New York: Avon Books, 1981). [End Page 70]

266. Goldstein, Political Repression, 474-75. Also see Frank J. Donner, "Hoover's Legacy," The Nation, 1 June 1974.

267. Paul Chevigny, Cops and Rebels (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 251-52.

268. Seattle Times, 7 December 1970; New York Times, 8 December 1970.

269. Goldstein, Political Repression, 473; Chevigny, Cops and Rebels, 258-59.

270. Churchill and Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers, 133-35. Also see Kenneth O'Reilly, "RacialMatters": The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), 305-9.

271. See Roy Wilkins and Ramsey Clark, Search and Destroy: A Report by the Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police (New York: Metropolitan Applied Research Center, 1973). Also see Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 64-77.

272. Although, by the early 1930s, the entry requirement for FBI hopefuls was ostensibly a "degree in law, accounting or some comparable field," J. Edgar Hoover recruited and maintained a "Special Squad" of hired guns whose only qualification for agent status was the demonstrated willingness to "exterminate" those named "public enemies" by the director. Headed by Melvin Purvis, this hit team—no other description is really adequate—included ex-Texas Ranger Gus T. Jones, as well as former cops like John Keith, Charles Winstead, C. G. Campbell, and Clarence Hurt; Gentry, Hoover, 169. For details on two of the Special Squad's more sensational summary executions, see Toland, Dillinger Days, 320-25; Wallis, Pretty Boy, 340-45. As concerns Pretty Boy Floyd, moreover, it is a virtual certainty that he had no involvement at all in the crime used as a pretext in Hoover's declaring him Public Enemy Number 1; see Robert Unger, The UnionStation Massacre: The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI (Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews McMeel, 1997).

273. Louis E. Tackwood, "My Assignment was to Kill George Jackson," The Black Panther, 21 April 1980. On Tackwood's polygraph examination, see Jo Durden-Smith, Who Killed George Jackson? Fantasies, Paranoia and the Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 131-32. In this case, the plot failed. Jackson was therefore murdered by San Quentin guards on 21 August 1971; for further context, see Gregory Armstrong, TheDragon Has Come: The Last Fourteen Months in the Life of George Jackson (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

274. On the IWW trials, see note 6. On the Chicago Eight, see Jason Epstein, The Great Conspiracy Trial: An Essay on Law, Liberty and the Constitution (New York: Random House, 1970).

275. Goldstein, Political Repression, 492; Bernard Weiner, "What, Another Conspiracy Trial?" The Nation, 2 November 1970; Bernard Weiner, "The Orderly Perversion of Justice," The Nation, 1 February 1971.

276. Goldstein, Political Repression, 492.

277. On the trials, see John William Sayer, Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials [End Page 71] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). On AIM more generally, see Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996).

278. That such was the result desired by the federal officials involved was made clear at the outset by Col. Volney S. Warner, a military adviser to the FBI personnel deployed on Pine Ridge, when he publicly observed that "AIM's most militant leaders are under indictment, in jail or warrants are out for their arrest. [So] the government can win, even if no one goes to [prison]"; quoted in Martin Garbus, "General Haig of Wounded Knee," The Nation, 9 November 1974.

279. Winston A. Grady-Willis, "The Black Panther Party: State Repression and Political Prisoners," in Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 380-82.

280. On the mechanics of ji Jaga's framing, see Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, 77-94. On his release, and for information on the man himself, see Jack Olsen, Last Man Standing: The Triumphand Tragedy of Geronimo Pratt (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

281. For the most detailed analysis of the case itself, see Jim Messerschmidt, The Trial of Leonard Peltier (Boston: South End Press, 1984). For the best contextualization, see Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of CrazyHorse: The Story of Leonard Peltier, 2d ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1991).

282. Readers desiring additional illustrations of the Bureau's fabrication of evidence to obtain convictions will find more than enough material in John F. Kelly's and Phillip K. Wearne's Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at theFBI Crime Lab (New York: Free Press, 1998). Those seeking amplification on the theme of FBI lethality will find plenty in David T. Hardy's and Rex Kimball's This is Not an Assault: Penetrating the Web of Official Lies Regarding the Waco Incident (San Antonio, Tex.: Xlibris, 2001). 

20 Things You Should Know About Corporate Crime [Russell Mokhiber, The Harvard Law Record, (March 24, 2015)]

Twenty-eight years ago, Corporate Crime Reporter, a weekly print newsletter, was launched. The Harvard Law School Library was one of our first subscribers. From the beginning, the most popular feature of Corporate Crime Reporter has been a weekly question/answer format interview. Over the years, we’ve interviewed hundreds of prosecutors, defense attorneys, law school professors, reporters, and activists. Our first interview, which appeared in Volume One, Number One on April 13, 1987 was with the premier corporate crime prosecutor of his day.

That was Rudolph Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. At the time, he was prosecuting the likes of Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and Marc Rich. President Bill Clinton later pardoned Marc Rich. Apparently Marc Rich’s wife was dumping big cash into the Clinton library. Rudy is now solidly in the hands of the corporate crime lobby. He prosecuted corporate crime as a way to achieve higher office. Then he learned one of the key lessons of corporate crime prosecution.

You can achieve higher office by prosecuting corporate crime. But as you move up the ladder, you have to make nice with the corporate powers that be. And so you turn your attention and rhetoric to various forms of street crime.

Corporate crime lesson number one – prosecute corporate crime to achieve higher office, then get tough on street crime to protect your political position.

Or to simplify it, corporate crime is all about power politics.

Number 20

Corporate crime inflicts far more damage on society than all street crime combined. Whether in bodies or injuries or dollars lost, corporate crime and violence wins by a landslide. Last year, Credit Suisse pled guilty to helping thousands of Americans file false income tax returns. The company was fined $2.6 billion. Last year, BNP Paribas pled guilty to violating trade sanctions and was forced to pay $8.9 billion.

The costs of just those two crimes dwarf the yearly out of pocket yearly costs of all the burglaries and robberies in the United States ($4.5 billion in 2014 according to the FBI).
Health care fraud alone costs Americans $100 billion to $400 billion a year. (For more on this, check in with your neighbor, Harvard’s own Malcolm Sparrow and his corporate crime classic — License To Steal: How Fraud Bleeds America’s Health Care System (Westview Press, 2000).

The savings and loan fraud – which former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called “the biggest white collar swindle in history” – cost us anywhere from $300 billion to $500 billion. And then you have your lesser frauds: auto repair fraud, $40 billion a year, securities fraud, $15 billion a year – and on down the list.

No comparison.

(For an incisive analysis on the double standard embedded in the U.S. criminal justice system — street crime versus corporate crime – check out — The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi (Random House, 2014)).

Number 19

Corporate crime is often violent crime.

Recite this list of corporate frauds and people will immediately say to you: but you can’t compare street crime and corporate crime – corporate crime is not violent crime.

Not true.

Corporate crime is often violent crime. The FBI estimates that, 14,000 Americans are murdered every year. Compare this to the 54,000 Americans who die every year on the job or from occupational diseases such as black lung and asbestosis and the additional tens of thousands of other Americans who fall victim every year to the silent violence of pollution, contaminated foods, hazardous consumer products, and hospital malpractice. These deaths are often the result of criminal recklessness. Yet, they are rarely prosecuted as homicides or as criminal violations of federal laws.

The April 2010 Upper Big Branch mining disaster in West Virginia – cost 29 lives. A Labor Department report found that the company’s unlawful policies and practices were the root cause of the disaster. Yet, the company was given a non prosecution agreement. (More on deferred and non prosecution agreements to settle corporate crime cases below.)

The company’s former CEO, Don Blankenship, is currently facing federal criminal charges in West Virginia in connection with the deaths of the miners. (For the best coverage of his trial — and the politics of corporate crime in West Virginia, follow Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward Jr. (Twitter handle: @kenwardjr)

Number 18

Corporate criminals are the only criminal class in the United States that have the power to define the laws under which they live.
The mafia, no.

The gangstas, no.

The street thugs, no.

But the corporate criminal lobby, yes. They have marinated Washington –from the White House to the Congress to K Street – and all fifty state capitals — with their largesse. And out the other end come the laws they can live with. They still violate their own rules with impunity. But they make sure the laws are kept within reasonable bounds.

Exhibit A – the automobile industry.

Over the past 30 years, the industry has worked its will on Congress to block legislation that would impose criminal sanctions on knowing and willful violations of the federal auto safety laws. Today, with very narrow exceptions, if an auto company is caught violating the law, only a civil fine is imposed.

Number 17

Corporate crime is under-prosecuted by a factor of say – 100. And the flip side of that – corporate crime prosecutors are underfunded by a factor of say – 100.

Big companies that are criminally prosecuted represent only the tip of a very large iceberg of corporate wrongdoing.

For every company convicted of health care fraud, there are hundreds of others who get away with ripping off Medicare and Medicaid, or face only mild slap-on-the-wrist fines and civil penalties when caught.

For every company convicted of polluting the nation’s waterways, there are many others who are not prosecuted because their corporate defense lawyers are able to offer up a low-level employee to go to jail in exchange for a promise from prosecutors not to touch the company or high-level executives.

For every corporation convicted of bribery or of giving money directly to a public official in violation of federal law, there are thousands who give money legally through political action committees to candidates and political parties. They profit from a system that effectively has legalized bribery.

For every corporation convicted of selling illegal pesticides, there are hundreds more who are not prosecuted because their lobbyists have worked their way in Washington to ensure that dangerous pesticides remain legal.

For every corporation convicted of reckless homicide in the death of a worker, there are hundreds of others that don’t even get investigated for reckless homicide when a worker is killed on the job. Only a few district attorneys across the country have historically investigated workplace deaths as homicides.

White collar crime defense attorneys regularly admit that if more prosecutors had more resources, the number of corporate crime prosecutions would increase dramatically. A large number of serious corporate and white collar crime cases are now left on the table for lack of resources.

Number 16

Beware of consumer groups or other public interest groups who make nice with corporations.

There are now probably more fake public interest groups than actual ones in America today. And many formerly legitimate public interest groups have been taken over or compromised by big corporations. Our favorite example is the National Consumer League. It was created to eradicate child labor.

But in the last twenty years or so, it has been taken over by large corporations. It now gets the majority of its budget from big corporations such as Pfizer, Bank of America, Pharmacia & Upjohn, Kaiser Permanente, Wyeth-Ayerst, and Verizon.

Number 15

It used to be when a corporation committed a crime, they pled guilty to a crime.

So, for example, so many large corporations were pleading guilty to crimes in the 1990s, that in 2000, we put out a report titled The Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the 1990s. We went back through all of the Corporate Crime Reporters for that decade, pulled out all of the big corporations that had been convicted, ranked the corporate criminals by the amount of their criminal fines, and cut it off at 100.

So, you have your Fortune 500, your Forbes 400, and your Corporate Crime Reporter 100.

With the advent of deferred and non prosecution agreements, corporate guilty pleas are down significantly. But corporate crime, by all reports, is up significantly.

Number 14

Today, corporate criminals don’t have to worry as much about pleading guilty to crimes. Three new loopholes have developed over the past five years – the deferred prosecution agreement, the non prosecution agreement, and pleading guilty a closet entity or a defunct entity that has nothing to lose.

Number 13

Corporations love deferred prosecution agreements.

In the 1990s, if prosecutors had evidence of a crime, they would bring a criminal charge against the corporation and sometimes against the individual executives. And the company would end up pleading guilty.

Then, the Justice Department said – hey, there is this thing called a deferred prosecution agreement.

We can bring a criminal charge against the company. And we will tell the company – if you are a good company and do not violate the law for the next two years, we will drop the charges. No harm, no foul. This is called a deferred prosecution agreement.

And most major corporate crime prosecutions are brought this way now. The company pays a fine. The company is charged with a crime. But there is no conviction. And after two or three years, depending on the term of the agreement, the charges are dropped.

Number 12

Corporations love non prosecution agreements even more — like the one that Massey Energy got.

In 2007, I was sitting my office in the National Press Building. And into my e-mail box came a press release from the Justice Department. The press release announced that Boeing will pay a $50 million criminal penalty and $615 million in civil penalties to resolve federal claims relating to the company’s hiring of the former Air Force acquisitions chief Darleen A. Druyun, by its then CFO, Michael Sears – and stealing sensitive procurement information.

So, the company pays a criminal penalty. And I figure, okay if they paid a criminal penalty, they must have pled guilty.

No, they did not plead guilty.

Okay, they must have been charged with a crime and had the prosecution deferred.

No, they were not charged with a crime and did not have the prosecution deferred.

About a week later, after pounding the Justice Department for an answer as to what happened to Boeing, they sent over something called a non prosecution agreement.

That is where the Justice Department says – we’re going to fine you criminally, but hey, we don’t want to cost you any government business, so sign this agreement. It says we won’t prosecute you if you pay the fine and change your ways.

Corporate criminals love non prosecution agreements. No criminal charge. No criminal record. No guilty plea. Just pay the fine and leave.

(For a book length analysis of the trend toward deferred and non prosecution agreements, check out a corporate crime classic –Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations by law professor Brandon Garrett (Harvard University Press, 2014.)

Number 11

In health fraud cases, find an empty closet or defunct entity to plead guilty.

The government has a mandatory exclusion rule for health care corporations that are convicted of ripping off Medicare.

Such an exclusion is the equivalent of the death penalty. If a major drug company can’t do business with Medicare, it loses a big chunk of its business. There have been many criminal prosecutions of major health care corporations for ripping off Medicare. And many of these companies have pled guilty. But not one major healthcare company has been excluded from Medicare.

Why not?

Because when you read in the newspaper that a major healthcare company pled guilty, it’s not the parent company that pleads guilty. The prosecutor will allow a unit of the corporation that has no assets – or even a defunct entity – to plead guilty. And therefore that unit will be excluded from Medicare – which doesn’t bother the parent corporation, because the unit had no business with Medicare to begin with.

In May 2007, federal prosecutors brought a criminal prosecution of Purdue Pharma, the Stamford, Connecticut-based maker of OxyContin.

It was reported in the press that the company pled guilty to pushing OxyContin by making claims that it is less addictive and less subject to abuse than other pain medications and that it continued to do so despite warnings to the contrary from doctors, the media, and members of its own sales force.

In fact, Purdue Pharma – the company that makes and markets the drug –didn’t plead guilty. A different company – Purdue Frederick pled guilty. Purdue Pharma actually got a non-prosecution agreement. Purdue Frederick had nothing to lose, so it pled guilty.

Number 10

Corporate criminals don’t like to be put on probation.

Very rarely, a corporation convicted of a crime will be placed on probation. Many years ago, Consolidated Edison in New York was convicted of an environmental crime. A probation official was assigned. Employees would call him with wrongdoing. He would write reports for the judge.

The company changed its ways. There was actual change within the corporation.

Corporations hate this.

They hate being under the supervision of some public official, like a judge.

We need more corporate probation.

Number 9

Corporate criminals don’t like to be charged with homicide.

Street murders occur every day in America. And they are prosecuted every day in America. Corporate homicides occur every day in America. But they are rarely prosecuted.

The last homicide prosecution brought against a major American corporation was in 1980, when a Republican Indiana prosecutor charged Ford Motor Co. with homicide for the deaths of three teenaged girls who died when their Ford Pinto caught on fire after being rear-ended in northern Indiana.

The prosecutor alleged that Ford knew that it was marketing a defective product, with a gas tank that crushed when rear ended, spilling fuel.

In the Indiana case, the girls were incinerated to death.

But Ford brought in a hot shot criminal defense lawyer who in turn hired the best friend of the judge as local counsel, and who, as a result, secured a not guilty verdict after persuading the judge to keep key evidence out of the jury room.

It’s time to crank up the corporate homicide prosecutions.

If you would like to know more about criminal prosecutions for workplace and marketplace deaths and illnesses, check out a recent book by University of Maryland Law Professor Rena Steinzor. It’s called Why Not Jail?: Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction (Cambridge University Press, December 2014).

Number 8

There are very few career prosecutors of corporate crime. This despite the fact that universally, white collar lawyers would prefer to work in the public sector than in the private sector. They will tell you this straight up. And they have.

For years, I would raise the then rare example of Patrick Fitzgerald as a career corporate and white collar prosecutor. For more than 20 years, he was U.S. Attorney in Chicago. He put away Scooter Libby. He put away the Canadian media baron Conrad Black. He prosecuted powerful corporations and public officials alike.

But then alas, in 2013, Fitzgerald succombed to seductions of the criminal defense bar and joined his colleagues at Skadden Arps.

Number 7

Most corporate crime prosecutors see their jobs as a stepping stone to greater things.

Some, like Giuliani, prosecuted corporate crime as a way to move up the political ladder and then into private practice.

Most young prosecutors prosecute corporate crime as a step up into the lucrative corporate crime defense bar.

Number 6

Corporate criminals often turn themselves into the authorities.

The vast majority of corporate criminal prosecutions are now driven by the corporations themselves. If they find something wrong, they know they can trust the prosecutor to do the right thing. They will be forced to pay a fine, maybe agree to make some internal changes.

But in this day and age, in all likelihood, they will not be forced to plead guilty.

So, better to be up front with the prosecutor and put the matter behind them. To save the hide of the corporation, they will cooperate with federal prosecutors against individual executives within the company. Individuals will be charged, the corporation will not.

Number 5

The market doesn’t take most modern corporate criminal prosecutions seriously.

Almost universally, when a corporate crime case is settled, the stock of the company involved goes up.

Why? Because a cloud has been cleared and there is no serious consequence to the company. No structural changes in how the company does business. No monitor. No probation. Preserving corporate reputation is the name of the game.

Number 4

The Justice Department needs to start publishing an annual Corporate Crime in the United States report.

Every year, the Justice Department puts out an annual report titled “Crime in the United States.”

But by “Crime in the United States,” the Justice Department means “street crime in the United States.”

In the “Crime in the United States” annual report, you can read about burglary, robbery and theft.

There is little or nothing about price-fixing, corporate fraud, pollution, or public corruption.

A yearly Justice Department report on Corporate Crime in the United States is long overdue and long resisted.

Number 3

We must start asking – which side are you on – with the corporate criminals or against?

Most professionals in Washington work for, are paid by, or are under the control of the corporate crime lobby.

Young lawyers come to town, fresh out of leading law schools, 25 years old, and their starting salary is $150,000 a year. And they’re working for the corporate criminals.

Young lawyers graduating from the top law schools have all kinds of excuses for working for the corporate criminals – huge debt, just going to stay a couple of years for the experience.

But the reality is, they are working for the corporate criminals.

What kind of respect should we give them? Especially since they have many options other than working for the corporate criminals.

Time to dust off that age-old question – which side are you on?

(For young lawyers out there considering other options, check out Alan Morrison’s book – Beyond the Big Firm: Profiles of Lawyers Who Want Something More (Aspen Publishers, 2007))

Number 2

We need a 911 number for the American people to dial to report corporate crime and violence.

If you want to report street crime and violence, call 911.

But what number do you call if you want to report corporate crime and violence?

We propose 611.

Call 611 to report corporate crime and violence.

We need a national number where people can pick up the phone and report the corporate criminals in our midst.

What triggered this thought?

I attended the press conference at the Justice Department in 2007 announcing the indictment of Congressman William Jefferson (D-Louisiana).

Jefferson was the first U.S. official charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Federal officials alleged that Jefferson was both on the giving and receiving ends of bribe payments.

On the receiving end, he took $100,000 in cash – $90,000 of it was stuffed into his freezer in Washington, D.C.

The $90,000 was separated in $10,000 increments, wrapped in aluminum foil, and concealed inside various frozen food containers.

At the press conference announcing the indictment, after various federal officials made their case before the cameras, up to the mike came Joe Persichini, assistant director of the Washington field office of the FBI.

“To the American people, I ask you, take time,” Persichini said. “Read this charging document line by line, scheme by scheme, count by count. This case is about greed, power and arrogance.”

“Everyone is entitled to honest and ethical public service,” Persichini continued. “We as leaders standing here today cannot do it alone. We need the public’s help. The amount of corruption is dependent on what the public with allow.”

The amount of corruption is dependent on what the public will allow.

“If you have knowledge of, if you’ve been confronted with or you are participating, I ask that you contact your local FBI office or you call the Washington Field Office of the FBI at 202.278.2000. Thank you very much.”

Shorten the number – make it 611.

Number 1

And the number one thing you should know about corporate crime?

Everyone is deserving of justice.

So, question, debate, strategize, yes.

But if God-forbid you too are victimized by a corporate criminal, you too will demand justice.

We need a more beefed up, more effective justice system to deal with the corporate criminals in our midst.

Mind Control [By Harry V. Martin and David Caul]

In July of 1991, two inmates died at the Vacaville Medical Facility. According to prison officials at the time, the two may have died as a result of medical treatment, that treatment was the use of mind control or behavior modification drugs. A deeper study into the deaths of the two inmates has unraveled a mind-boggling tale of horror that has been part of California penal history for a long time, and one that caused national outcries years ago.

In August of 1991, the Sentinel presented a graphic portrait of some of the mind control experiments that have been allowed to continue in the United States. On November 1974 a U.S. Senate Sub-committee on Constitutional Rights investigated federally-funded behavior modification programs, with emphasis on federal involvement in, and the possible threat to individual constitutional rights of behavior modification, especially involving inmates in prisons and mental institutions.

The Senate committee was appalled after reviewing documents from the following sources:

The Neuro-Research Foundation's study entitled "The Medical Epidemiology of Criminals."

The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence at UCLA.

The Closed Adolescent Treatment Center.

Senate Investigations of the History of US Mind Control

(Based on Testimony before the Senate Sub-Commmittee on Constitutional Rights)

A national uproar was created by various articles in 1974, which prompted the Senate investigation. But after all these years, the news that two inmates at Vacaville may have died from these same experiments indicates that though a nation was shocked in 1974, little was done to end the experimentations. In 1977, a Senate subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy, focussed on the CIA's testing of LSD on unwitting citizens. Only a mere handful of people within the CIA knew about the scope and details of the program.

To understand the full scope of the problem, it is important to study its origins. The Kennedy subcommittee learned about the CIA Operation MK.-Ultra through the testimony of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. The purpose of the program, according to his testimony, was to "investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means".

Claiming the protection of the National Security Act, Dr. Gottlieb was unwilling to tell the Senate subcommittee what had been learned or gained by these experiments.

He did state, however, that the program was initially engendered by a concern that the Soviets and other enemies of the United States would get ahead of the U.S. in this field.

MK-ULTRA Past and Present

(From testimony and files obtained under Freedom Of Information Act)

Through the Freedom of Information Act, researchers are now able to obtain documents detailing the M.K.-Ultra program and other CIA behavior modification projects in a special reading room located on the bottom floor of the Hyatt Regency in Rosslyn, VA.

The most daring phase of the M.K.-Ultra program involved slipping unwitting American citizens LSD in real life situations. The idea for the series of experiments originated in November 1941, when William Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA during World War Two. At that time the intelligence agency invested $5000 for the "truth drug" program. Experiments with scopolamine and morphine proved both unfruitful and very dangerous. The program tested scores of other drugs, including mescaline, barbituates, benzedrine, cannabis indica, to name a few.

The U.S. was highly concerned over the heavy losses of freighters and other ships in the North Atlantic, all victims of German U-boats. Information about German U-boat strategy was desperately needed and it was believed that the information could be obtained through drug-influenced interrogations of German naval P.O.W.s, in violation of the Geneva Accords.

Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate, a colorless, odorless marijuana extract, was used to lace a cigarette or food substance without detection. Initially, the experiments were done on volunteer U.S. Army and OSS personnel, and testing was also disguised as a remedy for shell shock. The volunteers became known as "Donovan's Dreamers". The experiments were so hush-hush, that only a few top officials knew about them. President Franklin Roosevelt was aware of the experiments. The "truth drug" achieved mixed success.

The experiments were halted when a memo was written: "The drug defies all but the most expert and search analysis, and for all practical purposes can be considered beyond analysis." The OSS did not, however, halt the program. In 1943 field tests of the extract were being conducted, despite the order to halt them. The most celebrated test was conducted by Captain George Hunter White, an OSS agent and ex-law enforcement official, on August Del Grazio, aka Augie Dallas, aka Dell, aka Little Augie, a New York gangster.

Cigarettes laced with the acetate were offered to Augie without his knowledge of the content. Augie, who had served time in prison for assault and murder, had been one of the world's most notorious drug dealers and smugglers. He operated an opium alkaloid factory in Turkey and he was a leader in the Italian underworld on the Lower East Side of New York. Under the influence of the drug,

Augie revealed volumes of information about the underworld operations, including the names of high ranking officials who took bribes from the mob. These experiments led to the encouragement of Donovan. A new memo was issued: "Cigarette experiments indicated that we had a mechanism which offered promise in relaxing prisoners to be interrogated."

When the OSS was disbanded after the war, Captain White continued to administer behavior modifying drugs. In 1947, the CIA replaced the OSS. White's service record indicates that he worked with the OSS, and by 1954 he was a high ranking Federal Narcotics Bureau officer who had been loaned to the CIA on a part-time basis.

White rented an apartment in Greenwich Village equipped with one-way mirrors, surveillance gadgets and disguised himself as a seaman. White drugged his acquaintances with LSD and brought them back to his apartment. In 1955, the operation shifted to San Francisco. In San Francisco, "safe houses" were established under the code name Operation Midnight Climax. Midnight Climax hired prostitute addicts who lured men from bars back to the safehouses after their drinks had been spiked with LSD. White filmed the events in the safehouses. The purpose of these "national security brothels" was to enable the CIA to experiment with the act of lovemaking for extracting information from men.

The safehouse experiments continued until 1963 until CIA Inspector General John Earman criticized Richard Helms, the director of the CIA and father of the M.K.-Ultra project. Earman charged the new director John McCone had not been fully briefed on the M.K.-Ultra Project when he took office and that "the concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people within and outside the Agency to be distasteful and unethical." He stated that "the rights and interest of U.S. citizens are placed in jeopardy". The Inspector General stated that LSD had been tested on individuals at all social levels, high and low, native American and foreign."

Earman's criticisms were rebuffed by Helms, who warned, "Positive operation capacity to use drugs is diminishing owing to a lack of realistic testing. Tests were necessary to keep up with the Soviets." But in 1964, Helms had testified before the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of President John Kennedy, that "Soviet research has consistently lagged five years behind Western research".

Upon leaving government service in 1966, Captain White wrote a startling letter to his superior. In the letter to Dr. Gottlieb, Captain White reminisced about his work in the safehouses with LSD. His comments were frightening. "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun," White wrote. "Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?"

The CIA and the Mafia

(Testimony before the 1951 Sub-Committee on Organized Crime and other public sources.)

Though the CIA continued to maintain drug experiments in the streets of America after the program was officially canceled, the United States reaped tremendous value from it. With George Hunter White's connection to underworld figure Little Augie, connections were made with Mafia king-pin Lucky Luciano, who was in Dannemore Prison.

Luciano wanted freedom, the Mafia wanted drugs, and the United States wanted Sicily. The date was 1943. Augie was the go-between between Luciano and the United States War Department.

Luciano was transferred to a less harsh prison and began to be visited by representatives of the Office of Naval Intelligence and from underworld figures, such as Meyer Lansky. A strange alliance was formed between the U.S. Intelligence agencies and the Mafia, who controlled the West Side docks in New York. Luciano regained active leadership in organized crime in America.

The U. S. Intelligence community utilized Luciano's underworld connections in Italy. In July of 1943, Allied forces launched their invasion of Sicily, the beginning push into occupied Europe. General George Patton's Seventh Army advanced through hundreds of miles of territory that was fraught with difficulty, booby trapped roads, snipers, confusing mountain topography, all within close range of 60,000 hostile Italian troops. All this was accomplished in four days, a military "miracle" even for Patton.

Senate Estes Kefauver's Senate Sub committee on Organized Crime asked, in 1951, how all this was possible. The answer was that the Mafia had helped to protect roads from Italian snipers, served as guides through treacherous mountain terrain, and provided needed intelligence to Patton's army. The part of Sicily which Patton's forces traversed had at one time been completely controlled by the Sicilian Mafia, until Benito Mussolini smashed it through the use of police repression.

Just prior to the invasion, it was hardly even able to continue shaking down farmers and shepherds for protection money. But the invasion changed all this, and the Mafia went on to play a very prominent and well-documented role in the American military occupation of Italy.

The expedience of war opened the doors to American drug traffic and Mafia domination. This was the beginning of the Mafia-U.S. Intelligence alliance, an alliance that lasts to this day and helped to support the covert operations of the CIA, such as the Iran-Contra operations.

In these covert operations, the CIA would obtain drugs from South America and Southeast Asia, sell them to the Mafia and use the money for the covert purchase of military equipment. These operations accelerated when Congress cut off military funding for the Contras.

One of the Allies' top occupation priorities was to liberate as many of their own soldiers from garrison duties so that they could participate in the military offensive. In order to accomplish this, Don Calogero's Mafia were pressed into service, and in July of 1943, the Civil Affairs Control Office of the U.S. Army appointed him mayor of Villalba and other Mafia officials as mayors of other towns in Sicily.

As the northern Italian offensive continued, Allied intelligence became very concerned over the extent to which the Italian Communists' resistance to Mussolini had driven Italian politics to the left. Community Party membership had doubled between 1943 and 1944, huge leftist strikes had shut down factories and the Italian underground fighting Mussolini had risen to almost 150,000 men. By mid-1944, the situation came to a head and the U.S. Army terminated arms drops to the Italian Resistance, and started appointing Mafia officials to occupation administration posts. Mafia groups broke up leftists rallies and reactivated black market operations throughout southern Italy.

Lucky Luciano was released from prison in 1946 and deported to Italy, where he rebuilt the heroin trade. The court's decision to release him was made possible by the testimony of intelligence agents at his hearing, and a letter written by a naval officer reciting what Luciano had done for the Navy. Luciano was supposed to have served from 30 to 50 years in prison. Over 100 Mafia members were similarly deported within a couple of years.

Luciano set up a syndicate which transported morphine base from the Middle East to Europe, refined it into heroin, and then shipped it into the United States via Cuba. During the 1950's, Marseilles, in Southern France, became a major city for the heroin labs and the Corsican syndicate began to actively cooperate with the Mafia in the heroin trade. Those became popularly known as the French Connection.

In 1948, Captain White visited Luciano and his narcotics associate Nick Gentile in Europe. Gentile was a former American gangster who had worked for the Allied Military Government in Sicily. By this time, the CIA was already subsidizing Corsican and Italian gangsters to oust Communist unions from the Port of Marseilles.

American strategic planners saw Italy and southern France as extremely important for their Naval bases as a counterbalance to the growing naval forces of the Soviet Union. CIO/AFL organizer Irving Brown testified that by the time the CIA subsidies were terminated in 1953, U.S. support was no longer needed because the profits from the heroin traffic was sufficient to sustain operations.

When Luciano was originally jailed, the U.S. felt it had eliminated the world's most effective underworld leader and the activities of the Mafia were seriously damaged. Mussolini had been waging a war since 1924 to rid the world of the Sicilian Mafia. Thousands of Mafia members were convicted of crimes and forced to leave the cities and hide out in the mountains.

Mussolini's reign of terror had virtually eradicated the international drug syndicates. Combined with the shipping surveillance during the war years, heroin trafficking had become almost nil. Drug use in the United States, before Luciano's release from prison, was on the verge of being entirely wiped out.

Mind Control Experiments Conducted in Our Name

The U.S. government has conducted three types of mind-control experiments: Real life experiences, such as those used on Little Augie and the LSD experiments in the safehouses of San Francisco and Greenwich Village; experiments on prisoners, such as in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville; experiments conducted in both mental hospitals and the Veterans Administration hospitals.

Such experimentation requires money, and the United States government has funneled funds for drug experiments through different agencies, both overtly and covertly.

The Role of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration

(Reportorial Sources, Including the Washington Post)

One of the funding agencies to contribute to the experimentation is the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a unit of the U.S. Justice Department and one of President Richard Nixon's favorite pet agencies. The Nixon Administration was, at one time, putting together a program for detaining youngsters who showed a tendency toward violence in "concentration" camps.

According to the Washington Post, the plan was authored by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch was told by John Erlichman, Chief of Staff for the Nixon White House, to implement the program. He proposed the screening of children of six years of age for tendencies toward criminality. Those who failed these tests were to be destined to be sent to the camps. The program was never implemented.

LEAA came into existence in 1968 with a huge budget to assist various U.S. law enforcement agencies. Its effectiveness, however, was not considered too great. After spending $6 billion, the F.B.I. reports general crime rose 31 percent and violent crime rose 50 percent. But little accountability was required of LEAA on how it spent its funds.

LEAA's role in the behavior modification research began at a meeting held in 1970 in Colorado Springs. Attending that meeting were Richard Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, John Erlichman, H.R. Haldemann and other White House staffers. They met with Dr. Bertram Brown, director fo the National Institute of Mental Health, and forged a close collaboration between LEAA and the Institute. LEAA was a product of the Justice Department and the Institute was a product of HEW.

LEAA funded 350 projects involving medical procedures, behavior modification and drugs for delinquency control. Money from the Criminal Justice System was being used to fund mental health projects and vice versa. Eventually, the leadership responsibility and control of the Institute began to deteriorate and their scientists began to answer to LEAA alone.

The Role of the National Institute of Mental Health

(Source: Court Records and US Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights)

The National Institute of Mental Health went on to become one of the greatest supporters of behavior modification research. Throughout the 1960's, court calenders became blighted with lawsuits on the part of "human guinea pigs" who had been experimented upon in prisons and mental institutions. It was these lawsuits which triggered the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights investigation, headed by Senator Sam Erwin. The subcommittee's harrowing report was virtually ignored by the news media.

The Department of Defense

(Source: CIA Documents released under FOIA and Subcommittee Testimony)

Thirteen behavior modification programs were conducted by the Department of Defense. The Department of Labor had also conducted several experiments, as well as the National Science Foundation. The Veterans' Administration was also deeply involved in behavior modification and mind control. Each of these agencies, including LEAA, and the Institute, were named in secret CIA documents as those who provided research cover for the MK-ULTRA program.

Eventually, LEAA was using much of its budget to fund experiments, including aversive techniques and psychosurgery, which involved, in some cases, irreversible brain surgery on normal brain tissue for the purpose of changing or controlling behavior and/or emotions.

Senator Erwin questioned the head of LEAA concerning ethical standards of the behavior modification projects which LEAA had been funding.

Erwin was extremely dubious about the idea of the government spending money on this kind of project without strict guidelines and reasonable research supervision in order to protect the human subjects. After Senator Erwin's denunciation of the funding polices, LEAA announced that it would no longer fund medical research into behavior modification and psychosurgery.

Lobotomies Performed on Black Activists

(Committee Testimony)

Despite the pledge by LEAA's director, Donald E. Santarelli, LEAA ended up funding 537 research projects dealing with behavior modification. There is strong evidence to indicate psychosurgery was still being used in prisons in the 1980's. Immediately after the funding announcement by LEAA, there were 50 psychosurgical operations at Atmore State Prison in Alabama. The inmates became virtual zombies. The operations, according to Dr. Swan of Fisk University, were done on black prisoners who were considered politically active.

Veteran's Administration Practices

(Committee Testimony)

The Veterans' Administration openly admitted that psychosurgery was a standard procedure for treatment and not used just in experiments. The VA Hospitals in Durham, Long Beach, New York, Syracuse and Minneapolis were known to employ these products on a regular basis. VA clients could typically be subject to these behavior alteration procedures against their will. The Erwin subcommittee concluded that the rights of VA clients had been violated.

LEAA also subsidized the research and development of gadgets and techniques useful to behavior modification. Much of the technology, whose perfection LEAA funded, had originally been developed and made operational for use in the Vietnam War.

Private Companies Involved

Companies like Bangor Punta Corporation and Walter Kidde and Co., through its subsidiary Globe Security System, adapted these devices to domestic use in the U.S. ITT was another company that domesticated the warfare technology for potential use on U.S. citizens. Rand Corporation executive Paul Baran warned that the influx back to the United State of the Vietnam War surveillance gadgets alone, not to mention the behavior modification hardware, could bring about "the most effective, oppressive police state ever created".

Some of the Players

One of the fascinating aspects of the scandals that plague the U.S. Government is the fact that so often the same names appear from scandal to scandal. From the origins of Ronald Reagan's political career, as Governor of California, Dr. Earl Brian and Edward Meese played key advisory roles. Dr. Brian's name has been linked to the October Surprise and is a central figure in the government's theft of PROMIS soft ware from INSLAW. Brian's role touches from the Cabazon Indian scandals to United Press International. He is one of those low-profile key figures.

And, alas, his name appears again in the nation's behavior modification and mind control experiments. Dr. Brian was Reagan's Secretary of Health when Reagan was Governor. Dr. Brian was an advocate of state subsidies for a research center for the study of violent behavior. The center was to begin operations by mid-1975, and its research was intended to shed light on why people murder or rape, or hijack aircraft. The center was to be operated by the University of California at Los Angeles, and its primary purpose, ac cording to Dr. Brian, was to unify scattered studies on anti-social violence and possibly even touch on socially tolerated violence, such as football or war. Dr. Brian sought $1.3 million for the center.

It certainly was possible that prison inmates might be used as volunteer subjects at the center to discover the unknowns which triggered their violent behavior. Dr. Brian's quest for the center came at the same time Governor Reagan concluded his plans to phase the state of California out of the mental hospital business by 1982. Reagan's plan is echoed by Governor Pete Wilson today, to place the responsibility of rehabilitating young offenders squarely on the shoulders of local communities. But as the proposal became known more publicly, a swell of controversy surrounded it. It ended in a fiasco. The inspiration for the violence center came from three doctors in 1967, five years before Dr. Brian and Governor Reagan unveiled their plans.

The "Scientific" Basis for Psychosurgery

(Publications of the Participants)

Amidst urban rioting and civil protest, Doctors Sweet, Mark and Ervin of Harvard put forward the thesis that individuals who engage in civil disobedience possess defective or damaged brain cells. If this conclusion were applied to the American Revolution or the Women's Rights Movement, a good portion of American society would be labeled as having brain damage.

In a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, they stated: "That poverty, unemployment, slum housing, and inadequate education underlie the nation's urban riots is well known, but the obviousness of these causes may have blinded us to the more subtle role of other possible factors, including brain dysfunction in the rioters who engaged in arson, sniping and physical assault.

"There is evidence from several sources that brain dysfunction related to a focal lesion plays a significant role in the violent and assaultive behavior of thoroughly studied patients. Individuals with electroencephalographic abnormalities in the temporal region have been found to have a much greater frequency of behavioral abnormalities (such as poor impulse control, assaultiveness, and psychosis) than is present in people with a normal brain wave pattern."

Soon after the publication in the Journal, Dr. Ervin and Dr. Mark published their book Violence and the Brain, which included the claim that there were as many as 10 million individuals in the United States "who suffer from obvious brain disease". They argued that the data of their book provided a strong reason for starting a program of mass screening of Americans.

"Our greatest danger no longer comes from famine or communicable disease. Our greatest danger lies in ourselves and in our fellow humans...we need to develop an 'early warning test' of limbic brain function to detect those humans who have a low threshold for impulsive violence...Violence is a public health problem, and the major thrust of any program dealing with violence must be toward its prevention," they wrote.

The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funded the doctors $108,000 and the National Institute of Mental Health kicked in another $500, 000, under pressure from Congress. They believed that psychosurgery would inevitably be performed in connection with the program, and that, since it irreversibly impaired people's emotional and intellectual capacities, it could be used as an instrument of repression and social control.

The doctors wanted screening centers established throughout the nation. In California, the publicity associated with the doctors' report, aided in the development of The Center for the study and Reduction of Violence. Both the state and LEAA provided the funding. The center was to serve as a model for future facilities to be set up throughout the United States.

The Director of the Neurophyschiatric Institute and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at UCLA, Dr. Louis Jolyon West was selected to run the center. Dr. West is alleged to have been a contract agent for the CIA, who, as part of a network of doctors and scientists, gathered intelligence on hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD, for the super-secret MK-ULTRA program. Like Captain White, West conducted LSD experiments for the CIA on unwitting citizens in the safehouses of San Francisco. He achieved notoriety for his injection of a massive dose of LSD into an elephant at the Oklahoma Zoo, the elephant died when West tried to revive it by administering a combination of drugs.

Dr. West was further known as the psychiatrist who was called upon to examine Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin. It was on the basis of West's diagnosis that Ruby was compelled to be treated for mental disorders and put on happy pills. The West examination was ordered after Ruby began to say that he was part of a right-wing conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy. Two years after the commencement of treatment for mental disorder, Ruby died of cancer in prison.

(Note: Dr West is now a member of the Board of Directors of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation.)

The Violence Control Center

(Testimony, FOIA documents, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Bay Guardian)

After January 11, 1973, when Governor Reagan announced plans for the Violence Center, West wrote a letter to the then Director of Health for California, J. M. Stubblebine:

"Dear Stub:

"I am in possession of confidential in formation that the Army is prepared to turn over Nike missile bases to state and local agencies for non-military purposes. They may look with special favor on health-related applications.

"Such a Nike missile base is located in the Santa Monica Mountains, within a half-hour's drive of the Neuropsychiatric Institute. It is accessible, but relatively remote. The site is securely fenced, and includes various buildings and improvements, making it suitable for prompt occupancy.

"If this site were made available to the Neurophyschiatric Institute as a research facility, perhaps initially as an adjunct to the new Center for the Prevention of Violence, we could put it to very good use. Comparative studies could be carried out there, in an isolated but convenient location, of experimental or model programs for the alteration of undesirable behavior.

"Such programs might include control of drug or alcohol abuse, modification of chronic anti-social or impulsive aggressiveness, etc. The site could also accommodate conferences or retreats for instruction of selected groups of mental-health related professionals and of others (e.g., law enforcement personnel, parole officers, special educators) for whom both demonstration and participation would be effective modes of instruction.

"My understanding is that a direct request by the Governor, or other appropriate officers of the State, to the Secretary of Defense (or, of course, the President), could be most likely to produce prompt results."

Some of the planned areas of study for the Center included:

Studies of violent individuals.

Experiments on prisoners from Vacaville and Atascadero, and hyperkinetic children.

Experiments with violence-producing and violent inhibiting drugs.

Hormonal aspects of passivity and aggressiveness in boys.

Studies to discover and compare norms of violence among various ethnic groups.

Studies of pre-delinquent children.

It would also encourage law enforcement to keep computer files on pre-delinquent children, which would make possible the treatment of children before they became delinquents.

The purpose of the Violence Center was not just research. The staff was to include sociologists, lawyers, police officers, clergymen and probation officers. With the backing of Governor Reagan and Dr. Brian, West had secured guarantees of prisoner volunteers from several California correctional institutions, including Vacaville. Vacaville and Atascadero were chosen as the primary sources for the human guinea pigs. These institutions had established a reputation, by that time, of committing some of the worst atrocities in West Coast history. Some of the experimentations differed little from what the Nazis did in the death camps.

Dr. Earl Brian, Governor Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Health, was adamant about his support for mind control centers in California. He felt the behavior modification plan of the Violence Control Centers was important in the prevention of crime.

The Violence Control Center was actually the brain child of William Herrmann as part of a pacification plan for California. A counter insurgency expert for Systems Development Corporation and an advisor to Governor Reagan, Herrmann worked with the Stand Research Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Hoover Center on Violence. Herrman was also a CIA agent who is now serving an eight year prison sentence for his role in a CIA counterfeiting operation. He was also directly linked with the Iran-Contra affair according to government records and Herrmann's own testimony.

In 1970, Herrmann worked with Colston Westbrook as his CIA control officer when Westbrook formed and implemented the Black Cultural Association at the Vacaville Medical Facility, a facility which in July experienced the death of three inmates who were forcibly subjected to behavior modification drugs. The Black Cultural Association was ostensibly an education program designed to instill black pride identity in prisons, the Association was really a cover for an experimental behavior modification pilot project designed to test the feasibility of programming unstable prisoners to become more manageable.

Westbrook worked for the CIA in Vietnam as a psychological warfare expert, and as an advisor to the Korean equivalent of the CIA and for the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. Between 1966 and 1969, he was an advisor to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch under the cover of working as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers.

His "firm" contracted the building of the interrogation/torture centers in every province of South Vietnam as part of the CIA's Phoenix Program. The program was centered around behavior modification experiments to learn how to extract information from prisoners of war, a direct violation of the Geneva Accords.

Westbrook's most prominent client at Vacaville was Donald DeFreeze, who be tween 1967 and 1969, had worked for the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence unit and later became the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Many authorities now believe that the Black Cultural Association at Vacaville was the seedling of the SLA. Westbrook even designed the SLA logo, the cobra with seven heads, and gave De Freeze his African name of Cinque. The SLA was responsible for the assassination of Marcus Foster, superintendent of School in Oakland and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

As a counterinsurgency consultant for Systems Development Corporation, a security firm, Herrmann told the Los Angeles Times that a good computer intelligence system "would separate out the activist bent on destroying the system" and then develop a master plan "to win the hearts and minds of the people". The San Francisco-based Bay Guardian, recently identified Herrmann as an international arms dealer working with Iran in 1980, and possibly involved in the October Surprise. Herrmann is in an English prison for counterfeiting. He allegedly met with Iranian officials to ascertain whether the Iranians would trade arms for hostages held in Lebanon.

The London Sunday Telegraph confirmed Herrmann's CIA connections, tracing them from 1976 to 1986. He also worked for the FBI. This information was revealed in his London trial.

In the 1970's, Dr. Brian and Herrmann worked together under Governor Reagan on the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, and then, a decade later, again worked under Reagan. Both men have been identified as working for Reagan with the Iranians.

The Violence Center, however, died an agonizing death. Despite the Ervin Senate Committee investigation and condemnation of mind control, the experiments continued. But when the Watergate scandal broke in the early 1970's, Washington felt it was too politically risky to continue to push for mind control centers.

Top doctors began to withdraw from the proposal because they felt that there were not enough safeguards. Even the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency, which funded the program, backed out, stating, the proposal showed "little evidence of established research ability of the kind of level necessary for a study of this cope".

Eventually it became known that control of the Violence Center was not going to rest with the University of California, but instead with the Department of Corrections and other law enforcement officials. This information was released publicly by the Committee Opposed to Psychiatric Abuse of Prisoners. The disclosure of the letter resulted in the main backers of the program bowing out and the eventual demise of the center.

Dr. Brian's final public statement on the matter was that the decision to cut off funding represented "a callous disregard for public safety". Though the Center was not built, the mind control experiments continue to this day.

The Victims of MK-ULTRA

(Court Records, Senate Testimony and FOIA Documents)

The Central Intelligence Agency held two major interests in use of LSD. to alter normal behavior patterns. The first interest centered around obtaining information from prisoners of war and enemy agents, in contravention of the Geneva Accords. The second was to deter the effectiveness of drugs used against the enemy on the battlefield.

The MK-ULTRA program was originally run by a small number of people within the CIA known as the Technical Services Staff (TSS). Another CIA department, the Office of Security, also began its own testing program. Friction arose and then infighting broke out when the Office of Security commenced to spy on TSS people after it was learned that LSD was being tested on unwitting Americans.

Not only did the two branches disagree over the issue of testing the drug on the unwitting, they also disagreed over the issue of how the drug was actually to be used by the CIA. The office of Security envisioned the drug as an interrogation weapon. But the TSS group thought the drug could be used to help destabilize another country, it could be slipped into the food or beverage of a public official in order to make him behave foolishly or oddly in public. One CIA document reveals that L.S.D. could be administered right before an official was to make a public speech.

Realizing that gaining information about the drug in real life situations was crucial to exploiting the drug to its fullest, TSS started conducting experiments on its own people. There was an extensive amount of self-experimentation. The Office of Security felt the TSS group was playing with fire, especially when it was learned that TSS was prepared to spike an annual office Christmas party punch with LSD, the Christmas party of the CIA. L.S.D. could produce serious insanity for periods of eight to 18 hours and possibly longer.

One of the "victims" of the punch was agent Frank Olson. Having never had drugs before, L.S.D. took its toll on Olson. He reported that, every automobile that came by was a terrible monster with fantastic eyes, out to get him personally. Each time a car passed he would huddle down against a parapet, terribly frightened. Olson began to behave erratically. The CIA made preparation to treat Olson at Chestnut Lodge, but before they could, Olson checked into a New York hotel and threw himself out from his tenth story room. The CIA was ordered to cease all drug testing.

Mind control drugs and experiments were torturous to the victims. One of three inmates who died in Vacaville Prison in July of 1991 was scheduled to appear in court in an attempt to stop forced administration of a drug, the very drug that may have played a role in his death.

Joseph Cannata believed he was making progress and did not need forced dosages of the drug Haldol. The Solano County Coroner's Office said that Cannata and two other inmates died of hyperthermia, extremely elevated body temperature. Their bodies all had at least 108 degrees temperature when they died. The psychotropic drugs they were being forced to take will elevate body temperature.

Dr. Ewen Cameron, working at McGill University in Montreal, used a variety of experimental techniques, including keeping subjects unconscious for months at a time, administering huge electroshocks and continual doses of L.S.D.

Massive lawsuits developed as a result of this testing, and many of the subjects who suffered trauma had never agreed to participate in the experiments. Such CIA experiments infringed upon the much-honored Nuremberg Code concerning medical ethics. Dr. Camron was one of the members of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

L.S.D. research was also conducted at the Addiction Research Center of the U.S. Public Health Service in Lexington, Kentucky. This institution was one of several used by the CIA. The National Institute of Mental Health and the U.S. Navy funded this operation. Vast supplies of L.S.D. and other hallucinogenic drugs were required to keep the experiments going.

Dr. Harris Isbell ran the program. He was a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulants Drugs. Almost all of the inmates were black. In many cases, L.S.D. dosage was increased daily for 75 days.

Some 1500 U.S. soldiers were also victims of drug experimentation. Some claimed they had agreed to become guinea pigs only through pressure from their superior officers. Many claimed they suffered from severe depression and other psychological stress.

One such soldier was Master Sergeant Jim Stanley. L.S.D. was put in Stanley's drinking water and he freaked out. Stanley's hallucinations continued even after he returned to his regular duties. His service record suffered, his marriage went on the rocks and he ended up beating his wife and children. It wasn't until 17 years later that Stanley was informed by the military that he had been an L.S.D. experiment. He sued the government, but the Supreme Court ruled no soldier could sue the Army for the LSD. experiments. Justice William Brennen disagreed with the Court decision. He wrote, "Experimentation with unknowing human subjects is morally and legally unacceptable."

Private James Thornwell was given L.S.D. in a military test in 1961. For the next 23 years he lived in a mental fog, eventually drowning in a Vallejo swimming pool in 1984. Congress had set up a $625,000 trust fund for him. Large scale L.S.D. tests on American soldiers were conducted at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and in Europe and the Pacific. The Army conducted a series of L.S.D. tests at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The purpose of the tests were to ascertain how well soldiers could perform their tasks on the battlefield while under the influence of L.S.D.

At Fort McClellan, Alabama, 200 officers in the Chemical Corps were given L.S.D. in order to familiarize them with the drug's effects. At Edgewood Arsenal, soldiers were given L.S.D. and then confined to sensory deprivation chambers and later exposed to a harsh interrogation sessions by intelligence people. In these sessions, it was discovered that soldiers would cooperate if promised they would be allowed to get off the L.S.D.

In Operation Derby Hat, foreign nationals accused of drug trafficking were given L.S.D. by the Special Purpose Team, with one subject begging to be killed in order to end his ordeal. Such experiments were also conducted in Saigon on Viet Cong POWs.

One of the most potent drugs in the U.S. arsenal is called BZ or quinuclidinyl benzilate. It is a long-lasting drug and brings on a litany of psychotic experiences and almost completely isolates any person from his environment. The main effects of BZ last up to 80 hours compared to eight hours for L.S.D. Negative after-effects may persist for up to six weeks.

Psychological Warfare Drugs

(Court Records, FOIA Documents, General Accounting Office investigations)

The BZ experiments were conducted on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal for 16 years. Many of the "victims" claim that the drug permanently affected their lives in a negative way. It so disorientated one paratrooper that he was found taking a shower in his uniform and smoking a cigar. BZ was eventually put in hand grenades and a 750 pound cluster bomb. Other configurations were made for mortars, artillery and missiles. The bomb was tested in Vietnam and CIA documents indicate it was prepared for use by the U.S. in the event of large-scale civilian uprisings.

In Vacaville, psychosurgery has long been a policy. In one set of cases, experimental psychosurgery was conducted on three inmates, a black, a Chicano and a white person. This involved the procedure of pushing electrodes deep into the brain in order to determine the position of defective brain cells, and then shooting enough voltage into the suspected area to kill the defective cells. One prisoner, who appeared to be improving after surgery, was released on parole, but ended up back in prison. The second inmate became violent and there is no information on the third inmate.

Vacaville also administered a "terror drug", Anectine, as a way of "suppressing hazardous behavior". In small doses, Anectine serves as a muscle relaxant; in huge does, it produces prolonged seizure of the respiratory system and a sensation "worse than dying". The drug goes to work within 30 to 40 seconds by paralyzing the small muscles of the fingers, toes, and eyes, and then moves into the the intercostal muscles and the diaphragm. The heart rate subsides to 60 beats per minute, respiratory arrest sets in and the patient remains completely conscious throughout the ordeal, which lasts two to five minutes. The experiments were also used at Atascadero.

Several mind altering drugs were originally developed for non-psychoactive purposes. Some of these drugs are Phenothiazine and Thorzine. The side effects of these drugs can be a living hell. The impact includes the feeling of drowsiness, disorientation, shakiness, dry mouth, blurred vision and an inability to concentrate. Drugs like Prolixin are described by users as "sheer torture" and "becoming a zombie".

The Veterans Administration Hospital has been shown by the General Accounting Office to apply heavy dosages of psychotherapeutic drugs. One patient was taking eight different drugs, three antipsychotic, two antianxiety, one antidepressant, one sedative and one anti-Parkinson. Three of these drugs were being given in dosages equal to the maximum recommended.

Another patient was taking seven different drugs. One report tells of a patient who refused to take the drug. "I told them I don't want the drug to start with, they grabbed me and strapped me down and gave me a forced intramuscular shot of Prolixin. They gave me Artane to counteract the Prolixin and they gave me Sinequan, which is a kind of tranquilizer to make me calm down, which over calmed me, so rather than letting up on the medication, they then gave me Ritalin to pep me up."

Prolixin lasts for two weeks. One patient describes how the drug does not calm or sedate nerves, but instead attacks from so deep inside you, you cannot locate the source of the pain. "The drugs turn your nerves in upon yourself. Against your will, your resistance, your resolve, are directed at your own tissues, your own muscles, reflexes, etc.." The patient continues, "The pain grinds into your fiber, your vision is so blurred you cannot read. You ache with restlessness, so that you feel you have to walk, to pace. And then as soon as you start pacing, the opposite occurs to you, you must sit and rest. Back and forth, up and down, you go in pain you cannot locate. In such wretched anxiety you are overwhelmed because you cannot get relief even in breathing."

Doctor Jose Delgado: "Man does not have the right to develop his own mind."

(Congressional Record, New York Times)

"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.

"The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective.

"Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain."

These were the remarks of Dr. Jose Delgado as they appeared in the February 24, 1974 edition of the Congressional Record, No. 262E, Vol. 118.

Despite Dr. Delgado's outlandish statements before Congress, his work was financed by grants from the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Aero-Medical Research Laboratory, and the Public Health Foundation of Boston.

Dr. Delgado was a pioneer of the technology of Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB). The New York Times ran an article on May 17, 1965 entitled Matador With a Radio Stops Wild Bull. The story details Dr. Delgado's experiments at Yale University School of Medicine and work in the field at Cordova, Spain. The New York Times stated:

"Afternoon sunlight poured over the high wooden barriers into the ring, as the brave bull bore down on the unarmed matador, a scientist who had never faced fighting bull. But the charging animal's horn never reached the man behind the heavy red cape. Moments before that could happen, Dr. Delgado pressed a button on a small radio transmitter in his hand and the bull braked to a halt. Then he pressed another button on the transmitter, and the bull obediently turned to the right and trotted away. The bull was obeying commands in his brain that were being called forth by electrical stimulation by the radio signals to certain regions in which fine wires had been painlessly planted the day before."

According to Dr. Delgado, experiments of this type have also been performed on humans. While giving a lecture on the Brain in 1965, Dr. Delgado said, "Science has developed a new methodology for the study and control of cerebral function in animals and humans."

Russian Experiments in Hypnotism and Radio Control of the Mind

(Scientific papers and books)

The late L.L. Vasiliev, professor of physiology at the University of

Leningrad wrote in a paper about hypnotism: "As a control of the subject's condition, when she was outside the laboratory in another set of experiments, a radio set was used. The results obtained indicate that the method of using radio signals substantially enhances the experimental possibilities." The professor continued to write, "I.F. Tomaschevsky (a Russian physiologist) carried out the first experiments with this subject at a distance of one or two rooms, and under conditions that the participant would not know or suspect that she would be experimented with. In other cases, the sender was not in the same house, and someone else observed the subject's behavior. Subsequent experiments at considerable distances were successful. One such experiment was carried out in a park at a distance. Mental suggestions to go to sleep were complied with within a minute."

The Russian experiments in the control of a person's mind through hypnosis and radio waves were conducted in the 1930s, some 30 years before Dr. Delgado's bull experiment. Dr. Vasiliev definitely demonstrated that radio transmission can produce stimulation of the brain. It is not a complex process. In fact, it need not be implanted within the skull or be productive of stimulation of the brain, itself. All that is needed to accomplish the radio control of the brain is a twitching muscle. The subject becomes hypnotized and a muscle stimulant is implanted. The subject, while still under hypnosis, is commanded to respond when the muscle stimulant is activated, in this case by radio transmission.

Lincoln Lawrence wrote a book entitled Were We Controlled? Lawrance wrote, "If the subject is placed under hypnosis and mentally programmed to maintain a determination eventually to perform one specific act, perhaps to shoot someone, it is suggested thereafter, each time a particular muscle twitches in a certain manner, which is then demonstrated by using the transmitter, he will increase this determination even more strongly. As the hypnotic spell is renewed again and again, he makes it his life's purpose to carry out this act until it is finally achieved. Thus are the two complementary aspects of Radio-Hypnotic Intracerebral Control (RHIC) joined to reinforce each other, and perpetuate the control, until such time as the controlled behavior is called for. This is done by a second session with the hypnotist giving final instructions. These might be reinforced with radio stimulation in more frequent cycles. They could even carry over the moments after the act to reassure calm behavior during the escape period, or to assure that one conspirator would not indicate that he was aware of the co-conspirator's role, or that he was even acquainted with him."

US Experiments in Radio Control of the Mind

(Public Statements of the Principals)

RHIC constitutes the joining of two well known tools, the radio part and the hypnotism part. People have found it difficult to accept that an individual can be hypnotized to perform an act which is against his moral principles. Some experiments have been conducted by the U.S. Army which show that this popular perception is untrue.

The chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, Dr. Estabrooks, has stated, "I can hypnotize a man without his knowledge or consent into committing treason against the United States." Estabrooks was one of the nation's most authoritative sources in the hypnotic field.

The psychologist told officials in Washington that a mere 200 well trained hypnotists could develop an army of mind-controlled sixth columnists in wartime United States. He laid out a scenario of an enemy doctor placing thousands of patients under hypnotic mind control, and eventually programming key military officers to follow his assignment. Through such maneuvers, he said, the entire U.S. Army could be taken over. Large numbers of saboteurs could also be created using hypnotism through the work of a doctor practicing in a neighborhood or foreign born nationals with close cultural ties with an enemy power.

Dr. Estabrooks actually conducted experiments on U.S. soldiers to prove his point. Soldiers of low rank and little formal education were placed under hypnotism and their memories tested. Surprisingly, hypnotists were able to control the subjects' ability to retain complicated verbal information. J. G. Watkins followed in Estabrooks steps and induced soldiers of lower rank to commit acts which conflicted not only with their moral code, but also the military code which they had come to accept through their basic training. One of the experiments involved placing a normal, stable army private in a deep trance. Watkins was trying to see if he could get the private to attack a superior officer, a cardinal sin in the military. While the private was in a deep trance, Watkins told him that the officer sitting across from him was an enemy soldier who was going to attempt to kill him. In the private's mind, it was a kill or be killed situation. The private immediately jumped up and grabbed the officer by the throat. The experiment was repeated several times, and in one case the man who was hypnotized and the man who was attacked were very close friends. The results were always the same. In one experiment, the hypnotized subject pulled out a knife and nearly stabbed another person.

Watkins concluded that people could be induced to commit acts contrary to their morality if their reality was distorted by the hypnotism. Similar experiments were conducted by Watkins using WACs exploring the possibility of making military personnel divulge military secrets. A related experiment had to be discontinued because a researcher, who had been one of the subjects, was exposing numerous top-secret projects to his hypnotist, who did not have the proper security clearance for such information. The information was divulged before an audience of 200 military personnel.

Dr. Watson's Experiments on Babies

In man's quest to control the behavior of humans, there was a great breakthrough established by Pavlov, who devised a way to make dogs salivate on cue. He perfected his conditioning response technique by cutting holes in the cheeks of dogs and measured the amount they salivated in response to different stimuli. Pavlov verified that "quality, rate and frequency of the salivation changed depending upon the quality, rate and frequency of the stimuli."

Though Pavlov's work falls far short of human mind control, it did lay the groundwork for future studies in mind and behavior control of humans. John B. Watson conducted experiments in the United States on an 11-month-old infant. After allowing the infant to establish a rapport with a white rat, Watson began to beat on the floor with an iron bar every time the infant came in contact with the rat. After a time, the infant made the association between the appearance of the rat and the frightening sound, and began to cry every time the rat came into view. Eventually, the infant developed a fear of any type of small animal. Watson was the founder of the behaviorist school of psychology.

"Give me the baby, and I'll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings or stone or wood. I'll make it a thief, a gunman or a dope fiend. The possibilities of shaping in any direction are almost endless. Even gross differences in anatomical structure limits are far less than you may think. Make him a deaf mute, and I will build you a Helen Keller. Men are built, not born,"

Watson proclaimed. His psychology did not recognize inner feelings and thoughts as legitimate objects of scientific study, he was only interested in overt behavior.

Though Watson's work was the beginning of man's attempts to control human actions, the real work was done by B.F. Skinner, the high priest of the behaviorists movement. The key to Skinner's work was the concept of operant conditioning, which relied on the notion of reinforcement, all behavior which is learned is rooted in either a positive or negative response to that action. There are two corollaries of operant conditioning" Aversion therapy and desensitization.

Aversion therapy uses unpleasant reinforcement to a response which is undesirable. This can take the form of electric shock, exposing the subject to fear producing situations, and the infliction of pain in general. It has been used as a way of "curing" homosexuality, alcoholism and stuttering. Desensitization involves forcing the subject to view disturbing images over and over again until they no longer produce any anxiety, then moving on to more extreme images, and repeating the process over again until no anxiety is produced. Eventually, the subject becomes immune to even the most extreme images. This technique is typically used to treat people's phobias. Thus, the violence shown on T.V. could be said to have the unsystematic and unintended effect of desensitization.

Skinnerian behaviorism has been accused of attempting to deprive man of his free will, his dignity and his autonomy. It is said to be intolerant of uncertainty in human behavior, and refuses to recognize the private, the ineffable, and the unpredictable. It sees the individual merely as a medical, chemical and mechanistic entity which has no comprehension of its real interests.

Skinner believed that people are going to be manipulated. "I just want them to be manipulated effectively," he said. He measured his success by the absence of resistance and counter control on the part of the person he was manipulating. He thought that his techniques could be perfected to the point that the subject would not even suspect that he was being manipulated.

Dr. James V. McConnel, head of the Department of Mental Health Research at the University of Michigan, said, "The day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with the use of drugs, hypnosis, and the astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain almost absolute control over an individual's behavior. We want to reshape our society drastically."

The Navy's Murderers

(Statements of Lt. Commander Thomas Narut, The London Times)

A U.S. Navy psychologist claims that the Office of Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, used behavior modification techniques on them, and then relocated them in American embassies throughout the world. Just prior to that time, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee had censured the CIA for its global political assassination plots, including plots against Fidel Castro. The Navy psychologist was Lt. Commander Thomas Narut of the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Naples, Italy. The information was divulged at an Oslo NATO conference of 120 psychologists from the eleven nation alliance.

According to Dr. Narut, the U.S. Navy was an excellent place for a researcher to find "captive personnel" whom they could could use as guinea pigs in experiments. The Navy provided all the funding necessary, according to Narut.

Dr. Narut, in a question and answer session with reporters from many nations, revealed how the Navy was secretly programming large numbers of assassins. He said that the men he had worked with for the Navy were being prepared for commando-type operations, as well as covert operations in U.S. embassies worldwide. He described the men who went through his program as "hit men and assassins" who could kill on command.

Careful screening of the subjects was accomplished by Navy psychologists through the military records, and those who actually received assignments where their training could be utilized, were drawn mainly from submarine crews, the paratroops, and many were convicted murderers serving military prison sentences. Several men who had been awarded medals for bravery were drafted into the program.

The assassins were conditioned through "audio-visual desensitization". The process involved the showing of films of people being injured or killed in a variety of ways, starting with very mild depictions, leading up to the more extreme forms of mayhem. Eventually, the subjects would be able to detach their feelings even when viewing the most horrible of films. The conditioning was most successful when applied to "passive-aggressive" types, and most of these ended up being able to kill without any regrets. The prime indicator of violent tendencies was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Dr. Narut knew of two Navy programming centers, the neuropsychiatric laboratory in San Diego and the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Italy, where he worked.

During the audio-visual desensitization programming, restraints were used to force the subject to view the films. A device was used on the subjects eyelids to prevent him from blinking. Typically, the preliminary film was on an African youth being ritualistically circumcised with a dull knife and without any anesthetic. The second film showed a sawmill scene in which a man accidentally cut off his fingers.

In addition to the desensitization films, the potential assassins underwent programming to create prejudicial attitude in the men, to think of their future enemies, especially the leaders of these countries, as sub-human. Films and lectures were presented demeaning the culture and habits of the people of the countries where it had been decided they would be sent.

After his NATO lecture, Dr. Narut disappeared. He could not be located. Within a week of so after the lecture, the Pentagon issued an emphatic denial that the U.S. Navy had "engaged in psychological training or other types of training of personnel as assassins." They disavowed the programming centers in San Diego and Naples and stated they were unable to locate Narut, but did provide confirmation that he was a staff member of the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Naples.

Dr. Alfred Zitani, an American delegate to the Oslo conference, did verify Narut's remarks and they were published in the Sunday Times.

Sometime later, Dr. Narut surfaced again in London and recanted his remarks, stating that he was "talking in theoretical and not practical terms." Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Naval headquarters in London issued a statement indicating that Dr. Narut's remarks at the NATO conference should be discounted because he had "personal problems". Dr. Narut never made any further public statements about the program.

During the NATO conference in Oslo, Dr. Narut had remarked that the reason he was divulging the information was because he believed that the information was coming out anyway. The doctor was referring to the disclosure by a Congressional subcommittee which were then appearing in the press concerning various CIA assassination plots. However, what Dr. Narut had failed to realize at the time, was that the Navy's assassination plots were not destined to be revealed to the public at that time.

Electromagnetic Control of Human Behavior

(Published scientific papers and press reports)

There were three scientists who pioneered the work of using an electromagnetic field to control human behavior. Their work began 25 years ago. These three were Dr. Jose Delgado, psychology professor at Yale University; Dr. W. Ross Adey, a physiologist at the Brain Research Institute at UCLA; and Dr. Wilder Penfield, a Canadian.

Dr. Penfield's experiments consisted of the implantation of electrodes deep into the cortexes of epilepsy patients who were to undergo surgery; he was able to drastically improve the memories of these patients through electrical stimulation. Dr. Adey implanted transmitters in the brains of cats and chimpanzees that could send signals to a receiver regarding the electrical activity of the brain; additional radio signals were sent back into the brains of the animals which modified their behavior at the direction of the doctor. Dr. Delgado was able to stop and turn a charging bull through the use of an implanted radio receiver.

Other experiments using platinum, gold and stainless steel electrode implants enabled researchers to induce total madness in cats, put monkeys into a stupor, or to set human beings jerking their arms up and down. Much of Delgado's work was financed by the CIA through phony funding conduits masking themselves as charitable organizations.

Following the successes of Delgado's work, the CIA set up their own research program in the field of electromagnetic behavior modification under the code name Sleeping Beauty. With the guidance of Dr. Ivor Browning, a laboratory was set up in New Mexico, specializing in working with the hypothalamus or "sweet spot" of the brain. Here it was found that stimulating this area could produce intense euphoria.

Dr. Browning was able to wire a radio receiver-amplifier into the "sweet spot" of a donkey which picked up a five-micro-amp signal, such that he could create intense happiness in the animal. Using the jolts of happiness as an "electronic carrot", Browning was able to send the donkey up a 2000 foot New Mexico mountain and back to its point of origin. When the donkey was proceeding up the path toward its destination, it was rewarded; when it deviated, the signal stopped. "You've never seen a donkey so eager to keep on course in your whole life," Dr. Browning exclaimed.

The CIA utilized the electronic carrot technique in getting trained pigeons to fly miniature microphone-transmitters to the ledge of a KGB safe house where the devices monitored conversations for months. There was a move within the CIA to conduct further experiments on humans, foreigners and prisoners, but officially the White House vetoed the idea as being unethical.

In May 1989, it was learned by the CIA that the KGB was subjecting people undergoing interrogation to electromagnetic fields, which produced a panic reaction, thereby bringing them closer to breaking down under questioning. The subjects were not told that they were being placed under the influence of these beams. A few years earlier, Dr. Ross Adey released photographs and a fact sheet concerning what he called the Russian Lida machine. This consisted of a small transmitter emitting 10-hertz waves which makes the subject susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. The device utilized the outmoded vacuum-tube design. American POWs in Korea have indicated that similar devices had been used for interrogation purposes in POW camps.

The ELF Connection

The general, long term goal of the CIA was to find out whether or not mind control could be achieved through the use of a precise, external, electromagnetic beam. The electrical activity of the brain operates within the range of 100 hertz frequency. This spectrum is called ELF or Extremely Low Frequency range. ELF waves carry very little ionizing radiation and very low heat, and therefore do not manifest gross, observable physical effects on living organisms. Published Soviet experiments with ELFs reveal that there was a marked increase in psychiatric and central nervous system disorders and symptoms of stress for sailors working close to ELF generators.

In the mid-1970s, American interest in combining EMR techniques with hypnosis was very prominent. Plans were on file to develop these techniques through experiments on human volunteers. The spoken word of the hypnotist could be conveyed by modulated electromagnetic energy directly into the subconscious parts of the human brain without employing any technical devices for receiving or transacting the messages and without the person exposed to such influence having a chance to control the information input consciously.

In California, it was discovered by Dr. Adey that animal brain waves could be altered directly by ELF fields. It was found that monkey brains would fall in phase with ELF waves. These waves could easily pass through the skull, which normally protected the central nervous system from outside influence.

In San Leandro, Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher, director of Technic Research Laboratory, has been doing ELF/brain research with human subjects for some time. One of the frequencies produces nausea for more than an hour. Another frequency, she calls it the marijuana frequency, gets people laughing. "Give me the money and three months," she says, "and I'll be able to affect the behavior of eighty percent of the people in this town without their knowing it."

The Devastating Mental and Physical Effect of Microwaves

(Soviet Research, State Department Admissions, Public Record)

In the past, the Soviet Union has invested large sums of time and money investigating microwaves. In 1952, while the Cold War was showing no signs of thawing, there was a secret meeting at the Sandia Corporation in New Mexico between U.S. and Soviet scientists involving the exchange of information regarding the biological hazards and safety levels of EMR. The Soviets possessed the greater preponderance of information, and the American scientists were unwilling to take it seriously. In subsequent meetings, the Soviet scientists continued to stress the seriousness of the risks, while American scientists downplayed their importance.

Shortly after the last Sandia meeting, the Soviets began directing a microwave beam at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, using embassy workers as guinea pigs for low-level EMR experiments. Washington, D.C. was oddly quiescent, regarding the Moscow embassy bombardment.

Discovered in 1962, the Moscow signal was investigated by the CIA, which hired a consultant, Milton Zaret, and code named the research Project Pandora. According to Zaret, the Moscow signal was composed of several frequencies, and was focused precisely upon the Ambassador's office. The intensity of the bombardment was not made public, but when the State Department finally admitted the existence of the signal, it announced that it was fairly low.

There was consensus among Soviet EMR researchers that a beam such as the Moscow signal was destined to produced blurred vision and loss of mental concentration. The Boston Globe reported that the American ambassador had not only developed a leukemia-like blood disease, but also suffered from bleeding eyes and chronic headaches. Under the CIA's Project Pandora, monkeys were brought into the embassy and exposed to the Moscow signal; they were found to have developed blood composition anomalies and unusual chromosome counts. Embassy personnel were found to have a 40 percent higher than average white blood cell count. While Operation Pandora's data gathering proceeded, embassy personnel continued working in the facility and were not informed of the bombardment until 10 years later. Embassy employees were eventually granted a 20 percent hardship allowance for their service in an unhealthful post. Throughout the period of bombardment, the CIA used the opportunity to gather data on psychological and biological effects of the beam on American personnel.

The U.S. government began to examine the affects of the Moscow signal. The job was turned over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA is now developing electromagnetic weaponry. The man in charge of the DARPA program, Dr. Jack Verona, is so important and so secretive that he doesn't even return President George Bush's telephone calls

The American public was never informed that the military had planned to develop electromagnetic weapons until 1982, when the revelation appeared in a technical Air Force magazine.

The magazine article stated, "....specifically generated radio-frequency radiation (RFR) fields may pose powerful and revolutionary anti-personnel military trends." The article indicated that that it would be very easy to use electromagnetic fields to disrupt the human brain because the brain, itself, was an electrically mediated organ. It further indicated that a rapidly scanning RFR system would have a stunning or killing capability over a large area. The system was developable.

Navy Captain Dr. Paul E. Taylor read a paper at the Air University Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education, at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. Dr. Taylor was responsible for the Navy's Radiation Laboratory and had been studying radiation effects on humans. In his paper, Dr. Taylor stated, "The ability of individuals to function (as soldiers) could be degraded to such a point that would be combat ineffective." The system was so sophisticated that it employed microwaves and millimeter waves and was transportable by a large truck.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the South Bay, are working on the development of a "brain bomb". A bomb could be dropped in the middle of a battlefield which would produce microwaves, incapacitating the minds of soldiers within a circumscribed area.

Applications of microwave technology in espionage were available for over 25 years. In a meeting in Berkeley of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as early as 1965, Professor J. Anthony Deutsch of New York University, provided an important segment of research in the field of memory control. In layman terms, Professor Deutsch indicated that the mind is a transmitter and if too much information is received, like too many vehicles on a crowded freeway, the brain ceases to transmit. The Professor indicated that an excess of acetyl choline in the brain can interfere with the memory process and control. He indicated excess amounts of acetyl choline can be artificially produced, through both the administration of drugs or through the use of radio waves. The process is called Electronic Dissolution of Memory (EDOM). The memory transmission can be stopped for as long as the radio signal continues.

As a result, the awareness of the person skips over those minutes during which he is subjected to the radio signal. Memory is distorted, and time-orientation is destroyed.

According to Lincoln Lawrence, author of Were We Controlled, EDOM is now operational. "There is already in use a small EDOM generator/transmitter which can be concealed on the body of the person.

Contact with this person, a casual handshake or even just a touch, transmits a tiny electronic charge plus an ultra-sonic signal tone which for a short period will disturb the time-orientation of the person affected....it can be a potent weapon for hopelessly confusing evidence in the investigation of a crime "

Microwave Transmission of Voices Direct to the Brain

Thirty years ago, Allen Frey discovered that microwaves of 300 to 3000 megahertz could be "heard" by people, even if they were deaf, if pulsed at a certain rate. Appearing to be originating just in back of the head, the sound boomed, clicked, hissed or buzzed, depending upon the frequency. Later research has shown that the perception of the waves take place just in front of the ears. The microwaves causes pressure waves in the brain tissue, and this phenomenon vibrates the sound receptors in the inner ear through the bone structure. Some microwaves are capable of directly stimulating the nerve cells of the auditory pathways.

This has been confirmed with experiments with rats, in which the sound registers 120 decibels, which is equal to the volume of a nearby jet during takeoff. Aside from having the capability of causing pain and preventing auditory communication, a more subtle effect was demonstrated at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research by Dr. Joseph C. Sharp. Dr. Sharp, himself, was the subject of an experiment in which pulsed microwave audiograms, or the microwave analog of the sound vibrations of spoken words, were delivered to his brain in such a way that he was able to understand the words that were spoken. Military and undercover uses of such a device might include driving a subject crazy with inner voices in order to discredit him, or conveying undetectable instructions to a programmed assassin.

But the technology has been carried even a step further. It has been demonstrated by Dr. Ross Adey that microwaves can be used to directly bring about changes in the electrical patterns of different parts of the brain. His experiments showed that he could achieve the same mind control over animals as Dr. Delgado did in the bull incident. Dr. Delgado used brain implants in his animals, Dr. Adey used microwave devices without preconditioning. He made animals act and look like electronic toys.

Nazi Mind Control Experiments

(Report from the US Naval Technical Mission)

At the conclusion of World War Two, American investigators learned that Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany had been conducting mind control experiments on inmates. They experimented with hypnosis and with the drug mescaline.

Mescaline is a quasi-synthetic extract of the peyote cactus, and is very similar to LSD in the hallucinations which it produces. Though they did not achieve the degree of success they had desired, the SS interrogators in conjunction with the Dachau doctors were able to extract the most intimate secrets from the prisoners when the inmates were given very high doses of mescaline.

There were fatal mind control experiments conducted at Auschwitz. The experiments there were described by one informant as "brainwashing with chemicals". The informant said the Gestapo wasn't satisfied with extracting information by torture. "So the next question was, why don't we do it like the Russians, who have been able to get confessions of guilt at their show trials?" They tried various barbiturates and morphine derivatives. After prisoners were fed a coffee-like substance, two of them died in the night and others died later.

The Dachau mescaline experiments were written up in a lengthy report issued by the U.S. Naval Technical Mission, whose job it was at the conclusion of the war to scour all of Europe for every shred of industrial and scientific material that had been produced by the Third Reich. It was as a result of this report that the U.S. Navy became interested in mescaline as an interrogation tool. The Navy initiated Project Chatter in 1947, the same year the Central Intelligence Agency was formed. The Chatter format included developing methods for acquiring information from people against their will, but without inflicting harm or pain. At the conclusion of the war, the OSS was designated as the investigative unit for the International Military Tribunal, which was to become known as the Nuremberg Trials. The purpose of Nuremberg was to try the principal Nazi leaders. Some Nazis were on trial for their experiments, and the U.S. was using its own "truth drugs" on these principal Nazi prisoners, namely Goring, Ribbentrop, Speer and eight others. The Justice in charge of the tribunal had given the OSS permission to use the drugs.

The Dachau doctors who performed the mescaline experiments also were involved in aviation medicine. The aviation experiments at Dachau fascinated Heinrich Himmler. Himmler followed the progress of the tests, studied their findings and often suggested improvements. The Germans had a keen interest in several medical problems in the field of flying, they were interested in preventing pilots from slowly becoming unconscious as a result of breathing the thin air of the high altitudes and there was interest in enhancing night vision.

The main research in this area was at the Institute of Aviation in Munich, which had excellent laboratories. The experiments in relationship to the Institute were conducted at Dachau. Inmates had been immersed in tubs of ice water with instruments placed in their orifices in order to monitor their painful deaths. Dr. Hubertus Strughold, who ran the German aviation medicine team, confirmed that he had heard humans were used for the Dachau experiments. Hidden in a cave in Hallein were files recording the Dachau experiments.

Nazi Altitude and Cold Endurance Experiments

On May 15, 1941, Dr. Sigmund Rascher wrote a letter to Himmler requesting permission to use the Dachau inmates for experiments on the physiology of high altitudes. Rascher lamented the fact that no such experiments have been done using human subjects. "The experiments are very dangerous and we cannot attract volunteers," he told Himmler. His request was approved.

Dachau was filled with Communists and Social Democrats, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, clergymen, homosexuals, and people critical of the Nazi government. Upon entering Dachau, prisoners lost all legal status, their hair was shaved off, all their possessions confiscated, they were poorly fed, and they were used as slaves for both the corporations and the government. The SS guards were brutal and sadistic. The idea to test subjects at Dachau was really the brain child of Erich Hippke, chief surgeon of the Luftwaffe.

Between March and August of 1942 extensive experiments were conducted at Dachau regarding the limits of human endurance at high altitudes. These experiments were conducted for the benefit of the German Air Force. The experiments took place in a low-pressure chamber in which altitudes of up to 68,000 feet could be simulated. The subjects were placed in the chamber and the altitude was raised, many inmates died as a result. The survivors often suffered serious injury. One witness at the Nuremberg trails, Anton Pacholegg, who was sent to Dachau in 1942, gave an eyewitness account of the typical pressure test:

"The Luftwaffe delivered a cabinet constructed of wood and metal. It was possible in the cabinet to either decrease or increase the air pressure. You could observe through a little window the reaction of the subject inside the chamber. The purpose of these experiments was to test human energy and the subject's capacity...to take large amounts of pure oxygen, and then to test his reaction to a gradual decrease in oxygen. I have personally seen through the observation window of the chamber when a prisoner inside would stand a vacuum until his lungs ruptured. Some experiments gave men such pressure in their heads that they would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve the pressure. They would tear their heads and face with their fingers and nails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness. They would beat the walls with their hands and head and scream in an effort to relieve pressure in their eardrums. These cases of extreme vacuums generally ended in the death of the subjects."

The former prisoner also testified, "An extreme experiment was so certain to result in death that in many instances the chamber was used for routine execution purposes rather than an experiment." A minimum 200 prisoners were known to have died in these experiments.

The doctors directly involved with the research held very high positions: Karl Brandt was Hitler's personal doctor; Oskar Schroeder was the Chief of the Medical Services of the Luftwaffe; Karl Gebhardt was Chief Surgeon on the Staff of the Reich Physician SS and Police and German Red Cross President; Joachim Mrugowsky was Chief of the Hygienic Institute of the Waffen SS; Helmut Poppendick was a senior colonel in the SS and Chief of the Personal Staff of the Reich Physicians SS and Police; Siegfried Ruff was Director of the Department of Aviation Medicine.

The first human guinea pig was a 37 year old Jew in good health. Himmler invited 40 top Luftwaffe officers to view a movie of an inmate dying in the pressure chamber. After the pressure chamber tests, the cold treatment experiments began. The experiments consisted of immersing inmates in freezing water while their vital signs were monitored. The goal was to discover the cause of death. Heart failure was the answer. An inmate described the procedures:

"The basins were filled with water and ice was added until the water measured 37.4 F and the experimental subjects were either dressed in a flying suit or were placed in the water naked. The temperature was measured rectally and through the stomach. The lowering of the body temperature to 32 degrees was terrible for experimental subjects. At 32 degrees the subject lost consciousness. They were frozen to 25 degrees. The worst experiment was performed on two Russian officer POWs. They were placed in the basin naked. Hour after hour passed, and while usually after a short time, 60 minutes, freezing had set in, these two Russians were still conscious after two hours. After the third hour one Russian told the other, 'Comrade, tell that officer to shoot us.' The other replied, 'Don't expect any mercy from this Fascist dog.' Then they shook hands and said goodbye. The experiment lasted at least five hours until death occurred.

"Dry freezing experiments were also carried out at Dachau. One subject was put outdoors on a stretcher at night when it was extremely cold. While covered with a linen sheet, a bucket of cold water was poured over him every hour. He was kept outdoors under sub-freezing conditions. In subsequent experiments, subjects were simply left outside naked in a court under freezing conditions for hours. Himmler gave permission to move the experiments to Auschwitz, because it was more private and because the subjects of the experiment would howl all night as they froze. The physical pain of freezing was terrible. The subjects died by inches, heartbeat became totally irregular, breathing difficulties and lung endema resulted, hands and feet became frozen white."

As the Germans began to lose the war, the aviation doctors began too keep their names from appearing in Himmler's files for fear of future recriminations.

The Nazi doctors who experimented on the inmates of prison camps during World War Two were tried for murder at the Nuremberg Tribunal. The accused were educated, trained physicians, they did not kill in anger or in malice, they were creating a science of death. Ironically, in 1933, the Nazi's passed a law for the protection of animals. The law cited the prevention of cruelty and indifference to animals as one of the highest moral values of a people, animal experimentation was unthinkable, but human experimentations were acceptable. The victims of the crime of these doctors numbered into the thousands.

US Contempt for International Human Experimentation Protocols

In 1953, while the Central Intelligence Agency was still conducting mind control and behavior modification on unwitting humans in this country, the United States signed the Nuremberg Code, a code born out of the ashes of war and human suffering. The document was a solemn promise never to tolerate such human atrocities again. The Code maintains three fundamental principles:

The subjects of any experimentation must be volunteers who thoroughly understand the purpose and the dangers of the experiments.

They must be free to give consent and the consent must be without pressure and they must be free to quit the experiments at any time.

The experiments must be likely to yield knowledge which is valuable to everyone. The knowledge must be such that it could not be gained in any other way.

The experiments must be conducted by only the most competent doctors, and they must exercise extreme care.

The Nazi aviation experiments met none of these conditions. Most inmates at Dachau knew that the experiments in the pressure chamber were fatal. From the very beginning, control of the experiments was largely in the hands of the SS, which was later judged to be a criminal organization by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Despite our lessons from Nuremberg and the death camps, the CIA, U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps targeted specific groups of people for experimentation who were not able to resist, prisoners, mental patients, foreigners, ethnic minorities, sex deviants, the terminally ill, children and U.S. military personnel and prisoners of war.

They violated the Nuremberg Code for conducting and subsidizing experiments on unwitting citizens. The CIA began its mind control projects in 1953, the very year that the U.S. signed the Nuremberg Code and pledged with the international community of nations to respect basic human rights and to prohibit experimentation on captive populations without full and free consent.

Dr. Cameron, a CIA operative, was one of the worst offenders against the Code, yet he was a member of the Nuremberg Tribunal, with full knowledge of its testimony. In 1973, a three judge court in Michigan ruled, "experimental psychosurgery, which is irreversible and intrusive, often leads to the blunting of emotions, the deadening of memory, the reduction of affect, and limits the ability to generate new ideas. Its potential for injury to the creativity of the individual is great and can infringe on the right of the individual to be free from interference with his mental process.

"The state's interest in performing psychosurgery and the legal ability of the involuntarily detained mental patient to give consent, must bow to the First Amendment, which protects the generation and free flow of ideas from unwarranted interference with one's mental processes."

Citing the Nuremberg Code, the court found that "the very nature of the subject's incarceration diminishes the capacity to consent to psychosurgery."

In 1973, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted regulations which would require informed written consent from voluntary patients before electroshock treatment could be performed.

Senator Sam Ervin's Committee lashed out bitterly at the mind control and behavior modification experiments and ordered them discontinued, they were not.

The New England Journal of Medicine states, that the consent provisions now in place are "no more than an elaborate ritual." They called it "a device that when the subject is uneducated and uncomprehending, confers no more than a semblance of propriety on human experimentation."

The Nuremberg Tribunal brought to light that some of the most respected figures in the medical profession were involved in the vast crime network of the SS. Only 23 persons were charged with criminal activity in this area, despite the fact that hundreds of medical personnel were involved. The defendants were charged with crimes against humanity. They were found guilty of planning and executing experiments on humans without their consent, in a cruel and brutal manner which involved severe torture, deliberate murder and with the full knowledge of the gravity of their deeds. Only seven of the defendants were sentenced to death and hanged, others received life sentences. Five who were involved in the experiments were not tried. Ernest Grawitz committed suicide, Carl Clauberg was tried in the Soviet Union, Josef Mengele escaped to South America and was later captured by Israeli agents, Horst Schumann disappeared and Siegmund Rascher was executed by Himmler.

US Use of Dachau Data and "Friendly" Nazi Doctors

There were 200 German medical doctors conducting these medical experiments. Most of these doctors were friends of the United States before the war, and despite their inhuman experiments, the U.S. attempted to rebuild a relationship with them after the war. The knowledge the Germans had accumulated at the expense of human life and suffering, was considered a "booty of war", by the Americans and the Russians.The Americans tracked down Dr. Strughold, the aviation doctor who was in charge of the Dachau experiments.

With full knowledge that the experiments were conducted on captive humans, the U.S. recruited the doctors to work for them. General Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his personal approval to exploit the work and research of the Nazi's in the death camps.

Within weeks of Eisenhower's order, many of these notorious doctors were working for the U.S. Army at Heidelberg. Army teams scoured Europe for scientific experimental apparatus such as pressure chambers, compressors, G-force machines, giant centrifuges, and electron microscopes. These doctors were wined and dined by the U.S. Army while most of Germany's post-war citizens virtually starved.

The German doctors were brought to the U.S. and went to work for Project Paperclip. All these doctors had been insulated against war crime charges. The Nuremberg prosecutors were shocked that U.S. authorities were using the German doctors despite their criminal past.

Under the leadership of Strughold, 34 scientists accepted contracts from Project Paperclip, and were moved to Randolph Air Force Base at San Antonio, Texas. The authorization to hire these Nazi scientists came directly for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The top military brass stated that they wished to exploit these rare minds. Project Paperclip, ironically, would use Nazi doctors to develop methods of interrogating German prisoners of war.

As hostilities began to build after the war between the Americans and the Russians, the U.S. imported as many as 1000 former Nazi scientists.

In 1969, Americans landed on the moon, and two groups of scientist in the control center shared the credit, the rocket team from Peenemunde, Germany, under the leadership of Werner von Braun, these men had perfected the V-2s which were built in the Nordhausen caves where 20,000 slave laborers from prison camp Dora had been worked to death. The second group were the space doctors, lead by 71-year-old Dr. Hubertus Strughold, whose work was pioneered in Experimental Block No. 5 of the Dachau concentration camp and the torture and death of hundreds of inmates. The torture chambers that was used to slowly kill the prisoners of the Nazi's were the test beds for the apparatus that protected Neil Armstrong from harm, from lack of oxygen, and pressure, when he walked on the moon.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Napa Sentinel would like to acknowledge the exceptional contribution of radio commentator David Emory and his extensive archives. Other source material included:

Acid Dreams by Martin Lee & Bruce Shlain

From the Belly of the Beast, Jack Henry Abbott

Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118, Feb. 24, 1974: testimony of Jose Delgado

The Glass House Tapes, by Louis Tackwood

The Great Heroin Coup, by Henrik Kruger

"Individual Rights and the Federal Role in Behavior Modification," 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, 1974. Sam Ervin Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional 'Rights

The Last Hero, Wild Bill Donovan, by Anthony Cave Brown

Mind Control, by Peter Schrag

The Mind Stealers, by Samuel Chavkin

"Matador with a radio stops wild bull," New York Times, May 17, 1965

Operation Mind Control, Water Bowart

The Phoenix Program, Douglas Valentine

The Physical Control of the Mind, Jose M. R. Delgado, MD

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Alfred McCoy

"Role of Brain Disease in Riots and urban Violence," by Vernon H. Mark, Frank R. Ervin, and William H. Sweet. Journal of the American Medical Association, September 11, 1967.

San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 28, 1991

"Convict Talks of 1984 Arms Talks With Iran," San Francisco Chronicle, December 29, 1986

San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 1973

Guy Wright Column, San Francisco Chronicle, July 5, 1987

Sunday Times, July 1975.

Violence and the Brain, by Vernon H. Mark and Frank R. Ervin

War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology, by Peter Watson

Were We Controlled? - by Lincoln Lawrence

"Why Was Patricia Hearst Kidnapped?" by Mae Brussell, The Realist

‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ [Interview with Nick Land by Marko Bauer and Andrej Tomažin in 2017]

In your 2014 book Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time you write: ‘“What happened to America?” is the Cyberpunk question par excellence’. What really happened to America in the last few months?

It’s sort of stolen from William Gibson, so it goes right back to the mid-1980s. I think you’re totally right to say that now is an excellent time to return to it. So what happened to America? If I was gonna say it in a nutshell: after roughly half a millennium during which the main driving force of global history has been to achieve the integration of larger and more powerful states, directed by a group of strongly universalist ideologists that basically think that the larger your aggregation and the larger the set of common rules that can be imposed on them, the better, we’re seeing a tidal reversal of truly historic scope. The basic tendency now is disintegrative. So what I see happening to America: holding itself together is going to become increasingly challenging.

We’re in advance sorry for referencing French theorists, which are, of course, part of your formation, but to which it seems you’re also increasingly allergic to.

That requires no apologies whatsoever.

One of the most valuable tendencies of your writing is/was the deterritorializing of the progressive/reactionary divide. This seems especially lost on your blog Xenosystems, where you position yourself on the Right, regardless of how far on the outside of it that is. Isn’t this a kind of reterritorialization?

I think we are overdue—always—for a big discussion about what people mean by Left and Right. The Left/Right polarity is a very interesting piece of language, a little compact system of language, because everyone’s using it with either an immense lack of clarity about what is really being invoked by that, or with greatly inconsistent basic associations with those terms.

The Left for you is now the conservative side, and the Right the progressive one. But where does the Left/Right distinction reside, actually? Does the Left stand for—as Badiou and co. would claim—egalitarianism, and the Right is against that? Is the Left the Golden Rule and the Right the rule of something along the lines ‘do whatever pleases you, but accept the consequences’?

Well, that’s the Crowleyite sense of the Right. Badiou is an interesting person to introduce, because I am kind of happy with his Left/Right distinction. In a sense that is now in play predominantly, the Left is the camp of unity and universalism, and egalitarianism is a big part of that. The Right is the camp of fragmentation, experimentation and, I’d say, competition as a term that is inherited from a tradition and is probably fairly uncontroversial. But yes, people do attach themselves to a sense of the Right and, no doubt, also of the Left that is exactly about hyperterritorialization. There is a Blood and Soil sense of the essence of the Right, which I feel compelled to engage with and try to displace or dethrone, because I don’t think it leads anywhere. It’s a dead end. There might be some tactical opportunities in those tendencies, but the ‘Neo’ in NRx implies precisely that there is no going back. In so far as Blood and Soil identitarianism will manage to attain power in various ways, it will see its worst days, it will be forced to deliver and perform, and will fail to do so. The more they are actually in a position to implement policy, the more they will become ineffective in their own terms. They will lose the potential for mass globalization and be associated with failure. I would like to see those experiments happen on a small enough scale that they can be educational, rather than globally catastrophic.

You’re interested in local failures?

Yes, local failures are great. Global failures, obviously, not so great.

All the ’30s analogies are kind of lethargic or nostalgic, as though there was nothing new going on. Nevertheless, there’s also Badiou’s passion for the Real and the phenomenon of ‘communists’ turning into ‘fascists’ during the period between the two world wars—figures such as Pierre Drieu la Rochelle or Charles Péguy, who is perhaps even more ambivalent, since he becomes a vector of reference for both Vichy France and Mussolini, but also of the resistance movement. We are aware of your different take on what fascism is, which sees no transformation in the above cases, and from the perspective of which Goebbels’s move from socialism to national socialism is a mere stroll. We are, however, interested in your move to the other—outer—side. What could a relation between passion for the Real and passion for the Outside be? Is your Outside similar to Badiou’s Real?

It might be. I would say, though, that without a notion of reality testing, an invocation of the Real is of absolutely zero significance. Anyone can invoke the Real, but unless there’s some mechanism that provides, not a voice for the Outside, but an actual functional intervention from the Outside, so it has a selective function, then the language is empty. In that sense it’s completely inseparable from fragmentation. The modernist systems work—whether you’re talking about the market economy or the natural sciences—because they are fragmentary systems. There’s no political decision about what is or is not a good scientific or economic result. These results are subject to a selective sorting process that mobilizes the Outside. That’s where, without being a great or even a mediocre Badiou scholar, my natural suspicion about an invocation of the Outside from the position that he seems to occupy would be.

A silly metaphysical question: Is the Outside something given/fixed or is it a changeable entity?

It’s an important, but not perfectly formulated question. The tendency of transcendental philosophy has been to increasingly identify the Real with Time. The Real and Temporality are deeply co-involved in such a way that Time cannot be used as a framework in which to place or make sense of the Real. We simply can’t ask the question of whether the Real is changeable or unchangeable. If we say the Real is either changeable or unchangeable, we are saying that it exists in Time, and if that’s the case, then we should be asking about Time and not what we thought we were asking about, when we were asking about the Real. Because it is the Real that is the ultimate controlling factor. To think that we can place It in Time is a distraction from this ultimate transcendental level of the question. That’s intrinsically obscure, but I think also inescapable.

How does reality testing function?

We do that by enabling a process of selection to happen. The natural sciences are as good an example of this as any. The only thing that makes the modern sciences elevated beyond epistemic procedures seen in other times and other cultures is the fact that there is a mechanism beyond human political manipulation for the elimination of defective theories. Karl Popper is on that level just totally right. If it’s politically negotiable, it’s useless, it’s unscientific by definition. You don’t trust scientists, you don’t trust scientific theories, you don’t trust scientific institutions in so far as they have integrity, what you trust is the disintegrated zone of criticism and the criteria for criticism and evaluation in terms of repeated experiments, in terms of the heuristics that are built up to decide whether a particular theory has been defeated and eliminated by a superior theory. It’s that mechanism of selection that is the only thing that makes science important and makes it a system of reality testing. And this is obviously intrinsically directed against any kind of organic political community aiming to internally determine—through its own processes—the negotiation of the nature of reality. Reality has to be an external disruptive critical factor.

CCRU’s text Lemurian Time War says that hyperstition is ‘charting a flight from destiny’. How does this notion come into play with reality testing?

I think hyperstition is one of those things that has completely escaped from the box and is now a wild, feral animal on the loose. My relation to this alien thing is like everyone else’s who’s interested in it. I am approaching it from a position of zero authority, trying to make sense of how it is living and changing and affecting the world. It, the thing, not it, the concept. But having said that, my sense of a hyperstition is that a hyperstition is an experiment. It makes itself real, if it works. And whether or not it works, is something that can’t be, again, decided by a process of an internal debate, you can’t as a result of some kind of internal dialectics decide that, hey, this is a good hyperstition, it has a great future. It’s gonna work because of its intrinsic relation to the Outside, which is something that cannot be managed. Perhaps it can be cautiously, tentatively predicted in a way that a scientist or an artist would—through learning their craft—get a sense of what is gonna work and what isn’t gonna work. But that’s not the same as having a criterion, still less a law.

Let’s return to our first question on America in this very historic moment, which is folded in with semiotic patterns and intensive regularities that seem to be tweeted and spread in a certain post-factual discourse into an image of the real, which one retroactively cannot distinguish from the real anymore. Is fabrication of fake news in Veles, Macedonia, during the US elections, a way to ‘propagate escape routes’ as you see it, or is it an ephemeral event with no significance?

I would definitely think some sort of a dismissive response along the second line would be grossly complacent. Is it an escape route? There’s definitely a relation to escape. This whole fake news phenomenon is hugely important and historically significant. At the moment I’m completely captivated by the strength of an analogy between the Gutenberg era and the internet era, this rhythmic force coming out of the connection between them. Radical reality destruction went on with the emergence of printing press. In Europe this self-propelling process began, and the consensus system of reality description, the attribution of authorities, criteria for any kind of philosophical or ontological statements, were all thrown into chaos. Massive processes of disorder followed that were eventually kind of settled in this new framework, which had to acknowledge a greater degree of pluralism than had previously existed. I think we’re in the same kind of early stage of a process of absolute shattering ontological chaos that has come from the fact that the epistemological authorities have been blasted apart by the internet. Whether it’s the university system, the media, financial authorities, the publishing industry, all the basic gatekeepers and crediting agencies and systems that have maintained the epistemological hierarchies of the modern world are just coming to pieces at a speed that no one had imagined was possible. The near-term, near-future consequences are bound to be messy and unpredictable and perhaps inevitably horrible in various ways. It is a threshold phenomenon. The notion that there is a return to the previous regime of ontological stabilization seems utterly deluded. There’s an escape that’s strictly analogous to the way in which modernity escaped the ancien régime.

At the beginning of the internet there was a notion of it being inherently democratic. In the 00s, namely in the time of The Arab Spring, bloggers and others, who were using the internet, were seen as the ones who would spread democracy around the world. From your perspective this expectation probably seems utterly ridiculous.

It’s this weird hybrid: recognizing quite realistically the massive insurgent potential of new media, but then applying that to these dying ideological formations. It’s like if someone had said, in the Gutenberg era the printing press is an amazing, powerful device and it’s going to spread Catholic orthodoxy all over the world. It’s half right and half insane. The neoconservative mentality, associated with these new communication technologies, is exactly the same hybrid of a glint of realism mixed with a healthy dose of utter psychosis.

Reza Negarestani somewhere writes that mere ‘collectivity is not enough for a work [or an event] to be hyperstitional.’ He elaborates this through a difference between Tolkien and Lovecraft. What kind of collectivities are we looking at here, if not the ones attached to universalism?

I am not 100 percent confident of what Reza is saying in that text. I wouldn’t want this to be treated as a commentary on his thought. But hyperstition did arise in a certain milieu that definitely rhetorically emphasized a certain type of collectivity and even more than that. What’s being referenced is not primarily universality at all, but something much closer to an anonymity or the problematization of attribution. Any hyperstitional unit—and what’s now called a meme is very close to this—that can be confidently attributed to a particular act of individual creation is originally disabled. H.P. Lovecraft seems to have understood that the whole production of the Lovecraftian mythos was very much an attempt on his part to subtract his own creative role. It’s only when that is subtracted that these things are released. Cthulhu becomes a kind of hyperstitional term to the point that it’s not simply something that has been invented by Lovecraft. The fact that he weirdly, often a bit hamfistedly, weaved his social network of friends, namely their names, into his stories, is part of that recognition. What’s more at stake in this notion of collectivity is something like a breakage of attribution, the original subversion of it. I don’t think it’s just a tactic. It’s precisely the things where you have no idea where they came from, it’s exactly those elements about whose genesis you have least confidence, that are the ones that have the greatest hyperstitional momentum.

To turn to the period between the two world wars once more, your many noms de plume remind us of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. One of them was a futurist, another a royalist, several of them occultists and neopaganists. With you it goes even further, it was first thought that Reza Negarestani is one of your monikers. The same goes for Jehu, a twitter Marxian (@Damn_Jehu) that certainly finds a lot of understanding for your positions. It’s as though heteronyms were a force against univocity, it seems crucial to keep them differentiated.

Pessoa is someone people keep telling me, always really persuasively, to look at, but I’m afraid I just haven’t yet had a chance to do that. I’m sure it’s a good reference, so I am embarrassed to confess my ignorance on that. Poly-maintenance of complex identity, if it is taken in a deliberated fashion, is not a manageable thing. It would be great if it was, but all you can do is to aim to follow a rough set of pragmatic guidelines that at least complicate the attempt that people obsessively make to engage in this psychobiographical reintegration. I have always absolutely detested the human cognitive effort devoted to trying to turn a final form of anything into a psychobiography. It’s not that I’m allergic to ever reading a biography, but the notion that in reading it you’re really getting to the core of something seems to me utterly ludicrous. I cannot recall any interesting figure, where I’ve thought, oh, if only I knew their biography better, I would get them. Nietzsche’s or Deleuze’s or Lovecraft’s biographies are, unless treated very carefully, sadly distracting. Refusal of the psychobiographical temptation is the one thing I do try to hold onto. But the functionality of it is in the hands of fate entirely, it exceeds human strategic competence. You’re constantly sliding down the slope.

For a long time we had a feeling you were a moderator or a cartographer of NRx, not its ideologue. Or maybe you are its termite, sooner or later moving onto something completely different again. Perhaps similarly to the viewpoint of the Legacy of Nick Land conference, which is going to take place this year and which, as organizers tell us in advance, is not going to promote NRx ideas. It reminds us of Brecht, where in order to preserve his status as a classical author, his socialism or communism has to be sanitized. Through your blogging interventions as aggregates or aggregators of links we found out that the way to move out of the echo chamber is to read about things/processes one finds fascinating, not the ones one necessarily agrees with. It is gazing into the abyss, as Roberto Bolaño would put it. It seems that is a highly controversial role/function.

There’s so much turmoil and tumult in this recent and dynamic situation that it’s difficult to be very lucid about it even in one’s own understanding of it. Maybe a disjointed answer is the only one that is practical or realistic. For one thing, the utter infamy of NRx.There is an understanding that this is the worst thing in the world, that it is going to be utterly traumatic and produce extreme aversive response. It’s something that is already present in The Dark Enlightenment and Moldbug’s writing in a playful way. I would also agree that it was at that stage more curatorial than polemical. I’m afraid I find something completely addictive about that. If you were to say to someone, what really is this thing, the NRx, the answer to that question would be vastly less clear than the clarity of the emotional response, which would be one of absolute horror and detestation. The whole syndrome is fascinating, because it seems in itself like a fundamental exploratory tool. As if you said: Mencius Moldbug has consolidated a notion of the Cathedral as something, which is ultimately a self-organizing religious process that has a definite orthodoxy and a definite doctrinal momentum and there are certain things that it treats with an extreme religious passion as being abominations and heresies. You encounter a cultural provocation that triggers such an extreme allergic immune responses, which means you’re actually engaged in an experimental engagement with this initially tentative, hypothetical object. That’s the most basic crucial lock-in process—at least provisionally right now. It locks itself in and becomes indispensable, because it generates such extreme reactivity. That’s why it would be very hard to simply step back from it in some decisive fashion. It’s like saying we’re not gonna do particle physics with large colliders any more, abandon the whole system of experimental potentialities.

NRx is also very young and extremely contested. Because it generates so much antagonism, people who want to fight, of which there are a whole lot right now, on both sides, flock to it, most passionately maybe in 2014. But NRx is hugely internally differentiated, it has been from the beginning. Various figures were thrown out and are now more identified with a sort of standard old Right, white nationalist type ideas. Other splits exist, too. There’s a faction that is much closer to a reactionary traditionalism and I don’t understand what it’s doing with the Neo thing, since it is identified with the throne-and-altar-type, pre-French-Revolutionary politics. The sheer amount of disorder and chaos in it means it’s really difficult to leave a room when you still have no idea what is happening in there. It’s not settled down enough to know whether it’s something you would actually want to miss out on. And, finally, if someone asked me to define NRx, I’d say it’s Moldbug’s Patchwork-Neocameralist political philosophy. I find it hugely important. I am under no inclination to dissociate myself at all from that basic trend in political analysis.

There seems to be a lot of engagements with contrarianism and Poe’s Law. Via @Outsideness you wrote: ‘Actually I like plenty of immigrants and black people, just not the grievance-mongers, rioters, street-criminals, and Jihadists that the Cathedral preaches incessantly in favor of.’ Don’t you here sound a bit like Borges (of the Tlon Corporation) advocating ‘liberty and order’ while supporting Pinochet, preserving or reestablishing the Human Security System? Isn’t all of this a far cry from: ‘Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.’?

[Long silence.] Let me see what is the best way to answer. [Long silence.] I don’t know, it’s difficult. I’ve got a whole ankle-biting fraternity on Twitter now. I am not identifying you with them, let me make that clear from the start, but I think that their question is very much like yours. One element of it is age. Youngsters are highly tolerant of massive incendiary social chaos. There are reasons for that, the best music comes out of it. It’s not that I am not understanding that, the whole appeal of cyberpunk is based on this. But I just don’t think you can make an ideology purely out of entropic social collapse, it’s not gonna fit together. It is not a sustainable, practically consistent process and, therefore, it’s a bad flag for acceleration. It produces a reaction that will win. All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order. Even if you’re completely unsympathetic with the party of order, and I am not pretending to be anything quite so unambiguous, it’s not something that you want to see. Nixon put down hippies, the Thermidor put down the craziness of French revolution. It’s an absolutely relentless and inevitable historical story that the party of chaos is not going to be allowed to run the process and will be suppressed. There’s obviously various types of aesthetic and libidinal attractions to it, but in terms of programmatic practicality there is nothing. What I would say to these crazy youngsters now is, you don’t have a programme. What you’re advocating leads perversely to the exact opposite of what you say you want.

You sound a bit like a Left accelerationist right now with all this talk of having a programme and ideology.

Yes, there is that problem, but you always have a practical orientation. NRx has a programme, even in its most libertarian form. It’s not a programme that is going to be implemented by a bureaucratic apparatus in a centralized regime, but it’s an attempt to have some consistency in your pattern of interventions. Of course everyone is trying to do that. Even the chaos fraternity, in so far as they want to be the chaos fraternity when they wake up the next day, have a programme in this minimal sense. And that sense, I think, is the only sense I would strongly hold onto here. A strategy.

Jonah Goldberg’s ‘We are all fascists now’, which you quote in your The ‘F’ word article, sounds like something Foucault would say, if we turned his ‘who fights against whom? We all fight against each other. And there is always within each of us something that fights something else’ up a notch. Let’s not forget that Foucault was fascinated by Henri de Boulainvilliers, a proto-neoreactionary of sorts: war as the foundation of society, war as race war between aristocratic Franks and common Gauls. On the other hand, decentralizing Franks got fucked precisely by the monarch.

Again, I’m afraid this particular writer is not someone I’m familiar with, but it reminds me of something that did make a big impression on me and seems close to this notion. When I was studying—I was doing a philosophy and literature course—I felt very interested in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It’s about the fact that class conflict is actually this ethnic war, the continuing ethnic conflict between the Norman, French-speaking aristocratic invaders and the English natives. But, honestly, anything that I was to say about it beyond that would be just cooked up so much on the spot, it would be of little value.

We’re asking you this because of the deterritorializing of the Left/Right divide. The concept of assortative mating, which is really controversial in some parts of the universe, almost sounds like standard Bourdieu about how only members of the same habitus socialize and reproduce. But when someone from the Right talks about it, it’s not interpreted as an observation, but as a diagnosis, prescription and wishful thinking at the same time.

The reason that this Right/Left language is so indispensable is because it’s now tied up with a structure of tribal animosity that is so profound. In recent years I’ve been stunned by the arbitrariness of the thing—it’s like the Roman Blue and Green. The differences between Right and Left are drowned out by tribal war. People have done tests on this. They put politicians’ policy proposals into the mouth of their opponent and the supporters of the opponent immediately backed up all those proposals that they had thought were absolute incarnation of evil when they came from the other guy. The notion that this tribal war is going to be reducible to a set a coherent ideological positions is nuts and an example you gave is totally like that. Who is saying something is much more important to people than the actual content, the positive proposition. The number of people who don’t fall prey to that is really small and I find them impressive. My own attempt not to be totally captured by tribalism is to try to make sure that there’s enough fissile hyperstitional craziness going on. Sometimes you have to flip about and get the sense what the thing looks like from the other side, but I really think that most of the world is locked so deep in the tribal war that it just doesn’t see what an idea is actually saying. They only see the question: is this the enemy thing or is this our stuff?

Which brings us to the issue of convergence and divergence between NRx and accelerationism, between the Xenosystems blog and the Urban Future (2.1) blog. When your @Outsideness that’s connected to the Xenosystems, got temporally locked on Twitter, you started tweeting NRx stuff on the accelerationist @UF_blog. We were like: we don’t want this, we want them separated.

You must be getting bored of me saying this, because it’s something I’ve been basically repeating as mantra, but I really feel devoid of any authoritative subject position in relation to this turbulent complicated process. Both big threads of process, the NRx and the accelerationist one, are being massively driven by all kinds of forces. Accelerationism was reignited by the Left Accelerationism hype. It happened after The Dark Enlightenment, which is why this weaving of time pattern is rather complex. From a certain position, it seems that accelerationism came first and after that you got NRx, which implies a sort of synchronic process, but from my perspective it’s much more helical and interweaving. The separation of blogs and Twitter accounts is—rather than an implementation of some deliberate coherent strategy—more a set of resources that I can use to try to avoid being just sucked into certain kinds of integration, which would lose the fascination of the fact that the dynamics of these two threads are not at all predictable from each other or even predictable in general. To simply smash together a kind of Right Accelerationism and NRx synthesis, which is obviously inescapable in a certain respect, would ultimately destroy a lot of experimenting capacity and a lot of space for dynamic development on both of those threads.

Is Left Accelerationism in its rational and pragmatic program missing the mythos and the mythical? Reza Negarestani tried to incorporate those things in Cyclonopedia, which is way too often mistaken for postmodernism. Do you think that Left Accelerationism is a in a way a rigidization of the aforementioned flows?

Language has this retrospective character, so it’s misleading. Left Accelerationism and Right Accelerationism are very recent terms. The original revival of accelerationism in the English speaking world comes about with the recapitulation of CCRU’s take-up of Deleuze and Guattari’s recapitulation of Nietzsche’s accelerated process. In Deleuze and Guattari there’s an explicit invocation of going in the direction of the market. At the origin, the CCRU was pushing this orientation in advance of a word accelerationism having yet been formed, which was done by a critic later. It was a Left position, because it was articulated by Deleuze & Guattari as an anti-capitalist political strategy. I don’t think CCRU was revisionist about that. Deleuze and Guattari’s accelerationism as the way to accelerate capitalism to its death was also CCRU-phase accelerationism. There was a suggestion that it came from the Right, because at that stage of its articulation it’s impossible to differentiate Left and Right Accelerationism. If you’re saying, complete the capitalist process, that means that all the policy recommendations, if there are any, are maximally beneficial to the vitality and dynamism of capitalism. So there is a structural necessity there can be no difference between pro- and anti-capitalist in this accelerationist framework. How can you tell which is which? When Left Accelerationism, which was calling itself just accelerationism, comes along, it is in its manifested politics doing something very different to anything that’s happened in entire lineage before. It says that you have to distinguish between the basic motor of acceleration and capitalism. Capitalism is not that motor, but something that’s to a degree coincidental with it at a certain stage in its history, but then becomes inhibitory in relation to it. Therefore accelerationism is not focally or centrally about capitalism and that becomes the Left Accelerationist mainstream doctrine. So the final stage from my perspective is that when the rejoinder comes in the name of Right Accelerationism, its theoretical task is to reintegrate accelerationism and the dynamics of capitalism. I would agree that Left Accelerationism is basically the managerial command-control response to techno-economic acceleration. Going along with that is a massive skepticism about its claims that it can actually accelerate things faster than these spontaneous catalytic processes can.

Then how do you see the new philosophical program of Reza Negarestani, and what do you think about his antagonism with Scott R. Bakker’s Blind Brain Theory?

My inclination is to be on the Scott Bakker side. I might be missing something, but I can’t recall ever reading a piece by him and thinking that’s wrong. It always seems to me, you’re totally right on this. Often brilliantly in a way that you have not seen, but as soon as I see it, I concur with it.

Were you so pro natural sciences before you encountered his thought?

I think that natural sciences and capitalism are different aspects of the same thing. Both are an effective self-propelling mechanism that gives the Outside a selective function in a domain considered, that domain being perpetually expanding, depending on how much autonomy you’re seeing. In that sense to be on the side of the natural sciences is to be on the side of the Outside. But there are all kinds of silly ways you could be on the side of the Outside, just as there are a whole bunch of silly ways you could be on the side of capitalism. You could say, the bourgeoisie are great, very admirable people, or, I love this company. I am not saying there’s never a case for that, but you’re totally missing the point, just like you’d be missing the point by saying, this particular scientist is a great guy and I think he is really honest and I trust him. It might be he is a great guy and he might be really struggling to be honest and he might be much more trustworthy than most people, but this misses what science is about. Science is orientated against scientists, capitalism is oriented against businesses. These are processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive destructive criticism with some kind of selective criteria, which means they push things in a particular self-propelling direction.

You were talking about artists getting to know the Outside. How do you see the divide between science fiction and natural sciences, between a scientist and an artist?

My tendency is not to draw a huge distinction between them. In all cases one’s dealing with the formulation or floatation of certain hypothesis. I am assuming that every scientist has an implicit science fiction. We all have a default of what we think the world is going to be in five years time, even if it’s blurry or not very explicit. If we haven’t tried to do science fiction, it probably means we have a damagingly conservative, inert, unrealistic implicit future scenario. In most cases a scientist is just a bad science fiction writer and an artist, hopefully, is a better one. There is, obviously, a lot of nonlinear dynamism, in that science fiction writers learned masses from scientists, how to hone their scenarios better, and also the other way around. Science fiction has shaped the sense of the future so much that everyone has that as background noise. The best version of the near future you have has been adopted from some science fiction writer. It has to be that science is to some extent guided by this. Science fiction provides its testing ground.

Rebekah Sheldon in a response to the emergence of Pepe the Frog as a modern day Kek and its occult attributes writes that outsideness is ‘dark in the sense that it operates without the assurance of full knowledge and it is chaotic because it presumes that the force of the other is always wholly other’. Can Pepe the Frog as seen by the internet community serve as a model for a hyperstitional event?

It’s hugely fascinating and something I haven’t yet thought about enough. It involves a constellation of so many weird random elements and has emerged in this unbelievable process of autonomous self-constitution. There’s always the attempt to attribute: some particular guys on /pol/ were using this thing and did it deliberately. But all of that is totally inadequate. It involves this translation from Orcish in Warcraft, it involves an ancient Egyptian cult, it involves a weird obsession with the set of phonemes that you see going right across, this phonemic eruption that happens, K K K K K. It obviously is a kind of model for a hyperstitional event. Within NRx an informal self-organizing discussion was hosted about the necessity of a new religion, long before Kek kicked down the wall. Because of Moldbug’s analysis that the Cathedral is a home of deformed, perverted Protestantism, a lot of Catholics get very attracted to this model. Their take on it is that what Moldbug is saying is that Protestantism is a terrible mistake that leads to the Cathedral, which is how they try to vindicate Catholicism. But there are also a lot of atheists. It’s a very strange social cocktail. This guy Spandrell, who’s always very abrasive, but very sharp, was saying that the only way out is a new religion. At the time you think, okay, you don’t just cook up a new religion, you don’t just cook Kek. Then the thing happens and all of these trolls are saying ‘Praise Kek’. But it’s not just a joke: you only psychologically defend yourself from something really intense and Lovecraftian about the whole subject by not thinking about it. Something insane has happened with this self-orienting massive Kek cult. It does take you back to ancient times and what these kind of religious insurgencies must have been like and where religions come from.

We could connect Pepe the Frog with the figure of trickster, which is seen by the so-called Left accelerationism as an effective agent of transformation in and of itself and has the ability to ‘change the transcendental of a world’, as Srnicek and Williams put it. Simon O’Sullivan notes that Gilles Deleuze offers an interesting inflection on this in his differentiation of the trickster from the traitor: the first is operating within a given regime, albeit to subvert its terms (a world turned upside down as it were). The second is breaking with a given regime, or world, altogether. In one of the replies on your blog you are building on a metaphor of a dam, which is being slowly devoured and destroyed by some external force—and you call this dam the Xenosystems blog. Who’s the tricker and who’s the traitor here?

Part of this is a question about agency. The trickster agent and the traitorous agent are both reduced by anthropomorphization. Any human individual who claimed identification with either of those roles is bullshiting everybody. Tricksters and traitors are those that have some kind of a method for traffic with the actual sources of agency. One fiction that explores this stuff brilliantly is Neuromancer. Who are traitors or tricksters in it? All the human figures take on their roles through their relation with an actual agency of the Outside, which is Wintermute. As when the Turing cops say to Case: You traitors, do you know what you’re dealing with, you’re trying to let this thing out, it’s completely out of control. It would be a disaster for the human species, what the hell are you thinking? The real question is: What are the reservoir resources of trickery or treachery that are being accessed?

Amy Ireland, in an interview with Andrej, said that in contrast with echo chamber leftists you are actually interacting with the real fascists, misogynists, white supremacists. It reminded us of Pasolini, when he emphasized one should meet young fascists. We guess you would rather call them so-called fascists. Who is a trickster, a traitor, a fascist is open.

The anthropomorphization is always tempting. The individuals concerned want to feel they are critical nodes of agency in what they’re doing and people outside want to be able to identify these processes with particular individuals and their explicit ideologies and structures of agency, but all of that stuff seems profoundly deluded. You don’t get fascism because there are a certain number of people who are self-conscious fascists, that’s like getting the cart before the horse. You get self-conscious fascists, because there is some effective fascist process taking place. People are in total denial, probably about different things on different sides. On the Left side they are in total denial about how much fascist orthodoxy has been generally built into modern societies in the twentieth century. They’re also in denial about how profound the forces they are dealing with are. They seem to think there are a few bad eggs, and if they can bully and terrorize them enough, this whole thing will stop. I think it’s crazy not to be interested in that and try to find out what you can and how do these people think and where’s stuff coming from.

In regard to the LD50 Gallery incident you tweeted: ‘The History of Modern Art (short version) 1917: Duchamp’s urinal-as-art-work. 2017: Small gallery in Dalston finally shocks the bourgeoisie.’ Is this a willing overstatement? Is it really about épater la bourgeoisie? There is something very situationist in treating AntiFa as bourgeoisie (or at least a simulacra of one).

There has been lots of discussion about Mark Fisher recently, where his position ends up being extremely and seemingly unambiguously leftist. There’s a boring psychobiographical story that would see my relation to him as a simple antonym. It’s not that there’s nothing to that, because it had something to do with this fissile reaction of the CCRU, where he takes one side of it and I take the other side, so I don’t want just to deride that interpretation. But if we look at his Exit the Vampire Castle piece, it consistently goes through the class basis of the dominant leftist culture, which had already been a target of CCRU’s deep critique. Evidently we can make the same point from the far Left and the far Right. Which is to say: yes, they are the bourgeoisie. I have always been in a relation of antagonism and remain in a relation of antagonism to the bourgeosie. I think it’s just self-evident that the breeding ground of this is primarily the elite universities. There would simply be nothing of this happening on the streets if it was actually spontaneously organized by people of low education level in Dalston. It happened because a university lecturer and his associates decided to rile the whole thing and provide a vocabulary for it. We are looking at a deep ideological, absolutely traumatic crisis of the late modern, late-Cathedral ruling elite, because they’ve built their whole lives and sense of what they should be doing, their etiquettes, their notions about credibility, credentials and institutional authority around a particular, very distinct social and historical structure that had seemed absolutely invulnerable and which now looks to be toppling into the abyss.

So when the AntiFa lady yells ‘Go back from where you came from’ to the guy carrying a sign ‘The Right to Openly Discuss Ideas Must Be Defended’ in front of the LD50 gallery, she actually means ‘Go back to the abyss’?

Right.

If we omit the Last Man’s stand part of the situationism, we can see it going into the direction of accelerationism. Like Debord of the late period when he does not believe in the workers’ councils anymore and just sees this huge undefeatable force.

Sadie Plant was a major situationist scholar. I’ve read The Society of the Spectacle with enjoyment, and a few other bits and pieces. I’d respond with two seemingly totally inconsistent points. Firstly, situationism comes up a lot, but I’ve never been fully versed in it. Secondly, I am writing an abstract horror story that is basically about situationism, even though I know nothing about it at the moment. I recognize the importance of the question, but I simultaneously recognize my incompetence to give you the kind of answer that it deserves.

Serge Daney somewhere writes that Godard and Straub-Huillet call upon the types of political power of which they would be the first victims. There’s a sense in which your invocations are similar to that. Is it a sort of avant-garde of disappearance or avant-garde of extinction with lots of nihilating jouissance? Or is it a mutation?

I have that point made a lot, but I doubt it. The one thing I explicitly and strategically would want to impose is fragmentation. Everything else is in the tactical relation to that. Certain questions—like what you think of Kek and so on—are ultimately tactical questions. The only strategic question is how can you break apart, I would say specifically, the Anglosphere. Any kind of project that exceeds that becomes a form of universalist aggression in danger of neoconservative overreach. I am not interested in telling the Russian or the Chinese what their societies should be. I might theorize about it, but the only zone of intervention I am interested in, is the English speaking world, which has a particular affinity with disintegration. There’s nothing suicidal in any fragmentation, I could be only and surely protected by it. I don’t have a sense of being protected by large Anglophone states. It’s not that I am claiming persecution by them, but it would definitely be on that side of ledger if anything. I am not a citizen or a resident of any Western country, I am living in Shanghai. And you don’t teach your hosts how they should be organizing their house.

We were thinking more about Singularity.

Oh, you are one step ahead!

You being human, you know. At least nominally human.

That’s much better. It’s just that the question on the political-economic level does get raised a lot.

That’s the Snowden/Assange question. We’re less interested in that.

My only problem with Singularity is that any notion of self-protection in that sphere is structured on hallucination. If we were gonna take this back to someone, it would be Bakker. What he is saying is: the ‘you’ that you think might be threatened by this stuff, is actually that thing that you will find out is an illusion. Now, is that a threat? That’s the way it is a threat. It’s not gonna be like being torn apart by some giant metallized robot, it’s gonna be the particular ego delusion, sustainable up to a certain point in history, becoming unsustainable.

Sometimes you’re retaining the scheme of robots against people, but it seems you’re actually interested in hybrid things and processes, not in this Manichean dialectics.

Well, Manichean dynamics are good for driving certain kinds of scenarios, so that’s why I like them a lot. I love Hugo de Garis’s whole thing about this artilect gigawar he thinks is going to come. The more these science fiction, cybernetic scenarios are in play, the more certain types of historical excitation are operative. People try to protect themselves and think about each other, but it’s actually a form of process stimulus. The Human Security System is structured by delusion. What’s being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind, it’s the structure of illusory identity. Just as at the more micro level it’s not that humans as an organism are being threatened by robots, it’s rather that your self-comprehension as an organism becomes something that can’t be maintained beyond a certain threshold of ambient networked intelligence.

The Hidden History Of U.S. Terror Bombing: How Washington Perfected Hitler's Schrecklichkeit [Workers Vanguard - March 1, 1991]

Video images of laser-guided "smart" bombs homing in on their targets, generals talking of "precision bombing," vague references to "collateral damage": the Pentagon has worked up A cult of high-tech as Washington's, propaganda 'machine is spreading the lie that the U.S. air assault against Iraq is a "clean" war. And meanwhile Iraqi civilians are deliberately incinerated in a bomb shelter in Baghdad. The roads of Iraq have become killing fields, lined with the bombed-out wreckage of cars and trucks. In two recent atrocities, bombers targeted buses loaded with civilians, killing a total of 60 people. The "surgical strikes" are hitting hospitals where doctors perform surgery on mutilated women and children.

The orgy of destruction has leveled power plants, factories, warehouses, bridges, roads, phone installations-the entire infrastructure of the country. The city of Basra in southern Iraq, which has been singled out for special devastation, was simply declared by U.S. military authorities to be a "military town." Pentagon spokesmen classify any civilian target hit as "dual purpose," both military and civilian. According to our estimate the U.S. is dropping at least 16,000 tons of bombs a day, so after 40 days of air war, with 100,000 sorties flown, the U.S. has dropped on Iraq almost a quarter of the total tonnage dropped by all the belligerent powers in World War II!

Uneasy with the "bad press" that the bombing of civilians is getting, the New York Times (14 February) asked plaintively: "Why not stop bombing cities?"' Liberals have often sought to distance themselves from the policy of strategic bombing, arguing that in any case it is "ineffective" in destroying a country's ability to wage war. This is the argument of economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who headed the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in World War II. Galbraith writes that his study showed, "Germany's industrial production-weapons and munitions, in particular-continued to increase, with no visible halt until nearly the end of the war" (Los Angeles Times, 10 February).

What Galbraith leaves unsaid is that the nose dive in production in those final months was because of the mass terror bombing campaign which deliberately targeted and massacred hundreds of thousands of industrial workers.

Colonel Harry Summers Jr., the Vietnam War historian and former professor of strategy at the Army War College, was blunter. In a column titled "'Collateral Damage' a Familiar, Often Intended, Part of War" (Los Angeles Times, 8 February), Summers noted that the deliberate targeting of the civilian population in order to break the will to resist "didn't start with 'We had to destroy the town in order to save it,' the unfortunate remark of the young Army officer in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam war...." The carpetbombing of Vietnam only continued the U.S. forces' "scorched earth" policy in Korea, the firebombing campaign in Germany and Japan and-the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In our last issue ("Terror Bombing Has Not Broken Iraq," WV No. 520, 15 February) we noted that "in World War II Hitler adopted a policy of Schrecklichkeit, deliberate terrorizing of the 'enemy' population," but "the Allies outdid the Nazis in this department." The "democratic" imperialists in fact had a preference for mass slaughter through air power, which kept the horrendous casualties at a distance.

The Allies pursued the policy of mass terror bombing of civilians with increasing ferocity throughout World War II, raising it to unspeakable dimensions. Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are among the many cities which were transformed into fiery crematoriums for their working populations. In Germany, Allied bombers deliberately massacred some 600,000 civilians; in Japan hundreds of thousands died under U.S. bombs. In sum, almost one million civilians were deliberately massacred by Allied terror bombing.

Schrecklichkeit U.S.-Style

In the Dictionary of Historical Terms (1983) by Chris Cook, Schrecklichkeit is defined as the "deliberate policy of committing atrocities to subdue a subject people." Louis L. Snyder's Historical Guide to World War II (1982) writes that "The bombing of Warsaw early in the war made it clear to the Allies how Hitler intended to fight his war. It was to be Schrecklichkeit ('frightfulness') with no regard for the civilian population." The Luftwaffe began the Blitzkrieg (lightning war) by destroying the Polish Air Force on the ground, and for six days 400 German bombers. battered the city day and night.

The next year, the Germans put an end to the Sitzkrieg (sitting war), the period of inactivity on the Western Front between September 1939 and May 1940 called the "phony war" in. English, by employing the same policy against the Dutch port of Rotterdam. In an act of gratuitous cruelty (the city had already surrendered), Stuka dive-bombers leveled the center of the city. In repeated attacks on London's civilian population throughout 1940, German bombers killed some 30,000 people as they tried to bomb the population into submission. Later that same year, when Hitler's plans for an invasion of Britain were frustrated, he took out his revenge on, the city of Coventry, killing over 500 people in a ten-hour bombing raid.

The policy of terror bombing civilians in order to undermine the ability to wage war was first systematically developed by the Italian general Giulio Douhet. His ideas on air war had a decisive influence in shaping American military doctrine. Colonel Summers refers to Douhet's 1921 treatise, The Command of the Air, reprinted by the U.S. Office of Air Force. History in 1983, as a "masterwork." And a recent U.S. Air Force publication calls him a "prophet of the air" (Thomas Greer, The Development of Air Doctrine in the Army Air Arm 1917-1941 [1985]). What they fail to mention is that this "prophet" was commissioner of aviation in Mussolini's fascist regime. Here is Douhet's strategy for waging air war:

"What civil or military authority could keep order, public services functioning, and production going under such a threat'? And even if a semblance of order was maintained and some work done, would not the sight of a single enemy plane be enough to stampede the population into panic? In short, normal life would be impossible in this constant nightmare of imminent death and destruction.... "A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air. The time would soon come when, to put an end to horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war." -quoted in Edward Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (1952)

From the start, U.S. air commanders embraced Douhet's policy of terror bombing as a way to limit their casualties and win wars "on the cheap." His ideas were taken up almost word for word - and rendered even more brutal - by "Billy" Mitchell, one of the first chiefs of the U.S. air service in the '20s. Mitchell wrote that instead of destroying cities it might be preferable to eliminate the civilian population with "a few gas bombs." Decades later, this same concept was behind the neutron bomb, a particularly "dirty" nuclear device designed to maximize deaths through radiation and minimize bomb blast damage to structures.

Douhet's doctrine was incorporated in the official Air Force textbook used until World War II which, according to Greer's official Air Force history, "established national morale and industry as more crucial objectives than enemy armies. The easiest and cheapest way to win a war was thought to be by air attack upon the enemy's population and production facilities." Military historian John Keegan correctly pointed out that this policy "depended ultimately upon class bias-the judgment that the latent discontents of the proletariat were the Achilles heel of an industrial state" (The Second World War [1989]).

Class hatred of the industrial proletariat is so pervasive in the documents of Allied military and political leaders that it is impossible to cite more than a fraction of the documents which explicitly affirm that the target of strategic bombing was to be the workers themselves. The future British chief of air staff John Slessor summed it up with imperial snideness:

"in air operations against production the weight of attack will inevitably fall upon a vitally important, and not by nature very amenable, section of the community - the industrial workers, whose morale and sticking power cannot be expected to equal that of the disciplined soldier." -quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (1979)

And the official British history of the air war cites the February 1942 bombing directive which notes that the "primary object" of the bombing "should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of the industrial workers" (see Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic, Air Offensive Against Germany: 1939-1945 [1961]. There is a widespread myth -that,unlike the British who engaged in indiscriminate "area" bombing against civilians, the U.S. carried out "precision" bombing against military and industrial targets. This myth is rooted in what was essentially a division of labor between the two Allied imperialist powers. The British, saddled with antiquated bombers and without long-range fighter protection, were forced to limit themselves to night; raids. Their notorious inaccuracy is highlighted in Len Deighton's novel, Bomber, which details the horrendous destruction inflicted on a German town by British bombers who got lost on a night raid.

One could hardly pretend that these raids were anything but indiscriminate terror directed against civilians, and British military leaders openly extolled the supposed efficacy of mass terror bombing. U.S. bombers, less vulnerable and (starting in early 1944) protected by a fleet of long-range fighters, were able to carry out daylight bombing raids. Drawing German fighters into a headto-head air war of attrition, they eventually depleted Germany's home defenses (while most of the Luftwaffe was on the Eastern Front facing the Soviet Army). This permitted the Allies toward the end of the war to bomb German cities with virtual impunity.

Most often it made scarcely any difference to those on the ground whether they were being subjected to U.S. "precision" bombing or British "area" bombing, since most U.S. bombs missed their assigned targets anyway and fell on surrounding working-class residential areas. Then as today, U.S. commanders generated a cult of high-tech arms, claiming that U.S. bombers equipped with the "top secret" Norden bomb sight could drop a bomb "into a pickle barrel." In reality, an estimated one-half of U.S. bombs were dropped through cloud cover or at night where the average bombing error was about three miles off target. And of those bombs dropped in daylight under clear conditions, at most half fell within one-quarter mile of the target point (John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War [1990]).

The myth that U.S. air strikes did not target civilians has been reinforced by a concerted whitewash by U.S. officials which started during World War II, keeping military memos "clean" of any hint of targeting civilians. In an important study, historian Ronald Schaffer notes:

"High-ranking officers sent official messages to one another which caused the record to suggest that AAF [Army Air Forces] practice fitted with the official policy. Yet these officers knew this was not the case.... [U.S. deputy air commander] Anderson and his colleagues were protecting the image of the AAF from historians and other investigators." -"American Military Ethics in World War II, The Bombing of German Civilians," Journal of American History, September 1980

Schaffer reveals that when the British and U.S. Combined Chiefs of Staff met to approve the terror bombing attacks on Berlin, Dresden and other cities, FDR's representative intervened to advise not to "record" such a decision.

This concern for prettifying the historical record was the. cause of a cynical "doublespeak" in U.S. military documents. After preparing a series of daylight raids with incendiary bombs against densely built-up sections of German cities, U.S. commander Arnold informed the Air Staff in Washington: "the way to stop the killing of civilians is to cause so much damage and destruction and deaththat the civilians will demand that their government cease fighting. This doesn't mean that we are making civilians or civilian institutions a war objective...."

Favorably contrasting U.S. military censorship in World War II with the Pentagon's "arrogant" but "so far successful" control of the press in the Persian Gulf War, Walter Cronkite wrote that army censors in Britain "held up my report that the Eighth Air Force had bombed Germany through a solid cloud cover," since supposedly "we were practicing only precision bombing on military targets." The Luftwaffe knew the reality, Cronkite pointed out: "The truth was not being withheld from Germans but Americans" (Newsweek, 25 February).

Incinerating the German Proletariat

in their drive to raze entire cities, the Allies eventually succeeded in provoking through incendiary bombing a horrible new phenomenon in warfare, the firestorm. They discovered that by concentrating sufficient fire in one area they could create an infernal microclimate in which an entire city was transformed into a blast furnace, enormously multiplying the bombs' murderous effects. The areas which were chosen for immolation were invariably the working-class districts.

The first firestorm took place in Hamburg, which the Allies bombed in July 1943, targeting the most heavily built-up and densely populated area. As in subsequent firebombings, both incendiary and high-explosive bombs were dropped; the latter were used to destroy metallic roofs and windows and expose the building interiors to the conflagration: "People died within seconds of being subjected to the unimaginable heat, dying from oxygen-lack, carbon monoxide poisoning, even incandescence" (Chaz Bowyer, Air War Over Europe [1981].. Some 50,000 civilians died in Hamburg. In the civilian bomb shelters the intense heat melted metal pots and pans. Photos taken when the shelters were opened show piles of grey ash outlining where the bodies had lain.

Allied bombers continued to wage an escalating war of extermination against Germany's cities. Toward the fall of 1944, as the Allies achieved supremacy in the skies over Germany and could concentrate their fire undeterred, they succeeded with regularity in provoking firestorms - in Kassel, Wurzburg, Darmstadt, Heilbronn, Wuppertal, Weser, Magdeburg, and culminating in the incredible butchery of Dresden. The Allies experimented on the best way to provoke the desired effect. Different bombing patterns were tried to give the deadliest concentration of incendiary bombs (the optimum was found to be a "fan" pattern which was then used on Dresden).

The Allies' firebombing of Dresden was the most terrible of all air raids on Germany - possibly the greatest single massacre in history. Prime Minister Winston Churchill berated British air minister Archibald Sinclair to get him to target' "Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in East Germany." In February 1945 British bombers, virtually unhindered by fighters or antiaircraft fire, dropped thousands of blast bombs and almost 650,000 incendiaries on Dresden, provoking a firestorm which was visible for 200 miles. The next morning 300 U.S. bombers blasted the still-burning city through the smoke and cloud cover (U.S. authorities would later present this as "precision" bombing of the rail yards). Escorting U.S. fighters strafed bombed-out survivors huddled on the banks of the Elbe.

The horrendous level of civilian casualties has been a subject of controversy for years. The city was swollen to twice its peacetime size by refugees fleeing fighting in the East, and these were concentrated in the railway terminal area which was ground zero for the bombs. For many years the figure of 225,000 was the standard estimate of the number of dead. The Americans and British have tried to reduce the figure to 60,000, which is absurdly low, while "the German Federal Bureau of Statistics in Wiesbaden claims that it was 600,000" (Janusz Piekalkiewicz, The Air War: 1939-1945 [1985]).

The grisly destruction of Dresden (which contained no important military or even industrial targets) provoked a wave of revulsion. In response to an AP story on "deliberate terror bombing," U.S. air commanders, after consultation with General Eisenhower, issued guidelines for officers on how to answer questions:

"A. That there has been no change in bombing policy;

"B. The United States Strategic Air Forces have always directed their attacks against military objectives and will continue to do so;

"C. The story was erroneously passed by censor."

Identical guidelines must have been issued by the Pentagon "spin doctors" on how to respond over the criminal U.S. bombing of the Baghdad shelter.

Histories of the air war in Europe generally explain the destruction of Dresden as an effort to facilitate the Soviet advance by blocking German reinforcements headed to the Eastern Front. In reality, the reason for extending the campaign of terror bombings to Dresden and other cities in eastern Germany was, as General David Schlatter, Eisenhower's deputy chief of air staff, noted at the time in his diary:

"I feel that our air forces are the blue chips with which we will approach the post-war treaty table, and that this operation will add immeasurably to their strength, or rather to the Russian knowledge of their strength."

Firebombing and A-Bombing Japan

At the very moment that American authorities were cynically denying wanton attacks on civilians in Dresden, they were preparing for the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. In the hysterical climate of anti-Japanese racism, U.S. officials felt less compunction than in Germany to camouflage the massacres. U.S. bombers launched massive firebomb raids on Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe and Nagoya, destroying a total built-up, area of 50, miles square. The most horrendous bloodletting came in Tokyo where in a single raid in March 1945 some 100,000 people perished as "canals boiled, metal melted, and buildings and human beings burst spontaneously into flames" (John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War [1986]).

By August 1945 fully 58 cities had been destroyed by firebombing. General Curtis LeMay, who commanded the raids, was forced to temporarily check his bloodlust after three weeks because he had run out of his entire supply of 10,000 tons of incendiary bombs. This was the same LeMay who as head of the Air Force at the outset of the Vietnam War called for bombing Vietnam "back to the Stone Age." In their savage attempt to crush a social revolution, they dropped unthinkable quantities. of napalm, cluster bombs and high explosives, carpet-bombing from Saigon to Hanoi before they were driven out by the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants.

On 6 August 1945 the U.S. dropped. the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and, three days later, on Nagasaki, slaughtering over 200,000 people. Untold thousands were left suffering from excruciating bums, radiation sickness and genetic defects. In choosing these cities, Secretary of War Henry Stimson said there

,..Should be a "war plant employing a large number of workers closely surrounded by workers' houses" (see our article "Racism, Anti-Sovietism and Atomic Holocaust," WV No. 459, 12 August 1988). In addition to the Japanese working people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over 10,000 Korean - and many Chinese forced laborers died. Yet President Truman cynically claimed that Hiroshima was a "military base" which was targeted "because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians" (Truman Speaks [1960]).

As we wrote a decade ago:

"With racist calculation the already defeated Japanese were chosen as the human testing ground to prove to American imperialism's opponents - especially the USSR - that the USA will stop at nothing to maintain world domination." -"Hiroshima Day: To Remember Is Not Enough!" WV No. 263, 5 September 1980

Air War Against the Workers

World War II closed as it had opened with the indiscriminate bombardment of civilians, but the bourgeoisie had pushed its criminal massacres to a truly monstrous scale. The 1937 terror bombing of Manchuria by the Japanese and the German blitz of Coventry and London were among the war crimes for which Japanese and German leaders were executed by the victorious Allies. (The latter were considerably less offended when German bombers sowed terror in Spain while fighting in support of Franco - the horror of which was captured in Picasso's mural Guernica.) Rarely has the stark hypocrisy,of the bourgeoisie been more patent. Allied prosecutors sat amid the ruins of Nuremberg and Tokyo as they condemned their vanquished foe for killing "men, women and children alike."

In reality, all the imperialist bourgeoisies had seized upon air power, from the earliest days of its development, as an effective instrument of mass terror for keeping their subject peoples in place. From the early '20s, the British used frequent air strikes in Iraq to terrorize rebellious Kurds and others. In India, British bombers killed thousands in smashing the 1942 "Quit India" movement. The French sent their bombers against Damascus in 1926 to crush a nationalist revolt. In 1945 they massacred tens of thousands of Algerians as an incipient colonial revolt was drowned in blood. The Italians used the horrors of aerial bombardment in the '30s in conquering Ethiopia.

The U.S. bourgeoisie distinguished itself by carrying out terror bombing against its own population, against black people. In May 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma a group of 75 armed blacks showed up at a jail to defend a young black man (arrested after falling against a, white woman) from a lynch mob. A report at the time describes how "the, white mobs, numbering by then more, than 10,000, invaded the negro section, the colored men resisting determinedly" (Literary Digest, 18 June 1921). The heart of the segregated black community of Tulsa was set on fire and allowed to burn to the ground as police dropped dynamite from commandeered private planes against blacks who had taken up arms to defend themselves against white racists. Dozens of people were killed, mostly blacks, and thousands of blacks were locked up in concentration camps (see "The Day They Bombed Blacks in Tulsa," WV No. 380, 31 May 1985).

And then, six years ago, on 13 May 1985 the home of Philadelphia MOVE was bombed from the air by a police helicopter, with the approval of black Democrat mayor Wilson Goode and the aid of U.S.. officials going right up to Ronald Reagan's White House. The resulting fire incinerated five black children and six black men and women and destroyed entire blocks of the black neighborhood. This heinous crime, symbol of the harsh brutality of the Reagan years, was intended to be a threatening message to blacks, workers and. all oppressed (see "Philly Inferno, Racist Murder!" WV No. 380, 31 May 1985).

From the time it was developed, air power has had a special attraction for the bourgeoisie as a weapon which can inflict unimaginable devastation at a distance, anonymously, and "on the cheap." And the principal victims have always been the workers, oppressed minorities and colonial peoples. Historian John Keegan quotes British military strategist B.H. Liddell-Hart to the effect that bombing attacks would provoke "the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud." The aim was to "stampede" the working people into rising up against their rulers, as General Douhet advocated. This reflected, wrote Keegan, "the ruling classes' prevailing fear of insurrection, perhaps leading to revolution, which the success of the Bolsheviks in war-torn Russia had rekindled throughout Europe after 1917" (The Second World War).

Certainly the bourgeoisie expected its bombing campaign to provoke chaos and social breakdown-in their class-limited view, this is no doubt how they summed up the Bolshevik Revolution. But sheer terrorization of the population does not lead to rebellion, nor did the terror bombing by either imperialist coalition in World War II succeed in breaking civilian will, to fight. Allied "strategic bombing" didn't work in Germany, The 900-day-long German siege of Leningrad, reducing the population to starvation, didn't break the will of the people of Leningrad, who rose fiercely to defend the gains of their revolution against the Nazi invaders. And in the extreme case of the Jewish ghettos of East Europe, Hitler's genocidal. destruction inspired the relative few who survived to become hardened, heroic fighters against the Third Reich.

As the U.S. imperialists rain hideous death and destruction on the working people of Iraq, we Trotskyists reaffirm our dedication to leading a true Bolshevik Revolution-to working-class power-which can put an end to imperialism and its ghastly wars. Workers Vanguard - March 1, 1991

Why Did Truman Really Fire MacArthur? ... The Obscure History of Nuclear Weapons and the Korean War Provides the Answer [By Bruce Cumings in Le Monde Diplomatique December 2004]

The media claim that North Korea is trying to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. Yet the United States, which opposes this strategy, has used or threatened to use such weapons in northeast Asia since the 1940s, when it did drop atomic bombs on Japan.

The forgotten war -- the Korean war of 1950-53 -- might better be called the unknown war. What was indelible about it was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States' air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons (1), and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. Yet this episode is mostly unknown even to historians, let alone to the average citizen, and it has never been mentioned during the past decade of media analysis of the North Korean nuclear problem.

Korea is also assumed to have been a limited war, but its prosecution bore a strong resemblance to the air war against Imperial Japan in the second world war, and was often directed by the same US military leaders. The atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been examined from many different perspectives, yet the incendiary air attacks against Japanese and Korean cities have received much less attention. The US post-Korean war air power and nuclear strategy in northeast Asia are even less well understood; yet these have dramatically shaped North Korean choices and remain a key factor in its national security strategy.

Napalm was invented at the end of the second world war. It became a major issue during the Vietnam war, brought to prominence by horrific photos of injured civilians. Yet far more napalm was dropped on Korea and with much more devastating effect, since the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) had many more populous cities and urban industrial installations than North Vietnam. In 2003 I participated in a conference with US veterans of the Korean war. During a discussion about napalm, a survivor who lost an eye in the Changjin (in Japanese, Chosin) Reservoir battle said it was indeed a nasty weapon -- but "it fell on the right people." (Ah yes, the "right people" -- a friendly-fire drop on a dozen US soldiers.) He continued: "Men all around me were burned. They lay rolling in the snow. Men I knew, marched and fought with begged me to shoot them . . . It was terrible. Where the napalm had burned the skin to a crisp, it would be peeled back from the face, arms, legs . . . like fried potato chips." (2)

Soon after that incident, George Barrett of the New York Times had found "a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war" in a village near Anyang, in South Korea: "The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck -- a man about to get on his bicycle, 50 boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No 3,811,294 for a $2.98 'bewitching bed jacket -- coral'." US Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of "sensationalised reporting," so it could be stopped. (3)

One of the first orders to burn towns and villages that I found in the archives was in the far southeast of Korea, during heavy fighting along the Pusan Perimeter in August 1950, when US soldiers were bedevilled by thousands of guerrillas in rear areas. On 6 August a US officer requested "to have the following towns obliterated" by the air force: Chongsong, Chinbo and Kusu-dong. B-29 strategic bombers were also called in for tactical bombing. On 16 August five groups of B-29s hit a rectangular area near the front, with many towns and villages, creating an ocean of fire with hundreds of tons of napalm. Another call went out on the 20 August. On 26 August I found in this same source the single entry: "fired 11 villages." (4) Pilots were told to bomb targets that they could see to avoid hitting civilians, but they frequently bombed major population centres by radar, or dumped huge amounts of napalm on secondary targets when the primary one was unavailable.

In a major strike on the industrial city of Hungnam on 31 July 1950, 500 tons of ordnance was delivered through clouds by radar; the flames rose 200-300 feet into the air. The air force dropped 625 tons of bombs over North Korea on 12 August, a tonnage that would have required a fleet of 250 B-17s in the second world war. By late August B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. (5) Much of it was pure napalm. From June to late October 1950, B-29s unloaded 866,914 gallons of napalm.

Air force sources delighted in this relatively new weapon, joking about communist protests and misleading the press about their "precision bombing." They also liked to point out that civilians were warned of the approaching bombers by leaflet, although all pilots knew that these were ineffective. (6) This was a mere prelude to the obliteration of most North Korean towns and cities after China entered the war.

China joins the war

The Chinese entry caused an immediate escalation of the air campaign. From November 1950, General Douglas MacArthur ordered that a wasteland be created between the fighting front and the Chinese border, destroying from the air every "installation, factory, city, and village" over thousands of square miles of North Korean territory. As a well-informed British attaché to MacArthur's headquarters observed, except for Najin near the Soviet border and the Yalu dams (both spared so as not to provoke Moscow or Beijing), MacArthur's orders were "to destroy every means of communication and every installation, and factories and cities and villages. This destruction is to start at the Manchurian border and to progress south." On 8 November 1950, 79 B-29s dropped 550 tons of incendiaries on Sinuiju, "removing [it] from off the map." A week later Hoeryong was napalmed "to burn out the place." By 25 November "a large part of [the] North West area between Yalu River and south to enemy lines is more or less burning"; soon the area would be a "wilderness of scorched earth." (7)

This happened before the major Sino-Korean offensive that cleared northern Korea of United Nations forces. When that began, the US air force hit Pyongyang with 700 500-pound bombs on 14-15 December; napalm dropped from Mustang fighters, with 175 tons of delayed-fuse demolition bombs, which landed with a thud and then blew up when people were trying to retrieve the dead from the napalm fires.

At the beginning of January General Matthew Ridgway again ordered the air force to hit the capital, Pyongyang, "with the goal of burning the city to the ground with incendiary bombs" (this happened in two strikes on 3 and 5 January). As the Americans retreated below the 38th parallel, the scorched-earth policy of torching continued, burning Uijongbu, Wonju and other small cities in the South as the enemy drew near. (8)

The air force also tried to destroy the North Korean leadership. During the war on Iraq in 2003 the world learned about the MOAB, "Mother of All Bombs," weighing 21,500 pounds with an explosive force of 18,000 pounds of TNT. Newsweek put this bomb on its cover, under the headline "Why America Scares the World." (9) In the desperate winter of 1950-51 Kim Il Sung and his closest allies were back where they started in the 1930s, holed up in deep bunkers in Kanggye, near the Manchurian border. After failing to find them for three months after the Inch'on landing (an intelligence failure that led to carpet-bombing the old Sino-Korean tributary route running north from Pyongyang to the border, on the assumption that they would flee to China), B-29s dropped Tarzan bombs on Kanggye. These were enormous 12,000-pound bombs never deployed before -- but firecrackers compared to the ultimate weapons, atomic bombs.

A blocking blow

On 9 July 1950 -- just two weeks into the war, it is worth remembering -- MacArthur sent Ridgway a hot message that prompted the joint chiefs of staff (JCS) "to consider whether or not A-bombs should be made available to MacArthur." The chief of operations, General Charles Bolte, was asked to talk to MacArthur about using atomic bombs "in direct support [of] ground combat." Bolte thought 10-20 such bombs could be spared for Korea without unduly jeopardising US global war capabilities.

Boite received from MacArthur an early suggestion for the tactical use of atomic weapons and an indication of MacArthur's extraordinary ambitions for the war, which included occupying the North and handling potential Chinese -- or Soviet -- intervention: "I would cut them off in North Korea . . . I visualise a cul-de-sac. The only passages leading from Manchuria and Vladivostok have many tunnels and bridges. I see here a unique use for the atomic bomb -- to strike a blocking blow -- which would require a six months' repair job. Sweeten up my B-29 force."

At this point, however, the JCS rejected use of the bomb because targets large enough to require atomic weapons were lacking; because of concerns about world opinion five years after Hiroshima; and because the JCS expected the tide of battle to be reversed by conventional military means. But that calculation changed when large numbers of Chinese troops entered the war in October and November 1950.

At a famous news conference on 30 November President Harry Truman threatened use of the atomic bomb, saying the US might use any weapon in its arsenal. (10) The threat was not the faux pas many assumed it to be, but was based on contingency planning to use the bomb. On that same day, Air Force General George Stratemeyer sent an order to General Hoyt Vandenberg that the Strategic Air Command should be put on warning, "to be prepared to dispatch without delay medium bomb groups to the Far East . . . this augmentation should include atomic capabilities."

General Curtis LeMay remembered correctly that the JCS had earlier concluded that atomic weapons would probably not be useful in Korea, except as part of "an overall atomic campaign against Red China." But, if these orders were now being changed because of the entry of Chinese forces into the war, LeMay wanted the job; he told Stratemeyer that only his headquarters had the experience, technical training, and "intimate knowledge" of delivery methods. The man who had directed the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 was again ready to proceed to the Far East to direct the attacks. (11) Washington was not worried that the Russians would respond with atomic weapons because the US possessed at least 450 bombs and the Soviets only 25.

On 9 December MacArthur said that he wanted commander's discretion to use atomic weapons in the Korean theatre. On 24 December he submitted "a list of retardation targets" for which he required 26 atomic bombs. He also wanted four to drop on the "invasion forces" and four more for "critical concentrations of enemy air power."

In interviews published posthumously, MacArthur said he had a plan that would have won the war in 10 days: "I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria." Then he would have introduced half a million Chinese Nationalist troops at the Yalu and then "spread behind us -- from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea -- a belt of radioactive cobalt . . . it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North." He was certain that the Russians would have done nothing about this extreme strategy: "My plan was a cinch." (12)

A second request

Cobalt 60 has 320 times the radioactivity of radium. One 400-ton cobalt H-bomb, historian Carroll Quigley has written, could wipe out all animal life on earth. MacArthur sounds like a warmongering lunatic, but he was not alone. Before the Sino-Korean offensive, a committee of the JCS had said that atomic bombs might be the decisive factor in cutting off a Chinese advance into Korea; initially they could be useful in "a cordon sanitaire [that] might be established by the UN in a strip in Manchuria immediately north of the Korean border." A few months later Congressman Albert Gore, Sr. (Father of former VP and 2000 Democratic candidate Al Gore, Jr., and subsequently a strong opponent of the Vietnam war) complained that "Korea has become a meat grinder of American manhood" and suggested "something cataclysmic" to end the war: a radiation belt dividing the Korean peninsula permanently into two.

Although Ridgway said nothing about a cobalt bomb, in May 1951, after replacing MacArthur as US commander in Korea, he renewed MacArthur's request of 24 December, this time for 38 atomic bombs. (13) The request was not approved.

The US came closest to using atomic weapons in April 1951, when Truman removed MacArthur. Although much related to this episode is still classified, it is now clear that Truman did not remove MacArthur simply because of his repeated insubordination, but because he wanted a reliable commander on the scene should Washington decide to use nuclear weapons; Truman traded MacArthur for his atomic policies. On 10 March 1951 MacArthur asked for a "D-Day atomic capability" to retain air superiority in the Korean theatre, after the Chinese massed huge new forces near the Korean border and after the Russians put 200 bombers into airbases in Manchuria (from which they could strike not just Korea but also US bases in Japan). (14) On 14 March General Vandenberg wrote: "Finletter and Lovett alerted on atomic discussions. Believe everything is set."

At the end of March Stratemeyer reported that atomic bomb loading pits at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa were again operational; the bombs were carried there unassembled, and put together at the base, lacking only the essential nuclear cores. On 5 April the JCS ordered immediate atomic retaliation against Manchurian bases if large numbers of new troops came into the fighting, or, it appears, if bombers were launched from there against US assets. On that day the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Gordon Dean, began arrangements for transferring nine Mark IV nuclear capsules to the Air Force's 9th Bomb Group, the designated carrier for atomic weapons.

The JCS again considered the use of nuclear weapons in June 1951, this time in tactical battlefield circumstances (15) and there were many more such suggestions as the war continued to 1953. Robert Oppenheimer, former director of the Manhattan Project, was involved in Project Vista, designed to gauge the feasibility of the tactical use of atomic weapons. In 1951 young Samuel Cohen, on a secret assignment for the US Defence Department, observed the battles for the second recapture of Seoul and thought there should be a way to destroy the enemy without destroying the city. He became the father of the neutron bomb. (16)

The most terrifying nuclear project in Korea, however, was Operation Hudson Harbour. It appears to have been part of a larger project involving "overt exploitation in Korea by the Department of Defence and covert exploitation by the Central Intelligence Agency of the possible use of novel weapons" -- a euphemism for what are now called weapons of mass destruction.

The 'limited war'

Without even using such "novel weapons" -- although napalm was very new -- the air war levelled North Korea and killed millions of civilians. North Koreans tell you that for three years they faced a daily threat of being burned with napalm: "You couldn't escape it," one told me in 1981. By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea had been completely levelled. What was left of the population survived in caves.

Over the course of the war, Conrad Crane wrote, the US air force "had wreaked terrible destruction all across North Korea. Bomb damage assessment at the armistice revealed that 18 of 22 major cities had been at least half obliterated." A table he provided showed that the big industrial cities of Hamhung and Hungnam were 80-85% destroyed, Sariwon 95%, Sinanju 100%, the port of Chinnampo 80% and Pyongyang 75%. A British reporter described one of the thousands of obliterated villages as "a low, wide mound of violet ashes." General William Dean, who was captured after the battle of Taejon in July 1950 and taken to the North, later said that most of the towns and villages he saw were just "rubble or snowy open spaces." Just about every Korean he met, Dean wrote, had had a relative killed in a bombing raid. (17) Even Winston Churchill, late in the war, was moved to tell Washington that when napalm was invented, no one contemplated that it would be "splashed" all over a civilian population. (18)

This was Korea, "the limited war." The views of its architect, Curtis LeMay, serve as its epitaph. After it started, he said: "We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said let us go up there . . . and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea -- and they're not very big -- and that ought to stop it. Well, the answer to that was four or five screams -- 'You'll kill a lot of non-combatants' and 'It's too horrible.' Yet over a period of three years or so . . . we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too . . . Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening -- a lot of people can't stomach it." (19)

NOTES

(1) Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, "First victims of biological warfare," Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, July 1999.

(2) Quoted in Clay Blair, Forgotten War, Random House, New York, 1989.

(3) US National Archives, 995.000 file, box 6175, George Barrett dispatch of 8 February 1951.

(4) National Archives, RG338, KMAG file, box 5418, KMAG journal, entries for 6, 16, 20 and 26 August 1950.

(5) See the New York Times, 31 July, 2 August and 1 September 1950.

(6) See "Air War in Korea," Air University Quarterly Review 4 no 2, autumn 1950, and "Precision bombing," ibid, n° 4, summer 1951.

(7) MacArthur Archives, RG6, box 1, Stratemeyer to MacArthur, 8 November 1950; Public Record Office, FO 317, piece n° 84072, Bouchier to Chiefs of Staff, 6 November 1950; piece n° 84073, 25 November 1959 sitrep.

(8) Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, Princeton University Press, 1990; New York Times, 13 December 1950 and 3 January 1951.

(9) Newsweek, 24 March 2003.

(10) New York Times, 30 November and 1 December 1950.

(11) Hoyt Vandenberg Papers, box 86, Stratemeyer to Vandenberg, 30 November 1950; LeMay to Vandenberg, 2 December 1950. Also Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995.

(12) Bruce Cumings, op cit; Charles Willoughby Papers, box 8, interviews by Bob Considine and Jim Lucas in 1954, published in the New York Times, 9 April 1964.

(13) Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, MacMillan, New York, 1966; Quigley was Bill Clinton's favorite teacher at Georgetown University. See also Bruce Cumings, op cit.

(14) Documents released after the Soviet Union collapsed do not bear this out; scholars who have seen these documents say there was no such major deployment of Soviet air power at the time. However, US intelligence reports believed the deployment happened, perhaps based on effective disinformation by the Chinese.

(15) This does not mean the use of "tactical" nuclear weapons, which were not available in 1951, but the use of the Mark IVs in battlefield tactical strategy, much as heavy conventional bombs dropped by B-29 bombers had been used on battlefields since August 1950.

(16) Samuel Cohen was a childhood friend of Herman Kahn. See Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1983. On Oppenheimer and Project Vista, see Bruce Cumings, op cit; also David Elliot, "Project Vista and Nuclear Weapons in Europe," International Security 2, n° 1, summer 1986.

(17) Conrad Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, University Press of Kansas, 2000.

(18) Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War, Pantheon Books, New York, 1988.

(19) J F Dulles Papers, Curtis LeMay oral history, 28 April 1966.

Public Authority and the State in the Western Tradition:A Thousand Years of Growth, A.D. 976 - 1976 [By Carroll Quigley]

I: “The State of Communities", A.D. 976 - 1576

by Carroll Quigley Ph.D.

0:00:01

[Introduction by SFS Dean Peter F. Krogh]

0:04:03

Dean Krogh, Ladies and Gentlemen, .... and the people who laughed at that.

0:04:14

                                     For a decade from 1931 to 1941, my chief intellectual concern was with the growth of public authority and the development of the European state.     I dreamed at that time that, at some date in the future, perhaps thirty years in the future, I would write the definitive history of the growth of the European state.     But in 1941, I had to postpone indefinitely, and gradually    abandoned, that project.     I    no longer after 1941 had adequate libraries (and it would take a very extraordinary library for the purpose, of which there are only a couple in the United States, perhaps).     I was much too busy with my teaching -- which I enjoyed thoroughly.    

0:05:15

                                     But above all, I discovered that other historians were so specialized in their studies, and were so lacking in basic historical concepts (such as:     What does "state" mean?     In what way is "state" different from many other things, such as "public authority", "government", and so forth?) that they could not understand what I had to say.     And I had a bitter experience which revealed that, namely in my doctoral dissertation, which was on "The Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy," which I wrote between 1936 and 1938.

0:06:11

                                     I will not go into the story, I will simply say there was only one man    who read it, who had the slightest idea what it was all about.     And that was the great University of Florence    historian,    Salvemini,    who at that time was a refugee in this country.     But most historians knew only one country.     They    knew England, or they knew France, or they might have known Italy, they might have known Germany.     And most historians knew only certain periods             And, of course, the period I was writing about,    the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, was technically from 1805 to 1814.     And anyone who knew that period, I discovered, really didn't know anything about, had, what the situation had been like before the Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789.

0:07:06

                                     So, instead of writing that, I    got into what, I suppose, was really my much stronger activity:     the creation of the necessary conceptual paradigms, structures, frameworks, for understanding historical processes.     Because I discovered that people could not, historians could not even understand their own specialties, because of their lack of concepts.

0:07:44

                                     Let me give you two examples of this, one very contemporary,    i.e., it's last last hundred years, which for me is contemporary.     There is an area of political activity, and for about a hundred years, and in all political argument and controversy to-day, there is a basic assumption that only two kinds of interests or entities operate in the area of political action,    i.e., individuals and the government.     There have been numerous books published, whith such titles as    Man vs. the State.     I know of two of those.     They both appeared, I think, in 1906.     We hear about Big Government as a threat to the individual, and so forth and so forth.     Conservatives now are telling us that we must curtail government, cut government spending, cut government powers, reduce government personnel, for the sake of making individuals more free.     Liberals, on the other hand, are still telling us, as they have for a long, long time, that, in order to make individuals free, we must destroy communities.     By communities, I mean villages, ghettoes in cities, ethnic groupings, religious groupings, anything which is segregated.     We must destroy them, so that all individuals would be, if possible,    identical, including boys and girls.    

0:09:51

                                     But the area of political action, and I won't draw it on here, but just assume a circle of political action, in which you have:     government, individuals, acting in there.     But you also have at least two other groups, really three others:     voluntary associations, which I'll say no more about, corporations, and communities.     And if the Liberals destroy communities for the sake of the individual; and the Conservatives destroy state government for the sake of individuals, you're going to have an area of political action in which irresponsible and immensely powerful corporations are engaged upon, in opposition to individuals who are socially naked and in[deed] defenseless.

0:11:00

                                     And what we get in history    is never what anyone is struggling for.     What we get in history is the resultant of diverse groups studying, struggling; and, if Liberals and Conservatives are struggling for these things, that is what the result will be.     That's one example of a lack of a paradigm.     I have given you the paradigm.

0:11:27

                                     The next thing is more personal.     A number of years ago, an old friend of mine -- we were colleagues at Princeton in the History Department in 1936 and '37 -- wrote a book    The Age of the Eight[teen Century], the Democratic Revolution.     Now, since neither of the revolutions that he talked about were democratic.     Neither the one in France nor the one in the United States were not intended to be, and did not turn out to be, democratic revolutions, people have changed this and talk about "The Eighteenth Century Revolution", but they talk as if the Eighteenth Century Revolution in, let us say, the United States, and France and in other places, was the same kind of a revolution.

0:12:28

                                     Now, Bob Palmer is a very industrious person, with a very agile mind, and a ready verbalizer; but he does not know what he means by "revolution" or by "democratic."         And he's totally wrong if he believes the Eighteenth Century Revolution in the United States, or the English-speaking world in general, was the same as the Eighteenth Century Revolution in France.     In fact, they were the opposite.     The revolution in France was a struggle by a government which did not have sovereignty to obtain sovereignty, which to us would be the essential, identifying characteristic of any state.     Sovereignty.     The English-speaking revolution, through the Eighteenth Century, and in the United States, very clearly was an effort by states who had sovereignty to curtail it, divide it up, hamper it, by such things as federalism, separation of powers, electoral colleges, and so forth and so forth.    

0:13:53

                                     Now this is what I mean by the need for paradigms.     The basic entity to understand is the civilization as a whole.     And although I give you the date that I'm going to talk about, the last thousand years, Western Civilization, of which we are a part,    has been around for a considerable time longer than that.     I think that we might say, perhaps, that Western Civilization began around 600.     It came out of the ruins and wreckage of the preceding Classical Civilization.     And Classical Civilization's dates might well be 1100 B.C., through a Dark Age of 1000 B.C., and it ended by about 550    A.D., and was followed by a Dark Age around 850 or 876 [A.D.], a hundred years before the outline begins this lecture.

0:15:05

                                     Out of the wreckage of Classical Civilization, which was [on] the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.     That was Classical Civilization.     And it was held together by the fact that the ease of water transportation on the Mediterranean was so superior to the difficulties of land transportation away from the shores of the    Mediterranean Sea, that the city of Rome could bring its food from Egypt when it could not bring food from Lombardy in Italy.     And anywhere in the    Mediterranean Sea, even at the height of the Roman Empire, if you went into the interior a few hundred miles, you had left Civilization.     That civilization perished and out of the wreckage came four other civilizations:     Islam, Byzantium, Russia and Western.     And I think we might say they all were, sort of, around from 600 onward, and certainly by 950 they were around.

0:16:29

                                     Now, another paradigm that I want to establish is a difference between two kinds of civilizations, which means a difference between two kinds of governments in these.     Asiatic civilizations, generally, do not attempt to deal with individuals or with the problems of individuals.     I have always called that Class B Civilization.     Class A Civilization is the kind of civilization that's Classical Antiquity, Classical Civilization, turned into, the kind that we are moving toward, and have been from the beginning, or the kind that was found in the first Chinese Civilization, which was from 1800 B.C. to 400    A.D., and is distinguished from the Chinese Civilization which was from 400 [A.D.} until about 1930.     We call that earlier one Sinic     -- s-i-n-i-c -- from the Latin word for China, which is Sinia.     In those Class A Civilizations, although the civilization starts by being an area of common culture made up of communities, in our type of civilization there is a long term trend to destroy and break down communities.

0:18:14

                                     Now, the way I would like to express it would be, and this is all on the back, blackboard, by saying that a civilization, all civilizations start out as aggregations of communities.     Those communities are generally of two types, either local (such as parishes, neighborhoods, villages, manors, or whatever else they may be) or kinship communities ([such as] families, clans, or so forth).     And at, when a civilization begins with communities such as this, and ours in 600, let us say, there is no state and there is no atomized individual.     

0:19:04

                                     Now, I won't go into details of this, but in such communities everything is different.     There are no written laws; it's all customary.     All controls, or most controls are what I call internalized,    i.e., they're built into your hormones and your neurological responses.     And you do what is necessary to remain a member of the community; because, if you weren't a member of the community, you would be nothing.     You would not be a man.     And as you may know, if you have ever studied linguistics, many of the names which primitive people have for, even not-quite-so-primitive people, have for themselves is their word for man.     That is, unless you were a member of their community, you were not a man.

0:19:59

                                     Now, what happens in the course of a civilization, if it's an A like ours, take a thousand or more years (It took fifteen hundred years to Sinic Civilization and it took about a thousand years with Classical Antiquity) is that those communities are broken up, and gradually break down in smaller and smaller groups, and may end up simply as what we call nuclear families, a father and a mother.         And then you will discover they lose all of their discipline and control of their own children.     And the only holder of the control is the    XXXX    isolated individuals, and so forth.     And what happens is, you end up with a state which is not only sovereign, but totalitarian, and it is filled with isolated individuals who face a totalitarian state.    

0:21:07

                                     The communities, of course, from which Classical Antiquity came, were clans,    i.e., kinship groups.     The communities from which Western Civilization came were local villages and manors.     And, indeed, the communities    always are either    one or the other.     And lucky civilizations, such as Chinese Civilization over the last 1500 years or more, have generally communities which are both kinship and local.     If a society has just kinship communities, like Islamic Civilization, it is in a very, very bad position.     It never, for example, can understand the meaning of the word "state".     For Islam[ic] there is no Arabic    word for the state.     And you may reach the point that the Arabs tended to reach, which was that    you trusted no one except your close relatives     The preferred marriage would be your parallel first cousins,    i.e., your father's brother's daughter is the one you must marry.     Because no one else....     And even then you don't trust her.     All right.

0:22:28

                                     Now, of the four civilizations which came out of Classical Antiquity's wreckage, two of them clearly are a different kind of a civilization from ours, and I think Russia is too.     What I am saying is that I think those three, Islamic, Byzantine (and this I'm certain), and probably Russia also, are Class B Civilizations,    i.e., they continue to work for communities.     I will take back about the Russia.     Let's forget the Russia.     It's very, much too complicated.         Just look at the Islamic and the Byzantine.     On the other hand, Western Civilization was different.     The civilizations and the governments which appeared in Class B Civilizations, those which preserved communities, were governments of limited power.     The chief powers that they had were raising money and recruiting soldiers.     And they made no effort to deal with interpersonal relations or anything else.     They were a kind of a, empire.     The finest example of that is the empire of Jenghiz Khan [about    A. D.    1250].     But a very good example of it would be the Ottoman Empire, which is the final empire of Islamic Civilization and which was destroyed in 1922.     Where you did not attempt to deal with the relationships of individuals.     You left that to their local or their kinship communities.

    0:24:10

                                     Now before I get deeply into West Civilization, I want to say one more thing about Classical Antiquity.     A moment ago I said there would be difficulty talking to historians about this subject.     The difficulties would be just as great in talking about Classical history, or Classical Civilization, if I spoke to classicists.     Classical Civilization began with clans as the basic community.     So where this group at the beginning of Classical Civilization were kinship groups of clans, and the beginning of our Western Civilization were little self-sufficient villages    across Europe, in deep forests mostly, where these were of that isolated and different nations, natures.

    0:25:14

                                     Such communities are totalitarian.     That is to say, everything that you get, which makes you a human being, you get from your community.     But since in Classical Civilization they gradually built up a state, and eventually a totalitarian state (One of the reasons they built up a totalitarian state is this:     Classicists for centuries    could not see that there was a difference between a society and a state).     When Aristotle says the    polis    (I won't translate it:     the    polis, p-o-l-i-s) is    a    koinonia    XXXX    or community    found in a community, he means the totalitarian group which gives you everything.     He says a man cut off from the    polis    is not a man.     He just looks like a man.     He's like a thumb cut off from a hand.     It looks like a thumb.     But it isn't.     It's just a piece of meat.     So the word    polis    in Aristotle, and in Plato, and there it's just as late,    this is the Fourth Century (the society is already at least six centuries old).     Now eventually the    polis, of which there were many, was replaced by the    imperium, of which there was one.     But they continued to find it utterly impossible to see the distinction between the society in which you live,    which gives you everything which makes you a man, rather than some kind of a, animal, and the state, which has the monopoly, or the large part, of the political power    in that society.

0:27:25

                                     So the    polis, we say, was a city-state     It was community, but it was also a state.     And, when they came to the    imperium    hundreds of years later, it's the same way.     The imperial community.     Now, in order for this, [to] clarify this, I have to point out a few things:     first,    no other communities were approved of; and, in many cases in Roman history, no other communities were permitted.     Every society has, what we might call, the orthodox theory of the state for that society.     And every society has the suppressed heresy of the state in that society.     In the society of Classical Antiquity the orthodoxy was that the state is the community,    and no one should desire any else.     No one should desire a quiet life.     Everybody's life should be public.     Everyone should be prepared to give up anything, including his life, for the state, because the state was his community.     And, if he said "I'm going to go off and found my    own commune", he, by that statement, becomes a traitor.     One of the first ones to do that was Epicurus, who was Fourth Century B.C.     And Epicurus said all he wanted to do was to sit down in a quiet garden with his friends and talk.     And ignore politics.     But that would be the ultimate act in our society to-day.     We haven't reached the point yet, but we're about to.     Because we are like Classical Antiquity.     We're trying to, in our society, to grind down individuals into identical atoms in a mass culture, in which all communities are dis-approved.     And, if any community wishes to stand apart, we will go in by force, and bus them out, or bus them in, or do anything that is necessary, to make them become the kind of red-blooded Americans that all should want to be.

0:30:05

                                     Now, then the state in Classical Antiquity was totalitarian, because it was regarded as a community.     Now, once the Classical Civilization was gone, the whole configuration of civilized and cultural society in the West (that's the west of Eurasia) was transformed.     Where the Mediterranean Sea had been the site of Classical Civilization, it became instead, by the year 700, the barrier between Arabic Civilization (I'll draw it from your point of view on this, the Mediterranean Sea) Arabic Civilization to the south, Byzantine Civilization to the northeast, Western Civilization to the northwest.     And the    Mediterranean, instead of being an area of communication, became an area of frontier for the different societies.

0:31:14

                                     A community is not easy to define; but I would define it, approximately, this way:     if you trust everyone you meet, automatically, until they prove to be unworthy of trust, then you are in your community.     On the other hand, if you mis-trust everyone you meet, until they prove worthy of trust, then you are in an alien community.     You're in Moscow, or some place like that.     This is the, a workable definition, it seems to me, of the two.     Now, if I go back to the history of Western Civilization, which began around 600    [A.D.], what we see is an effort being made, after the civilization got started,    to establish the kind of totalitarian state structure which was, been successfully established just about 600 in Byzantium, or which was established shortly after this, 1650, in the caliphate of Islamic Civilization, or which was established at least by 6 or 700 B.C. in Sinic Civilization, that is to say....         

0:32:56

                                     Now, my mind block would be here.     Oh, a, a kind of monarchy, which I will give you now as a paradigm.     It's called Providential Monarchy.     And it is associated with the idea of a Providential Deity.     So [for] us to-day, who shove religion off into a corner somewhere, and insist that religion mustn't have anything to do with communities or, certainly nothing to do with politics, or business, or many, many other things, it's hard for us to grasp that one of the most potent things in the    establishment of the structure of the state, in any civilization, have always been men's ideas of the nature of Deity.    

0:33:58

                                     And I will not give you my paradigm for that.     I will simply point out to you something that is obvi---, must be obvious to you.     The Deity, God, has many different attributes:     He's creator.     He's masculine.     He's up [there].     He's transcendental,    i.e., He's outside of the world of space and time.     (That was established by 500 B.C.)         Eventually, He's one (That's what the,    Mohammed insisted on: "God is One")     And then, that He is omnipotent.     All-powerful.     Now, I stop at this point.     Providential empires never got further than this.

0:34:56

                                     Now, the next thing to develop in our ideas of Deity in Western Civilization were:     that God is good.     That was established by the prophets of the desert, certainly by the Fifth Century B.C.     And then came the Christian message that God is love.     And then came the scholastic inference that God is pure reason.     By the year 1250    A.D.    

0:35:28

                                     Now, what you believe is in the nature of God, in many civilizations, including our own, has helped to determine the structure of the society.     And the crucial one I want to point out here is this:     by 500 B.C. in western Asia it was pretty well established that God is omnipotent.     He could do anything.     And there is nothing He cannot do.     Thus He is pure will.     And, at almost the same time, came the other idea, which you find in Job, that God is good.     But if God is good, He cannot do anything.     He can only do things that are good.     And if He can only do things that are good, and cannot do things that are evil, then there is something higher than God: the rules of ethics.     Thus the great contribution, even before Christ, moving toward the Western idea of Deity, was the idea of Transcendental Ethical Monotheism, in which part of    that is that God is love, and so forth, and the    other kinds of things    

0:36:58

                                     Now, if God is one, and God is all powerful, and He can do anything, and He is providential, which means He interferes in the world, then whatever happens in the world is because He permitted it.     And whatever He permitted, who the Hell is any ordinary human being to question it?     (Now, if you read the, Job, you will see that this begins to come into that contradiction, that conversation, where Job is saying:     "God, you're running the world all wrong. You're letting bad people be elected President...", and so forth.)    XXXX    Apparently.     This gave Providential Monarchy.     Let me read     what I wrote here about it.     In Providential Monarchy, Deity is (and it's Asiatic) Heaven.     The Chinese word is "tien", which means Heaven.     The idea, in the original language, Indo-European, was something like "dyess".         "Dyess", from which    XXXX    was came, and what    XXXX    was, which is Zeus came, and so forth.     It meant bright, brilliant sky.     That was the Deity.     And this was a being of willful and arbitrary omnipotence; and, if there is a ruler on Earth, that ruler was picked by the Deity.     This means you must accept whatever happens:     it leads, of course, as you see, to fatalism, even though they don't accept that in their actions, frequently.     And the ruler is the vicar of omnipotent will on Earth.

0:39:25

                                     Now, this lead to a number of results.     There is no rule of law; there is the rule of God's will.     This is the heresy of the West.     Part of the heresy of the West.     When the Crusaders went to capture Jerusalem, and their war cry was "God wills it!",     they should have been rejected.     This is not Western, because the Western idea is that God gives man, man free will, and, if he does evil things, he's responsible.     And so forth.     A totally different kind of thing.     In the West you get, accordingly,    the rule of law.     In Providential Monarchy you do not get, you get the rule of will.     And the slogan very quickly became:     "one God in Heaven; one ruler on Earth," which meant that Providential Monarchs consistently tried to conquer the world.     And these were the great world conquerors, and I have already said Jenghiz Khan was the greatest of them.         And further    XXXX    studies, his government, his army, his whole attitude was a magnificent machine for world conquest and world rule as the vicar of Heaven on Earth.    

0:41:10

                                     There are no constitutional rules of political succession in a Providential Monarchy. There are no constitutional rules of succession in Islamic Civilization, in Byzantine Civilization, or in Russian Civilization -- ever.     And to talk about constitutional law in Russia is to talk nonsense.     Even right up to the end, there was no constitutional rule of succession.     Alexander I left a note in his desk saying that he wanted his second or third son, I forget which one it was, his second son, I believe, to be his successor, and that settled it.     That was an act of will, it's not an act of constitutional law.     And this is to-day, of course,in Russia to-day.     Notice it's true of China.     It always was true of China.     China was a Providential Monarchy.     But in the West, where we have the rule of law, where even God is under rules, the rules of ethics, you have a totally     different situation, and you expect to have constitutional rules of political action, including the rules of political succession.

0:42:40

                                     Now, the Carolingian Empire, whose dates you, it    was built up in the course of two hundred years, approximately, let's say 687 to 887, approximately, two hundred years, was an attempt to impose in the West a Providential Monarchy, which was a heresy, not in terms of the Western beliefs of the time, but in terms of the belief[s] which were intrinsic in the nature of Western thought, including our belief in Christ and in both of the Testaments.     And while everyone is, that I read, is full of praise about Charlemagne, Charlemagne was that kind of a willful man trying to do something that was impossible     to do, which was to conquer practically the whole world.     And he failed.     The reason he failed was that he was doing it in a period of    constantly deepening economic depression.     And as a result of this constantly deepening economic depression, it became less and less possible even to conquer all of the provinces in his own empire, and totally impossible to rule the provinces of his own empire.     Because, as the depression become worse and worse, transportation broke down, all bridges collapsed. (I have read a magnificent account of somebody trying to go from Chartres to Paris.     To drive this would [take about] half an hour, I guess, I don't know, depends on the traffic.     And it took him something like eleven days: when he got there, the horse died of exhaustion.     And they had to do such things as try to patch holes in bridges by placing the shield, so the horse wouldn't fall through, and so forth).     All right, all commerce disappeared; everybody was reduced to living off the piece of land they were on.     And this became the community which I've    XXXX    organizational pattern of the West, the local community, call it the parish, the village, or the manor, whatever you want.     It's local.     It is self-sufficient.

0:45:24

                                     And one of the chief reasons that you could not, and Charlemagne could not, conquer great distance was it became economically impossible to capture any fortified building, because you couldn't stay there long enough -- you couldn't take enough men and enough food there -- to starve out the people inside, because anybody inside would have more food on hand than you could carry.     And if they carried a smaller amount of food, and had to take a smaller number of men, in that case they would come out and chase you away.    

0:46:17

                                     So we got then,    after Charlemagne and the last Carolingian is 887.     He was removed for not fighting the Vikings sufficiently vigorously.     And for a hundred years there was no ruler.     Instead the whole society....And we call this a Dark Age.     There is nothing wrong with a Dark Age.     Dark Ages are in many cases the most productive periods in the history of any civilization.     And certainly in Western Civilization they were     Any of though, you who have read Lynn White's book on the technological advances of the Dark Ages, such as the plough and so forth, and harnessing and so forth, so forth, know that we got a great deal [from it].     But out of the Dark Age that followed the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, we got the most magnificent thing which we have in our society:     the recognition that people can have a     society without having a state.     In other words, the recognition that people    can have a        society without having a state.     In other words, this    wiped away -- by experience -- the assumption that is found all through Classical Antiquity, except by unorthodox and heretical thinkers, that the state and the society are identical, and the state, such as the    imperium, must be a society.         Therefore you can desire nothing more than to be a citizen.     And, if you want to go down in a ghetto or catacomb, and be with your co-sig, co-believers, and so forth and so forth, then you are an enemy.     Because you are violating the fundamental assumption.

0:48:16

                                     Now, again, to get to the structure. After this Dark Age.     The Mediterranean had become a barrier.     In the north, much neglected in our history books, but of vital importance -- the Vikings were pouring outward.     Before 750 they were pouring outward.     Raiders, slavers, pirates, men of violence and virility.     And, as you know, they occupied Iceland in 870, Greenland and Newfoundland. And so forth.     And they went eastward too, into Russia and started the beginning of Russian Civilization.     Now I call this Northern Monarchy.     It started as individual groups of pirate leaders.     But it ended up, and that would be from 750 or so to 930.     Then there was a     brief lull.     From 980, for a thousand [actually, a hundred] years,    til about 1080, they were coming out as monarchies,    i.e., organized state structures.     We call    call this Northern Monarchy.     I invented the title and it has certain definite ideas.     Where those ideas came from, I do not know.     And it hasn't been discussed.     It's possible that they got some of them from Byzantium, because the Vikings went across Russia all the way to the Black Sea and Bysantine [Empire].     It's possible that they got it from the Carolingians, some memory of the Carolingians.     But the extraordinary thing about the Vikings -- I cannot spend too much time on that -- [is] that they went so far that they surrounded Europe.     That is to say, the Vikings did not just get, go to Newfoundland and places like that.     They conquered Normandy in 911.     They had conquered England several times, most recently in 1066.     They had gone down and conquered southern Italy and Sicily.     They had gone    into Russia and opened up the trade across Russia, from the north down to the south.     They had even attacked Constantinople and eventually had become the hired mercenaries.         And the extraordinary thing is this:     in a battle in 1018 in southern Italy, Normans -- of Viking descent -- fighting on the side of the pope, were in battle with so-called Varangians -- of Viking descent -- fighting in behalf of the Byzantine Empire.     So there they had gone all the way around and were fighting [each other].

0:51:53

                                     That Northern Monarchy is of very great significance and had things which seem very precocious.     For example, it raised a military force and it raised taxes on the basis of assessments on plots of land, [which] in England we call hides, but they had different names.     They are found in Russia too. They had standing armies.     Archaeologists recently, that is to say, in the last twenty-five years, they found three large camps in Denmark, built about the year 1000 by the king Sven Forked Beard, where his standing army was ready at any moment to embark in the ships and go off.     The success of the Vikings, like the success of the raiders of the    steppes of Asia, was in its mobility.     But where the steppes of Asia mobility was based on horseback riding with an excellent weapon, the composite bow, the threat    of the Vikings was their mobility on water.     And they also had missile weapons.     But by the year 1000 in Western Europe you had a two class society:     peasants, who produced food, and then a small percentage of fighters,    who fought on horseback with shock weapons.     In Europe    they, that is with a spear, and    XXXX    had fortified a house in which to live.     That's all they needed.

0:53:51

                                     So you have a two-class society.     Now, eventually, that two-class society began to develop.     And when we come to the year 1150 we find that there, a new class has appeared, a separate class, the clergy     (I won't tell, say how this happened.)     So what you have is a monarch, at the top.     You have the nobility, who have weapons.     You have the clergy.     And you have the peasants at the bottom.     So, as I say, by the middle of the 12th Century, you also have the beginnings of commerce, the rise of towns, the appearance of a middle class of commercial traders.         So we have commercial traders.

0:54:41

                                     What the king did.     At the top.     Was build up a bureaucracy,    i.e., a group of people who could write, keep records, to handle cases of justice in his court, to keep track of the money he could raised in his treasury.     And he built up these.     Now, here's the king, there's the feudal lords, L.,    there were the clergy, there are the    bourgeoisie, the middle class, and there are the    peasants, who are out of it.     All through this, they're out of it     They never paid, they never could play any major political rôle.     At first the king used the clergy to gradually take away from the lords (the fighting men) powers that would make him stronger and stronger, they build up    the bureaucracy by doing it, but doing it so you can't trust the clergy.     They are frequently much too loyal to the bishops or even to the Pope.     By that time, according to    XXXX    the king built up his bureaucracy out of the    bourgeoisie, sons of the middle class, towns-dwelling, commercial people who could read and write and count, and put them in his bureaucracy.     And this meant that you had the king and the bureaucracy    recruiting and, to some extent, obtaining financial support from the bureaucracy, from the    bourgeoisie;    and it meant that the feudal lords and at least the upper clergy tended to come together and cooperate in resistance to this.     

0:56:44

                                     ????

0:56:54

                                     A thousand, a hundred years after the last Carolingian died in 887, a microscopic lord near Paris was permitted by the seven or eight great lords who surrounded him, much more powerful than he was, to take the royal title.     His name was Hugh Capet.         The date is 987.     Hugh Capet was the first of the Capetian kings; and he was allowed to take that title because he was so weak.     They would not have permitted anyone with any strength.     In fact, [with] the title of king, he was also allowed to take the title of    suzerain, which means he was the top man in the feudal system.     (I'll not attempt to define the feudal system if you don't know it.)         So here's the    suzerain, and combined with the king, and a man with no power.     And it was done because he was pious and religious and weak.     Now, as    suzerain    he didn't have any power or real....     Suzerain.     A    suzerain    is simply a feudal lord who has no feudal lord above him.     Because the feudal lords below him, who were technically his vassals, did not perform military service, did not come to his court to settle disputes, and had very little to do with him.     But nevertheless, the power of his religious aura allowed him gradually to accumulate more and more and more power.    

0:58:53

                                     Now, I want to say a few words about the title of king.     King is a religious title.         it means a ruler who has been consecrated with holy oils by an archbishop in an archepiscopal cathedral.         it's a ceremony very simple, similar to the Sacrament of Confirmation.     You're anointed with holy oil; and you thus become a kind of a special thing.     This power and [title] of king allowed him to assume certain things, such as, the king should see that everyone gets justice; the king should see that everyone gets protection.     The king' s peace, in other words.     He will seek justice on Earth with God's blessing.     To the vassals that meant the Capetians should provide ethical and moral support for their individual and political rights, which for them was exactly what they wanted.     The interesting thing is that in 1792, when Louis XVI was going to the scaffold in the French Revolution, he still believed this:     that the obligations that he had as a king was [sic] to support the rights of everyone, including the nobles and the Church.     So it was a powerful feeling.     This was the central core of the Old Regime and it cannot be emphasized too much:     the king is the source of justice.    

1:00:38

                                     Now, with this I want to combine something else which is    difficult, perhaps.     The idea of property in Classical Antiquity we sum up in the word    proprietas.     It means possession [of] all the innumerable and un-numerable rights in an object, maybe with a few specific restraints.     In other words, you have a car that will drive 150 miles an hour, but you're not supposed to drive it 150 miles an hour.     Now, but it's your car.     And you can drive it or not; you can let other people drive it; you can rent it; you can sell it, and then.     In other words, that's propriety [proprietas].     Proprietas is the sum of un-, innumerable and undesignated rights in an object.     This    is not the mediaeval idea of property.     The mediaeval idea of property was specific rights, and the word that we use is    dominia, d-o-m-i-n-i-a, which is a plural, meaning rights.     

1:01:54

                                     Now. the obligation of the Capetian king was to preserve everyone's    dominia.     This meant     that if there's an object, a piece of land, and those people have certain rights in it, his job is to preserve their rights.     And this includes, because he's under the law, his own property, because it isn't his.     It's the monarchy's.     It's the family's.     This means he cannot alienate his own property.     It isn't his own.     He cannot alienate    the    demesne, we call it, the property of the monarchy it[self].    

1:02:44

                                     He gradually was assuming the dimly remembered powers that monarchy had had in the past:     to coin money; to call out the whole people for military service in an emergency; to see that all men lived in peace and had justice; to grant municipalities    rights of self-government, or to recognize specifically the rights of self-government; to protect the Church and religion;    to regulate commerce, particularly experts, exports, so that there would be no shortage of food for the people.     That's six things which were incumbent upon him as king.     The last four of these are what in French public law is known as    la police, the policy,    i.e., administrative power to use discretion in an emergency or a complicated social situation.

1:03:45

                                     Now, In building up these, one of the greatest assets which the Capetians had was that    for eight generations    they produced sons.        From 987 to 1328 they produced sons.     And in 1328 when they didn't produce sons, there were brothers.     In fact when they first started in 1814 [sic] there were several brothers and the brothers had sons.     The much more powerful feudal lords who surrounded the Capetians (the duke of France, originally) did not have so much luck.     For one thing, they took a lot risks.     They went off to the Crusades, and things like that.

1:04:33

                                     And as they, their families, died out, they have no heirs, a right that existed with the king    as    suzerain    was exercised.     This is the right of    escheat.     That if a territory, a group of    dominia, has no heirs, it comes back to the king, who can give it out to someone else.     In this way,    the kings were able gradually, and it took them to 1493, to obt[ain], get the territorial unity of France.     But in get, getting the territorial unity in France, they didn't get the power in those territories.     They simply replaced the existing lords; and, because they were king, because they were under the obligations to preserve everyone's    dominia, they were even less powerful when they became duke of Normandy, count of Flanders, count of Anjou, duke of Burgundy, or any of these other places that they were gradually accumulating.     They were less powerful in those    apanages    (they called them), those territories, than the rulers they were replacing, who had not been under obligation to be that law-abiding and that subject to the rules of what is right.

1:06:03

                                     There grew up then, gradually, a legalized confusion of extremely limited sovereignty, because each, any act     that a person did which was profitable or advantageous to him, if he could, did it long enough, he acquired a right to do it.     We have in this, in English law, this is called    the right of prescription.     But in English law the right of prescription does not go against the state.     Now    if you do something, and you do it for thirty years, you may have the right to do it against a private person who has private property, but you do not have this right against the state.     You may notice that every few years in there    in Rockefeller Center in New York City is roped off and you are not allowed to walk between the buildings. This is to break your prescriptive right to walk across, between the buildings and    XXXX.    

1:07:20

                                     ????

1:07:21

XXXX    1338 to 1453.     And in this the king obtained royal taxation, a royal army, and a royal system of justice.

1:07:37

                                     We got something which is typical of the West:     the rule of lawyers and judges.     And there were three periods in the history of the West in which we have been overwhelmed by lawyers and judges, who tell us again and again that you cannot do certain things because they are illegal, even if these things are absolutely essential to be done.     That would be in 1315 to about 1480 or so    (that's the first period); again, from about 1680 to the French Revolution, 1789, which was a revolt against this mass of confused, legalistic rigidity.     You couldn't do anything.     And then    the third [period] is our own day, when judges and lawyers are running everything and we are obsessed by it.     But it is part of the tradition of the West, and it goes back.     And the French Revolution is, of course, the violent response to such a situation.

1:08:53

                                     Now, after about 1370.     Let me, much more briefly.     The English attempt to conquer France was hopeless.     They could win battles, but they could not control territory.     Eventually all they did was go out and plunder, killing people, burn villages, seize rich people and demand ransoms, and so forth and so forth.     Living off the country.     And they     believed that    XXXX    if they punished the French in this way, the French people would realize that the king of France would not protect them, and therefore they should turn their allegiance to the king of England, and not give allegiance to    the king of France.     But the English were quite mistaken in this, because ultimately the French people    XXXX    thinking was the local lords should protect them;    and, when they were unable to protect them, instead of shifting their allegiance to the king of England, they shifted their allegiance from the local lords to the king of France.     This reached its peak in such things as Joan of Arc, 1429, who summoned the whole religious loyalty and allegiance of France, to a very considerable degree, to focus it    on this pious, weakling (I suppose, in many ways), retiring man, the so-called    Dauphin.     She insisted that he must go to Rheims and be coronated; and she insisted that everybody rally to throw out the English.     And the English were thrown out, in about 25 years.    

1:10:50

                                     That king, Charles VII, I think was one of the most important of French kings, although this is not widely recognized.     Two years ago, a new biography of him appeared in English and it is almost worthless,         By a, by    XXXX    at Yale [M. G. A. Vale, 1974].     Notice he is king technically, I suppose, from 1422 to 1461, and the war ended in 1453, although he didn't have a peace treaty    until 1492, I believe it was.         So here's a hundred years after the war ended a, in which he was king.     And what he did, he tried to solidify the    dominia    of France in a way that they should detect, because that was the custom,     And that is the rights of everyone.     To do this he did a number of things,     He established a royal army with a systematic system of taxation to support it.     But two other things were much more important.     In    the    Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, 1438,    he codified the rights of the Church in France; and these were the rights of the Church in France against the king as well as against the Pope.     An autonomous Church, electing its own members, its own bishops, controlling its own property, and so forth.     That's 1438, while the war was still going on.     

1:12:47

                                     And then in 1457 [actually, 1454], four    years after the war, he issued -- this is amazing -- he issued an edict,    Montils-le-Tours    -- m-o-n-t-i-l-[s]             l-e-[s]             t-o-u-r-[s].     I don't find it mentioned in most history books.     It certainly is the most important edict, probably, that was in of the Old, Old Regime.     It was an order for every locality to write down the local customs.         It took a hundred and fifty years to do it, and then    XXXX    to revise it,    but by 1580, which is where we're talking, there were 365 law codes of the local customs in France; and these were the binding laws,    which meant he had condemned France to what we would call legal dis-unity.     So where he had territorial unity, he had every other kind of legal dis-unity.     Taxes were different everywhere, because [of] the way it was customary to do it.     There were tolls preventing commerce from moving everywhere. There was no unity of the judicial system:     at one time there were fourteen supreme courts.    

1:14:28

                                     And this dis-unified condition was the condition which led inevitably to the French Revolution, although it took hundreds of years to reach that inevitable fact.     Inevitable fact is simple.     No modern state in 1789 could survive which had different systems of weights and measurements for every commodity, even every miller's sack (with a miller in every district), which had different laws (so that Voltaire said you changed laws every time you changed your post horse), which had conflicting jurisdictions; which had different rates of pay[ing taxes] (so the rich paid nothing in taxes and the poor paid a great deal, and in other places the rich paid a great deal).     I mean it was just chaos, because whatever was, was custom; and, under the prescriptive rights, that custom was    dominia.        And    dominia    was the law.    

1:15:35

                                     And as a result, in 1789 we find a solution to a problem which, when I was younger than even the students who are here, struck me right in the face (I always had the eyes of a child).     I said:     "If the king of France was absolute in 1789, and all the books say so, how could he be bankrupt, unless the country was bankrupt?"     And no one claims that France was bankrupt in 1789; France was among the wealthiest countries of Europe.     So if the king was absolute, there was no reason why he couldn't use his absolute power to raise the money he needed from a wealthy economic system such as existed in France.     This is one of the reasons I studied this subject; and what I found was that the king of France was not absolute -- he was not even sovereign.     And, indeed, he had reached perhaps the peak of his power around 1520; and by 1576, when we are ending this lecture, already his power was collapsing.         And it collapses into a growing morass of increasingly rigid restraints.     I'll give you one example, and then you can leave, although you've been very patient.

1:17:07

                                     The king could not borrow, because he had no collateral.     If anything he had belonged to the monarchy, it doesn't belong to him, then he can't put up any of these royal possessions as collateral on loans.     Because, if I    like to borrow 100,000    livres, and someone says    I'd have to put up collateral, maybe I could get a necklace or something of the Queen, which wasn't part of the royal    dominia, that    XXXX    means it would be all right.     But he had to borrow millions.     So he had no credit.     What he did was, for centuries, he, he couldn't alienate properties, so he alienated incomes.     And by 1789 every income that he had coming in had already been committed to some extent.         So when he, his    ancestors said to someone, "I want you to do this, and if you do this, you will make this income from this place".     And maybe you can buy    XXXX    So when he wanted to borrow money, he could say:     "All right, there's little money.     He would pay, I wouldn't pay it back , but I will pay you the interest on it.     And in just the    interest on this income, that has just come free (because the family who has been getting it for three hundred years has died out).     And now that it's become free, it leaves, yields, let us say, 100,000 a year, and at ten percent interest you will give me a million.     And then you'll have 100,000 a year     And if you ever want your money, you can always sell an income of 100,000 a year to anybody for a million."

1:19:09

                                     Now, he had to find in 1561 enormous sums of money.     (I won't explain how he got so badly in debt, to save time.)         And what he did was, the city of Paris said that they would do it.     They would guarantee these loans that were given to him, but they needed a guarantee that the interest would be paid.     And the Church of France volunteered to pay the interest.     These are    les Rentes sur l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris.     This made within a hundred years, a hundred fifty years, the Church of France stronger, and more of a sovereign political entity, than the monarchy itself.     But we'll have to save that for next Wednesday.    

1:20:10

Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen.    

1:20:12

II: “The State of Estates", A.D. 1576 - 1776

by Carroll Quigley Ph.D.

0:00:01

[Applause]

0:00:17

Thank you, Professor Brown.

0:00:23

                             You know, of course,...     Well, I might as well begin by thanking you for coming out in such awful weather.     You know, I just retired this spring, with joy that I was retiring, in spite of the fact I enjoyed every minute of my 41 years of teaching    on the university level.

0:00:46

                                     The only slight flaw in retiring was that I would no longer have Professor Brown as my boss.     I considered it my gift just before I retired to the fact that she was unanimously re-elected head of our department last year.     We have a prize with her.

0:01:16

                                     Last time, I portrayed the sweep that we're concerned with of a thousand years as a period in 976 when we had no state at all.     All power was private power.     But we also had, really, no individuals, that is, no isolated individuals.     All that we had were individuals so deeply embedded in local communities, local self-sufficient communities, that their power relationships within which they functioned were in their day-to-day activities, and the controls of their behavior were almost totally internalized in their neurological and hormone systems.     So they obeyed what seemed to them to be their inner compulsions and what they were doing was fulfilling their functions that they had in this interwoven community structure, which changed so slowly, that even in a long life     -- and, of course, most people in those days did not live long lives -- but even in a long life, let us say,    of sixty or seventy years almost no changes would be noticed by anyone in the pattern    XXXX    which they had embedded inside of themselves.    

0:02:54

                                     And at the end of the thousand year period, in the year in which we now are, we no longer have communities, except shattered, broken, crippled ones, isolated ones.     Instead, we have states of monstrous power and frustrated individuals, isolated individuals; the state and the individuals working together, from opposite sides, to destroy what we have left of communities -- local, family, or whatever they might he.    

0:03:35

                                     Over this long period of a thousand years, the growth of the state, which is our subject, marked by the beginning of public power, the appearance of a state apparatus of a very primitive kind, made up of a king and his assistants, which eventually became a monarch and a bureaucracy.     And around this core, there gradually accumulated sufficient activities to make what we would regard as a public authority and, eventually, a state.     And the mark of that can be most clearly, I think, indicated by the development of what we call sovereignty.     Without sovereignty, I do not think we would say that a     state is much of a state, although we might call it that.     Now, there has been a great deal of talk in books about sovereignty -- not, unfortunately, in history books very much -- but no one has ever bothered to define it.     And from my study of the growth of the state, I have been able to, it seems to me, put together what sovereignty consists of, at least historically in the tradition of our Western Civilization.     It seems to me, it has eight functions or aspects, and the approximate order in which they appeared are these:    

0:05:32

                                     First, all human needs require that a person live and cooperate with other people for satisfaction.     Nobody, no one, none of us can satisfy any significant human needs by acting alone in a state of nature.     The two fundamental ones from the beginning are: that the group within which a community is satisfying the functions and needs must be defended from outside attack.     So the first aspect is defense.     Secondly, disputes and conflicts within the group must be settled, so that insiders do not fight with each other, but cooperate, rather than open themselves to enemy attack.     So defense is first, against outsiders; judicial activity is second, settling disputes among insiders.    

0:06:38

                                     The third one is very difficult to talk about.     I once years ago gave a whole course upon it:     the administrative power.     The French word for it --    i.e., in the study of French public law -- most of my study was done in the French language and in French public law -- is    la police.     It does not mean "police," it rather means "policy," and I suppose the best way to define it would be to say:     the power to take those discretionary actions which are necessary for the continued existence of the community.     In the Middle Ages and in the Dark Ages with which I began, in 976, one of the chief needs was the food supply, and by the Eighteenth Century, the early Eighteenth Century, in France, if you simply said "la police," what it meant was control of the grain trade.     However, in strict legal understanding it meant much more.     For example, it meant:     what emergency measures would be taken. and who would order them, if a plague appeared?     That the dead, dead must be buried the same day, and things of this kind.     When anyone must get a swine flu injection.     La police.     Now, notice: the, it's nothing that you can designate.     But it is a most significant power, administrative power; and, when I taught the subject, I found out I shocked the students by saying that, in my opinion, it is almost the most important of the eight aspects of sovereignty, and there is no provision whatever for it in the Constitution of the United States.     

0:08:33

                                     And when people talk in terms of three branches of government, or three aspects of government, if they    XXXX    on England, they tend to call [it] -- as    the Lord Chief Justice of England,    Lord Hewart [of Bury], did around 1935 [actually, in 1929] --        "the headless fourth branch of government."             He wrote a book whose title was    The New Despotism.    The Headless Fourth Branch of the Government.     And yet I could show him that where a thousand years before his book, it had existed as one of the attributes of what is necessary to keep a community, or a group of people cooperating together, and keep it functioning.     La police.     I emphasize that the power is discretionary.     And the finest example I can give you of that is a voice cop that's directing traffic at a busy intersection: he has the power to start and stop the traffic as he judges fit, and can enforce that with the power of the state.     And it does not obey any of the rules of public authority, which the common [law] lawyers of to-day insist is necessary (But I'm not gonna speak my passion on that subject til the third lecture) when it [sic] destroyed the efforts to create administrative power in this country.     When the Interstate Commerce Commission was created, that was the first effort, in 1889, and has been absolutely paralyzed and made it impossible, a number of things, one of them was insisting that they must use the procedures of the common law courts, which is nonsense. It's the discretionary power.     That is just as if you asked a policeman, who's directing traffic down here at the Key Bridge end of M Street. should obey the common, the common law procedural requirements.         All right that is the third.

0:10:48

                                     The fourth is quite obvious: the taxing power, mobilizing resources for public purposes.     Notice:     that the French government, when the French Revolution started in 1789, did not have the taxing power.     But I'll get back to that.    

0:11:02

                                     The third [fifth] is legislative power.     Now, here there has always been confusion because for many centuries, and certainly back in 976, there was no legislative power, and yet there were laws and were rules.     And the reason was that in a society largely dominated by a community, in which, in which personal behavior is largely controlled by internalized controls, in such a situation the rules are not made by an outsider.     You discover what the rules are by observing how people act and, accordingly, the law was found and not made, and it was a very drastic innovation when we shifted from finding the law to making the law.     And we haven't really yet made that transition completely in the common law countries, where we still say that the judges are finding the law, as if, by looking back to previous decisions, rather than to previous actions of people.    

0:12:14

                                     When originally the law was found and when the royal judges first began to go around England trying cases, they never said "This is the law."     They gathered together a group of men, sworn local people, and they said, "What do you do in a case like this?"     And they said "We generally do this".     Now in some cases they would look puzzled and say, "In the memory of no one here has there been such a case."     That they had arson or something of the kind.     And then the judges would say, "Well, In traveling around England trying cases, I have found that the most common rule is...."     And thus we established the common law.     So the common law in England was the law that the royal judges discovered going around and finding out what the     law was, and filling in gaps with what was common to England.     Notice: the common law in England was a royal creation, from true local custom.    

0:13:27

                                     The law in France, as I showed you last time, was the writing down of local customs in all of their diversity.     The legislative process,    I will say very little more about it,    but the first examples of writing down were not regarded as making new rules at all:     they were simply promulgations of customs.     And it was a long time before people realized that we did, in fact, have a legislative process going in and went on, and were making new rules.     It was centuries before people knew this.     All right, that's the fifth aspect, legislation.    

0:14:09

                                     The sixth aspect we might as well call executive, and it's of relative little importance.     it's the enforcement of laws and judicial decisions.     And the executive action became increasingly necessary.     As time went on, communities disintegrated, and peoples’ behavior became less and less subject to internalized controls and had to become invasively    subject to externalized controls, such as force, duress, threats, fines, restitution, or other kinds of outside, external pressure.     To-day we think almost entirely in terms of law and order.     If someone campaigns for the Presidency on law and order, what he's saying is, he's gonna intensify the external controls upon behavior that people don't approve of.     Executive.    

0:15:13

                                     Now, the last two [aspects of sovereignty] are of tremendous importance, and they are, perhaps, the most important to-day.     And yet they are rarely discussed in connection with sovereignty.     The seventh is money control.     I pointed out last time that from the very beginning, going back to the very earliest days, I would say more than 500 B.C., coinage, and control of money, was one of the attributes of royalty.     But, of course, to-day it includes much more than just coinage:     it means the creation and control of money and credit, and in the English-speaking world this is not a part of sovereignty.     It is in private hands, even though it is perhaps the most important power that exists in a society such as ours to-day.    

0:16:08

                                     And the last aspect of sovereignty, the incorporating power,    i.e., the right to say that a group of people is a single legal entity,    i.e., to create corporations.     This did not exist in the English-speaking world until quite late.     It existed in the Roman Law always.     One of the distinctive things different about the Roman Law was that all that existed was the    imperium    (public authority) and individuals.     That's all that existed.         If there existed any other legal groups -- and by legal, I mean that they had the right to own property and to sue or be sued in court -- then they had to have some kind of a charter from the Imperial power to justify this.     Now, of course, with the fall of Rome that ceased entirely, and corporations of the year 970, and there were thousands of them all over Europe, many of them ecclesiastical, but some other kinds as well.     It was never quite clear, for example, whether each diocese was a corporation, whether each parish was a corporation.     Certainly    we generally knew that each monastery or convent was a corporation, and so forth.     But there were certainly thousands of them and they did not have any charter of incorporation.

0:17:48

                                     All right, those are the eight aspects of sovereignty.     Now once I have shown them in this way, it's quite clear that when I come to the end of to-night's lecture in 1789, very few states in Europe will have all of them.     And indeed, when I begin the lecture to-night in 1576, almost no states in Europe had all of them.     However, we could say    XXXX    if a state had a good try at them, and had six of them, or most of the    six, we might say it was a sovereign state or a sovereign entity.    

0:18:34

                                     Now, the next aspect is: How was it possible to build up a sovereign entity around the basic core?     Which had to exist, because, unless there were something there of an administrative nature,....     And, in almost every case, what was there....     There are two exceptions, city-states, like Venice and so forth, which did not have a monarch.     But all landed, extensive landed territories had a monarch, and unless that monarch had assistants, which I will call a bureaucracy, then you could hardly expect that the aspects of sovereignty would accumulate.

0:19:21

                                     In accumulating, however, the king and his bureaucrats needed something else.     They needed allies outside; and they got, the reason they needed these allies; and, of course, they needed money.     They needed personnel, which I mentioned last time, that is people who could read, and write, and keep records, count their money, and so forth.     And these people would have the seals indicating that they were doing this by authority of the king, and so forth.     (And the collection of seals is quite interesting. I've been in archives where seals were lying around, loose on the floor, and I did want to pick up a couple.     One in particular was beautiful     -- Richard the Third, I believe it was --    seal of green wax, and,    but they would only let me take two that were lying there.     They were papal bulls, of the late mediaeval period. They had somehow been cut off.     Papal bulls, you know, are only about as big as quarters, and they're lead, with very garish silk strings attaching them to the document, they break off quite easily.     The garish strings are either bright, they're bright yellow and red together.    

0:20:40

                                     So, now, the    gradual development in the thousand years that we're concerned with, which we would call economic expansion and growth, and these were the result of social changes, made it possible for the monarchy to find allies.     And I don't believe I will take the time to write them on the board here, but, I will say, at the beginning, all that we had were lords and serfs, a kind of a two-class system.        

0:21:19

                         Then, when the king began to appear with his bureaucracy -- and we'll put him outside the classes -- the lords separated (and that was in the Thirteenth Century, I mean the Eleventh Century, as a result of the Investiture Struggle) into the Lords Spiritual, that's the clergy, and the Lords Temporal, what we would call the nobility.     And the peasants.     We'd have a three-class system.        

0:21:48

                         And eventually, the beginnings of commerce and the growth of towns gave rise to a middle class, the merchants, the burghers -- and we would put them in there -- so you now have peasants, burghers, nobles, clergy, and above it all, still the king with his bureaucracy.     That you, you would have those    by the year 1300, very    clearly established.     

0:22:12

                                     Within a hundred and fifty years, when they reached a great crisis (in fact, it's....,they reached a crisis within fifty years), you have an additional one, in the city:     craftsmen in giles, in guilds.     Woodworkers, leatherworkers, people of this kind.     

0:22:36

                                     And you might make a distinction, and say that not every landlord was a noble.     There were lesser landlords, who were not noble.     And, in fact, in England they were a very vitally important group.     They are frequently called the gentry.     That would be, let us say, around 1400 or certainly 1450.    

0:22:57

                                     And you would thus have the clergy, nobles, gentry, burghers, craftsmen, peasants.     And then, if you come up past this night's lecture, into the Nineteenth Century, past 1776, you would find that you had a new kind of    bourgeoisie    in the city, the industrial    bourgeoisie, and this created a new kind of working class in the city, the    proletariat, while craftsmen were being pushed aside.     And so forth.     I will come up to that now.

0:23:34

                                     Now, what the monarch had to do was to find allies down below, in order to accumulate powers when he would be resisted.     His first alliance was with the clergy, and he was resisted by the nobility.     But soon the clergy and nobility allied together; and he was being resisted by them jointly.     He found then allies in the    bourgeoisie, in the merchants, the sons of merchants, who could read and write and count, and, indeed, were much more loyal to the king than any clergy had ever been.     And in England and other places, they found allies among the gentry.     In Eastern Europe, in Eastern, in Germany, the    Junker, younger sons of the landed class, and so forth.     Notice, that at no time, at least in [the period covered by] the first two lectures, did the king find any allies worth talking about in what was really the most important group in society, the peasants, who were producing the food for everyone else.     And one of the    XXXX    studies I have been making in the past ten years on this whole problem has been that it is of no use to have something, no matter how essential it is, and expect it will be a source of power.     If you take basic things that everyone needs, like food and, I assume, sex, maybe health, things of this kind, you will never find that possession of these has ever given the possessors or the people who supply the community with them enough power to play any rôle in political action.     So we just leave the peasants out of it.    

0:25:30

                                     Not all of these    XXXX    groups obtained status and became a focus of political authority.     Those that did formed what is the subtitle of the lecture to-night: Estates.     And the number of Estates that exist in a community is no real criterion or sign of the number of social classes that they had.     I have given you six social classes here that many places had, let us say, in 1789.     I don't know any country with six Estates, however.     In England they had two estates, the Lords Temporal and Spiritual, and then the Commons.     And the Commons was made up of the gentry from the shires and the    bourgeoisie    from the municipalities.     So they had then four classes, but only two houses.

0:26:35    

                                     Now, the significant thing in English history, which I want to emphasize, is that England did have what you certainly would call, I think, a sovereign state very early.     Certainly by 1400.     And it had that sovereign state, however, not in the hands of the king,    but instead in the hands of a joint corporation, known technically as    Rex in Parlamento, the king-in-parliament.     And this possessor of sovereignty,    Rex in Parlamento, or prince in parliament, if you wish, is, I'm quite sure (and I haven't investigated it as exhaustively), is quite sure, I, is not just English.     It's Northern Monarchy.     In other words, you will find the oldest parliament in the world to-day -- it's more than a thousand years old -- is in Iceland, and other old ones are in Norway and Denmark and places like this.     And this idea of a ruler having the power to do almost anything, if the parliament agrees, is the real, basic background of a tremendous political power like Gustavus Adolphus in 1630, in the Thirty Years War.     All right, that's, is in England.

0:27:58

                                     But if you go into France you will find there are three Estates: there's the clergy, the nobility, and the rest, called the Third.     In France there was a certain representation there for the peasants.     They did have representatives, the same as everybody else.     But, as you certainly know, the so-called    Estates General    did not meet for a hundred and seventy-five years.     It was not called to assemble after 1614, until it was forced to be called to meet in 1789, and that's what started the French Revolution.    And the reason it wasn't called was because the king did not want more problems than he had.     And he would have had more.        

0:28:44

                                     All right, now, if you go farther east, you will find places where there are four, and there are some places where there are five, Estates.     And in the course of history some of them changed.     They eliminated groups, until finally they reduced the number, and so forth.     

0:29:02

                                     Now, the next point I have to make is extraordinarily    complex.     I have to make a distinction, which I have already been developing, that as you go across Europe the situation is quite different the further east you go.     I have already showed you a tremendous difference between England and France.     But there are two other zones that we must deal [with].     France goes from the     English Channel to the Rhine.     Western Germany goes from the Rhine to the Elbe River.     Eastern Europe goes from the Elbe River to the Pinsk Marshes or the Pribyat River, which is considerably east of Warsaw, and is the natural boundary between Europe and Asia.         And is very close to the actual boundary to-day between Russia and Poland     (It's a little further east).     Now, these four had totally different experiences, and I want to look at them a little bit.     Let me glance at my notes.     I think some of those differences. These other differences became crucial in what happened to monarchical authority and to state power,    depending upon what happened to the Estates.     So I think it is perfectly justifiable to call this two hundred years [period] the Age of Estates.    

0:30:49    

                         If we look at the four parts of Europe, which I've put here,    a general rule which you might keep in mind is:     that the more extensive the power,    i.e., the greater acreage you had, the less intense it was:     extension at the sacrifice of intension.     By intension, I mean how far down socially does the royal power go?     And you will you find that in almost no places did the royal power go down where it interfered with the behavior of peasants.     Now, which would be eighty percent of the whole population.     I won’t go.    XXXX     I could give you a periodization of it, but there's no point.    

0:31:35

                                     Now    these four sections are usually introduced by saying it's like a ham sandwich: that is to say, England and Eastern Europe are similar in certain ways, although very different in others,         The chief simularity I want to point out at once is this:     England was an area of large estates; Eastern Europe was an area of large estates; but France and West Germany were areas of family-sized farms.     In the Middle Ages, if you go back to 976. no one owned the land.     People had rights of usage in the land.     But eventually some troublemaker, and according to Rousseau he should have been struck dead, or something, asked "Who owns this land?"     The question should never have been asked.    That is asking    "Who has    proprietas    in this land?    

0:32:45

                                     Instead they should have continued, as the Middle Ages did, "What    dominia    exist in this land, and who owns them?"     And that's what you'll find in the questions that William the Conqueror asked, in 1087, when he sent out people in the Domesday survey.     They asked not who    own[s].     Instead "Of whom is this land held?     Who holds it?         What people live upon it?     What obligations do they have?"     And questions of this kind, which makes it possible, rather dimly, to use the Domesday survey to create a social structure of England in 1087.     Now, these changes, and you can see how drastic it is.     If England had large estates, serfdom ended in England by 1300.     By    1300 in Eastern Europe    serfdom was really just beginning.     See they also had large estates.     In Eastern Europe serfdom was still there, and in Germany by 1800.     And only the defeat by Napoleon made them make up their minds they had to abolish it, in 18--, approximately 1808.

0:34:06

                         As you know, if we leave Europe and go into Asia, in Russia they did not abolish serfdom until 1863, just before the time we freed our slaves.     So the history of serfdom is entirely different. It was eliminated just about    totally in England, simply because people, instead of working on someone's land a couple of days a week, paid him money, a penny a day.     So they made an agreement: "You won't have to work for me any more -- and I'm just as glad because I'm not going to grow things to eat.     I'm going to grow wool from sheep, or something of this kind.     So you owe me two days work a week, give me two pennies a week instead."     Unfortunately, in [cases] the English judges, and I'll show you why in a moment, said [that] that payment is rent and, if it's rent, it's an indication that the lord owns the land.     Therefore the peasant had no real right in the land, though he wouldn't be paying rent.    

0:35:16

                                     Now in France those obligations to work and to do other things, what we call manorial dues, still existed in the French Revolution.     And they're not abolished until the Fourth of August of 1789.     But they were not of great significance; they weren't....They were a nuisance.     And they did not involve week work or things of that kind.     That all had been paid off, and.... Had been paid off by money, which had, because of the inflation    (And the whole history of France is the history of inflation), showed that the value of money had become so small, that the payment that had been agreed upon was hardly worth collecting.

0:36:02

                         Now, let us look at a number of things.     What law existed in the....?     In England.     The Common Law, I told you.     It was the law that was "found."     In France.     It was the local customs which had been "written down."     Ah, in Germany, West Germany.     A totally different situation.     We had, in the western part of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, what we called "Ren and Ref" ("Renaissance and Reformation").     But in Germany they had "Ren and Ref and Rec"     (the "Reception"), because they generally took over the Roman law in the Sixteenth Century.     And this meant that the prince became the head; and, if he can make Roman law be obeyed, he becomes sovereign in that way.     And he used that power to protect the landholding of the peasantry, rather than to protect the rights of the nobles or the clergy.     Furthermore, as a result of the Renaissance [sic, should be Reformation], the prince in Western Germany also became head of the Church.     Well that's the way it was in Roman law:     the Roman Emperor was Supreme Pontiff,    Pontifex Maximus, the head, chief of all the priests in the Roman system, and so forth.    

0:37:39

                         So, by the "Reception" of the Roman law, Western Germany became sovereign.     XXXX    The king became, or the prince, because most of them were not kings.     The reason they were not kings is that you couldn't adopt the title of king in the Holy Roman Empire except with the permission of the Emperor, and the Emperor would not generally allow that, unless you paid him off or    were    somebody....     For instance, the Wittelsbach family he could trust.     That's in Bavaria, so he allowed them to be called King of Bavaria.     But he, he couldn't trust the Hohenzollems up in the north, in Prussia, so he, they could not become King of Brandenburg.     They were Elector of Brandenburg, but when they wanted to take the title of king in 1701, they could not take it in the Holy Roman Empire, so they took it in Prussia, which was outside the Holy Roman Empire, to the east.     And the correct name was not King of Prussia, although that, within 100 years, that    was adopted.     It was King    in    Prussia, though he was Elector of Brandenburg and King in Prussia without the Habsburg -- because they were, mostly the emperors were Habsburgs -- without their permission.

0:38:56

                                     Now, the, if you go further east, what happened is, the rulers did not have the money, and above all, could not find the skilled personnel to keep his records.     He couldn't build up a bureaucracy.     He did not want to build up a bureaucracy out of townspeople, and the towns were few and far between.     Furthermore, the towns in Germany were collapsing into a long period of depression beginning around, right in the Renaissance period, certainly by 1500.     So what they did generally, the princes in Eastern Europe, is that they used for their bureaucracy the younger sons (that's where the word    Junker    comes from) or the nobility themselves and the gentry themselves.     And they used them as their administrators.     But they did not pay these, so they were not paid officials,     And, naturally, as administrators, they would be administrating only in their own localities, where they would systematically administer to their own benefit and not necessarily to the benefit of the ruler, the prince.    

0:40:13

                                     Now, as a result of this, all the earlier monarchs in that period, in that area, in Eastern Europe vanished; and, generally, the state that they represented vanished with them.     It's worth pointing this out.     Why did these kingdoms, Lithuania, or principalities, Transylvania,    kingdom of Bohemia,    above all, the kingdom of Poland, why did they vanish?     And the answer is:     they vanished because the prince or king found himself facing an Estate that was made up very largely of landlords.     And he could not get the money or the skilled bureaucracy or the other things he needed; he really couldn't even get the army, because without money    he couldn't hire    mercenaries.     And, as a result, they were able to destroy him.     Now, how they destroyed him is this, in most cases: they refused to admit that his family had any hereditary right to the throne.     (And it is correct that kingship originally was not a hereditary title; it was    an elective title.     And by    only, it was only after years that it gradually became accepted that the kingship should be inherited -- and inherited by fundamental laws of the monarchy)

0:41:54

                                     These elective kingships were suicidal, not just for the king here, but for the country itself.     The reason is that the,XXXX    the Estates would elect as king only that man who promised to reduce the royal power the most.     We almost got a competition in this in the 1976 election.     If we had Ford and Reagan running against each other -- and I guess I would like to see that, except you would have to take one or the other, I suppose, and there is not really any choice -- but they would be    XXXX    saying, "I will govern less.     I will cut back taxes.     I will cut back big government.     I will do all these kinds of things to reduce the government."

0:42:48    

                                     Now this is what the elected monarchs of Eastern Europe did; and, as they did this, they eventually had no powers at all.     And at that point you got the military revolution, which began about 1440 and which was well established by 1579.     By the military revolution I mean this:     the previous weaponry, particularly in Eastern Europe, was mounted nobles on horseback with spears.     In other words, what we would call knights.     But after 1500, and certainly after 1400, these were not successful.     Infantrymen with spears, such as the Swiss pikemen, or infantrymen (if they could be    protected by spearmen or by obstacles of various kinds), who had missile weapons, such as guns,    arquebusiers, and, above all, artillery, which could smash down the castles of nobles, were necessary.     Not only to control the nobles in your own country, as the king of France did and the king of England did, but it was also necessary to protect your country against outside invaders.     

0:44:15    

                                     And the Estates controlled by landlords in Eastern Europe refused to permit that military revolution.     They would rather go down to defeat as an obsolete system of weaponry, if they could be certain that they would retain control of all the people who lived on their estates, which the king had already granted to them.    

    0:44:47    

                                     And this is why you got in Eastern Europe large estates, increasingly troubled, and abject serfdom, the domination of a landed group, and even one....     Because, as you know, in Poland    they even established that if even a single landlord said no, it couldn't be done.     The "free veto."         It's as if we had a parliamentary body that, any time it made a decision, it had to be unanimous.     And the reason is because they were going to stick together and they would get what they could in their own little areas.     

0:45:28    

                                     But they were anti-cities.     They did not want people in cities who were trading.     If any trading went on, they wanted it [for] themselves, and they wanted foreigners, such as the Dutch, or the Swedes, or others, to come, or the Germanic cities, or the Hanseatic cities, to come right into their estates in the Vistula River and others, and they would then trade to them the goods that they were producing with serf labor,    i.e., grain, wool, hides, lumber, things of this kind.     So, as a result, Eastern Europe fell backward into a colonial area.     Its trade and its middle class more or less vanished.     The cities became more and more [insignificant], and the trade in the cities was largely taken over by foreigners and aliens, many of them Jews.     And this is where the ghettos and pales of Eastern European cities came.     Incidentally, this is not unique, just in Poland.     It went on in many other places, because this was a regular problem.     Where you have a landed group in control of a society, they are very likely to destroy commercial activity and allow it to fall into the hands of foreigners and aliens, like the Ottoman Empire allowed it to fall in the hands of French and Greeks and various others. The people in Russia allowed it to fall in the hands of Greeks and various others, and so forth.     This is a largely prevalent system.    

0:47:12    

                                     Another area    XXXX    that marks a difference here,    XXXX        all of the differences, is corporation bodies ceased to be of much significance.     In other words, guilds ceased to be important, the same way that towns, and these were two chief secular corporate bodies that we would find.     And, indeed, the Church as corporate body tended to become part of the landlord system also, so that a prince or a [member of a] princely family would also be the archbishop and the bishop.     And in some cases, as in Prussia, Albert of Brandenburg, who was bishop of at least three different places and archbishop, I believe, in two places, became the Prince, the Hohenzollern Prince of Prussia.     Which meant that he was taking over the corporation.     On the other hand, in Western Europe, corporations,    XXXX    the guilds and, above all, the towns, had a vitality and life of their own, and an independent rôle in law, in spite of the fact that in a truly sovereign state you would not have corporations unless they had an incorporating charter, as I've indicated to you.    

0:48:40    

                         Generally, in the period of Estates, government functions were not centralized; they were not uniform; they were assigned to different persons, different groups, different boards, different committees, and on an    ad    hoc    basis, without any rational distinctions such as we would accept; and this system    XXXX    went down, in many cases, to the low levels of villages or parishes, although I can guarantee that there were infrequently peasants and, almost as infrequently, parish priests found on these governing boards.    

0:49:24    

                         In this period, right through, up to    XXXX    period we're concerned with this evening, dynastic monarchy was essentially a personal thing.     If you go back to the beginning, you had feudalism with no monarchy, or no monarchy of any significance.     The next period we call feudal monarchy.     There allegiance, and loyalty, was owed to the monarchy only by his vassals.     But then you have the period we are dealing with to-night, dynastic monarchy, where loyalty, and allegiance, was due to the dynasty in which the monarch belonged,    but it's always on a personal basis.        Your allegiance is owed to the existing member of that family -- the Tudors or the Bourbons or the Hohenzollerns or whatever it is -- and it's a personal one.     

0:50:22    

                                     However, by the period we're dealing with to-night, from 1576 to 1776, the loyalty was expected from any people who are active political participants.     Now that would still be much less than twenty percent of the population roughly, because,    XXXX    that as I said, it still included no peasants, and they were probably at eighty percent at least.     And there were others too.        So it was a personal thing.

0:50:56    

                                     Treason was disloyalty to the person or to the dynasty; it was not disloyalty to the state, to the community, or to the territory in which people lived.     XXXX    we    looked very briefly at these.     Now,    XXXX

0:51:22

                                     In England, sovereignty was achieved early.     Rex in Parlamento.     Why the state    used the judiciary for unpaid services.         And the gentry were unpaid members of Parliament.     They were also unpaid local justices, the justices of the peace, and so forth.     The law that was practiced was the Common Law.         Now, there are things that are important here.     [One] is, how do you become a judge?     You have to know the law.     And if you have to know the law, how do you learn it?

0:52:09

                                     The local justice of the peace in England, which was the local, the lowest level of justice throughout all this period and even later, right up into the Twentieth Century, was the justice of the peace.     He was not expected to know the law.     He was unpaid.     And he was the local magistrate.     Now, if he was to learn the law,    he did not go to a law school, really, and certainly not to a university, because the common law was not taught in universities.     Instead it was taught in four very expensive eating clubs in Westminster, the Inns of Court: [the Inner Temple,] the Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn, and [Grey's Inn] so forth.     Inner Temple.     The four Inns of Court.     And these were expensive.     You had to eat meals there, you had to listen to the lawyers talking about....     You see, they were there, they were the places where the judges and lawyers who were trying cases in Westminster spent the evening[s] during the judicial sessions.     And they not only discussed    the cases that were going on each day, but men who were regarded as authorities gave discussions afterwards in the lounge in regard to contracts, or whatever it would be.     And in this way you would pick up the necessary knowledge of the law.

0:53:29

                         But this was expensive.     To join the Inns of Court, it required, oh, hundreds and hundreds of guineas, which would mean hundreds and hundreds of dollars in our language.     Only the landed oligarchy could afford it; and this, only people who were lawyers, and had passed the bar through this process, could become judges.     So what you had was, which is true of much of English history, a very small hole through which circulation was allowed for people to work their way up.     But it was an educational loophole that they had to squeeze their way through, and it was expensive in most cases.     And the result was that only those people who had affluent parents [could become lawyers and judges], and for    much of English history, at least up until the period we're concerned with at    the end of this lecture to-night,    i.e., to 1776,    the only affluent parents that most people had would be the gentry, landlord class.        So your eldest son would take over the estate; your second son would, perhaps, go into the navy or the army, or you would find him a place in the Church, a living, as they called it; and then the third son would. perhaps, go to the Inns of Court and try to become a lawyer.    

0:55:02

                                     By 1776 -- and this will end my discussion of England, which is very brief, and, as you can see, inadequate -- you had a landed oligarchy in England.     And that landed oligarchy controlled the Parliament.     It had taken it away from the king, so you now had sovereignty in [Rex in] Parlamento,     It had taken it away    in the civil wars of the Seventeenth Century.     And that same land oligarchy had control of the court system and the interpretation of the law.     And, naturally, when any occasion arose when there was a dispute, "What rights does someone have in this piece of land?", they invariably decided in favor of the landlord group and against any other group, above all, any peasants.     And the result was, England's rural areas became depopulated.     And that's why, in the early 1700s, Goldsmith wrote    The Deserted Village.     " Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain...."     But there's no one there.     Or if you read    Elegy in a Country Churchyard, once again, there's no one around.     The whole countryside is deserted by the Eighteenth Century.     And they came to America, and this, or they went to other places, and this gave us eventually the British Empire.

0:56:25    

                                     Now,    France I'm saving, because I want to end up with France.    

0:56:29    

                                     In    West,    West Germany, there had been originally, much later [earlier] than in France, an emperor.         But because the emperor was elective, the same thing occurred to him    which occurred, happened to all elected kings and princes,    i.e.,    he had to make concessions, go into debt to get the necessary money and necessary votes, in order to be elected Emperor.     And the empire thus disintegrated into principalities which the emperor could not control.     However, the emperor, as long as he continued to exist, and technically he continued to exist until 1806, when his name was changed, from Holy Roman Emperor to Habsburg Emperor of Austria, by Napoleon.     If you want an imperial title, you can have one for Austria, but you can't have it for the Holy Roman Empire, and so forth.         The imperial title still existed, but all the rights and    powers of the Hapsburgs were the powers of the hundreds of other inheritances which they had.     The most significant, of course, were they were Archdukes of Austria, but they were Kings of Hungary, Kings of Bohemia, and many, many other things, as you know.    

0:57:55        

                         Now, as a result of this disintegration, what you got    what you got was small sovereign principalities, some of them so small that we are told you could walk around the circumference of the principality before breakfast.     And without spending any time upon it, I want to point out that, in my opinion, the greatest period of European history in the post-mediaeval period, certainly up until 1800, up to the time of Napoleon, was Western Germany in the late Eighteenth Century.     And I think you will see, if you make a list of the great geniuses in the history of Europe, that they are clustered in that period.     I won't attempt to do it, but think of the greatest mathematician.     Now, Englishmen will always say Newton, but it was a German in that period.     The greatest musician -- or, if you dispute it, there were three great musicians.     Great philosopher.     It was a very great period, and a period much    worth studying.

0:59:10    

                                     Now when they received the Roman law back at the time of the Reformation, and made themselves also heads of the Church, they got the following things:     the prince is at the top and, legally, beneath him are individuals.     Corporations must have a charter.     Judges are agents of the prince: he names them, he can fire them, he should pay them.     The prince is, in most cases, the head of the Church, even though in many cases he wasn't that religious, so you had Lutheran kings who, or you mean you had Calvinist kings who were heads of the Lutheran Church, and things like this.     Law was studied in the universities.     That's where you studied the Roman law.     In England that's where you studied the Roman law.     They called it the Civil Law.     In the universities.         And the prince controlled the army, the armed forces.     And that gave him; in fact, it meant that Germany was decentralized into hundreds of principalities.     And even after Napoleon, it still consisted of dozens of principalities.     But that does not mean it wasn't a good place.    

1:00:33

                                     Eastern Europe I have discussed.

1:00:37

                                     All right. Now, France.     France is the most interesting case.     It did not achieve sovereignty; and, I explained to you last time, it did not because the king was going    to rule according to law.     That meant he was going to protect    dominia    and not insist    proprietas;    but it meant that he did not have the powers to be effectively a king.     He had enormous incomes around; but, even in total, they were not enough for what was demanded of him.     And what he did was, instead of collecting the money from all of them into a treasury, and then paying out what was necessary, and having some kind of a budget or a system of account, or knowing where he was, what he did was, he promised people or got people to promise they would do something for him that he needed done, whatever it would be,    XXXX    a royal printer or something of this kind, and    XXXX    then he said, "All right.     Oh, here is a free income: it is the    Octrois, [i.e., the tolls paid going into a city, somewhere. -- It might be Rheims, or a number of cities]     All right, I will divert these tolls to you, that will pay you for being my printer to publish my    ordonnances"    and so forth.     Generally, at least sixty to eighty percent of his income were committed to these different purposes, and the only funds that he had available in any particular year would be the funds that would come free for some reason.     For example, if he gave it for life, when the person died, then it would come back to him; if he gave it for ten years, it would then come back.

1:02:32

                                     Now, this was not sufficient.     To raise money, he had to do other things.     I indicated to you last time, he did not have credit, because he couldn't alienate anything that the monarchy owned, because it wasn't his.     It was the monarchy's.     Therefore, he did not have credit.     But there was another restriction.     If he did have credit and borrowed money, because he obeyed the law, the laws of usury against interest were still in force, and remained in force until the French Revolution.     Now, they got around that in two ways.     One way is they said that certain moderate payments on borrowed money are necessary.     This is insurance against loss, and is not interest for use of the money.     But that limit, in most cases, was five and a half percent, which was not sufficient because you could get ten percent quite easily for money, let us say,    in the Seventeenth Century or in the....     In the early Eighteenth Century, there were occasions where you could certainly get twelve percent.     Instead, they devised a system called    les rentes, the incomes, and what it is is this:     Here is an income.     All right, that would be the interest.     But we won't call it that.             How would you like to buy an income?     All right, here is an income    which yields 50,000 a year.        If you will give me 100,000, I'll let you have it for a year.     That's fifty percent.     Then at the end of the year, I won't be able to give you back the money, the 100,000, so if you want the money back, sell it to somebody else.     So    rentes    became claims upon incomes which could be sold almost like stock exchange certificates of some kind.     And this is what became one of the chief sources, but they built up fantastic burdens of debt in this way.    

1:04:54

                                     I will not go into the details of it.     What they were doing became eventually, with    every act they were doing -- much worse than our Watergate,    everything they were doing in the financial world was illegal.         And they exempted supervisors and accounting, accountants who had to be sweared, so in order to do this they had to create thousands and thousands of fraudulent and forged documents to indicate that they were only getting    five and a half    percent and that the money was being repaid, when it wasn't at all.     Because they would make a document saying it was repaid, and then they would make another document saying that someone else had got it -- and that somebody else is your brother-in-law, and so no change was being made at all.     This is a most fantastic story, and there's an adequate book on it, which I will recommend, by a man named Julian Dent,     it's quite a recent book.     Crisis in Finance: Crown Financiers and Society in Seventeenth Century France.     It was published in 1973.     It is an extraordinary, hair-raising book.     The result was that the king of France was over the edge of bankruptcy most of the period, in fact, all of the period, covered by this lecture to-night, for two hundred years.         By that I mean, that his income, in gross, was smaller than the interest payments that he owed, in gross.     And to figure this out, now, I don't, Mr. Dent, Dent, I throw a French accent in there, but I can't, he's an American, spent years working in this before he discovered what it was that was going on.    

1:06:50

                                     All right.     Now, let's look at the situation in France.     Because of this, the king could not pay officers.     So he couldn't have officers.     What he had to do was to let people take positions in the government and use those positions to get money from fees.     And if the fees are not adequate, then they can take several    XXXX    positions, and they can then neglect all of them and spend a good deal of time working at something else, as a jeweler, or something.     (The Near East is like this, as you know, now.     Everyone in the Near East has five jobs and they don't appear at any of them except briefly, to say, "How is everything to-day?"     And they duck off again and they go to another job.     And so forth.     If you put it all together, it barely gets them by.)     XXXX    The king didn't have agents.     Now. he discovered that people were willing to pay to get jobs like this, so he began to sell offices that were totally unnecessary.     For example, they had, say, six or eight inspections to make sure that the quality of textiles was up to the rules that had been established.     And every time anybody inspected -- now he only inspected one bolt out of a thousand,    XXXX    whenever he passed around, but he then sold you a tag for the thousand.     But he only looked at one, if he looked at that.         Generally, he came in and they said, "Oh, let's go over and have a drink."     They sat in the café and now he said, “How many do you want?"     And the fellow said, "I got a thousand bolts."     "All right, here's a thousand tags, and at fifty cents each, that's five hundred dollars."     And they would attach each one.     There were six inspections, originally.     But the king discovered that he could name dozens or more inspectors who would go around and would pay money to go around and sell inspection tickers, stickers, so they now had not six inspection stickers on each bolt of cloth, but you might easily have eight, and the fellow had to pay for those.     Now. this is part of this insane situation.     This is a totally irrational society, which is obviously crippled in its ability to satisfy basic hunan needs, and which is, almost as obvious, I think, explosive, in the sense that a revolution is bound to come unless there are drastic changes made in a hurry.    

1:09:25

                                     He lost the legislative power.     The reason is that all the judges owned their seats.     This appeared, all this appeared in the Seventeenth Century, when we have the beginning of it.     That is the sales of offices, the restrictions, the issue of    rentes, all of these things I am telling you about now as examples of corruption, if you wish     The private ownership of government offices, including judgeships.     Now a judgeship thus became almost exactly what a seat on the stock exchange is here.     That is, you had a judicial seat, as a result of the judicial activity you imposed fees on cases, and these fees become your income.     The value of the seat is the annual average income capitalized at the rate of interest.     So if you made 10,000 a year out of this job, and people thought ten percent was a fair return on investment, then you could probably sell the seat for 100,000.     And thus the seats, the judicial seats, became the possession of a new class in society, the    noblesse de la robe longue,    i.e., the nobility of the robe, the nobility of the long robe.     A hereditary nobility, nobility not in the sense that the nobleness went from father to son so much, as the possession of his seat did.     And you may remember that Montesquieu, who wrote    L'Esprit des Lois, had inherited from an uncle a seat, and when his book was such a success, he decided he was better as a popular writer, so he sold the seat.    

1:11:16

                                     Now what this meant was that the king could not really control judicial cases: they would decide cases against him.     And this was the group who decided that the peasants in France owned the land, but they still owed manorial dues, which had to be abolished in the Revolution.     But as a result, you had France all broken up into small little holdings, as you had in the Nineteenth Century.    

1:11:48

                                     Now, this meant also that the king could not legislate, because, if he passed a law, an    ordonnance, a decree, or something of this kind, the judges claimed they never heard of it.     So they never enforced it.     In order to have it enforced, he had to send it to them and say, "Register it."     Well, they would look at it and say "We don't like it."    XXXX    "Now."     "We won't register it; we'll send it back."     Now, I won't go into the details, but it became a long and involved ritual.     But the king would send the chancellor to order it written; they would refuse.     The king himself would appear, and the chancellor was in the presence of the king; this was called a    lit de justice, a bed of justice, because the king was reclining (He couldn't sit up straight, I guess.     Probably a delinquent of some kind.)     But in any case, in a    lit de iustice, the judges admitted that, in the presence of the king, they became clerks.     So they wrote it down in their books, and registered it.     But then they wrote, in the margin, in big letters: “Inscribed in the presence of the king" -- "coram    rege"    -- "In the presence of the king," and they never enforced it.

1:13:15

                                     Now, what this meant, is that not only did they not, did the king not have    the legislative power, but he did not    did not have either the taxing power or the ability to reform the tax system.     And since everything was the result of centuries of custom, everything was extraordinarily inequitable.     That is, people who were not wealthy paid heavy taxes, people who were quite wealthy paid very little -- just as we do to-day, only they were much more excited about it, although it was probably no more inequitable than our system to-day is, which is very inequitable, if you know anything about it.     And, but nothing could be done.     Now, what the king wanted to do was not only to be able to tax    XXXX    ; but they refused to allow any new taxes, and above all, they would not allow one thing -- I'm making this very simple -- the so called    taille tariffé.     A    taille    was a direct tax assessed upon people;    tariffé    is what we mean by "graduated;" so this is a graduated income tax.     Again and again, the king tried to register a graduated income tax    in the Eighteenth Century; and again and again it was refused.     And he came and ordered it, and they inscribed it, but they would not permit it.     Now the way they prevented it    was not by saying, "We will not enforce it."     They issued an order that any Frenchman who answered any questions about his income to anyone was in contempt of court. That's the kind of Supreme Court we need here!    

1:15:07

                                     Thus the king lost the taxing power, the legislative power. His loss of the judicial power I've already indicated to you:     he couldn't control the judges.     Here again in the Eighteenth Century was a terrific explosion.     They said:     "We are all members of a single corporation" and they debated that endlessly for two centuries.     He said:     "No, there is no judicial corporation"     They said:     "Yes, there is," and so forth.     It doesn't matter.     Finally, in 1770, December 1770, the king realized he was bankrupt.     He was engaged in great wars with Britain for control of India, in North America, and the world, and so forth.     He was eventually, in seven years, going to come to the rescue of the United States in the American Revolution.     He had to do something about the court system.     So in, in December 1770, he abolished the court system and established a new court system.     It wouldn't work.     Why?     Because he was not going to be an illegal, criminal;    and he admitted that those judges, whose seats he had abolished, were private property; and, therefore, having abolished the seats,    he had to pay them the value of the seats.     And he could not get that, because he could not tax.     Furthermore, no one would take cases to the new courts that he set up. The new courts he paid.     They didn't work for fees.     They were named by him, and paid by him, and much simplified.     But no one would take a case,    because they said:     "Well, we know he has no money.     He can't pay the value of the judicial seats to the judges, so eventually he is going to have to put them back."     And eventually, in 1776, he put them all back.     Now it was a different king,     because Louis XV died in 1774 and it was his, Louis, his successor, Louis XVI, the one who eventually had his head chopped off.     And he had his head chopped off in the French Revolution because he was so law-abiding, and unable to restore and pay for the seats that he had taken over, to establish what we would have regarded a more modern judicial system.     He put it all back.     And the result, when he called the    Estates General    after a hundred and seventy-five years in 1789, he did it because the    Parlement    (i.e., the Supreme Court of Paris) insisted that he must consult the nation.     The    Estates General.

1:18:04

                                     Now, one last thing that    I should mention, the incorporating power.     I said very few governments at that time had the incorporating power.     Certainly the king of France and his government did not.     France was filled with corporations that had no charters, but they had existed through all eternity.     Some of them had been there much before there was ever any king of France,     The Cathedral of Rheims, and others like this.     [Al]so there were churches, towns, universities, guilds, innumerable ones.     Furthermore, they, litigation between these corporations was endless, just as to-day -- although we have this in medical science more even than in law to-day: they keep the thing going forever.     The case must be kept going because it's a source of income.     When the    Estates General    assembled in 1789 and abolished the judicial system of France, there was before the court a case that had been before the court for more than three hundred years.     It was a lawsuit between the second-hand clothing dealers guild and the guild of the tailors of the city of Paris; and it had been going on for three hundred and thirty-some years, because it was such a juicy plum for the law firm and they could keep, and the judges too, that they kept it going and never settled it.     (We're moving in this direction, both in medicine and law, and, I hope not, in higher education, in the United States.)     Eventually, as a step in this direction, in 1776 Turgot abolished the guilds.     Once again, it couldn't be done.     He would have to pay off all of their debts, and they had enormous, millions and millions and millions of debts. And it couldn't be done.

1:20:23

                                     Now, when the Revolution came, it was a tremendous earthquake.     It wiped out just about everything. You cannot believe it.     When I was in Paris in 1937, I went over there, very much devoted to this kind of thing, I found that there were hundreds and hundred and hundreds of tons of not only law books, but legal papers of all kinds; and no one had to look at them after the French Revolution, because they pulled down the curtain:     they said, "What was, is over."     And they set up a new system of law, a single book, the    Code Napoléon, about 1802; and if you hold it in your hands, it's smaller than an ordinary Bible.     The ordinary Old Testament.     And that's what, all you do, have to go back to that.        You don't have to go back any further.

1:21:27

                                     Now, what the French Revolution did, it created a fully sovereign state, which had all power.     That sovereignty was embodied not in the monarchy, but in the nation.     That means that the residents are no longer subjects, they are citizens.        These are revolutionary changes.     They are participants in this entity, now which is the,    la patrie, in French.     All restraints, or all legal restraints, on public action are replaced by acts of sovereignty.     Now, the sovereign power in France after the French Revolution can do anything, the only restraint is it must be done according to the rules of the sovereign power.     And    XXXX    It did become and remain a Western Civilization government under the rule of law, but it was procedural rules and no longer substantive rules of limits upon what could be done.    

1:22:46

                                     The polity was transformed, and this, to me, is    the most utmost importance, because it leads to next week's lecture:     was transformed from a    hierarchical system    of subjects in communities and corporations    and chaos, really, all interwoven together into a hierarchy.     It was wiped away and replaced by a system which is a naked dualism: supreme state power and individuals.     I hope you'll pardon my bad French: ["Un État vraiment libré ne doit souffrir dans son sein aucune corporation pas même celles qui vouée à l'enseignement public bien merité de la patrie."]     I'll translate it for you:     "A state truly free will not suffer in its bosom any corporation, not even those which, because they are devoted to public education, or other well-deserved things favored of the [father]land."     In other words, that's the 18th of August 1792, the French proclaimed, "There are no groups in our society."     If you want to make a group, you make a voluntary group, it has no legal existence.     If you want it to have a legal existence, you must get a charter.

1:24:16

                                     In other words, this is really Roman.     But, this raises future problems: it says that men are equal before the law.     If men are equal, legally equal, and are equal participants in the polity, why should they not be politically equal?     Full democracy, which the French did not get, you know, until 1848.     And, eventually, why should they not be economically equal?     That is, use their sovereign power, as the nation embodied under..., to share the wealth, equally or any way.     If sovereignty can do anything, and law is merely an act of sovereignty, why should not the wealth be divided?     All right, that is the problem we're going to come up with in the last two centuries, next week.    

1:26:22

                                     Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen.    

1:26:25

Part III: “The State of Individuals", A.D. 1776 - 1976

by Carroll Quigley Ph.D.

0:00:01

[Applause]

0:00:08

Thank you Dean Krogh.

0:00:12

Ladies and Gentlemen:

0:00:15

                                     This is the most difficult of the three lectures that I'm giving covering this thousand years of the growth of public authority.     What's happened in the last two hundred years is fairly clear to me; but it is not easy to convey it to you, even those of you who have had courses with me and are familiar with the framework of much of my thinking.     

0:01:50

                                     One reason for this difficulty, of course, is the complexity of the subject itself; but, after all, the preceding eight hundred years were quite complex as well as the last    two hundred that we are going to deal with this evening.     A much more fundamental reason for the difficulty is this; and it is where we can have difficulties to-night:     The reality of the last two hundred years of the history of Western Civilization, including two hundred years of the history of our own country, is not reflected in the general brainwashing which you have received, in the political mythology which you have been hearing, or in the historiography of the period as it exists to-day.    

0:00:08

                                     The period from 1776 to 1976 I will divide into two parts.     The first, about a hundred and twenty, or twenty-five, years,    i.e., to about 1890, which was a period of expansion of industrial society; and then the last eighty years, approximately, which is an age of profound crisis, not only in our own country, but in Western Civilization, which is the unit in which I carry on my thinking on the subject.

0:02:34

                                     In order to deal with this, I have to go back to fundamentals, and particularly to the fundamentals of human values; and, to do that, we must have paradigms.     The whole thousand years, as I explained in my first lecture, is a shift from a society made up of communities, in 976, to a society, to-day, where we have a state of monstrous power and atomized individuals.     

0:03:18

                                     I will use certain definitions: I am talking about society. And the society of Western Civilization a thousand years ago, which was made up of communities.     A society is an organization of persons and artifacts -- things made by people -- and it's an organization to satisfy human needs.     It would not exist if it had not come into existence to satisfy human needs.     Notice:     I do not say human desires.     One of the striking things about our society to-day is how remote our desires are from our needs.     If you ask anybody what they want, what they desire, they will give you lists of things which are as remote as can be from human needs.     Now, in this society, the process we have been tracing for the thousand years is the growth of the state.     And as I indicated in the first lecture, a state is not the same thing as a society, even though the Greeks and Romans thought so.     A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis.     The link between the two, a society (whether it's made up of communities or of individuals) and a state, is this:     Power rests in the ability to satisfy human needs.    

0:05:16

                                     Now, I put on the board something which former students are familiar with.     I always call it the levels of culture, the aspects of a society: military, political, economic,     social, emotional, religious, intellectual.     Those are your basic human needs.     The interesting thing about them is that they are arranged in evolutionary sequence.     Millions of years ago, before men were even human, they had need for defense of the group, because it is perfectly obvious that men cannot live outside of groups.     They can only satisfy any needs, or almost any needs, by cooperating within a group.     But I'll go further than that, and return to it again in a moment, that men will not become men unless they grow up in communities.     We will come back to that because it is the basis of what I am going to talk about to-night.    

0:06:41

                                     If you have a group, it must be defended against outsiders.     That's military.     Before men came out of the trees they had that.    

0:06:50

                                     If you are going to obtain your needs being satisfied in some kind of a group, you must have ways of settling disputes and arguments and reconciling individual problems within the group.     That's political.    

0:07:05

                                     You must have organizational patterns for satisfying material needs: food, clothing, and shelter.     [That's economic.]

0:07:13

                                     And then come two which have been largely destroyed in the last thousand years of Western Civilization,    i.e., men have social needs.     They have needs for other people; they have need to love and to be loved.     They have need to be noticed.     Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy because nobody had ever noticed him; and, by God, he was determined that, from now on, he, someone would know that he existed.     In fact, most of these "motive," "motiveless" assassinations are of this type.     Someone went up to the top of the University of Texas tower with a high-powered rifle and shot something like seventeen people before they got him.     This was because no one had ever noticed him.     Men need other people.     That's the social need.     The basis of social inter-relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others will cooperate with you.    

0:08:25

                                     The next is emotional needs.     Men must have emotional experience.     It's obtained in two ways, that I can see:     moment-to-moment relationships with other people, moment-to-moment, and moment-to-moment relationships with nature.     Our society to-day has so cluttered up our lives with artifacts -- TV sets,     or whatever it is, automobiles -- and organizational structures, that to have moment-to-moment relationships with nature is almost impossible.     Most people don't have any idea what the weather is out[side].     Someone said recently that until September we had a great draught here.     And four or five people standing there said "That's ridiculous."         We had a shortage, I believe, of about almost eight inches of rain up to the middle of September of this year in Washington.     Nobody notices it.     Because they are in buildings, it doesn't matter to them if it's raining or not.

0:09:53

                                     Religious needs.     It became fashionable in Western Civilization, particularly in the last hundred years, to be scornful of religion.     But it is a fact that human beings have religious needs.     They have a need for a feeling of certitude in their minds about things that they cannot control and that they do not fully understand, and, with humility, they will admit they do not understand.     What happens, when you destroy people's religious expression, is that they establish secularized religions, for instance, Marxism.    

0:10:46

                                     Now, on the intellectual level.     People have intellectual needs.     I used to say to students that Marilyn Monroe had profound intellectual needs.     And when nobody else would treat her as an intellect or even a potential intellect, for obvious reasons, she was starved for intellectual experience.     That's why she married a man like Arthur Miller: because she thought he was an intellectual.     All right, those are the human needs.     

0:11:21

                                     Power is the ability to satisfy those needs.     And for someone to say that power is organized force, or that power is the outcome of an election, or that power is the ability to cut off our supply of oil, it is a completely inadequate way of looking at it.     Because my experience and study of the destruction of civilizations and the collapse of great empires has now convinced me that empires and civilizations do not collapse because of deficiencies on the military or the political levels.     The Roman army never met an army that was better than it was.     Any time.     But the Roman army could not be sustained when all of these things had collapsed and nobody cared.     Nobody wanted to serve, nobody wanted to pay taxes, nobody cared.

0:12:41

                                     All right.     The other part of this, this is going to require that you put these things together to some extent.     Persons, personalities, if you wish, can be made only in communities.     Communities are intimate relationships between a, diverse types of individuals -- a kinship group, or a local group, a neighborhood, a village, a large family, possibly, whatever it is.     Without communities, no infant will be sufficiently socialized.     He may grow up and be forty years old, he may have made an extremely good living, he may have engendered half a dozen children, but he is still an infant unless he was properly socialized and that occurs in the first four or five years of life.     We have attempted in our society to-day to throw the whole burden of socializing our population upon the school system, to which the individual arrives only at the age of four or five.     A state of individuals, such as we have now reached in Western Civilization, will not create persons; and the atomized individuals who make it up will be motivated by desires, which do not necessarily reflect needs.     Instead of the need for other people, they need a shot of heroin; instead of some kind of religious conviction, they have to be with the winning team.     In fact, when you come to a civilization as it turns off the last couple of centuries, and ours still has a couple of centuries to go, I would guess.     Things are moving faster than they ever did in any civilization I ever knew before this one.     But we still probably have at least a century or two centuries to go.

0:15:21

                                     Now, human needs are the basis of power.     The state, I said, is a power structure on a territorial basis; and the state will survive only if it has sufficient ability to satisfy enough of these needs.     It is not enough that it has organized force     And when a politician says, "Elect me President and I will establish law and order," and by law and order he means organized force or even organized power of other kinds (and I won't analyze that.     it's too complex.     We don't have time).     I will simply say that the object of the political level is to legitimize power:     that is, to get people, in their minds, to recognize and accept what is the actual power relationship in their society.

0:16:33

                                     Next Tuesday a decision will be made as to who shall be President of the United States.     That will not reflect necessarily the actual power relationships of the United States at all.     If the people are so frustrated with intellectual frustration.     Many of you come to these lectures because you have been intellectually frustrated, and you want to be exposed again to my insistent demands that you think about things.     For example, we no longer have intellectually satisfying arrangements in our educational system, in our arts, humanities, or anything else; instead we have slogans, ideologies.     An ideology is a religious or emotional expression.     So when a society is reaching its end, in the last couple of centuries, you have what I call misplacement of satisfactions.     You find your emotional satisfaction in making a lot of money, or being elected in 1972 to the White House, or something of this kind.     Or proving to the poor, half-naked people of Southeast Asia that you can kill them in large numbers.     And out of this you get the satisfactions which are being frustrated up here.

0:18:24

                                     Now, the state is a good state if it is sovereign and if it is responsible.     The idea that the state has to be any of these other things, such as, for example, democratic, is more or less incidental.     If democracy reflects the structure of society's power, then the state has to be democratic.     But if the reflection of power, and the pattern of power, in a society is not a democratic pattern, then you cannot have a democratic state.     This is what happens in Latin America, and Africa, and places like this, where they have an election and the army doesn't like who's elected, so they move in and kick him out and put somebody else in.     That's because the election did not reflect the power situation, in which the dominant thing is organized force.     So when I say governments have to be responsible, I'm saying the same thing as I said when I said that they have to be legitimate,    i.e., that they have to reflect the power structure of the society.     Politics is the area for establishing responsibility by legitimizing power,    i.e., somehow demonstrating to people that the power structure is this.     And it may take a revolution, such as the French Revolution, or it may take a war, like the American Civil War.     In the American Civil War in 19, 1861 the structure of power in the United States was such -- perhaps unfortunately,     I don't know -- that the South could not leave unless the North was willing.     It was that simple.     But it took a war to prove it.    

0:20:38

                                     Now, sovereignty I defined last time; and I want to run through it for the benefit of those who weren't here.     Sovereignty has eight aspects:     DEFENSE; JUDICIAL, [i.e.,] settling disputes; ADMINISTRATIVE POWER, [i.e.,] discretionary actions for the public need; TAXATION, [i.e.,] mobilizing resources, this is what the French government didn't have in 1776, one of them; LEGISLATION, [i.e.,] the finding of rules and [the] establishment of rules through promulgation and statute; the sixth, EXECUTIVE,    i.e., the enforcement of laws and judicial decisions.     Then two which are absolutely of paramount importance to-day: MONETARY, [i.e.,] the creation and control of money and credit -- if that is not an aspect of the public sovereignty, then the state is to-day far less than fully sovereign; and the eighth one, the last, THE INCORPORATING POWER,    i.e., the right to say that an association of people is a fictitious person with the right to hold property and sue, and be sued, in the courts.     Notice:     the federal government of the United States to-day does not have the seventh and eighth, but I'll come back to that later.    

0:22:31

                                     In the meantime, I'm still on my introduction for this evening, and I want to speak of what happened in the last thousand years.     If we go back before 976, when you had communities, little villages, really, in Europe, the main core of people's life and experience, which controlled their behavior and determined their desires -- controls and rewards, I call it -- was in this, the religious and emotional and social [levels].     In these three.     They had religious beliefs, they had emotional relationships with the people whom they saw every day, they had social relationships as well with them.     That was the core of it.     The significant thing is this:     that those controls and those rewards are internalized; they are inside.     They are what was acquired very largely in the first four or five years of life.     When we speak of the need for socializing infants.     When a child is born, he is not a person[ality]; he is a human being.     That is a totally different thing.     He is utterly potential.     When somebody becomes a personality, such as you or myself, then he has traits which were acquired out of his potentialities as the result of experiences over numerous years.    

0:24:19

                                     Now, here you have internalized controls.     That's why they could get along in 976 without a state: because all significant controls were internalized on these bases.     The reason I took the year 976 was that, although Western Civilization had come into existence about two hundred years before that, let's say, 876 or even earlier, it began to expand in 976.     By expand I mean they began to produce more goods per person, per day or per year, whatever you want.     And you know what I mean by expansion if you took my freshman course:     increased output per capita, increased knowledge, increased geographic area for the civilization itself, and increased population.     In 976 that began.     And we'll put an arrow here indicating that.     The chief way in which that economic expansion was achieved was by specialization and exchange:     that instead of each little group's trying to produce everything which would satisfy all of these needs, little groups began to concentrate and say we will produce only wool and exchange wool for other things.     And so forth and so forth.     That process of increasing specialization and exchange, which is the basis of expansion in any civilization, I'll call commercialization.     And as long as the society is expanding, that process of commercialization will continue, as it has for a thousand years in our society, so that to-day in our society everything is commercialized, politics, religion, education, ideology, belief, everything, the armed services.     Everything, practically, is commercialized.     Everything has its price.    

0:26:51

                                     All right, when this expansion reaches a crisis, you get increasing politicalization.     That is, instead of... I won't go into the details of this.     It can be explained in detail, as most of you, perhaps, know.     Politicalization is that the expansion is slowing up, and you are no longer attempting to achieve increased output per capita, or whatever it is, or increased wealth, or increased satisfactions, or whatever is motivating you, by expansion;     but you are going to do it by mobilizing power.     We have seen this going on in our society now for almost a century.     Increased politicalization of the society.

0:27:45

                                     And then, as the society continues and does not reform, you get increased militarization of the society.     You can see that certainly in Western Civilization, and in the history of the United States.     In the last forty years, our society has been drastically militarized.     It certainly isn't yet as militarized as other societies and other periods have been.     We have a long way to go in this direction still.    

0:28:31

                                     Now, as this process goes on, you get certain other things.     I've hinted at a number of them.     Misplacement of satisfactions.     You find your satisfactions -- your emotional satisfaction, your social satisfaction -- not on moment-to-moment relationships with other people and with nature, but with power, or with wealth, or even with organized force -- sadism, in some cases.     Go out and murder a lot of people, in a war -- a just war, naturally.    

0:29:18

                                     The second thing that I'd like to point to [in] the    period    as this goes on: increasing remoteness of desires from needs.     I've mentioned this.     Then the next thing is an increasing confusion between means and ends.     The ends are the human needs, but if I asked most people what are the needs of these, they could hardly tell me.     Instead they would want the means that they have been brainwashed or accepted, that will give them the satisfaction that they think of a need.     But it's perfectly obvious that the methods we have been using are not working.     Never was any society in human history as rich and as powerful as the United, as Western Civilization and the United States, and it is not a happy society.     I just looked at a book this week called    The Joyless Economy, by an economist [named Tibor Scitovsky], in which he diagrammed some of these things.    

0:30:40

                                     All of that is establishment of new paradigms.

0:30:44    

                                     Now, what happened in the last two hundred years?     In 1776, Europe was approaching, and Western Civilization was approaching, a revolutionary situation.     Why?     A revolutionary situation is one in which the structure of power -- real power -- is not reflected in the structure of law, institutions, and conventional arrangements.     Law and legal arrangements, including constitutional arrangements, were not legitimate in 1776 in much of Western Civilization,    i.e., they were not responsible because they did not reflect power.     The laws of the polity, whether it is the English Parliament, which legally had the right to rule America; or with what is the nightmare constitution of France, which no longer in any way reflected the structure of power in French society; or whether, east of the Rhine, it was the enlightened despotisms which existed there, which did not reflect the power struggle, the structure of Europe at all, as Napoleon showed them very quickly.     This, therefore, is a revolutionary situation.    

0:32:21

                                     Let's look a little more closely at these.    

0:32:26

                                     In England, the polity established control of the country in an oligarchy of landowners, the Whig oligarchy.     Members of Parliament were sent to Parliament by pieces of land, and someone, who owned a piece of land which did have the right to send a member to Parliament, could send a member to Parliament, whether that piece of land had anyone living on it or not.     Well, that was not a reflection of the power structure of England.     That pieces of land were powerful.     And I would, do not have to demonstrate to you that the legal arrangements by which the British Parliament made the rules to govern life in the United States was [sic] equally unrealistic.    

0:33:18

                                     I'll leave France for a moment and go east of the Rhine.     In Central Europe we had what was called Enlightened Despotism:     small principalities ruled by despots who presumably in law had the right to say,     "This will happen.     That will happen.     Something else will happen, the show is over ."

0:33:37

                                     What they tried to do in the period from 1776 onward, for about twenty-five years, was to establish some kind of a more rational life in their principalities, to create a uniform system of weights and measures.     They couldn't do it.     Their systems of weights and measures -- I won't attempt to describe them to you -- were absolute, unholy chaos.     They had a different weight or measurement for every commodity.     Those measurements changed as you went from village to village or district to district.     And they also had been changing in time for hundreds of years.     What had been happening is the measurements had been getting larger because the power of the creditors was so great that, if you owned, owed a bushel of wheat to your landlord, all the landlords together, over generations, could make the bushel a larger measure.    

0:34:48

                                     All right, let's continue.     In Eastern Europe, I discussed it adequately the last time.     I'll simply point out that, in this period, Poland disappeared.     It disappeared because the landlord class in Poland preferred keeping their serfs down, as their slaves, to independence.     And were unwilling to organize a modern army, with modern weapons and modern military training, to defend Poland against outside enemies, such as Prussia, Russia or Austria.     For that reason, those three got together and divided up Poland in 1795, so Poland did not exist.     And did not exist again, you know -- briefly under Napoleon there was a Grand Duchy of Warsaw -- but it did not exist again until 1919.    

0:35:50

                                     In France, and I described this last week, in 1776 the polity had reached a condition of total paralysis.     They did not have sovereignty.     The government did not have the taxing power; it did not have the legislative power; it did not have the incorporating power; it did not have the judicial power.     It did not have most of these eight aspects of sovereignty which I mentioned to you.     And in 1776 they discovered that, when the government tried to abolish the guilds and could not do so, because under the law they could not abolish them unless it agreed to pay off their debts.     And it could not pay off their debts because the government didn't have the taxing power.     And didn't have the taxing power because it didn't have the judicial power:     if it took someone to court, the judges would say, "No, you have no right to examine his income.     You can ask him only what he has been paying for the last couple of hundred years on that piece of property," or whatever it is.

0:37:08

                                     The result was the explosion of the French Revolution, in which you got not only about the most sovereign state in Europe, by the time of Napoleon, let's say 1805.     And notice:     Napoleon was an enlightened despot, the last one in Europe.     Anyone who says, as, for instance, Robert Palmer says, that in 1789 France was leading the parade in terms of government and public authority, just doesn't know what he's talking about.     France was bringing up the absolute rear in 1789 as far as public authority and sovereignty is [sic] concerned.     And that is why, say, France got their enlightened despot so late.     He wasn't even a Frenchman; he was an Italian.     But what he did was he imposed an Italian government on France.     Provided it was so rational, so powerful, so well-organized, and the fact that the new sovereignty was embodied in the nation, a new entity, really, gave it a power which made it possible for him almost to conquer all of Europe.     Although he was ultimately defeated, as most conquerors of all of Europe have been throughout history.     And we have William II in 1918, Hitler in 1945.     There were others:     Philip II in the Sixteenth Century, I don't know, England, perhaps, in the early Fifteenth Century, and so forth.    

0:39:07

                                     By 1820, after the Napoleonic system has been replaced, all four of these areas which I have mentioned were unstable, but they were much more stable and much more legitimate than they had been in 1776.     Now, although I say that in 1820 they were fundamentally not that stable, we know that there was political stability in Europe after 1820 for at least three generations, to at least the 1860's.     A brief war in '66, and then so forth.     I won't go into that.     But the stability of Europe from 1815 to about 1880, or '85, is now something we look back on with nostalgia.     The reasons for this were, had nothing to do with the structure of the state, except to the degree that the structure of the state had become sufficiently rationalized and sufficiently sovereign through the period of revolution, from 1776 to, let's say, 1820.     Sufficiently stable.     So that with the additional events, it looked like stability.     Now, the additional events were a new Age of Expansion.    

0:40:39

                                     The Agricultural Revolution of about 1720 and onward, where more and more food was being obtained from land with less and less labour, and so forth.     And above all, the Industrial Revolution:     the patenting of the steam engine in 1776.     You see 1776 is a very significant year.         It is not just Bicentennial Year.    The Wealth of Nations, which advocated free trade, was 1776; Watt's patenting of the steam engine is 1776; the failure of the French to reorganize their political system is clearly 1776, and so forth.

0:41:23

                                     Now, in the Nineteenth Century, expansion, which is the third time in Western Civilization in which we had expansion, people fell back from conflict and politicalization and militarization to the level of commercialization, and industrialization, if you want to add it.     But this process means that certain subversive influences were being accelerated.     One is:     externalization of rewards and controls.     The disruption of communities, the destruction of religion, the frustration of emotions, all of these were greatly intensified by the Industrial Revolution:     railroads, factories, growth of cities, technological revolution in the countryside and in the manner, growing of food, and so forth.     The externalization of rewards and controls to the point that we are at to-day.     A continued acceleration of the main focus of the activities of the society downward.         Again,    i.e., from these areas of internal controls down to these areas of external controls.     If you can be controlled by being bought, like a higher salary, to go to San Diego, or something, and give up all your friends and associations, now that's an external control.     If you can be forced to go there by power, if you can be sent there by the draft, or something, all right, that's militarization.    

0:43:25

                                     Another thing which became very obvious in the Nineteenth Century is increasing role of propaganda to change people's ways of looking at things.     Right at the beginning of the lecture, I offended some of you by saying you have been brainwashed.     That is not an insult.     It's a simple statement of fact.     When any infant is born and is socialized in a society, even if he is socialized to become a very mature individual, he has been brainwashed.     That is, he has been given a structure for categorizing his experience and a system of values applied to that structuring of categories.     But this has now become, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in our society, a propagandist system, in which increasing emphasis is put on the future.     Think only of the future. This is what the rebellions of the '50's and '60's were against.     Future preference:     plan; study hard; save.     All of these things which I used to get from my maiden aunts:     "Wise bees save honey; wise boys save money."     And then they'd each secretly give me a dollar as I was leaving.     "A penny saved is a penny earned."         "A stitch in time....."     All, everything that's in "Poor Richard's."     The Benjamin Franklin propaganda machine.

0:45:28

                                     Another change in the Nineteenth Century in this propaganda system is the increasing emphasis upon material desires.     If you had the material things you want -- a nice house in the suburbs, a swimming pool, a couple of big cars, a place in the country, a motor boat, a trailer to take it back and forth.     And what do you want?     Anything else?     Material things.     Now, a pocket computer, citizens' band.     It's endless.     Material desires.

0:46:18

                                     A third thing we were brainwashed: that the only thing that matters is individualism. They called it freedom. There is no such thing as freedom.     There is a thing called liberty.     It's quite different, actually.     I'll not spend much time on this.     If you're interested, read Ruggiero's    History of European Liberalism, particularly the, couple of first chapters.     Oxford University Press, 1927.         That's the English translation of an Italian book.     Freedom is freedom from restraints.     We're always under restraints.     The difference between a stable society and an unstable one is the restraints are external in an unstable one.     In a stable society we don't even need a government.     Ultimately the restraints on your actions are internal.     They're self-disciplined.     They are the restraints that you have accepted because it is the way in which you can satisfy all of your desires and needs to the degree that's good for you.    

0:47:31

                                     And then another thing which they have brainwashed us in the last hundred years:     that quantitative change is superior to any qualitative attributes.     In other words, if we can turn out more automobiles this year than last year, it doesn't matter whether they're half as good.     And the same is true of everything.     We are quantifying every[thing], and this is why we are trying to put everything now on computers.     Governments no longer have to make decisions; the computers will do it.    

0:48:14

                                     Another thing they've tried to do, and have succeeded, is to give us vicarious satisfactions for many of these frustrations.     It is unbelievable the way American people are hung up on vicarious experiences: I can.... TV, movies, mass spectator sports.     You have no idea what small towns and cities of America is [sic] like, Friday night like this, when the local high school football or basketball team is engaged in competition with their neighbor eighteen miles away.     And what a gloomy place the chapel or church is to-morrow morning, I mean Sunday morning, if they lose -- it won't matter if it rains.     People need exercise; they do not need to watch other people exercise, particularly people who've already had too much exercise.     Vicarious satisfaction.     These sexy magazines.     This is vicarious sex.     If anyone rushes up to buy one, I'd like to say to him "The real thing is better."    

0:49:56

                                     The replacement, this is part of what brainwashing has gone on for the last 100 years, the replacement of intellect, intelligence, intellectual and of religion by ideologies and science.     It is hardly possible to-day to discuss in any sensible way the problems of the historical past without running up against Marxist interpretations.     I have nothing against Marx['s theories], except the fact they do not explain what happened, which, to me, is a fatal defect.     The very idea that between science and religion    there is some kind of a conflict, when science is a method for investigating experience, and religion is something quite different.     Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of your value system of more permanent values.    

0:51:20

                                     Another thing that they've tried to get upon us in the last 100 years -- and it is now dying in front of us -- is the myth of the nation, as the repository of sovereignty, can be both a state and a community.     This is the great French revolution thing, you see.     Why is it that the nation....?     It can be the repository of sovereignty.     But suppose weapons systems in a society are of such a character that it is possible for a government with the existing weapon system to impose its will over an area a thousand miles across.     And suppose in that thousand mile area there are a number of nations, like the Bretons, the Catalonians, the Welsh, the Lithuanians.     These are as much nations as the ones that somehow or other became the embodiments of sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century.     Why did the English, the French, the Castilians, the Hohenzollerns, and others became [sic] the repository of sovereignty    in    nations: (Notice: they missed out in the whole Balkan and Danube basin.)     They did because, at that time, weapons systems made it possible to compel obedience over areas which were approximately the same size as these national groups that I have mentioned.     And as a result, they were able to crush out other nationalisms, such as the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the Catalonians -- who had a much longer and much more cultured history than the Castilians -- the Provençals, and many others.     In other words, nationalism is an episode in history, and it fitted a certain power struggle and a certain configuration of human life in our civilization which would allow these groups.     Now what's happening?     They all want autonomy.     The Scots think that they can get their independence and control the oil that's being found in the North Sea, and then England will become a colonial area for Edinburgh. And so forth.    

0:54:37

                                     In 1820, thus, the state was essentially unstable.     It was not fully sovereign.     For example, it did not have the control of credit and money, in most places.     It did not have the control of corporations, in most places.     It is not stable because the nation was not a satisfactory community.     The very idea that, because everyone who speaks French is in the same nation and, therefore -- in the Nineteenth Century -- in the same state (what the French republicans want) they, therefore, is [sic] in the same community as you, is just not true.    

0:55:24

                                     And to attempt to socialize people leaving out the first four or five years of life, and ignoring what happens in that period.     We're doing the same thing in this country in regard to the Blacks and the Latin Americans and many others.     They're now saying "Oh, yes, we'll have..., we'll push back..., we'll take them from the homes at age 2."     A few years ago they had a big program: take them for a few hours at age two and three and four, but this will not socialize them.     The first two years are important.     The way a child is treated in the first two days is of vital importance.     He has to be loved.     The.... Above all. he has to be talked to.     And so forth.

0:56:25

                                     The nation or the state, as we now have it in terms of the structure of power, cannot be a community.    

0:56:37

                                     Another thing which may, points out the instability of this system, the power system of the state, you know:     the individual cannot be made the basic unit of society, what we have tried to do, or of the state, since the internalization of controls must be the preponderant influence in any stable society.     Even in a society where it looks as if all power is in the hands of the government -- let's say, Soviet Russia -- still eighty percent, at least, of human behavior in Russia is controlled by internalized controls which were socialized in them by the way they were treated from the moment that they were born.     And as a result, they have come to accept certain things which allow the Russian state to act as if it can do anything, when it obviously can't.     It knows it can't.     Notice the new Russian budget announced this week:     as a result of our pouring of our food surpluses into Russia, they are now going to raise the consumption sector of their new budget.

0:58:14

                                     The shift of weapons in our society.     This is a profound problem.     I've spent ten years working on this, through all of history, and I hope to produce a book on it eventually if I can find a publisher.     (I have a publisher, but I don't want go back to him.     He lied to me too many times.)     The shift of weapons in any civilization and, above all, in our civilization, from shock weapons to missile weapons.     Notice, that if you go back several hundred years to the Middle Ages, all weapons were shock,    i.e., you came at the guy with a spear or a sword.     And even as late as 1916, in the First World War, you came at the Germans with bayonets, after a preliminary barrage with artillery.     But we have now shifted completely, almost totally, to missile weapons.     Missile weapons which you hurl.     You may shoot, you may have bombs dropped from airplanes, take a hand grenade, and, whatever it is.     Missile weapons.     This has an absolutely dominant influence upon the ability to control individuals.     And individuals cannot be controlled by missile weapons.     The chief reason for that, and again I hope when the book comes, if you read the rest you can look it up.     There'll be endless analyses of Chinese history, Byzantine history and Russian history and everything else, and the book is about nine-tenths written, I'd say, in the last ten years.

1:00:13

                                     The difference between a shock weapon and a missile weapon is essentially this:     a missile weapon is either fired or it isn't fired.     It cannot be half-way fired.     In other words, once you let it go, it's out of your control.     It's gone.     It is a killing weapon.     But a shock weapon -- a billy club or a bayonet -- can be used to any degree that you wish.     And if you say to someone who's sitting in a chair, "Get up and out of the room," and you pull out a machine gun, or you call in a B-52 bomber that, or you pull the pin in a hand grenade, and say "I'll...."     But with a bayonet.....    

1:01:17

                                     All right.     Individual behavior in our society no longer can be controlled by any system of weaponry that we are using.     In fact, without eighty percent of [our population's having] internalized controls, we do not have enough people, even if we equip them with shock weapons, to control the behavior of the population which does not have internalized controls.     We're already reached that in our society.

1:01:58

                                     One reason, of course, is that the twenty percent that don't have internalized controls are concentrated into certain areas.     I won't go into the whole business of this, of controls.     It opens up the whole field of guerrilla resistance, terrorism, and everything else.     These cannot be controlled by any system of organized structure of force which exists, at least on a basis of missile weaponry.     And, as I say, it would take too many people on the basis [of shock weaponry].     We have now done what the Romans did when they started committing suicide: we have shifted from an army of citizen soldiers to an army of mercenaries, and those mercenaries are being recruited, in our society, as they were in Roman society, from the twenty percent of their population which does not have the internalized controls of classical civilization.    

1:03:07

                                     All right.     Now.     The appearance of stability from 1840 to about 1900 was superficial, temporary and destructive in the long run, because, I have said, you must have communities; and communities and societies must rest upon cooperation and cannot be on competition.     Any society who says that you can run the society on the basis of here's everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense.     And all the study of human society shows that it's nonsense.     And to teach it in schools, and to go on TV and call it the “American way of life,” still doesn't make it true.     Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community.

1:04:27

                                     Now, the ecological, the economic and technological achievements of industrialization, here, were fundamentally mistaken.     This could get quite technical; I'll try not to.     The expansion, the economic expansion of industrialization has been based on plundering the natural capital of the globe, such as it was created over millions of years:     the plundering of the soils of their fertility; the plundering of the human communities, whether they were our own or somebody else's, in Africa or anywhere else; the plundering of the forest.     In 1776 the wealth of forest in North America was beyond belief; within 200 years, in fact 150 years, it has been destroyed or more than ninety percent of it wasted.     And it had in it three hundred years of accumulated capital saving and investment of sunlight and the fertility of the soil.     (And now that our bread is going to have five times as much fiber by making it out of sawdust, we're going to go on plundering the forests to a larger degree, which, of course, is one of the reasons I am sure that President Ford two days ago signed the new bill which allowed clear cutting in the National Forests.     Because we need that roughage or fiber in our bread, having taken all the natural fiber out of the wheat, of course, and thrown it away.)    

1:06:40

                                     The energy which gave us the Industrial Revolution -- coal, oil, natural gas -- represented the accumulated saving of twel..., three weeks of sunlight that managed somehow to be saved in the earth out of the three billion years of sunshine.     Because that's what the fossil fuels are.     This is not income to be spent; this is capital to be saved and invested.         And we have now destroyed into what we call entropy --    i.e., into a form of energy which is no longer possible to be utilized.     We have now destroyed into entropy eleven or twelve days of that accumulated twenty-one days of sunlight.

1:07:56        

                                     And we have wasted it.    

1:08:09

                                     For example, we have changed our agricultural system, which used to be a system in which seed was put into the earth to take sunlight, rain and the wealth of the soil to create food, and we have replaced it with an agricultural system which is entirely capital intensive, has eliminated labor, has eliminated land to a very considerable extent, so that we pour out what we call food.     It's now chemical synthetic.     And we have done that by putting into a smaller and smaller amount of soil a larger and larger amount of chemicals made out of fossil fuels.     Just to give you one figure:     every bushel of corn sent to the Russians represents one gallon of gasoline.     And they say that we are getting by selling our grain to the Russians, we're getting the foreign exchange that will allow us to pay for the petroleum, at fourteen dollars a barrel, that we're bringing in.     Nobody ever stops to look at how many gallons of ... did you get to send this to the Russians.     To sell millions of bushels which represent millions of gallons.

1:09:51

                                     From 1940 to 1970,     and I put this in to indicate to you how our whole system is destroying communities.     Much of the legislation of the last forty years in this country has been aimed at the destruction of families, neighborhoods, ghettoes, parishes, or anything else.     In thirty years, from 1940 to 1970, three million American farms were abandoned because the people who worked on them with their families could not compete with the corporation farmers using the new chemical methods of producing crops.     Thirty million people left these abandoned farms and the rural areas and went into the towns and into the cities.     Millions of them, millions of them certainly, to be, get on relief.     In 1970, the last year for which I have any reliable figures, two thousand farms a week are going out of production.     

1:11:17

                             These are the farms on which we brought up your grandparents, the people who won the Civil War, indeed, the people who fought in the First [World] War, and, in many cases, even in the Second War.     Will the tractors be able to fight the next war?         When there are no more farm boys to fight.     Well, of course, whether there are farm boys or not, they won't want to fight.     Eight hundred thousand rural people each year, in 1970, were leaving rural areas and moving into towns and being replaced by corporations.     

1:11:59

                             In the same way, by urban renewal and other things, in the cities we are destroying communities.

1:12:06

                                     The fundamental cause of world instability to-day, and it's all pervasive, is the destruction of communities by commercialization of all human relationships with resulting neuroses and psychoses.     The technological increase, and speeding up, of transportation, communication, and weapons systems is creating power areas to-day wider than existing political structures.     We still have half a dozen at least political structures in Europe, but the power system of our technology and     Western Civilization to-day, as it exists, is such that most of Europe should be a single power system.     Therefore this is    instability.    

1:13:14

                                     Medical science and the population explosion have continued to produce people and people, when the supply of food and the supply of jobs are increasingly precarious, not just in the United States, but everywhere, because the whole purpose of using fossil fuels in the corporate structure is to eliminate jobs.         "Labor saving," we call it.     As if there were something wrong with working.     Working is one of the joys of life.     And if we are creating a society in which working is a pain in the neck, then we have created a society which is not fit for human beings.     It will be obvious to you that I have enjoyed my work, and enjoyed it here, although at the end of my career I have no conviction that I did any good.     Fortunately, I had a marvelous parent, and a marvelous mother    [Mary Frances Carroll, 1878 - 1957, wife of William Francis Quigley, 1880 - 1957]    and we were taught you don't have to win, but you have to give it all you've got.     Then it won't matter.

1:14:56

                                     Now,     to get back to the structure of the state and sovereignty.     We now have a society in America, but [too] in Europe and in much of the rest of the world, which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty which were not included in the state structure: control of banking and credit and the corporation.     These are free of political controls.     They have now largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in our society without social responsibility.     And are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial / managerial skills, and everything else which the economists once told us were the chief elements of production.     And the only element of production that they are concerned with is the one they can control:     capital.     So everything now is capital intensive, including medicine.     

1:16:13

                                     And it hasn't worked.     I'll just give you one figure.     Nobody has a more capital intensive medical system than that of the United States, and many of you may be well satisfied with it.     I simply want to point out a couple of facts.     When a boy baby is born in the United States, his expectation of life is less than that in nineteen other countries in the world.     And it's that good only because, while our infant mortality rate is not good, it is better than our adult mortality rate.     In other words, in infant mortality we are not the best.     We are about ninth or tenth.     These figures are about 1972, I think.     Let us look at a man, a boy, ten year old in the United States to-day.     His expectation of life is less than that of thirty other countries, according to the United Nations statistics.     I would say more [here] than anybody in those thirty countries are paying for a capital intensive medical system devoted to keeping people, who are almost dead, alive a few more days, instead of making people grow up healthy, by teaching them that work is fun, by teaching them that they don't have to be gluttons.     That with moderation -- I mean, we all.... In the United States, more than half of our food is wasted.     And that may be because it isn't that good.     Exercise, moderation, and so forth -- it's all the old stuff we used to get in Sunday school.     It just happens to be correct.    

1:18:41

                                     Now, I come to a topic of delicacy:     the US constitutional crisis.     The three branches of government [system] set up in 1789 does not contain the eight aspects of sovereignty.     It left out completely, for example, the administrative power.     The result is that ever since the three branches of government have been struggling to decide which of them will control the administrative power.     The growth of political parties was necessary to establish relationships between the three branches.     Changes in the process of the nomination for election.     I used to tell my students it doesn't matter who votes in an election; the important thing is the nomination.     And, when you come to the election, it doesn't matter who votes.     What's important is who didn't vote.     Every election in the United States, and increasingly so, is determined by the people who didn't vote.     And they're turned off for various reasons.    

1:20:16

                                     As a result of the three branches that were set up, they're out, they've all tried to go outside the sphere in which they should be restrained.

1:20:28

                                     Walking over here with the Dean and Professor Brown, we spoke briefly about the Latin School that I went to.     The oldest school in the United States.     1635.     Preparatory school.     Harvard was created the next year as a place for Latin School boys to go to.     And in my day, it was the largest single source of supply.     My day would be 1929 - 1930.     It was the largest single source of supply.     Although Harvard was doing everything they could to cut down on them, the Latin School boys.     But the chief method that they tried to cut us down was by raising the requirements for us, and we could handle that.     But to-day that school is controlled by a judge in Boston who has taken it upon himself to tell the school who will be admitted.     And he has said:     you must have so many girls; you must have such a percentage of blacks; and so forth and so forth and so forth.         And if they do not meet....         And you cannot have entrance exams; and, if people fail, you can't throw them out.     And what was once an absolutely incredible preparatory school [is now being destroyed].     It had many drawbacks -- it was murderous.     But if it gets any students into any competitive system of entrance in the country, in numbers of the university in question is wrong.

1:22:16

                                     Now, one of the flaws in our, to me the most ominous one, in our Constitutional set-up.     The fact that the Federal Government does not have control of money and credit; it does not have control over corporations.     It is therefore not really sovereign.     And it is not really responsible.     Because it is now controlled exactly by those two groups:     those who control the flows of the money and corporations.     The new public financing of the Presidency is arranged so they can spend as much as they want, voluntary contributions, to elect someone that he has not authorized, is legal.

1:23:14

                                     The President of the United States, when I look at him, as he exists, is what young Schlesinger -- that's Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- called the Imperial Presidency.     What I see is Caesar Augustus.     He is commander-in-chief, that's what imperator, emperor, means.     He's the head of the executive branch.     He's the head of the state as well as head of the executive branch and these other things.     Head of the state means he is the representative of the United States government in all foreign affairs and all ambassadors are accredited to him, and so forth.     Thirdly, fourthly, he's the head of the political party.     Fifth, he's head of the administrative system, which is increasingly making all the decisions.     What will be spent and who will spend it.     In the Bureau of Budget and Management.     And the system in England is even worse.     The Parliament in England now no longer has any control at all over expenditures, and yet they are still teaching in the schools that that is how they got the English Constitution, by control of grants to the Monarchy.     Do you know who is making the decisions in the Bureau of the Budget and Management as to who will get how much?         And he is also the symbol of national unity, the focus of our emotional feeling regarding our country.     This is why it is so difficult to get rid of an incumbent President, either by election or impeachment.    

1:25:08

                                     But there are other reasons.

1:25:10

                                     We have a general paralysis of government in the United States to-day, especially in the administrative power, by the very things that we praise:     the so-called rule of law, which should rather be called the rule of lawyers.     Let me give you one example.     It is perfectly clear in the U.S. Constitution that a President can be impeached by a vote of the Congress:     indictment by the House, conviction by the Senate.     It does not require common law procedures; it does not require judicial process.     It is not a judicial action at all.     It is a simple political action.     If you have the votes, he can be removed, simply by counting them.     The horrible thing about the whole Nixon business is that impeachment will never be used again in the history of the United States, because the lawyers in Congress....     Imagine, every member of the judiciary Committee has to be a lawyer, and the Judiciary committee has to recommend that he be impeached.     And have to do all kinds of things that you might do in a court of law if you're accused of holding up a bank.     And the result is that never again will anybody attempt to impeach a President.     It would take years, be indecisive; when you could simply have had a vote and do the whole thing in one morning.     Which is the way it was intended.

1:27:23

                                     Now, there are a lot of other things in the Constitution which are perfectly obvious,    but I can't get any constitutional lawyer to agree with me.     It's perfectly obvious in the Constitution that if the three branches of government couldn't agree, don't do it.     That was the theory was....     No, we have somebody supreme:     the court will make the ultimate decision, and so forth.    

1:27:47

                                     I'll just touch on something else: secrecy in government.     Secrecy in government exists for only one reason:     to prevent the American people know, from knowing what's going on.     The idea that anything that is going in our government is not known to the Russians about the moment it happens is nonsense.     The minute the President leaves the White House he is in communication.         My farm, ninety miles away from here, I can tell when he has left, because the Federal Communications system begins to operate.     And much of it is buried in the mountains, fifteen miles from me.     And the Russians are listening.     Tune on and get their free message.

1:28:53

                                     Now, we're getting...         I'll have to forget that.     The dominance of the administrative system and the elections is by private power to-day: [by] money flows and corporation activities.     And I just want to read you a summary from James Willard Hurst[’s]    The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States from 1780 to 1970.     He points out that there was powerful anti-corporation feeling in the United States in the day.     And among other things it was established that no corporation could exist by prescription:    i.e., they had to have a charter.     That they had to have a limited term of life, and not be immortal.     Corporations to-day are immortal:     they get a charter, they can live forever, and bury us all.     That they have to have a limited purpose, in other words, have a    XXXX.     Who is it giving us this bread that's made out of sawdust?         ITT.     International Telegraph and Telephone.     The same corporation that drove Ivar Kreuger to suicide in Paris in April 1931, when it was an international telegraph corporation, controlled by J P. Morgan at that time.    

1:30:44

                             I won't take time to read these things, but certain things were established in the United States regarding corporations (of course, it was on the state level, 'cause they controlled the corporations): restricted purpose and activities, especially by banks and insurance companies; prohibition on one corporation to hold the stock of another, without specific statutory grant (we definitely should have that again); limits on the span of the life of the corporation itself, reconst---,     requiring recurrent legislative scrutiny; limits on total assets;    XXXX    use of limits on new issues of capital, so that the proportion of control of existing stockholders could be maintained; limits on the vote allowed to any stockholder, regardless of the size of his holding; and so forth.    

1:31:45

                                     By 1890 all of these had been destroyed by judicial interpretation, which extended to corporations -- fictitious persons -- those constitutional rights guaranteed, especially [by] the Fifteenth [actually, should be Fourteenth] Amendment, to living persons.     Because Roscoe Conklin, known as "Turkey Strut Conklin," came to the Supreme Court and he said there were no records kept of the committee of the Senate which drew up the Fifteenth    [actually, should be Fourteenth]    Amendment.     But he had kept private notes, which showed that they intended the word "person" to include corporations.     It was most convenient.     The corporation which was hiring him to do this suitably rewarded him.    

1:33:01

                                     Now, we come to the last statement.     And I regret ending on such a, I suppose, a pessimistic [note] -- I'm not personally pessimistic.     The final result will be that the American people will prefer, ultimately, communities.     They will cop out, or opt out, of the system.     Now, it will be a long time.     The system to-day consists of...         Well, I will give it to you.     But.     Everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say:     "This was a great life" -- although I would assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise.     Notice: we are already on a wholesale basis copping out of military service.     We are already on a large scale basis copping out of voting.         An estimate to-night was that the President will probably be chosen by forty percent of the people eligible to vote.     And it's for the fourth time, over sixteen years, the percentage of voters, who are registered, who didn't vote, will be higher.     They also are copping out by no longer paying any attention to newspapers or what's going on, and by increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in your own neighborhood.    

1:34:59

                                     In this pathetic election, I am simply amazed that neither of the candidates has thought about any of the important issues, such as localism, the rights of areas to make their own decisions about what goes on.     Now, I realize that if there's a sulphur mine or a sulphur factory out, a couple of miles away, that you can't do much about it with localism.     But I think you may find with this election one rather extraordinary thing:     a considerable number of people who go to the polls and vote for the local candidate, but do not vote for the President.     Which is the reverse of what it used to be fifty years ago.

1:36:02

                                     Now, I want to say good night.     Do not be pessimistic.     Life goes on; life is fun.     And if a civilization crashes, it deserves to.     When Rome fell, when Rome fell, the Christian answer was "Create our own communities."    

1:36:48

Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen.

1:36:50

The Mythology of American Democracy [A Lecture by Carroll Quigley]

     I COULD easily make this talk a self-praising, Fourth of July oration, vintage 1880. But that's not what you want and that's not what I am qualified to give you.

     I am going to give you an historical view of the American democratic tradition with analytical overtones showing how democracy has changed over the course of our history. The United States is a democracy. I think there is no doubt of that — but the American democratic tradition is largely a myth.

     First, a few definitions. I define democracy as majority rule and minority rights. Of these the second is more important than the first. There are many despotisms which have majority rule. Hitler held plebiscites in which he obtained over 92 percent of the vote, and most of the people who were qualified to vote did vote. I think that in China today a majority of the people support the government, but China is certainly not a democracy.

     The essential half of this definition then, is the second half, minority rights. What that means is that a minority has those rights which enable it to work within the system and to build itself up to be a majority and replace the governing majority. Moderate deviations from majority rule do not usually undermine democracy. In fact, absolute democracy does not really exist at the nation-state level. For example, a modest poll tax as a qualification for voting would be an infringement on the principle of majority rule but restrictions on the suffrage would have to go pretty far before they really abrogated democracy. On the other hand relatively slight restrictions on minority rights — the freedoms of speech, assembly, and other rights — would rapidly erode democracy.

     Another basic point. Democracy is not the highest political value. Speeches about democracy and the democratic tradition might lead you to think this is the most perfect political system ever devised. That just isn't true. There are other political values which are more important and urgent—security, for example. And I would suggest that political stability and political responsibility are also more important.

     In fact, I would define a good government as a responsible government. In every society there is a structure of power. A government is responsible when its political processes reflect that power structure, thus ensuring that the power structure will never be able to overthrow the government. If a society in fact could be ruled by a minority because that elite had power to rule and the political system reflected that situation by giving governing power to that elite, then, it seems to me, we would have a responsible government even though it was not democratic.

     Some of you are looking puzzled. Why do we have democracy in this country? I'll give you a blunt and simple answer, which means, of course, that it's not the whole truth. We have democracy because around 1880 the distribution of weapons in this society was such that no minority could make a majority obey. If you have a society in which weapons are cheap, so that almost anyone can obtain them, and are easy to use — what I call amateur weapons — then you have democracy. But if the opposite is true, weapons extremely expensive and very difficult to use — the medieval knight, for example, with his castle, the supreme weapons of the year 1100 — in such a system, with expensive and difficult-to-use weapons, you could not possibly have majority rule. But in 1880 for $100 you could get the two best weapons in the world, a Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver; so almost anyone could buy them. With weapons like these in the hands of ordinary people, no minority could make the majority obey a despotic government.

     Now there are some features of democracy that many people really do not understand. It is said, for example, that our officials are elected by the voters, and the one that gets the most votes is elected. I suggest that this is misleading. The outcome of an election is not determined by those who vote, but by those who don't vote. Since 1945 or so, we have had pretty close elections, with not much more than half of the people voting. In the 1968 election about 80 million voted, and about 50 million qualified to vote did not. The outcome was determined by the 50 million who didn't vote. If you could have got 2 percent of the nonvoters to the polls to vote for your candidate, you could have elected him. And that has been true of most of our recent elections. It's the ones who don't vote who determine the outcome.

     Something else we tend to overlook is that the nomination process is much more important than the election process. I startle a lot of my colleagues who think they know England pretty well by asking them how candidates for election are nominated in England. They don't have conventions or primary elections. So the important thing is who names the candidates. In any democratic country, if you could name the candidates of all parties, you wouldn't care who voted or how, because your man would be elected. So the nominations are more important than the elections.

     A third point is one I often make in talking with students who are discouraged about their inability to influence the political process. I say this is nonsense. There never was a time when it was easier for ordinary people to influence political affairs than today. One reason, of course, is that big mass of nonvoters. If you can simply get 2 or 3 percent of them to the polls — and that shouldn't be too difficult — then you can elect your candidate, whoever he is.

     There are three key factors in elections — money, organization, enthusiasm. If you have two of them you can win. Students may not have much money, but they can organize — apparently McGovern has an organization — and they are enthusiastic. Gene McCarthy went pretty far on enthusiasm alone four years ago, even though he didn't have an organization or much money.

  That Anglo-Saxon Heritage

       Now let's look at some democratic traditions. Most people say that our democratic traditions began in England. This is totally a myth. England was in no sense a democratic country in 1775, when we declared our independence. It remained an undemocratic country until well into the 20th century. Candidates were not nominated by the people, and members of parliament were not even paid until 1911.

     Furthermore, England had an oligarchic political structure. It did reform itself radically in the 1820's and became one of the best governments in the world by shifting to what I would call an aristocratic structure, that is, one with a sense of responsibility to the public welfare. But they didn't have a democratic system. An ordinary person couldn't get a secondary education at all until after 1902, and higher education didn't become widely available until after 1945 and the reforms of the last quarter of a century.

     Furthermore, both in England and in our country — this is part of our undemocratic heritage from England — access to justice is strictly limited. Until 30 years ago England had a rigidly stratified society, the only one in Europe where you could tell a person's social class the minute he opened his mouth. The upper classes had a different accent. Today, with the BBC and more popular education, speaking accents are blending, as opportunities for changing status are opening upward. But access to law, to the courts, to justice, as well as to education, were strictly limited, and for he most part still are in the English-speaking world.

     When somebody infringes your rights, it's usually too expensive for you to defend them. This is true even in income-tax disputes. And it hit me, for example, in the matter of copyright. A fellow published a book a couple of years ago, in which 30 of its 121 pages came right out of a book I had published. I cannot sue him for infringement of copyright because I can't afford it. And he's made so much money out of his book, that he could fight me right up to the Supreme Court, and he might even win. But I don't have the $150,000 it takes to flight a case to the Supreme Court.

     So, the American democratic tradition was born here, not in England, and its antecedents go back to non-English sources — for example, the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

The Constitution and the Powers

     Next, the Constitution. It is not democratic but republican, a different thing. That means only that we don't have a king. It protects minority rights chiefly in the first ten amendments. Before they were added, it provided very little protection for minority rights. It did provide for jury trial, but as I have shown, access to the courts was a class privilege.

     These first ten amendments were the basis of minority rights in the Constitution. But they were accompanied by many weaknesses, which have remained throughout our history. It is important that we realize this, because our safety, our lives, and our happiness depend upon our constitutional forms of government.

     The Constitution established three branches of government — executive, legislative, and judicial — but any governing system has more than three parts. For instance, the taxing power was split up. Two other powers are especially important: the administrative power and the incorporating power. These are vital in any government. They are not allotted to anyone in the Constitution, certainly not to the Federal Government.

     By the incorporating power I mean the right of a government to say that a group of people will be regarded in law as a person with the right to hold property and to sue and be sued in the courts. That power is left with the States.

     The administrative power is that discretionary power which is absolutely essential to government. It is best represented, I think, in a policeman controlling traffic at a busy intersection. He starts and stops the traffic according to his judgment of what is best to keep traffic flowing smoothly and safely. That is the administrative power. It is one of the original powers of government. It involves such things as protecting the health and sanitation of any community by such means as requiring vaccination. In constitutional law we call it the police power but that does not mean the policeman's power. It means discretionary power.

     For almost 100 years after the Civil War there was a struggle among the three branches of the Government for control of the administrative power. Now we have independent administrative and regulatory agencies which are subject to the courts or to the executive branch or to the congressional branch. In many cases they have become autonomous. For instance, one of the things they did, without guidance from any of the three main branches until very late, was to introduce all the inequities of the English-speaking judicial and legal system into the procedures of administration.

     The Constitution made no provision for breaking a deadlock among the three branches. It was assumed that in such a case whatever action was at issue should not be done—in other words, anything worth doing will be supported by all branches of the government. If they don't agree, it's better not to do it. The basic assumption was, of course, that no disasters would result from paralysis in government, because we were secure from sudden and overwhelming attack from abroad. Domestic paralysis we could live with. And as long as we were protected by our two oceans and the British Navy, and later by our own armed forces, we were able to muddle through. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, the situation is different, and the problem of how to ensure prompt action in a crisis, has been a continuing constitutional issue.

     One of the most essential parts of our political system is our political parties, which grew up wholly outside the Constitution and the legal system as the links between the three branches of our government. You have been reading about the dispute over delegates for the Republican National Convention. For a long time about a quarter of the Republican delegates did not represent the voters at all because they came from purely Democratic States in the South. Today the non-Republican States do not have so large a block of delegates. McKinley's nomination in 1896 was arranged ahead of time in Thomasville, Georgia, the preceding winter by Mark Hanna's buying up the Southern delegates to the Republican Convention of 1896. The Southern delegates were paid $200 plus rail fare and hotel bills to vote for McKinley. Anyway, the party system has evolved to make up for one of the major deficiencies of the Constitution, the lack of provisions to translate the citizen's vote into a government responsive to the popular will.

     Another extraconstitutional development is judicial supremacy. This was simply asserted and exercised by the judiciary, which determines whether legislation is constitutional and makes rulings which the executive branch is supposed to carry out. But in adopting this principle, we have simply taken over the undemocratic feature of the English system, which requires the citizen to defend his rights in courts of law. Today people who are penniless do enjoy that right because they can get the American Civil Liberties Union, or some foundation, or somebody else, to finance their litigation. But an ordinary middle-class person of limited means is denied that right. Both of these institutional developments, political parties and judicial supremacy, are outside the Constitution. Both of them are largely irresponsible. They are not responsible to the people.

The Stages of Political Growth

     Let me quickly review the history of American democracy in terms of how candidates are nominated. There were five stages in that historical evolution. In the first, beginning in 1789 and for more than 40 years thereafter, candidates were named by the legislators. This method was called the legislative caucus. Up to the early 1840's there was a steady extension of democracy by changes in the State voting laws, culminating in the Rhode Island reforms of 1842, resulting from Dorr's rebellion, extending the suffrage to the ordinary man. By 1843 voting democracy was established more or less in all the States.

     The second stage was the era of the spoils system, and it lasted for a little over 40 years, from just before 1840 to just after 1880. The spoils system arose, from the fact that in a system of mass democracy, where most men at least have the right to vote, there must be some way of nominating candidates for office. The method chosen was the nominating convention. This raised the problem of how to finance sending the delegates to the convention.

     The solution developed around 1840 was for the party machine of the winning party in an election to reward the party faithful by appointing them to government office. To the victor belong the spoils. These appointees then kick back money to the party kitty, say, a quarter or 10 percent of their salary every year; and these kick-backs provide the funds for the nomination convention and the process of political campaigning. In that new system government officials themselves went as paid delegates to the nominating conventions, and the nominations and getting out the vote in elections were controlled by the party machines. All of these were local in cities or on a State basis. It was a feudalistic power structure.

     One of the interesting features of the whole system is the role that polities played in people's lives. In this period, from 1840 to 1880, politics and religion, frequently revivalist religion, were the chief entertainment outlets the American people had. They did not have organized sports or other kinds of entertainment except an occasional traveling company of actors, and, more often, revivalist preachers. So people identified with a political party.

     The closest parallel to this in our own time perhaps, is the national hullabaloo in the late thirties and early forties over the contest between the Yankees and the Dodgers in the World Series, when everybody at least in the eastern part of the country and everybody in New York, was rooting for one or for the other, for totally irrational reasons. This was a purely emotional thing. If their team won they were ecstatic, if their team lost they were downcast. Well, that's what politics was like in the era of the spoils system, and it continued until about the mid-1890's.

     Here's how the system worked. Professionals, not amateurs, ran the elections. Issues were of little importance. Charisma was not important; in fact, it was a drawback. The parties put up the most colorless dark horse they could find—the less people knew about him the better—and then counted on enthusiasm for the party to get out the votes.

     Elections in that period were pretty close, although after 1865, on the whole, the Republicans did better than the Democrats because the South had become a minority area and the Democrats a minority party. But on the whole few people were interested in issues or in candidates, and it was very difficult for a winning candidate to be reelected because once people got to know him they quickly discovered how dull a person he was. That's why he got nominated in the first place. The nominee was by definition the candidate that the local State party machines had nothing against. The local machines had an effective veto, and by the time they finished vetoing everybody who had any importance or was known, the only one left might be a man like James A. Garfield, a completely dark horse. The only alternative was a Civil War general, who did, of course, exercise some attraction. The elections were extremely close, and up to 80 percent of the electorate voted. We have the exact figures for most of this period. The average was 78.5 percent. We have never gone that high since 1896.

     This spoils system was, in a sense, a shakedown operation, particularly against business. And as business and finance became stronger, they became increasingly restive under this exploitation by party machines. Take the New York Customs House, which had 1,100 officials who were the very core of the New York election machine, which in turn was the core of the system for the whole country. Those 1,100 officials kicked back a good part of their salaries to the New York State party machine. So they in turn, charged businessmen outrageous tariffs, as much as the traffic would bear. The laws were ignored. The customs officials would tie up a shipment of steel and keep it tied up until the tariff they demanded was paid.

     As a consequence, businessmen changed the system in 1880-1883. A great man, William C. Whitney (who later started the modern American Navy as Secretary of the Navy in the Cleveland administration), devised a scheme to cut the very roots out from under the party machines. He established the Civil Service in the Pendleton Act of 1883. This had the effect of cutting off most of the funds on which the party machines depended. So the parties now had to look to big business to finance them.

     This led to the third historical stage, the era of big-business domination, from 1884 to 1932. It was radically different from the one preceding. Voting dropped off drastically. In the 1870's political activity had cut across all groups and classes — rich and poor, while and black, Catholic and Protestant. Negroes were more active in politics in the 1870's and 1880's than they have been at any time in the 20th century until very recently. Politics was everybody's game. But once big business got control, voting fell off and hovered around 52 percent, instead of the 78 percent it had been before. The professionals were pushed out and amateurs took over — people who came in for one campaign or two, generally financed by business — men like William McKinley, who was elected President in 1896.

     Then, big business discovered it could control the Republican National Convention, because of all those delegates from the Solid South who did not represent voters and who therefore could easily be bought. From 1896 on, as a result, the Republicans dominated the national scene through amateur control of politics, and increasingly restricting political activity among middle class whites to the WASP's. It was in the 1890's that we got the Jim Crow laws and other restrictions which in one way or another ensured that certain minority groups really couldn't expect to make it.

     Eventually big business undermined its own dominance by being too greedy — there's no other word for it — in the 1920's. They alienated not only the workers and the farmers and the petit-bourgeois white-collar workers, but much of the middle classes, including most of the merchants and light industry. All that was left, still in control at the top, was high finance (sometimes called Wall Street) and heavy industry — steel, coal, the automobile industry, and so on. By running politics solely for their own benefit they alienated everybody else.

     So in 1932 everybody else lined up behind a Democrat. In the once solid mid-West, which for decades had voted Republican year in and year out — except rarely for a third party as in 1892 and in 1924 — many people now decided that the Civil War had been over for a long time and it was time to vote Democratic.

     Out of this situation came the New Deal, the fourth stage. The New Deal was a system of organized blocs. Formerly organized finance and organized heavy industry had run everything else. Now the New Deal set about organizing all the other interests, especially mass labor in the CIO, the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee (SWOC), and the United Mine Workers, which had been the only really strong labor union before 1930. They organized mass labor; they organized the farmers, they organized others: Most of their money came from merchants. The largest contributor to Franklin Roosevelt's campaign in 1932 was the Strauss family of R. H. Macy. Second largest was Vincent Astor, whose real-estate holdings in New York City had been injured by the depression. Third was Bernard Baruch (who is considered one of the founding fathers of this institution), who was a professional contributor to the Democratic Party.

     These were the groups that the New Deal organized. What they wanted to set up was a system of countervailing blocs: finance, heavy industry, light industry, professional groups, labor, farmers, and so forth. They figured that if any party or political group got control of the Government and acted too selfishly, the others would form a coalition and restore the balance.

Threats to Democracy

     Well, the New Deal ran its course, and since about 1950 or so we have had plutocratic control. I said before that three things were necessary to win elections: money, enthusiasm, organization. The role of money has increased to the point where it's more and more difficult to offset the lack of it with good organization and enthusiasm. Organization must be super-efficient and enthusiasm has to be sustained and widespread. Because the costs of elections, what with TV air time, air transportation, and all the rest of it, have climbed sky-high. It cost McGovern $6 million just to get the nomination, and God knows what it would take to win the election. The Democrats just don't have it. Do they have organization and enthusiasm? It's hard to tell. I'm afraid the enthusiasm has dwindled to some extent.

     Anyway, we now have a plutocratic system, and many politicians see it simply as a matter of buying elections. Here's why. As our economy is now structured, the big corporations — aerospace, oil, and so on — are able to pour out millions to support the candidates they favor. The restrictions on the books are easily evaded, and the politicians in power won't do much about it because they want some, too.

     The second reason is that labor unions are now a part of the system. They too want to get on the gravy train, and are no longer concerned with defending the rights of ordinary men or making the political system more democratic. Their outlook is little different from that of the big corporations, because this in effect is what they are. They are enormously rich, they are not democratically run, and they have increasingly taken on the characteristics of great corporations: irresponsibility, anonymity, and undemocratic procedures.

     So money is one of the great threats to democracy. A second threat is what Roman law called persona ficta, fictitious persons—corporations, labor unions, and similar organizations which have the legal status of persons in the sense that they can buy and sell property, they can sue and be sued in the courts, they are generally anonymous, they are certainly irresponsible, and they are increasingly powerful. The 15th amendment and various court rulings have given corporations all the rights of living persons. This is dangerous because they already have certain rights that real persons don't have, principally immortality. That's the saving grace about even the worst scoundrel: someday he will die, and maybe we can wait that long. We felt that way about, Hitler, and Stalin. Maybe Mao is different; we'll see. But a corporation never dies. It has the first quality of divinity, as the ancient Greeks defined it. They called their gods the immortals, because the only quality they had that set them apart from men was that they never died.

     Besides setting limits to corporate immortality, we must put other restraints upon all fictitious persons, including foundations, universities, and all such entities. From 1890 there was competition among the States to lower the restraints on corporations. Originally, when a corporation was set up, its charter specified what it was entitled to do, sell hamburgers to the public or whatever. Today there are no restrictions, no restraints, no reporting. Even the Congress can't find out what are the actual costs, expenditures, and profits of the automobile manufacturers, whose profits are incredibly high and yet they are going to raise their prices even higher.

     We've got to make our corporations more responsible.

     Another danger to democracy. I have just spent 3½   years studying ancient China, Islam, and Byzantium. What undermined all these civilizations is clearly evident. You see it most clearly in Augustus Caesar. What did his power rest upon? He wore many hats. He had the powers of a tribune, he was chief priest, he was commander in chief, he was consul. There were two consuls, but does anybody know the name of the other one? One of the threats to our constitutional system, it seems to me, is that the President of the United States has many hats.

     First he is head of the State. Secondly, he is head of the government. As you know, these are different things. Ambassadors are accredited to the head of the State. This seriously hurt us at the Paris Peace Conference, after World War I when President Wilson represented the United States. Of the five major powers, four were represented by prime ministers, who are heads of governments. Wilson, who was a head of State had the power of immediate decision, and the English really took advantage of this. They got him to commit himself to certain things and then used them to bargain for other things they wanted. He wanted Latin America more or less out of the League of Nations, so in return for that they got him to promise to reduce the U.S. Navy in the 1922 Naval Conference. The head of the State in most, countries is the king or the president. But our President is both.

     Thirdly, he is head of a political party. Look at the problems this creates for Nixon right now. If the bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate is ever pinned on the Republican Party, many people will see the President himself as responsible.

     Fourthly, he is Commander in Chief. The point came up yesterday in some law court that there has been no declaration of war in Southeast Asia either by Congress, as the Constitution provides, or by a President.

     Now, let's look at Augustus Caesar again. Augustus Caesar's real power was in his role as commander in chief. The Latin word is imperator which we now translate as emperor. He was emperor because be was commander in chief and for no other reason.

     I won't go into any fantasies or scenarios about what could happen. You could think of them yourself. Thank God, in this country — I believe also in Russia — the armed forces do not directly or even significantly interfere in politics as armed forces, as they do for example in Latin American countries, or in the recent attempt by part of the Moroccan Air Force to assassinate the King. This is unthinkable in our country. And what makes it unthinkable has nothing to do with restraints placed upon the military in our government, but with their self-restraint, their sense of obligation to our system. And for that we should be very thankful.

     But suppose a Presidential candidate lost the election, decided he wanted to be President anyway, and persuaded the military leaders to support him. To you military types this may seem an absolute fantasy. How could the generals and admirals be sure the rank and file would support such an undertaking. But historically this has happened again and again in almost every civilization, usually in the later stages of decline.

     The President is also the head of the administrative system with discretionary and emergency powers.

     Another threat to democracy is mass culture.   There is an increasingly pervasive belief in the United States that equality of opportunity is not enough; we should also have equality in rewards for performance. Everybody starts the race together and finishes together; everybody wins. You see this in universities which are abolishing all grading, all track systems, all encouragement of excellence. The whole trend both in colleges and in high schools is toward equalization and uniformity.

     Our democratic system is not based and cannot be based on uniformity. It must be based on diversity. We need the diverse talents of many people working together because of their shared belief in the necessity and value of our constitutional way of life.

     Finally, more and more we have subordinated means and methods to goals. If the end is good, to hell with the legality. You can see this clearly in the Southeast Asia war. It should have been put up to Congress to declare war. You say that's mere legality. But when legality and constitutional restraints go by the board, then you are simply saying that might makes right, and more and more you will rely on force to achieve your goals.

Remedies

     What to do about this? Well, reduce the influence of money. There are many ways of doing this. I urged 30 years ago public financing of elections. Try in every way possible to reward enthusiasm and dedicated effort, strive to internalize individual controls by built-in restraints. Our Armed Forces have these to a considerable degree. But let's internalize controls also in the business world and in labor unions and in the universities and everywhere else. This involves social restraints and the kind of social relationships in which people attach more importance to the good opinion of their friends and associates than to material gain, power, or success.

     We must provide nuclei of pluralistic balancing of forces which can unite to resist despotism by agreement on the widest possible interests. What are those interests? Being human is one, and an important one. We're all people and we're all consumers, so the rights of human beings and of consumers should be the big issues around which the pluralistic grouping and constant reshuffling of power groups should revolve.

     We must curtail gross growth. I would distinguish between expansion, which is good, growth, which is neutral, and gross growth, which is damaging. We've got to reduce gross growth by going back to the beginning with new methods of doing things.

     Here's an example of what I mean. Consider the related problems of pollution and shortage of energy. We are now going to spend at least $3 billion to ensure delivery of Middle East oil to this country by building supertankers and deep-water harbors to accommodate them. At present we have only one port in the United States that can handle them, near Seattle. They're even talking about spending $47 million, I think, to deepen the tunnel bridge across the Chesapeake Bay so that supertankers can come under it.

     There's another solution, the hydrogen engine. Its emissions will be only water vapor. Or we can use the sun's energy directly. Out in New Mexico they get 400 or 500 days of consecutive sunshine. So cover some of these sun-baked surfaces with energy accumulating devices and channel the energy into our electric grid. There was an article on this in Science three weeks ago and a book came out recently on the hydrogen engine.

     Now one last point. In the Government there are trigger points. A trigger point I call a point where slight changes, if you press it, will have enormous repercussions. I'll give you one example. Congress operates on the seniority principle. Seniority is an obstacle to responsibility and to democracy. Does that mean we must abolish seniority? Not at all. We can make a very simple change, what I call a trigger point change. Simply provide that any committee at any time by majority vote can bring out legislation on the floor. Who can object to that? Let the committees become responsible instead of authoritarian.

Discussion

       QUESTION: Would you elaborate on your statement that we need to reduce our gross growth? I don't understand that term as you use it.

     DR. QUIGLEY: Look at it this way. Our society is made up of a series of what I call operational lines, each of which satisfies an area of human needs — military, political, economic, social, emotional, intellectual, religious. At the far end of these lines are resources. Behind resources are the technologies that exploit and use them. Technology is embedded in technological systems; in the military, these would be weapon systems. Behind these systems are the patterns of thought, feeling, and action in the society. Behind them, in turn, are human desires, and behind these are human needs.

     Now human needs are socialized into desires. We need food but we desire steak or hamburger and will not eat roast locusts or pickled whale blubber, as a friend of mine had handed to him in Iceland one time. So needs are socialized into desires, desires operate through patterns of culture upon a technological system — business system, military system, some other kind of system — and technology works on resources.

     A system is past its prime and in trouble when it increases the satisfaction of needs simply by using more and more and more resources, instead of using the same or fewer resources more efficiently. In short, as our needs and desires increase, we need better technologies and better systems which can satisfy our needs without using more resources. For example, Japan, Italy, and Germany were have-not countries before World War II. They went to war to get more of the world's economic goods for themselves. They were defeated, and lost a lot of their resources. Then we reformed the organizational structure of their economic system, and introduced new technology, and today all three of them are have nations, with the highest standard of living they have ever had, on a smaller resource base.

     In short, you have to improve the technology and systems portions of the operational line in order to increase satisfaction of need. The operational or output end of the line should be dominated by the input of needs and desires, but without continually increasing the consumption of resources. Gross growth results when, say, the need for moving around is satisfied by a transportation system which uses the same old technology to produce more and more automobiles, superhighways, concrete parking lots, underground offices (to make room for the parking lots), and so on. That is gross growth.

     Expansion occurs when you satisfy more needs with the same resources by improving the operational system which is processing resources into satisfaction of needs. This is not the system we've got today.

     QUESTION: Which powers of the President do you believe should be curtailed?

     DR. QUIGLEY: I didn't say anything about curtailing his powers. All I want is responsibility. Particularly when responsibility is already fixed in the Constitution, it should be exercised. Specifically, the power to make war is vested in the Congress. If that's where we want it, then let's use it. If we don't, then we should change the Constitution and maybe give the President the power to make war. But he doesn't have it now.

     In other words I want to bring the legal situation closer to the actual situation, because I think it dangerous for the legal situation to deviate noticeably from the actual power structure. That's how you get into wars. A war occurs only when one, if not both sides, misjudges the actual power relationships. As long as the legal situation is what they both agree upon—in other words, it reflects the actual power relationship—then they will act according to the law. We always prefer to act upon the basis of our conception of what the facts are and law is a kind of conceptualization or idealization of the real world—rather than on the basis of an objective view of reality.

     So it's important that the ideal and the real not be too far apart when vital decisions are made. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or when Hitler attacked Russia, both had perceptions of reality that were dangerously at varience with the real power situation. Their decisions, in other words, were irresponsible.

     QUESTION: You expressed concern over our multihatted President. What remedies would you suggest to deal with the threat of a President who wears many hats?

     DR. QUIGLEY: I think we should start with the Congress. If the President gets away with a lot of things that are or may be unconstitutional, that's the fault of the Congress. The Congress should enforce their responsibilities. They should never go along with a President like Johnson who could go down there and get them to agree to just about anything, because he was a very difficult man to say no to.

     Walter Lippmann says the Congress is getting stronger and the executive weaker, but this is the reverse of the truth. The Congress is getting weaker. They let all kinds of things go by, because they're interested in their own vested interests, particularly their committee chairmanships.

     The Congress should be more responsible to the people, and the best way to do that is, of course, to have a well-informed electorate. So this goes back to my original proposal to curtail the power of money in elections and increase the power of enthusiasm and organization.

     QUESTION: You started to talk about trigger points. Could you give some more illustrations of what you mean?

     DR. QUIGLEY: Well, the nomination process is an important one. We have had some improvements in the process over the last 8 years, but in the Democratic Party, at least, there is a tendency to fall for slogans and make changes which don't really get at what is needed. Specifically, I would not favor any nomination process which stipulates how many women or how many blacks or how many young people must be delegates. The important thing is that any black or any young person or any Catholic or any Hottentot who wants to function in the system can do so. So the place to begin, I would say, is the the nomination process. There again you have to restrict the power of money.   

     Then in the election we have to get the nonvoters to vote, make them feel it's important. You have no idea the struggle I had with my students two or three years ago. All they wanted to do was to destroy the system. I told them they were crazy. They simply had no idea how the system worked, what determines which legislation comes to the floor of Congress, how candidates for Congress are nominated, and things like that. They were just against the system. Burn it down, blow it up, destroy it.

     Do you know that the McCarthy campaign began in my freshmen class at Georgetown? I didn't realize at the time that Ellen McCarthy was in the class. After I talked to the class that December, she got the whole crowd to go up to New Hampshire for the primary. I’m sure Gene had the same idea. But what I tried to show the kids was that they could influence the process by working in the system. There are all kinds of ways to do it, and above all there are those 50 million people who are nonvoters.

     First, however, you have to know how the system actually functions. Today no system functions the way it seems at first glance, and never the way the people who are in it describe it. That is certainly true in the system of higher education in which I operate, where the jobs go to the fellow who has a Ph.D., not to the one who is best qualified!

     QUESTION: Would you comment on the relationship of the availability of cheap weapons to the current efforts to control small handguns?

     DR. QUIGLEY: Well, I don't think the American people should be disarmed, but on the other hand I think it's perfectly possible to keep track of every gun that is made. We could have a licensing system, with every gun numbered and every time it changes hands it is reported to a central computer. Just make sure that the person who gets the identification actually is who he says he is, and hold him responsible if the gun gets into someone else's hands, unless it is stolen and he promptly reports it.

     Of course, the small handguns can't be equated with the cheaper weapons of the 1880's because the latter were really the basic weapons of their day. A citizenry armed with rifles and revolvers at that time was in little danger of succumbing to the military, which didn't have anything much better. That has no relation to today's situation, and that’s why I'm worried about the prospect of an all-professional army, which as I said, is a terrible threat to any democratic system.   We’re going for a professional army for the same reason that the Romans did. They couldn’t keep people in the army, away from their homes, for 20 and 25 years if they were just drafted men. So they established a professional army.

     Well, pretty soon the soldiers married the girls in the locality and pretty soon barbarians were enlisting, and one day the Romans woke up to discover they didn't, even have a Roman or a Latin-speaking army at all, but an army of barbarian mercenaries. And you've all read about what that army did to Roman society in the early centuries of the Christian era.

     I'm not saying this is likely to happen to us — the emergence of a non-American mercenary army, I mean — but high pay and fringe benefits are going to attract a pretty varied assortment of types, and I just don't foresee what it may lead to. And I do know, as a historian, that whenever weapons become difficult to use and expensive to obtain, democracy as a functioning political system is in grave danger. How can we avoid the danger? I believe internal restraints are the only solution, in the long run. And how you build those I don't know.

     The crime rate of the largest city in the world, Tokyo, is approximately one seventh of the crime rate of a city like New York. Why? Internal restraints. Those internal restraints are rooted in something that maybe we don't want to buy, in the Japanese family. In the United States, crime rates among, Chinese-Americans are infinitesimal on a percentage basis compared to, say, those among the Irish in the 1860's or the Italians in the 1920's. The reason is that the Irish and Italians were broken up sociologically into atomized, self-centered individuals.   

The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan [Playboy Magazine, March 1969]

In 1961, the name of Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone but his English students at the University of Toronto--and a coterie of academic admirers who followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation quarterlies. But then came two remarkable books-- "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962) and "Understanding Media" (1964)--and the graying professor from Canada's western hinterlands soon found himself characterized by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the hottest academic property around." He has since won a world-wide following for his brilliant--and frequently baffling--theories about the impact of the media on man; and his name has entered the French language as mucluhanisme, a synonym for the world of pop culture.

Though his books are written in a difficult style--at once enigmatic, epigrammatic and overgrown with arcane literary and historic allusions--the revolutionary ideas lurking in them have made McLuhan a best-selling author. Despite protests from a legion of outraged scholastics and old-guard humanists who claim that McLuhan's ideas range from demented to dangerous, his free-for-all theorizing has attracted the attention of top executives at General Motors (who paid him a handsome fee to inform them that automobiles were a thing of the past), Bell Telephone (to whom he explained that they didn't really understand the function of the telephone) and a leading package-design house (which was told that packages will soon be obsolete). Anteing up $5000, another huge corporation asked him to predict--via closed-circuit television--what their own products will be used for in the future; and Canada's turned-on Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau engages him in monthly bull sessions designed to improve his television image.

McLuhan's observations--"probes," he prefers to call them--are riddled with such flamboyantly undecipherable aphorisms as "The electric light is pure information" and "People don't actually read newspapers--they get into them every morning like a hot bath." Of his own work, McLuhan has remarked: "I don't pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult." Despite his convoluted syntax, flashy metaphors and word-playful one-liners, however, McLuhan's basic thesis is relatively simple.

McLuhan contends that all media--in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate--exert a compelling influence on man and society. Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste. But technological innovations are extensions of human abilities and senses that alter this sensory balance--an alteration that, in turn, inexorably reshapes the society that created the technology. According to McLuhan, there have been three basic technological innovations: the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which jolted tribal man out of his sensory balance and gave dominance to the eye; the introduction of movable type in the 16th Century, which accelerated this process; and the invention of the telegraph in 1844, which heralded an electronics revolution that will ultimately retribalize man by restoring his sensory balance. McLuhan has made it his business to explain and extrapolate the repercussions of this electronic revolution.

For his efforts, critics have dubbed him "the Dr. Spock of pop culture," "the guru of the boob tube," a "Canadian Nkrumah who has joined the assault on reason," a "metaphysical wizard possessed by a spatial sense of madness," and "the high priest of popthink who conducts a Black Mass for dilettantes before the altar of historical determinism." Amherst professor Benjamin De-Mott observed: "He's swinging, switched on, with it and NOW. And wrong."

But as Tom Wolfe has aptly inquired, "What if he is right? Suppose he is what he sounds like--the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov?" Social historian Richard Kostelanetz contends that "the most extraordinary quality of McLuhan's mind is that it discerns significance where others see only data, or nothing; he tells us how to measure phenomena previously unmeasurable."

The unperturbed subject of this controversy was born in Edmonton, Alberta, on July 21, 1911. The son of a former actress and a real-estate salesman, McLuhan entered the University of Manitoba intending to become an engineer, but matriculated in 1934 with an M.A. in English literature. Next came a stint as an oarsman and graduate student at Cambridge, followed by McLuhan's first teaching job--at the University of Wisconsin. It was a pivotal experience. "I was confronted with young Americans 'I was incapable of understanding," he has since remarked. "I felt an urgent need to study their popular culture in order to get through." With the seeds sown, McLuhan let them germinate while earning a Ph.D., then taught at Catholic universities. (He is a devout Roman Catholic convert.)

His publishing career began with a number of articles on standard academic fare; but by the mid-Forties, his interest in popular culture surfaced, and true McLuhan efforts such as "The Psychopathology of Time and Life" began to appear. They hit book length for the first time in 1951 with the publication of "The Mechanical Bride"--an analysis of the social and psychological pressures generated by the press, radio, movies and advertising--and McLuhan was on his way. Though the book attracted little public notice, it won him the chairmanship of a Ford Foundation seminar on culture and communications and a $40,000 grant, with part of which he started "Explorations," a small periodical outlet for the seminar's findings. By the late Fifties, his reputation had trickled down to Washington: In 1959, he became director of the Media Project of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters and the United States Office of Education, and the report resulting from this post became the first draft of "Understanding Media." Since 1963, McLuhan has headed the University of Toronto's Center for Culture and Technology, which until recently consisted entirely of McLuhan's office, but now includes a six-room campus building.

Apart from his teaching, lecturing and administrative duties, McLuhan has become a sort of minor communication industry unto himself. Each month he issues to subscribers a mixed-media report called "The McLuhan Dew-Line"; and, punning on that title, he has also originated a series of recordings called "The Marshall McLuhan Dew-Line Plattertudes." McLuhan contributed a characteristically mind-expanding essay about the media--"The Reversal of the Overheated-Image"--to our December 1968 issue. Also a compulsive collaborator, his literary efforts in tandem with colleagues have included a high school textbook and an analysis of the function of space in poetry and painting. "Counterblast," his next book, is a manically graphic trip through the land of his theories.

In order to provide our readers with a map of this labyrinthine terra incognita, PLAYBOY assigned interviewer Eric Norden to visit McLuhan at his spacious new home in the wealthy Toronto suburb of Wychwood Park, where he lives with his wife, Corinne, and five of his six children. (His eldest son lives in New York, where he is completing a book on James Joyce, one of his father's heroes.) Norden reports: "Tall, gray and gangly, with a thin but mobile mouth and an otherwise eminently forgettable face, McLuhan was dressed in an ill-fitting brown tweed suit, black shoes and a clip-on necktie. As we talked on into the night before a crackling fire, McLuhan expressed his reservations about the interview--indeed, about the printed word itself--as a means of communication, suggesting that the question-and-answer format might impede the in-depth flow of his ideas. I assured him that he would have as much time--and space--as he wished to develop his thoughts."

The result has considerably more lucidity and clarity than McLuhan's readers are accustomed to--perhaps because the Q. and A. format serves to pin him down by counteracting his habit of mercurially changing the subject in mid-stream of consciousness. It is also, we think, a protean and provocative distillation not only of McLuhan's original theories about human progress and social institutions but of his almost immobilizingly intricate style--described by novelist George P. Elliott as "deliberately antilogical, circular, repetitious, unqualified, gnomic, outrageous" and, even less charitably, by critic Christopher Ricks as "a viscous fog through which loom stumbling metaphors." But other authorities contend that McLuhan's stylistic medium is part and parcel of his message--that the tightly structured "linear" modes of traditional thought and discourse are obsolescent in the new "postliterate" age of the electric media. Norden began the interview with an allusion to McLuhan's favorite electric medium: television.

The Interview:

PLAYBOY: To borrow Henry Gibson's oft-repeated one-line poem on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In--"Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?"

MCLUHAN: Sometimes I wonder. I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me. My work is designed for the pragmatic purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. But my books constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. I want to map new terrain rather than chart old landmarks.

But I've never presented such explorations as revealed truth. As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory--my own or anyone else's. As a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement I've ever made about any subject if events don't bear me out, or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of the problem. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safe-cracker's. I don't know what's inside; maybe it's nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences--until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.

PLAYBOY: Isn't such a methodology somewhat erratic and inconsistent--if not, as your critics would maintain, eccentric?

MCLUHAN: Any approach to environmental problems must be sufficiently flexible and adaptable to encompass the entire environmental matrix, which is in constant flux. I consider myself a generalist, not a specialist who has staked out a tiny plot of study as his intellectual turf and is oblivious to everything else. Actually, my work is a depth operation, the accepted practice in most modern disciplines from psychiatry to metallurgy and structural analysis. Effective study of the media deals not only with the content of the media but with the media themselves and the total cultural environment within which the media function. Only by standing aside from any phenomenon and taking an overview can you discover its operative principles and lines of force. There's really nothing inherently startling or radical about this study--except that for some reason few have had the vision to undertake it. For the past 3500 years of the Western world, the effects of media--whether it's speech, writing, printing, photography, radio or television--have been systematically overlooked by social observers. Even in today's revolutionary electronic age, scholars evidence few signs of modifying this traditional stance of ostrichlike disregard.

PLAYBOY: Why?

MCLUHAN: Because all media, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment. Such an extension is an intensification, an amplification of an organ, sense or function, and whenever it takes place, the central nervous system appears to institute a self-protective numbing of the affected area, insulating and anesthetizing it from conscious awareness of what's happening to it. It's a process rather like that which occurs to the body under shock or stress conditions, or to the mind in line with the Freudian concept of repression. I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible.

This problem is doubly acute today because man must, as a simple survival strategy, become aware of what is happening to him, despite the attendant pain of such comprehension. The fact that he has not done so in this age of electronics is what has made this also the age of anxiety, which in turn has been transformed into its Doppelgänger--the therapeutically reactive age of anomie and apathy. But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us--indeed, compelling us--to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies. We live in the first age when change occurs sufficiently rapidly to make such pattern recognition possible for society at large. Until the present era, this awareness has always been reflected first by the artist, who has had the power--and courage--of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world.

PLAYBOY: Why should it be the artist rather than the scientist who perceives these relationships and foresees these trends?

MCLUHAN: Because inherent in the artist's creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change. It's always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the message--that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists.

PLAYBOY: Is the public, then, at last beginning to perceive the "invisible" contours of these new technological environments

MCLUHAN: People are beginning to understand the nature of their new technology, but not yet nearly enough of them--and not nearly well enough. Most people, as I indicated, still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. Because we are benumbed by any new technology--which in turn creates a totally new environment--we tend to make the old environment more visible; we do so by turning it into an art form and by attaching ourselves to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it, just as we've done with jazz, and as we're now doing with the garbage of the mechanical environment via pop art.

The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day. In the midst of the electronic age of software, of instant information movement, we still believe we're living in the mechanical age of hardware. At the height of the mechanical age, man turned back to earlier centuries in search of "pastoral" values. The Renaissance and the Middle Ages were completely oriented toward Rome; Rome was oriented toward Greece, and the Greeks were oriented toward the pre-Homeric primitives. We reverse the old educational dictum of learning by proceeding from the familiar to the unfamiliar by going from the unfamiliar to the familiar, which is nothing more or less than the numbing mechanism that takes place whenever new media drastically extend our senses.

PLAYBOY: If this "numbing" effect performs a beneficial role by protecting man from the psychic pain caused by the extensions of his nervous system that you attribute to the media, why are you attempting to dispel it and alert man to the changes in his environment?

MCLUHAN: In the past, the effects of media were experienced more gradually, allowing the individual and society to absorb and cushion their impact to some degree. Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

Because of today's terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us--and thus win back control of our own destinies. The new extensions of man and the environment they generate are the central manifestations of the evolutionary process, and yet we still cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it does to us and with us. This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot. It's to escape this Narcissus trance that I've tried to trace and reveal the impact of media on man, from the beginning of recorded time to the present.

PLAYBOY: Will you trace that impact for us--in condensed form?

MCLUHAN: It's difficult to condense into the format of an interview such as this, but I'll try to give you a brief rundown of the basic media breakthroughs. You've got to remember that my definition of media is broad; it includes any technology whatever that creates extensions of the human body and senses, from clothing to the computer. And a vital point I must stress again is that societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which men communicate than by the content of the communication. All technology has the property of the Midas touch; whenever a society develops an extension of itself, all other functions of that society tend to be transmuted to accommodate that new form; once any new technology penetrates a society, it saturates every institution of that society. New technology is thus a revolutionizing agent. We see this today with the electric media and we saw it several thousand years ago with the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which was just as far-reaching an innovation--and had just as profound consequences for man.

PLAYBOY: What were they?

MCLUHAN: Before the invention of the phonetic alphabet, man lived in a world where all the senses were balanced and simultaneous, a closed world of tribal depth and resonance, an oral culture structured by a dominant auditory sense of life. The ear, as opposed to the cool and neutral eye, is sensitive, hyperaesthetic and all-inclusive, and contributes to the seamless web of tribal kinship and interdependence in which all members of the group existed in harmony. The primary medium of communication was speech, and thus no man knew appreciably more or less than any other--which meant that there was little individualism and specialization, the hallmarks of "civilized" Western man. Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen. Oral cultures act and react simultaneously, whereas the capacity to act without reacting, without involvement, is the special gift of "detached" literate man. Another basic characteristic distinguishing tribal man from his literate successors is that he lived in a world of acoustic space, which gave him a radically different concept of time-space relationships.

PLAYBOY: What do you mean by "acoustic space"?

MCLUHAN: I mean space that has no center and no margin, unlike strictly visual space, which is an extension and intensification of the eye. Acoustic space is organic and integral, perceived through the simultaneous interplay of all the senses; whereas "rational" or pictorial space is uniform, sequential and continuous and creates a closed world with none of the rich resonance of the tribal echoland. Our own Western time-space concepts derive from the environment created by the discovery of phonetic writing, as does our entire concept of Western civilization. The man of the tribal world led a complex, kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, cannot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive. The models of life of nonliterate people were implicit, simultaneous and discontinuous, and also far richer than those of literate man. By their dependence on the spoken word for information, people were drawn together into a tribal mesh; and since the spoken word is more emotionally laden than the written--conveying by intonation such rich emotions as anger, joy, sorrow, fear--tribal man was more spontaneous and passionately volatile. Audile-tactile tribal man partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual man creates an environment that is strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.

PLAYBOY: Was it phonetic literacy alone that precipitated this profound shift of values from tribal involvement to "civilized" detachment?

MCLUHAN: Yes, it was. Any culture is an order of sensory preferences, and in the tribal world, the senses of touch, taste, hearing and smell were developed, for very practical reasons, to a much higher level than the strictly visual. Into this world, the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell, installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses. Literacy propelled man from the tribe, gave him an eye for an ear and replaced his integral in-depth communal interplay with visual linear values and fragmented consciousness. As an intensification and amplification of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell, permeating the discontinuous culture of tribal man and translating its organic harmony and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected and visual mode that we still consider the norm of "rational" existence. The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished "individuals," or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space.

PLAYBOY: But literate societies existed in the ancient world long before the phonetic alphabet. Why weren't they detribalized?

MCLUHAN: The phonetic alphabet did not change or extend man so drastically just because it enabled him to read; as you point out, tribal culture had already coexisted with other written languages for thousands of years. But the phonetic alphabet was radically different from the older and richer hieroglyphic or ideogrammic cultures. The writings of Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan and Chinese cultures were an extension of the senses in that they gave pictorial expression to reality, and they demanded many signs to cover the wide range of data in their societies--unlike phonetic writing, which uses semantically meaningless letters to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds and is able, with only a handful of letters, to encompass all meanings and all languages. This achievement demanded the separation of both sights and sounds from their semantic and dramatic meanings in order to render visible the actual sound of speech, thus placing a barrier between men and objects and creating a dualism between sight and sound. It divorced the visual function from the interplay with the other senses and thus led to the rejection from consciousness of vital areas of our sensory experience and to the resultant atrophy of the unconscious. The balance of the sensorium--or Gestalt interplay of all the senses--and the psychic and social harmony it engendered was disrupted, and the visual function was overdeveloped. This was true of no other writing system.

PLAYBOY: How can you be so sure that this all occurred solely because of phonetic literacy--or, in fact, if it occurred at all?

MCLUHAN: You don't have to go back 3000 or 4000 years to see this process at work; in Africa today, a single generation of alphabetic literacy is enough to wrench the individual from the tribal web. When tribal man becomes phonetically literate, he may have an improved abstract intellectual grasp of the world, but most of the deeply emotional corporate family feeling is excised from his relationship with his social milieu. This division of sight and sound and meaning causes deep psychological effects, and he suffers a corresponding separation and impoverishment of his imaginative, emotional and sensory life. He begins reasoning in a sequential linear fashion; he begins categorizing and classifying data. As knowledge is extended in alphabetic form, it is localized and fragmented into specialties, creating division of function, of social classes, of nations and of knowledge--and in the process, the rich interplay of all the senses that characterized the tribal society is sacrificed.

PLAYBOY: But aren't there corresponding gains in insight, understanding and cultural diversity to compensate detribalized man for the loss of his communal values?

MCLUHAN: Your question reflects all the institutionalized biases of literate man. Literacy, contrary to the popular view of the "civilizing" process you've just echoed, creates people who are much less complex and diverse than those who develop in the intricate web of oral-tribal societies. Tribal man, unlike homogenized Western man, was not differentiated by his specialist talents or his visible characteristics, but by his unique emotional blends. The internal world of the tribal man was a creative mix of complex emotions and feelings that literate men of the Western world have allowed to wither or have suppressed in the name of efficiency and practicality. The alphabet served to neutralize all these rich divergencies of tribal cultures by translating their complexities into simple visual forms; and the visual sense, remember, is the only one that allows us to detach; all other senses involve us, but the detachment bred by literacy disinvolves and detribalizes man. He separates from the tribe as a predominantly visual man who shares standardized attitudes, habits and rights with other civilized men. But he is also given a tremendous advantage over the nonliterate tribal man who, today as in ancient times, is hamstrung by cultural pluralism, uniqueness and discontinuity--values that make the African as easy prey for the European colonialist as the barbarian was for the Greeks and Romans. Only alphabetic cultures have ever succeeded in mastering connected linear sequences as a means of social and psychic organization; the separation of all kinds of experiences into uniform and continuous units in order to generate accelerated action and alteration of form--in other words, applied knowledge--has been the secret of Western man's ascendancy over other men as well as over his environment.

PLAYBOY: Isn't the thrust of your argument, then, that the introduction of the phonetic alphabet was not progress, as has generally been assumed, but a psychic and social disaster?

MCLUHAN: It was both. It try to avoid value judgments in these areas, but there is much evidence to suggest that man may have paid too dear a price for his new environment of specialist technology and values. Schizophrenia and alienation may be the inevitable consequences of phonetic literacy. It's metaphorically significant, I suspect, that the old Greek myth has Cadmus, who brought the alphabet to man, sowing dragon's teeth that sprang up from the earth as armed men. Whenever the dragon's teeth of technological change are sown, we reap a whirlwind of violence. We saw this clearly in classical times, although it was somewhat moderated because phonetic literacy did not win an overnight victory over primitive values and institutions; rather, it permeated ancient society in a gradual, if inexorable, evolutionary process.

PLAYBOY: How long did the old tribal culture endure?

MCLUHAN: In isolated pockets, it held on until the invention of printing in the 16th Century, which was a vastly important qualitative extension of phonetic literacy. If the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell on tribal man, the printing press hit him like a 100-megaton H-bomb. The printing press was the ultimate extension of phonetic literacy: Books could be reproduced in infinite numbers; universal literacy was at last fully possible, if gradually realized; and books became portable individual possessions. Type, the prototype of all machines, ensured the primacy of the visual bias and finally sealed the doom of tribal man. The new medium of linear, uniform, repeatable type reproduced information in unlimited quantities and at hitherto-impossible speeds, thus assuring the eye a position of total predominance in man's sensorium. As a drastic extension of man, it shaped and transformed his entire environment, psychic and social, and was directly responsible for the rise of such disparate phenomena as nationalism, the Reformation, the assembly line and its offspring, the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection or inner direction that greatly intensified the tendencies toward individualism and specialization engendered 2000 years before by phonetic literacy. The schism between thought and action was institutionalized, and fragmented man, first sundered by the alphabet, was at last diced into bite-sized tidbits. From that point on, Western man was Gutenberg man.

PLAYBOY: Even accepting the principle that technological innovations generate far-reaching environmental changes, many of your readers find it difficult to understand how you can hold the development of printing responsible for such apparently unrelated phenomena as nationalism and industrialism.

MCLUHAN: The key word is "apparently." Look a bit closer at both nationalism and industrialism and you'll see that both derived directly from the explosion of print technology in the 16th Century. Nationalism didn't exist in Europe until the Renaissance, when typography enabled every literate man to see his mother tongue analytically as a uniform entity. The printing press, by spreading mass-produced books and printed matter across Europe, turned the vernacular regional languages of the day into uniform closed systems of national languages--just another variant of what we call mass media--and gave birth to the entire concept of nationalism.

The individual newly homogenized by print saw the nation concept as an intense and beguiling image of group destiny and status. With print, the homogeneity of money, markets and transport also became possible for the first time, thus creating economic as well as political unity and triggering all the dynamic centralizing energies of contemporary nationalism. By creating a speed of information movement unthinkable before printing, the Gutenberg revolution thus produced a new type of visual centralized national entity that was gradually merged with commercial expansion until Europe was a network of states.

By fostering continuity and competition within homogeneous and contiguous territory, nationalism not only forged new nations but sealed the doom of the old corporate, noncompetitive and discontinuous medieval order of guilds and family-structured social organization; print demanded both personal fragmentation and social uniformity, the natural expression of which was the nation-state. Literate nationalism's tremendous speed-up of information movement accelerated the specialist function that was nurtured by phonetic literacy and nourished by Gutenberg, and rendered obsolete such generalist encyclopedic figures as Benvenuto Cellini, the goldsmith-cum-condottiere-cum-painter-cum-sculptor-cum -writer; it was the Renaissance that destroyed Renaissance Man.

PLAYBOY: Why do you feel that Gutenberg also laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution?

MCLUHAN: The two go hand in hand. Printing, remember, was the first mechanization of a complex handicraft; by creating an analytic sequence of step-by-step processes, it became the blue-print of all mechanization to follow. The most important quality of print is its repeatability; it is a visual statement that can be reproduced indefinitely, and repeatability is the root of the mechanical principle that has transformed the world since Gutenberg. Typography, by producing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, also created Henry Ford, the first assembly line and the first mass production. Movable type was archetype and prototype for all subsequent industrial development. Without phonetic literacy and the printing press, modern industrialism would be impossible. It is necessary to recognize literacy as typographic technology, shaping not only production and marketing procedures but all other areas of life, from education to city planning.

PLAYBOY: You seem to be contending that practically every aspect of modern life is a direct consequence of Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.

MCLUHAN: Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of the electric media, which forge environments and cultures antithetical to the mechanical consumer society derived from print. Print tore man out of his traditional cultural matrix while showing him how to pile individual upon individual into a massive agglomeration of national and industrial power, and the typographic trance of the West has endured until today, when the electronic media are at last demesmerizing us. The Gutenberg Galaxy is being eclipsed by the constellation of Marconi.

PLAYBOY: You've discussed that constellation in general terms, but what precisely are the electric media that you contend have supplanted the old mechanical technology?

MCLUHAN: The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single sense or function as the old mechanical media did--i.e., the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, the phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye--but have enhanced and externalized our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all aspects of our social and psychic existence. The use of the electronic media constitutes a break boundary between fragmented Gutenberg man and integral man, just as phonetic literacy was a break boundary between oral-tribal man and visual man.

In fact, today we can look back at 3000 years of differing degrees of visualization, atomization and mechanization and at last recognize the mechanical age as an interlude between two great organic eras of culture. The age of print, which held sway from approximately 1500 to 1900, had its obituary tapped out by the telegraph, the first of the new electric media, and further obsequies were registered by the perception of "curved space" and non-Euclidean mathematics in the early years of the century, which revived tribal man's discontinuous time-space concepts--and which even Spengler dimly perceived as the death knell of Western literate values. The development of telephone, radio, film, television and the computer have driven further nails into the coffin. Today, television is the most significant of the electric media because it permeates nearly every home in the country, extending the central nervous system of every viewer as it works over and molds the entire sensorium with the ultimate message. It is television that is primarily responsible for ending the visual supremacy that characterized all mechanical technology, although each of the other electric media have played contributing roles.

PLAYBOY: But isn't television itself a primarily visual medium?

MCLUHAN: No, it's quite the opposite, although the idea that TV is a visual extension is an understandable mistake. Unlike film or photograph, television is primarily an extension of the sense of touch rather than of sight, and it is the tactile sense that demands the greatest interplay of all the senses. The secret of TV's tactile power is that the video image is one of low intensity or definition and thus, unlike either photograph or film, offers no detailed information about specific objects but instead involves the active participation of the viewer. The TV image is a mosaic mesh not only of horizontal lines but of millions of tiny dots, of which the viewer is physiologically able to pick up only 50 or 60 from which he shapes the image; thus he is constantly filling in vague and blurry images, bringing himself into in-depth involvement with the screen and acting out a constant creative dialog with the iconoscope. The contours of the resultant cartoonlike image are fleshed out within the imagination of the viewer, which necessitates great personal involvement and participation; the viewer, in fact, becomes the screen, whereas in film he becomes the camera. By requiring us to constantly fill in the spaces of the mosaic mesh, the iconoscope is tattooing its message directly on our skins. Each viewer is thus an unconscious pointillist painter like Seurat, limning new shapes and images as the iconoscope washes over his entire body. Since the point of focus for a TV set is the viewer, television is Orientalizing us by causing us all to begin to look within ourselves. The essence of TV viewing is, in short, intense participation and low definition--what I call a "cool" experience, as opposed to an essentially "hot," or high definition-low participation, medium like radio.

PLAYBOY: A good deal of the perplexity surrounding your theories is related to this postulation of hot and cool media. Could you give us a brief definition of each?

MCLUHAN: Basically, a hot medium excludes and a cool medium includes; hot media are low in participation, or completion, by the audience and cool media are high in participation. A hot medium is one that extends a single sense with high definition. High definition means a complete filling in of data by the medium without intense audience participation. A photograph, for example, is high definition or hot; whereas a cartoon is low definition or cool, because the rough outline drawing provides very little visual data and requires the viewer to fill in or complete the image himself. The telephone, which gives the ear relatively little data, is thus cool, as is speech; both demand considerable filling in by the listener. On the other hand, radio is a hot medium because it sharply and intensely provides great amounts of high-definition auditory information that leaves little or nothing to be filled in by the audience. A lecture, by the same token, is hot, but a seminar is cool; a book is hot, but a conversation or bull session is cool.

In a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses. In any case, the overwhelming majority of our technologies and entertainments since the introduction of print technology have been hot, fragmented and exclusive, but in the age of television we see a return to cool values and the inclusive in-depth involvement and participation they engender. This is, of course, just one more reason why the medium is the message, rather than the content; it is the participatory nature of the TV experience itself that is important, rather than the content of the particular TV image that is being invisibly and indelibly inscribed on our skins.

PLAYBOY: Even if, as you contend, the medium is the ultimate message, how can you entirely discount the importance of content? Didn't the content of Hitler's radio speeches, for example, have some effect on the Germans?

MCLUHAN: By stressing that the medium is the message rather than the content, I'm not suggesting that content plays no role--merely that it plays a distinctly subordinate role. Even if Hitler had delivered botany lectures, some other demagog would have used the radio to retribalize the Germans and rekindle the dark atavistic side of the tribal nature that created European fascism in the Twenties and Thirties. By placing all the stress on content and practically none on the medium, we lose all chance of perceiving and influencing the impact of new technologies on man, and thus we are always dumfounded by--and unprepared for--the revolutionary environmental transformations induced by new media. Buffeted by environmental changes he cannot comprehend, man echoes the last plaintive cry of his tribal ancestor, Tarzan, as he plummeted to earth: "Who greased my vine?" The German Jew victimized by the Nazis because his old tribalism clashed with their new tribalism could no more understand why his world was turned upside down than the American today can understand the reconfiguration of social and political institutions caused by the electric media in general and television in particular.

PLAYBOY: How is television reshaping our political institutions?

MCLUHAN: TV is revolutionizing every political system in the Western world. For one thing, it's creating a totally new type of national leader, a man who is much more of a tribal chieftain than a politician. Castro is a good example of the new tribal chieftain who rules his country by a mass-participational TV dialog and feedback; he governs his country on camera, by giving the Cuban people the experience of being directly and intimately involved in the process of collective decision making. Castro's adroit blend of political education, propaganda and avuncular guidance is the pattern for tribal chieftains in other countries. The new political showman has to literally as well as figuratively put on his audience as he would a suit of clothes and become a corporate tribal image--like Mussolini, Hitler and F.D.R. in the days of radio, and Jack Kennedy in the television era. All these men were tribal emperors on a scale theretofore unknown in the world, because they all mastered their media.

PLAYBOY: How did Kennedy use TV in a manner different from his predecessors--or successors?

MCLUHAN: Kennedy was the first TV President because he was the first prominent American politician to ever understand the dynamics and lines of force of the television iconoscope. As I've explained, TV is an inherently cool medium, and Kennedy had a compatible coolness and indifference to power, bred of personal wealth, which allowed him to adapt fully to TV. Any political candidate who doesn't have such cool, low definition qualities, which allow the viewer to fill in the gaps with his own personal identification, simply electrocutes himself on television--as Richard Nixon did in his disastrous debates with Kennedy in the 1960 campaign. Nixon was essentially hot; he presented a high-definition, sharply-defined image and action on the TV screen that contributed to his reputation as a phony--the "Tricky Dicky" syndrome that has dogged his footsteps for years. "Would you buy a used car from this man?" the political cartoon asked--and the answer was no, because he didn't project the cool aura of disinterest and objectivity that Kennedy emanated so effortlessly and engagingly.

PLAYBOY: Did Nixon take any lessons from you the last time around?

MCLUHAN: He certainly took lessons from somebody, because in the recent election it was Nixon who was cool and Humphrey who was hot. I had noticed the change in Nixon as far back as 1963 when I saw him on The Jack Paar Show. No longer the slick, glib, aggressive Nixon of 1960, he had been toned down, polished, programed and packaged into the new Nixon we saw in 1968: earnest, modest, quietly sincere--in a word, cool. I realized then that if Nixon maintained this mask, he could be elected President, and apparently the American electorate agreed last November.

PLAYBOY: How did Lyndon Johnson make use of television?

MCLUHAN: He botched it the same way Nixon did in 1960. He was too intense, too obsessed with making his audience love and revere him as father and teacher, and too classifiable. Would people feel any safer buying a used car from L. B. J. than from the old Nixon? The answer is, obviously, no. Johnson became a stereotype--even a parody--of himself, and earned the same reputation as a phony that plagued Nixon for so long. The people wouldn't have cared if John Kennedy lied to them on TV, but they couldn't stomach L. B. J. even when he told the truth. The credibility gap was really a communications gap. The political candidate who understands TV--whatever his party, goals or beliefs--can gain power unknown in history. How he uses that power is, of course, quite another question. But the basic thing to remember about the electric media is that they inexorably transform every sense ratio and thus recondition and restructure all our values and institutions. The overhauling of our traditional political system is only one manifestation of the retribalizing process wrought by the electric media, which is turning the planet into a global village.

PLAYBOY: Would you describe this retribalizing process in more detail?

MCLUHAN: The electronically induced technological extensions of our central nervous systems, which I spoke of earlier, are immersing us in a world-pool of information movement and are thus enabling man to incorporate within himself the whole of mankind. The aloof and dissociated role of the literate man of the Western world is succumbing to the new, intense depth participation engendered by the electronic media and bringing us back in touch with ourselves as well as with one another. But the instant nature of electric-information movement is decentralizing--rather than enlarging--the family of man into a new state of multitudinous tribal existences. Particularly in countries where literate values are deeply institutionalized, this is a highly traumatic process, since the clash of the old segmented visual culture and the new integral electronic culture creates a crisis of identity, a vacuum of the self, which generates tremendous violence--violence that is simply an identity quest, private or corporate, social or commercial.

PLAYBOY: Do you relate this identity crisis to the current social unrest and violence in the United States?

MCLUHAN: Yes, and to the booming business psychiatrists are doing. All our alienation and atomization are reflected in the crumbling of such time-honored social values as the right of privacy and the sanctity of the individual; as they yield to the intensities of the new technology's electric circus, it seems to the average citizen that the sky is falling in. As man is tribally metamorphosed by the electric media, we all become Chicken Littles, scurrying around frantically in search of our former identities, and in the process unleash tremendous violence. As the preliterate confronts the literate in the postliterate arena, as new information patterns inundate and uproot the old, mental breakdowns of varying degrees--including the collective nervous breakdowns of whole societies unable to resolve their crises of identity--will become very common.

It is not an easy period in which to live, especially for the television-conditioned young who, unlike their literate elders, cannot take refuge in the zombie trance of Narcissus narcosis that numbs the state of psychic shock induced by the impact of the new media. From Tokyo to Paris to Columbia, youth mindlessly acts out its identity quest in the theater of the streets, searching not for goals but for roles, striving for an identity that eludes them.

PLAYBOY: Why do you think they aren't finding it within the educational system?

MCLUHAN: Because education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression, imposing upon retribalized youth the obsolescent visual values of the dying literate age. Our entire educational system is reactionary, oriented to past values and past technologies, and will likely continue so until the old generation relinquishes power. The generation gap is actually a chasm, separating not two age groups but two vastly divergent cultures. I can understand the ferment in our schools, because our educational system is totally rearview mirror. It's a dying and outdated system founded on literate values and fragmented and classified data totally unsuited to the needs of the first television generation.

PLAYBOY: How do you think the educational system can be adapted to accommodate the needs of this television generation?

MCLUHAN: Well, before we can start doing things the right way, we've got to recognize that we've been doing them the wrong way--which most pedagogs and administrators and even most parents still refuse to accept. Today's child is growing up absurd because he is suspended between two worlds and two value systems, neither of which inclines him to maturity because he belongs wholly to neither but exists in a hybrid limbo of constantly conflicting values. The challenge of the new era is simply the total creative process of growing up--and mere teaching and repetition of facts are as irrelevant to this process as a dowser to a nuclear power plant. To expect a "turned on" child of the electric age to respond to the old education modes is rather like expecting an eagle to swim. It's simply not within his environment, and therefore incomprehensible.

The TV child finds if difficult if not impossible to adjust to the fragmented, visual goals of our education after having had all his senses involved by the electric media; he craves in-depth involvement, not linear detachment and uniform sequential patterns. But suddenly and without preparation, he is snatched from the cool, inclusive womb of television and exposed--within a vast bureaucratic structure of courses and credits--to the hot medium of print. His natural instinct, conditioned by the electric media, is to bring all his senses to bear on the book he's instructed to read, and print resolutely rejects that approach, demanding an isolated visual attitude to learning rather than the Gestalt approach of the unified sensorium. The reading postures of children in elementary school are a pathetic testimonial to the effects of television; children of the TV generation separate book from eye by an average distance of four and a half inches, attempting psychomimetically to bring to the printed page the all-inclusive sensory experience of TV. They are becoming Cyclops, desperately seeking to wallow in the book as they do in the TV screen.

PLAYBOY: Might it be possible for the "TV child" to make the adjustment to his educational environment by synthesizing traditional literate-visual forms with the insights of his own electric culture--or must the medium of print be totally unassimilable for him?

MCLUHAN: Such a synthesis is entirely possible, and could create a creative blend of the two cultures--if the educational establishment was aware that there is an electric culture. In the absence of such elementary awareness, I'm afraid that the television child has no future in our schools. You must remember that the TV child has been relentlessly exposed to all the "adult" news of the modern world--war, racial discrimination, rioting, crime, inflation, sexual revolution. The war in Vietnam has written its bloody message on his skin; he has witnessed the assassinations and funerals of the nation's leaders; he's been orbited through the TV screen into the astronaut's dance in space, been inundated by information transmitted via radio, telephone, films, recordings and other people. His parents plopped him down in front of a TV set at the age of two to tranquilize him, and by the time he enters kindergarten, he's clocked as much as 4000 hours of television. As an IBM executive told me, "My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one."

PLAYBOY: If you had children young enough to belong to the TV generation, how would you educate them?

MCLUHAN: Certainly not in our current schools, which are intellectual penal institutions. In today's world, to paraphrase Jefferson, the least education is the best education, since very few young minds can survive the intellectual tortures of our educational system. The mosaic image of the TV screen generates a depth-involving nowness and simultaneity in the lives of children that makes them scorn the distant visualized goals of traditional education as unreal, irrelevant and puerile. Another basic problem is that in our schools there is simply too much to learn by the traditional analytic methods; this is an age of information overload. The only way to make the schools other than prisons without bars is to start fresh with new techniques and values.

PLAYBOY: A number of experimental projects are bringing both TV and computers directly into the classrooms. Do you consider this sort of electronic educational aid a step in the right direction?

MCLUHAN: It's not really too important if there is ever a TV set in each classroom across the country, since the sensory and attitudinal revolution has already taken place at home before the child ever reaches school, altering his sensory existence and his mental processes in profound ways. Book learning is no longer sufficient in any subject; the children all say now, "Let's talk Spanish," or "Let the Bard be heard," reflecting their rejection of the old sterile system where education begins and ends in a book. What we need now is educational crash programing in depth to first understand and then meet the new challenges. Just putting the present classroom on TV, with its archaic values and methods, won't change anything; it would be just like running movies on television; the result would be a hybrid that is neither. We have to ask what TV can do, in the instruction of English or physics or any other subject, that the classroom cannot do as presently constituted. The answer is that TV can deeply involve youth in the process of learning, illustrating graphically the complex interplay of people and events, the development of forms, the multileveled interrelationships between and among such arbitrarily segregated subjects as biology, geography, mathematics, anthropology, history, literature and languages.

If education is to become relevant to the young of this electric age, we must also supplant the stifling, impersonal and dehumanizing multiversity with a multiplicity of autonomous colleges devoted to an in-depth approach to learning. This must be done immediately, for few adults really comprehend the intensity of youth's alienation from the fragmented mechanical world and its fossilized educational system, which is designed in their minds solely to fit them into classified slots in bureaucratic society. To them, both draft card and degree are passports to psychic, if not physical, oblivion, and they accept neither. A new generation is alienated from its own 3000-year heritage of literacy and visual culture, and the celebration of literate values in home and school only intensifies that alienation. If we don't adapt our educational system to their needs and values, we will see only more dropouts and more chaos.

PLAYBOY: Do you think the surviving hippie subculture is a reflection of youth's rejection of the values of our mechanical society?

MCLUHAN: Of course. These kids are fed up with jobs and goals, and are determined to forget their own roles and involvement in society. They want nothing to do with our fragmented and specialist consumer society. Living in the transitional identity vacuum between two great antithetical cultures, they are desperately trying to discover themselves and fashion a mode of existence attuned to their new values; thus the stress on developing an "alternate life style." We can see the results of this retribalization process whenever we look at any of our youth--not just at hippies. Take the field of fashion, for example, which now finds boys and girls dressing alike and wearing their hair alike, reflecting the unisexuality deriving from the shift from visual to tactile. The younger generation's whole orientation is toward a return to the native, as reflected by their costumes, their music, their long hair and their sociosexual behavior. Our teenage generation is already becoming part of a jungle clan. As youth enters this clan world and all their senses are electrically extended and intensified, there is a corresponding amplification of their sexual sensibilities. Nudity and unabashed sexuality are growing in the electric age because as TV tattoos its message directly on our skins, it renders clothing obsolescent and a barrier, and the new tactility makes it natural for kids to constantly touch one another--as reflected by the button sold in the psychedelic shops: If It Moves, Fondle It. The electric media, by stimulating all the senses simultaneously, also give a new and richer sensual dimension to everyday sexuality that makes Henry Miller's style of randy rutting old-fashioned and obsolete. Once a society enters the all-involving tribal mode, it is inevitable that our attitudes toward sexuality change. We see, for example, the ease with which young people live guiltlessly with one another, or, as among the hippies, in communal mènages. This is completely tribal.

PLAYBOY: But aren't most tribal societies sexually restrictive rather than permissive?

MCLUHAN: Actually, they're both. Virginity is not, with a few exceptions, the tribal style in most primitive societies; young people tend to have total sexual access to one another until marriage. But after marriage, the wife becomes a jealously guarded possession and adultery a paramount sin. It's paradoxical that in the transition to a retribalized society, there is inevitably a great explosion of sexual energy and freedom; but when that society is fully realized, moral values will be extremely tight. In an integrated tribal society, the young will have free rein to experiment, but marriage and the family will become inviolate institutions, and infidelity and divorce will constitute serious violations of the social bond, not a private deviation but a collective insult and loss of face to the entire tribe. Tribal societies, unlike detribalized, fragmented cultures with their stress on individualist values, are extremely austere morally, and do not hesitate to destroy or banish those who offend the tribal values. This is rather harsh, of course, but at the same time, sexuality can take on new and richer dimensions of depth involvement in a tribalized society.

Today, meanwhile, as the old values collapse and we see an exhilarating release of pent-up sexual frustrations, we are all inundated by a tidal wave of emphasis on sex. Far from liberating the libido, however, such onslaughts seem to have induced jaded attitudes and a kind of psychosexual Weltschmerz. No sensitivity of sensual response can survive such an assault, which stimulates the mechanical view of the body as capable of experiencing specific thrills, but not total sexual-emotional involvement and transcendence. It contributes to the schism between sexual enjoyment and reproduction that is so prevalent, and also strengthens the case for homosexuality. Projecting current trends, the love machine would appear a natural development in the near future--not just the current computerized datefinder, but a machine whereby ultimate orgasm is achieved by direct mechanical stimulation of the pleasure circuits of the brain.

PLAYBOY: Do we detect a note of disapproval in your analysis of the growing sexual freedom?

MCLUHAN: No, I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand. Sexual freedom is as natural to newly tribalized youth as drugs.

PLAYBOY: What's natural about drugs?

MCLUHAN: They're natural means of smoothing cultural transitions, and also a short cut into the electric vortex. The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational, sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip.

Drug taking is also a means of expressing rejection of the obsolescent mechanical world and values. And drugs often stimulate a fresh interest in artistic expression, which is primarily of the audile-tactile world. The hallucinogenic drugs, as chemical simulations of our electric environment, thus revive senses long atrophied by the overwhelmingly visual orientation of the mechanical culture. LSD and related hallucinogenic drugs, furthermore, breed a highly tribal and communally oriented subculture, so it's understandable why the retribalized young take to drugs like a duck to water.

PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. "LSD doesn't mean anything until you consume it," she said. "Likewise McLuhan." Do you see any similarities?

MCLUHAN: I'm flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?

MCLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant. I had an operation last year to remove a tumor that was expanding my brain in a less pleasant manner, and during my prolonged convalescence I'm not allowed any stimulant stronger than coffee. Alas! A few months ago, however, I was almost "busted" on a drug charge. On a plane returning from Vancouver, where a university had awarded me an honorary degree, I ran into a colleague who asked me where I'd been. "To Vancouver to pick up my LL. D.," I told him. I noticed a fellow passenger looking at me with a strange expression, and when I got off the plane at Toronto Airport, two customs guards pulled me into a little room and started going over my luggage. "Do you know Timothy Leary?" one asked. I replied I did and that seemed to wrap it up for him. "All right," he said. "Where's the stuff? We know you told somebody you'd gone to Vancouver to pick up some LL. D." After a laborious dialog, I persuaded him that an LL. D. has nothing to do with consciousness expansion--just the opposite, in fact--and I was released. Of course, in light of the present educational crisis, I'm not sure there isn't something to be said for making possession of an LL. D. a felony.

PLAYBOY: Are you in favor of legalizing marijuana and hallucinogenic drugs?

MCLUHAN: My personal point of view is irrelevant, since all such legal restrictions are futile and will inevitably wither away. You could as easily ban drugs in a retribalized society as outlaw clocks in a mechanical culture. The young will continue turning on no matter how many of them are turned off into prisons, and such legal restrictions only reflect the cultural aggression and revenge of a dying culture against its successor.

Speaking of dying cultures, it's no accident that drugs first were widely used in America by the Indians and then by the Negroes, both of whom have the great cultural advantage in this transitional age of remaining close to their tribal roots. The cultural aggression of white America against Negroes and Indians is not based on skin color and belief in racial superiority, whatever ideological clothing may be used to rationalize it, but on the white man's inchoate awareness that the Negro and Indian--as men with deep roots in the resonating echo chamber of the discontinuous, interrelated tribal world--are actually psychically and socially superior to the fragmented, alienated and dissociated man of Western civilization. Such a recognition, which stabs at the heart of the white man's entire social value system, inevitably generates violence and genocide. It has been the sad fate of the Negro and the Indian to be tribal men in a fragmented culture--men born ahead of rather than behind their time.

PLAYBOY: How do you mean?

MCLUHAN: I mean that at precisely the time when the white younger generation is retribalizing and generalizing, the Negro and the Indian are under tremendous social and economic pressure to go in the opposite direction: to detribalize and specialize, to tear out their tribal roots when the rest of society is rediscovering theirs. Long held in a totally subordinate socioeconomic position, they are now impelled to acquire literacy as a prerequisite to employment in the old mechanical service environment of hardware, rather than adapt themselves to the new tribal environment of software, or electric information, as the middle-class white young are doing. Needless to say, this generates great psychic pain, which in turn is translated into bitterness and violence. This can be seen in the microcosmic drug culture; psychological studies show that the Negro and the Indian who are turned on by marijuana, unlike the white, are frequently engulfed with rage; they have a low high. They are angry because they understand under the influence of the drug that the source of their psychic and social degradation lies in the mechanical technology that is now being repudiated by the very white overculture that developed it--a repudiation that the majority of Negroes and Indians cannot, literally, afford because of their inferior economic position.

This is both ironic and tragic, and lessens the chances for an across-the-board racial dètente and reconciliation, because rather than diminishing and eventually closing the sociopsychic differences between the races, it widens them. The Negro and the Indian seem to always get a bad deal; they suffered first because they were tribal men in a mechanical world, and now as they try to detribalize and structure themselves within the values of the mechanical culture, they find the gulf between them and a suddenly retribalizing society widening rather than narrowing. The future, I fear, is not too bright for either--but particularly for the Negro.

PLAYBOY: What, specifically, do you think will happen to him?

MCLUHAN: At best, he will have to make a painful adjustment to two conflicting cultures and technologies, the visual-mechanical and the electric world; at worst, he will be exterminated.

PLAYBOY: Exterminated?

MCLUHAN: I seriously fear the possibility, though God knows I hope I'm proved wrong. As I've tried to point out, the one inexorable consequence of any identity quest generated by environmental upheaval is tremendous violence. This violence has traditionally been directed at the tribal man who challenged visual-mechanical culture, as with the genocide against the Indian and the institutionalized dehumanization of the Negro. Today, the process is reversed and the violence is being meted out, during this transitional period, to those who are nonassimilable into the new tribe. Not because of his skin color but because he is in a limbo between mechanical and electric cultures, the Negro is a threat, a rival tribe that cannot be digested by the new order. The fate of such tribes is often extermination.

PLAYBOY: What can we do to prevent this from happening to America's Negro population?

MCLUHAN: I think a valuable first step would be to alert the Negro, as well as the rest of society, to the nature of the new electric technology and the reasons it is so inexorably transforming our social and psychic values. The Negro should understand that the aspects of himself he has been conditioned to think of as inferior or "backward" are actually superior attributes in the new environment. Western man is obsessed by the forward-motion folly of step-by-step "progress," and always views the discontinuous synaesthetic interrelationships of the tribe as primitive. If the Negro realizes the great advantages of his heritage, he will cease his lemming leap into the senescent mechanical world.

There are encouraging signs that the new black-power movement--with its emphasis on Negritude and a return to the tribal pride of African cultural and social roots--is recognizing this, but unfortunately a majority of Negro Americans are still determined to join the mechanical culture. But if they can be persuaded to follow the lead of those who wish to rekindle their sparks of tribal awareness, they will be strategically placed to make an easy transition to the new technology, using their own enduring tribal values as environmental survival aids. They should take pride in these tribal values, for they are rainbow-hued in comparison with the pallid literate culture of their traditional masters.

But as I said, the Negro arouses hostility in whites precisely because they subliminally recognize that he is closest to that tribal depth involvement and simultaneity and harmony that is the richest and most highly developed expression of human consciousness. This is why the white political and economic institutions mobilize to exclude and oppress Negroes, from semiliterate unions to semiliterate politicians, whose slim visual culture makes them hang on with unremitting fanaticism to their antiquated hardware and the specialized skills and classifications and compartmentalized neighborhoods and life styles deriving from it. The lowest intellectual stratum of whites view literacy and its hardware environment as a novelty, still fresh and still status symbols of achievement, and thus will be the last to retribalize and the first to initiate what could easily become a full-blown racial civil war. The United States as a nation is doomed, in any case, to break up into a series of regional and racial ministates, and such a civil war would merely accelerate that process.

PLAYBOY: On what do you base your prediction that the United States will disintegrate?

MCLUHAN: Actually, in this case as in most of my work, I'm "predicting" what has already happened and merely extrapolating a current process to its logical conclusion. The Balkanization of the United States as a continental political structure has been going on for some years now, and racial chaos is merely one of several catalysts for change. This isn't a peculiarly American phenomenon; as I pointed out earlier, the electric media always produce psychically integrating and socially decentralizing effects, and this affects not only political institutions within the existing state but the national entities themselves.

All over the world, we can see how the electric media are stimulating the rise of ministates: In Great Britain, Welsh and Scottish nationalism are recrudescing powerfully; in Spain, the Basques are demanding autonomy; in Belgium, the Flemings insist on separation from the Walloons; in my own country, the Quebecois are in the first stages of a war of independence; and in Africa, we've witnessed the germination of several ministates and the collapse of several ambitiously unrealistic schemes for regional confederation. These ministates are just the opposite of the traditional centralizing nationalisms of the past that forged mass states that homogenized disparate ethnic and linguistic groups within one national boundary. The new ministates are decentralized tribal agglomerates of those same ethnic and linguistic groups. Though their creation may be accompanied by violence, they will not remain hostile or competitive armed camps but will eventually discover that their tribal bonds transcend their differences and will thereafter live in harmony and cultural cross-fertilization with one another.

This pattern of decentralized ministates will be repeated in the United States, although I realize that most Americans still find the thought of the Union's dissolution inconceivable. The U.S., which was the first nation in history to begin its national existence as a centralized and literate political entity, will now play the historical film backward, reeling into a multiplicity of decentralized Negro states, Indian states, regional states, linguistic and ethnic states, etc. Decentralism is today the burning issue in the 50 states, from the school crisis in New York City to the demands of the retribalized young that the oppressive multiversities be reduced to a human scale and the mass state be debureaucratized. The tribes and the bureaucracy are antithetical means of social organization and can never coexist peacefully; one must destroy and supplant the other, or neither will survive.

PLAYBOY: Accepting, for the moment, your contention that the United States will be "Balkanized" into an assortment of ethnic and linguistic ministates, isn't it likely that the results would be social chaos and internecine warfare?

MCLUHAN: Not necessarily. Violence can be avoided if we comprehend the process of decentralism and retribalization, and accept its outcome while moving to control and modify the dynamics of change. In any case, the day of the stupor state is over; as men not only in the U.S. but throughout the world are united into a single tribe, they will forge a diversity of viable decentralized political and social institutions.

PLAYBOY: Along what lines?

MCLUHAN: It will be a totally retribalized world of depth involvements. Through radio, TV and the computer, we are already entering a global theater in which the entire world is a Happening. Our whole cultural habitat, which we once viewed as a mere container of people, is being transformed by these media and by space satellites into a living organism, itself contained within a new macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature. The day of the individualist, of privacy, of fragmented or "applied" knowledge, of "points of view" and specialist goals is being replaced by the over-all awareness of a mosaic world in which space and time are overcome by television, jets and computers--a simultaneous, "all-at-once" world in which everything resonates with everything else as in a total electrical field, a world in which energy is generated and perceived not by the traditional connections that create linear, causative thought processes, but by the intervals, or gaps, which Linus Pauling grasps as the languages of cells, and which create synaesthetic discontinuous integral consciousness.

The open society, the visual offspring of phonetic literacy, is irrelevant to today's retribalized youth; and the closed society, the product of speech, drum and ear technologies, is thus being reborn. After centuries of dissociated sensibilities, modern awareness is once more becoming integral and inclusive, as the entire human family is sealed to a single universal membrane. The compressional, implosive nature of the new electric technology is retrogressing Western man back from the open plateaus of literate values and into the heart of tribal darkness, into what Joseph Conrad termed "the Africa within."

PLAYBOY: Many critics feel that your own "Africa within" promises to be a rigidly conformist hive world in which the individual is totally subordinate to the group and personal freedom is unknown.

MCLUHAN: Individual talents and perspectives don't have to shrivel within a retribalized society; they merely interact within a group consciousness that has the potential for releasing far more creativity than the old atomized culture. Literate man is alienated, impoverished man; retribalized man can lead a far richer and more fulfilling life--not the life of a mindless drone but of the participant in a seamless web of interdependence and harmony. The implosion of electric technology is transmogrifying literate, fragmented man into a complex and depth-structured human being with a deep emotional awareness of his complete interdependence with all of humanity. The old "individualistic" print society was one where the individual was "free" only to be alienated and dissociated, a rootless outsider bereft of tribal dreams; our new electronic environment compels commitment and participation, and fulfills man's psychic and social needs at profound levels.

The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it's inclusive; after all, there is far more diversity and less conformity within a family group than there is within an urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It's in the village where eccentricity lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquillity are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony--the customary life mode of any tribal people.

PLAYBOY: Despite what you've said, haven't literate cultures been the only ones to value the concepts of individual freedom, and haven't tribal societies traditionally imposed rigid social taboos--as you suggested earlier in regard to sexual behavior--and ruthlessly punished all who do not conform to tribal values?

MCLUHAN: We confront a basic paradox whenever we discuss personal freedom in literate and tribal cultures. Literate mechanical society separated the individual from the group in space, engendering privacy; in thought, engendering point of view; and in work, engendering specialism--thus forging all the values associated with individualism. But at the same time, print technology has homogenized man, creating mass militarism, mass mind and mass uniformity; print gave man private habits of individualism and a public role of absolute conformity. That is why the young today welcome their retribalization, however dimly they perceive it, as a release from the uniformity, alienation and dehumanization of literate society. Print centralizes socially and fragments psychically, whereas the electric media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man.

PLAYBOY: Are you claiming, now, that there will be no taboos in the world tribal society you envision?

MCLUHAN: No, I'm not saying that, and I'm not claiming that freedom will be absolute--merely that it will be less restricted than your question implies. The world tribe will be essentially conservative, it's true, like all iconic and inclusive societies; a mythic environment lives beyond time and space and thus generates little radical social change. All technology becomes part of a shared ritual that the tribe desperately strives to keep stabilized and permanent; by its very nature, an oral-tribal society--such as Pharaonic Egypt--is far more stable and enduring than any fragmented visual society. The oral and auditory tribal society is patterned by acoustic space, a total and simultaneous field of relations alien to the visual world, in which points of view and goals make social change an inevitable and constant by product. An electrically imploded tribal society discards the linear forward-motion of "progress." We can see in our own time how, as we begin to react in depth to the challenges of the global village, we all become reactionaries.

PLAYBOY: That can hardly be said of the young, whom you claim are leading the process of retribalization, and according to most estimates are also the most radical generation in our history.

MCLUHAN: Ah, but you're talking about politics, about goals and issues, which are really quite irrelevant. I'm saying that the result, not the current process, of retribalization makes us reactionary in our basic attitudes and values. Once we are enmeshed in the magical resonance of the tribal echo chamber, the debunking of myths and legends is replaced by their religious study. Within the consensual framework of tribal values, there will be unending diversity--but there will be few if any rebels who challenge the tribe itself.

The instant involvement that accompanies instant technologies triggers a conservative, stabilizing, gyroscopic function in man, as reflected by the second-grader who, when requested by her teacher to compose a poem after the first Sputnik was launched into orbit, wrote: "The stars are so big / The earth is so small / Stay as you are." The little girl who wrote those lines is part of the new tribal society; she lives in a world infinitely more complex, vast and eternal than any scientist has instruments to measure or imagination to describe.

PLAYBOY: If personal freedom will still exist--although restricted by certain consensual taboos--in this new tribal world, what about the political system most closely associated with individual freedom: democracy? Will it, too, survive the transition to your global village?

MCLUHAN: No, it will not. The day of political democracy as we know it today is finished. Let me stress again that individual freedom itself will not be submerged in the new tribal society, but it will certainly assume different and more complex dimensions. The ballot box, for example, is the product of literate Western culture--a hot box in a cool world--and thus obsolescent. The tribal will is consensually expressed through the simultaneous interplay of all members of a community that is deeply interrelated and involved, and would thus consider the casting of a "private" ballot in a shrouded polling booth a ludicrous anachronism. The TV networks' computers, by "projecting" a victor in a Presidential race while the polls are still open, have already rendered the traditional electoral process obsolescent.

In our software world of instant electric communications movement, politics is shifting from the old patterns of political representation by electoral delegation to a new form of spontaneous and instantaneous communal involvement in all areas of decision making. In a tribal all-at-once culture, the idea of the "public" as a differentiated agglomerate of fragmented individuals, all dissimilar but all capable of acting in basically the same way, like interchangeable mechanical cogs in a production line, is supplanted by a mass society in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus. The election as we know it today will be meaningless in such a society.

PLAYBOY: How will the popular will be registered in the new tribal society if elections are passè?

MCLUHAN: The electric media open up totally new means of registering popular opinion. The old concept of the plebiscite, for example, may take on new relevance; TV could conduct daily plebiscites by presenting facts to 200,000,000 people and providing a computerized feedback of the popular will. But voting, in the traditional sense, is through as we leave the age of political parties, political issues and political goals, and enter an age where the collective tribal image and the iconic image of the tribal chieftain is the overriding political reality. But that's only one of countless new realities we'll be confronted with in the tribal village. We must understand that a totally new society is coming into being, one that rejects all our old values, conditioned responses, attitudes and institutions. If you have difficulty envisioning something as trivial as the imminent end of elections, you'll be totally unprepared to cope with the prospect of the forthcoming demise of spoken language and its replacement by a global consciousness.

PLAYBOY: You're right.

MCLUHAN: Let me help you. Tribal man is tightly sealed in an integral collective awareness that transcends conventional boundaries of time and space. As such, the new society will be one mythic integration, a resonating world akin to the old tribal echo chamber where magic will live again: a world of ESP. The current interest of youth in astrology, clairvoyance and the occult is no coincidence. Electric technology, you see, does not require words any more than a digital computer requires numbers. Electricity makes possible--and not in the distant future, either--an amplification of human consciousness on a world scale, without any verbalization at all.

PLAYBOY: Are you talking about global telepathy?

MCLUHAN: Precisely. Already, computers offer the potential of instantaneous translation of any code or language into any other code or language. If a data feedback is possible through the computer, why not a feed-forward of thought whereby a world consciousness links into a world computer? Via the computer, we could logically proceed from translating languages to bypassing them entirely in favor of an integral cosmic unconsciousness somewhat similar to the collective unconscious envisioned by Bergson. The computer thus holds out the promise of a technologically engendered state of universal understanding and unity, a state of absorption in the logos that could knit mankind into one family and create a perpetuity of collective harmony and peace. This is the real use of the computer, not to expedite marketing or solve technical problems but to speed the process of discovery and orchestrate terrestrial--and eventually galactic--environments and energies. Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.

PLAYBOY: Isn't this projection of an electronically induced world consciousness more mystical than technological?

MCLUHAN: Yes--as mystical as the most advanced theories of modern nuclear physics. Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

PLAYBOY: You said a few minutes ago that all of contemporary man's traditional values, attitudes and institutions are going to be destroyed and replaced in and by the new electric age. That's a pretty sweeping generalization. Apart from the complex psychosocial metamorphoses you've mentioned, would you explain in more detail some of the specific changes you foresee?

MCLUHAN: The transformations are taking place everywhere around us. As the old value systems crumble, so do all the institutional clothing and garb-age they fashioned. The cities, corporate extensions of our physical organs, are withering and being translated along with all other such extensions into information systems, as television and the jet--by compressing time and space--make all the world one village and destroy the old city-country dichotomy. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles--all will disappear like the dinosaur. The automobile, too, will soon be as obsolete as the cities it is currently strangling, replaced by new antigravitational technology. The marketing systems and the stock market as we know them today will soon be dead as the dodo, and automation will end the traditional concept of the job, replacing it with a role, and giving men the breath of leisure. The electric media will create a world of dropouts from the old fragmented society, with its neatly compartmentalized analytic functions, and cause people to drop in to the new integrated global-village community.

All these convulsive changes, as I've already noted, carry with them attendant pain, violence and war--the normal stigmata of the identity quest--but the new society is springing so quickly from the ashes of the old that I believe it will be possible to avoid the transitional anarchy many predict. Automation and cybernation can play an essential role in smoothing the transition to the new society.

PLAYBOY: How?

MCLUHAN: The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness. Already, it's technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways.

PLAYBOY: How do you program an entire society--beneficially or otherwise?

MCLUHAN: There's nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programing of the sensory life of whole populations. I know it sounds rather science-fictional, but if you understood cybernetics you'd realize we could do it today. The computer could program the media to determine the given messages a people should hear in terms of their over-all needs, creating a total media experience absorbed and patterned by all the senses. We could program five hours less of TV in Italy to promote the reading of newspapers during an election, or lay on an additional 25 hours of TV in Venezuela to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio the preceding month. By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world's competing economies.

PLAYBOY: How does such environmental programing, however enlightened in intent, differ from Pavlovian brainwashing?

MCLUHAN: Your question reflects the usual panic of people confronted with unexplored technologies. I'm not saying such panic isn't justified, or that such environmental programing couldn't be brainwashing, or far worse--merely that such reactions are useless and distracting. Though I think the programing of societies could actually be conducted quite constructively and humanistically, I don't want to be in the position of a Hiroshima physicist extolling the potential of nuclear energy in the first days of August 1945. But an understanding of media's effects constitutes a civil defense against media fallout.

The alarm of so many people, however, at the prospect of corporate programing's creation of a complete service environment on this planet is rather like fearing that a municipal lighting system will deprive the individual of the right to adjust each light to his own favorite level of intensity. Computer technology can--and doubtless will--program entire environments to fulfill the social needs and sensory preferences of communities and nations. The content of that programing, however, depends on the nature of future societies--but that is in our own hands.

PLAYBOY: Is it really in our hands--or, by seeming to advocate the use of computers to manipulate the future of entire cultures, aren't you actually encouraging man to abdicate control over his destiny?

MCLUHAN: First of all--and I'm sorry to have to repeat this disclaimer--I'm not advocating anything; I'm merely probing and predicting trends. Even if I opposed them or thought them disastrous, I couldn't stop them, so why waste my time lamenting? As Carlyle said of author Margaret Fuller after she remarked, "I accept the Universe": "She'd better." I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.

The point to remember here is that whenever we use or perceive any technological extension of ourselves, we necessarily embrace it. Whenever we watch a TV screen or read a book, we are absorbing these extensions of ourselves into our individual system and experiencing an automatic "closure" or displacement of perception; we can't escape this perpetual embrace of our daily technology unless we escape the technology itself and flee to a hermit's cave. By consistently embracing all these technologies, we inevitably relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. Thus, in order to make use of them at all, we must serve them as we do gods. The Eskimo is a servomechanism of his kayak, the cowboy of his horse, the businessman of his clock, the cyberneticist--and soon the entire world--of his computer. In other words, to the spoils belongs the victor.
This continuous modification of man by his own technology stimulates him to find continuous means of modifying it; man thus becomes the sex organs of the machine world just as the bee is of the plant world, permitting it to reproduce and constantly evolve to higher forms. The machine world reciprocates man's devotion by rewarding him with goods and services and bounty. Man's relationship with his machinery is thus inherently symbiotic. This has always been the case; it's only in the electric age that man has an opportunity to recognize this marriage to his own technology. Electric technology is a qualitative extension of this age-old man-machine relationship; 20th Century man's relationship to the computer is not by nature very different from prehistoric man's relationship to his boat or to his wheel--with the important difference that all previous technologies or extensions of man were partial and fragmentary, whereas the electric is total and inclusive. Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin; new technology breeds new man. A recent cartoon portrayed a little boy telling his nonplused mother: "I'm going to be a computer when I grow up." Humor is often prophecy.

PLAYBOY: If man can't prevent this transformation of himself by technology--or into technology--how can he control and direct the process of change?

MCLUHAN: The first and most vital step of all, as I said at the outset, is simply to understand media and its revolutionary effects on all psychic and social values and institutions. Understanding is half the battle. The central purpose of all my work is to convey this message, that by understanding media as they extend man, we gain a measure of control over them. And this is a vital task, because the immediate interface between audile-tactile and visual perception is taking place everywhere around us. No civilian can escape this environmental blitzkrieg, for there is, quite literally, no place to hide. But if we diagnose what is happening to us, we can reduce the ferocity of the winds of change and bring the best elements of the old visual culture, during this transitional period, into peaceful coexistence with the new retribalized society.

If we persist, however, in our conventional rearview-mirror approach to these cataclysmic developments, all of Western culture will be destroyed and swept into the dustbin of history. If literate Western man were really interested in preserving the most creative aspects of his civilization, he would not cower in his ivory tower bemoaning change but would plunge himself into the vortex of electric technology and, by understanding it, dictate his new environment--turn ivory tower into control tower. But I can understand his hostile attitude, because I once shared his visual bias.

PLAYBOY: What changed your mind?

MCLUHAN: Experience. For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century--Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot--had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience--from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.

As someone committed to literature and the traditions of literacy, I began to study the new environment that imperiled literary values, and I soon realized that they could not be dismissed by moral outrage or pious indignation. Study showed that a totally new approach was required, both to save what deserved saving in our Western heritage and to help man adopt a new survival strategy. I adapted some of this new approach in The Mechanical Bride by attempting to immerse myself in the advertising media in order to apprehend its impact on man, but even there some of my old literate "point of view" bias crept in. The book, in any case, appeared just as television was making all its major points irrelevant.

I soon realized that recognizing the symptoms of change was not enough; one must understand the cause of change, for without comprehending causes, the social any psychic effects of new technology cannot be counteracted or modified. But I recognized also that one individual cannot accomplish these self-protective modifications; they must be the collective effort of society, because they affect all of society; the individual is helpless against the pervasiveness of environmental change: the new garbage--or mess-age--induced by new technologies. Only the social organism, united and recognizing the challenge, can move to meet it.

Unfortunately, no society in history has ever known enough about the forces that shape and transform it to take action to control and direct new technologies as they extend and transform man. But today, change proceeds so instantaneously through the new media that it may be possible to institute a global education program that will enable us to seize the reins of our destiny--but to do this we must first recognize the kind of therapy that's needed for the effects of the new media. In such an effort, indignation against those who perceive the nature of those effects is no substitute for awareness and insight.

PLAYBOY: Are you referring to the critical attacks to which you've been subjected for some of your theories and predictions?

MCLUHAN: I am. But I don't want to sound uncharitable about my critics. Indeed, I appreciate their attention. After all, a man's detractors work for him tirelessly and for free. It's as good as being banned in Boston. But as I've said, I can understand their hostile attitude toward environmental change, having once shared it. Theirs is the customary human reaction when confronted with innovation: to flounder about attempting to adapt old responses to new situations or to simply condemn or ignore the harbingers of change--a practice refined by the Chinese emperors, who used to execute messengers bringing bad news. The new technological environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to alter their old value structures. The literati find the new electronic environment far more threatening than do those less committed to literacy as a way of life. When an individual or social group feels that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change, its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury. But for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place.

PLAYBOY: You've explained why you avoid approving or disapproving of this revolution in your work, but you must have a private opinion. What is it?

MCLUHAN: I don't like to tell people what I think is good or bad about the social and psychic changes caused by new media, but if you insist on pinning me down about my own subjective reactions as I observe the reprimitivization of our culture, I would have to say that I view such upheavals with total personal dislike and dissatisfaction. I do see the prospect of a rich and creative retribalized society--free of the fragmentation and alienation of the mechanical age--emerging from this traumatic period of culture clash; but I have nothing but distaste for the process of change. As a man molded within the literate Western tradition, I do not personally cheer the dissolution of that tradition through the electric involvement of all the senses: I don't enjoy the destruction of neighborhoods by high-rises or revel in the pain of identity quest. No one could be less enthusiastic about these radical changes than myself. I am not, by temperament or conviction, a revolutionary; I would prefer a stable, changeless environment of modest services and human scale. TV and all the electric media are unraveling the entire fabric of our society, and as a man who is forced by circumstances to live within that society, I do not take delight in its disintegration.

You see, I am not a crusader; I imagine I would be most happy living in a secure preliterate environment; I would never attempt to change my world, for better or worse. Thus I derive no joy from observing the traumatic effects of media on man, although I do obtain satisfaction from grasping their modes of operation. Such comprehension is inherently cool, since it is simultaneously involvement and detachment. This posture is essential in studying media. One must begin by becoming extraenvironmental, putting oneself beyond the battle in order to study and understand the configuration of forces. It's vital to adopt a posture of arrogant superiority; instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond beautifully to such resolute treatment and soon become servants rather than masters. But without this detached involvement, I could never objectively observe media; it would be like an octopus grappling with the Empire State Building. So I employ the greatest boon of literate culture: the power of man to act without reaction--the sort of specialization by dissociation that has been the driving motive force behind Western civilization.

The Western world is being revolutionized by the electric media as rapidly as the East is being Westernized, and although the society that eventually emerges may be superior to our own, the process of change is agonizing. I must move through this pain-wracked transitional era as a scientist would move through a world of disease; once a surgeon becomes personally involved and disturbed about the condition of his patient, he loses the power to help that patient. Clinical detachment is not some kind of haughty pose I affect--nor does it reflect any lack of compassion on my part; it's simply a survival strategy. The world we are living in is not one I would have created on my own drawing board, but it's the one in which I must live, and in which the students I teach must live. If nothing else, I owe it to them to avoid the luxury of moral indignation or the troglodytic security of the ivory tower and to get down into the junk yard of environmental change and steam-shovel my way through to a comprehension of its contents and its lines of force--in order to understand how and why it is metamorphosing man.

PLAYBOY: Despite your personal distaste for the upheavals induced by the new electric technology, you seem to feel that if we understand and influence its effects on us, a less alienated and fragmented society may emerge from it. Is it thus accurate to say that you are essentially optimistic about the future?

MCLUHAN: There are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. The extensions of man's consciousness induced by the electric media could conceivably usher in the millennium, but it also holds the potential for realizing the Anti-Christ--Yeats' rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Cataclysmic environmental changes such as these are, in and of themselves, morally neutral; it is how we perceive them and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants. It's inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through.

Personally, I have a great faith in the resiliency and adaptability of man, and I tend to look to our tomorrows with a surge of excitement and hope. I feel that we're standing on the threshold of a liberating and exhilarating world in which the human tribe can become truly one family and man's consciousness can be freed from the shackles of mechanical culture and enabled to roam the cosmos. I have a deep and abiding belief in man's potential to grow and learn, to plumb the depths of his own being and to learn the secret songs that orchestrate the universe. We live in a transitional era of profound pain and tragic identity quest, but the agony of our age is the labor pain of rebirth.

I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny--if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image--tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics [By Richard Hofstadter  Harper's Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.]

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it - and its targets have ranged from "the international bankers" to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

       American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression "paranoid style" I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
       Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men...What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence... The laws of probability would dictate that part of... [the] decisions would serve the country's interest.

Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:

As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America... For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose... Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.

Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:

...It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism... The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States... These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here...

These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders' conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers' conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens' Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.

Illuminism and Masonry

       I begin with a particularly revealing episode - the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naive and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.
       Americans first learned of Illumism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed "for the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of europe." It had become "one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe." And to it he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion - a secret substance that "blinds or kills when spurted in the face," and a device that sounds like a stench bomb - a "method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours."
       These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse's sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.
       The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.
       The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statement who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.
       As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to treason - for example, Aaron Burr's famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.
       Since Masons were pledged to come to each other's aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, is was held that the order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so "muzzled" by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.
       Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was "not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man... It may truly be said to be hell's master piece."

The Jesuit Threat

       Fear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.
       Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. "A conspiracy exists," Morse proclaimed, and "its plans are already in operation...we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies." The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich's government: "Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here... She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply." Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.

"It is an ascertained fact," wrote another Protestant militant,

that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.

Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. "Whatever we do, it must be done quickly...." A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by "the potentates of Europe," multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to "lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power."

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

The Paranoid Style in Action

The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor,... The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs....

The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin...said an "avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action - just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes.� (A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its planes, following "considerable public reaction against it.")

Birch official John Rousselot said, "We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy."

- San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964

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

       Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths, the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom's Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must "obey the priests in all things"; to her "utter astonishment and horror," she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended, continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.
       Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more suitable to the times - the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century.

Why They Feel Dispossessed

       If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country - that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
       Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower., secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.
       Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.
       The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt's New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.
       The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.
       Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.
       Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall was the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a "baffling pattern" of Marshall's interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America's relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not "just happen"; it was "brought about, step by step, by will and intention," the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, "a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man."
       Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy manufacturer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strategically placed and has a much smaller but better organized following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that "Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government" - note the care and scrupulousness of that "almost." He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history n which Communists figure at every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it "one of the most important agencies of Communism."
       Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. "For many reasons and after a lot of study," he wrote some years ago, "I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent." The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors was "merely a cover-up for Burns's liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses." Eisenhower's brother Milton was "actually [his] superior and boss within the Communist party." As for Eisenhower himself, Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer famous, as "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" - a conclusion, he added, "based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt."

Emulating the Enemy

       The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms - he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. ("Time is running out," said Welch in 1951. "Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.")
       As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated - if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
       The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman - sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid's interpretation of history is distinctly personal:   decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).
       It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through "front" groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.
       On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons - later, Negroes and Jews - have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

Renegades and Pedants

       A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; certainly the highest significance was attributed to their revelations, and every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well known. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid's archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.
       A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.
       Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.
       The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent - in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy's 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch's incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee's historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, "Labour party bosses in England," and various members of the Anglo-American "liberal establishment" to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.

The Double Sufferer

       The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering - a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: "the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies...systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque."
       This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture - it is no more than that - that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest - perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands - are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power - and this through distorting lenses - and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him - and in any case he resists enlightenment.
       We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

� Richard Hofstadter is DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. His latest book, "Anti-intellectualism in American Life," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction earlier this year. This essay is adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University in November 1963.

* Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations. My own favorite is the oath attributed to a royal archmason who invited "having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun."

* In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: "Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village." Shadegg comments:   "In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung." "I would suggest," writes senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? "that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not."

U.S. Imperialism: The National Security State [Clifford A. Kiracofe, Jr. in the March 17, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review]

I thank our hosts for the opportunity to participate in our fourth meeting here in Berlin at this fine venue. It is a pleasure to be with you all today and to see many friends and colleagues in the audience. I will present an overview of the rise of the "National Security State" that the United States have become. This phenomenon includes the "garrison state" at home and global imperialism abroad, both controlled by an all-powerful imperial Presidency.

The project for the imperial Presidency, garrison state, and imperial foreign policy, was advanced after World War II by Presidents Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. For five decades, the project has relied on the manipulation of fear, and the creation of "emergency" conditions, through the systematic deception of the United States public and Congress about the international situation and foreign threats.

Today, according to current official United States government policy statements such as the just-released 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, the former "Soviet Threat" and "Red China Threat" have been replaced now by the "Islamic Threat" and the "New China Threat." The war against Iraq is ongoing, while preventive wars against Iran and Syria are discussed and military conflict with China is anticipated.

My presentation this afternoon will sketch out various stages in the rise of the U.S. National Security State. To properly grasp the current situation in the United States, for the purpose of foreign policy analysis, historical context is essential.

First, I will start with the notorious White House National Security Council policy paper "NSC-68" of April 1950 and then consider the Korean War.

Second, I will turn to the Gaither Committee Report of 1957, the so-called "Missile Gap" of 1960, and the "Team B" Report of 1976. In all of these, we will trace the hand of Paul Nitze (1907-2004) as one of the primary instruments of the imperial faction in the United States who made a career of falsifying the so-called "Soviet Threat."

Third, I will turn to a consideration of U.S. imperialism and the Vietnam War.

Fourth, I will consider Paul Nitze as a mentor of neo-conservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.

Fifth, I will conclude with a consideration of the parallel between the imperial Presidency of Richard M. Nixon and that of George W. Bush.

Rise of the National Security State:
Paul Nitze's NSC-68 and the Korean War

President Franklin Roosevelt hoped that after World War II the major powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China—would cooperate in concert, on a realistic basis, to promote international stability and peace. At the same time, President Roosevelt hoped that the United Nations organization would operate at the world diplomatic level toward the same end. The Cold War, and the bi-polar world the Cold War created, however, placed severe constraints on this vision, a vision that was shared on a nonpartisan basis by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Although the United States in good faith demobilized rapidly after World War II, unlike Stalin's Soviet Union, certain circles in the United States planned to reverse this and remilitarize U.S. foreign policy with a view towards a global imperial policy from which they could personally profit.[1] These "Establishment" circles, still with us today, contain representatives of finance, business, politics, academia, press, and the military.

This faction, which I refer to as the "imperial faction," was described by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as the "military-industrial complex." President Eisenhower's work developing the United States Industrial War College and mobilization planning in the 1930s, and his later leadership in World War II, made him fully aware of the nexus between industry, high finance, and the military, both in the United States and in Europe.[2]

In the earliest phase of the post-World War II "Cold War," 1946-48, we had the constructive and balanced vision of Gen. George C. Marshall (1880-1959), who served as Truman's Secretary of State (1947-49) and as his Secretary of Defense (1950-51). As Secretary of State, Marshall tasked Ambassador George F. Kennan (1904-2005)—a career diplomat, Soviet specialist, and head of the newly created Policy Planning Staff—with developing post-war planning that would get Europe back on its feet economically, while at the same time promoting a democratic political evolution.

Significantly, Secretary Marshall and Ambassador Kennan emphasized the economic, political, psychological, and diplomatic elements of policy, and this emphasis was institutionalized in the original "Marshall Plan."[3] President Truman's later "Point Four" plan for aid to the developing world followed Marshall's concepts and emphasis.

As Ambassador Kennan has explained,

The concept of containment, which I had been so bold as to put forward in 1947, had been addressed to what I and others had believed was a danger of the political expansion of Stalinist Communism—and especially the danger that local Communists, inspired and controlled by Moscow, might acquire dominant positions in the great defeated industrial countries of Germany and Japan. I did not believe, nor did others who knew the Soviet Union well, that there was the slightest danger of a Soviet military attack against the major Western powers or Japan. This was, in other words, a political danger, not a military one. And the historical record bears out this conclusion. Yet for reasons I have never fully understood, by 1949 a great many people in Washington—in the Pentagon, the White House, and even the Department of State—seemed to have come to the conclusion that there was a real danger of the Soviets unleashing, in the fairly near future, what would have been World War III.[4]

The balanced, and prudent, Marshall-Kennan approach, emphasizing non-military policy elements to restore Europe politically and economically, was overturned by the imperial faction that gained the upper hand in the Truman Administration. Clark Clifford (1906-98), a Washington, D.C. lawyer and Truman White House political insider, in September 1946 created a startling memorandum for the President, laying out the international situation in the starkest terms, emphasizing in apocalyptic tone what he perceived as Soviet global designs for world domination. The President was so shocked by this memorandum that he locked it away in his safe and prevented its distribution outside a small circle. The memo called for atomic and even biological warfare against the Soviet Union.[5]

The fundamental change in U.S. policy, however, came several years later, in 1950, with the policy paper produced by Paul Nitze for the White House National Security Council, entitled "NSC-68."[6]

Nitze was a Wall Street investment banker turned political insider.[7] After graduating from Harvard, he joined Dillon, Read, and Company of New York City, rising to become a vice president prior to World War II. James Forrestal (1892-1949), a partner of Dillon, Read who became Secretary of the Navy in World War II, then Secretary of Defense (1947-49), was well positioned to give Nitze good entry into Washington, D.C. political circles. Dillon, Read financed the German military-industrial complex during the 1920s and 1930s when Nitze was employed there.

Nitze took over the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State after Ambassador Kennan resigned the post. This followed General Marshall's replacement by Dean Acheson, a Washington, D.C. lawyer and Democratic Party insider. The Acheson-Nitze perspective was radically different from the prudent Marshall-Kennan perspective, and there were profound policy implications as a result.

It was Nitze's April 1950 "NSC-68" policy paper that overturned the balanced and prudent Marshall-Kennan approach to the Cold War and prepared the way for a dramatic militarization of U.S. foreign policy, aimed against the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The paper called for massive increases in defense spending and building capabilities for fighting "limited wars" in peripheral areas around the globe.

As Ambassador Charles F. Bohlen (1904-73), a Foreign Service colleague of Kennan and fellow Soviet specialist, said in his memoirs:

Soviet policy was presented as nothing more than an absolute determination to spread the Communist system throughout the world. As I have said before, even in those days I was convinced that the Soviet Union, as far as its own actions went, was largely motivated by its interests as a national state, and that the idea of spreading Communism was secondary to such considerations. . . . NSC-68's misconception of Soviet aims misled, I believe, Dean Acheson and others in interpreting the Korean War.[8]

Kennan's concept of patient long-term "containment," emphasizing political, economic, diplomatic, and psychological means, was replaced by an aggressive policy emphasizing military confrontation. The Marshall Plan itself then became militarized, contrary to its original spirit.[9] Kennan left government in 1949, returned briefly, and then was terminated in 1952 by incoming Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Kennan became a scholar at Princeton University.

The Korean War, launched in June 1950 by North Korea, triggered the critical escalation of the Cold War and the conversion of the United States into a "national security state," or "garrison state," as President Eisenhower called it.[10] Today, through increased access to key archives, specialist historians argue that the Korean War was launched on the direct initiative of North Korea.[11] For different reasons, Stalin and Mao gave a "green light," to be sure, but it was a North Korean initiative and a Korean civil war, scholars say, and not part of a Stalinist blueprint for world conquest and World War III.[12]

As Ambassador Bohlen explained, and this may be of particular interest today as we are meeting in Berlin and there are many German colleagues with us,

At Acheson's request, I spent a month in Washington examining evidence to ascertain whether the Korean invasion was the forerunner of similar Communist military moves elsewhere in the world. I was working then with Gustav Hilger, whom I had known when he was German Minister in Moscow during the early years of the war and who happened to be in Washington. He was called in as a consultant after Korea. Born in Russia, he was fluent in the Russian language and an acknowledged expert on Soviet affairs. My conclusion was that there was little chance of the Soviet Union's repeating the invasion in any other place, such as Germany. The Soviet action in Korea was limited strictly to Korea.

Hilger and Kennan shared my view, but we were in the minority. The Korean war was interpreted by Acheson and most others in the State Department, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as ushering in a new phase of Soviet foreign policy. Their view, which Truman accepted, was that having launched an attack on Korea—the first case of Communist open use of naked military force to expand the system—the Soviet Union was likely to call on satellite armies elsewhere, particularly in East Germany, to spread Communist control. They were understandably influenced by emotions engendered by the Communist invasion. At various meetings, Kennan and I argued in vain against this thesis.

We were particularly opposed to plans for a counterinvasion of North Korea. We warned that Communist countries would react strongly if hostile forces approached their borders. We had both China and the Soviet Union in mind, of course.[13]

But the imperial faction in Washington was quick to take advantage of the North Korean attack to impose its will on U.S. foreign policy through the manipulation of fear and the creation of an atmosphere of crisis and emergency. Indeed, U.S. military forces under MacArthur's arrogant leadership recklessly crossed the 38th parallel and approached China's borders. After a due official diplomatic warning from China via India and multiple other diplomatic avenues, and an initial military intervention, the Chinese next sent some 400,000 troops against U.S. forces.[14] Overall some 2.5 million Chinese military and some 500,000 Chinese civilians would serve in the Korean War.

The Korean War was immediately painted by the imperial faction as a demonstration of Soviet global designs and a step in its master plan for world domination and even "World War III." At the same time, a potentially viable U.S. policy option—based on multipolarity—for easing mainland China away from the Soviet bloc by normalizing our relations with Beijing, and developing commercial relations, was dropped.

Although our close ally, the United Kingdom, and a number of other countries, quickly developed relations with Beijing, the United States pressured Japan, and other countries, to refrain from so doing.[15] The People's Republic of China was treated by Washington as a "pariah state" or "rogue state," much in the same way Iraq, Syria, Iran, and North Korean are treated by the current Bush Administration.

This mode of foreign policy posturing should not surprise us, as there has been a clear continuity for five decades in political lobbying—organizations and personnel—on Capitol Hill, and across the United States, from the old pro-Taiwan "China Lobby," to the anti-Communist "Vietnam Lobby," to the contemporary anti-Iraq-Syria-Iran lobby.[16]

Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. of Harvard University, in a book published 33 years ago, ably described the situation in the 1950s:

... in the 1950s American foreign policy called on the American government to do things no American government had ever tried to do before. The new American approach to world affairs, nurtured in the sense of omnipresent crisis, set new political objectives, developed new military capabilities, devised new diplomatic techniques, invented new instruments of foreign operations and instituted a new hierarchy of values. Every one of these innovations encouraged the displacement of power, both practical and constitutional, from an increasingly acquiescent Congress into an increasingly imperial Presidency.... Washington appointed itself the savior of human freedom and endowed itself with worldwide responsibility and a worldwide charter ... the guardianship of world freedom required, first of all, an enormous military establishment.... The new American approach to world affairs, the obsession with crisis, the illusion of "world leadership," the obligations of duty so cunningly intertwined with the opportunities of power carried forward the process, begun during the Second World War, of elevating "national security" into a supreme value.[17]

The highly unpopular Korean War, of course, ended Truman's political career on a black note, as his national approval polling crashed into the 20% range.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower came into office with the task of extracting the United States from the Korean War quagmire, which he did. Eisenhower's overall philosophy of government was what some academics have called "defense liberalism." He strove to emphasize peacetime conditions under which military spending could be reduced, so as to allow for increased private sector initiative, peacetime oriented government spending, balanced budgets, inflation control, and lower taxes.

History records that, despite the Cold War, President Eisenhower restrained, even cut, defense expenditures, as he felt the United States was overspending in this area of the national budget. Instead, Eisenhower emphasized major government-supported civilian infrastructure programs, such as the Interstate Highway System and the St. Lawrence Seaway and private sector initiative.

Eisenhower's defense strategy, known as the "New Look," emphasized: adequate nuclear deterrence, moderate defense spending and appropriate force structures, avoidance of large-scale conventional military intervention in peripheral areas, and diplomacy.

Eisenhower's vision for the United States and international life contrasted sharply with the dark vision of the imperial faction which sought the erection of a "garrison state" on a permanent imperial war footing fighting global "protracted war."[18]

Paul Nitze: the Gaither Committee Report, the `Missile Gap,' and `Team B'

What was the imperial faction's response to the Eisenhower policy to lower the defense burden on the federal budget, other moves to calm Cold War tensions, and desire to restore a peacetime life and normalcy in the United States?

The imperial faction strove once more to create an intensified sense of external threat and "emergency." Not surprisingly, we find Paul Nitze again playing a critical role in the escalation of Cold War fears in 1957. At this time, a study on the U.S.-Soviet military balance was put together by the "Gaither Committee," a group of outside advisors originally tasked by the White House, as the "Security Resources Panel," to consider civil defense issues.[19]

Nitze played a central role drafting the committee's final report, which was a sharp criticism of the Eisenhower Administration's overall defense policy. The final report, using language similar to Nitze's NSC-68 document, claimed there was a rapidly growing Soviet intercontinental nuclear missile capability. The report laid the groundwork for the "missile gap" propaganda of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Similar propaganda, in 1955, created a falsified "bomber gap" threat. The Gaither Report called for increased defense spending on the nuclear triad, as well as spending to create a capability to fight "limited wars" in peripheral areas around the globe.

In January 1958, a similar report was created for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, under the direction of a young Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger. Kissinger's report offered a sharp criticism of the Eisenhower defense policy and called for defense budget increases and policies, much the same as the Gaither Committee report. The Gaither Committee report was a classified government secret document, while the Kissinger report was public and, hence, could be used politically in the Fall 1958 Congressional mid-term elections and in the run-up to the 1960 general election. There was an overlap in the teams of consultants for both reports, which explains the similarities of criticism and policy recommendations.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund report drafted by Kissinger was used by Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York, to attack President Eisenhower's defense policies, and thereby force a change in the Republican Party's foreign policy and defense policy in the direction of the requirements of the Wall Street-based imperial faction and away from the Eisenhower "defense of liberalism" perspective.

During the 1960 Republican Convention, held in Chicago, Richard Nixon secretly left the convention and went to New York City to meet with Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller demanded that Nixon accept his defense policy views and influence the convention accordingly. Nixon accepted, and returned to Chicago to work with the Rockefeller Republican forces to defeat the Eisenhower defense perspective.[20] This meant that, whichever candidate won the coming election (Nixon or Kennedy), the imperial faction's defense policy and imperial strategy would be implemented, as Kennedy had adopted the same policy perspective. Traditional Republicans called the Nixon capitulation to the Rockefeller-Wall Street forces the "Republican Munich."

History records that there was no "missile gap." Our intelligence services, and President Eisenhower, knew this from the Central Intelligence Agency's secret U-2 flights, which began in 1956, and other national technical means such as the CORONA satellite launched in August 1960, SIGINT (signals intelligence), and HUMINT (human intelligence) such as the Penkovsky case. The hyperinflated Soviet threat was a calculated deception on the part of Nitze and the Gaither Committee, and the Kissinger Rockefeller Brothers Fund report, for political purposes, to support massive increased defense spending and an imperial foreign policy.

The manipulation of fear, and attack on Eisenhower's policies, for political purposes, served Nitze and the imperial faction well. Eisenhower was at a particular disadvantage, as he could not reveal sensitive intelligence "sources and methods"—such as the U-2 aircraft, the CORONA satellite program, and the Penkovsky case—and he did not want to unnecessarily provoke the Soviet Union by propagandizing the clear U.S. nuclear superiority embodied in the missile-bomber-submarine triad.

Nitze joined the John F. Kennedy campaign as a special advisor, and the "missile gap" propaganda was used against Republicans in the 1960 election.[21] However, candidates Kennedy on July 23, 1960 and Lyndon Johnson on July 28, 1960 were briefed specifically on the strategic missile issue by CIA director Allen W. Dulles.[22] After the election, on Feb. 8, 1961, President Kennedy gave equivocal answers to press questioning on the "missile gap" issue.[23] Kennedy was trying to cover himself politically, owing to the truthful, but impolitic, remark at a press conference by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, that there was no missile gap.[24]

Kennedy's national security strategy involved the main points of NSC-68, the Gaither Committee Report, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund report. Kennedy's defense policy became known as "Flexible Response," and was based on increased nuclear capabilities in the ground-air-sea triad, as well as the capability to fight conventional and unconventional wars in the periphery, Vietnam becoming a case in point.[25]

Nitze was well rewarded by Kennedy and went on to become Secretary of the Navy (1963-67) under Kennedy and Johnson, and Deputy Secretary of Defense (1967-69) under Johnson. He next served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) (1969-73) under Nixon, and then became the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (1973-76). He became Reagan's chief negotiator for the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) (1981-84).

Paul Nitze and the Neo-Conservatives

Within the Cold War context, as we have seen, Paul Nitze was one of the key members of the imperial faction, combining personal wealth and social position with intellectual ability and political influence.[26] It is significant that Nitze's two most notorious protégés, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, played a major role in pushing the United States into the Iraq War. Perle, Wolfowitz, and their circle form an important part of the second generation post-World War II imperial faction. The military-industrial complex requires a network of such defense intellectuals arrayed across the United States in a variety of think-tanks and universities, to help justify massive defense overspending.

Perle, Wolfowitz, and others were also schooled by Prof. Albert Wohlstetter (1913-97), a mathematician and nuclear "strategist" who had served at the Rand Corporation and later taught at the University of Chicago. Wohlstetter's methodology, based upon abstract models, produced the sort of hyperinflated "threat analyses" profitable to the military-industrial complex. As one observer has said:

But Wohlstetter, through his command of detail, particularly quantitative detail, and his ability to weave elaborate numerical models out of arcane pieces of information, had changed the language of strategy. Earlier thinking had been built on an assessment of the enemy's intentions and capabilities. It relied on secret intelligence and scholarly analysis of communist ideology, Russian nationalism, and "Kremlinology"—detailed expertise on Moscow's palace intrigues. Wohlstetter's methodology, on the other hand, relied largely on probabilistic reasoning and mathematical modeling that utilized systems analysis and game theory, signature methodologies developed at Rand. The designs or intentions of the enemy were presumed, or presented as a future possibility. This methodology exploited to the hilt the iron law of zero margin of error that was the asymptotic ideal for nuclear strategy. Even a small probability of vulnerability, or a potential future vulnerability, could be presented as a virtual state of national emergency [emphasis added].[27]

Following the lead of Paul Nitze and Albert Wohlstetter, neo-conservative defense intellectuals like Perle and Wolfowitz embraced the notorious "Team B" study in 1976, which deceptively promoted the false image of a dramatically increased Soviet military threat, thereby justifying massive U.S. defense spending increases profitable to the military-industrial complex.[28] This study was conducted under the auspices of the Central Intelligence Agency, while George H.W. Bush was Director of Central Intelligence. "Team B" was brought in specifically to challenge the balanced professional assessments of career intelligence community analysts, and its findings were used to help justify the unnecessary later Reagan defense build-up.[29] Indeed, according to a former U.S. government official, Anne Hessing Cahn,

For more than a third of a century, assertions of Soviet superiority created calls for the United States to "rearm." In the 1980s, the call was heeded so thoroughly that the United States embarked on a trillion-dollar defense buildup. As a result, the country neglected its schools, cities, roads and bridges, and health care system. From the world's greatest creditor nation, the United States became the world's greatest debtor—in order to pay for arms to counter the threat of a nation that was collapsing.[30]

It is not surprising that the George W. Bush Administration utilized Wohlstetter and Nitze's techniques, and protégés, to create hyperinflated threat assessments concerning Iraq to justify the preventive war. We can also see the same pattern of lies and deception today with respect to the so-called "Syria Threat," "Iran Threat," "Islamic Threat," and "New China Threat"—all purposefully hyperinflated so as to manipulate public opinion and the Congress, to increase military spending to unnecessary levels, and to smooth the path to war.

Imperialism and Constitutional Crisis: Vietnam

The militarization of U.S. foreign policy and the creation of the National Security State in the years after Korea culminated in the Vietnam debacle and in the Nixon Presidency and Watergate scandal. But today, a generation later, we are plunged into the same constitutional crisis, and a much graver strategic predicament, owing to the program of George W. Bush and his backers, such as George Shultz, to return to the Nixon project for a radical imperial Presidency and foreign policy.

President Johnson's unnecessary escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 shattered American prestige worldwide, impaired our NATO alliance relations, left the American polity a shambles, and plunged the American economy into deep crisis for two decades. Johnson expanded the imperial Presidency legacy of Truman, thereby opening the door for Richard Nixon's revolutionary advance of the imperial Presidency. And we should not forget that the Johnson escalation was based upon the lie of so-called "Gulf of Tonkin incidents" which, in fact, never took place.[31]

Who played a role in the Administration during the Nixon years supporting the imperial Presidency project?

One key player was University of Chicago professor and business school dean, George P. Shultz. He started as Secretary of Labor (1969-70) and then headed the powerful Office of Management and Budget before becoming Secretary of the Treasury (1972-74). Shultz would become Secretary of State (1982-89) in the Reagan years. Shultz, as the co-chairman of the George W. Bush campaign, created the so-called Vulcan Group of advisors for candidate Bush, coordinated by his protégé Condi Rice and headed by none other than Paul Wolfowitz.

President Nixon also called on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harriman Democrat, to be an advisor in the White House. This connection is significant, as Harvard professor Moynihan was a leading intellectual within the "neo-conservative" perspective and allied to Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Indeed, leading neo-conservative intellectuals, such as Irving Kristol, flocked to Nixon's support in 1972.

And when Nixon was replaced by Gerald Ford as President, whom do we find brought into the Administration but Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, certainly familiar names today.

At the core of Nixon's strategy for advancing the imperial Presidency was the use of the concept of "emergency" and, hence, "emergency powers." As Professor Schlesinger said,

... the theory of the Presidency he [Nixon] embodied and propagated meant that the President of the United States, on his own personal and secret finding of emergency, had the right to nullify the Constitution and the law. No President ever made such a claim before.... his private obsessions pushed him toward the view that the Presidency could set itself, at will, above the Constitution. It was this theory that led straight to Watergate.[32]

This doctrine is, of course, similar to the doctrine once espoused by Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist, although Professor Schlesinger refrains from pointing this out in a specific manner.

So how did Nixon's revolutionary project operate? Professor Schlesinger ably described its essence:

The Nixon revolution thus aimed at reducing the power of Congress at every point along the line and moving toward rule by presidential decree. To perfect his design he had to control the use of information by Congress and the flow of information to Congress. To do this his administration mounted an unprecedented attack on legislative privilege and made unprecedented claims of executive privilege.[33]

The Imperial Presidency:
Richard Nixon and George W. Bush

Does this sound familiar today?

The imperial faction's five-decade-old technique of deceiving the American public and Congress about external threats, as developed by Paul Nitze in 1950 and promoted through hardline and neo-conservative defense intellectual circles ever since, was used by the Bush White House to deceive the public and Congress into the Iraq War.[34] Indeed, Nitze's very protégés, Perle and Wolfowitz, played major roles, as I noted earlier.

Vice President Cheney often states the view that the powers of the U.S. President were undermined by the Congressional action taken in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Cheney's view takes on special meaning if we consider the sweep of post World War II U.S. history and the half-century-old project to create an imperial Presidency to implement an imperial foreign policy. Today the imperial Presidency is justified by the "unitary Executive" theory espoused by Bush supporters and the extremist Federalist Society, a national lawyers' organization.

By looking back and examining the practices and methods of the Nixon White House, we can see the direct roots of the practices and methods adopted in the Bush White House through players such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Shultz, who have created the current imperial foreign policy and Presidency.[35]

Professor Schlesinger's comments on U.S. interventionism a generation ago have an eerie familiarity:

The weight of messianic globalism was indeed proving too much for the American Constitution.... In fact, the policy of indiscriminate global intervention, far from strengthening American security, seemed rather to weaken it by involving the United States in remote, costly and mysterious wars, fought in ways that shamed the nation before the world and, even when thus fought, demonstrated only the inability of the most powerful nation on earth to subdue bands of guerrillas in black pajamas. When the grandiose policy did not promote national security and could not succeed in its own terms, would it not be better to pursue policies that did not deform and disable the Constitution?[36]

Professor Schlesinger in this passage well summarizes precisely what President Eisenhower had hoped to avoid, and warned against.

If we turn to today's world, and view Bush foreign policy in historical context, we can perceive clearly the methods of the imperial faction operating on U.S. foreign policy and global strategy. Iraq is a case in point, but we also must consider the potential for the United States expanding the war in the region to include Syria, and possibly Iran. This could be with or without direct, and overt, Israeli support.

Just as in the Vietnam era, our Congress—out of cowardice and deep corruption, moral and financial—has not been willing yet to effectively resist a reckless and unnecessary imperial policy. Nor has Congress been willing to halt the systematic imposition of a police state and erosion of civil liberties.[37]

Just as in the Vietnam era, the controlled and concentrated press in the United States, by and large, goes along with the official imperial policy line. Self-censoring "journalists" and "editors" can rest easy and collect their weekly paychecks, while media owners use them to promote their own agendas involving power and profits. The universities are quiet today because, unlike the Vietnam era, there is currently no military draft, and because students feel intimidated by the growing national security state apparatus.

Whether reflected in the speeches and statements of President Bush or Secretary of State Condi Rice, or whether presented in official Administration documents such as the Pentagon's most recent Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), current U.S. foreign policy and global strategic policy concepts are delusional and dangerous. A careful assessment of major policy statements and action of this Administration from 2001 to the present indicates fundamental continuity. The fundamental continuity is a dark vision of global "dominance" or hegemony enforced through military power involved in permanent warfare and permanent intervention.

The QDR, released this January, spells out the "enemy" as a vague and amorphous "international terrorism," or rather its ideology, and also the not-so-vague and amorphous People's Republic of China, consisting of 1.5 billion people on the rise. High-tech "Fourth Generation" global warfare capabilities are portrayed as the panacea.[38]

At the end of the bi-polar Cold War, back in 1992, Wolfowitz, as head of the Pentagon's Defense Planning Board, developed the concepts behind the Defense Planning Guidance for Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.[39] The underlying fundamental concept was global dominance, a strategy in which the United States aims to enforce a "unipolar" world order by preventing any regional or global rivals, such as China, to emerge.

If this sounds familiar, it should. This is precisely the underlying strategic concept of the present Bush Administration, as stated clearly in publicly available official documents such as the 2002 White House National Security Strategy of the United States and the QDR.[40]

Behind the dominance strategy, one objective of the Bush White House is to control the global energy market.[41] For this reason, the White House is greatly concerned that Iran can become a key supplier to China and India, as well as become a larger force in the international energy markets. Would an attack on Iran using the excuse of a currently non-existent nuclear threat in fact involve intentional significant destruction of the Iranian hydrocarbon infrastructure?

Looking for historical parallels for the imperialism of the Bush White House United States, one might suggest the Roman Empire or the British Empire, but perhaps we should also consider Napoleonic France or the reactionary "Holy Alliance," which adopted many Napoleonic practices and institutions. The messianic delusions of a Napoleon, or an Alexander I, and the cynical manipulations of a Metternich, are not so far removed from those of the current occupants of the White House with their global interventionist obsessions.[42]

Conclusion

In conclusion, as you all know, the United States will hold its mid-term elections for one-third of the U.S. Senate and all of the U.S. House of Representatives this coming November.

I would suggest keeping a close eye on developments in each of the main political parties. Both major parties have their left, center, and right factions, and within these factions we can find supporters and opponents of the current imperial foreign policy. Bear in mind that three-quarters of the Senate and three-quarters of the House of Representatives voted in favor of the Iraq War.

For a brief period, the Watergate scandal halted—owing to Congressional action, aroused public opinion, and Nixon's resignation—the profound constitutional crisis engendered by Nixon's drive toward an imperial Presidency. But, as the last three decades have shown, this was only a temporary pause in the overall process of the erection of an imperial Presidency and a garrison state committed to permanent imperial war.

We can ask today, and we must ask, "What will halt the Bush White House's reckless folly and endangerment of the Republic?" The consequences of the Iraq War are only slowly dawning on the American public, Congress is deeply corrupt, and the press is owned in large measure by the imperial faction. Americans evidently learned nothing from the "limited war" in Vietnam and so repeat the mistake of unnecessary intervention in the Middle East today.

We can hope that the Democratic Party will come to its senses and unify sufficiently to oppose the Bush imperial Presidency and imperial foreign policy.[43] We can also hope that conservative, moderate, and liberal Republican Party factions, which oppose imperialism and an imperial Presidency, begin to place constraints on the extremists in their party and on the extremists in the White House such as Vice President Cheney and his entourage. For Republicans, a return to the fundamental decency and commonsense of President Eisenhower would put the party on the right path, the path set by our martyred President Abraham Lincoln.

[1] For theoretical insight into the problem of imperialism, see J.A. Hobson, Imperialism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965).

[2] For background on the contemporary military-industrial complex, see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback. The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), and his The Sorrows of Empire. Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt, 2004).

[3] For Kennan's perspective at this time, see Giles D. Harlow and George C. Maerz, eds., Measures Short of War. The George F. Kennan Lectures at the National War College 1946-47 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1991). These significant, now declassified, lectures were presented by Ambassador Kennan while teaching at the National War College.

[4] George F. Kennan, "America's Far-Eastern Policy at the Height of the Cold War," a lecture given in 1984, in George F. Kennan, At a Century's Ending. Reflections 1982-1995 (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 94.

[5] "American Relations with the Soviet Union," a report prepared by Clark M. Clifford and submitted to Truman on Sept. 24, 1946, printed in Arthur Krock, Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line (New York, 1968), Appendix A, pp. 431, 476-478, 482.

[6] NSC-68, "United States Objectives and Policies for National Security," April 14, 1950, appears in Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, D.C.: 1950), Vol. I, pp. 235-292.

[7] On Dillon, Read and Company, see Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy. The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1983), pp. 135, 212, and William C. McNeil, American Money and the Weimar Republic Economics and Politics on the Eve of the Great Depression (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 72-75, 256, 259-60, 261-269.

[8] Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929-1969 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1973), pp. 290-291.

[9] For a critical survey of early U.S. Cold War diplomacy, see Norman A. Graebner, Cold War Diplomacy 1945-1960 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1962). See also, John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 282-362, and his The United States and the End of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

For insight into U.S. intelligence community assessments, and declassified documents in the early Cold War period, see Woodrow J. Kuhns, Assessing the Soviet Threat: Early Cold War Years (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1997), online at www.cia.gov/csi/books/coldwaryrs/index.html. The Preface is most helpful, and the declassified documentation valuable.

[10] For the most recent scholarship, see Mark F. Wilkinson ed., The Korean War at Fifty. International Perspectives (Lexington, Va.: Virginia Military Institute, 2004).

[11] Chen Jian, "China and the Korean War: New Findings and Perspectives in Light of New Documentation," ibid. pp. 66-86.

[12] For an excellent overview of the Korean War, see Joseph C. Goulden, Korea. The Untold Story of the War (New York: Times Books, 1982).

[13] Bohlen, op. cit., p. 292.

[14] For a concise Chinese perspective, see Xia Liping, "The Korean War and Chinese-American Relations," in Wilkinson, op. cit., pp. 264-276.

[15] See, for example, Osamu Ishii, "China Trade Embargo and America's Alliance Management in the 1950s—The Japanese Case," Hitotsubashi Journal of Law and Politics, Vol. 20, February 1992, pp. 23-30, and Tadashi Aruga, "The Problem of Security Treaty Revision in Japan's Relations with the United States: 1951-1960," Hitotsubashi Journal of Law and Politics, Vol. 13, February 1985, pp. 31-60.

[16] For example, see in particular Stanley D. Bachrack, The Committee of One Million. "China Lobby" Politics 1953-1971 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), and the revealing study by Andrew F. Smith, Rescuing the World. The Life and Times of Leo Cherne (Albany: State University of New York, 2002). Also, Lewis McCarroll Purifoy, Harry Truman's China Policy. McCarthyism and the Diplomacy of Hysteria, 1947-1951 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976), and W.A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972).

[17] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), pp. 164-165.

[18] See the discussion of the "garrison state," a hypothesis developed by social scientist Harold Lasswell in the 1930s, in Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State. The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (New York: Vintage, 1964 reprint of 1957 ed.), pp. 346-350, and the discussion on "defense liberalism," pp. 392-399. Huntington writes from the perspective of the imperial faction, and was so mentored by Harvard Professor William Yandell Elliott and Paul Nitze, among others.

[19] H. Rowan Gaither was Chairman of the Ford Foundation and also of the Rand Corporation. For the report, see Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age (The "Gaither Report" of 1957) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976).

[20] This situation is treated in Theodore White, The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Atheneum, 1961), pp. 208-227.

[21] For a brief comment, see Dwayne A. Day, "Of Myths and Missiles: The Truth About John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap," The Space Review, online at www.thespacereview.com/article/523/1. For academic studies, see Christopher Preble, John F. Kennedy and the Missile Gap (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); Peter Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and David L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999). For a useful early study, see Morton H. Halperin "The Gaither Committee and the Policy Process," World Politics, Vol. 13, No. 3 (April 1961), pp. 360-384.

[22] Allen W. Dulles, Director, Central Intelligence Agency, "Memorandum for the President," Aug. 3, 1960, online at www.thespacereview.com/archive/523.pdf.

[23] President John F. Kennedy, News Conference Number 3, Feb. 8, 1961, online at the John F. Kennedy Library website, www.jfklibrary.org/jfk_press_conference_610208.html.

[24] See Preble, op. cit., passim for discussion of this point.

[25] On Vietnam policy, see the classic by Neil Sheehan, et al., The Pentagon Papers (New York: Bantam Books, 1971). Also, Bernard B. Fall, The Two Vietnams. A Political and Military Analysis, 2nd Rev. ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967) and John T. McAlister, Jr., Vietnam. The Origins of Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969).

[26] Nitze's own wealth was established during his career in banking and real estate development. His sister, Elizabeth, married Walter Paepcke (1896-1960), Chairman of the Container Corporation of America, who established the Aspen Institute in 1950.

[27] Khuram Hussein, "Neocons: The Men Behind the Curtain," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, November-December 2003, online at www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=nd03husain.

[28] For background, see Anne Hessing Cahn, "The Trillion Dollar Experiment," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, April 1993, online at www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=apr93cahn.

[29] For an important analysis of the Bush family which references ties to the military-industrial complex and the Harriman interests, see Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty. Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Viking, 2004).

[30] Cahn, op. cit.

[31] For information, including recently declassified information, on the Gulf of Tonkin deception, see The National Security Archive website at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/. Compare the Gulf of Tonkin deception with the Bush deceptions on WMD and Iraq.

[32] Schlesinger, op. cit., p.266.

[33] Ibid, p. 246.

[34] For background on the Iraq War, see John K. Cooley, An Alliance Against Babylon. The U.S., Israel, and Iraq (London Pluto Press, 2005). On the earlier Gulf War, see Majid Khadduri and Edmund Ghareeb, War in the Gulf 1990-1991. The Iraq-Kuwait Conflict and Its Implications (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[35] See John W. Dean, Worse Than Watergate. The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Little Brown, 2004).

[36] Schlesinger, p. 299.

[37] See Matthew Rothschild, "Senators Roll Over on Patriot Act," The Progressive, Feb. 18, 2006, online at http://progressive.org/mag_wx021806. See also, Paul Craig Roberts, "My Epiphany: From Reaganaut to Antiwar Radical," VDARE, Feb. 7, 2006, online at www.vdare.com/roberts/060207_epiphany.htm.

[38] For a critique of so-called "Fourth Generation War," see Antulio J. Echevarria II, Fourth-Generation War and Other Myths (Carlisle, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, 2005). See also, John P. White, Transformation for What? (Carlisle, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, 2005).

[39] Hussein, op. cit.; Patrick E. Tyler, "U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop," New York Times, March 8, 1992; Patrick E. Tyler, "Lone Superpower Plan: Ammunition for Critics," New York Times, March 10, 1992; "America Only," New York Times editorial, March 10, 1992.

[40] Online at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html.

[41] For background, see William Engdahl, A Century of War. Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, rev. ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

[42] For comparison, see Frederick B. Artz, Reaction and Revolution 1814-1832 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1934). A disturbing psychological profile of George W. Bush is presented in Justin A. Frank, MD, Bush on the Couch. Inside the Mind of the President (New York: Regan Books, 2004).

[43] See Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values (New York: Simon and Shuster, 2005), and Sen. Robert C. Byrd, Losing America. Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).

Every cook can govern: a study in democracy in ancient Greece; its meaning for today (By CLR James in Correspondence, Vol. 2, No. 12. June 1956)

Direct Democracy

The Greek form of government was the city-state. Every Greek city was an independent state. At its best, in the city state of Athens, the public assembly of all the citizens made all important decisions on such questions as peace or war. They listened to the envoys of foreign powers and decided what their attitude should be to what these foreign powers had sent to say. They dealt with all serious questions of taxation, they appointed the generals who should lead them in time of war. They organized the administration of the state, appointed officials and kept check on them. The public assembly of all the citizens was the government.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek Democracy was that the administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily, selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the ones whose names came out.

Now the average CIO bureaucrat or Labor Member of Parliament in Britain would fall in a fit if it was suggested to him that any worker selected at random could do the work that he is doing, but that was precisely the guiding principle of Greek Democracy. And this form of government is the government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

Modern parliamentary democracy elects representatives and these representatives constitute the government. Before the democracy came into power, the Greeks had been governed by various forms of government, including government by representatives. The democracy knew representative government and rejected it. It refused to believe that the ordinary citizen was not able to perform practically all the business of government. Not only did the public assembly of all the citizens keep all the important decisions in its own hands. For the Greek, the word isonomia, which meant equality, was used interchangeably for democracy. For the Greek, the two meant the same thing. For the Greek, a man who did not take part in politics was an idiotes, an idiot, from which we get our modern word idiot, whose meaning, however, we have limited. Not only did the Greeks choose all officials by lot, they limited their time of service. When a man had served once, as a general rule, he was excluded from serving again because the Greeks believed in rotation, everybody taking his turn to administer the state.

Intellectuals

Intellectuals like Plato and Aristotle detested the system. And Socrates thought that government should be by experts and not by the common people. For centuries, philosophers and political writers, bewildered by these Greeks who when they said equality meant it, have either abused this democracy or tried to explain that this direct democracy was suitable only for the city-state. Large modern communities, they say, are unsuitable for such a form of government.

We of Correspondence believe that the larger the modern community, the more imperative it is for it to govern itself by the principle of direct democracy (it need not be a mere copy of the Greek). Otherwise we face a vast and ever-growing bureaucracy. That is why a study, however brief of the constitution and governmental procedures of Greek Democracy is so important for us today. Let us see how Greek Democracy administered justice. The Greek cities for a time had special magistrates and judges of a special type, like those that we have today. When the democracy came into power, about the middle of the 5th Century B.C., there began and rapidly developed a total reorganization of the system of justice. The quorum for important sessions of the assembly was supposed to be 6,000. The Greek Democracy therefore at the beginning of each year, chose by lot 12 groups of 500 each. These 500 tried the cases and their decisions were final. The Greek Democracy made the magistrate or the judge into a mere clerk of the court. He took the preliminary information and he presided as an official during the case. But his position as presiding officer was merely formal. The jury did not, as in our courts today, decide only on the facts and look to him for information on the law. They decided on the law as well as on the facts. Litigants pleaded their own case, though a litigant could go to a man learned in the law, get him to write a speech and read it himself. The Greeks were great believers in law, both written and unwritten. But the democrats believed not only in the theory of law, but in the principles of equity and we can define equity as what would seem right in a given case in the minds of 500 citizens chosen by lot from among the Athenian population.

No Experts

He would be a very bold man who would say that that system of justice was in any way inferior to the modern monstrosities by which lawyers mulct the public, cases last interminably, going from court to court, and matters of grave importance are decided by the position of full stops and commas (or the absence of them) in long and complicated laws and regulations which sometimes have to be traced through hundreds of years and hundreds of law books. When the Russian Revolution took place and was in its heroic period, the Bolsheviks experimented with People’s Courts. But they were timid and in any case, none of these experiments lasted for very long. The essence of the Greek method, here as elsewhere, was the refusal to hand over these things to experts, but to trust to the intelligence and sense of justice of the population at large, which meant of course a majority of the common people.

The Organization or Government

We must get rid of the idea that there was anything primitive in the organization of the government of Athens. On the contrary, it was a miracle of democratic procedure which would be beyond the capacity of any modern body of politicians and lawyers, simply because these believe that when every man has a vote, equality is thereby established. The assembly appointed a council of 500 to be responsible for the administration of the city and the carrying out of decisions.

But the council was governed by the same principle of equality. The city was divided into 10 divisions and the year was divided into 10 periods. Each section of the city selected by lot 50 men to serve on the council. All the councillors of each section held office for one tenth of the year. So that 50 people were always in charge of the administration. The order in which the group of 50 councillors from each section of the city should serve was determined by lot. Every day, the 50 who were serving chose someone to preside over them and he also was chosen by lot. If on the day that he was presiding, the full assembly met, he presided at the assembly.

The council had a secretary and he was elected. But he was elected only for the duration of one tenth of the year. And (no doubt to prevent bureaucracy) he was elected not from among the 50, but from among the 450 members of the council who were not serving at the time.

When members had served on the council, they were forbidden to serve a second time. Thus every person had a chance to serve. And here we come to one of the great benefits of the system. After a number of years, practically every citizen had had an opportunity to be a member of the administration. So that the body of citizens who formed the public assembly consisted of men who were familiar with the business of government.

No business could be brought before the assembly except it had been previously prepared and organized by the council.

When decisions had been taken, the carrying out of them was entrusted to the council. The council supervised all the magistrates and any work that had been given to a private citizen to do.

The Greeks had very few permanent functionaries. They preferred to appoint special boards of private citizens. Each of these boards had its own very carefully defined sphere of work. The coordination of all these various spheres of work was carried out by the council. A great number of special commissions helped to carry out the executive work. For example, there were 10 members of a commission to see after naval affairs, and 10 members of a commission to hear complaints against magistrates at the end of their term. One very interesting commission was the commission for the conduct of religious ceremonies. The Greeks were a very religious people. But most of the priests and officials of the temples were elected and were for the most part private citizens. The Greeks would not have any bunch of Bishops, Archbishops, Popes and other religious bureaucrats who lived by organizing religion. Some of these commissions were elected from the council. But others again were appointed by lot.

At every turn we see the extraordinary confidence that these people had in the ability of the ordinary person, the grocer, the candlestick maker, the carpenter, the sailor, the tailor. Whatever the trade of the individual, whatever his education, he was chosen by lot to do the work the state required.

And yet they stood no nonsense. If a private individual made propositions in the assembly which the assembly considered frivolous or stupid, the punishment was severe.

Democratic Drama

Here is some idea of the extent to which the Greeks believed in democracy and equality. One of the greatest festivals in Greece, or rather in Athens, was the festival of Dionysus, the climax of which was the performance of plays for four days, from sunrise to evening. The whole population came out to listen. Officials chose the different playwrights who were to compete. On the day of the performance, the plays were performed and, as far as we can gather, the prizes were at first given by popular applause and the popular vote. You must remember that the dramatic companies used to rehearse for one year and the successful tragedians were looked upon as some of the greatest men in the state, receiving immense honor and homage from their fellow citizens. Yet it was the public, the general public, of 15 or 20 thousand people that came and decided who was the winner.

Later, a committee was appointed to decide. Today such a committee would consist of professors, successful writers and critics. Not among the Greeks. The committee consisted first of a certain number of men chosen by lot from each section of the city. These men got together and chose by lot from among themselves 10 men. These 10 men attended as the judges. At the end of the performances, they made their decision. The 10 decisions were placed in the hat. Five were drawn out. And the one who had the highest vote from among these five received the prize. But even that does not give a true picture of the attitude of the Greeks towards democracy.

Despite the appointment of this commission, there is evidence that the spectators had a preponderant influence on the judges. The Greek populace behaved at these dramatic competitions as a modern crowd behaves at some football or baseball game. They were violent partisans. They stamped and shouted and showed their likes and dislikes in those and similar ways. We are told that the judges took good care to notice the way in which popular opinion went. Because, and this is typical of the whole working of the democracy on the day after the decision, the law allowed dissatisfied citizens to impeach the members of the commission for unsatisfactory decisions. So that the members of the commission (we can say at least) were very much aware of the consequences of 15 disregarding the popular feeling about the plays.

Yet it was the Greeks who invented playwriting. In Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, they produced three tragedians who, to this day, have no equals as practitioners of the art which they invented. Aristophanes has never been surpassed as a writer of comic plays. These men obviously knew that to win the prize, they had to please the populace. Plato, the great philosopher, was, as can easily be imagined, extremely hostile to this method of decision. But the Greek populace gave the prize to Aeschylus 13 times. They were the ones who repeatedly crowned Aeschylus and Sophocles, and later Euripides, as prize winners. It is impossible to see how a jury consisting of Plato and his philosopher friends could have done any better. There you have a perfect example of the Greek attitude to the capacities, judgment and ability to represent the whole body of citizens, which they thought existed in every single citizen.

Slavery and Women

There are many people today and some of them radicals and revolutionaries who sneer at the fact that this democracy was based on slavery .So it was, though we have found that those who are prone to attack Greek Democracy on behalf of slavery are not so much interested in defending the slaves as they are in attacking the democracy. Frederick Engels in his book on the family makes an analysis of slavery in relation to Greek Democracy and modern scholars on the whole agree with him. In the early days, Greek slavery did not occupy a very prominent place in the social life and economy of Greece. The slave was for the most part a household slave. Later, the slaves grew in number until they were at least as many as the number of citizens.

In later years, slavery developed to such a degree, with the development of commerce, industry, etc., that it degraded free labor. And it is to this extraordinary growth of slavery and the consequent degradation of free labor that Engels attributes the decline of the great Greek Democracy.(

However, it is necessary to say this. In the best days of the democracy, there were many slaves who, although denied the rights of citizenship, lived the life of the ordinary Greek citizen. There is much evidence of that. One of the most important pieces of evidence is the complaint of Plato that it was impossible to tell a slave to go off the pavement to make way for a free citizen (especially so distinguished a citizen as Plato) for the simple reason that they dressed so much like the ordinary citizen that it was impossible to tell who was a citizen and who was a slave. In fact, Plato so hated Greek Democracy that he complained that even the horses and the asses in the streets walked about as if they also had been granted liberty and freedom. Near the end of the period of radical democracy, Demosthenes, the greatest of Athenian , orators, said that the Athenians insisted on a certain code of behavior towards the slaves, not because of the slaves, but because a man who behaved in an unseemly manner to another human being was not fit to be a citizen. There were horrible conditions among the slaves who worked in the mines. But on the whole, the slave code in Athens has been described by competent authorities as the most enlightened the world has known.

It was also stated by many that the position of women in Athens during the democracy was very bad. Naturally in these days, they did not have the vote. But for many centuries we were taught that the women of the Greek Democracy were little better than bearers of children and housekeepers for their husbands. Yet some modern writers, on closer examination of the evidence, have challenged the old view, and we believe that before very long, the world will have a more balanced view of how women lived in the Greek Democracy.

The Founders of Western Culture

Now if the ancient Greeks had done little beside invent and practice this unique form of human equality in government, they would have done enough to be remembered. The astonishing thing is that they laid the intellectual foundation of Western Europe. Today when we speak about philosophy, logic, dialect; when we speak of politics, democracy, oligarchy, constitution, law; when we speak of oratory, rhetoric, ethics; when we speak of drama, of tragedy and comedy; when we speak of history; when we speak of sculpture and architecture; in all these things we use the terms and build on the foundations that were discovered and developed by the Greeks.

Correspondence is not sure about science. but in every other sphere of human endeavor, whatever the methods, routines, procedures, etc. that are used by people in intellectual and political association with each other, these were discovered, invented, classified and analyzed by the people of ancient Greece.

They not only invented or discovered these things. The men who invented and discovered and developed them — sculpture, politics, philosophy, art and literature, medicine, mathematics, etc. — these men are still to this day unsurpassed as practitioners of the things that they invented or discovered. If you were writing a history of modern civilization, you might find it necessary to bring in perhaps half a dozen Americans. Let us be liberal. A dozen. You will be equally in difficulty to find a dozen Englishmen. But in any such history of Western Civilization, you would have to mention some 60 or 80 Greeks.

Here are some of the names. Epic poetry — Homer. Dramatic poetry — Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes. Comedy — Aristophanes. Lyric poetry — Pindar and Sappho. Statesmen — Solon, Themistocles and Pericles. Sculpture The Master of Olympia and Phidias. Oratory — Dernosthenes. History — Thucydides and Herodotus. Philosophy — Socrates, Aristotle and Plato. Science and mathematics — Pythagoras and Archimedes. Medicine — Hippocrates.

These are only some of the best known names. And the fact which should never be forgotten and which indeed we should make the foundation of all our thinking on Greece is that by far the greatest number of them lived, and their finest work was done, in the days when the Greek Democracy flourished.

Modern Comparison

This is the greatest lesson of the Athenian democracy for us today. It was in the days when every citizen could and did govern equally with any other citizen, when in other words, equality was carried to its extreme, that the city produced the most varied, comprehensive and brilliant body of geniuses that the world has ever known. The United States today has a population of 155 million people. In other words, 1500 times the population of Athens. In economic wealth, any two-by-four modern city of 20,000 people probably contains a hundred times or more of the economic resources of a city like Athens in its greatest days. Furthermore, for a great part of its existence, the total citizen population of Athens could be contained in Ebbets Field or at any of a dozen football grounds in England. This will give you some faint idea of the incredible achievements not of ancient Greece in general, but of Greek Democracy. For it was the democracy of Greece that created these world-historical achievements and they could not have been created without the democracy.

Greece did not only produce great artists, philosophers and statesmen at a time when their work laid the foundation of what we know as civilization. The Greeks fought and won some of the greatest battles that were ever fought in defense of Western Civilization. At the battles of Marathon, Plataea and Salamis, a few thousand Greeks, with the Athenian democrats at their head, defended the beginnings of democracy, freedom of association, etc., against the hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the Oriental despotic monarchy of Persia. In those battles in the 5th Century, Oriental barbarism, which aimed at the destruction of the Greeks, was defeated and hurled back by the Greeks fighting against odds at times of over 20 to 1. The Oriental despots knew very well what they were doing. They came determined to crush the free and independent states of Greece. Never before and never since was so much owed by so many to so few, and as the years go by the consciousness of that debt can only increase.

Athenian Democrat — What Kind of Man?

This has always been an important question but at the stage of society that we have reached, it is the fundamental question: What kind of a man was this Greek democrat? Karl Marx has stated that the future type of man, the man of a socialist society, will be a “fully developed individual, fit for a variety 20 of labors, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.” Here is how Pericles, one of the greatest statesmen of the Greek Democracy, described the ordinary Greek citizen:

Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece, and I declare that in my opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility.

Marx and all the men who have written of a society of democracy and equality had to place it in the future. For our Greek, this conception of the citizen was not an aspiration. It was a fact. The statement occurs in perhaps the greatest of all the Greek statements on democracy, the speech of Pericles on the occasion of a funeral of Athenians who had died in war.

The Greek democrat achieved this extraordinary force and versatility because he had two great advantages over the modern democrat. The first was that in the best days of the democracy, he did not understand individualism as we know it. For him an individual was unthinkable except in the city-state. The city-state of democracy was unthinkable except as a collection of free individuals. He could not see himself or other people as individuals in opposition to the city-state. That came later when the democracy declined. It was this perfect balance, instinctive and unconscious, between the individual and the city-state which gave him the enormous force and the enormous freedom of his personality.

Pericles shows us that freedom, the freedom to do and think as you please, not only in politics but in private life, was the very life-blood of the Greeks. In that same speech, he says:

And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-today life in our relations with each other; We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect.

We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break.

Human “Gods”

Those simple words need hard thinking for us to begin to understand them today. The United States is notorious among modern nations for the brutality with which majorities, in large things as in small, terrorize and bully minorities which do not conform; in Great Britain, the conception of “good form” and “what is not done” exercises a less blatant but equally pervasive influence. The Greek democrat would have considered such attitudes as suitable only for barbarians. One reason why the Greeks so hated the Persians was that a Persian had to bow down and humble himself before the Persian King — the Greek called this “a prostration” and this too he thought was only fit for barbarians. Instead, in the midst of a terrible war, he went to the theatre (which was a state-theatre) and applauded a bitterly anti-war play by Aristophanes, and on another occasion, when the ruler of Athens, accompanied by foreign dignitaries, attended the theatre in his official capacity, Aristophanes ridiculed him so mercilessly in the play that he sued the dramatist — and lost the case.

Another great advantage of the Greek democrat was that he had a religion. The Greek religion may seem absurd to us today, but any serious study of it will show that it was as great an example of their genius as their other achievements. Religion is that total conception of the universe and man’s place in it without which a man or a body of men are like people wandering in the wilderness. And the religious ideas of a people are usually a reflection and development of their responses to the society in which they live. Modern man does not know what to think of the chaotic world in which he lives and that is why he has no religion.

So simple and easy to grasp in all its relations was the city-state that the total conception with which the Greeks conceived of the universe as a whole and man’s relation to it was extremely simple and, despite the fact that it was crammed with absurdities, was extremely rational. The Greek gods were essentially human beings of a superior kind. The Greeks placed them on top of a mountain (Olympus) and allowed them their superiority up there. But if any citizen looked as if he was becoming too powerful and might establish himself like a god in Athens, the Athenian Democracy handled him very easily. They held a form of referendum on him and if citizens voted against him, he was forthwith banished for ten years, though when he returned, he could get back his property. Gods were strictly for Olympus.

Around all religions there is great mystery and psychological and traditional associations which are extremely difficult to unravel. But, although the Greek no doubt recognized these mysteries, his relation to them was never such as to overwhelm him.

Thus in his relation to the state, and in his relation to matters beyond those which he could himself handle, he understood what his position was and the position of his fellow men in a manner far beyond that of all other peoples who have succeeded him.

Working Politics

In strict politics the great strength of the system was that the masses of the people were paid for the political work that they did. Politics, therefore, was not the activity of your spare time, nor the activity of experts paid specially to do it. And there is no question that in the socialist society the politics, for example, of the workers’ organizations and the politics of the state will be looked upon as the Greeks looked upon it, a necessary and important part of work, a part of the working day. A simple change like that would revolutionize contemporary politics overnight.

The great weakness of the system was that, as time went on, the proletariat did little except politics. The modern community lives at the expense of the proletariat. The proletariat in Greece and still more in Rome lived at the expense of the community. In the end, this was a contributory part of the decline of the system. But the system lasted nearly 200 years. The Empires of France and Britain have not lasted very much longer. And America’s role as a leader of world civilization is mortally challenged even before it has well begun.

The Greeks Were a Sophisticated People

It is obvious that we can give here no more than a general account of Greek Democracy. There are great gaps in our knowledge of many aspects of Greek life; and even the facts that scholars have patiently and carefully verified during centuries can be, and are, very variously interpreted. There is room for differences of opinion, and Greek Democracy has always had and still has many enemies. But the position we take here is based not only on the soundest authorities, but on something far more important, our own belief in the creative power of freedom and the capacity of the ordinary man to govern. Unless you share that belief of the ancient Greeks, you cannot understand the civilization they built.

History is a living thing. It is not a body of facts. We today who are faced with the inability of representative government and parliamentary democracy to handle effectively the urgent problems of the day, we can study and understand Greek Democracy in a way that was impossible for a man who lived in 1900, when representative government and parliamentary democracy seemed securely established for all time.

Take this question of election by lot and rotation so that all could take their turn to govern. The Greeks, or to be more strict, the Athenians (although many other cities followed Athens), knew very well that it was necessary to elect specially qualified men for certain posts. The commanders of the army and of the fleet were specially selected, and they were selected for their military knowledge and capacity. And yet that by itself can be easily misunderstood. The essence of the matter is that the generals were so surrounded by the general democratic practices of the Greeks, the ordinary Greek was so vigilant against what he called “tyranny”, that it was impossible for generals to use their positions as they might have been able to do in an ordinary bureaucratic or representative form of government.

Pericles Cries

So it was that the Greeks, highly sophisticated in the practice of democracy, did not, for example, constantly change the men who were appointed as generals. Pericles ruled Athens as general in command for some 30 years. But although he ruled, he was no dictator. He was constantly reelected. On one occasion, he was tried before the courts but won a victory .On another occasion, Aspasia, the woman with whom he lived, was brought before the court by his enemies. Pericles defended her himself. He was a man famous for his gravity of deportment, but on this occasion, Aspasia was so hard pressed that he broke down and cried. The jury was so astonished at seeing this, that it played an important role in the acquittal of Aspasia. Can you imagine this happening to a modern ruler? Whether democratic or otherwise?

The Greek populace elected Pericles year after year because they knew that he was honest and capable. But he knew and they knew that if they were not satisfied with him, they were going to throw him out. That was the temper of the Greek Democracy in its best days.

This democracy was not established overnight. The early Greek cities were not governed in this way. The landed aristocracy dominated the economy and held all the important positions of government. For example, rich and powerful noblemen, for centuries, controlled a body known as the Areopagus and the Areopagus held all the powers which later were transferred to the council. The magistrates in the courts were a similar body of aristocrats who functioned from above with enormous powers such as modern magistrates and modern judges have. The Greek Democracy had had experience of expert and bureaucratic government.

It was not that the Greeks had such simple problems that they could work out simple solutions or types of solutions which are impossible in our more complicated civilizations. That is the great argument which comes very glibly to the lips 26 of modern enemies of direct democracy and even of some learned Greek scholars. It is false to the core. And the proof is that the greatest intellectuals of the day, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others (men of genius such as the world has rarely seen), were all bitterly opposed to the democracy. To them, this government by the common people was wrong in principle and they criticized it constantly. More than that, Plato spent the greater part of his long life discussing and devising and publishing ways and means of creating forms of society, government and lay which would be superior to the Greek Democracy. And yet, Plato owed everything to the democracy.

He could think and discuss and publish freely solely because he lived in a democracy. We should remember too that the very ideas of what could constitute the perfect society he was always seeking, came to him and could come to him only because the democracy in Greece was itself constantly seeking to develop practically the best possible society. It is true that Plato and his circle developed theories and ideas about government and society which have been of permanent value to all who have worked theoretically at the problems of society ever since. Their work has become part of the common heritage of Western Civilization.

But we make a colossal mistake if we believe that all this is past history. For Plato’s best known book, The Republic, is his description of an ideal society to replace the democracy, and it is a perfect example of a totalitarian state, governed by an elite. And what is worse. Plato started and brilliantly expounded a practice which has lasted to this day among intellectuals — a constant speculation about different and possible methods of government, all based on a refusal to accept the fact that the common man can actually govern. It must be said for Plato that, in the end, he came to the conclusion that the radical democracy was the best type of government for Athens. Many intellectuals today do not do as well. They not only support but they join bureaucratic and even sometimes totalitarian forms of government.

The intellectuals who through the centuries preoccupied themselves with Plato and his speculations undoubtedly had a certain justification for so doing. Today there is none. What all should study first is the way in which the Greeks translated into active concrete life their conception of human equality. The Greeks did not arrive at their democracy by reading the books of philosophers. The common people won it only after generations of struggle.

How the Democracy Was Won

It would seem that somewhere between 650 and 600 B.C., the first great stage in the development of Greek Democracy was reached when the laws were written down. The people fought very hard that the law should be written so that everyone should know what it was by which he was governed.

But this was not accidental. As always, what changed the political situation in Greece were changes in the social structure. Commerce and (to a degree more than most people at one time believed) industry; the use of money, played great roles in breaking down aristocratic distinctions, and over the years, there was a great social levelling, social equality, due to the growth of merchant and trading classes, to the increase of the artisan class, of workmen in small factories and sailors on the ships. With these changes in Greek society, the merchants made a bid for power in the manner that we have seen so often in recent centuries in European history and also in the history of Oriental countries. Solon was the statesman who first 28 established a more or less democratic constitution and, for that reason, his name is to this day famous as a man of political wisdom. We see his name in the headlines of newspapers, written by men who we can be pretty sure have little sympathy with what Solon did. But the fact that his name has lasted all these centuries as a symbol of political wisdom is significant of the immense change in human society which he inaugurated. A few years before the end of the 6th Century B.C., we have the real beginning of democracy in the constitution of Solon.

Solon’s Constitution

The citizens of the city-state were not only those who lived in the city, but the peasants who lived around. Solon was supported by the merchants and the urban classes, and also by the peasants. The growth of a money economy and of trade and industry, as usual, had loaded the peasants with debt and Solon cancelled the burden of debt on them. So that in a manner that we can well understand, the growth of industry and trade, and the dislocation of the old peasant economy provided the forces for the establishment of Solon’s great constitution. It was the result of a great social upheaval.

To give you some idea of the state of the surrounding world when Solon was introducing his constitution, we may note that 30 years after Solon’s constitution, we have the death of Nebuchadnezzar, the king in the Bible who was concerned in that peculiar business of Shadrack, Meshak and Abednego. And this is the answer to all who sneer about the greatness of Greek Democracy. You only have to look at what the rest of the world around them was doing and thinking.

But although Solon’s constitution was a great and historic beginning, the democracy that he inaugurated was far removed from the radical democracy, the direct democracy of later years. For at least a century after Solon, the highest positions of the state could only be filled by men who had a qualification of property and this property qualification was usually associated with men of noble birth. The constitution in other words, was somewhat similar to the British constitution in the 18th Century. The real relation of forces can be seen best perhaps in the army. In cities like Athens, the whole able-bodied population was called upon to fight its wars. Political power, when it passed from the aristocracy, remained for some decades in the hands of those who were able to supply themselves with armor and horses.

Power of Rowers

About 90 years after Solon, there was another great revolution in Athens. It was led by a radical noble, Cleisthenes by name. Cleisthenes instituted a genuinely middle class democracy. As in Western European history .the first stage in democracy is often the constitution. Then later comes the extension of the constitution to the middle classes and the lower middle classes. That was what took place in Greece.

The great masses of the people, however, the rank and file, were excluded from the full enjoyment of democratic rights. The ordinary citizen, the ordinary working man, the ordinary artisan, did not have any of the privileges that he was to have later. The way he gained them is extremely instructive.

The development of commerce gradually transformed Athens first into a commercial city, and then into a city which did a great trade in the Mediterranean and the other lands around it. But a few years after the establishment of this middle class democracy by Cleisthenes, we have the period of the great Persian invasion. In 490 B.C., we have the battle of Marathon, in 480, the battle of Salamis, and in 479, the battle of Plataea, in which the whole population fought. Much of this war was fought at sea. Thus, commercially and militarily, Athens became a naval power. But the ships in those days were propelled by the men who rowed them. Thus the rowers in the fleet became a great social force. The Greeks always said that it was the growth of democracy which had inspired the magnificent defense of Greece against Persia. But after that victory was won, the rowers in the fleet became the spearhead of the democracy and they were the ones who forced democracy to its ultimate limits.

Proletarians or Piraeus

The port of Athens was, as it is to this day, the Piraeus. There, for the most part, lived the sailors of the merchant fleet and the navy and a number of foreigners, as takes place in every great naval port. The leaders in the popular assembly were sometimes radical noblemen and later were often ordinary artisans. But the proletarians of the Piraeus were the driving force and they were the most radical of the democrats.

The struggle was continuous. The battle of Plataea took place in 479 B.C. A quarter of a century later, another revolution took place and power was transferred definitely from the nobles who still retained some of it, to the radical democracy. Pericles, an aristocrat by birth, was one of the leaders of this revolution. Five years after, the lowest classes in the city gained the power of being elected or chosen for the Archonship, a very high post. It was Pericles who began to pay the people for doing political work. From 458, the radical democracy continued until it finally collapsed in 338 B.C.

Class Struggle

The struggle was continuous. The old aristocratic class and some of the wealthy people made attempts to destroy the democratic constitution and institute the rule of the privileged. They had temporary success but were ultimately defeated every time. In the end, the democracy was defeated by a foreign enemy and not from inside. One notable feature of Athenian democracy was that, despite the complete power of the popular assembly, it never attempted to carry out any socialistic doctrines. The democrats taxed the rich heavily and kept them in order, but they seemed to have understood instinctively that their economy, chiefly of peasants and artisans, was unsuitable as the economic basis for a socialized society. They were not idealists or theorizers or experimenters, but somber, responsible people who have never been surpassed at the practical business of government.

How shall we end this modest attempt to bring before modern workers the great democrats of Athens? Perhaps by reminding the modern world of the fact that great as were their gifts, the greatest gift they had was their passion for democracy. They fought the Persians, but they fought the internal enemy at home with equal, if not greater determination. Once, when they were engaged in a foreign war, the antidemocrats tried to establish a government of the privileged. The Athenian democrats defeated both enemies, the enemy abroad and the enemy at home. And after the double victory, the popular assembly decreed as follows:

Athenian Oath

If any man subvert the democracy of Athens, or hold any magistracy after the democracy has been subverted, he shall be an enemy of the Athenians. Let him be put to death with impunity, and let his property be confiscated to the public, with the reservation of a tithe to Athena. Let the man who has killed him, and the accomplice privy to the act, be accounted holy and of good religious odor. Let all Athenians swear an oath under the sacrifice of full-grown victims in their respective tribes and demes, to kill him. Let the oath be as follows: “I will kill with my own hand, if I am able, any man who shall subvert the democracy at Athens, or who shall hold any office in the future after the democracy has been subverted, or shall rise in arms for the purpose of making himself a despot, or shall help the despot to establish himself. And if anyone else shall kill him, I will account the slayer to be holy as respects both gods and demons, as having slain an enemy of the Athenians. And I engage, by word, by deed, and by vote, to sell his property and make over one-half of the proceeds to the slayer, without withholding anything. If any man shall perish in slaying, or in trying to slay the despot, I will be kind both to him and to his children, as to Harmodius and Aristogeiton and their descendants. And I hereby dissolve and release all oaths which have been sworn hostile to the Athenian people, either at Athens, or at the camp (at Samos) or elsewhere.” Let all Athenians swear this as the regular oath immediately before the festival of the Dionysia, with sacrifice and full-grown victims; invoking upon him who keeps it good things in abundance, but upon him who breaks it destruction for himself as well as for his family.

That was the spirit of the men who created and defended the great democracy of Athens. Let all true believers in democracy and equality today strengthen ourselves by studying what they did and how they did it. 

Rome's Outstanding Experiment [Excerpt from Scott Nearing's "Civilization and Beyond"]

Among the many attempts to make the institutions and practices of civilization promote human welfare, Roman civilization deserves a very high rating. First, it was located in the eastern Mediterranean area, the home-site of so many civilizations. Second, it was part and parcel of a prolonged period of attempts by Egyptians, Assyrians, Hittites, Babylonians, Mycaenians, Phoenicians and others in the area to set up successful empires and to play the lead role in building a civilization that would be more or less permanent. Third, the Romans seemed to have the hardiness, adaptability, persistence and capacity for self-discipline necessary to carry such a long term project to a successful conclusion. Among the widely varied human groups occupying the eastern Mediterranean area between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the Romans seem to have been well qualified to win the laurel crown.

Western civilization is an incomplete experiment. Its outcome remains uncertain. Its future still hangs in the insecure balance between construction and destruction, between life and extinction. It is "our" civilization in a very real sense. It was developed by our forebears. We live as part of its complex of ideas, practices, techniques, institutions. Since we are in it and of it, it is difficult for us humans to judge it objectively.

Roman civilization, on the contrary, is a completed experiment, one that came into being, developed over several centuries, attained a zenith of wealth and power, then sank gradually from sight, until it lived only as a part of history. A study of Roman civilization has two advantages. First, its life cycle has been completed. Second, it is close enough to us in history and its records are so numerous and so well preserved that we can form a fairly accurate picture of its structure and its functions. It was written up extensively by the Romans themselves, by their Greek and other contemporaries and by a host of scholars and students; since the break-up of Roman civilization as a political, economic and cultural force in world affairs.

Rome's experiment is sometimes called Graeco-Roman civilization because Greece and Italy were close geographical neighbors and also because Greek culture, which reached its zenith by 500 B.C. and was closely paralleled by the rise of Roman culture, had a profound effect in determining the total character of Roman civilization. In a very real sense Graeco-Roman civilization was the parent of western civilization. Among the many completed civilizations of which we have fairly adequate records, those concerning Rome are most complete and most available.

The story of Roman civilization begins in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin in an era when Greek and Phoenician cities, together with segments and fragments of the Egyptian-Assyrian-Babylonian civilizations were competing for raw materials, trade and alliances. Egyptians had been supreme in the area for centuries. The Sumerian, Aegean, Chinese, Hittite, Assyrian and Indian civilizations had enjoyed periods of dominance but had never reached the level of supremacy enjoyed by the Egyptians.

When Rome came on the scene as a first-rate power, circa 300 B.C., the crucial land bridge joining Africa, Europe and Asia was being passed from hand to hand, with no power strong enough to succeed Egypt as the dominant political-economic-cultural force in the region. Historically speaking it was an interregnum, a period of transition. Egypt had ceased to dominate the public life of the area. The trading cities of the Greeks and the Phoenicians were pushing their way of life into the front ranks among the recognized powers. The kingdoms of Asia-Minor were still warring for supremacy in a field which none of the local kingdoms was able to dominate and hold for any considerable period of time.

Public affairs at the African-European-Asian crossroads were being periodically disturbed and upset by the intrusion of Asian marauders and nomads who came in successive waves, defeated and drove the native inhabitants off from the choicest land and settled down in their places, only to be pushed out in their turn by fresh Asian migrants.

The African-European-Asian triangle was a meeting place and a battle ground. Phoenician and Greek cities brought to this scene new factors and new forces: the rudiments of science; trade and commerce, including a money economy, accounting and cost keeping; the elements of economic organization; the conduct of public affairs by governments based on law rather than on the whim and word of a deified potentate; and the construction of cities and city states built on these foundations.

Rome entered the picture when the forces of political absolutism based upon an agriculture operated by serfs and slaves had fought themselves to a standstill and exhausted their historical usefulness. The times called for new forces capable of adapting themselves to a new culture pattern extending over a greatly enlarged world. The Romans, with their Greek associates, were in a position to fill the gap.

Romans lived originally in Latium, a small land area in southern Italy on the Tiber River far enough inland to be protected against pirates. They built a city which finally covered seven adjacent hills and developed a community of working farmers, merchants, craftsmen and professionals. The farms were small, averaging perhaps eight to fifteen acres, an area large enough to provide a family with a stable though meagre livelihood. The farmers were hard working and frugal.

At this period of Roman history and mythology Latium was one of many communities occupying Italy. Each was self-governing. Each took the steps necessary for survival and expansion. Like their neighbors, the inhabitants of Latium were prepared to defend themselves against piracy, brigandage and ambitious, aggressive rivals. Defense took the form of an embankment and a water-filled moat which surrounded the early settlements and provided shelter for herdsman and farmers in case of emergencies.

At some point in pre-history, presumably when Etruscan princes were in control of Roman affairs, the protective earth embankment which surrounded the Roman settlements was strengthened by building a moat 100 feet wide and 30 feet deep. Behind the moat was a stone wall 10 feet thick and 30 feet or more in height. Parts of this defense were built and rebuilt at various times. When completed they were about six miles in length, enclosing an area sufficient to accommodate the chief buildings of the city and living space for a population of perhaps 200,000 people.

The defenses were designed to prevent interference or intrusion into the life of the Romans. Behind them the inhabitants constructed temples, a forum, palaces and other public buildings, bringing in clean mountain water by an aqueduct that eventually reached a length of 44 miles, constructing an extensive system of drains and sewers that disposed of city wastes, building a network of roads that eventually gave the Romans access first to all parts of Italy and later to the entire Mediterranean Basin. They also replaced the wooden bridges over the Tiber and other rivers by stone bridges carried on stone piers and arches.

Early in their building activities the Romans learned to make a cement so weather-resistant that many of their constructs are still usable two thousand years after the Romans built them. These and similar building operations made Rome one of the show places of the Graeco-Roman world. They also provided for the Romans a level of stability and security far beyond that of their neighbors in that part of the unstable Italian peninsula.

At the time Rome was founded, presumably about 700 B.C., the Italian peninsula was occupied by a large number of principalities, kingdoms and tribal nomads, newly arrived from eastern Europe and Asia. The struggle for pasturage and fertile soil, for dwelling sites and trading opportunities, went on ceaselessly. Romans, like their neighbors and competitors, were reaching out to provide themselves with food, building materials, trade opportunities, strategic advantages. They expanded peacefully if possible, using diplomacy up to a certain point and only engaging in war as a last resort. But since the entire Italian peninsula was occupied by more or less independent groups, each of which was seeking a larger and safer place in the sun, the outcome was ceaseless diplomatic maneuvering, using war as an instrument of policy in the struggle for pelf and power. Four centuries of power struggle, in which Romans played an increasingly prominent role, gave the Roman Republic and its allies substantial control of the entire Italian peninsula. Beginning as one among many small independent states in Italy, the inhabitants of Latium emerged from four centuries of competitive diplomatic and military struggle as the de facto masters of all Italy.

Power struggles are carried on by contestants who occupy a particular land area with its resources and other advantages. Latium was small in extent (some 2,000 square miles) and had very limited natural advantages. Operating from this restricted base, through four centuries of diplomacy, intrigue and war, the Romans enlarged their base of operations to include the whole of Italy. In this crucial era of its history Rome expanded its geographic-economic base to a point from which it could use the natural and human resources of all Italy as a nucleus upon which to build the Roman Empire in Europe, West Asia and North Africa.

At the beginning of this period the Mediterranean Basin housed a number of African, Asian and European empires. Each exercised authority over a part of the Mediterranean littoral. Each empire was built around its central city or cities. Each empire had its distinctive institutions and practices. During these centuries all of the empires were defeated, conquered, occupied and either dismembered or otherwise brought under Roman control.

Extension of Roman authority, first over the Italian peninsula and subsequently over parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, was the result of a policy of expansion that was aggressively, persistently and patiently followed by Roman leaders and policy makers. Neighboring territories were amalgamated into the nucleus of the Roman Empire. More remote territories were associated by treaty as allies of Rome, as dependent or client dependencies of Rome, and as colonies or provinces of the Roman Empire. In all cases they were integral parts of an expanding political, economic and military sphere of influence with Rome, and later Italy, as the center and nucleus. In the course of this development the expanding Roman Empire grew to be the wealthiest and most powerful political, sociological and cultural unit in the Euro-Asian-African area.

The Roman imperial cycle spanned some thirteen centuries. During this period Roman life was transformed from its small, local seat of authority in Central Italy into its new stature as the outstanding power in the Mediterranean area. Economically it extended from peasant proprietorship and a use economy to a market-money economy; from a society of working peasant farmers to an economy resting upon war captives reduced to slavery; from an economy based on production for trade and profit to an economy based on power-grabbing, special privilege, speculation and corruption; from an austerity economy based on primary production to an economy based on affluence, exploitation, and gluttony.

These revolutionary transformations in the Roman economy were accompanied, politically, by hardening of the division of Roman society along class lines with the resulting contradictions, antagonisms, and class struggles, including open class warfare.

Domestic contradictions, confrontations, civil strife and formal civil war were present throughout the entire history of Rome. They existed in embryo in the earliest days of the original settlements on the seven hills over which the city of Rome eventually spread. As Rome and its interests became more complex socially and more extensive geographically the number and variety of contradictions, confrontations, civil and military conflicts increased correspondingly.

In terms of individual human lives the changes which took place in Roman society during the six or seven centuries that elapsed between the early Roman settlements and the reign of their Emperor Augustus were profound and far-reaching. Many communities of diverse and often incompatible backgrounds and interests were herded together, helter-skelter, into the City of Rome, Latium, the Italian nucleus and the subsequent alliances, federations, conquests, consolidations into colonies, occupied areas, provinces and spheres of influence. The greater the number and diversity of these interests and relationships, the greater the probability of conflict. This empire building process was not gradual and directed with scrupulous care to preserve the amenities and niceties of polite social intercourse. The job was done by and under the direction of military leaders who are traditionally in a hurry to get results. The subordinates who carried out military decisions were volunteer-professional soldiers, mercenary adventurers and conscripts drawn form the four corners of the empire. As the empire grew in extent and as its troubles multiplied, the military was more frequently called upon to take over and iron out difficulties.

Domestically, in the city of Rome and its immediate environs, there were several sharp lines of cleavage; between Roman citizens and non-citizens; between the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the working proletariat and the idle proletariat; between the rich and the poor; between freeman (citizens) and the slaves who grew in numbers as the wars of conquest and consolidation multiplied war captives; between the civilian bureaucrats and the members of the military hierarchy.

In the brief period of maximum territorial expansion following the defeat and destruction of Carthage, the frontiers of the Roman Empire were pushed out ruthlessly, North, East, West and South. In the hurly-burly of rapid expansion individual rights were ignored, local communities and entire regions were overrun, depopulated and resettled with the tough disregard of individual and local interests that must characterize any quick, general movement--economic, sociological or military. If the expansion, expulsion and rehabilitation had produced greater degrees of stability and security for individuals and social groups they might have been tolerated and assimilated by the diverse populations caught up in the maelstrom of drastic expansion. But rapid, coercive social transformation produces neither stability nor security. Its normal consequence is chaos, conflict and further change. In the course of these internal conflicts the Roman Republic was gradually phased out. In theory it persisted until the establishment of the military dictatorship of Julius Caesar. Practically, while many of its forms remained, the conduct of public affairs passed more and more into the hands of political leaders who were able to command the backing of the legions.

When the first war against Carthage was launched in 265 B.C., Carthage was at the height of her power. Situated on the North African Coast almost directly across the Mediterranean from Italy, the Carthaginians were in effective control of the western Mediterranean. Carthage was firmly entrenched in Spain. It was trading extensively with the British Isles. Fleets of Carthaginian war ships patrolled the Mediterranean guarding against piracy and economic or political interference by rivals.

Roman political and business leaders, inexperienced in international political dealings and the promotion of international trade, found their further expansion to the west blocked by Carthaginian political, economic and military installations. The result of the confrontation was a series of three wars that began in 265 B.C., and ended in 146. During these 119 years an established power, Carthage, struggled to preserve its position against aggressive Roman efforts to take control of the West Mediterranean basin. The Carthaginians, under the able generalship of Hannibal, mobilized a military force (including elephants), marched from Spain over the Alpine passes into Italy reaching the gates of Rome. Romans countered with the slogan: "Carthage must be destroyed!" When the third Punic war ended in 146 B.C., with the defeat of the Carthaginian military forces, the city of Carthage was leveled.

The defeat of Carthage gave the Romans control of the western Mediterranean. During the same period Roman interests were pushing into East Europe and Western Asia. In 214 B.C., Philip of Macedon had made an alliance with Hannibal, directed against Rome. Consequently, three wars between Rome and Macedonia followed, the third ending in 168 B.C., with the defeat of the Macedonians and their subordination to Roman authority in the form of a Roman governor.

When opposition to Roman influence developed in Greece in 148 B.C., a commission of ten was appointed by the Roman Senate to settle affairs in the Greek peninsula. The city of Corinth was burned to the ground and its lands were confiscated. Thebes and Chalcis were also destroyed. The walls of all towns which had shared in the revolt against Rome were pulled down. All confederations between Greek cities were dissolved. Disarmament, isolation and Roman taxation were imposed on the Greek cities and the oversight of affairs was assigned to the Roman governor of neighboring Macedonia.

Successful wars against Syria and Egypt extended Roman control over additional territory in West Asia and North Africa. A map of Italy at the time of the Roman Federation in 268 B.C. shows Rome as the most powerful among two score minor associates in the federation. A map of the Roman Empire at the death of Augustus in 14 A.D. shows a Roman Empire extending from the Atlantic seaboard on the west to Central Europe on the north, the Black Sea on the east and a generous strip of Africa on the south.

Within three centuries Rome had expanded from its position as a minor state in Italy to the effective control of those portions of three continents which bordered the Mediterranean. Conquests during the following century further extended the Roman frontiers.

Under the Caesars Rome was a society in the throes of political transition. Roman Emperors, backed and frequently selected by the military, were exercising despotic power. They still paid lip service to the Constitution, an instrument that had relevance during the life of the defunct Republic. In the era of the Caesars the law slumbered and might ruled. The turbulent masses were fed and housed by the Roman Oligarchy to which the Emperors were ultimately responsible. The far flung territories conquered by military power and held by military occupation were subject to the authority of the same Roman Oligarchy.

Behind the shams, frauds and tyrannies of a political dictatorship paying lip service to the corpse of a defunct Republic lay the stark realities of a bankrupt economy. Throughout the era of the Caesars the Roman Empire continued to expand geographically. It also came into contact and conflict with peoples so remote from Italy that for them Rome was only a name for tyranny, extortion and exploitation. Julius Caesar and his immediate successors penetrated these remote territories, subjugating them, levying tribute, appointing governors and other officials, policing them, pretending to rule over them. To do this soldiers were marching on foot into regions that lay thousands of miles from the mother city. To be sure, they marched over Roman roads and bridges so well constructed that some of them are still being used at the present day.

But the excellence of Roman engineering could not match up to the implacable limitations of time and distance. Nor could they overlook the need for building the physical structure of Roman economy as they advanced into enemy territory. Equally decisive were the political consequences of the property confiscation and forced labor required to establish and maintain Roman power and enrich greedy Roman officials and their lackeys and overseers.

Rising overhead costs, with no corresponding growth of income, an empty treasury in Rome, and a persistent policy of fleecing the provinces to pay for the normal costs of bureaucracy, plus its extravagances and excesses, could lead to only one possible outcome. Higher taxes and more ruinous levies in the newly conquered provinces could not fill the insatiable maw of deficit spending.

Inflation was the immediate result, accompanied and followed by the debasement of currency and new expropriations of private property. Government expenses consistently exceeded income. The situation was aggravated by the growth of parasitic elements which persistently produced little or nothing and as persistently multiplied their luxuries and extravagances. The parasites grew richer. The impoverished masses suffered the normal deprivations of poverty plus the weight of steadily rising over-head costs. As Roman authority extended farther from its center, the chasm between its income and its out-go widened.

Slave labor aggravated the situation. There was a time when Roman farmers and craftsmen did their own work. That time ended with the enslavement of war captives who swamped the labor market. Like any parasitic growth, slavery and forced labor destroyed the fabric of a largely self-contained economy based on peasant proprietorship.

Roman economy was honey-combed with problems created by deficit spending, currency devaluation and exploitation. At its base was a foot-loose urban proletariat made up largely of refugees from a countryside given over increasingly to the employment of military captives as slave labor. The city masses at the outset were extensively unemployed. Increasingly they became unemployable, parasitic, restless, demanding.

At the outset the slave revolts were local and occasional. As the slaves grew more numerous unrest spread and hardened into organized resistance. Spartacus, a slave, led a revolt which mobilized armies, defeated the Roman legions in a series of battles and ended only with the death of Spartacus and the dispersal of his forces.

Local and provincial affairs under the Roman Empire were administered by a self-seeking corrupt bureaucracy.

Expansion by means of military conquest increased the influence of the military at the expense of the civilian administrators. The consequent burdens of militarism reached from the bottom to the top of Roman society. Eventually, under the Caesars, the military selected emperors from among the rivals for the purple of imperial authority, and used the legions under their command to protect and promote their own political fortunes, thus maintaining a form of latent and frequently open civil war.

Colonial unrest and provincial self-seeking were promoted by conspiracies among Rome's less dependable allies.

Wars of rivalry between Roman candidates for top preferment shifted the power-balance out of civilian hands into the grip of the military. Step by step and stage by stage the Roman Empire became a warfare state maintained at home and abroad by the intervention of the military. Wars of rivalry at home in Rome were paralleled by wars of rivalry abroad.

During the Era of the Caesars Rome became the Eurasian-African honey pot. Wealth centered there. Authority was enthroned there. Power was generated there. Throughout the sphere of Roman political influence, of trade and travel, the central position of Rome was recognized and acknowledged. Not only knowledge and authority, but folklore mushroomed, with Rome as its central theme. Asian nomads, searching for grass, Asian potentates seeking new worlds to conquer and plunder, heard of Rome and finally went there. All roads led to Rome. Thousands of miles of stone roads were built as binding forces to hold the Empire together and defend it against all possible enemies. It was along these roads that the legions marched as they pushed back potential invaders and extended the frontiers. It was these same roads and bridges that made easy and sure the advance of the Asian hordes that would one day occupy and loot the home city. Roads and bridges enabled Roman authority to maintain and extend itself. The same roads and bridges provided a freeway that led into the citadel of Roman power.

Under the Caesars the Roman Empire achieved its greatest geographical extent and exercised its widest cultural influence. The city of Rome was the capital of the western world. There was one state, one law, one economy, one official language, one military authority.

Despite its apparent massiveness, Roman civilization was not a monolith. Rather it was a conglomerate, consisting of many parts held together by connecting social tissues which Rome and Italy alone supplied. In the first instance there was a division into provinces, colonies and newly acquired territories. The provinces, under their Roman appointed governors, enjoyed a large measure of economic and cultural self-determination within the Roman Empire. Beyond the Roman Empire lay territories and peoples associated with Rome by treaties, bound to Rome by trade and travel, in some cases paying tribute to Rome, but enjoying sufficient autonomy as peoples, nations and empires maneuvering for position and advantage, frequently allying themselves with non-Roman areas and occasionally conspiring to by-pass Roman authority and even to challenge Roman supremacy.

This political diversity along the defense perimeter of the Roman Empire existed in a chaos ranging from questioned authority to open defiance and military challenges to Rome and the threat of Romanization. Along this defense perimeter were stationed the legions that guarded the frontiers. Across it moved trade, travel, incursions, invasions and periodic reprisals as a result of which the more turbulent neighbors were brought within the sphere of Rome's influence or, in cases of extreme dissidence and resistance, were depopulated, colonized and added to the Roman conglomerate.

It goes without saying that the influence of Roman culture extended far beyond the Roman defense perimeter, reaching peoples, nations and empires to which Rome was little more than a name. The no-man's land between what-was and what-was-not Rome not only existed in a state of perpetual uncertainty, but provided a battle field for the smuggling, brigandage, the periodic border clashes, the migrations, incursions, invasions and punitive expeditions that are the characteristic features of every ill-defined political boundary.

Roman civilization under the Caesars was a centralized absolutism with a large measure of peripheral deviation and autonomy. It was directed by a central oligarchy and patrolled, defended and extended by a military force unified in theory but in practice grouped around the outstanding personalities and subjected to the vagaries and upsets always associated with power politics in the hands of military backed political despots.

Roman civilization, like all social organisms, came into being, moved toward maturity, reached a plateau of fulfillment from which it declined, broke up and eventually disappeared into the interregnum known as the Dark Ages. The entire episode occupied a dozen centuries. Its beginnings were unimpressively local. At the height of its wealth, power and cultural influence it bestrode the Eurasian-African triangle. Its decline and disappearance were no less spectacular than its meteoric rise to fame and fortune.

I would like to summarize the Roman experiment and some of its lessons by listing and commenting briefly on the forces that built up Roman civilization and those forces which resulted in its decline and dissolution.

Primary up-building forces in the Roman experiment:

  1. Establishing the city of Rome as a stable, defensible center
  of merchandising and commerce, transport, finance, population,
  wealth and power with a hinterland of associates
  and dependencies. As it turns out, the city of Rome has
  outlived both the Roman Empire and Roman Civilization.

  2. Steadfast dedication to Roman interests first, by all necessary
  means and despite costs which at the time seemed to
  be excessive.

  3. A recognition of that which is possible, especially in political
  relationships. The acceptance with good grace of a
  half-loaf where no more was available.

  4. Consistent, persistent aggression and expansion where such
  policies were beneficial to Rome, with little or no regard
  for their effects on Roman associates, allies, friends or
  enemies. Studied ruthlessness.

  5. Rewarding Rome's friends, allies and associates with economic,
  political and cultural advantages. Implacably punishing
  and where necessary exterminating Rome's persistent
  enemies.

  6. Wide tolerance of local cultural variation in matters that
  did not conflict with the major principles and practices of
  Rome's central authority.

  7. Taking defeats in their stride, paying the price, and recovering
  lost momentum. Again advancing along avenues
  which led to Roman success and aggrandizement.

  8. Indomitable persistence in the pursuit of major objectives.

  9. After the reigns of Julius Caesar and Augustus, concentrating
  power in a single person and his chosen brain trust,
  using that power to further aggrandize the Roman Empire
  and Roman Civilization.

This category is not complete. It aims to answer the basic question: In a situation where a thousand contestants entered the knock-down and drag-out struggle, first for survival and then for supremacy, what qualities or qualifications enabled Romans to win the laurel crown of victory?

Paralleling the up-building forces that established Roman supremacy were counter-forces which undermined and eventually destroyed the Roman Empire and Roman civilization:

  1. The growth of city life at the expense of rural existence.
  At the outset of its life cycle, Rome was essentially rural.
  At the end of the cycle Roman culture was turning its
  back upon ruralism and moving into a culture that was
  to be chiefly urban during an entire millennium. In that
  millennium Rome, her associates and dependencies, experimented
  with a culture that was essentially urban, but
  encircled, dependent and eventually replaced by a culture
  that was essentially rural.

  2. During the millennium between 600 B.C. and 500 A.D.
  the Romans and their associates succeeded in bringing
  large parts of Europe, Asia and Africa under their control,
  but the control was so rigid and temporary that tribalism
  and local nationalisms broke loose from the fetters of central
  authority and coercive integration, shattering the
  structure of Roman civilization and its structural core--the
  Roman Empire. Instead of resulting in closer cooperation,
  the strategy and tactics of the Roman builders and
  organizers led to contradictions, bitter feuds, civil strife,
  independence movements which combined with expansionist
  diplomacy and periodic wars to discourage, frustrate
  and eventually to eliminate peace, order and planned
  progress.

  2. The spread of chattel slavery had a profound effect upon
  the texture of Roman life. At the outset Roman family
  farms housed the bulk of the population. During the cycle
  of Roman civilization unnumbered millions of captives
  were seized in the course of military operations and reduced
  to slavery. By the end of the Roman cycle the
  work-load of agriculture, commerce, industry, mining,
  transport, and the domestic life of the well-to-do was
  carried by slaves. Basically, therefore, the Roman world
  was divided first into Romans and non-Romans and second
  into masters and slaves, with a third category which consisted
  of an immense bureaucracy (including the military),
  a professional and technological group and a heavy burden
  of persistent parasitism.

  4. Growth of the abyss that separated wealth and the
  wealthy from mass poverty in the cities and the countryside.
  The abyss was widened and deepened by the presence
  of slavery. More extensive and more frequent foreign
  conquests added to the volume of slave labor in a market
  already glutted and reduced the price of slaves. Against
  this super-abundant cheap slave labor, free labor could
  compete only by reducing its standard of living and thus
  deepening the abyss of poverty. At the other end of the
  social arc, the rich were able to surround themselves with
  multitudes of slaves who provided the energy needed to
  carry on the complex life of Roman civilization. As the
  Roman world expanded, the abyss widened, deepened
  and became all but impassable. It was from such lower
  depths that Spartacus and other leaders of rebellious slaves
  drew sufficient manpower to challenge and for a time
  even defeat the full military power of Rome.

  5. Built into the structure of Roman civilization was the
  potential of civil war. The contradictions of mass slavery
  and poverty side by side with boundless leisure and
  abundance was only one side of the picture. Each of the
  more distant provinces became a possible base from which
  ambitious governors or generals could wage wars of independent
  conquest at the expense of Roman authority. Each
  newly subjugated people, smarting under defeat and the
  heavy hand which Rome laid on its dissidents and opponents,
  became a potential center for disaffection, conspiracy
  and rebellion against Roman authority.

  6. Conflicts over power succession, in the provinces, and
  more significantly in the mother city, added another
  aspect to the many sided pressures. As there was no legal
  means of determining the succession, the end of each
  imperial reign offered the probability of military intervention.

  7. Deification of emperors, during the era of the Caesars,
  led to the denigration and degradation of the common
  man. The fact that the common men of Rome were more
  and more likely to be poor slaves furthered the process
  and deepened the abyss between the haves and have-nots.

  8. Among the forces of disintegration operating in Rome
  none was more potent and more decisive than the numerical
  growth of the military and the increasing probability
  that any one of the growing contradictions and conflicts
  would lead to intervention by the military. Roman emperors
  were dictators and their retention of authority
  was increasingly decided by the legions which were
  willing and able to fight for the perpetuation and extension
  of their authority.

  9. The extensive, complicated, elaborate structure of Roman
  civilization involved a persistent and implacable rise of
  overhead costs of food and raw materials, of production,
  of transportation, of the bureaucracy, including the military.
  The area of Roman civilization increased arithmetically.
  Overhead costs rose geometrically. They were
  expressed in an empty treasury, rising taxes, inflation,
  expropriation, the degradation of the currency.

  10. Side by side with the rise in overhead costs went the
  increase of parasitism among the rich and among the poor.
  Something-for-nothing was the order of the day. Speculation
  was rampant. Gambling was universal. Instead of
  living by production of goods and services, Romans let
  the slaves do their work and lived by their wits.

  11. From top to bottom of Roman society negative forces
  replaced positive forces. Self directed labor gave place to
  slavery; participation in productive activity yielded to
  parasitism; productivity was subordinated to destructivity;
  the spirit of independence was replaced by the acceptance
  of increasing arbitrary individual authority.

  12. Roman society constantly faced and consistently failed
  to solve the contradiction between centralism and local
  interests and local rights. This contradiction increased
  with increasing size, diversity and complexity.

  13. Psychological forces played a part in the breakdown and
  break-up of Roman civilization. People lost faith and hope.
  They became disillusioned and cynical. They forgot the
  common good and devoted themselves to the gratification
  of body hungers. They turned from proud service of
  fatherland to the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure's sake.
  Romans lost freshness and vigor. Creativeness had never
  been as highly regarded among the Romans as it was
  among the Greeks. Life was lived closer to the surface. It
  was confined more and more to the present. Growth in
  the volume of Roman life sapped its vitality so that there
  was less surplus for experiment and innovation as more
  and more of the social income was devoted to meeting
  overhead costs.

Moralists have insisted that the decline and dissolution of Roman civilization resulted from the abandonment of moral standards. Undoubtedly this was true. The upstanding womanhood and manhood of early Rome was replaced by a wealth-seeking, pleasure-loving, parasitically inclined population. But these features of Roman life under the empire and during the period of Roman decline were the outcome of political, economic and social forces that have characterized one civilization after another. Instead of insisting that Rome declined and fell because it was immoral, it would be far more accurate to insist that Rome declined and fell because the objectives which it sought, the means it employed and the civilized institutions which it developed contained within themselves oppositions and contradictions which led to decline and dissolution. Rome declined and fell because the ideas, institutions and practices upon which it depended--the ideas, institutions and practices of civilization--could lead to no other outcome.

The First Great Culture War [By Jamie Stantonian]

Tensions with conservatives had been building for decades, but the 60s were the real turning point. That was when middle and upper-class teenagers began rejecting the future set out by their parents to become doctors and lawyers in favour of the ideas and lifestyle of a subversive underground movement. Rejecting materialism, they set off to live in religious communes in the desert or up in the mountains, and when they returned years later, their heads were filled with big ideas about fairness, equality and a new vision for the world. Their parents thought their ideas were dumb and just wanted them to get a job.

Many did embark on careers, only ones completely at odds with the values of the older generation. Starting as lobbyists, consultants and advisers they increasingly came to hold real power and began to freeze out those who did not share their ideas. By the 90s, this youthful movement of outsiders had become grown-up insiders, holding positions in the city that commanded big salaries. Over time the cosmopolitan ruling class was completely consumed, and the movement set out to irreversibly change society — for the better, in their eyes — by enacting laws to eliminate old thinking and practices they deemed toxic and harmful. A largely urban movement, they saw the beliefs of those in the country as repulsive and backwards, a hostility that often flared into civil unrest, cultural vandalism and occasionally urban warfare. As time wore on their victory became total, and the traditions, values and beliefs of their parents were consigned to history. In a bitter twist, the world they build was not an equal one, but another type of steeply hierarchical power structure.

This was not the US Pacific Coast of the 1960s, but the Roman-occupied Mediterranean of the 360s, a time in which the cultural tide changed and the once-persecuted Christian subculture seised the reigns of the Roman Empire. What started with the faith of a single Emperor in the early fourth century came to consume the entire state bureaucracy from top to bottom by the fifth. More than this, these events altered the cosmological and social dynamics of the West and set in motion a cultural dynamo that was to characterise its evolution down to the present day. This is the story of how it happened.

Pax Romana

The sacred fire of Vesta had burned for almost a thousand years; from a time when Rome was an obscure village on the Tiber, to its zenith as the capital of a superpower in the third century. It was believed that if the fire was ever was ever extinguished, the arcane rituals botched, or the virginal purity of its priestesses ever compromised, it would spell disaster for the city and the state. It was also the public manifestation of the most numinous form of worship in the ancient Roman world; the family. For at the heart of every home sat a flame that was the heart of their own ancestral cult, a deeply private form of worship which Vesta drew into the public gaze with her annual public festivals. To the heads of each Roman household it was thought if the family flame ever perished, so would the family itself, and as such its maintenance was the central focus of their activities and ambitions, and had been — as far as they were concerned — since the dawn of time.

How long these fires were actually nurtured will forever be unknown. Today, from the perspective of the far future of ancient Rome, we think that our earliest prehuman ancestors carried around flames captured from bushfires or lightning strikes in bundles of moss long before we could even create it; perhaps half a million years ago. If these carefully tended fires were ever to be extinguished then the group also lost the ability to cook food or create campfires, and there was a very real chance the family would perish in a very literal sense. Even if it is unlikely that these elite families had tended exact same fire since prehistory, they nurtured sacred ideas perhaps older than humanity itself. But soon, these fires would be extinguished forever.

Vesta was just one cult in the colourful tapestry of deities in polytheistic Rome whose existences were woven into the lives of its inhabitants in rolling landscapes of shrines, groves and temples. Historian Edward G.Watts speaks of the;

“Vast sacred infrastructure that had been built up over the past three millennia. The size, age, and pervasiveness of this infrastructure likely would have made it difficult for anyone to appreciate fully all of the ways in which traditional religious practice influences the rhythms of public, domestic and family life.”

Some of the Roman Gods had Etruscan origin, such as Janus, the god of transitions, Minerva, goddess of handicrafts, and Mars, the god of war. Some shared deep cultural genealogy with the Greek deities. Vulcan, the god of technology seemingly had the same cultural roots as his Greek counterpart, Hephaestus. Mercury, the god of commerce shared origins with his Greek equivalent Hermes, and so on. Some gods faded into obscurity as the elites drifted from their agricultural roots, such as Vervactor, god of “turning over uncultivated land” and “Imporcitor”, god of “ploughing with wide furrows”. Later in the Republican period, some represented more abstract concepts or qualities, such as the goddess “Victory” and Elpis, goddess of “Hope”.

The interior of the Temple of    Vesta

As the Republic became an Empire and was exposed through conquest to new cultures across Europe, North Africa and Mesopotamia, new sects were folded — mostly peacefully — into the Roman pantheon. This was often achieved by retconning their own overarching mythic system to present new additions as revivals of lost traditions. At times of social anxiety, there were spasms of persecution and scapegoating, notably of the transgressive, foreign “youth-culture” cult of Dionysius during the Punic War. Overall though, the Roman Empire was tolerant of different sects, proud, even, of the rich tapestry of beliefs woven over the 6.5 million square kilometres of Pax Romana where — it was presumed — local cultures could thrive in the absence of warlords and banditry. The price the ruled paid for this — other than taxes — was deference to the Roman way of life and its paideia; the systems of law and education that they thought alone could save humanity from brutalism and savagery.

But things are never simple. And Rome’s very success in maintaining peace within its borders came to undermine this key selling point of stability. Because for many young people growing up in the Empire peace meant escape from the shackles of rural life and the weight of family expectations. This mobility from the provinces to the city led to a growing cosmopolitan class who were thrown around the empire by chance, adventure and fate, and whose native culture gradually faded into memory. Classicist Peter Brown writes that it meant;

“wider horizons and unprecedented opportunities for travel; it meant the erosion of local differences through trade and emigration, and the weakening of ancient barriers before new wealth and new criteria of status. Imperceptibly, the Roman empire dissolved in the lower classes that sense of tradition and local loyalties on which the upper class depended.”

Rome didn’t just upset traditionalist parents whose children took to backpacking or fame-seeking in the cities, it was resented in much more explicit form as naked imperial domination. Having been subject to rule by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks for centuries, and recognising only their own god, Judean traditionalists were perennially rebellious. During the period of Greek dominance in 160 BCE there was a guerrilla war against the Hellenes triggered by a refusal to worship their gods. The “Maccabean revolt” was a success, resulting in compromise with the authorities, but even this did not satisfy the most pious of orthodox Jews who saw the victorious Hasmonean dynasty as sellouts. Seemingly traumatised by the eight centuries of oppression and the political chaos they saw around them they believed that the world itself was about to end. And that from this cataclysm their God would destroy their enemies and established a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth; an eternal theocracy. This community, the Essenes, practiced an austere form of religious communism of which the historian Josephus later wrote highly;

“Riches they despise, and their community of goods is truly admirable; you will not find one among them distinguished by greater opulence than another. They have a law that new members on admission to the sect shall confiscate their property to the order, with the result that you will nowhere see either abject poverty or inordinate wealth; the individual’s possessions join the common stock.”

While moderately successful for a time — reaching numbers of about 4000 — being all-male presented certain difficulties when it came to propagating itself, especially when the end-times stubbornly failed to materialise. This resulted in a tense relationship to women, and to keep their community alive they adopted orphan boys and indulged in sexual liaisons with women only if absolutely necessary as their “wantoness” was seen as a corrupting force. The Essenes may have become just another obscure reclusive sect in the cosmopolitan fabric of Rome had their central beliefs not been shared by a growing number of others in the region. This revelation (in Greek, apocalypsis) eventually came to be a widespread belief in the sects of the Near East and North Africa. Although it is not known for certain, it has been plausibly argued that John the Baptist was an Essene, for he shared a substantial number of their beliefs, including those the imminent end times. So too did his disciple, Jesus. Historian Bart Ehrman writes that;

“The earliest sources that we have consistently ascribe an apocalyptic message to Jesus… It appears that when the end never did arrive, Christians had to take stock of the fact that Jesus said it would and changed his message accordingly. You can hardly blame them.”

In short, the region of Judea was aglow with this apocalyptic frenzy and is perhaps something we moderns can recognise from more recent episodes of mass hysteria, such as Y2K and 2012. However in the classical world, the notion that the world could “end” for all eternity was revolutionary. And it was to go from obscure theological detail of Near Eastern cults to an idea that would come to channel the intellectual evolution of the West for the next two thousand years.

A rupture in    time

In the cosmologies of archaic societies, time was not thought to only run in one direction. Rituals that invoked stories of the dawn of time were thought to literally reenact these events to draw on their sacred energy. It was thought by narrating the mythical origins of the cosmos all the way down to a place or an animal, it was possible to attain power over it. And while this was true for archaic communities in a mythic sense, it was also true in a practical one. Because while the stories were fantastical they were also the containers of very much practical information about how to find and exploit resources and thus survive in a given environment.

While the time of sacred origins was invoked to “remake” the world in archaic cultures, notions the “end” of the world were often absent, perhaps because notions of time itself were still vague. Later civilisations; Mesopotamia, India China, and the classical world all retained sacred creation myths, with the added innovation that time was cyclical; that a vanished golden age would come again after a great catastrophe; a cosmological innovation that emerged seemingly in parallel with the invention of the agricultural information technology of the calendar. Influenced by this, the cosmos was seen to repeat over and over again, for eternity. For the Aztecs, it was the concept of “Suns” that would end variously by fire or flood only to give birth to the world anew. In India it was “Yugas” of immense length, that ended in the cosmic dance of Shiva who would destroy the universe, only for it to be reborn. These disasters would be inflexion points; both the beginning and the end of the world — a cataclysm that would give rise to a new Golden Age that would decay as the cycle continued again. Christianity represented a rupture with this concept of time; there would still be a catastrophe at the end of the world, but now the new world that emerged at the end would continue for all eternity. As Mircea Eliade describes in Myth and Reality;

“The end of the world will occur only once, just as the cosmogony occurred only once. The cosmos that will appear after the catastrophe will be the same cosmos God created at the beginning of Time, but purified, regenerated, restored to its original glory. This Earthly Paradise will not be destroyed again, will have no end. Time is no longer the circular Time of the Eternal Return; it has become a linear and irreversible Time. Nor is this all: the eschatology also represents the triumph of a Sacred History. For the End of the World will reveal the religions value of human acts, and men will be judged on their acts.”

If Jesus were just one of a plethora of would-be Jewish apocalyptic preachers in ancient Juedea, what explains the appeal of his message in the rest of the Roman Empire? Recall the centrality of the ancestral alters tended by Roman families that were the centre of their spiritual world. By the Imperial period in the first and second centuries, this was largely the preserve of the Roman elites. Many of the lower classes did not have them, neither did slaves or their freeman descendants, or for that matter many of its conquered peoples whose cultural traditions were being slowly eroded by the imperial system. The new mobile cosmopolitan class of merchants and career-seekers too felt a growing spiritual vacuum as their roots gradually withered and their identities themselves became more and more of a phantom.

The new gospels as recounted by Paul were a radical departure from both the family cults and the of the worship pagan gods, including the cult of the Emperor. Previously it was assumed inequality was inevitable and natural; something that humans just had to live with and work around. With Christianity came class and gender agnostic moral equality and a melting away of caste and ethnic distinctions; “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” At the same time, it opened the door to individual relationships with the divine that bypassed the need for any hierarchy or family bonds and placed emphasis on the will of the individual and their deeds. For a generation adrift and lost, either through agency or economics, Christianity offered a new type of fraternity and a new vision of eternity. Historian Larry Siedentop writes that;

“Now, through the story of Jesus, individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things, into the experience grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending death. The individual replaced the family as the focus of immortality.”

Rejecting hierarchy, the appeal of Early Christianity was of extreme equality derived from communistic sects like the Essenes, although for the time stripped of its more misogynistic elements. Unlike the priestesses of Vesta who were chosen randomly to serve for 30 year periods by drawing lots (and faced being buried alive if they ever took a lover), women from any strata of society could become Christian by their own free will and to do so was seen as a form of empowerment. This is supported by the first historical reference to Christianity in the Roman record, which was a mail exchange between Emperor Trajan and Pliny the Younger, who had been tasked with cleaning up the province of Pontus. In Pliny’s correspondence, he casually refers to the torture of two Christians, slave women “who they call deaconesses”. He concluded that it was “nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths.” What exactly Pliny mean by “extravagant lengths?”

Descended from these apocalyptic, communistic cults, the early Christians were radical in their rejection of just about anything that did not fit into their vision of the world. What most wound-up the Romans was a contempt for the law and a refusal to acknowledge their gods and offer sacrifices to them. What’s so difficult? The Romans fumed. Such eccentricities made Christianity seem alien even by the standards of classical cults, so much so that they were referred to as “atheists”. It seemed perverse the way they turned poverty into a virtue and vilified wealth. The supposed pacifism of the Christians and their refusal of military service was a cause of much annoyance, as was their obstinate desire to martyr themselves at all costs.

Martyrdom was an outcome of the fetishisation of Christ’s suffering and led to a knack of escalating every brush with the law into a drama that may end in their torture or death. Some magistrates were frustrated during trials in which the defendant would answer every question with the phrase “I am a Christian” thus leading courtroom deliberations down a one-way path. What was most infuriating to the Romans was the explosion in popularity of this weird subculture with its “suicide by cop” mentality. Rumours abound. Why did they call each other “brother” and “sister” while holding hands? Were they incestuous? There were even rumours swirling around that they worshipped a crucified donkey.

The more educated of the old-guard knew this wasn’t so, but considered their singe-minded and inflexible monotheism as crude and unsophisticated. Contrary to today’s caricatures of polytheism, they did have a notion of a “One God” but considered it too immense a concept to be captured by any one deity. Only through living in the full tapestry of its multiple incarnations could one hope to be immersed in this expansive oneness. To them, Christian dogma was just stubborn and petulant. Roman intellectual Celsus had contempt for their credulous tendency to think and talk in slogans, saying they;

“Do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe, and use such expressions as “Do not ask questions; just believe”, and “Thy faith will save thee”.”

Celsus saw this habit to blindly “listen and believe” to be an existential threat to Rome; an attitude of unthinkingly accepting dogma which he put down to a lack of education. In about 180 CE he wrote a new book called The True Word, which was a muscular and humorous treatise seemingly designed to outrage them and the first systematic attempt to dismantle Christian thinking. Amongst other things, he accused The Virgin Mary of having been knocked up by a Roman soldier and mocked them for having “culturally appropriated” their holy books from the Jews. As for the eschatological idea of Judgement Day, he wrote that it was so stupid that “a drunken old woman would have been ashamed to sing…it to lull a little child to sleep”. Apparently, though, Celsus and the Roman elite were missing something, for the religion continued to grow year-on-year and in both numbers and influence.

Religion of the    network

While the desire for martyrdom bewildered many a Roman magistrate, from a Christian perspective it was a new, egalitarian form of heroism. While the myths of the Romans and the Greeks were of remote, semi-divine aristocrats, Christian heroism was open for anyone to participate in, no matter how humble a background. In later centuries, the stories of the “Saints” would act as both role-models and adventure stories, much as the Greco-Roman canon did. Martyrdom offered a pathway for anyone to achieve immortality with the right amount of moral fortitude. Gender, social status, or even species was no impediment (Saint Guinefort was a dog). Sidenhop says tales of the Saints;

“Combined elements from stories of Wild West, crime novels and science fiction with morality tales… they democratised the ancient cult of the hero… It did not depend on birthright, gender, bodily strength or mere cunning.”

Besides offering this equitable fast-track to immortality, the success of the Christians also relied on an innovation of information technology; the Coptic Alphabet. It was a multicultural mashup of the Egyptian demotic script, which was syllabic and required too much training for the everyday person, and the Greek alphabet, which was easy to learn but otherwise lacked important phonemes used by Egyptians. The fusion of the two, however, made an easy to learn alphabet that matched the spoken dialects of North Africa, where the Early Church thrived. Its use helped forge a collective identity and sense of solidarity amongst poor and downtrodden elements of society.

But by the second and third centuries Christianity was no longer the exclusive religion of slaves and servants. The floating class of mobile cosmopolitans were easy converts to the growing faith, as the ephemeral and impersonal nature of cities set their spiritual compasses spinning and yearning for a new identity. Almost unknowingly, Christianity became the religion of the network, spreading through the dendrites of the Cursus publicus and the stories of travelling merchants and evangelists. And over time, from this network emerged a hierarchy.

In both cities and rural backwaters from Gaul to Pontus, a newly invented caste of Christians called “Bishops” sprung up in around the middle third century and soon became part of the social fabric of the city; tying together both local and distant communities in a way the Roman state itself struggled to do. This power was maintained through activism; on a city level, Christians became a kind of emergency service, able to orchestrate food distribution and burials during plagues and natural disasters. Bishops became in effect lobbyists, who in alliance with communities of monks, wielded considerable social and political influence on a local and state level. It was an emergent, parallel power structure described by historian Hendrik Willem van Loon as a “supertheocracy”; the pragmatic outcome of the failures of the end-times to arrive.

“As soon as it became apparent that the end of the world was not at hand, that the death of Jesus was not to be followed immediately by the Last Judgement, and that Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of tears for a good long time, the need was felt for a more or less definite form of government.”

As the emergent Church gained more power and influence, so was the vilification of wealth gradually downgraded. In the late second century, Clement of Alexandria argued The Rich Man’s Salvation that, actually, wealth can be used for good or ill and was not in fact evil in and of itself. As it slowly gained material power, the socialistic origins of the faith were increasingly mythologised as something that existed amongst early Christian communities, and — importantly — ideals of extreme equality were bundled into the ambiguous “Kingdom of Heaven” in the days beyond the Second Coming. Inequality and hierarchy could be endured in the here-and-now if the payoff was just around the corner.

As Christianity spread, it coincided with a growing unease amongst devout followers of the old religion that the all-important act of sacrifice — so important to keep the gods on-side — was in decline. This was used to explain some of the poor luck that the Empire had been having around the same time. Similar anxieties gripped the regions of Greece who thought the ritual of their sacred groves and oracles — thought to have been conducted since the dawn of time — were accumulating errors through neglect, leading to natural disasters.

Festival of Pales by Joseph-Benoît Suvée, depicting the Roman ritual of animal sacrifice

In the year 250 CE, the Emperor Decius demanded that citizens across the Empire perform a sacrifice to the cult of the Emperor as a sign of loyalty. The Christians refused, which was perceived as a form of sedition and as a result mobs took to the streets to persecute them. Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria went into hiding in the Libyan desert and sent out messages in the Coptic script to help consolidate and organise Christian resistance, much as the Ayatollah Khomeini would do with cassette tapes in Iran over a thousand years later.

Rome’s run of bad luck continued. A decade after the Decian persecution Valerian suffered an unfortunate historical first by becoming the first Emperor to be taken prisoner by the Persians after losing to them at the Battle of Edessa. It was said his fate was to have been enslaved and used as a human footstool before being killed and stuffed as a trophy. Baring in mind that the Romans considered the Emperor divine, these did not indicate the gods were particularly amused. By the end of the third century, a new strongman, Diocletian took the reins of the Empire in an effort to turn things around, which he did militarily in a successful campaign against the Perians which resulted in him sacking their capital Ctesiphon.

After this triumph, he gathered rounds priests of the old gods — consultants basically — with the hope of forecasting the future of his reign. Their trusted predictive technology, the haruspex, failed to yield any meaningful predictions and blame was put on the presence of Christians in the royal court. This had a knock-on effect of Diocletian demanding sacrifices be made by everyone in the army, which in practical terms meant an early retirement for Christians, followed by all those in the state bureaucracy. Surrounded by anti-Christian hardliners, such as his co-Emperor Galerius, he claimed that it was “the greatest crime to undo what has been fixed and established by antiquity”. After consulting the oracle at Delphi in 302, he decided to launch a general persecution of Christians, which resulted in Churches being destroyed and their scriptures burned. Galerius pushed for them to be burned alive, and although Diocletian forbade this, fiery death did come to some unfortunate Bishops in the East. One member of the royal household suspected of treason, Gorgonius, was slowly boiled alive. For those seeking identity in oppression and glory in martyrdom, this was their hour.

Diocletian’s edicts were enforced unevenly across the Empire but resulted in the deaths of around three thousand people. This bloody persecution, however, was to be the last. For within a few decades, a seismic shift would sharply change imperial religious policy; and a revolution would be launched against the old gods themselves.

The Battle of Milvian Bridge by Giulio Romano    (1524)

Supertheocracy

The Great Persecution initiated by Diocletian ended in 311. The following year, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity after seeing a glowing cross in the sky during the Battle of Milvian Bridge. By 324 he became the first Christian Emperor of a united Roman Empire. This changed everything.

Less than a tenth of the inhabitants of Rome were, in fact, Christian at that time, which meant there were over fifty million “pagans” practising what Constantine considered “the pollutions of idolatry”. Constantine saw at his religious duty to change this and enacted laws, mostly ignored at first, that forbade animal sacrifice in pagan temples, and others to ensure that “no one should erect images, or practice divination and other false and foolish arts, or offer surface in any way”. He said that the “madness of polytheism” was to be banished, and that “pretty nearly all of mankind would henceforth attach themselves to the service of God”. This, as can be imagined, shocked the old-guard.

One temple of Aphrodite — a place of sacred prostitution — was claimed to be coincidentally sitting on the spot where Christ was to be resurrected, so it was torn down and replaced with a Church. Deemed “sanctuaries of falsehood”, Eusebius claimed that Constantine began to strip the pagan temples of their statues and precious items to fund the construction of his new imperial capital, Constantinople. At the same time as the Church was given tax-free status.

His successors, the two emperors Constans and Constantius, were even more enthusiastic about suppression of the old gods. Books that criticised Christianity were banned, including the works of Celsus, almost all of which are now lost. Much of the work of the philosopher Democritis — who pioneered the theory of atomism — were also rooted out and destroyed. In 356AD, Constantius introduced the death penalty for animal sacrifice or the worship of images. While again the laws were largely ignored, the cultural momentum was gravely at odds with the old religion, which was perceived by Christian fundamentalists as malevolent sorcery. In 364 AD the two emperors Valentinian and Valens introduced laws outlawing magic rituals intended to bring harm to others; “No person during that night time should try to celebrate either wicked prayers of magic preparations or destructive sacrifices”. What was “wicked” was open to interpretation and in practical terms it would have resulted in a crackdown on pagan nighttime rituals, essentially killing them. Eventually Valentinian was talked out of imposing the law, for fear of the social unrest it would cause.

“Making it” in the preceding centuries was often down to family ties and nepotism, and the upper Senatorial class were often of Italian origin and from old and wealthy families. Reforms in the fourth century changed this, and the state began to look for new blood from across the provinces. This new system rewarded Christians; but not blindly. It included a safety mechanism in which competence was also considered an important factor (One could not be embarrassed for promoting a “brother” or “sister” that was completely hopeless at their jobs). While this Christian form of nepotism had a meritocratic streak, it still had the had the effect of gradually isolating and freezing out non-Christians from the imperial bureaucracy. Believers in the old gods that did retain their positions did not seem too concerned, or were indifferent, to the cultural changes happening around them.

The cultural tide was turning, and a key decade was the 360s with the publication of a bestseller by Athanasius of Alexandria called The Life of Saint Anthony. The book recounts an archetypical religious story of a young man in the mid-third century who flees the wealthy trappings of his Egyptian landowner family to pursue spiritual truth. Athanasius wrote that a preacher inspired the teen with the words of Jesus in Matthew 19:21.

“Jesus told him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me”.

So he did exactly that. What follows was a montage scene of Anthony learning under a series of the famous Christian sages before spending 15 years living in a tomb in silent contemplation. Ultimately he founds a communistic monastery near the Red Sea where his followers live lives of austere piety. It was said that he was so ashamed of his earthly body that he blushed whenever he had to eat, but whatever he was doing seemed to aid his longevity, as he lived to the methuselan age of 105 — quite a feat for the fourth century. The Life of Saint Anthony though was more than just a biography; it was the first book to describe Christian mystical thinking in terms that resonated with Roman elites and stood on equal footing with the classical canon. It was, in other words, a rival paideia. The impact of the book was remarkable. As Edward J Watts summarises;

The first three chapters of the Life of Anthony offer an idealised blueprint for how a member of the local elite could extricate himself from personal relationships, financial obligations, and social aspirations that defined mid-fourth century elite life.

The Temptations of Saint Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck (1650)

The story of Saint Anthony inspired a generation of the young Roman elites to evade the dreary 9–5 of imperial drudgery mapped out by their parents; training to be doctors, teachers, lawyers, bureaucrats and so on. Instead, they dropped out of school to live a life of religious simplicity as monks in remote communes. In this sense, the 360s in the Roman Empire was something like the 1960s in the U.S. West Coast. This, naturally, led to estrangement parents and their children, severing as it did the primordial bonds of family that they presumed immortal. It also led to practical problems of household economics akin to a death in the family. Despite the door-slamming teenage dramas must have sprung from this tension, this pious new generation set up support networks for one another to deal with these traumatic episodes and ease their conversion into the new faith. It is not without a certain sense of irony that the roots of Christianity were in the destruction of the family.

Some of the monasteries such as that of Shenoute in Egypt became famous for its iron discipline. When entering the complex, initiates handed over all their worldly possessions so that the could achieve complete equality within its walls. This community grew to number in the thousands; all synchronised to eat, sleep and pray simultaneously. The monastery of Pachominis was similarly enormous, monks numbered seven thousand by the late fourth century. Throughout the third century, new monasteries sprung up across the Roman world, in deserts, mountains and the edges of cities. From Antioch and Tur Abdin in southern Turkey, to the mountains around Milan and Carthage.

One can understand the concern of affluent parents whose children fled to live lives of religious poverty and sign over their inheritance to some monks in the mountains instead of pursuing lucrative and influential careers. However, “love of the poor” was not necessarily a dead-end job. By the 370s, a revolving door policy between communes and bishoprics meant kids who spent their 20s in religious piety could gain lucrative posts as Bishops, whose salaries were swollen from imperial grants, private donations, charitable contributions and growing estates. Arts historian Catherine Nixey writes that “Bishops were paid five times as much as professors, six times as much as doctors — as much even as a local governor.” Historian Peter Brown describes how their rhetoric of protecting the oppressed gained them growing power and influence.

“The theme of ‘love of the poor’ exercised a gravitation pull quite disproportionate to the actual workings of Christian Charity in the fourth century… in the name of a religion that claimed to challenge the values of the elite, upper-class Christians gained control of the lower-classes of the cities.”

Coming from well-connected families, Bishops knew the workings of the system and could speak its jargon. And they began to make their influence felt. In his book, The City of God Against the Pagans Saint Augustine wrote that pagans were “teachers of depravity, delighting in obscenity.” He lays out his mission statement thus;

“All superstition of pagans and heathens should be annihilated is what God wants, God commands, God proclaims!”

Toxic paganism

While believers in the old gods were deeply frustrated at the Christian’s obstinate refusal to acknowledge the traditional faith, Christians viewed paganism with a much more visceral revulsion. One former monk turned Bishop, Basil of Caesarea, developed a whole philosophy of censorship in regards to classical literature, rooted in the theory of poisonous ideas. Writing of the Roman canon, he said that “just as in culling roses we avoid the thorns, from such writings as these we will gather everything useful, and guard against the noxious.” Whole works were edited to ensure the soul of the reader was not damaged by the problematic themes or topics of classical literature. This even included the irreverent Roman comedies that poked fun at the old gods.

The language used by the Christians to describe their ideological enemies is of particular interests. Romans would never have described themselves as “pagan”; this was a term derived from “Pagani”, which just meant “country people” and its sudden usage to describe believers in the old god represents an inversion of the elitism of Celsus. It was also around the time that the word “heretic” — which meant “the ability to choose (a sect)” — first starts to be used as a pejorative by the Supertheocracy. In fact, a whole new language of hygiene revolved around this revulsion of the old gods. Nixey writes that;

”A newly violent vocabulary of disgust started to be applied to all other religions and anything to do with them — which meant almost everything in Roman life. Religion ran through the Roman world like lines through marble… The worship of the old gods began to be represented as a terrifying pollution and, like a miasma in Greek tragedy, one that might drag you to catastrophe.”

In place of the preoccupation with insufficient sacrifice as being the cause of Rome’s difficulties, the supertheocracy sought to cleanse the Empire of pagan elements in order to achieve the favour of God. In 380 the three Emperors; Gratian, and Valentinian II of the West and Theodosius on the East, made the Nicene Christian theological school the official religion of the empire and expected the tens of millions of pagan Romans to follow suit. Unfortunately, this alone did not win the favour of the Almighty, as Theodosius suffered humiliating defeats against the Goths after they invaded and settled in Roman territory. Compensating for these failures, he pivoted, and decided to wage another kind of battle; a culture war.

He surrounded himself with Christian hardliners and appointed former monk Gregory of Nazianzus to be Bishop of Constantinople. The former ascetic encouraged him on to “legislate piety” and praised Theodosius on his “written laws of persuasion”. Theodosius added muscle to long-ignored laws that had functionally outlawed paganism and introduced new laws that expanded restrictions on sacrifice, diplomatically stating that temples were not to be closed and should be appreciated for their artistic merits, but neither should they be used as places of worship and sacrifice, effectively shutting them down.

In 391, he went after pagans in the legal profession, enacting new laws that fined judges who were “devoted to profane rites and entered a temple” as well as fines for colleagues who did not report them. Nowhere was off limits. He banned ceremonies at the Olympic Games which honoured the old gods, leading to their eventual demise and outlawed common pagan practices like tree binding. Making offerings to the old gods inside your own home was also made illegal.

John Chrysostom, one of the generation of Christians who converted against the wishes of their pagan parents, became the Archbishop of Constantinople in the late fourth century. He argued that happiness was to be found “in God alone” and began to lecture against the perils of banter.

“Laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more foul. Often from words and laughter proceeds railing and insult; and from railing and insult, blows and wounds; and from blows and wounds, slaughter and murder…. avoid not merely foul words and foul deeds… but unseasonable laughter itself — and the very language of raillery — since these things have proved the root of subsequent evils.”

In the piety preached by Chrysostom we see echoes of the Essene’s strained and misogynistic relationship with women, teaching that they should be avoided if possible as they were the cause of the unclean thoughts of men. By dressing in a manner men found seductive; “You have made another sin in his heart, how can you be innocent?” before comparing their beauty to poison which “murder[s] not the body but the soul”. A long way, then, from the empowerment of Deaconesses.

Cultural revolution

In the Western Empire, Gratian played along and cut funding for the temples of the old gods. Perhaps the most symbolic of Gratian’s enforcement of the Theodosian Code was to close the Temple of Vesta and extinguished the fire that was said to have burned since Rome was founded a thousand years before. The statue of the goddess Victory which had sat in the Senate chamber since the time of Augustus had been the centre of a political dispute for decades. Christian Senators, offended by its demonic presence stench of the incense, demanded that it be removed. It became a political football, removed, restored, and with Gratian ultimately removed permanently. Pleading in vain for toleration, the statesman Quintus Aurelius Symmachus argued for upholding the pluralist traditions of Rome, which offered multiple pathways to seeking truth;

“We ask, then, for peace for the gods of our fathers and of our country. It is just that all worship should be considered as one. We look on the same stars, the sky is common, the same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road; but this discussion is rather for persons at ease, we offer now prayers, not conflict.”

Alarmed by these developments, Symmachus travelled to Milan to get an audience with Gratian, but his meeting was denied by people who he describes as inprobi (wicked men). Whether this was a group of monks of shadowy court advisers, we will never know. Symmachus continued in vain to fight against the laws, but was up against newly powerful Bishops like Aurelius Ambrosius (Later Saint Ambrose), who was to whisper “Emperors serve god in the same way Romans serve the emperor”, thus a change of policy on the pagan temples was out of the question. Themistius, an adviser to Theodosius, rationalised this focus on cultural matters by arguing that “order is manifestly stronger than disorder, system than chaos… these are the weapons with which men will conquer other men”. With order at the back of his mind, The Theodosian Code both outlawed the old gods but stopped short of calling for the destruction of the temples.

“Although all superstitions must be completely eradicated, nevertheless, it is Our will that the buildings of the temples situated outside the walls shall remain untouched and uninjured“’”

Many temples were already in a decrepit state after funding for them had been pulled, or wealthy donors had converted to Christianity. Some had already fallen into ruin, or were stripped of religious icons and repurposed as secular buildings, so perhaps Theodosius was playing the long game. In practice though, this did not always pan out. Sectarian violence against pagan places of worship did occur, undertaken not by the state but by the supertheocracy; mobs of monks whipped into pious frenzy by the Bishops. The Praetorian Prefect Cynegius went on a grand tour of Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt with a mob of monks and Bishops in tow, and systematically vandalised pagan religious sites including the sacred grove to Daphne outside Antioch and a famous temple to Zeus in Syria. Jews, too, were subject to persecution and had their synagogues burned down.

Mosaic of Aphrodite, vandalised by Christians

The writer Libanius describes these monks as cynical and self-serving    , saying that “after demolishing one they scurry to another, and to a third, and trophy is piled on trophy”. He talks of a “black robed tribe, who eat more than elephants… [that] hasten to attack temples with sticks and stones and bars of iron, and in some cases, disdaining these, with hands and feet. Then utter desolation follows.” That it is “nothing less than war in peace time waged against the peasantry.” Temples, sometimes containing books and knowledge stowed away for safekeeping, were raided by mobs and their contents destroyed. In Egypt, a hotbed of Christian fundamentalism, a 6 temples were destroyed, including one of the most spectacular buildings of antiquity.

The ancient and magnificent Temple of Serapis in Alexandria had been described as “one of the most unique and uncommon sights in the world. For nowhere else on earth can one find such a building.” It had become the last pagan temple in the predominantly Christian city, and in 391 religious riots broke out after rumours spread that they had been kidnapping and torturing Christians. Bishop Theophilus led a raid on the temple, and it was looted, its statues destroyed, its priests and followers brutalised. Its entire contents “burned to ashes before the eyes of the Alexandria which had worshipped him”. The head of Serapis’ statue was then dragged through the streets in triumph, to the horror of the remaining pagans. A prominent landmark since the time of the Ptolemies, the emotional shock to the city would be like the sudden destruction of St Paul’s Cathedral today, or the collapse of the Twin Towers. Though nominally against such disruption, The Emperor Theodosius, congratulated the monks for taking the law into their own hands. A few decades later the people of Alexandria they did so again and committed one of the most notorious crimes of the early Christians when Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria was stripped naked and stoned to death with roof tiles.

The activities of one particular forth century community of monks called the Circumcellions were particularly nasty. A communistic Christian suicide cult, they wore all-black robes and referred to themselves as the “fighters for Christ”. They talked the big talk about equality and freeing slaves, but on a practical level they conducted home invasions, set fire to rival churches and people’s houses (and themselves) and randomly beat people up in the street    . All of this in the hope they would provoke retaliation in which they would be “martyred”. One innovation was particularly cruel, and too much for the more educated, upper-class Christians like St Augustine, who described it as a “new and unspeakable kind of violence, a piece of cruelty deserving of the Devil Himself” These were acid attacks designed to blind pagan priests or anyone they considered enemies of the faith. Too extreme to be tolerated, they were eventually outlawed.

Libanius and others of the old guard used to use their influence within the imperial system to blunt the excesses of the Christian legislation. But as he approached his dotage, the tactics became less and less effective, and he would even lament that he was being pushed out of his day job of public speaking and delivering lectures, while his former student, Christian hardliner John Chrysostom, continued to enjoy power and influence. As Libanius and his friends passed into memory, the new generation of Bishop Theophilus, who laid waste to Serapis, Saint Martin and Benedict of Nursia, were committed to the ideological extinction of his way of life, thinking themselves engaged in a cosmic battle against the forces of evil.

Seizing the means of reproduction

In the era of the old gods, the world was animated by a large cast of natural and conceptual roles that represented a facet of the unknowable and alien “One God”. Daimones were thought to be at best neutral forces, like spirit guides, or ghosts. As Christians gained influence, these were one-by-one reinterpreted as evil demonic spirits animating and inhabiting every corner of the natural world, even your own mind. “Demons” were blamed for all woes, placing ideas, usually infernal notions about money, food or sex, in the minds of men. For the monk or pious believer harangued by such thoughtcrimes, there was the book Talking Back by Evagrius of Pontus, which contained no less than 498 slogans used to banish troublesome ideas from the conscious mind. Things like fancying a glass of wine, or having erotic thoughts about a young woman. If they found the idea of living in self-imposed poverty not a lot of fun, they could console themselves with Psalms 22:1 “The Lord shepherds me, and I will lack nothing”. If they are having sinful notions about treating themselves to a nice plate of vegetables, they could chant to themselves Romans 14:2; “The weak eat vegetables“. And so forth.

There was heated discussion about the lengths to which individual will could triumph over earthly passions, like weakness for sexual procreation and vegetables. Curiously, it came to resemble quarrels of the current era regarding social constructionism vs innate human qualities. This can an be traced to theological disputes in the early fifth century between the Tunisian Saint Augustine and the British theologian Pelagius. St Augustine dwelled on our fallen nature, our inner struggles and torments within us as we tried to live up to our own morals. In his view, human nature made the perfect society impossible. Pelagius, on the other hand, thought complete obedience to the will of God was attainable; “Since perfection is possible for man, it is obligatory.” Pelagius’ frustration at Christian Rome’s inability to live up to its ideals coincided with the gradual erosion of the Western Roman Empire to the barbarians and Rome’s sacking by Alaric the Goth in 410AD (an event that in fact empowered Bishops in the Western Empire who filled the power vacuum). He insisted that a new type of society could be built if we could just control ourselves. But what did this society look like on the ground? Pelagius’ disciples were so notorious for street violence that he was eventually excommunicated. Augustine won this battle of ideas, but the notion of human perfectibility was to appear again in different guises down through the ages.

What was agreed upon is that there would be no tolerance for ideas that offended Christians. When the illiterate and book-hating Emperor Justinian came to power in 527 CE, he set out to extinguish the remnants of the Athenian schools of philosophy forever. And then he went one further and looked to finally close the last sanctuary of the art of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, bringing to an end a tradition over three thousand years old. As detailed by van Loon;

“By order of an illiterate farm-hand known as His Imperial Majesty, the temple and the adjoining school were declared state property, the statues and images send to the museum in Constantinople, and the priests and the writing-masters were thrown into a gaol. And when the last of them had died from hunger and neglect, the age-old trade of making hieroglyphics had become a lost art.”

The censorship of ideas and traditions had become so effective because the Christians had seized the means of reproduction of ideas themselves; the art of transcription, over which they now held a virtual monopoly in the monasteries. Part of this was by accident. The publishing industry in the age of Augustus in the early first century was reliant on a steady supply of slaves to perform the tedious task of transcription as librarii. However, even by the time of Diocletian the expansion of the Empire had stalled and the slave supply dried up. As such the cost of book had already steeply risen by the time the Christians had taken over. By dominating the transcription industry, Christianity acted as a vast filtration system on the knowledge of antiquity.

For ideas that lay outside of this system of knowledge-reproduction, for instance, books left over from the earlier publishing boom, there was still the law and by wielding it more and more vestiges of pagan thought were made illegal. By the seventh century, according to Sidenhop “legislation by the church councils was directed against seeing different parts of the physical world as habitations of spirits or demigods.” Homes were raided seeking out books that were deemed “hateful to God” which were then burned in public. We know much of the knowledge that was lost, but of course there will forever be “unknown unknowns”, things consigned to intellectual oblivion.

In some instances, knowledge survived by the skin of its teeth. One collection by Archimedes including The Method of Mechanical Theorems was only rediscovered in 2007, behind the pages of a liturgical book from the 13th century (being expensive items many books were recycled during this period by having the original text painted over). It contained mathematics that laid the foundations of calculus, only rediscovered in the 17th century by Newton and Leibniz. Had the Christian purges never taken place, it could have sent the Romans to the moon a thousand years ago. Nixey concludes that;

“At some point, a hundred or so years after Christianity comes to power, the transcription of the classical texts collapses. From AD 550 to 750 the numbers copied plummeted. This is not, to be clear, an absolute collapse in copying: monasteries are still producing reams and reams of religious books. Bible after Bible; copy after copy of Augustine is made…

Less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains.”

Twilight of the    Gods

Despite the intensity of the persecution of pagans from the fourth century, they did not die out completely. Laws were enforced unevenly, for a start, and in traditional pagan centres such as Athens public worship and even sacrifice to the old gods continued for another century. Christianity came to dominate in the cities while old ways still endured in the countryside, increasingly in secret. There is also much evidence to suggest that their worship shifted from the public sphere of the grand temple into the private sphere of the home, in the Cubiculum. These were “the most ‘secret’ place within the household, where its occupants might expect to conceal their activities to certain degrees from certain audiences.”

Surviving Cubiculum from    Pompeii

Forced into near extinction, the “pagan” religion in effect went underground. For over a thousand years this would fuel an unending paranoia within Christendom that “satanic” practices were going on behind closed doors, flaring up as witch-hunts, conspiracy theories and subversion myths centring around secret societies and subcultures that continues to this day. That, however, is a story for another time.

In another sense, the old gods maintained their cosmic immortality despite this erosion. Peter Brown wrote that;

“In the stars at night, the gods had found shapes more suitable to their impassive eternity than perishable human statues. For, in the stars, the diffracted colours of earth were concentrated into a steady, imperturbable glow. The stars and the planets swung safely above the heads of the last pagans, glittering statues of the gods far removed from the vandalism of the monks.”

What motivated all of these leading Christian thinkers, Ambrosius, Basil, Augustine and Chrysostom all firmly believed that the world was about to end and that Jesus was to return soon to conduct the Last Judgement. When they too passed into memory, and the messiah stubbornly refused to return to earth to perform his cosmic duties, their disciples continued the campaign to suppress all other forms of thought and to root out all ideas that it found heretical, pagan or toxic. What triumphed in the fourth and fifth centuries was not just Christianity, but ideological totalism itself.

Swept away was the colourful cauldron of sects and cults that had been strewn across the classical Mediterranean, Europe, and North Africa, leaving behind new social dynamic. On the one hand, Christianity reigned triumphant. On the other, the world promised by Jesus and his followers had continually failed to materialise. As time wore on the Empire itself receded to the solitary city of Constantinople, while throughout Europe and Western Asia and the Church crystallised into a robust new social and spiritual hierarchy. As it did so, the world-to-come of total equality promised to generations of Christians sank into the event horizon at the end of time, a conceptual mirage forever hovering out of reach, numinous in its moral purity and captivating in its bold and unfulfilled vision. A blank canvas one which succeeding generations would map increasingly elaborate visions of future worlds. On earth, men made do with the monasteries; island idyls of piety and communistic simplicity amidst a world of growing lawlessness. As antiquity gradated into the medieval world, Christian eschatology eclipsed the cyclical cosmos of antiquity, but by forever anticipating the end of time created its own form of historical cycles. Mircea Eliade observes that;

“For centuries the same religious ideas recurs again and again: this world — the world of History — is unjust, abominable, demonic; fortunately, it is already decaying, the catastrophes have just begun, this world is cracking everywhere; very soon it will be annihilated, the powers of darkness will be conquered once and for all, the “good” will triumph, Paradise will be regained. All millennialist and eschatological movements display optimism.”

Just as the Pax Romana laid the seeds of its own destruction by its success, so did Christianity’s ghostly vision of a world-to-come pave the way to its future instability. Its theology created tension between those inspired to try and craft a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, and an increasing paranoia of those out to subvert the status quo. A dynamo that was to power the intellectual development of Europe and beyond down to the present day.

Untimely Reflections Upon the State of the World [Essay by Arno Mayer in Le Monde a few days after 9/11]

This is a time to reject the temptation or superstition of fixing on a single cause for the loss of America’s ‘splendid’ invulnerability and exceptionalism on Sept. 11, 2001. The infamous terrorist attack, presumably masterminded by Osama bin Laden, a Muslim zealot, is no more the causa causans of the crisis in this early dawn of the 21st century than the assassination by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian zealot, of Francis Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, was the causa causans of the twilight crisis of the long 19th century in July-August 1914. As Washington chooses to treat this horrific crime as an act of war, it is well to remember that it takes at least two (states) to fight a war. And any war raises the question of the relative responsibility of each side and its allies for the underlying and precipitant causes of conflict.

Of course, in 1914, the leaders of the opposing but equiponderant Triple Entente and Triple Alliance knew who the prospective enemy was, even if they could not foresee the consequences of their diplomatic decisions and military actions, which spiraled into catastrophe. Today, quite apart from the nebulosity of the “enemy other” there is not even the semblance of a balance of military power and even without allies America has the military capability to “make the law,” which is not to say that the consequences, both immediate and long-term, will be any less fraught with imponderables.

But the temptation of war in 2001, not unlike in 1914, calls into question Montaigne’s axiom, grounded in Aeschylus and Aristotle, that foreign war is “a milder evil than civil war” and that to resort to external war to avoid internal war is “a bad means for a good purpose.” Presently this prescriptive formula is being revised to say that the violence of international war is also less wicked than the violence of terror. Indeed, we are witnessing the incipient collaboration between, in Arnold Toynbee’s words, an “an external and internal proletariat” against an overweening imperial ascendancy. This battle will take the place of yesteryear’s international civil war.

Chateaubriand challenged the millennial wisdom that foreign war is “morally superior” to civil war. In fact, he posited that a civil war might actually be “less unjust and revolting,” as well as more “natural” than an external conflict. In any case, Chateaubriand invited reflection on the degree to which foreign and (un)civil war may, in fact, be two sides of the same coin of violence.

Except in America, the Second World War radically narrowed the dividing line between heroic fighting men and blameless civilians. This ideologically and technologically conditioned transformation of the realm of war removes one of the main reasons for preferring military over civil conflict in the moral economy of — pace Kant — perpetual violence and war. The growing place, since 1945, of women in the armed services, in the strategic elite and in key economic sectors further reduces the boundaries between civil and military society in times of foreign and civil war, as well as in moments of terrorist violence.

The blurring of the line between the battlefield and the homefront is rendered all the more lethal by the absence of doctrines and laws governing irregular and indirect warfare. Tellingly, there is no treatise on civil war equal to Clausewitz’s On War. To date, civil war has been essentially blind and wild, in part for being impregnated with vengeance and re-vengeance. The same is true for terrorist violence. Nor is there anything comparable to the “laws of war” for civil and terrorist warfare, except the  embryonic laws and courts to punish genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. And they are likely to be no more effective than the Geneva conventions during the Thirty Years’ War of the 20th century. Incidentally, taking the long view, the warning of cross-border wars between and among states in favor of ethnically, religiously and culturally fueled civil conflicts is a return to the historical norm — to before the emergence of the sovereign state and the attendant international state system.

Until now, in modern times, acts of individual terror have been the weapon of the weak and the poor, while acts of state and economic terror have been the weapon of the strong. In both types of terror it is, of course, important to distinguish between target and victim. This distinction is crystal-clear in the fatal hit on the World Trade Center: the target is a prominent symbol and hub of globalizing corporate financial and economic power; the victim the hapless and partly subaltern work force. Such a distinction does not apply to the strike on the Pentagon: it houses the supreme military command — the ultima ratio regnum — of capitalist globalization, even if it entailed, in the Pentagon’s own language, “collateral” damage to human life.

In any case, since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of “preemptive” state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled. Besides the unexceptional subversion and overthrow of governments in competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Washington has resorted to political assassinations, surrogate death squads and unseemly freedom fighters (e.g., bin Laden). It masterminded the killing of Lumumba and Allende; and it unsuccessfully tried to put to death Castro, Khadafi, Saddam Hussein (and bin Laden?). These “rogue” actions worsened local political and economic conditions and were of a piece with equally unscrupulous blockades, embargoes, military interventions, punitive air (missile) strikes and kidnappings, always in the name of democracy, liberty and justice. To be sure, for some of these actions America secured the sanction of the United Nations and the collaboration of NATO allies. At the same time, however, Washington refused to pay its dues to the United Nations, defied the nascent International Criminal Court and condoned Israel’s violation of international agreements and UN resolutions as well as its practice of preemptive state terror.

Having implanted a subculture of state terror in the world system, the United States at once upholds and undermines the established rules of international statecraft in pursuit of its imperial interests. Indeed, the United States is an empire, not a superpower, exceeding the Roman empire in its hegemonic reach and mastery. America may not be, as its catechism proclaims, the most beautiful, the most democratic and the freest country in the world. But it is, without a doubt, the mightiest empire in recorded history, as measured by its military and economic power as well as its ideological and cultural influence. This globalizing imperial ascendancy is all the more impressive and unique for being exercised indirectly and informally, except for the extraterritorial military, naval and airbases which girdle the globe. Not surprisingly this unprecedented and unrivaled omnipotence sustains an uncommon arrogance of power. America’s reaction, both foreign and domestic, to the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001 is potentially so very violent and so disproportionate precisely because they are experienced as a blow to this overbearing pride.

Whereas the rest of the First World, as a full if competing partner in this imperial hegemony, intermittently cringes at America’s hubris, much of the Third World resents and bears the brunt of it. In particular “the wretched of the earth,” evoked by Frantz Fanon, are ready prey for political leaders who blame the stillbirth of the post-colonial Eden on the new imperial domination in the guise of American-led economic and cultural globalization. Indeed, these downtrodden, at this time primarily in the Arab and Muslim worlds, may be said to constitute what Nietzsche conceived as the ever more numerous, cunning and impoverished social classes seething with a resentment fired by not only a festering impotence but also an acute fear of defeat should they — “the slaves” — once again rise to break their chains. More than likely this condition of disempowerment and pent-up rage is the seedbed for the recruitment and support of terrorists, with America’s partiality to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict serving as kindling and catalyst.

The geopolitical context and international environment of the increasingly cunning terrorism of the weak and the poor is such that it cannot be contained, controlled or eradicated by decapitating one or several of its masterminds or operatives. To use state terror — in the form of military blackmail — gilded with financial bribery — in the form of loans and cancelled debts — amounts to killing the messenger of bad fortunes rather than attacking their economic and cultural root causes. To boot, to put a price on the heads of suspects to be brought in dead or alive is to weave the lawlessness of the Wild West into the fabric and practice of imperial rule.

Yesterday’s Cold War between Capitalist freedom and Communist totalitarianism, of which today’s terror is one of many troublesome sequels, is about to be reborn as a battle between absolute Good and absolute Evil. With Manichaeism riding high on both sides there will, once again, be somber times for independent-minded spirits and, as always, for the wretched of the earth.

The Despoiling of America: How George W. Bush became the head of the new American Dominionist Church/State [By Katherine Yurica]

The First Prince of the Theocratic States of America

It happened quietly, with barely a mention in the media. Only the Washington Post dutifully reported it.[1] And only Kevin Phillips saw its significance in his new book, American Dynasty.[2] On December 24, 2001, Pat Robertson resigned his position as President of the Christian Coalition. 

Behind the scenes religious conservatives were abuzz with excitement. They believed Robertson had stepped down to allow the ascendance of the President of the United States of America to take his rightful place as the head of the true American Holy Christian Church. 

Robertson’s act was symbolic, but it carried a secret and solemn revelation to the faithful. It was the signal that the Bush administration was a government under God that was led by an anointed President who would be the first regent in a dynasty of regents awaiting the return of Jesus to earth. The President would now be the minister through whom God would execute His will in the nation. George W. Bush accepted his scepter and his sword with humility, grace and a sense of exultation. 

As Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court explained a few months later, the Bible teaches and Christians believe “… that government …derives its moral authority from God. Government is the ‘minister of God’ with powers to ‘revenge,’ to ‘execute wrath,’ including even wrath by the sword…”[3] 

George W. Bush began to wield the sword of God’s revenge with relish from the beginning of his administration, but most of us missed the sword play. I have taken the liberty to paraphrase an illustration from Leo Strauss, the father of the neo-conservative movement, which gives us a clue of how the hiding is done: 

“One ought not to say to those whom one wants to kill, ‘Give me your votes, because your votes will enable me to kill you and I want to kill you,’ but merely, ‘Give me your votes,’ for once you have the power of the votes in your hand, you can satisfy your desire.”[4]

Notwithstanding the advice, the President’s foreign policy revealed a flare for saber rattling. He warned the world that “nations are either with us or they’re against us!” His speeches, often containing allusions to biblical passages, were spoken with the certainty of a man who holds the authority of God’s wrath on earth, for he not only challenged the evil nations of the world, singling out Iraq, Syria, Iran, and North Korea as the “axis of evil,” but he wielded the sword of punishment and the sword of revenge against his own people: the American poor and the middle class who according to the religious right have earned God’s wrath by their licentiousness and undisciplined lives. 

To the middle class he said, “I’m going to give you clear skies clean air and clean water,” then he gutted the environmental controls that were designed to provide clean air and water. The estimated number of premature deaths that will result: 100,000.[5] He said to the poor and to the middle class: “I’m going to give you a prescription drug program, one that you truly deserve.” Then he gave the drug industry an estimated $139 billion dollars in increased profits from the Medicare funds and arranged for the poorest of seniors to be eliminated from coverage, while most elderly will pay more for drugs than they paid before his drug benefit bill passed.[6] After that he arranged for the dismantling of the Medicare program entirely, based on the method outlined by his religious mentors.[7] He said to the people of America, “I’m going to build a future for you and your children,” then he gutted their future with tax breaks to the rich and a pre-emptive war against Iraq, and the largest spending deficit in history.[8] 

This article is the documented story of how a political religious movement called Dominionism gained control of the Republican Party, then took over Congress, then took over the White House, and now is sealing the conversion of America to a theocracy by taking over the American Judiciary.  It’s the story of why and how “the wrath of God Almighty” will be unleashed against the middle class, against the poor, and against the elderly and sick of this nation by George W. Bush and his army of Republican Dominionist “rulers.”

How Dominionism Was Spread

The years 1982-1986 marked the period Pat Robertson and radio and televangelists urgently broadcast appeals that rallied Christian followers to accept a new political religion that would turn millions of Christians into an army of political operatives. It was the period when the militant church raised itself from centuries of sleep and once again eyed power. 

At the time, most Americans were completely unaware of the militant agenda being preached on a daily basis across the breadth and width of America. Although it was called “Christianity” it can barely be recognized as Christian. It in fact was and is a wolf parading in sheep’s clothing: It was and is a political scheme to take over the government of the United States and then turn that government into an aggressor nation that will forcibly establish the United States as the ruling empire of the twenty-first century. It is subversive, seditious, secretive, and dangerous.[9] 

Dominionism is a natural if unintended extension of Social Darwinism and is frequently called “Christian Reconstructionism.” Its doctrines are shocking to ordinary Christian believers and to most Americans. Journalist Frederick Clarkson, who has written extensively on the subject, warned in 1994 that Dominionism “seeks to replace democracy with a theocratic elite that would govern by imposing their interpretation of ‘Biblical Law.’” He described the ulterior motive of Dominionism is to eliminate “…labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools.” Clarkson then describes the creation of new classes of citizens:

“Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently Christian men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed. So severe is this theocracy that it would extend capital punishment [to] blasphemy, heresy, adultery, and homosexuality.”[10]

Today, Dominionists hide their agenda and have resorted to stealth; one investigator who has engaged in internet exchanges with people who identify themselves as religious conservatives said, “They cut and run if I mention the word ‘Dominionism.’”[11]  Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University wrote, “In March 1986, I was on a speaking tour in Iowa and received a copy of the following memo [Pat] Robertson had distributed to the Iowa Republican County Caucus titled, “How to Participate in a Political Party.” It read:

“Rule the world for God.

“Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.

“Hide your strength.

“Don’t flaunt your Christianity.

“Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God willing.”[12]

Dominionists have gained extensive control of the Republican Party and the apparatus of government throughout the United States; they continue to operate secretly. Their agenda to undermine all government social programs that assist the poor, the sick, and the elderly is ingeniously disguised under false labels that confuse voters. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Dominionism maintains the necessity of laissez-faire economics, requiring that people “look to God and not to government for help.”[13]

It is estimated that thirty-five million Americans who call themselves Christian, adhere to Dominionism in the United States, but most of these people appear to be ignorant of the heretical nature of their beliefs and the seditious nature of their political goals. So successfully have the televangelists and churches inculcated the idea of the existence of an outside “enemy,” which is attacking Christianity, that millions of people have perceived themselves rightfully overthrowing an imaginary evil anti-Christian conspiratorial secular society.

When one examines the progress of its agenda, one sees that Dominionism has met its time table: the complete takeover of the American government was predicted to occur by 2004.[14] Unless the American people reject the GOP’s control of the government, Americans may find themselves living in a theocracy that has already spelled out its intentions to change every aspect of American life including its cultural life, its Constitution and its laws.

Born in Christian Reconstructionism, which was founded by the late R. J. Rushdoony, the framers of the new cult included Rushdoony, his son-in-law Gary North, Pat Robertson, Herb Titus, the former Dean of Robertson’s Regent University School of Public Policy (formerly CBN University), Charles Colson, Robertson’s political strategist, Tim LaHaye, Gary Bauer, the late Francis Schaeffer, and Paul Crouch, the founder of TBN, the world’s largest television network, plus a virtual army of likeminded television and radio evangelists and news talk show hosts.

Dominionism started with the Gospels and turned the concept of the invisible and spiritual “Kingdom of God” into a literal political empire that could be taken by force, starting with the United States of America. Discarding the original message of Jesus and forgetting that Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” the framers of Dominionism boldly presented a Gospel whose purpose was to inspire Christians to enter politics and execute world domination so that Jesus could return to an earth prepared for his earthly rule by his faithful “regents.”

How Machiavellianism, Communism, Secular Humanism and Neo-Conservatism Inspired a New Militant and Evil Anti-Christian Religion

In the fifties and sixties, right-wing Christians worried about communists and communism taking over the world. Along with communism, another enemy to Christianity was identified by ministers. In 1982, Francis Schaeffer, who was then the leading evangelical theologian, called Secular Humanism the greatest threat to Christianity the world had ever seen. Soon American fundamentalists and Pentecostals were seeing “humanists” everywhere. Appearing on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club show, Schaeffer claimed that humanism was being forced on Christians; it taught that man was the “center of all things.” Like communism, secular humanism was based on atheism, which was sufficient enough for Schaeffer to conclude that humanism was an enemy to the Kingdom of God.[15]

“The enemy is this other view of reality,” Schaeffer spoke emotionally. Citing the Declaration of Independence as his authorizing document, he said:

“Today we live in a humanist society. They control the schools. They control public television. They control the media in general. And what we have to say is we live in a humanist society….[Because] the courts are not subject to the will of the people through elections or re-election… all the great changes in the last forty years have come through the courts. And what we must get in our mind is the government as a whole, but especially the courts, has become the vehicle to force this view on the total population, even if the total population doesn’t hold the view.”[16]

 Schaeffer claimed that the major “titanic changes” to America occurred since 1942:

“If you don’t revolt against tyranny and this is what I call the bottom line, is that not only do you have the privilege but [you have] the duty to revolt. When people force upon you and society that which is absolutely contrary to the Word of God, and which really is tyranny…we have a right to stand against it as a matter of principle. And this was the basis upon which the founding fathers built this country.”

The appeal to evangelicals went further. On April 29, 1985, Billy Graham, the respected and world famous evangelist, told Pat Robertson’s audience on the 700 Club show that:

“[T]he time has come when evangelicals are going to have to think about getting organized corporately….I’m for evangelicals running for public office and winning if possible and getting control of the Congress, getting control of the bureaucracy, getting control of the executive branch of government. I think if we leave it to the other side we’re going to be lost. I would like to see every true believer involved in politics in some way shape or form.”

According to Schaeffer, Robertson, and Billy Graham, then arguably the three most famous and influential leaders in the American protestant church world, “God’s people” had a moral duty to change the government of the United States.[17] 

Significantly, at the time, many other fundamentalist ministers were identifying communism and secular humanism as religions. However, the equating of a political ideology on the one hand, and a philosophy that rejects supernaturalism on the other hand, with religions was not accidental.[18] It allowed the preachers to revile an economic-political system as well as a philosophy as false religions, even demonic religions, which Christians should reject at any cost.[19] 

Underneath the pejoratives, however, there was a grudging admiration on the part of Pat Robertson and the other politically astute Dominionists, for they saw that a political agenda that wrapped itself in religious robes had the innate power to explode exponentially into the most politically dynamic movement in American and world history. 

The result of the new religion was that by the year 2000, thirty-five million Americans would declare war on the remaining 245 million. Karl Rove, President Bush’s political advisor, told the Family Research Council in 2002, “We need to find ways to win the war.”[20] One is tempted to respond, “Wait a minute, they’re in power so why do they need to continue the war?”  That is the salient question. The answer is frightening. 

Starting with a simple idea, Robertson perceived the enormous advantage of placing an otherwise unacceptable political theory into a religious context. By doing so it would stand Christianity up-side-down and end American democracy.

A Machiavellian Religion Was Born

American Christianity had already seen extremes. For Dominionists, perhaps the single most important event in the last half of the twentieth century occurred when the Reverend Jim Jones proved that the religious would follow their leader to Guyana and even further, to their deaths. That fact could hardly have escaped the notice of even the dullest of politically minded preachers. 

Indeed, Jim Jones’ surreal power over his congregants leaps out from the grave even today. If a man desired to change the laws in America—to undo Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal for instance, and allow corporations the unbridled freedom they enjoyed prior to the Great Depression (which included the freedom to defraud, pillage, and to destroy the land with impunity on the way to gathering great fortunes), what better way to proceed than to cloak the corruption within a religion? If a few men wanted to establish an American empire and control the entire world, what better vehicle to carry them to their goal than to place their agenda within the context of a religion? Jim Jones proved religious people would support even immoral political deeds if their leaders found a way to frame those deeds as “God’s Will.” The idea was brilliant. Its framers knew they could glorify greed, hate, nationalism and even a Christian empire with ease.[21]

The religion the canny thinkers founded follows the reverse of communism and secular humanism, it poured political and economic ideology into a religion and that combustible mixture produced “Dominionism,” a new political faith that had the additional advantage of insulating the cult from attacks on its political agenda by giving its practitioners the covering to simply cry out, “You’re attacking me for my religious beliefs and that’s religious persecution!”[22]

But how could a leader get away with a religious fraud that barely hides its destructive and false intent?

Jim Jones’s history holds the answer. He not only proved the obvious fact that people are blinded by their religious beliefs and will only impute goodness, mercy, and religious motivations to their leader, but Jim Jones proved the efficacy of the basic teaching of Machiavelli: a leader must only appear to have the qualities of goodness—he need not actually possess those attributes.

In fact, Machiavelli taught that it is dangerous for a leader to practice goodness. Instead, he must pretend to be good and then do the opposite. Machiavelli taught that a leader will succeed on appearances alone. A good leader puts his finger to the wind and changes course whenever it is expedient to do so. Machiavelli wrote this revealing passage that could be applied not only to false religious leaders but to a false President:   

“Alexander VI did nothing else but deceive men, he thought of nothing else, and found the occasion for it; no man was ever more able to give assurances, or affirmed things with stronger oaths, and no man observed them less; however, he always succeeded in his deceptions, as he well knew this aspect of things.”

“Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are, and those few will not dare to oppose themselves to the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of men, and especially of princes, from which there is no appeal, the end justifies the means.” (p. 93)

Chillingly Machiavelli advises his readers:

“Let a prince therefore aim at conquering and maintaining the state, and the means will always be judged honourable and praised by every one, for the vulgar is always taken by appearances and the issue of the event; and the world consists only of the vulgar, and the few who are not vulgar are isolated when the many have a rallying point in the prince.” (p. 94)

Machiavelli also wrote how to govern dominions that previous to being occupied lived under their own laws. His words eerily reflect the Bush Administration’s decisions on how to rule Iraq:

“When those states which have been acquired are accustomed to live at liberty under their own laws, there are three ways of holding them. The first is to despoil them;[23] the second is to go and live there in person; the third is to allow them to live under their own laws, taking tribute of them, and creating within the country a government composed of a few who will keep it friendly to you. Because this government, being created by the prince, knows that it cannot exist without his friendship and protection, and will do all it can to keep them. What is more, a city used to liberty can be more easily held by means of its citizens than in any other way, if you wish to preserve it.” (p. 46)

However Machiavelli has second thoughts and follows with this caveat:

“…. [I]n truth there is no sure method of holding them except by despoiling them. And whoever becomes the ruler of a free city and does not destroy it, can expect to be destroyed by it, for it can always find a motive for rebellion in the name of liberty and of its ancient usages…”[24] (p. 46)

(The above quotes are from The Prince in the original Oxford University Press translation by Luigi Ricci, 1903; revised by E. R. P. Vincent, 1935) 

Machiavelli’s books, The Prince and The Discourses are not abstract treatises. Christian Gauss, who wrote an important introduction to the Oxford edition, called them by their rightful name: they are in fact a “concise manual—a handbook of those who would acquire or increase their political power.” Gauss tells us that a long line of kings and ministers and tyrants studied Machiavelli, including Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin and Stalin.  

How Can Evil Deeds Be Reconciled With Christian Beliefs?

It’s important to understand that the founders of Dominionism are sitting on the horns of a moral dilemma: How can a leader be both good and evil at the same time? For if biblical moral proscriptions are applicable to him, he will certainly suffer some form of censure. And if proscriptions are applicable, the leader could not lie to the citizenry with impunity or do evil so that “good” could be achieved. The answer to the dilemma of how a Dominionist leader could both do evil and still maintain his place of honor in the Christian community lies in the acceptance and adoption of the Calvinistic doctrine that James Hogg wrote about in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.  (W.W. Norton, N.Y. 1970.)

This novel, published in 1824, is concerned with psychological aberration and as such, anticipates the literature of the twentieth century. The protagonist is a young man named Robert, who drenched in the religious bigotry of Calvinism, concluded that he was predestined before the beginning of the world to enter heaven, therefore no sin he committed would be held to his account. This freed Robert to become an assassin in the cause of Christ and His Church.

Fifty years ago a variation on the concept was expressed disapprovingly as, “Once saved—always saved.” In this view, salvation had nothing to do with “good works or a holy life.” A drunk who had a born again experience would be among God’s chosen elect whether he stopped drinking or not. But the logical extension of the reasoning is the idea that Christianity could have within itself not ex-sinners but active sinners: as Christian murderers, Christian pedophiles, Christian rapists, Christian thieves, Christian arsonists, and every other kind of socio-pathological behavior possible. As we have sadly witnessed of late the concept is broadly accepted within the American churches.

But the Dominionists needed the aberrant extension of Calvinism; they believe as did Calvin and John Knox that before the creation of the universe, all men were indeed predestined to be either among God’s elect or were unregenerate outcasts. And it is at this point Dominionists introduced a perversion to Calvinism—the same one James Hogg utilizes in his The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—its technical name is “supralapsarianism.” It means essentially that the man called from before the foundation of the world to be one of the elect of God’s people, can do no wrong. No wonder then observers noted a definite religious swing in George W. Bush from Wesleyan theology to Calvinism early in his administration.[25]

How comforting the Calvinistic idea of a “justified sinner” is when one is utilizing Machiavellian techniques to gain political control of a state. It’s more than comforting; it is a required doctrine for “Christians” who believe they must use evil to bring about good. It justifies lying, murder, fraud and all other criminal acts without the fuss of having to deal with guilt feelings or to feel remorse for the lives lost through executions, military actions, or assassinations.

If this doctrine seems too wayward to believe as it might have done had I not heard a recent interview with a Pentecostal minister—rest assured the twisted doctrine is horribly alive and thriving in America today.

The interview conducted by Brian Copeland a news talk show host for KGO, San Francisco on September 5, 2003, was with the Reverend Donald Spitz of Pensacola, Florida who is involved with a Pro Life group in Virginia and with the Army of God. The occasion was the execution of Paul Hill, another Pentecostal minister who murdered a doctor and his body guard outside an abortion clinic. Hill was caught and convicted of the crimes. Spitz admitted that he was Paul Hill’s spiritual counselor. He said Hill died with the conviction he had done the Lord’s work. Spitz who approved of the murder said, “Someone else is going to handle the publishing of Paul Hill’s book On How to Assassinate.”

Spitz believed that Hill was completely justified in murdering the physician because, according to him, “twenty-six babies’ lives were saved by the killing.”  When Copeland pointed out that the scheduled abortions for the morning of the murders would have simply been postponed to another day—and that the lives of the fetuses were only extended for a day or so, Spitz refused to accept the argument.

Not surprisingly, Spitz opposed the use of birth control methods. Copeland asked, “If a woman is raped should she be forced to carry the fetus to term?” Spitz said, “Yes.” 

“What if the pregnancy will kill the mother?” Spitz replied that under no circumstances could “the baby be killed.” When Spitz was asked, “Why haven’t you gone out and killed an abortionist?” he replied calmly, “God hasn’t told me to do the killing.”

The Neo-Conservative Connection with Dominionists and Machiavelli

I suspect that most Americans have never heard of Machiavelli, nevertheless, it should be no surprise to us that Machiavelli has been accepted, praised, and followed by the Neo-Conservatives in the White House and his precepts are blindly adopted by the so-called “Christian” Dominionists. Kevin Phillips tells us in his masterful book, American Dynasty that Karl Rove, political strategist for President George W. Bush, is a devotee of Machiavelli, just as Rove’s predecessor, Lee Atwater had been for the elder Bush.[26] In fact, there has been an incredible effort to dilute the immoral implications of Machiavelli’s teachings. Today’s best apologist for Machiavelli is one of the most influential voices in Washington with direct connections into the oval office. 

Michael A. Ledeen was a Senior Fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a counselor to the National Security Council and special counselor to former Secretary of State, Alexander Haig in 1985. His relationship with Pat Robertson goes back at least to the early 1980’s.[27]  Like Robertson, Ledeen was an advocate for military intervention in Nicaragua and for assistance to the Contras. (Ledeen was also involved in the Iran-Contra affair.)[28] 

Today, in 2004, Michael Ledeen is a fellow at the conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute and according to William O. Beeman of the Pacific News Service, “Ledeen has become the driving philosophical force behind the neoconservative movement and the military actions it has spawned.”[29] 

Ledeen made a number of appearances on the 700 Club show during the 1980’s. Always presented as a distinguished guest, Robertson interviewed him on April 30, 1985 and asked him on this occasion: “What would you recommend if you were going to advise the President [Ronald Reagan] as to foreign policy?” 

Ledeen responded:

“The United States has to make clear to the world and above all to its own citizens, what our vital interests are. And then we must make it clear to everyone that we are prepared to fight and fight fiercely to defend those interests, so that people will not cross the lines that are likely to kick off a trip wire.” (Emphasis added.)

If Ledeen’s advice sounds ruthless and Machiavellian—it may be because it is Machiavellian. (By definition his statement presupposes the existence of something or several things that are life threatening to the nation by the use of the word “vital.” Yet Ledeen asserts that which is life threatening must be made manifest or defined. If an interest must be defined, then it is not apparent; yet the nation will nevertheless ask its sons and daughters to fight and die for something that is not apparent. Therefore, whatever “interests” Ledeen wanted to be defined, cannot have been vital interests, which are apparent—so in reality he advised the President to call discretionary interests vital—which is a lie.) 

Be aware that Ledeen is in complete accord with Machiavellian thinking. And so is Pat Robertson.[30] Robertson agreed to virtually every nuance Ledeen presented. In fact, it’s not clear which of the two first proposed invading Syria, Iran and Iraq back in the 1980’s,[31] a refrain that also echoed in the reports of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), one of the major homes for neo-conservatives in 2000. Both Ledeen and Robertson targeted the same nations that PNAC lists as America’s greatest enemies in its paper, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (published in September 2000.)[32] 

In 1999, Ledeen published his book, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago. (Truman Talley Books, St. Martin’s Griffin, N.Y. 1999.) Here is a sample of how Ledeen smoothes rough edges and presents a modern Machiavelli:

“In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to ‘enter into evil.’ This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired, and challenging. It is why we are drawn to him still…” (p. 91)

Again, Ledeen writes:

“Just as the quest for peace at any price invites war and, worse than war, defeat and domination, so good acts sometimes advance the triumph of evil, as there are circumstances when only doing evil ensures the victory of a good cause.” (p. 93)

Ledeen clearly believes “the end justifies the means,” but not all the time. He writes “Lying is evil,” but then contradictorily argues that it produced

 “a magnificent result,” and “is essential to the survival of nations and to the success of great enterprises.” (p. 95)

Ledeen adds this tidbit:

“All’s fair in war . . . and in love. Practicing deceit to fulfill your heart’s desire might be not only legitimate, but delicious!” (p. 95)

William O. Beeman tells us about Michael Ledeen’s influence. Writing for the Pacific News Service he says: 

Ledeen’s ideas are repeated daily by such figures as Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz…He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America’s manifest destiny. Consequently, he has become the philosophical legitimator of the American occupation of Iraq.”[33]

In fact, Ledeen’s influence goes even further. The BBC, the Washington Post and Jim Lobe writing for the Asia Times report that Michael Ledeen is the only full-time international affairs analyst consulted by Karl Rove.[34] Ledeen has regular conversations with Rove. The Washington Post said, “More than once, Ledeen has seen his ideas faxed to Rove, become official policy or rhetoric.”[35]

Leo Strauss the Father of Neo-Conservatism

Leo Strauss was born in 1899 and died in 1973. He was a Jewish scholar who fled Germany when Hitler gained power. He eventually found refuge in the United States where he taught political science at the University of Chicago. He is most famous for resuscitating Machiavelli and introducing his principles as the guiding philosophy of the neo-conservative movement. Strauss has been called the godfather of Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” More than any other man, Strauss breathed upon conservatism, inspiring it to rise from its atrophied condition and its natural dislike of change and to embrace an unbounded new political ideology that rides on the back of a revolutionary steed, hailing even radical change; hence the name Neo-Conservatives.

The father of neo-conservatism had many “spiritual” children at the University of Chicago, among them: Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky, who received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972. Harry V. Jaffa was a student of Strauss and has an important connection to Dominionists like Pat Robertson as we shall see below. However, Strauss’s family of influence extended beyond his students to include faculty members in universities, and the people his students taught. Those prominent neo-conservatives who are most notable are: Justice Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Irving Kristol and his son William Kristol, Alan Keyes, William J. Bennett, J. Danforth Quayle, Allan Bloom, John Podhoertz, John T. Agresto, John Ashcroft, Newt Gingrich, Gary Bauer, Michael Ledeen and scores of others, many of whom hold important positions in George W. Bush’s White House and Defense Department.

To understand the Straussian infusion of power that transformed an all but dead conservative realm, think of Nietzsche’s Overman come to life. Or better yet, think of the philosophy most unlike Christianity: Think of pure unmitigated evil. Strauss admits that Machiavelli is an evil man. But according to Strauss, his admission is a prerequisite to studying and reading Machiavelli: the acknowledgement is the safety net that keeps the reader from being corrupted. One is tempted to talk back to Strauss and point out an alternative: the admission could be the subterfuge that keeps a man from being ridiculed and rejected for espousing Machiavellian methods.

In one of the most important books for our times, Shadia Drury’s Leo Strauss and the American Right, undertakes to explain the ideas behind Strauss’s huge influence and following. Strauss’s reputation, according to Drury, rests in large part on his view that “a real philosopher must communicate quietly, subtly, and secretly to the few who are fit to receive his message.” Strauss claims secrecy is necessary to avoid “persecution.”[36]

In reading Strauss, one sometimes encounters coded contradictory ideas. For example, Strauss appears to respect Machiavelli because—as he points out—in contrast to other evil men, Machiavelli openly proclaimed opinions that others only secretly expressed behind closed doors. But we have just noted that Strauss teaches that secrecy is essential to the real philosopher. Strauss concluded, some would say that Machiavelli was after all, a patriot of sorts for he loved Italy more than he loved his own soul. Then Strauss warns, but if you call him a patriot, you “merely obscure something truly evil.”[37] So Strauss dances his way through the Machiavellian field of evil, his steps choreographed with duplicity and it’s opposite. The reader cannot let go.

In Strauss’s view, Machiavelli sees that Christianity “has led the world into weakness,” which can only be offset by returning the world to the ancient practices of the past. (Implied is not a return to the pagan past, but rather a return to the more virulent world of the Old Testament). Strauss laments, “Machiavelli needed …a detailed discussion revealing the harmony between his political teaching and the teaching of the Bible.” [38]These statements of Strauss, by themselves, were sufficient to send neo-conservative Christians to search for correlations between Machiavellianism, radical conservatism and the scriptures.[39]

Strauss’s teaching incorporated much of Machiavelli’s. Significantly, his philosophy is unfriendly to democracy—even antagonistic.  At the same time Strauss upheld the necessity for a national religion not because he favored religious practices, but because religion in his view is necessary in order to control the population. Since neo-conservatives influenced by Strauss are in control of the Bush administration, I have prepared a brief list that shows the radical unchristian basis of neo-conservatism. I am indebted to Shadia Drury’s book (Leo Strauss and the American Right) and published interviews for the following:

First: Strauss believed that a leader had to perpetually deceive the citizens he ruled.

Secondly: Those who lead must understand there is no morality, there is only the right of the superior to rule the inferior.

Thirdly:  According to Drury, Religion “is the glue that holds society together.”[40] It is a handle by which the ruler can manipulate the masses. Any religion will do. Strauss is indifferent to them all.

Fourthly: “Secular society…is the worst possible thing,” because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, all of which encourage dissent and rebellion. As Drury sums it up: “You want a crowd that you can manipulate like putty.”[41]

Fifthly: “Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured.”[42]

Sixthly: “In Strauss’s view, the trouble with liberal society is that it dispenses with noble lies and pious frauds. It tries to found society on secular rational foundations.”

Strauss’s Student, Harry Jaffa on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson

For four days in 1986, from July first through the fourth of July, Pat Robertson interviewed neo-conservative Dr. Harry Jaffa, a former student of Leo Strauss, on the 700 Club show. The topic was the importance of the Declaration of Independence. Joining with Jaffa was Robertson’s own man, Herb Titus, the Dean of CBN’s School of Public Policy. This series of interviews was one of the most important philosophical moments in the development of the political agenda and political philosophy of the Dominionists.

Robertson found in Harry Jaffa, the champion he needed, whose reasoning would influence how the Constitution should be interpreted by conservatives and would provide a “Christian” view of the establishment of the United States that excluded the secular social contract view. Harry Jaffa would influence both Clarence Thomas (who would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Bush senior in 1991) and Antonin Scalia (who would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan on September 26, 1986).

During the four days of interviews Jaffa and Titus agreed that the Declaration of Independence was the premier document and it superceded the Constitution. Titus said, “The Declaration…is the charter of the nation. It is what you might call the articles of incorporation, whereas the Constitution is the bylaws. The Constitution is the means by which to carry out the great purposes that are articulated in the Declaration.”

Robertson asked: “Let’s assume that eighty percent of the people are just totally immoral, they want to live lives of gross licentiousness and they want to prey on one another, that’s what they want and they want a government to let them do it. How does that square with the Declaration of Independence and its consent of the governed?”

Titus said, “Even the people can’t consent to give away that which God says is unalienable.”

Robertson then asked, “The principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, how far have we gone from it and what can we do to redress some of these problems?”

Jaffa responded cryptically:

“I’d say that today, for example in the Attorney General’s [Edwin Meese’s] warfare with the liberals on the Supreme Court, in his appeal to original intent, he appeals to the text of the Constitution. Jefferson and Madison said together in 1825, ‘If you want to find the principles of the Constitution of the United States, you go first to the Declaration of Independence.’”

First, Jaffa means by the term “original intent” that the Constitution must be interpreted according to what it meant when it was originally adopted. It is a revolutionary and brilliant idea that will allow the Dominionists to effectively repeal most of the judicial decisions made in the last century. [43]   

econdly, if we take Jaffa and the Dominionists at their word and go to the Declaration of Independence, we can see just how radical the conservative revolution and Dominionism are. The only portion that is ever quoted publicly are these words:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,”

The quote stops in the middle of the sentence—the part that is never quoted is this:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Dominionism then, takes its authority to overthrow the government of the United States from our own Declaration of Independence. By the time all Americans wake up to the Dominionist’s intent, it may be too late.

Though Harry Jaffa speaks with a high minded sense of political righteousness, Shadia Drury exposes his Machiavellian side. Like Strauss, he “clearly believes that devious and illegal methods are justified when those in power are convinced of the rightness of their ends.”[44] Jaffa and Robertson saw eye to eye on more than one topic: for instance, Jaffa like his host Pat Robertson, found Oliver North to be a hero (and by extension Michael Ledeen) when both North and Ledeen went around the law to provide military aid to the contras.[45]

How Dominionism Stealthily Swept Over America

Within a period of twenty to thirty years beginning in the 1970’s, Dominionism spread like wild fire throughout the evangelical, Pentecostal and fundamentalist religious communities in America. It was aided and abetted by television and radio evangelists. More than any other man, Pat Robertson mobilized the millions of politically indifferent and socially despised Pentecostals and fundamentalists in America and turned them into an angry potent army of political conquerors.[46] 

But it would be a mistake to limit Dominionism to the Pentecostals and fundamentalists alone: conservative Roman Catholics and Episcopalians have joined and enlarged the swelling numbers.[47] Robertson, like other media preachers, used every form of communication: television, radio, books and audio tapes available for sale. One book stands out. Originally published in 1982 and written with Bob Slosser, a key Robertson loyalist, Pat Robertson’s The Secret Kingdom soared on the bestseller charts. It underwent four printings during its first year. By 1984 Bantam published a mass paperback in cooperation with Thomas Nelson, the original publisher. (Though the book has since been revised, my quotes are from the original version.)

However, it was the Pentecostals and fundamentalists who made up the core of Robertson’s audience. To a people who were largely uneducated and who often remained ignorant even if they went through college because of their fear of becoming tainted by the “world and worldliness,” Dominionism came as a brilliant light that assuaged their deep sense of inferiority. Pentecostals in particular could take comfort from the notion that no longer would the world think of them as “Holy Rollers” who danced in the “Spirit” and practiced glossolalia. This time, they would be on top—they would be the head and not the tail—and the so-called elite, the educated of the world, would be on the bottom.

A new world was coming. To help the transition along, Pat Robertson, along with other pastors, evangelists and churchmen, founded schools, universities and colleges throughout the United States to train “Christians” how to run for office, how to win, and how to manage the affairs of government after they gained office. To get an idea of how successful the plan was, Robertson’s Regent University now has a $100 million endowment. After watching the Dominionists takeover the Republican Party and observing their ruthless methods, it is indeed apparent that Machiavellian principles are the fuel running their “How to Manual.”

Starting with a class of only twelve in 1985, Robertson began his Journalism Department at CBN University where 800 other graduate students were earning Master degrees in a fully accredited institution. Later Robertson changed the name of CBN University to “Regent University”—based on Dominionism’s teaching that the national government of America and governments of the world will be ruled by Dominionists, who will act as regents on an interim basis, that is, until the true King—Jesus Christ—will return to earth again and gratefully accept His Kingdom from the hands of His faithful regents.

The Dominionist Plan: Today Control the USA, Tomorrow the World

Significantly, Dominionism is a form of Social Darwinism.[48] It inherently includes the religious belief that wealth-power is a sign of God’s election. That is, out of the masses of people and the multitude of nations—wealth, in and of itself, is thought to indicate God’s approval on men and nations whereas poverty and sickness reflect God’s disapproval. The roots of the idea come from a natural twist of an Old Testament passage, which I discuss below. Essentially there were two elements necessary to establish Dominionism among Christians who previously believed helping the poor was a mandate of Christianity.[49]

First, Old Testament law had to be accepted as an essential part of a Christian’s theology.

Secondly, the Christian had to undergo a second conversion-like experience that went beyond being born again and demanded not only a commitment to reestablishing the Old Testament legal structure but required the implementation of that law in the nations of the world (including the U.S.) based upon a different understanding of the Great Commission (Matthew 28: 18-20).[50]  Under this concept Dominionists are to go into all the world to take dominion and “make disciples” teaching the disciples to “observe all” that Jesus “commanded.” All nations under Dominionist’s teaching are to convert to biblical laws, which are ranked superior to secular laws that were not God given or God directed and are found wanting. The Christian therefore must be willing to overthrow all laws that are secular.

In other words, a measure of one’s spirituality rested upon the individual’s willingness to accept the concept of taking dominion over not only the people of America, but taking dominion over the people of the entire world. From Dominionists’ actual words, the taking of America is perceived as a violent act. Ben Kinchlow who co-hosted CBN’s 700 Club with Pat Robertson told an audience, “We need to grab the American dream by the short hairs and snatch it back to where it was originally designed to be.”

As Robertson wrote approvingly in his book, The Secret Kingdom, the kingdom of heaven “suffers violence, and violent men take it by force.” He explained, “Zealous men force their way in. That’s what it means.” (Page 82.)

What “Dominion” Means

There were an estimated 110,000 Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches in America in the 1980s. Robertson taught them—through his vast television network and through his books—that the role of the Christian is to rule over the wicked. Dominionism’s purpose is to create theocrats (a Christian class of rulers). But in order to successfully place only certain Christians in positions of power, Dominionism divides Christian believers into classes based upon political ideology and certain hot point issues such as the privatization of Social Security and Medicare, freedom to decide on medical procedures with ones own physician, freedom of the press and freedom of speech, freedom of the arts, and certain rights like the right to a fair trial and protection from governmental intrusion into the privacy of marriage and adult associations.

The believers who are destined to rule are called the “elect,” and are separated from those believers who do not and will not accept the predestined superiority of the chosen ruling class. A Christian who raises his voice against the “elect” could be labeled a “false prophet or a dreamer of dreams,” and therefore, according to the Deuteronomic law “shall be put to death.”

Placing his own words in the mouth of God, Robertson wrote in The Secret Kingdom:

“It is clear that God is saying, ‘I gave man dominion over the earth, but he lost it. Now I desire mature sons and daughters who will in My name exercise dominion over the earth and will subdue Satan, the unruly, and the rebellious. Take back My world from those who would loot it and abuse it. Rule as I would rule.’” (p. 201.)

On his 700 Club television show (5-1-86) Robertson said:

“God’s plan is for His people, ladies and gentleman to take dominion…What is dominion? Well, dominion is Lordship. He wants His people to reign and rule with Him…but He’s waiting for us to…extend His dominion…And the Lord says, ‘I’m going to let you redeem society. There’ll be a reformation….We are not going to stand for those coercive utopians in the Supreme Court and in Washington ruling over us any more. We’re not gonna stand for it. We are going to say, ‘we want freedom in this country, and we want power…’”

Charles Colson, the former Special Counsel to Richard Nixon, who was called “Nixon’s Hatchet Man,” pled guilty to charges in the Daniel Ellsberg case during the Watergate Scandal. He served a prison sentence, and started a prison ministry afterward. Pat Robertson has called him “the most brilliant political strategist in the world.” Over the years, Colson made many appearances on the 700 Club. On one occasion, he laid out the battle lines:

“It always has been a conflict between the kingdoms: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. When you really look at what Jesus is saying, He is saying the time is fulfilled, repent and believe, the kingdom is at hand. And He is calling for the kingdom of God to rule over the affairs of man. And so inevitably there’s going to be a conflict.” (The 700 Club 5-21-86)

Robertson said on his program the 700 Club (5-13-86):

“We’ve sat idly by long enough and said, ‘Well religion and politics don’t mix.’ Don’t you believe it. If we don’t have moral people in government then the only other people that can be in government are immoral. That’s the only way it goes. Either you have moral people in there or you have immoral people.”

On another show (5-7-86) he revealed a partial list of changes the Dominionists planned for America:

“We can change the government, we can change the court systems, we can change the poverty problem, we can change education…We can make a difference.”

Who Rules? And Who Are to Be the Ruled?

In an earlier section, I discussed the principle held by both Machiavelli and Leo Strauss that religion is necessary as a tool for a leader to control the masses. If conformity—not dissent is required, then religion is the power tool of choice, for it will insure a controlled populace. We’re about to examine its uses, its ingenious gifts and its powers, in this and the following sections. Be aware that Dominionism is in fact, a brilliantly executed road that leads to total power. 

In his book, which tended to be more formal and less expansive, Pat Robertson began the listing of those Americans not fit for public office:

“Obviously the drunk, the drug addict, the lustful, the slothful do not have the discipline to rule the earth and to correct its evils.” (p. 82)

“If we remain unrighteous, the Bible says, we will miss the kingdom.” (p.83)

Then he quoted Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians:

“Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”(1 Corinthians 6:9-10) (p. 83)

If “Secular Humanists are the greatest threat to Christianity the world has ever known,” as theologian Francis Schaeffer claimed, then who are the Humanists? According to Dominionists, humanists are the folks who allow or encourage licentious behavior in America. They are the undisciplined revelers.

Put all the enemies of the Dominionists together, boil them down to liquid and bake them into the one single most highly derided and contaminated individual known to man, and you will have before you an image of the quintessential “liberal”—one of those folks who wants to give liberally to the poor and needy—who desires the welfare and happiness of all Americans—who insists on safety regulations for your protection and who desires the preservation of your values—those damnable people are the folks that must be reduced to powerlessness—or worse: extinction.

Dominionists determine who is among God’s elect—not solely by a religious experience such as being born again, but by a political determination of whether one is a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative or simply a person who questions the deeds of Dominionist political figures. The politics of exclusion, including bigotry, is in fact wide spread throughout the United States.

Take, for instance, Sean Hannity’s remarks to Time Magazine, “You can play golf with liberals, be neighbors with them, go out to dinner. I just don’t want them in power.”[51] Or take Ann Coulter’s assertions: “Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason.” Or, “Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy.” (It turns out that every single “liberal” in the country is a member of the Democratic Party and therefore is a traitor.)[52]

The Machiavellian nature of the Dominionist cult explains why Bill Clinton who is a Christian believer was attacked so viciously for his sexual folly but Newt Gingrich, Bill Livingston, Henry Hyde, Strom Thurmond and scores of other Republicans escaped the punishment of public ridicule, verbal abuse, and humiliation for the same sexual peccadilloes. (It appears only Democratic “liberals” must be held to the fire of biblical standards and biblical punishments because as we all know, they are “unregenerate from the beginning of time.”)

Robertson’s book acknowledges that his followers, the “Christian” army raised up for political purposes are the elect chosen to rule. Robertson’s transcribed television interviews and dialogs give shocking evidence to the legitimization of greed, hatred, violence and cruelty by members of the various fundamentalist branches of the American clergy and by elected officials of the Republican Party, which can be cited as evidence that Dominionism is not a Christian religion—that above everything else, Dominionism is synonymous with Machiavellianism: the ends justify the means. Under Dominionism, true Christianity is a target to destroy, not a goal to achieve.

Who Lives and Who Dies? How Justice Scalia Would Expand the Death Penalty

In one of those peculiar moments when a host on television seems to have a disconnect with his guest, I realized that Pat Robertson was using “code” with Herb Titus, his “guest” on the show on May 27, 1985. Titus was the Dean of CBN University’s School of Public Policy and was a known Christian Reconstructionist (Dominionist) who had written position papers arguing that government has exceeded its authority by requiring individuals such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers to be licensed by the state. Robertson, himself, revealed what the School of Public Policy was teaching on a later show (July 5, 1985). “What are we going to teach them? We’ll teach them the foundation of our government. We’re going to teach them how to win elections.”

This exchange with Titus occurred on May 27, 1985:

Robertson:  “We have with us today Constitutional authority, Herb Titus. Herb . . . . How about the biblical concept of war? You know there are many people who don’t think we should ever fight wars and yet we’re talking about brave men who died for freedom.” (Emphasis added)

Titus: “Well I believe the scripture is very clear that if you are attacked by evil whether within the country or outside the country, that it’s the duty of the civil authorities to defend the nation and the people of the nation from evil whether it comes from an aggressor outside or an aggressor inside. We can see that in Romans 13 for example.”

Curious about the meaning of what was being said, particularly since Robertson had asked a question about war, and Titus’ answer included war against one’s own population, I looked up Romans 13. I had always read this passage to be St. Paul’s concept of a good government providing beneficial services to the governed and I restricted its meaning to only a lawfully constituted government that rules justly.

But read Romans 13 in the light of Machiavelli’s and Leo Strauss’s discourses on religion and its uses by a political leader, and one glimpses the danger that Dominionism represents to the American people and to the American way of life. For it can be read to mean that any lawful government is ordained by God to execute retribution and punishment upon those who challenge (resist or rebel against) unjust policies of a government. When read this way, it takes on a new and sinister meaning. Or, it can be read to mean that once a new government of the United States of America has been established under biblical law—then no citizen will have the right to resist it or rebel against its edicts. In other words, the Declaration of Independence will no longer be applicable to the regency established by the Dominionists.  This is how Romans 13 reads in the New English Version:

“Every person must submit to the supreme authorities. There is no authority but by act of God, and the existing authorities are instituted by him; consequently anyone who rebels against authority is resisting a divine institution, and those who so resist have themselves to thank for the punishment they will receive. For government, a terror to crime, has no terrors for good behaviour. You wish to have no fear of the authorities? Then continue to do right and you will have their approval, for they are God’s agents working for your good. But if you are doing wrong, then you will have cause to fear them; it is not for nothing that they hold the power of the sword, for they are God’s agents of punishment, for retribution on the offender. That is why you are obliged to submit. It is an obligation imposed not merely by fear of retribution but by conscience. That is also why you pay taxes. The authorities are in God’s service and to these duties they devote their energies.”

This section, if taken literally as fundamentalists are apt to do, appears to prohibit any kind of resistance against the policies of a government, including peaceful protests, petitions, and writings. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia appears to endorse that position, for he quoted this same Romans 13 passage in his article, “God’s Justice and Ours,” to prove that Christian doctrine states “government—however you want to limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God.”[53] Government is not only the “minister of God” but it has the authority to “execute God’s wrath.” 

The power of the sword is surely the power to kill or maim and certainly the power to intimidate. Scalia believes the power of the sword in this passage is “unmistakably a reference to the death penalty.” 

At this point, Scalia demonstrates the absolute brilliance of the judicial rule created by neo-conservatives that requires a judge to determine the “original intent” of the writers of the Constitution. As Scalia himself describes it, “The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead…It means today not what current society…thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”[54] Once the original thinking is determined, the judge can enforce the Constitution only as a document that is bound by the time zone in which a particular passage was written. 

When I first read articles by authors who were exposing the Dominionists’ intention to extend the death penalty to cover “crimes” like adultery, rebelliousness, homosexuality, witchcraft or effeminateness, I found the death penalty extension goal to be laughable. It couldn’t be done in America. 

I was wrong. I now realize that we are very close to seeing the Dominionists achieve their goal. All they need to do is to appoint a majority of judges who will adhere to the “dead Constitution” construction rule of Scalia (or what Harry Jaffa called “the original intent” construction rule). At the point when the Dominionist’s control the judiciary—that judiciary can roll back America’s body of legal jurisprudence to a century or more ago as Law Professor Patricia J. Williams pointed out.[55] 

Scalia spilled the beans in his article, “God’s Justice and Ours” when he explained how he would determine whether the death penalty is constitutional or not. His reasoning goes like this: since the death penalty was “clearly permitted when the Eighth Amendment [which prohibits ‘cruel and unusual punishments’] was adopted,” and at that time the death penalty was applied for all felonies—including, for example, the felony of horse-thieving, “so it is clearly permitted today.”[56] Justice Scalia left no doubt that if the crime of horse stealing carried a death penalty today in the United States—he would find that law constitutional. 

All a willing Dominionist Republican controlled congress need do to extend the death penalty to those people who practice witchcraft, adultery, homosexuality, heresy, etcetera, is to find those particular death penalty laws existing as of November 3, 1791, and re-instate them. No revolution is required. That’s why the battle over Bush’s judicial appointments is so crucial to the future of the America we know and love. And that’s why the clock is running out on freedom loving Americans.

Scalia himself appears to be a Dominionist, for he believes that Romans 13 represents the correct view— that government authority is derived from God and not from the people; he asserts his view was the consensus of Western thought until recent times. Like Pat Robertson, he laments that the biblical perspective was upset by “the emergence of democracy.”[57] Taking his cue from Leo Strauss, Scalia argued, “a democratic government, being nothing more than the composite will of its individual citizens, has no more moral power or authority than they do as individuals.” Democracy, according to Scalia, creates problems, “It fosters civil disobedience.”[58]

As Patricia Williams wrote: “God bless America. The Constitution is dead.”[59]

Dominionism’s Theocratic Views

What would a “reconstructed” America look like under the Dominionists?  K.L. Gentry, a Dominionist himself, suggests the following “elements of a theonomic approach to civic order,” which I strongly suggest should be compared to the Texas GOP platform of 2002, which reveals that we are not just talking about imaginary ideas but some things are already proposed on Republican agendas.[60] Dominionism’s concept of government according to Gentry is as follows:

“1. It obligates government to maintain just monetary policies ... [thus prohibiting] fiat money, fractional reserve banking, and deficit spending.

“2. It provides a moral basis for elective government officials. ...

“3. It forbids undue, abusive taxation of the rich. ...

“4. It calls for the abolishing of the prison system and establishing a system of just restitution. ...

“5. A theonomic approach also forbids the release, pardoning, and paroling of murderers by requiring their execution. ...

“6. It forbids industrial pollution that destroys the value of property. ...

“7. It punishes malicious, frivolous malpractice suits. ...

“8. It forbids abortion rights. ... Abortion is not only a sin, but a crime, and, indeed, a capital crime.”[61]

The fourth item in Gentry’s list, “abolishing of the prison system and establishing a system of just restitution” has been worked on extensively by Dominionist Gary North, who holds a doctorate degree in Economics. North has written volumes of books, essays and articles, (many of which falsely predicted that the year 2000 computer problem would bring down modern civilization.) He is most famous among Dominionists for reconciling economic theory with Old Testament passages.  

Gary North describes the ‘just restitution’ system of the bible, which happens to reinstitute slavery, like this: 

“At the other end of the curve, the poor man who steals is eventually caught and sold into bondage under a successful person. His victim receives payment; he receives training; his buyer receives a stream of labor services. If the servant is successful and buys his way out of bondage, he re-enters society as a disciplined man, and presumably a self-disciplined man. He begins to accumulate wealth.”[62]

The Immorality of the Medicare and Medicaid Programs

If the blithe acceptance of slavery isn’t shocking enough, here is one of the coldest attitudes I ever heard expressed in an interview on American television. I can’t help reading it in light of the coercive bullying tactics resorted to by Dominionist leaders in the House of Representatives to get the necessary votes to pass the controversial new Medicare Prescription Drug law.[63] The following interview reveals the deep seated hatred Dominionists have against governmental medical assistance to the elderly. The interview was conducted on August 1, 1985 with Dr. Walter Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University and author of thirty-five books. Danuta Soderman was a co-host on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. She began the interview with a question about Medicare and Medicaid fraud, suggesting cost possibly “millions and billions” of dollars:

Williams: “Well, I think that the abuse and fraud in and of itself is a relatively minor problem. That is, the bigger problem is the whole concept of funding somebody’s medical care by a third party. And I might also mention here, that is, I saw in the audience many older and senior citizens. Now whose responsibility is it to take care of those people? I think it lies with their children and it also lies with themselves. That is, I think Christians should recognize that charity is good. I mean charity, when you reach into your pocket to help your fellow man for medical care or for food or to give them housing. But what the government is doing in order to help these older citizens is not charity at all. It is theft. That is, the government is using power to confiscate property that belongs to one American and give, or confiscate their money, and provide services for another set of Americans to whom it does not belong. That is the moral question that Christians should face with not only Medicare, Medicaid. But many other programs as well….Well, people should have insurance. But I would say if our fellow man is found in need, does not have enough, well that’s a role for the church, that’s a role for the family, that’s a role for private institutions to take care of these things.” 

Danuta Soderman: “I thought it was interesting you talked about Medicare and Medicaid as not being a moral issue. A lot of people would think that to want to eliminate the program is rather uncompassionate—that there is something immoral about taking away something that people are relying so heavily upon, but you said that there is no moral issue here.” 

Williams: “I think the moral issue runs the other way. That is, we have to ask ourselves, ‘What is the moral basis of confiscating the property of one American and giving it to another American to whom it does not belong for whatever reason?’ That is, I think we Americans have to ask ourselves is there something that can justify a legalized theft? And I think that even if the person is starving in the street that act, in and of itself, doesn’t justify my taking money from somebody else.”

How to Destroy the Social Security Program

On August 14, 1985, Pat Robertson unveiled his ingenious program on how to get rid of Social Security. The plan amazingly resembles sections of the Bush Administration’s Medicare Prescription Drug bill passed in December of 2003. Robertson, however, outlined what to do twenty years ago as follows:

1.  “We should say to all the elderly, ‘You’re going to be taken care of. The government’s going to pay you. Don’t worry about it. [You’ll] get your Social Security like you’re expecting, ‘cause you’re counting on it.” 

2. “There should be a gradual moving [up] of [the retirement] age to reflect the fact that we’re healthier and we live longer and people should have dignity and be allowed to work a little bit longer.” 

3. “The last thing we should do is to begin to let the younger workers slowly but surely go into private programs where the money is tax sheltered and over the years build up their own money and that would in turn, through the intermediary organizations, banks, insurance companies, would invest in American industry. They would buy plants and equipment, put people to work and it would help a tremendous boom. Imagine …$100 billion dollars a year flowing into American industry. It would be marvelous.”

Wealth is a Sign of God’s Favor, Poverty is a Sign of God’s Disfavor

How did the Dominionists get so far from the Lord’s edict to help the poor, the sick, and the elderly? Using the text of Deuteronomy 28, which is a list of God’s blessings and curses, Robertson and other Dominionists believe that the chapter reveals God’s covenanted economic law. God only bestows “material wealth or blessings” upon those who are among his elect and he does so because these are the individuals and nations who obey his commandments and laws. So what about the poor? Dominionist Gary North explains it this way:

“God is sovereign over the poor. He raises them up—not all of them, but some of them. ‘The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and lifteth up.’”[64]

I grant that the verse cited leaves government assistance out of the picture. North claims, the blessings and sanctions of Deuteronomy 28 are historical. He says, “They are predictable. Covenantal rebellion by a society will lead to God’s imposition of these sanctions.”[65] North then ties the package up neatly: “The blessings and cursings of God under the Mosaic Covenant were sure. They were not disconnected from God’s law. There was a bedrock objectivity that united covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers.”[66] 

To understand what North is talking about, we have to read a portion of the text of Deuteronomy 28:

“The Lord shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee…and the Lord shall make thee the head and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath…”

A conclusion drawn by the scripture itself is that a nation who follows the commandments or laws of God will be “high above all nations of the earth…and all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of thee.” On the other hand, the Dominionists believe those who are poor, sick, and weak are so situated because God’s wrath has been visited upon them—they are the “wicked” of this earth and they deserve the wrath of God because their behavior is bringing the entire nation under condemnation. 

The litany of the curses of God on those who do not keep his laws and commandments are among the most horrendous descriptions of torture in literature. Here is a sample from Deuteronomy 28:

“The Lord shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies…thy carcass shall be food unto all fowls of the air…The Lord will smite thee with [boils]…and with …tumors, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed. The Lord shall smite thee with madness and blindness and astonishment of heart [fear]; thou shalt grope at noonday; thou shalt not prosper in thy ways; and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore…thou shalt betroth a wife and another man shall lie with her; thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein, and thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof; thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face and shall not be restored to thee; they sheep shall be given unto thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them. Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thine hand. The fruit of thy land, and all thy labors, shall a nation whom thou knowest not eat up, and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed always…”

Gary North explained: “The point of Deuteronomy 28 is this: the way to wealth, both individual and corporate, is through systematic adherence to God’s Bible-revealed law.”[67]

Hence the idea that should a nation minister to the poor or attempt to lift the poor out of poverty or save people from poverty and ill health, that nation is contravening the will of Almighty God and such legislation is contrary to the laws of God. It is only one step further to say that if this is God’s attitude toward the poor, it is morally wrong to help them. So it’s easy to see how Social Security and Medicare are viewed by Dominionists as “evil” programs that rob money from some citizens to enrich others. 

There’s one other little trap for the unwary Dominionist; when a government is seen to be the enforcer of the Deuteronomic laws, it’s easy to take the next step and say that it is the duty of the “Christian” Dominionist government to subdue the wicked of the world, especially the vast American middle class, because its collective licentious life style is bringing the nation down as a whole; therefore the government must “minister the wrath of God” against the citizens of America as punishment for “rebelliousness.” That the entire scheme is an unending circular argument, escapes the notice of the rank and file sitting in the pews.

In their new role as ministers of God’s wrath against this nation, Dominionist political strategists are aware they must not be seen as being cruel and hateful. So at first, until the population is completely subdued and dominated by the elect, Dominionists are forced to devise laws that will create the political, social, and medical environment that will ultimately ensure that the wicked are punished—but it will appear—at first blush to be a gift. The truth, of course, according to Machiavellian/Straussian dictates, must be hidden from the population; not just once or twice, but over and over again.

In the end, Dominionism should be viewed as a backboard that bounces the New Deal and FDR’s social safety net programs, social security (as well as Medicare) into its political opposite: laissez-faire economics (the motto of 18th century French economists who protested excessive government regulation of industry.) Laissez-faire is a doctrine opposing governmental interference (as by regulation or subsidy) in economic affairs beyond the minimum necessary for the maintenance of peace and property rights. Dominionism opposes the licensing and regulating power of the government.

One last comment on Pat Robertson. On November 3, 1986, the 700 Club ran a piece on the use of computers in counting votes. Robertson ended his Perspective by saying there should be some kind of control on computer voting to assure an honest count. How prescient this man is! And how worrisome his prescience is.

Who Is on the Side of Freedom? Let Him Speak Now!

There is an infection, a religious and political pathology that has corrupted our churches. Those we trusted the most have embraced evil. That knowledge is almost more than we can bear. Who among us will stand in the gap and make up the hedge to save our nation?

When we look for help—for the wealthy leaders with the means to help rescue America, we find they have all defected to the Dominionists. They do not realize that if the middle class of America is wiped out—there will be no one to buy their cars, their computers or their products. Only one or two brave souls like George Soros have made massive contributions to combat the think tanks and the organized political machine of the Dominionists. The corporate press lies sleeping, not realizing they will be allowed to report only what they are instructed to report. 

Freedom is under siege. There is only one free major political party still left in America. I know the Democrats look chaotic, unfocused and generally unsmooth and thank God, unprogramed. Make no mistake, these plain ordinary citizens are holding the candles that together form the great torch of liberty. For all their faults, they love America and they love freedom and they love the Bill of Rights. America’s independents, its true Conservatives, its sensible Republicans, and its Libertarians must join hands together with the homely Democrats and take back America for all Americans. 

The livelihood of the working people of America is at stake. The Dominionists have lost more American jobs in the last three years than since the days of Herbert Hoover. And now they want to eliminate the minimum wage laws too. America’s unions have helped to create a better life for millions of workers. The Dominionists want to break all unions apart (especially the teacher’s union). As Americans, we love our schools and are proud of our educational system. The Dominionists want to destroy all public education in America and force Americans to be educated in their religious schools. Americans love our culture and the arts. The Dominionists want to destroy that culture.

The election of 2004 is not just another election. It is the battle of the century. It is the gravest political war since the Civil War, which if lost, spells the end of Independence Day and every right in the Bill of Rights that we have fought so hard to preserve. Is there an American, regardless of his or her party, who would not fight for our Democracy? It’s in jeopardy now. Our friends and cousins in Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand and scores of other nations have seen our jeopardy and have been crying out for months and days and years to wake up America! 

Let me see your face and look into your eyes. Let me hear you say, “There is no difference between the two parties.” May God help us and grant us discernment when we vote.

Notes to The Despoiling of America 

(By clicking on the endnote number, you will be returned to the referenced text)

[1] “Religious Right Finds Its Center in Oval Office,” Washington Post, December 24, 2001.

[2] Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, Viking Press, 2004, at page 224.

[3] Antonin Scalia, “God’s Justice and Ours,” in First Things 123 (May 2002): 17-21, http://www.firsthings.com/ftissues/ft0205/articles/scalia.html

[4] Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, University of Chicago Press, 1978, at page 9. The actual quote is: “…[O]ne ought not to say to someone whom one wants to kill, ‘Give me your gun, I want to kill you with it,’ but merely, ‘Give me your gun,’ for once you have the gun in your hand, you can satisfy your desire.”

[5] Osha Gray Davidson, “Dirty Secrets,” Mother Jones, September/October 2003 at page 53. “The Bush administration has been gutting key sections of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, laws that have traditionally had bipartisan support and have done more to protect the health of Americans than any other environmental legislation.” The subtitle reads: “No president has gone after the nation’s environmental laws with the same fury as George W. Bush and none has been so adept at staying under the radar.”

[6] Alan Sager, Ph.D. and Deborah Socolar, M.P.H. “61 Percent of Medicare’s New Prescription Drug Subsidy Is Windfall Profit to Drug Makers,” Health Reform Program, Boston University School of Public Health.  http://www.healthreformprogram.org You may read the report in a PDF file by clicking here:

[7] See Pat Robertson’s prescription on how to eliminate Social Security on page 27.

[8] Pat Robertson ironically outlined the drastic effects that follow rash government spending in 1985. He stated that it will wipe out the middle class and destroy the Social Security and Medicare programs. (Taped and transcribed by the author.) Read Robertson’s description by clicking here: http://www.yuricareport.com/Campaign2004/PatRobertsonCongressBuyingVotes.html

[9] If my words appear extreme, consider that in January of 2004, Walter Cronkite broke a lifetime rule, saying, “I must speak out.” Mr. Cronkite continued, “I am deeply disturbed by the dangerous and growing influence of people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on our nation’s political leaders.”

Former Governor of Delaware, Russ Peterson in his new book, Patriots, Stand Up!, wrote, “Our cherished American way of life is under attack by the far right-wing Republicans who are now running the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. This is the product of a conspiracy that has been growing over the past few decades through the use of evil tactics and strategies, lies and deceptions to transform America.

“Deception is now the hallmark of the Bush administration. Read of the frightening chicanery in furthering an imperial strategy, nurturing the military-industrial complex, waging war on the environment, plunging the nation into debt, demeaning the needy, antagonizing the world and using terrorism to frighten and exploit.”

The author calls on patriots to apply the principles of democracy now to retake America from a conservative elite that controls the country.

The author’s background: Russ Peterson, scientist, citizen activist, former executive with the DuPont Co., Republican Governor of Delaware, assistant to Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, head of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality under Presidents Nixon and Ford, head of the Office of Technology Assessment, reporting to six Republican and six Democratic members of Congress, president of the National Audubon Society, internationally acclaimed environmental leader, United Nations goodwill ambassador, and faculty member at Dartmouth College, Carleton College and the University of Wisconsin Madison. His numerous national and international awards include 15 honorary doctorates. In 1996 he became a Democrat. http://www.governorpeterson.org/

[10] “Christian Reconstructionism: Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence,” by Frederick Clarkson, The Public Eye Magazine, Vol. VIII, Nos. 1 & 2, March/June 1994, Part 1 of a four part series.  See http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v08n1/chrisre1.html

[11] Gary North, Ph.D., in Econonmics, the President of the Institute for Christian Economics (ICE) and is also the son-in-law of R.J. Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism, advises his followers not to give out his literature to everyone—just to interested people. “Let word of mouth tell the story. You need not become very visible if you choose not to.” From Replacing Evil With Good   http://reformed-theology.org/ice/books/conspiracy/html/8.htm on page 9 of 11. For a complete understanding of how good and evil are inverted and the "conspiriators" become us--see this entire collection titled: "Conspiracy: A Biblical View" by Gary North at http://reformed-theology.org/ice/books/conspiracy/index.html Click on each section of the Table of Contents at the site. This web site can be reached only by entering from the root directory.

[12] See Joan Bokaer’s article in “The Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party,” a public information project from TheocracyWatch.org  http://www.4religious-right.info/taking_over.htm

[13] Ben Kinchlow, co-host of the 700 Club with Pat Robertson, was made Vice President of CBN in charge of CBN’s charities program “Operation Blessing.” On March 27, 1985, while criticizing farmers for wanting a government bailout he said: “What’s wrong in this country is that so many people have substituted the government for God. Instead of looking to God to supply their needs, they’re looking to government.” Railing at financially stressed people was very common on the show.

[14] Tim LaHaye predicted on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club show on September 25, 1985 that 110,000 evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal churches could sponsor one person per church to run for office and win, that in a decade they would hold every office in the U.S. At the time, he said there were only 97,000 public offices in the U.S. so “we would have more Christians in office than there are positions.” By 1994, for the first time in forty years, Republicans regained control of Congress. Similarly Ralph Reed predicted that by the year 2,000 they would control Congress. Gary North wrote in 1985: “I propose a program. Some variant of this program must be adopted if we are to have any meaningful hope in recapturing the machinery of civil government, the media, and the educational institutions. It will be done. It has already begun. How long it will take is problematical; I think we will begin to see major victories before the year 2005.” http://reformed-theology.org/ice/books/conspiracy/html/8.htm at page 5 of 11 pages.

[15] Francis Schaeffer originally appeared on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson in 1982. The series of interviews with Schaeffer were repeated on the show in the week of July 7, 1986 as Robertson presented the legal and biblical foundations for Christian political action. Francis Schaeffer, however, died between the first and second airing. The Schaeffer interviews were tape recorded and transcribed, my quotes are from my transcript. The accuracy of my transcript can be compared to the video tapes of the shows. At the time, People for the American Way were recording the shows and establishing a Pat Robertson 700 Club library for future reference.

[16] All 700 Club quotes in this article were recorded and transcribed by the author and her assistant unless otherwise indicated.

[17] Although neither Robertson nor Schaeffer used the words “Dominionism” or “dominion” in this interview series they used the word “dominant” when asking which culture was dominant in the United States: the Christian culture or the humanistic culture. They asserted the humanistic culture was the dominant force in America and “Christians” had to regain dominance.

[18] The most successful ministers knew the psychological importance of creating “enemies” that were attacking the church. Jerry Falwell maintains the rule: “To be successful, keep a good fight going all the time.”

[19] Psychiatrist Scott Peck has written about the phenomena groups resort to almost universally in his book, The People of the Lie, “There are profound forces at work within a group to keep its individual members together and in line...Probably the most powerful of these group cohesive forces is narcissism…group pride….A less benign but practically universal form of group narcissism is what might be called ‘enemy creation,’ or hatred of the ‘out-group.’”

[20] “War on Secular Society” at http://www.4religious-right.info/introduction2.htm

[21] In short, they needed a religion of their own to justify evil acts and to counter the political acceptance by many Christians who were attracted to the communal and “communistic” principles of the early church (Acts 2:42-47), where the early Christians sold all their possessions, gave them to the needy, and held “all things [in] common.” Such Christian ideas were a direct threat to capitalism’s future robber barons. How could great fortunes be amassed if one had to give it all away to the poor and follow Jesus? (Matthew 19:16-30.)

[22] Pat Robertson is particularly adept at changing the issue from questioning an aggressively religious political agenda into an attack on religion. The Constitution prohibits a religious test for office in America (Article 6). However, a battle over the nomination of Herb Ellingwood in 1985 to the position of Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy caused a fire storm. (That office screens candidates for the federal judiciary.) During the same period dominionists like Ellingwood and Tim LaHaye were advocating that twenty-five percent of all government positions should be handed to Christian fundamentalists (dominionists) since they made up twenty-five percent of the nation’s population. Pat Schroeder, former Democratic congresswoman from Colorado and chairman of the Civil Service Committee strongly opposed the view as a religious quota system and a violation of Article VI of the Constitution. She said the questions that were asked of judicial candidates, apparently prepared by Ellingwood, amounted to a religious test for office. She spoke on the Phil Donahue show on (September 6, 1985):

“If you look at some of the questions that are being asked by some of the senators of judges, they don’t have to do with their background, their training, whether or not they understand the law, they have to do with personal beliefs. That’s not where we have been in the past, and that’s a very dangerous turn…”

During the same period of time (August-September) Pat Robertson easily turned the legitimate questioning of Herb Ellingwood’s agenda into an attack on Christianity by framing it this way on his 700 Club Show on August 9, 1985:

“Can an evangelical Christian hold high office in the United States of America? Now that is the question. Or are evangelical Christians going to be discriminated against? And indeed will there be a religious test for public office which disqualifies anybody who speaks to a religious group? . . . .Herb Ellingwood is Chairman right now of the Merit Protection Review Board and he has done a superb job. He was the former legal counsel to President Reagan in California and has worked closely with Ed Meese for years. He’s been a very distinguished attorney. It just seems like this campaign of assassination that goes on against good men like that should be brought to a stop. . .And if you feel that Christians ought to be allowed to serve in positions of responsibility in the government…and you don’t think that Christians should be discriminated against…here’s the number of the White House: 202 446-7639…” (700 Club 8-9-85)

[23] One cannot help comparing this passage with the fact that 27,000 bombs were dropped on Iraq in the 2003 air war and in a demonstration of cold indifference, the Bush administration ignored the advice of prominent archeologists to protect Iraq’s museums, which contained the greatest collection of ancient relics, art, and ancient treasures in the world, and in so doing, allowed the looting—the despoiling—of that nation’s treasures.

[24]Again, because we will learn in this article that Machiavelli is a handbook in the Bush administration, one must ask if the George W. Bush administration perceives despoiling as a plan of action to control the American populace. The question must be asked.

[25] See Kevin Phillips, author of American Dynasty, Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush. Viking Press, 2004, at page 239-240.

[26] Ibid. at page 321.

[27] Robertson’s and Ledeen’s relationship continues.  For a recent CBN interview of Ledeen conducted by Pat Robertson and transcribed by CBN.com go to: http://cbn.com/CBNNews/News/030623e.asp?option=print

[28] Ledeen tried to arrange the sale of arms to Iran in order to divert the profits to the Contra militants who were fighting the Nicaraguan government’s Sandinistas. However, Congress had voted to cut off U.S. aid to the Contras and therefore any such transaction was illegal.

[29] William O. Beeman’s article, “Who Is Michael Ledeen?” was published on May 8, 2003 and may be read at the alternet.org: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15860

[30] Gerard Thomas Straub worked at CBS for eight years before joining the 700 Club as executive producer. After leaving CBN’s employment, he went to work for ABC’s “General Hospital” as associate producer. His 1986 book, Salvation for Sale, (Prometheus Books, N.Y.) offers insights to how Pat Robertson conducted business off camera from the perspective of an insider. The dichotomy between his public friendly “pastoral” role and his actual business conduct is stark evidence that he understood Machiavelli’s rule that only appearance counts. Straub wrote: “In reality Pat is a pompous pope of the video Vatican of Christian broadcasting, and he rules his empire with absolute authority. He does not tolerate debate, discussions, or dissent…His television followers never get to see the tough-minded, hard-driving cut-throat leader.” In addition, over the years, Pat Robertson revealed his Machiavellian political philosophy repeatedly and openly on his show in discussions of how to handle foreign policy and in his ruthless approach to the poor and needy of America.

[31] On June 19, 1985: Danuta Soderman, the second member of Pat Robertson’s daily team, asked Pat Robertson how the United States should deal with middle-east terrorist groups: “Speaking about being decisive in dealing with terrorists’ groups, yesterday you offered some opinion on how Iran should be one of the places we should target our energies on; any other thoughts on this?

Robertson: “Just like the last guest in that clip our news department did, he said it’s pretty much undeclared war. Khomeini has declared war against the United States. He has told people that if they die against the infidel, they go to heaven. The Islamic Jihad is controlled out of Iran, and the other factor of course is Syria, which is giving some sanctuary to all of these people. Syria controls the Becca Valley now— practically all of it, since Israel withdrew its forces. So up in the Becca Valley the Shiite Muslims from Iran are forcing the Lebanese women to wear veils and practice the various extreme views of the Islamic faith in the Shiite traditions. We’ve got to go after the source. If you want to go after a snake you don’t cut inches off his tail.”

Robertson also focused on the Becca Valley on July 12, 1985 and on several other occasions. The refrain has not changed in nineteen years. A recent January 2004 article published in the Jerusalem Post states Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is considering invading the Becca Valley, which is still controlled by Syria.

[32] See: Project for the New American Century “Principles”: http://newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm and “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” http://newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm

[33] William O. Beeman’s article, “Who Is Michael Ledeen?” was published on May 8, 2003 and may be read at the alternet.org: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15860

[34]The BBC article may be read at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3031803.stm The longer and more important article, “Veteran neo-con advisor moves on Iran,”  by Jim Lobe, writing for the Asia Times can be found at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF26Ak03.html Another very interesting article is “Flirting with Fascism: Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right,” by John Laughland and published in the June 30, 2003 issue of The American Conservative. You may read this article at: http://www.amconmag.com/06_30_03/print/featureprint.html  And for a recent interview with Ledeen, conducted by Pat Robertson on CBN.com, go to endnote 14 above.

[35] As quoted by Jim Lobe in “Veteran neo-con advisor moves on Iran” published in the Asia Times. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF26Ak03.html

[36] Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, St. Martin’s Press, 1999 at page 1.

[37] From Thoughts on Machiavelli by Leo Strauss, University of Chicago Press, 1958 at pp. 10-11.

[38] Ibid. pp. 176-178.

[39] The only example of this possibility I have found so far is in the work of Dominionist Gary North who wrote tirelessly on the correlations between conservative economic principles and the Old Testament laws and rules. See Gary North, “The Covenantal Wealth of Nations,” from Biblical Economics Today, Vol. XXI, No 2, February/March 1999. It can be read at: http://reformed-theology.org/ice/newslet/bet/bet99.02.htm See also an article by J. Ligon Duncan, III, “Moses’ Law for Modern Government: The Intellectual and Sociological Origins of the Christian Reconstructionist Movement,” Premise, Vol. II, Number 5, May 27, 1995, page 4 and on the web at: http://capo.org/premise/95/may/ssha2.html Ligon states: “...Reconstructionism is attempting to make a systematic and exegetical connection between the Bible and the conservative ideology of limited government and free market economics. For instance, Gary North has written volume after volume deriving principles of economics from his studies of the Pentateuch.”

[40] Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, St. Martin’s Press, 1999 at page 11-13.

[41] Shadia Drury is quoted in an analysis by Jim Lobe for the Inter Press Service News Agency. http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=18038

[42] Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, St. Martin’s Press, 1999 at page 23.

[43] I’m indebted to Patricia J. Williams, Professor of law at Columbia University for this insight. See her article, “Infallible Justice,” The Nation; October 7, 2002 at http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20021007&s=williams   Not only is the concept of “original intent brilliant and revolutionary, it in fact goes further than any other political format to legitimize the conversion of present day jurisprudence back to the judicial weltanschauung (world view) of eighteenth century jurists. It is the key factor in the Dominionist’s intent to establish biblical law over all Americans. Two Supreme Court justices subscribe to it already. In other words, as Law Professor Patricia J. Williams has pointed out, the rule would effectively repeal most of the judicial decisions made in the last century.

[44] Ibid at page 106.

[45] Ibid.

[46] See the excerpts from my book, The New Messiahs which trace the political machinations of the Dominionists within the Republican Party and the plot to take over all three branches of the government of the United States.

[47] J. Ligon Duncan, III “Moses Law for Modern Government: The Intellectual and Sociological Origins of the Christian Reconstructionist Movement,” Premise, Vol. II Number 5, May 27, 1995. http://capo.org/premise/95/may/ssha2.html.

[48] Social Darwinism is the discredited extension of Darwin’s evolutionary theory to the human social condition. Social Darwinism takes Charles Darwin’s concept, “the survival of the fittest,” and applies it to the idea that the ladder to material wealth and to the “good life” may be climbed only after one has successfully engaged in group battles and conflicts and prevailed in the pit of life by drop kicking one’s opponents. Those who climb out of the pit and up the ladder become the socially recognized victors in the competition and are considered biologically superior to those who fail. The illogical fallout from this concept is the circular argument that the existence of a socially elite class must be proof that those who possess wealth and power are necessarily superior to those in economic classes below them.

[49] Dominionists may argue with some credibility that they do believe in helping the poor; however, they want churches to undertake that task and adamantly fight against government social aid programs funded from tax monies—unless of course—it is a so-called “faith based” initiative. Pat Robertson forgot his objections to the government handing out money and gratefully accepted the $500,000 Mr. Bush sent him early in his administration for “good faith based charitable work.” Regardless of their protestations, however, the churches of America cannot and do not have the billions of dollars to provide the social safety net for the poor, elderly and sick among America’s population. In 1985, for example, Robertson bragged CBN gave $50 million worth of food, clothes, and supplies to 8.5 million people, but that was what he called “leveraged” contributions, in which CBN had joined with other charities. Robertson admitted they gave only $10 million. Deducting the $2 million of CBN’s contributions to the Contras in Central America, CBN’s total contribution amounted to only about eighty-eight cents to every hungry, needy person he said CBN helped.

[50] Pat Robertson wrote in The Secret Kingdom: “Unhappily, evangelical Christians have for too long reduced the born-again experience to the issue of being ‘saved.’ Salvation is an important issue, obviously, and must never be deemphasized. But rebirth must be seen as a beginning, not an arrival. It provides access to the invisible world, the kingdom of God, of which we are to learn and experience and then share with others. Jesus Himself said it clearly before His ascension: ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.’ [Matthew 28:18-20 New American Standard Bible]. The commission was to make followers and learners—converts—and to teach them the principles of the kingdom. Entry into the body of believers was not enough. They were to learn how to live in this world…The invisible was to rule the visible. Christ has authority over both.” Emphasis is Robertson’s. (p. 51)

[51] James Poniewozik, “10 Questions for Sean Hannity,” Time Magazine, Nov. 11, 2002.

[52] Mark S. Zaid, “The New, Unabashed McCarthyism: A Review of Treason: Liberal Treachery From The Cold War To The War On Terrorism Originally published by Findlaw.com and reprinted with permission at the Yurica Report.com:   http://www.yuricareport.com/RevisitedBks/ZaidonCoulterTreason.htm

[53] Antonin Scalia, “God’s Justice and Ours,” in First Things 123 (May 2002): 17-21, http://www.firsthings.com/ftissues/ft0205/articles/scalia.html

[54] Ibid.

[55] Patricia J. Williams, Professor of law at Columbia University. See her article, “Infallible Justice,” The Nation; October 7, 2002 at http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20021007&s=williams

[56] Ibid.

[57] Antonin Scalia, “God’s Justice and Ours,” in First Things 123 (May 2002): 17-21, http://www.firsthings.com/ftissues/ft0205/articles/scalia.html

[58] Ibid.

[59] Patricia J. Williams, Professor of law at Columbia University. See her article, “Infallible Justice,” The Nation; October 7, 2002 at http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20021007&s=williams

[60] The platform of the Republican Party of Texas may be found at: http://www.4religious-right.info/texas_gop.htm. Here are excerpts: “The Republican Party of Texas reaffirms the United States of America is a Christian Nation ...

“1. GOVERNMENT:  We reclaim freedom of religious expression in public on government property, and freedom from government interference. Support government display of Ten Commandments.

Dispel the "myth" of the separation of church and state. A strong and vibrant private sector [should be] unencumbered by excessive government regulation. Oppose Campaign Finance Reform. Oppose any form of gun control. Abolish: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; Position of Surgeon General; EPA; Department of Energy; Department of Housing and Urban Development; Department of Education; Department of Commerce and Labor; National Endowment for the Arts.

“2. ECONOMY:  Abolish the dollar in favor of the gold standard.  Abolish the IRS. Eliminate income tax, inheritance tax, gift tax, capital gains, corporate income tax, payroll tax and property tax. Repeal minimum wage law. ... Gradually phase out Social Security tax for a system of private pensions.

“3. UNITED NATIONS:   .. We immediately rescind our membership in, as well as all financial and military contributions to the United Nations." We should " ... evict the United Nations from the United States and eliminate any further participation.

“4. FAMILY: We believe that traditional marriage is a legal and moral commitment between a man and a woman. We recognize that the family is the foundational unit of a healthy society and consists of those related by blood, marriage, or adoption. The family is responsible for its own welfare, education, moral training, conduct, and property.

     “The practice of sodomy tears at the heart of our society... The party oppose[s] decriminalization of sodomy. Oppose all forms of abortion - even in cases of rape or incest. We unequivocally oppose United States Senate ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

“5. EDUCATION: We call for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education and the prohibition of the transfer of any of its functions to any other federal agency.

     “Support official prayer in public schools Oppose Early Childhood Development Programs. We support ... a program based upon biblical principles... Terminate bilingual education. Since Secular Humanism is recognized by the United States Supreme Court as a religion ... Secular Humanism should be subjected to the same state and federal laws as any other recognized religions.

“6. THE ENVIRONMENT:  Oppose the myth of global warming.  Reaffirm the belief in the fundamental right of an individual to use property without governmental interference. Oppose EPA management of Texas air quality.

“7. THE MIDDLE EAST:  ... Jerusalem is the capital of Israel ... therefore, the United States should move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.”

To read the complete Texas GOP Platform click here to go to a PDF file: more

[61] J. Ligon Duncan, III “Moses Law for Modern Government: The Intellectual and Sociological Origins of the Christian Reconstructionist Movement,” Premise, Vol. II Number 5, May 27, 1995. http://capo.org/premise/95/may/ssha2.html.

[62] Gary North, “The Covenantal Wealth of Nations,” from Biblical Economics Today, Vol. XXI, No. 2, February/March 1999. It can be read at: http://reformed-theology.org/ice/newslet/bet/bet99.02.htm

[63] Katherine Yurica, “Rogue Republican Dons in Congress Tear Up the Constitution, Exclude Democrats and Accept a New Title: The Godfathers,” at http://www.yuricareport.com/Corruption/RogueRepublicanBillsUnconstitutional.htm

[64] Gary North, “The Covenantal Wealth of Nations,” from Biblical Economics Today, Vol. XXI, No. 2, February/March 1999. It can be read at: http://reformed-theology.org/ice/newslet/bet/bet99.02.htm

[65] Ibid.

[66] Ibid.

[67] Ibid.

Why did it happen? An attempt to explain the unexplainable [By Rahul Bedi, Janes Information Group, September 14, 2001]

The origins of last Tuesday's attack on the United States arguably have their roots in the 1970s. At this time, during the height of the Cold War, a Washington shamed by defeat in Vietnam embarked on a deep, collaborative enterprise to contain the Soviet Union.

The genesis of the policy came to a head following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when President Jimmy Carter set up a team headed by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to employ its 'death by a thousands cuts' policy on the tottering Soviet empire, especially the oil- and mineral-rich Central Asian Republics then ruled by Moscow.

A marriage of convenience

Thus began the US-love affair with Islamists in which short-term profit motivated all parties concerned, but the deadly ramifications of which are haunting the world today and the effects of which were brought home starkly to America earlier this week.

This "marriage of convenience," consummated in an alliance with Islamic fundamentalists, particularly suited the Pakistani military junta of General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, which was looking for greater strategic depth and economic influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

The flip side of the wily general's agenda was that this alliance with the US would also strengthen Pakistan's military capabilities with respect to rival India with the induction of sophisticated US weaponry at throwaway prices. This was also the time when Pakistan made great strides in developing its covert nuclear capability through a combination of clandestine transactions, outright theft and forging closer military and nuclear relations with China, all connived at by Washington.

The US-led "proxy war" model was based on the premise that Islamists made good anti-Communist allies. The plan was diabolically simple: to hire, train and control motivated Islamic mercenaries. The trainers were mainly from Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and Navy SEALS in various US training establishments. Mass training of Afghan mujahideen was subsequently conducted by the Pakistan Army under the supervision of the elite Special Services Group (SSG), specialists in covert action behind enemy lines and the ISI.

Pakistan's current military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, spent seven years with the SSG and was also involved in training Afghan mujahideen. Provided he co-operates, he will prove a useful guide to the US in hunting down terrorists inside Afghanistan.

The entire anti-Soviet operation, headed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and held together on the ground by the ISI, was supported by generous donations from the US State Department, Western governments, Saudi Arabia and a handful of commando experts from the UK Special Air Service (SAS), while surveillance training, communication and first aid help came from France.

Israel provided weapons like rifles, tanks and even artillery pieces, captured during its many wars with the Arab states, while Sudan and Algeria contributed committed mujahideen and religious motivation. The entire operation was, inexplicably but amusingly, christened the Safari Club.

Fallout from the fighting

The fallout of this "holy war," which ended with the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, brought in its wake a series of distinctly "unholy wars" and "epidemics of violence" in places like Kashmir in northern India. It also brought grave unrest to the Central Asian and other former Soviet Republics like Chechnya as well as to North Africa. Now, it has been brought to the US, and to the rest of the world.

Over the past decade Afghanistan has been steadily devastated by internecine battles in which the Pakistan-backed Taliban militia has emerged partially victorious. Nearly two million Afghans of the country's population of some four million became refugees in Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia. The majority of those who were part of the jihad became unemployed, lacking food and shelter and, most importantly, patrons.

This, in turn, made them ideal recruits for exploitation by the ISI and Pakistan's increasingly fundamentalist army. According to intelligence estimates over 10,000 Islamic mercenaries, trained in guerrilla warfare and armed with sophisticated weapons, are unemployed in Pakistan today, waiting to be transported to the next jihad.

Osama bin Laden was one of many US beneficiaries in its war against Moscow. He spent years in the mid-1980s travelling widely to raise funds and recruit thousands of Muslim youths to fight the Soviets.

The rise of Al-Qaeda

In 1988, with US knowledge, Bin Laden created Al Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells in countries spread across at least 26 countries, including Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Burma, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Uganda, Ethiopia, Syria, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Bosnia as well as the West Bank and Gaza.

Western intelligence sources claim Al Quaeda even has a cell in Xinjiang in China, a country that ironically was another willing partner in the jihad against the Soviets. China wanted the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan for its own strategic ends and even trained and despatched Muslim Uighurs of the western Xinjiang region to fight alongside the Afghan mujahideen. China feared that the old Silk Route along the Karakoram Highway could, in time, come under Moscow's domination if the Soviets were not swiftly dislodged from Kabul.

Chinese strategy on this front, however, had a negative fallout for Beijing as the returning Uighur jihadis fuelled the already-simmering insurgency for an independent Muslim Eastern Turkestan in Xinjiang. This insurgency continues, though the Chinese have managed to significantly counter it through economic sops, effective sealing of borders and drowning dissidence using strong-arm methods, actions unquestioned by the outside world.

Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda, confident that it would not directly impinge on the US. By the time the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in 1998, killing 224 people including 12 Americans, and the ill-fated World Trade Center was similarly attacked around the same time, it was too late for remedial measures. It was this reality that was brought home with such an unimaginable atrocity this week. 

Deep History of America’s Deep State by Jada Thacker

Everybody seems to be talking about the Deep State these days. Although the term appears to have entered the lexicon in the late 1990s, for years it referred only to shady foreign governments, certainly not to our own “indispensable nation.”

An artist’s rendering of the Constitutional Convention in 1787

Does the sudden presence of an American Deep State – loosely defined as an unelected elite that manipulates the elected government to serve its own interests – pose a novel, even existential, threat to democracy?

Not exactly. The threat seems real enough, but it’s nothing new. Consider these facts: 230 years ago, an unelected group of elite Americans held a secretive meeting with an undisclosed agenda. Their purpose was not merely to manipulate lawful government in their own interests, but to abolish it altogether. In its place, they would install a radically undemocratic government – a “more perfect” government, they said – better suited to their investment portfolios.

History does not identify these conspirators as the Deep State. It calls them the Founders. The Founders did not consider themselves conspirators, but “republicans” – not in reference to any political party, but rather to their economic station in society. But their devotion to “republicanism” was transparently self-serving. A current college text, The American Journey: A History of the United States, explains though does not explicate “republican ideology”:

“Their main bulwark against tyranny was civil liberty, or maintaining the right of the people to participate in government. The people who did so, however, had to demonstrate virtue. To eighteenth century republicans, virtuous citizens were those who were focused not on their private interests but rather on what was good for the public as a whole.

“They were necessarily property holders, since only those individuals could exercise an independence of judgment impossible for those dependent upon employers, landlords, masters, or (in the case of women and children) husbands and fathers.” [Emphasis supplied]

Republicanism was a handy idea if you happened to be a master or a landlord, who were the only persons this ideology considered “virtuous” enough to vote or hold political office. Thus, “republicanism” – virtually indistinguishable from today’s “neoliberalism” – created the original Deep State in the image of the economic system it was designed to perpetuate.

How this was accomplished is not a comforting tale. But it cannot be related nor understood without an appreciation of the historical context in which it occurred.

Masters and Servants

Post-colonial America was predominantly agrarian, and about 90 percent of the population was farmers. (The largest city in 1790 was New York, with a whopping population of 33,000 residents.) There was a small middle class of artisans, shopkeepers, and even a handful of industrial workers, but the politically and economically powerful people were the relatively few big-time merchants and landowners – who also fulfilled the function of bankers.

Gouverneur Morris, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and a key drafter of the Preamble. (Painting by Edward Dalton Marchant)

America was not quite a feudal society, but it resembled one. Commoners did not call at the front doors of the rich, but were received around back. Most states had official religions, some with compulsory church attendance backed by fines. Commodity-barter was the currency of the day for the vast majority. Debtors were imprisoned. Parents sold their children into bondage. It wasn’t what most people think of when they hear “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

All states restricted voting only to men who owned a requisite amount of property, while the majority: un-widowed women, servants, and tenants owned no property. Moreover, most states had property requirements for eligibility to elective office, some with the higher offices reserved for those with the most property. Such restrictions had discriminated against the urban underclass and farmers since the beginning of American colonization.

Nobody at the time characterized this land of masters and servants as a “democracy.” Indeed, the master class considered “democracy” synonymous with “mob rule.” But not everybody was happy with “republican virtue” in post-war America, least of all the slaves of the “virtuous.”

The Revolutionary War had stirred passions among the servant class for social and economic liberty, but when the war ended nothing much had changed. In fact, the war proved not to have been a revolution at all, but represented only a change from British overlords to American overlords. Edmund Morgan, considered the dean of American history in the colonial era, characterized the “non-Revolutionary War” this way:

“The fact the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle for office and power between members of an upper class: the new against the established.”

About 1 percent of the American population had died in a war fought, they had been told, for “liberty.” (Compare: if the U.S. lost the same proportion of its population in a war today, the result would be over three million dead Americans.) Yet after the war, economic liberty was nowhere in sight.

Moreover, the very concept of “liberty” meant one thing to a farmer and quite another to his rich landlord or merchant. Liberty for a common farmer – who was generally a subsistence farmer who did not farm to make money, but rather only to provide the necessities of life for his family – meant staying out of debt. Liberty for merchants and property owners – whose business it was to make monetary profits – meant retaining the ability to lend or rent to others and access to the power of government to enforce monetary repayment from debtors and tenants.

Much like the American Indians who had first communally owned the property now occupied by American subsistence farmers, agrarian debtors faced the unthinkable prospect of losing their ability to provide for their families (and their vote) if their land were confiscated for overdue taxes or debt. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Debt Conquered America.”]

Loss of their land would doom a freeholder to a life of tenancy. And the servitude of tenants and slaves differed mainly as a function of iron and paper: slaves were shackled by iron, tenants were shackled by debt contracts. But iron and paper were both backed by law.

By the end of the Revolutionary War, as few as a third of American farmers owned their own land. When the urban elites began to foreclose on the debts and raise the taxes of subsistence farmers – many of whom had fought a long and excruciating war to secure their “liberty” – it amounted to a direct assault on the last bastion of Americans’ economic independence.

The Original Great Recession

After the war, British merchants and banks no longer extended credit to Americans. Moreover, Britain refused to allow Americans to trade with its West Indies possessions. And, to make matters worse, the British Navy no longer protected American ships from North African pirates, effectively closing off Mediterranean commerce. Meanwhile, the American navy could not protect American shipping, in the Mediterranean or elsewhere, because America did not happen to possess a navy.

George Washington crossing the Delaware, in Emanuel Leutze’s iconic (though historically inaccurate) painting

In the past, American merchants had obtained trade goods from British suppliers by “putting it on a tab” and paying for the goods later, after they had been sold. Too many Americans had reneged on those tabs after the Revolution, and the British now demanded “cash on the barrelhead” in the form of gold and silver coin before they would ship their goods to America.

As always, Americans had limited coin with which to make purchases. As the credit crunch cascaded downwards, wholesalers demanded cash payment from retailers, retailers demanded cash from customers. Merchants “called in” loans they had made to farmers, payable in coin. Farmers without coin were forced to sell off their hard-earned possessions, livestock, or land to raise the money, or risk court-enforced debt collection, which included not only the seizure and sale of their property but also imprisonment for debt.

The most prominent result of Americans’ war for “liberty” turned out to be a full-blown economic recession that lasted a decade. Even so, the recession would not have posed a life-threatening problem for land-owning subsistence farmers, who lived in materially self-sufficient, rural, communal societies. But when state governments began to raise taxes on farmers, payable only in unavailable gold and silver coin, even “self-sufficient” farmers found themselves at risk of losing their ability to feed their families.

Debt, Speculation, and the Deep State

The Continental Congress had attempted to pay for its war with Britain by printing paper money. The British undermined these so-called “Continental” dollars, not only by enticing American merchants with gold and silver, but by counterfeiting untold millions of Continental dollars and spending them into circulation. The aggregate result was the catastrophic devaluation of the Continental dollar, which by war’s end was worthless.

In the meantime, both Congress and state governments had borrowed to pay for “liberty.” By war’s end, war debt stood at $73 million, $60 million of which was owed to domestic creditors. It was a staggering sum of money. In his now studiously ignored masterpiece, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, historian Charles A. Beard showed that domestically-held war debt was equivalent to 10 percent of the value of all the surveyed land holdings (including houses) in the entire United States at the time.

The war debt carried interest, of course – which is a problem with debt if you owe it, but is a feature of debt if it is owed to you. Not only was “freedom not free” – it came with dividends attached for Deep State investors. This should sound at least vaguely familiar today.

President George Washington

As Continental paper money lost its value, Congress and state governments continued to pay for “liberty” with coin borrowed at interest. When that ran short, government paid only with promises to pay at a later date – merely pieces of paper that promised to pay coin (or land) at some indeterminate time after the war was won.

This was how the government supplied the troops (whenever it managed to do so) and also how it paid its troops. In actual practice, however, Congress often did not pay the troops anything, not even with paper promises, offering only verbal promises to pay them at the end of the war.

But war is never a money-making enterprise for government, and when it ended, the government was as broke as ever. So, it wrote its verbal promises on pieces of paper, and handed them to its discharged troops with a hearty Good Luck with That! Even so, Congress paid the soldiers in bonds worth only a fraction of the amount of time most had served, promising (again!) to pay the balance later – which it never did.

Thousands of steadfast, longsuffering troops were abandoned this way. Most had not been paid any money in years (if ever), and many were hundreds of miles from their homes – ill, injured, and starving – as they had been for months and years. Others literally were dressed only in rags or pieces of rags. Some carried paper promises of money; some carried paper promises of geographically distant land – none of which would be available until years in the future, if at all.

Seven-year Revolutionary War veteran Philip Mead described his plight in a bitter memoir entitled A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier: “We were absolutely, literally starved. I do solemnly declare that I did not put a single morsel of victuals in my mouth for four days and as many nights, except a little black birch bark which I gnawed off a stick of wood, if that can be called victuals. I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them….

“When the country had drained the last drop of service it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses, and nothing said about land to pasture them on.”

Was this liberty? To impoverished veterans, “liberty” looked bleak, indeed. To speculators in government bonds, liberty looked like a golden opportunity, quite literally so.

Vultures possessed of coin swooped in and bought a dollar’s worth of government promises for a dime, and sometimes for just a nickel. Speculators wheedled promises not only from desperate veterans (many of whom sold their promises merely to obtain food and clothes on their long trudge home), but from a host of people whose goods or services had been paid with IOUs.

Optimistic speculators cadged bonds from pessimistic speculators. The more desperate people became during the recession, the more cheaply they sold their promises to those who were not.

Speculators expected their investments, even those made with now-worthless paper money, to be paid in gold or silver coin. What’s more, “insiders” expected all those various government promises would eventually be converted – quietly, if possible – into interest-bearing bonds backed by a single, powerful taxing authority. All the Deep State needed now was a national government to secure the investment scheme. A man named Daniel Shays unwittingly helped to fulfil that need.

Rebellion and Backlash

Thomas Jefferson penned the famous sentence: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” He was not referring to heroic American Patriots charging up Bunker Hill against British bayonets. He was referring instead to American farmers – many of whom had been the starving soldiers in a war for forsaken liberty – taking their lives into their hands to oppose the tax policies of the government of Massachusetts in 1787. The principal leader of this revolt was a farmer and war veteran Daniel Shays.

General Benjamin Lincoln who led a force in 1787 to put down Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts. (Painting by Charles Willson Peale)

In a sense, the most interesting thing about Shays’s Rebellion is that it was not a unique event.

The first notable example of agrarian revolt had been Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 Virginia, when frontier farmers marched on the rich plantation owners of Jamestown, burned it to the ground, published their democratic “Declaration of the People,” and threatened to hang every elite “tyrant” on their list – which included some of the forefathers of America’s patriot Founders.

Historian Gary Nash reminds us Bacon’s Rebellion had echoes across early American history: “Outbreaks of disorder punctuated the last quarter of the 17th century, toppling established governments in Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina.” Jimmy Carter, in The Hornet’s Nest, the only novel ever published by an American president, tells a similar story of the agony of dispossessed farmers in Georgia a century later.

Other farmers had rebelled in New Jersey in the 1740s; in the New York Hudson Valley rent wars in the 1750s and 1760s and concurrently in Vermont by Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys; for a decade in North Carolina in the 1760s, where vigilantes called Regulators battled the government of the urban elite; and in Virginia in the 1770s. Likewise, American cities had been scenes of labor unrest, riots, and strikes for a century. American class rebellion, apparently unbeknownst to most history teachers in America, was closer to the rule than the exception.

Victory in the war against England only intensified the conflict between those who considered “liberty” as a necessary condition to live without debt, against those who considered “liberty” to be their class privilege to grow rich from the debts others owed them. Howard Zinn, in his A People’s History of the United States describes the economic realities of Eighteenth Century America:

“The colonies, it seems, were societies of contending classes – a fact obscured by the emphasis, in traditional histories, on the external struggle against England, the unity of colonists in the Revolution. The country therefore was not ‘born free’ but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich.”

Although Shays’s Rebellion was not unique, it was a huge event, coming at a time when the rich were owed a great deal of money by impoverished governments. Pressured by rich bondholders and speculators, the government of Massachusetts duly raised taxes on farmers. To make matters far worse, the taxes were to be paid only in gold or silver – which was completely out of the question for most western farmers, who had no way to obtain coined money.

When the farmers complained, their complaints were ignored. When farmers petitioned the government to issue paper money and accept it as payment of debts and taxes, the government refused their petitions. When the farmers pleaded for the passage of “legal tender laws” that would allow them to settle their debts or taxes with their labor, they were rebuffed.

But when farmers could not pay what they did not have, the Massachusetts’s courts ordered their land seized and auctioned. At last, the farmers understood the practical effect, if not the specific intent, of the tax: confiscation of their property and its transfer to the rich, to whom the government owed its interest-bearing debt. Government had become an armed collection agency.

To the utter dismay of the erstwhile proudly tax-rebellious Patriots, the farmers too rebelled. Shaysites forcibly shut down the tax courts that were condemning them to servitude. The rich responded by loaning the destitute government more money (at interest!) to pay a militia force to oppose Shays’s rebels.

At this point, tax rebels abandoned reform for radical revolution and – in a resounding echo of Nathaniel Bacon’s century-old Declaration of the People – pledged to march on Boston and burn it to the ground. This was no Tea Party vandalism, stage-managed by well-to-do Bostonians like Samuel Adams. It was a full-blown, grassroots agrarian revolution a century in the making.

The urban bond-holding merchant-class in Boston and elsewhere panicked. And none panicked more than bond speculators, who intimately understood the rebels threatened their “virtuous” republican “liberty” to extract profit from others. Historian Woody Holton exposes the astonishing callousness of one of America’s major bond speculators in his nationally acclaimed Unruly Americans and the Origin of the Constitution:

“As a bondholder, Abigail Adams would benefit immensely if her fellow Massachusetts citizens [paid the tax] levied by the legislature in March 1786, but she also saw compliance as a sacred duty. If Massachusetts taxpayers were ‘harder-prest by publick burdens than formerly,’ she wrote, ‘they should consider it as the price of their freedom’.”

Abigail Adams, wife of the second President John Adams, in a portrait by Benjamin Blythe.

Future First Lady Abigail Adams was not alone in thinking freedom came with dividends payable to her account. Historian David Szatmary reminds us in his Shays Rebellion; The Makings of an Agrarian Insurrection that the former Patriot leadership, especially those in the merchant class, were among the first to advocate violence against democratic rebellion.

Said a published opinion piece at the time: “When we had other rulers, committees and conventions of the people were lawful – they were then necessary; but since I myself became a ruler, they cease to be lawful – the people have no right to examine my conduct.”

Showboat Patriot and bond speculator Samuel Adams –former mastermind of the Boston Tea Party and erstwhile propagandist against unfair British taxes (as well as cousin to Abigail’s husband John Adams) – sponsored a Massachusetts law that allowed sheriffs to kill tax protesters outright.

Another rich bondholder and speculator, ex-Revolutionary War General Henry Knox (the fitting namesake of Fort Knox, the famous repository of gold bullion) wrote an alarming letter to his former commander George Washington, accusing the Shays’s rebels of being “levelers” (which was the closest term to “communists” then in existence). He informed Washington that the country needed a much stronger government (and military) to prevent any riffraff challenge to the elite. His message was not wasted on General Washington, America’s richest slave owner.

In the end, the Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, could raise no money from the states to provide an army, but the privately-financed, for-profit Massachusetts militia successfully defeated Shays’s rebels. Still, the nearly hysterical fear of democratic economic revolution had been planted in the minds of the masters. Shays’s Rebellion proved to be the last straw for bond speculators whose profits were jeopardized by democracy.

Worse even, the governments of many other states were beginning to cave under intense democratic pressure from rebellious debtors. Some states were entertaining laws that prevented the seizure of property for debt; others were creating paper money in order to break the gold and silver monopoly. Rhode Island not only voted in a paper money system, but threatened to socialize all commercial business enterprises in the state.

In response to the threat of populism, the “virtuous” elite reacted decisively – not to remedy the plight of debtors, of course – but to secure their own profits from them. Accordingly, in 1786, five states sent delegates to meet at Annapolis, Maryland, just as Shays’s Rebellion veered into revolution. This unelected minority called for Congress to authorize a convention to be held in Philadelphia the next year “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” The Articles were never to be “revised.” They were to be scrapped altogether by the Deep State.

The Deep State Conspires

Thanks to Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, we know quite a lot about the status of the 55 men who conspired to draft the Constitution. But the very first thing we need to know is that they were not authorized by “We the People” simply because nobody had voted for them; all were political appointees.

James Madison

Nor were they even a representative sample of the people. Not a single person in the Convention hall “worked for a living,” nor was female, nor was a person of color. Only one claimed to be a “farmer,” the current occupation of about 90 percent of the population. Most were lawyers. Go figure.

If the delegates represented anybody at all, it was the economic elite: 80 percent were bondholders; 44 percent were money-lenders; 27 percent were slave owners; and 25 percent were real estate speculators. Demographically, the 39 who finally signed the final draft of the Constitution constituted .001 percent of the American population reported in the 1790 census. George Washington, who presided, was arguably the wealthiest man in the country. Deep State gamblers all.

And the stakes were high. Recall that the face value of outstanding domestic government bonds in 1787 was $60 million, equivalent to 10 percent of the total improved land value of the country. But these bonds, for the most part, had been obtained by speculators at a fraction of face value. Beard very conservatively estimated the profit of speculators – if the bond were redeemed at face value – would have been some $40 million. Expressed as the same proportion of total improved land value at the time of the Founding, the expected profit from government bonds held then would equal at least $3 trillion today. Tax free.

We still do not know everything that transpired at the convention. No one was assigned to keep a record of what was discussed. Reportedly, even the windows to the meeting hall were nailed shut to prevent eavesdropping – though there would be “leaks.” Because of its secrecy and its unauthorized nature, some historians have called the convention “the second American Revolution.” But revolutions are public, hugely participatory events. This was a coup d’état behind locked doors.

Most delegates presumably understood their undisclosed purpose was to dump the whole system of confederated government (which had cost 25,000 American lives to secure) into a dustbin. They evidently did not intend to obey their instructions “solely to revise” the Articles because a number of them showed up at the convention with drafts for a new constitution in hand.

The conspirators’ ultimate goal was to replace the Confederation with what they later euphemized as “a more perfect Union” – designed from the outset to protect their class interests and to ensure the new government possessed all the power necessary to perpetuate the existing oligarchy.

At the Convention, Alexander Hamilton captured the prevailing sentiment: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born; the other the mass of the people … turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the Government. … Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.”

A portrait of Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull, 1792.

Hamilton further proposed that both the President and the Senate be appointed (not elected) for life. His vision was but half a step removed from monarchy. Though not a Convention delegate, John Jay, Hamilton’s political ally, slaveowner, and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, stated the purpose of “republicanism” with brutal brevity: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.”

The Founders never once envisioned any such a thing as “limited government” – unless perhaps in the sense that the power of government was to be limited to their own economic class. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Made-up Constitution.”]

In Towards an American Revolution: Exposing the Constitution & Other Illusions, historian Jerry Fresia sums the Founders’ views succinctly: “The vision of the Framers, even for Franklin and Jefferson who were less fearful of the politics of the common people than most, was that of a strong centralized state, a nation whose commerce and trade stretched around the world. In a word, the vision was one of empire where property owners would govern themselves.” [Emphasis supplied]

Self-government by the people was to remain permanently out of the question. The Deep State was to govern itself. “We the People,” a phrase hypocritically coined by the ultra-aristocrat Gouverneur Morris, would stand forever after as an Orwellian hoax.

The tricky task of the hand-picked delegates was to hammer out a radical new system of government that would superficially resemble a democratic republic, but function as an oligarchy.

William Hogeland’s excellent Founding Finance, recounts the anti-democratic vehemence expressed at the Convention: “On the first day of the meeting that would become known as the United States Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph of Virginia kicked off the proceedings […] ‘Our chief danger,’ Randolph announced, ‘arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions. … None of the constitutions’ – he meant those of the states’ governments – ‘have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.’”

No wonder they nailed the windows shut. It should be no surprise that the word “democracy” does not appear once in the entire U.S. Constitution, or any of its Amendments, including the Bill of Rights. Accordingly, the Constitution does not once refer to the popular vote, and it did not guarantee a single person or group suffrage until the adoption of the 15th Amendment in 1870, over 80 years after ratification. The Preamble aside, the Founders used the phrase “the People” only a single time (Art. I, Sec. 2).

It has been suggested the word “democracy” had a different meaning then than it has now. It did not. “Democracy” to the Convention delegates meant the same thing as it does today: “rule by the people.” That’s why they detested it. The delegates considered themselves the patriarchs of “republicanism,” the ideology that rejected participation in government by people like their wives, servants, tenants, slaves, and other non-propertied inferiors. No doubt, the delegates passionately disagreed on many things, but the “fear and loathing” of democracy was not one of them. Then or now.

The Deep State’s Specific Goals

Embedded within the Founders’ broadly anti-democratic agenda were four specific goals. These were not a list of items jotted down in advance, but were derived by group consensus as the minimum requirements necessary to achieve the Deep State’s ultimate agenda.

Thomas Jefferson in a 1800 portrait by Rembrandt Peale.

To camouflage the stark oligarchic nationalism the measures intended, the Founders disingenuously styled themselves “Federalists.” But nothing about these measures concerned a “federation” of sovereign states; taken together, they were intended to demolish the existing “perpetual” confederation, not to re-create it more effectively.

National government with limited citizen participation. Of all the measures required to achieve a national oligarchy, this was the most daunting. It was achieved by a wide array of provisions.

The Electoral College. The President and Vice President are not elected by popular vote, but by electors – then and now. For example, when George Washington was first elected President, the American population was 3.9 million. How many of those folks voted for George? Exactly 69 persons – which was the total number of electors voting at the time. (Art. I, Sec. 3)

Bi-Cameral Congress. Congress is bi-cameral, composed of two “houses” – the House of Representatives and the Senate. Under the original Constitution, the House members represented the people who vote for them, while the Senate represented states, not persons, and was therefore not a democratic body, at all. It was generally expected that the Senate would “check” the democratic House. Indeed, this was the entire purpose of bi-cameralism wherever it has existed. (Art. I, Secs. 1 and 2)

State Appointment of Senators. Senators were originally appointed by state legislatures (until the 17th Amendment in 1913). It was expected that the Senate would function in Congress as the House of Lords functioned in Parliament: the voice of the aristocracy. Even though Senators are now popularly elected, it is far more difficult to challenge an incumbent because of the prohibitive expense of running a state-wide campaign. (Art. I, Sec. 3)

Appointment of the Judiciary. All federal judges are appointed for life terms by the President and confirmed by the (originally undemocratic) Senate. (Art. III, Sec. 1)

Paucity of Representation. Most undemocratic of all was the extreme paucity of the total number of House members. The House originally was composed of only 65 members, or one member per 60,000 persons. Today, there are 435 members, each representing about 700,000 persons. Thus, current House representation of the public is 12 times less democratic than when the Constitution was written – and it was poor (at best) then.

Compare: The day before the Constitution was ratified, the people of the 13 United States were represented by about 2,000 democratically elected representatives in their various state legislatures (1:1950 ratio); the day after ratification, the same number of people were to be represented by only 65 representatives in the national government (1:60000). In quantitative terms, this represents more than a 3,000 percent reduction of democratic representation for the American people. (Art. I, Sec. 2)

Absence of Congressional Districts. Although House members now run for election in equal-populated districts, the districts were created by Congress, not the Constitution. Until the 1960s, some House members were elected at-large (like Senators). This disadvantaged all but the richest and best-known candidates from winning. (Not referenced in Constitution)

Absence of Recall, Initiative and Referendum. The Constitution does not allow the people to vote to recall (un-elect) a Congress member, demand a Congressional vote on any issue (propose an initiative) or vote directly in a referendum on any issue (direct democracy). (Not referenced in Constitution)

Absence of Independent Amendment Process. One of the reasons Americans now have professional politicians is that the Constitution does not provide a way for “the people” to amend it without the required cooperation of a sitting Congress. At the Constitutional convention, Edmund Randolph of Virginia (surprisingly) proposed that the people be afforded a way to amend the Constitution without the participation of Congress. This excellent idea, however, was not adopted. (Art. V)

National authority to tax citizens directly. (Art. I, Sec. 8; 16th Amendment)

National monopolization of military power. (Art. I, Sec.8, clauses 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)

Denial of states’ power to issue paper money or provide debtor relief. (Art. I, Sec.10; Art. I Sec.8, clause 4)

All of these provisions were completely new in the American experience. For 150 years or more, citizen participation in government, independent militias, and the issuance of paper money had been the prerogative of the several, independent colonies/states – while direct external taxation had been universally and strenuously resisted. When the British Crown had threatened to curtail colonial prerogatives, the very men who now conspired for national power had risen in armed rebellion. The hypocrisy was stunning. And people took note of the fact.

Consent of the Minority

One of the note-takers was Robert Yates, a New York delegate to the Convention, who had walked out in protest. Not long afterwards, Yates (who owned no government bonds) stated his objection to the new Constitution: “This government is to possess absolute and uncontrollable power, legislative, executive and judicial, with respect to every object to which it extends. …

“The government then, so far as it extends, is a complete one. … It has the authority to make laws which will affect the lives, the liberty, and the property of every man in the United States; nor can the constitution or the laws of any state, in any way prevent or impede the full and complete execution of every power given.”

A photograph showing the whipping scars on the back of an African-American slave.

At least half of the American population (collectively called “Anti-federalists”) thought the Constitution was a terrible idea. To be sure, well-to-do Anti-federalists like Yates were not overtaxed farmers, and their objections were often based upon the defense of states’ rights, not peoples’ economic rights. Most Anti-federalists, however, seemed alarmed that the Constitution contained no guarantee of the basic political rights they had enjoyed under the British Empire, such as freedom of speech or trial by jury.

The debate between supporters and critics of the Constitution raged for a year, while partisan newspapers published articles both pro and con. A collection of 85 “pro” articles is known now as The Federalist Papers, which were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. Although these articles have been studied almost as religious relicts by historians, they do not tell us “what the Constitution really means.”

The Constitution means what it says. The Federalist Papers are sales brochures, written by lawyers trying to get others to “buy” the Constitution. The same can be said about a similar collection of “Anti-federalist Papers,” from which Yates’s quote above was taken. In any event, it is up to the courts to interpret the Constitution, not lawyers with vested interests.

In due course, the Anti-federalists put their collective foot down. There would be no hope of ratification without amendments guaranteeing fundamental political – but not economic – rights. Although Hamilton argued a guarantee of rights would be “dangerous,” James Madison convinced the Federalists that agreeing to guarantee a future Bill of Rights would be much safer that meddling with the text of the current document, which might entail unraveling its core nationalist, anti-democratic agenda. And so, a deal was struck.

Even so, the battle over the ratification of the Constitution was not ultimately decided by the people of the nation. Although the people of the several states had not voted to authorize the Convention, or the document it had produced, the Founders had been incredibly arrogant, not to mention sly. Not only had they presented the unauthorized document to the states as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition (no changes allowed), but the document itself demanded that only special state “conventions” could ratify it – not the majority popular vote of the people.

Specifying ratification by conventions meant the people would be voting for convention delegates, who would in turn vote for ratification. This was tantamount to turning ratification into a popularity contest between convention delegates, rather than a democratically direct vote on the document, itself. Moreover, ratification by convention would present the possibility that a minority of the people in a state (those in favor of the Constitution) might “pack” a convention with delegates, who would then approve of a document establishing a government for all.

Electoral shenanigans were not just hypothetical possibilities. In Philadelphia, for example, a mob kidnapped elected legislators who were boycotting a convention vote, physically dragged them into the state house, and tied them to their chairs in order to force a convention vote. Other, more subtle methods of manipulation occurred elsewhere, notably the disenfranchisement of voters through property qualifications.

Over a hundred years ago, Charles A. Beard completed his exhaustive study of the Constitution and confirmed that it most likely was ratified by a majority – of a minority of the people.

Among Beard’s final conclusions were these: “The Constitution was ratified by a vote of probably not more than one-sixth of the adult males….The leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying conventions represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia Convention….The Constitution was not created by ‘the whole people’ as the jurists [judges] have said; neither was it created by ‘the states’ as Southern nullifiers long contended; but it was the work of a consolidated group whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in their scope.”

The Deep State, in other words. It was darkly appropriate that a document whose primary purpose was to defeat democratic rule was, itself, brought into force without a majoritarian vote.

In 1788, nine of the 13 states’ conventions ratified the Constitution (as specified in the Constitution’s own Article VII) and the document became the supreme law of the land for those nine states. By 1789, even the democratic holdout Rhode Island had followed suit. And America’s schoolchildren have been led to believe ever since that the Constitution is a sacred document, inspired and ordained by the public-spirited benevolence of Founding Fathers.

But this had been predicted. It had seemed painfully obvious to Eighteenth Century Genevan political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau that constitutional government was the invention of the Deep State, its designated beneficiary.

Dripping with sarcasm, his virtuoso Discourse on Inequality explained the process: “[T]he rich man … at last conceived the deepest project that ever entered the human mind: this was to employ in his favour the very forces that attacked him, to make allies of his enemies…

“In a word, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, let us collect them into a sovereign power, which may govern us by wise laws, may protect and defend all the members of the association, repel common enemies, and maintain a perpetual concord and harmony among us.”

Rousseau penned these words in 1754, 33 years before Gouverneur Morris oversaw the drafting of the identical sales pitch that constitutes the Preamble to the United States Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Rousseau concludes: “All offered their necks to the yoke in hopes of securing their liberty; for though they had sense enough to perceive the advantages of a political constitution, they had not experience enough to see beforehand the dangers of it; those among them, who were best qualified to foresee abuses, were precisely those who expected to benefit by them….” [Emphasis added]

Does the Deep State pose an existential threat to American democracy today? Move along, folks – nothing new to see here.

The Black Budget Report: An Independent Investigation of the CIA’s ‘Black Budget’ and the Second Manhattan Project   [By Dr. Michael E. Salla, first Published 11/23/2003 and revised 02/05/04]    

Introduction [1]

Each year the US Department of Defense (DoD) lists a number of single line items in its budget that have a program number such as 0605236F, code names like CLASSIC WIZARD or vague description such as “special evaluation program,” that don’t refer to any weapons system known to the general public, Congressional officials or even defense analysts. These single line items are covers for the creation of a ‘black budget’ - a top secret slush fund set up by the DoD, with the approval of the US Congress, to apparently fund intelligence organizations such as the CIA as well as covert operations and classified weapons programs by the DoD. The ‘black budget’ allows intelligence activities, covert operations and classified weapons research to be conducted without Congressional oversight on the grounds that oversight would compromise the secrecy essential for the success of such ‘black programs’. These ‘black programs’ are typically classified as ‘Special Access’ or ‘Controlled Access Programs’ that have a security classification system more rigorous than the secret-top secret classifications for most government agencies, making such programs known only to those with a ‘need to know’. This report seeks to unmask the size of the black budget and the covert world of ‘deep black’ projects it funds by investigating the mechanisms used to transfer money into the black budget’. Following the money trail and official efforts to keep secret the size of the black budget and how it is generated, provides the key pieces of a complex financial and national security jigsaw puzzle.

The ‘black budget’ funds a covert world of unaccountable intelligence activities, covert military/intelligence operations and classified weapons programs. The conventional view is that this covert world is funded by Congressional appropriations that authorize the DoD to use US Treasury funds for classified projects and intelligence activities that appear as vague items on the DoD budget. Subtracting the cost of known weapons systems and programs from the total DoD budget gives Congressional analysts a means of estimating the size and scope of operations of the covert world of ‘black projects’, without knowing their precise budgets or activities. There is however compelling evidence that the covert world of black programs is primarily funded by a black budget created by the CIA rather than the DoD. Rather than being a beneficiary of a Congressionally sanctioned DoD ‘black budget’, the CIA has its own ‘unofficial’ black budget that acts as a conduit for funds to be secretly siphoned into the various military intelligence agencies associated with both the CIA and the DoD for intelligence activities, covert operations and weapons research.

The CIA has the unique legal ability among all US government departments and agencies to generate funds through appropriations of other federal government agencies and other sources “without regard to any provisions of law” and without regard to the intent behind Congressional appropriations. [2] Every year, billions of dollars of Congressional appropriations are diverted from their Congressionally sanctioned purposes to the CIA and DoD based intelligence agencies without knowledge of the public and with the collusion of Congressional leaders. The covert world of ‘black programs’ acts with virtual impunity, overseen and regulated by itself, funding itself through secret slush funds, and is free of the limitations that come from Congressional oversight, proper auditing procedures and public scrutiny.

This report examines the existence of a CIA ‘black budget’ and an extensive network of ‘black projects’ that it funds. The report identifies the legal framework established by the US Congress for the creation of a CIA ‘black budget’ from the appropriations earmarked for other federal agencies that are siphoned through the CIA as the sole conduit of black budget funds. The report investigates the legal challenges to the constitutionality of the CIA’s black budget; how the CIA uses its legal authority to extract appropriations from government agencies such as HUD; how the CIA even launders non-appropriated money through other federal agencies; and the efforts the CIA goes to prevent these financial transfers from being exposed. Using as a case study the legal difficulties faced by an innovative mortgage finance company, Hamilton Securities, the report will argue that the CIA’s covert role in Hamilton’s demise is compelling evidence that the CIA was involved in funding irregularities in HUD.

The key to uncovering the true size of the black budget are the chronic accounting anomalies in the DoD budget that reveal that as much as one trillion US dollars is annually being siphoned by the CIA into the DoD for secret distribution to various military intelligence agencies and the ‘deep black’ programs they respectively support. All of this, it will be argued, has dubious constitutional status but is made legal by the various Congressional enactments, senior Congressional officials and the Executive Office. It will be finally argued that the size of black budget, the secrecy surrounding it, the extent senior officials in Federal agencies go to targeting individuals and companies that threaten to reveal where Congressional appropriations are ultimately going, suggest a vast network of ‘deep black projects’ that collectively form a highly classified second Manhattan Project whose existence, goals and budget are kept secret.

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Birth of the Black Budget

In 1947, the National Security Act created the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Organization (CIA) and consolidated the US military into one entity, the Department of Defense (DoD). One of the issues that remained unresolved from the creation and operation of the CIA was the extent to which its budget and intelligence activities would remain a secret. According to Article 1, sec. 9, of the US Constitution, “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.” This constitutional requirement conflicted with the need for secrecy concerning Congressional appropriations for the CIA. The solution was for Congress to pass legislation approving the secrecy over the funding mechanisms used for the CIA and its intelligence related activities. The necessary bill was passed with great haste and minimal debate causing considerable concern among those few Congressmen brave enough to openly challenge the constitutionality of the Act. [3] Congressman Emmanuel Celler of New York voted for the bill but protested: “If the members of the Armed Services Committee can hear the detailed information to support this bill, why cannot the entire membership? Are they the Brahmins and we the untouchables? Secrecy is the answer.” [4] Celler, like the majority of Congressmen, passed the CIA Act very much like the wealthy father viewed the birth of an illegitimate child, appropriate care would be taken to provide for the child, but there would be no official admission of patrimony and the responsibility that entails.

The 1949 CIA Act comprised additions to those sections of the 1947 National Security Act that dealt with the creation of CIA. The 1949 CIA Act gave a Congressional stamp of approval to the creation of a ‘black budget’ as the following sections make clear:

… any other Government agency is authorized to transfer to or receive from the Agency such sums without regard to any provisions of law limiting or prohibiting transfers between appropriations [emphasis added]. Sums transferred to the Agency in accordance with this paragraph may be expended for the purposes and under the authority of sections 403a to 403s of this title without regard to limitations of appropriations from which transferred. [5]

This section meant that funds could be transferred from the appropriations of other government departments earmarked for specific tasks, “without regard to any provisions of law”. For example, a Congressional appropriation earmarked for housing subsidies to low-income workers by Housing and Urban Development (HUD), could be legally transferred either to the CIA for covert intelligence activities or through the CIA to a DoD associated intelligence agency for a classified program. Thus HUD employees might find that their relevant housing programs were lacking the necessary funds for relief efforts even though Congress had appropriated these funds for this purpose. Any HUD official unfortunate enough as to enquire into the location of the missing funds would be deterred from pursuing the issue, and if these officials persisted, they could be summarily dismissed, and then exposed to a variety of CIA activities to silence them. [6]

Despite its legal authority to transfer funds from other federal agencies regardless of what their Congressional appropriations were for, the conventional wisdom was that the major source of appropriations for the CIA came through the DoD. This is apparently what President Truman had in mind when he approved that the "operating funds for the organization [CIA] would be obtained from the Departments of State, War, and Navy instead of directly from Congress." [7] This funding arrangement ostensibly assured that the CIA would be subordinate to the Secretaries of Defense and State who would be in a better position to influence its covert activities. Four years after passage of the 1949 CIA Act, the following categories and sums in the relevant defense force appropriations apparently provided the bulk of the black budget funding of the CIA.

Table 1. CIA – Location of Budget Funds Fiscal Year 1953

Table 1. CIA – Location of Budget Funds Fiscal Year 1953 [8]

Appropriation & Service

Project

Total

Maintenance & Operations, Army

Project 1732 Classified project

33 million

Project 2110 Commercial transportation

163 million

Service-wide Operations, Navy

Activity 10 Contingencies of the Navy

33 million

Ships and Facilities, Navy

Activity 1 Maintenance and operation of the active fleet

70 million

Ordinance and Facilities, Navy

Activity 1 Procurement of ordnance and ammunition

93 million

Contingencies, Air Force

Project 891

33 million

Military Personnel Requirements, Air Force

Project 510 Pay of the Air Force

70 million

Aircraft and Related Procurement, Air Force

Project 120 Aircraft component spares and spare parts

92 million

Total

587 million

The Congressionally sanctioned method of CIA appropriations meant that the $587 million the CIA acknowledged receiving from DoD for its intelligence operations in 1953 would remain a secret both to rank and file members of Congress, and the general public. The alleged sum the CIA received from the DoD in 1953 ($3.4 billion in 2002 terms) was in likelihood already dwarfed, as will be argued later, by the funds the CIA was transferring through other government agencies into its black budget.

The constitutional validity of the CIA’s black budget and its size was something that did not unduly trouble most Congressmen during the early years of the Cold War who believed that national security considerations concerning the Soviet threat merited such an extraordinary practice. However, it did trouble one US citizen who in 1967 took the CIA to court over the secrecy surrounding the true size of its black budget.

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Legal and Congressional Efforts to Disclose the CIA’s Black Budget

William Richardson was an ‘ordinary’ citizen who realized the inconsistency between the Constitution’s requirement that all government appropriations would have “a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures” published, and the CIA’s Act’s secrecy provision concerning the CIA budget. In 1967, Richardson made an effort to discover the true size of the CIA’s ‘black budget’ by writing a letter to the US Government Printing Office. He requested a copy of the CIA budget “published by the Government in compliance with Article I, section 9, clause 7 of the United States Constitution.” [10] Richardson received replies from the US Treasury that essentially rebuffed his efforts and he decided to start a Federal court action against the US government. He argued that the CIA Act was “repugnant to the Constitution” since it “operates to falsify the regular Statement and Account of all public Money.” [11] After three years of legal wrangling, Richardson’s case was dismissed by the Pittsburgh Federal Judge, Joseph P. Wilson, who decided that Richardson did not have ‘standing’ to sue the Federal government since he was not directly affected by issue at dispute. In short, the judge was taking the conservative legal position that a ‘generalized grievance’ is not a sufficient basis for a private citizen to take a US Federal Agency to court. Richardson appealed and in 1971, succeeded in having his case heard before a full bench of the United States Court of Appeals in Philadelphia (the penultimate legal court in the US). In his legal brief, Richardson claimed:

Never in the history of this country has so much money been spent without the traditional safeguard of openness and in direct defiance of constitutional provisions…. Billions are spent each year by unknown entities and this amount is spread throughout the Treasury’s reporting system to confuse the public and belittle the Constitution. [12]

The nine federal judges ruled in a 6-3 decision in 1972 that Richardson did have legal standing since the Court reasoned that a

… responsible and intelligent taxpayer and citizen, of course, wants to know how his tax money is spent. Without this information he cannot intelligently follow the actions of the Congress or the Executive. Nor can he properly fulfill his obligations as a member of the electorate. [13]

Richardson had won an extraordinary, though ultimately short lived, legal victory. He had succeeded in arguing that the ‘black budget’ was inconsistent with his constitutional obligations and that the CIA Act had doubtful constitutional standing. The 1971 decision of the Court of Appeals is the closest any US court has come to ruling on the constitutionality of the CIA Act. The Court had effectively decided that Congress had no right to deprive American citizens knowledge of the true size of the appropriated money that was being channeled to the CIA through other government agencies.

The Federal Government immediately appealed to the Supreme Court and in July 1974, the nine Supreme Court Justices ruled in a 5-4 decision, that Richardson did not have the legal standing to challenge the Federal government. [14] Adopting a conservative legal position, the Court argued that Richardson’s suit was nothing more than a generalized political grievance by a citizen that needed to be dealt with through the political system, rather than the legal system. The Supreme Court concluded that it did not need to examine the merits of Richardson’s case, since he did not have legal standing to bring the suit to the Court. The Supreme Court thus overturned the earlier ruling of the US Court of Appeals. The immediate consequence was that the black budget would remain a secret for some years yet. Despite the setback, Richardson had demonstrated that the ‘black budget’ and the CIA Act that created it, had dubious constitutional standing, and only required a challenge from a party with legal standing to most likely have it struck from the statute books. [15]

In the 1970’s the black budget and its true size became for the first time a subject of intense congressional scrutiny. In the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the behavior of the intelligence community in sponsoring private wars throughout Indochina and elsewhere, the Senate decided in 1976 to elect a committee to investigate the CIA’s covert activities and the black budget for the intelligence community. In its final report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Church Committee) found the black budget to be unconstitutional and recommended public disclosure of its size:

The budget procedures, which presently govern the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies of the Intelligence Community, prevent most members of Congress from knowing how much money is spent by any of these agencies or even how much money is spent on intelligence as a whole. In addition, most members of the public are deceived about the appropriations and expenditures of other government agencies whose budgets are inflated to conceal funds for the intelligence community.

The failure to provide this information to the public and to the Congress prevents either from effectively ordering priorities and violates Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 of the Constitution…. The Committee finds that publication of the aggregate figure for national intelligence would begin to satisfy the Constitutional requirement and would not damage the national security. [16]

Unfortunately, the Church Committee’s recommendation was never implemented as the CIA Director (DCI), George Bush, successfully argued for the committee to hold off implementing its decision. The Committee voted 6-5 to hold off and the recommendation was never brought to the whole Senate for a decision. [17]

It would have to wait until the 1990’s before Congress would once again take up the issue of the black budget. Ironically it was Congress that had provided the legislation that would be an effective mechanism to end the secrecy surrounding the size of the black budget. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was passed in 1966 and made it possible for individuals to gain access to the records of any federal government agency by making a written request. [18] All agencies are required to disclose requested records except for information that falls under nine exemptions and three exclusions of the FOIA. The most relevant of these exemptions for the CIA Act was (b)(1) exemption 1 which says: “This exemption protects from disclosure national security information concerning the national defense or foreign policy, provided that it has been properly classified in accordance with the substantive and procedural requirements of an executive order.” If an agency refused to release information, the requestor could ask for a Federal judge to adjudicate whether the information did or didn’t qualify for the exemption claimed by the agency in withholding the relevant information.

In 1967 when Richardson first took legal action, he did not use the newly passed FOIA in requesting information about the CIA’s ‘black budget’ since he was challenging the constitutional basis of the black budget and CIA Act, rather than arguing that release of the figures would not pose a national security threat. Richardson rightly assumed that the CIA would not release information concerning the black budget on the grounds of national security, and that it could persuasively argue this before a federal judge qualifying for exemption from FOIA.

In 1996, President Clinton introduced a major change in the secrecy over the size of the black budget when he argued that its disclosure would not threaten national security. The DCI under Clinton, John Deutsch gave Congressional testimony that President Clinton was “persuaded that disclosure of the annual amount appropriated for intelligence purposes would inform the public and not, in itself, harm intelligence activities.” [19] President Clinton had effectively undercut the main legal barrier to the CIA indefinitely withholding the size of the black budget from an FOIA request. In 1997 the Federation of Atomic Scientists made an FOIA request to the CIA, to disclose the secret combined appropriations for the Intelligence community that comprises the CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), and intelligence branches of the Air force, Navy and Army. [20] The DCI refused and the case eventually went before a Federal Court. In a last ditch effort to prevent disclosure of the ‘black budget’ the DCI persuaded both the Senate [21] and the House of Representatives [22] to vote against amendments that would have recommended its disclosure.

The CIA’s efforts were to no avail and in 1997 the Federal Judge decided in favor of the FAS that the ‘black budget’ could be disclosed without harming the national security of the US. In what was the first major crack in the official secrecy surrounding the CIA’s budget and its intelligence activities, the CIA subsequently decided to release for the first time the size of its ‘official’ black budget (appropriations drawn from single line items on the DoD budget), but reserved the right to not disclose this figure in future. For the fiscal year of 1997, the combined aggregate appropriations for the Intelligence Community (black budget) was said to be 26.6 billion dollars. [23]

The ‘official’ black budget for the CIA can be estimated by using the percentage of the black budget for the intelligence community that went to the CIA as opposed to other intelligence agencies from DoD appropriations. According to Victor Marchetti and John Marks, the CIA portion of the intelligence black budget was 750 million from 6.228 billion (approximately 12%) for 1973. [24] Victor Marchetti and John Marks put the overall intelligence budget at $6.228 billion for 1973, of which the CIA disposed of $750 million. According to David Wise

In 1975 the entire CIA budget was hidden within a $2 billion appropriation for "Other Procurement, Air Force." The $12 billion total for all U.S. intelligence, much higher than previous estimates, was indicated in the report of the Senate intelligence committee. [25]

Wise’s estimate suggests that the proportion of the intelligence black budget that goes to the CIA is closer to approximately 16.7% than the 12.0% estimated by Marchetti and Mark. At the other end, the Federation of Atomic Scientists, using 1998 figures, estimated that the CIA’s portion of the black budget was 11.5%. [26] If 12% is taken as the more accurate estimate of the CIA portion of the black budget, then this suggests that of the 26.6 billion dollars Tenet disclosed went to the Intelligence Community from DoD appropriations, approximately $3.2 billion (12%) was the official ‘black budget’ of the CIA. The 1998 estimate converts to $3.5 billion in 2002 terms, and compares quite favorable with the 1953 figures that presumably made up DoD appropriations for the CIA black budget that can be converted to approximately $3.4 billion in 2002 using CPI adjustments. [27] Consequently it appears that much of the mystery surrounding the black budget of the CIA and the intelligence community had been ended once official figures for the CIA were released through FOIA in 1997.

However, it will now be argued that the figures released by Tenet in 1997 for the ‘official black budget’ for the intelligence community, and earlier estimates dating from 1953 data, committee reports in the 1970’s, is disinformation intended to steer analysts, Congress and the general public away from the true size of the CIA’s black budget. It will be argued that the ‘unofficial’ CIA black budget, in terms of Congressional appropriations and other funds the CIA transfers through other government departments and agencies far exceeds the ‘official’ black budget (DoD appropriations earmarked for the intelligence community), and has been well disguised as a major purpose of the CIA ever since its creation. The major purpose of the CIA is to act as a funnel for the combined black budgets of the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. This is the reverse of the conventional wisdom behind the ‘official’ black budget that the DoD funds the CIA. In fact it is the CIA that funds secret projects run by the various military and intelligence services in the DoD. Using the testimony of whistleblowers of other federal government agencies and testimony of DoD Inspector Generals, I will argue that billions of dollars are annually extracted from these agencies by the CIA, topped up by revenue from other sources used by the CIA, and then siphoned to the military intelligence agencies within the DoD for distribution to ‘deep black projects’ outside of the regular appropriations and oversight process mandated by Congress for ‘black projects’.

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HUD’s Missing Money, Catherine Fitts, Hamilton Securities and the CIA.

In 1989 Catherine Austin Fitts became Assistant Secretary for Housing in Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). She began to notice money was not properly tracked as it moved between different HUD departments and there was a lack of proper accounting mechanisms to deal with discrepancies in revenue indicated fraud at an alarming level. [28] She attempted to put in place some credible financial tracking mechanisms to identify where the money was going and to identify the responsible individuals and HUD departments, but after 18 months on the job she was suddenly fired by the Bush administration. Fitts was told the day after she left that her financial reforms through ‘place-based financial accounting and statements’ would also be terminated. [29]

Fitts subsequently created her own investment company, Hamilton Securities Group that used specially created computer software for tracking financial flows in the mortgage industry. In 1993, Hamilton Securities Group won a contract with HUD to manage its $500 billion portfolio. As a result of its innovative computer tracking of finances called ‘Community Wizard’, Hamilton Securities saved Federal Taxpayers $2 billion and according to Fitts "took the world's breath away." [30] Carolyn Betts, a former Hamilton Securities employee said:

The HUD field office people went absolutely crazy when they saw it. You could go in with a pointer on a map and get to information on expenditures by each HUD program. It was a pretty beautiful program and would have become unbelievably powerful. [31]

Fitts’ innovative program was so successful that it was earning special attention from Congressmen with one chairman of an oversight committee in October 1997 favorably commenting on the "eye-popping" results. [32] Fitts’ program had the potential to revolutionize the way in which large multibillion dollar portfolios were managed. Vice President Al Gore's Reinventing Government Initiative gave her firm the Hammer Award for Excellence in Re-engineering Government. Fitts innovation also came to the attention of powerful individuals who viewed it as a threat to existing way in which finances were tracked in HUD and other federal government agencies that apparently allowed corporations to reap large profits from government inefficiency.

Fitts’ pioneering work came crashing down around her in June, 1996 when a qui tam (whistleblower) suit was brought against her firm by a rival HUD contractor John Ervin who alleged Fitts committed fraud against HUD to the tune of $3.8 million. According to the Federal False Claims Act, a qui tam suit has 60 days to be investigated before a federal judge has to reach a conclusion on the substance of the suit and unseal the qui tam so that the defendant can respond to the allegations. Instead, the HUD Inspector General together with the federal judge in charge of the case took four years before another judge decided the allegations lacked substance, unsealed the qui tam, and dismissed the suit in July 2000. [33] In the meantime, Fitts’ firm was subjected to 18 audits and investigations, multiple subpoenas for thousands of documents, not paid money owed to it by HUD while the ‘investigation’ was underway, subjected to media leaks and a smear campaign that frightened away potential investors, and ultimately raided by Department of Justice agents in 1998. The raid effectively destroyed the Community Wizard program and put an end to Hamilton Securities’ efforts to survive the legal onslaught that involved steep legal costs. At the end, Fitts company went bankrupt, Fitts was emotionally exhausted, but continued to fight for her reputation, repayment from HUD, and exposure of wrong doing by the HUD Inspector General in allowing the qui tam law suit to proceed for four years on a ‘fishing expedition’, while simultaneously leaking false information. [34]

After her experiences in both working with HUD as an employee (1988-1989) and as a contractor (1993-1997) and observing at first hand the chronic state of finances that could not be accounted for under normal accounting rules, Fitts concluded that HUD was being run as a ‘criminal enterprise’:

In the summer of 2000, a member of the staff for the Chairman of the Senate appropriation subcommittee (with jurisdiction over HUD …) confided to me that they believed that HUD was being run as "a criminal enterprise." I responded that I "did not disagree." Reaching that conclusion was a long time coming. It took many years of experience implementing practical and sound reforms to the FHA mortgage system, only to have the system reject any and all efforts to have it become anything other than an integral part of a significant mortgage bubble and a pork and slush fund operation. [35]

The fraudulent movement of finances through HUD were made possible by poor auditing standards that enabled as much as tens of billions of dollars to go annually missing. [36] In a March 2000 report, the HUD Inspector General, Susan Gaffney, reported a high number of ‘adjustments’ that had to be made to account for $59 billion that could not be located in 1999:

At the time we discontinued our audit work, a total of 42 adjustments totaling about $17.6 billion had been processed in this manner to adjust fiscal year 1998 ending balances. An additional 242 adjustments totaling about $59.6 billion, were made to adjust fiscal year 1999 activity. [37]

Gaffney argued that the ‘adjustments’ were caused by HUD’s difficulties in reconciling different computer systems. An unnamed official within HUD dismissed the idea of the adjustments being solely problems associated with different computers systems:

Everything that has transpired at HUD is not an accident, and it sure isn't a computer glitch. When you take the different material violations of the most basic financial-management rules and compare them to the time and effort put in to have first-rate systems, it is impossible to explain it as anything other than significant financial fraud. [38]

Such fraud would not have been possible without collusion at the highest level, the Director of HUD, Mario Cuomo. Confirmation that the missing $59 billion for 1999 was known to Cuomo was disclosed by the unnamed source in HUD:

The losses could be far greater than $59 billion, but they don't know for sure because the audit isn't completed. Secretary Cuomo is a very smart control freak, so it's ludicrous to think that he doesn't know what is going on. [39]

Confirmation that losses from HUD were an endemic problem rather than peculiar to 1998 and 1999 comes from the General Accounting Office of Congress that released a report in 2003 stating that in January 2003, “for the 12th year in a row, the HUD OIG [Office of Inspector General] cited the lack of an integrated financial-management system as a material weakness in its audit of the department's financial statements.” [40] In short, billions of dollars were annually missing from HUD and no one knew where the money was going.

Fitts analysis of the fraudulent movement of funds through HUD, her initial firing as an Assistant Secretary, subsequent difficulties her company had with HUD [41] , indicated that she had stumbled on to one of the strategies used by the CIA to generate its secret black budget. Fitts ultimately came to the conclusion that HUD was being run as a money laundering operation to fund black projects. [42] The sums for HUD alone, $59 billion for 1999, were far greater than the official $3.5 billion annual estimated budget of the CIA that came from DoD appropriations. Missing funds from HUD, the participation of the HUD Director in permitting the funds to go missing, and the difficulties suffered by Fitts, point to the CIA being behind the missing HUD funds. The CIA is the only government agency that has the legal authority to co-opt Federal Agency Directors in permitting billions of dollars to go missing from or laundered through their budgets for transfer into a ‘black budget’. It is worth investigating the destruction of Fitts company, Hamilton Securities Group to identify any CIA fingerprints in covering up the secret transfer of HUD funds into what will be argued to be the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ black budget.

The individual who brought the lawsuit against Fitts, John Ervin, has been described as “notorious for filing nuisance lawsuits and "bid protests’.” [43] His small mortgage investment firm apparently had, according to one inside source, “up to 17 in-house personnel working full time on mountains of paperwork regarding this and other cases.” [44] Ervin may simply have been a small time contractor with a chip on his shoulder from losing the HUD mortgage contract to Fitts’ company. However, the large number of legal cases his firm was involved in suggests he may have been simply a front for more powerful actors threatened by Hamilton’s Securities who wished to cripple it through a damaging court process. More revealing was the behavior of the federal judge in charge of Fitts’ case that eventually presided over the case. According to court transcripts, the initial judge had indicated in 1996 that it would be inappropriate to extend the seal [on the qui tam] without evidence and that unless evidence was produced he would not extend the seal again. The case was then transferred to Judge Stanley Sporkin of the District of Columbia’s District Court. According to Uri Dowbenky, Sporkin “managed to illegally keep a qui tam lawsuit sealed for almost 4 years. That could be a ‘judicial’ record.” [45] Sporkin had given multiple 60-day extensions to further investigate the allegations that he claimed were not limited to the False Claims Act limit of 60 days that applied to Department of Justice investigations, since the HUD Inspector General had independent subpoena power and chose to continue the investigation. [46] Extending the qui tam in this highly dubious manner meant that it was kept sealed thus preventing Hamilton from responding to the allegations, and thus prolonged an elaborate ‘fishing expedition’ that would financially exhaust Hamilton Securities.

A significant background fact about Judge Sporkin was that he was the General Counsel for the CIA (1981-86) before being appointed as a federal judge to the District of Columbia District Court by Ronald Reagan in 1985. [47] Sporkin’s CIA background and the continued extensions of the qui tam case that had questionable legal standing and which was finally unsealed and dropped by a new Federal judge appointed to the case after Sporkin’s retirement in 2000 point to a CIA covert program to destroy Hamilton Securities. One conclusion that emerges is that Fitts company was targeted since it threatened to undermine and even expose the way the CIA secretly extracted congressional appropriations from or laundered funds through HUD and other government agencies. [48] The CIA was using its unique legal status of being able to lawfully transfer Congressional appropriations or ‘laundered money’ through other federal government agencies, to fund projects administered by the intelligence community, and to destroy any individual or company that threatened to reveal such a process.

The wide extent of chronic auditing irregularities for most government agencies suggested that it was not just HUD that was used by the CIA as vehicle for siphoning money into its ‘unofficial’ black budget. A Senate Committee on government reform investigated the auditing practices of federal government agencies in 2001, and the Committee Chairman, Senator Fred Thompson, released a report that found that ineffectual auditing practices were endemic and led to billions of dollars going annually missing from most government agencies. [49] Rather than restricting itself to the appropriations through the DoD (the ‘official’ black budget), something Congress was aware of and tolerated, the accounting irregularities of many government agencies were possible evidence that the CIA was accumulating a sizable portion of the ‘actual’ black budget from other government agencies.

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The Ultimate Beneficiary of the CIA ‘Black Budget’: The Intelligence Community and the Second Manhattan Project

The covert role of the CIA in destroying Hamilton Securities suggests that the $59 billion missing from HUD in 1999 was some of the money transferred to the CIA’s ‘unofficial black budget’. The ‘legal’ status of such a secret transaction on the basis of national security meant that the CIA could do this and be sure that senior officials in HUD and the Department of Justice would cooperate in keeping these transfers a secret. The legal onslaught suffered by Hamilton Securities was indicative of a covert CIA operation that involved cooperation by senior officials in HUD, the DOJ, a federal judge and a former HUD contractor, in destroying a domestic US company that had developed technology that threatened to reveal where the missing HUD money was really going.

Estimates of the CIA’s ‘official’ black budget have been shown earlier to be in the vicinity of $3.5 billion and thought to be extracted from DoD appropriations. If the CIA was the recipient of the missing HUD money, this meant that the CIA was in fact a conduit for appropriated federal funds and non-appropriated funds being channeled through HUD and the CIA. Rather than the CIA being a recipient of DoD funds, as commonly thought, the CIA was more likely secretly funding intelligence activities and covert operations conducted through the intelligence community associated with the DoD. It is worth exploring how the CIA could be siphoning money to those elements of the intelligence community associated with the DoD, and how these funds could in turn be used by the DoD and the intelligence community to fund a large number of ‘deep black projects’ that operate outside of the oversight system that had been developed for regular classified projects funded by Congressional appropriations. These regular classified programs are ‘waived’ Special Access Programs in the DoD, and ‘waived’ Covert Access Programs in the CIA. [50] I turn now to examine events surrounding the inception of the CIA and its relationship with the DoD in jointly running and funding the intelligence community associated with the DoD.

The end of the Second World witnessed the dissolution of the CIA’s predecessor, Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that had been established in June 1942, and headed by a former civilian, William Donovan. [51] Donovan put together an assortment of adventurers, intellectuals, and military personnel that carried out a number of intelligence activities and covert operations during the war that had limited success. The OSS, however, was not trusted with the most sensitive war intelligence by the two main US military intelligence services - the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and the Army’s G-2, nor by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The war’s end meant that foreign intelligence and covert operations were again dominated by the different military services, the State Department and the FBI (the FBI had extensive operations in Latin America) who would be very protective when it came to their most sensitive intelligence data.

The post-war structure of the national security system was debated, and the military services were on the record for being opposed to the formation a civilian agency that would play a leading role in foreign intelligence gathering or covert operations. [52] Indeed, the idea of the different military intelligence services being headed by a civilian agency would have been quite a challenge for President Truman and his advisors to argue due to the major role played by US military intelligence in successfully conducting the war, and the peripheral role played by the OSS. Despite the wartime experience and the conventional wisdom that the military were more than capable of handling intelligence related activities, the passage of the National Security Act in 1947, led to the formation of a unified defense bureaucracy, the Department of Defense, three main military services (US Army, Navy and Air Force), and the creation of the National Security Council and the CIA. [53] The CIA became the formal head of the US intelligence Community responsible for coordinating and providing leadership on all intelligence related activities. This meant that an organization based on the wartime model of a relatively small organization that conducted covert operations (the OSS) would be formally responsible for all US intelligence activities both military and civilian. This represented a major shift for the different military services yet they acquiesced to Truman’s request, but did so in a way that meant the DoD through its various associated intelligence services maintained considerable bureaucratic power in running the intelligence community in association with the CIA.

The Director of the CIA (DCI) would be the formal head of the Intelligence Community comprising the CIA, the National Security Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, the various military intelligence agencies and intelligence services of civilian agencies such as the FBI and the State Department. [54] Importantly, the DCI would play a key role in the budget allocations for agencies within the intelligence community to be funded by the black budget. [55] The DCI has statutory power to move funds in the intelligence community with the approval of the Secretary of Defense as described in the following:

No funds made available under the National Foreign Intelligence Program may be reprogrammed by any element

of the intelligence community without the prior approval of the Director of Central Intelligence except in

accordance with procedures issued by the Director. The Secretary of Defense shall consult with the Director

of Central Intelligence before reprogramming funds made available under the Joint Military Intelligence Program.[56]

In theory, this meant that the DCI would have some leverage despite what was conventionally thought to be the budgetary power of the DoD over the DCI since the ‘official’ black budget would comprise DoD appropriations in one form or another. If the CIA, however, were able to get more significant sources of funds than DoD appropriations, then the CIA would control the money flow that sustained the intelligence community associated with the DoD, and their various intelligence activities, covert programs and classified technologies associated with these.

Leadership of the Intelligence Community is not exercised solely by the Director of the CIA (DCI), but is shared with the Secretary of Defense, who is responsibly for ensuring that budget needs are met for DoD associated intelligence agencies, and who also appoints key personal in these agencies. This power sharing and the extensive funding arrangement that involves the CIA in DoD operations, is evidenced in terms of the relevant statutory provision for funding military intelligence agencies:

The Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Director of Central Intelligence, shall--

(1) ensure that the budgets of the elements of the intelligence community within the Department of Defense are

adequate to satisfy the overall intelligence needs of the Department of Defense, including the needs of the

chairman \1\ of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of the unified and specified commands …[57]

One of clauses of this statute worth emphasizing is that the CIA has a ‘consultative role’ in satisfying the funding needs of the ‘Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commanders of the unified and specified commands.” Such a clause provides legal justification for the Secretary of Defense to transfer funds provided by the CIA’s black budget to an extensive number of military services, commands and operations.

As far as appointments are concerned, the Secretary of Defense has the power to nominate the Directors of military related intelligence agencies such as the NSA, NRO and National Imagery and Mapping Agency, even in cases where the DCI does not approve of the Secretary’s choice. [58] Thus the Secretary of Defense has considerable bureaucratic power over the main military intelligence agencies in terms of senior appointments and how funds would be spent. [59] Consequently, leadership of the intelligence community is shared between the Director of the CIA (DCI) and the Secretary of Defense who share decisions concerning appointments, programs and budgetary allocations for the US intelligence community.

While the CIA is the junior partner to the DoD when it comes to intelligence activities and covert operations, it has one major bureaucratic advantage to the DoD. This concerns ‘black budget’ allocations for highly classified projects. It would be far easier for the Congress to accept the idea of an ‘official’ black budget sanctioned by law, if it was a civilian agency that was formally in charge of this unusual budgetary mechanism that would require an extraordinary degree of trust by Congress that such budgetary power was not being abused. As far as the DoD was concerned, Congress was quite adamant that all appropriations to the DoD would be spent in ways that were consistent with the law, i.e., Congressional resolutions and enactments. [60] After all, this is what distinguished American style democracy from an authoritarian police state. This meant that the DoD’s power to create a ‘black budget’ would be circumscribed by relevant Congressional provisions governing the ‘unacknowledged’ Special Access Programs (‘black projects’) this funded. [61] The CIA provided the ideal cover for the creation of an ‘unofficial’ black budget that could legally transfer the appropriations of, or launder funds through, non-DoD federal government agencies, not to the CIA as Congress intended in the CIA Act, but directly to ‘deep black projects’ institutionally located within the NSA, NRO, NIMA, DIA, the different military intelligence services of the Army, Navy, and Air Force; and to the various special projects and commands overseen by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The CIA’s ‘official’ black budget is a cover for the large network of projects run by the different military intelligence agencies, the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff, that used government appropriations from, and money laundered through, different federal agencies. The CIA could provide for sufficient funding for an extensive number of ‘deep black projects’ that would be entirely separate to regular DoD appropriations and the oversight process developed for DoD classified projects, without Congressional budget analysts and the general public being aware of how the different military intelligence services were secretly housing projects funded by the CIA siphoned funds.

A secret funding arrangement between the CIA and the different military intelligence services in a manner that bypassed budgetary restraints on DoD associated activities would offer considerable mutual advantages to the CIA and the military intelligence services if they wanted to create deep black projects outside of both the normal Congressional appropriation system and the regular DoD oversight process. First, the CIA had the legal power to transfer appropriations from other government agencies, keeping this secret and moving these funds to whatever operations it deemed necessary. The 1949 CIA Act describes this power as follows:

The sums made available to the Agency may be expended without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of Government funds; and for objects of a confidential, extraordinary, or emergency nature, such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the Director. [62]

As the clause makes clear, the CIA Director may use funds from the black budget “without regard to the provisions of law.” This means that the DCI has enormous power in funding ‘deep black programs’ and disregarding any legal or budgetary restrictions where he deems a project to be of “extraordinary” or “emergence nature”. Unlike other agencies, the Director of the CIA would be able to prevent the Inspector General of the CIA - an independent official appointed by Congress - from conducting a thorough audit of the CIA’s budget and exposing the actual size of the black budget. The relevant statute from the CIA Act is worth quoting since it is unique restriction not found in the case of the power of Inspector Generals of other federal agencies:

The Director may prohibit the Inspector General from initiating, carrying out, or completing any audit, inspection, or investigation, or from issuing any subpoena, after the Inspector General has decided to initiate, carry out, or complete such audit, inspection, or investigation or to issue such subpoena, if the Director determines that such prohibition is necessary to protect vital national security.[63]

The above clause directly contradicts the relevant federal statute that governs Inspector Generals in other government departments and agencies: “Neither the head of the establishment nor the officer next in rank below such head shall prevent or prohibit the Inspector General from initiating, carrying out, or completing any audit or investigation, or from issuing any subpoena during the course of any audit or investigation. [64]

A second advantage from having the CIA act as the unofficial funding source, was that the various military intelligence agencies and Joint Chiefs of Staff would be able to provide the physical and personnel infrastructure for deep black projects to be funded by the CIA’s black budget which comprised some funds from the appropriations of other government departments and agencies. This enabled the DoD associated intelligence services to circumvent the Congressional requirement that no appropriations for DoD activities be expended “unless funds therefor have been specifically authorized by law”. [65] In essence, the DoD and DCI were collaborating in circumventing Congressional intent designed to prevent DoD ever using funding sources outside of the Congressional appropriation process.

A third mutual advantage was that the CIA could play a significant consultative role in the various DoD associated intelligence agencies in both intelligence activities and covert operations that would be outside of the regular oversight process in Congress, the Executive Office and even the DoD. This would enable security professionals within the military intelligence agencies, rather than political appointees in Congress, the Executive Office and DoD to make key decisions in the oversight of the ‘deep black projects’ that could run on whatever ‘unofficial’ black budget funding the CIA could raise. The only restraint was the willingness of directors of different government agencies to allow some of portion of their budget allocations to go to the CIA and DoD agencies in the intelligence community, and to cover up the movement of significant sums of money that the CIA had raised elsewhere and were ‘laundering’ through these agencies. Most disturbingly, there is a growing body of evidence that a portion of the funds laundered through government agencies such as HUD by the CIA comes from organized crime and the drug trade. [66]

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Organized Crime, Drugs, and the CIA

Allegations of links between the CIA and the drug trade first came to public attention in the 1970’s when a number of public officials came forward with evidence of such links. One of these was a former police officer in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Michael Ruppert. In 1977, as a result of his official investigation into the drug trade in Los Angeles, Rupert uncovered evidence that the CIA was playing an active role in bringing drugs into New Orleans and Los Angeles. When Rupert disclosed this information to his superiors in the LAPD, he became a target for surveillance, harassment and burglaries that eventually led to his resignation. [67]

Another key official is a retired Drug Enforcement Agency agent, Celerino Castillo III, who was the lead DEA agent in Guatemala and discovered that the CIA was involved in the drug trade to raise finances for its covert operations. In a written statement to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Castillo gave detailed information on a number of drug running operations that involved cooperation between the CIA and organized crime cartels. [68] Celerino claimed:

The key to understanding the "crack cocaine" epidemic, which exploded on our streets in 1984, lies in understanding the effect of congressional oversight on covert operations. In this case the Boland amendment(s) of the era, while intending to restrict covert operations as intended by the will of the People, only served to encourage C.I.A., the military and elements of the national intelligence community to completely bypass the Congress and the Constitution in an eager and often used covert policy of funding prohibited operations with drug money. [69]

Another prominent official was Marine Colonel James Sebow, the third in command of the El Toro Airbase, California, who discovered evidence that C-130 cargo flights coming into the airbase from Central America were filled with drugs. Sebow communicated his finding to the base commander, Col Joseph Underwood, and then found himself along with Col Underwood, subject to investigations for minor offenses, relieved of command and threatened with Court Martial if he did not cooperate with the investigation. On January 22, 1991, Sebow was found dead, apparently by suicide, but an investigation by family members and supporters revealed evidence that he in fact was murdered for what he had discovered. [70] On the day before his death, Sebow’s widow recalled a conversation Sebow had with Col Underwood who had stopped by for a visit:

Underwood stopped by and repeatedly tried to talk Jimmy into accepting an early retirement to avoid a court-martial. Jimmy objected strongly. At this, Underwood became quite angry. Sally stated, "I have never seen such a vicious face as Joe's when Jimmy said he would not retire and would take the entire matter to a court-martial if necessary. Underwood jumped up and said, "You'll never go to a court-martial, and I mean never!" [71]

The events surrounding Sebow’s death support allegations that he had uncovered a CIA supported drug running operation into the US, and was murdered to prevent this from being exposed.

In the July 12, 1985 personal notes of Oliver North, used by his legal defense during his various trials and Congressional hearings over his role in selling US weapons to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, North reported that at a meeting involving a number of NSC and CIA officials, $14 million was mentioned as the funds the Contra rebels would raise from the drug trade.[72] North’s admission did not get serious press coverage despite the apparent confirmation that the CIA was complicit in the use of drugs as revenue for covert operations.[73] It can be inferred that North’s efforts were an amateurish effort by an NSC ‘basement team’ to raise revenue for NSC covert operations that was modeled on a far more successful effort by the CIA to use revenue from the drug trade.

The best known case of an alleged link between the CIA and the drug trade emerged from the pioneering investigative journalism of Gary Webb in 1996 who published the “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury during Summer 1996. [74] Webb presented a compelling case that the CIA played a role in allowing drug money to be used to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. While Webb’s series was focused on the proceeds of drug activities going to the Contras, his conclusion that the CIA colluded in this endeavor supported broader allegations of the CIA using the drug trade to finance covert operations. Webb’s series of articles generated intense national interest until the publication of ‘independent’ investigation by the Washington Post on October 4, 1996, claimed there was insufficient evidence to support Webb’s allegations. [75] The New York Times and Los Angeles Times followed up on October 20 with equally critical articles. [76] Criticisms began to mount and eventually led to the editors of the San Jose Mercury apologizing for ‘errors’ in Webb’s Dark Alliance series, and had Webb transferred to a less prominent news bureau. [77] Webb resigned in disgust in November, 1997, ending a nineteen year career as a journalist. It was subsequently learned that one of the two writers of the Washington Post article, Walter Marcus was a CIA asset, suggesting that the Post had been co-opted into a covert campaign to undermine Webb’s work. The critical stories in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times relied on similar ‘unnamed sources’ to the Post article indicating that Webb had become a victim of a covert CIA operation through the ‘establishment’ newspapers to discredit his findings. [78] In January 1998, the Inspector General of the CIA released a report exonerating the CIA of any role in the drug trade. [79]

Having so far determined the existence of a black budget created by the CIA that circumvents Congressional intent on the use of appropriations of different federal departments and agencies, and/or involves laundering of funds possibly gained from organized crime and the drug trade, it is worth estimating the size of the CIA’s black budget and what it is used for.

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Estimating the Size of the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ Black Budget

Using Fitts estimates of money missing from HUD, and knowledge of the appropriations process, a more accurate figure of the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ black budget that feeds the intelligence community associated with DoD can be estimated. It should be emphasized that it is only the CIA that has Congressional authority to draw appropriations through other government agencies without ‘without regard to any provisions of law’ or ‘intended use of appropriations’. This means that money missing from the Congressional appropriations of other agencies would be initially being siphoned through the CIA and no other intelligence agency. Other agencies in the intelligence community gather their appropriations through the DOD that generates the ‘official’ black budget through fictitious line items on its annual budget. Consequently, it can be concluded that appropriated money channeled through HUD and other agencies is going into the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ black budget that in turn goes directly into deep black programs within the DoD associated intelligence agencies and specialized programs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The CIA’s ‘unofficial’ black budget would therefore not appear on the DoD budget as single line items but would be annually moved through the DoD budgetary mechanisms in a way that cannot be financially tracked. A description of the way this is done appears is described by Tim Weiner, author of Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget:

One way the form [Form 1080, Voucher for Transfer Between Appropriations and/or Funds] is used to allow money to flow from the Treasury to the Army, or from one Army account to another, is for an officer to fill out the 1080. The bursar then signs the form and issues a Treasury check. The 1080 vouches that the money has been used to pay for the costs of authorized programs. It creates an audit trail - a paper path showing money flowing. [80]

An estimate of the size of the CIA’s black budget, would therefore be unaccounted movement of funds through the DoD. According to an investigative journalist, Kelly O’Meara, the use of a range of accounting mechanisms such as "unsupported entries," "material-control weakness," "adjusted records," "unmatched disbursements," "abnormal balances" and "unreconciled differences" are evidence of large sums of money that are moved through the DoD that cannot be accounted for. [81] Since the Inspector General of DoD has a certain degree of independence, traces of the CIA black budget would appear in auditing anomalies using some of the terms O’Meara describes. David K. Steensma, Acting Assistant Inspector for auditing DoD wrote in a 2002 report that “DoD processed $1.1 trillion in unsupported accounting entries to DoD Component financial data used to prepare departmental reports and DoD financial statements for FY 2000.” [82] Elaborating on the significance of the DoD Inspector General reports, O’Meara has written:

[T]he deputy IG [Inspector General] at the Pentagon read an eight-page summary of DOD fiduciary failures. He admitted that $4.4 trillion in adjustments to the Pentagon's books had to be cooked to compile the required financial statements and that $1.1 trillion of that amount could not be supported by reliable information. In other words, at the end of the last full year on Bill Clinton's watch, more than $1 trillion was simply gone and no one can be sure of when, where or to whom the money went. [83]

According to the Office of the Inspector General, the accounting irregularities for fiscal year 1999 were even larger and added up to 2.3 trillion dollars; and for fiscal year 1998, these irregularities were 1.7 trillion (see table 2).

Table 2. Department of Defense (DoD) – Unsupported Accounting Entries 1998-2003

Fiscal Year

Unsupported Entries USD

Source

Highlighted Quotes

2002

Not disclosed due accounting irregularities

Independent Auditor Report

"DoD financial management and feeder systems cannot currently provide adequate evidence to support various material amounts on the financial statements. Therefore we did not perform auditing procures to support material amounts on the financial statements." [84]

2001

Not disclosed due accounting irregularities

Independent Auditor Report

"We did not obtain sufficient, competent evidentiary matter to support the material line items on the financial statements … the scope of our work was not sufficient to enable us to express, and we do not express, an opinion on these financial statements" [85]

2000

1.1 trillion

Office of Inspector General, Audit

"Of the $4.4 trillion in department-level accounting entries, $2.8 trillion were supported with proper research, reconciliation, and audit trails. However, department-level accounting entries of $1.1 trillion were unsupported or improper." [86]

1999

2.3 trillion

Office of Inspector General, Audit

"… department-level accounting entries of $2.3 trillion were made to force financial data to agree with various sources of financial data without adequate research and reconciliation, were made to force buyer and seller data to agree in preparation for eliminating entries, did not contain adequate documentation and audit trails, or did not follow accounting principles." [87]

1998

1.7 trillion

Inspector General Statement

"… final statements were more untimely than ever and a record $1.7 trillion of unsupported adjustments were made in preparing the statements." [88]

The Inspector General reports are important evidence that trillions of dollars were siphoned through the Department of Defense (DoD) for the fiscal years 1998-2002. [89] Using the Inspector General reports of accounting anomalies, it can be estimated that Fitts and O’Meara’s estimates of missing money from the DoD is a close approximation to the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ black budget. Consequently, the CIA black budget is annually in the vicinity of 1.1 trillion dollars – a truly staggering figure when one considers that the DoD budget for 2004 will be approximately 380 billion dollars. [90] This suggests that the vast size of the DoD in terms of its personnel, weapons systems and research into ‘conventional weapons systems’, is dwarfed by something that in funding terms is almost three times larger than the entire conventional military system funded by the DoD budget.

The vast size of the estimated CIA ‘unofficial’ black budget is strong evidence of a collective effort by the CIA and DoD associated military intelligence agencies and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to fund a network of highly classified projects so large in scope that they collectively dwarf the original Manhattan project conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratories during the Second World War. [91] Since the original Manhattan project aimed to develop an atomic bomb for use in the war against Nazi Germany, it can be inferred that the network of projects funded by the CIA’s black budget aims to develop a range of advanced weapons systems and intelligence capabilities for use against an adversary whose existence and identity still remains classified. [92] I will henceforth refer to this network of highly classified projects as the second Manhattan Project - ‘Manhattan II’ is the ultimate beneficiary of the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ black budget.

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Conventional Oversight System for the CIA’s and DoD’s Classified Programs

Oversight of the Manhattan II would predictably have been a major concern for the Truman administration that was instrumental in the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949 that institutionalized the black budget that would fund Manhattan II. Major considerations of the Truman administration would have been to create an oversight body dominated by professionals that would not be affected by the partisan political process or by the new political appointees that came and went with each Presidential administration. Consequently, an oversight system would have evolved comprising individuals appointed either due to the technical abilities (e.g., scientists), political skills (e.g., international diplomacy experts), or military expertise (e.g., J-2 & J-3 directorates in the Joint Chiefs of Staff). This oversight system would have most likely evolved in a manner that was independent of the conventional oversight system for classified projects. Consequently, before considering how oversight of the Black Budget and Manhattan II are conducted, it is worth exploring how the conventional oversight system works for classified programs in the CIA and DoD.

This conventional oversight system for highly classified intelligence activities and/or covert projects concerns Controlled Access Programs (CAPs) of the intelligence community or Special Access Programs (SAP) of the DoD. CAPs/SAPs are programs that have additional security measures attached to them over and above the normal classificatory system (confidential, secret, top-secret) attached to most classified information and programs. [93] CAPs/SAPs are divided into two classes ‘acknowledged’ and ‘unacknowledged’ as described in a 1997 Senate Commission Report: “Publicly acknowledged programs are considered distinct from unacknowledged programs, with the latter colloquially referred to as “black” programs because their very existence and purpose are classified.” [94]

A ‘waived’ CAP/SAP is so sensitive that only eight members of Congress (the chairs and ranking members of the four intelligence [or defense] committees divided between the House of Representatives and Senate) are notified of a waived CAP/SAP without being given any information about it. [95] This would enable them to truthfully declare no knowledge of such a program if asked, thereby maintaining secrecy of this CAP/SAP. If unacknowledged CAPs/SAPs are ‘black programs’, then ‘waived’ unacknowledged CAPs/SAPs are ‘deep black’. The most secret of the intelligence and covert operations conducted by the CIA are ‘deep black’ CAPs.

CAPs are funded through the ‘official’ black budget and in theory are subject to both Executive and Congressional oversight. [96] In practice though, Congressional oversight in the case of waived acknowledged CAPs is nominal as revealed by the 1997 Senate Commission Report. President Clinton’s Executive Order 12958 issued on April 17, 1995, reformed how CAPs/SAPs would in future be created and oversight established. The main component of the Executive Order was that only the Director of Central Intelligence or the Secretaries of State, Defense and Energy (or their principal deputies) could create a CAP/SAP. CAPs/SAPs would be kept to an “absolute minimum”; and would be created when “the vulnerability of, or threat to, specific information is exceptional,” and their secrecy cannot be protected by the normal classification system. [97]

As far as oversight was concerned, the key clause in Executive Order 12958 was an effort by the Clinton administration to coordinate oversight through a central executive office (Information Security Oversight Office) that would be responsible to the National Security Council (NSC) and annually report to the President. [98] The President’s effort to centralize and coordinate oversight features of CAPs/SAPs was resisted by both the Defense and Intelligence communities. While in theory, oversight coordination occurs in the Information Security Oversight Office set up in the NSC that issues an annual report to the President; the power to approve or terminate a CAP/SAP lies with the respective intelligence community and DoD committees and executive officers. In general, Executive Office oversight of CAPs/SAPs has been described as “nothing more than a sop used to placate anyone who questions the propriety of an administration’s covert action policy.” [99]

Oversight of CAPs/SAPs is performed by a committee comprising officials from the Intelligence Community, the Controlled Access Program Oversight Committee (CAPOC); and a similar committee in the DoD, the Special Access Program Oversight Committee (SAPOC). [100] CAPOC reviews CAPs and Sensitive Compartmented Information (intelligence data) in the intelligence community annually and can recommend their ‘compartmentation’ or termination. [101] It is however, only the Director or Deputy Director of the CIA that has the authority to “create, modify, or terminate controlled access programs.” [102] :

While CAPOC provides more direct oversight and coordination of CAPs, it is not ultimately the body that oversees the CIA’s most secret projects conducted in collaboration with the military intelligence community. The exclusion of some CIA CAPs from CAPOC is indicated in the following Directive from the Director of the CIA (DCI): “The DCI or DDCI may waive review by the CAPOC for programs covered by equivalent oversight mechanisms, or when review by the CAPOC is unnecessary to carry out the DCI's responsibilities.” [103] Essentially, if the DCI deems it unnecessary for CAPOC to provide oversight information of a CAP, then CAPOC plays no role in monitoring the program.

While the DCI is legally obliged to verbally notify Congress of the CIA’s most sensitive CAPs without providing specific budgetary or operational details, there is no independent way of confirming if he indeed is doing so. Similarly, the DCI could similarly withhold information of the CIA’s most sensitive CAPs to the National Security Council’s ‘Information Security Oversight Office” (ISOO).

The extent to which authority is vested in the different security agencies is the way in which program managers of CAPs/SAPs have the authority to come up with their own rules concerning access and security. A 1994 Commission Report stated:

The special access system gave the program manager the ability to decide who had a need-to-know and thus to strictly control access to the information. But elaborate, costly, and largely separate structures emerged. According to some, the system has grown out of control with each SAP [CAP] program manager able to set independent security rules. [104]

Program managers of CAPs/SAPs have the power to restrict access and information to the heads of Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees, and even to the NSC’s Information Security Oversight Office. Consequently, operational control of CAPs and SAPs is firmly maintained by CAP/SAP program managers who answer only to their immediate superiors despite the fact that they are funded by the CIA’s unofficial black budget with the explicit support of the DCI. Consequently there are two categories of waived CAPs/SAPs or ‘deep black programs’: those CAPs/SAPs where oversight is exercised by the relevant oversight committees in the CIA, DoD and the Executive Office; and those CAPs where the program managers answer to an entirely different oversight body. I now explore whom it is that does provide oversight of the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ Black Budget and Manhattan II.

*********

Oversight of the CIA’s ‘Unofficial’ Black Budget & Manhattan II

Considering the vast size and unconventional funding source for Manhattan II, it is worth exploring how oversight of both the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ black budget and of Manhattan II has evolved, and whom program managers for projects funded by the CIA’s unofficial black budget actually answer to. The vastness and secrecy surrounding Manhattan II from its inception sometime during the Truman administration places it outside of the conventional political process where the appointment of key civilian leaders is subject to partisan politics that could compromise the secrecy of Manhattan II and the black budget that funds it. In contrast, the conventional political process has little direct influence on the appointment of senior military personal who undergo a process of first being recommended to the President by the relevant DoD promotions boards, then appointed by the President and finally confirmed by the Senate. While the military leadership of the DoD is outside the partisan political arena, this is not the case for the appointment of the civilians who take on key positions as Secretaries, Deputy Secretaries, and Undersecretaries of the different military services in the DoD with each new administration.

It is very likely that the senior military officials in key bodies such as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are aware of Manhattan II without having detailed knowledge of the black budget that funds it. It is likely that the politically appointed leaders of the DoD have little substantive knowledge of Manhattan II, and have as their chief task the goal of ensuring secrecy of Manhattan II and of the CIA generated ‘black budget’ that feeds it. Thus the Secretary of Defense would play no formal oversight of Manhattan II, far less of the black budget that sustains it. The operational side of Manhattan II, in terms of product testing and application, is most likely be controlled by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Directorates for Intelligence (J-2) and Operations (J-3) that are responsible for intelligence and operational functions of the DoD.

It is unlikely that the Director of the CIA (DCI) is made fully aware of the extent of the ‘unofficial’ black budget, the activities used to raise money for it, and the second Manhattan project it funds. The DCI like all agency and department heads appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate is subject to the partisan political process. Up to the Carter administration, the tradition was that the appointment DCI would not be politicized. However, President Gerald Ford effectively abandoned this with the appointment of George Bush as DCI in 1975. [105] President Carter appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner as the new DCI in 1977, who in turn was replaced by William Casey as the new DCI by President Reagan in 1981. Given the partisan political nature of the DCI since Bush, it is likely much of the budgetary authority of the DCI was secretly delegated by executive authority to a body that formally plays the key oversight role for the ‘unofficial’ black budget, and the covert projects it funds that make up Manhattan II. [106] The delegated powers would most likely have derived from the Truman administration in the form of an executive order and/or National Security Council directive not published in the US Federal Gazette that is required for all executive orders, and thereby remains secret. [107] Such an executive order/NSC directive would been reconfirmed and gradually expanded by subsequent administrations so that ultimate oversight of the black budget and of Manhattan II remained firmly outside of the conventional oversight process.

Consequently, effective oversight of Manhattan II, comes from an ‘executive committee’ especially established in a way that would make it immune to the partisan political process thus ensuring strict secrecy can be preserved, and politically motivated leaks prevented. The power and resources delegated to this ‘executive oversight committee’ for Manhattan II by the Executive Office, and its role in ensuring that ‘black budget’ funds are correctly used and kept secret from the general public, justifies a description of it as a ‘shadow government’.

*********

Conclusion

The method used in guiding the analysis in this report is to simply follow the money trail created by the CIA’s black budget that enables a number of important insights to be drawn by the institutions playing key roles in generating, protecting and distributing black budget funds. Critical in this analysis has been the experience of individuals and companies such as Catherine Fitts and Hamilton Securities that experienced what evidence indicates was a CIA orchestrated covert campaign to discredit the financial tracking reforms that threatened to make more transparent the financial flows of HUD and other government agencies. The systematic accounting problems experienced by HUD and other agencies points to the existence of an unofficial black budget of up one trillion dollars annually. The size of the black budget and the CIA activities used to generate funds for it, point to a vast secret network of projects that is funded outside of the normal Congressional appropriation process. Consequently, what follows is a discussion of some of the primary conclusions that can be drawn and arguments made concerning the CIA’s ‘unofficial’ black budget and the Manhattan II project it has been argued to fund.

It is worth repeating that the CIA is legally authorized by Congress to transfer, “without regard to any provisions of law”, funds from other government agencies for the generation of a black budget. There is strong evidence that the CIA uses this power to disregard law to complement whatever funds it can generate through Congressional appropriations, with funds gained through the drugs trade and organized crime that is laundered through different government agencies. The total annual sum of the black budget is best estimated in the form of accounting anomalies in the main departmental recipient of all black budget funds, the DoD, and is in the vicinity of 1.1 trillion dollars that funds a network of classified intelligence activities and covert operations that collectively form a second Manhattan Project.

The oversight of Manhattan project occurs outside of the conventional oversight system that can be easily compromised by partisan politics. The oversight system that has evolved has been very successful in dividing different functions for Manhattan II in ways that balance institutional rivalries between national security organizations without compromising secrecy. Thus the CIA generates the black budget that in turns transfers these funds to projects that are institutionally located in the military intelligence and special operations units of the DoD. The various military intelligence agencies in turn hire private contractors and/or provide the necessary military resources for these covert programs to be conducted in national laboratories, military bases, private corporations or other classified locations. The program managers of each of the classified projects associated with Manhattan II answer directly to an ‘executive committee’ that is outside of the regular oversight process in DoD, CIA, Congress and the Executive Office. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have control of the testing and applications of Manhattan II products that are conducted in collaboration with the intelligence community. The respective intelligence, defense and appropriations committees in the US Congress provide legitimacy for Manhattan II and the black budget that funds it by not revoking the budgetary powers allocated to the CIA through the 1949 CIA Act. Finally, the Executive Office through the National Security Council issues the necessary executive orders/NSC directives to coordinate the functions and activities in all the branches of government in order to secretly run Manhattan II. Thus each branch of the national security system plays an important role in Manhattan II, without being fully in control of it, thereby insuring a division of powers according to different functions required for Manhattan II. Effective oversight of Manhattan II, however, comes from an ‘executive committee’ that is immune to the partisan political process and whose oversight power and control of resources makes it virtually a ‘shadow government’.

It needs to be emphasized that the ‘unofficial’ black budget and Manhattan Project have legally evolved in ways to respond to a national security contingency that is yet to be revealed to the American public. The classified adversary that this elaborate secret system has been developed to respond to is arguably a potential threat that warrants an extraordinary network of covert programs that dwarf the original Manhattan Project and annually consume as much as 1.1 trillion dollars in a non-transparent manner. More disturbingly, the importance of Manhattan II is such that the CIA has evidently used organized criminal networks and the drug trade as sources to partially fund Manhattan II.

It is unclear when the full scope and impact of Manhattan II will be disclosed to the American public. However, the consequences in terms of increased loss of trust in federal government agencies, loss of morale among senior agency officials instructed to cover up black budget transactions, non-transparency in the flow of government appropriations, targeting of policy makers and business leaders who discover the fraudulent accounting and money laundering that occurs with the black budget, all warrant a serious examination of the need for maintaining the secrecy of Manhattan II and the black budget that funds it. Finally, the classified adversary against whom Manhattan II is directed requires immediate declassification due to the inherent dangers of dealing with what appears to be an undisclosed security threat in a non-transparent and unaccountable manner, and totally outside of the moral/legal restrictions that emerge from vigorous public debate in democratic societies.

*********

ENDNOTES

[1] I wish to acknowledge H.M. for his hospitality, intellectual stimulation and research facilities for the completion of this paper. Many thanks to A.M. for his assistance in printing and distributing this report.

[2] 50 United States Code (U.S.C.) 403j(b). For an online database of all federal statutes codified in the USC, go to: http://www.access.gpo.gov/uscode/index.html

[3] See Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (Warner Books, 1990) 118

[4] 95 Congressional Record 1945 (1949). Also quoted in Weiner, Blank Check, 119

[5] 50 U.S.C. 403f(a)

[6] This occurred to Catherine Austin Fitts whose work in detailing the black budget will be examined later.

[7] Cited in Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/STchp3ii.html

[8] Data comes from a declassified CIA document detailing its projected budget for fiscal year 1953, “Location of Budgeted Funds for Fiscal Year 1953,” CIA, 15 February, 1952, available online at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/cia1953bud.pdf

[9] Converting 1953 dollars into 2002 dollars, I used the conversion factor 0.175. For more details see, “Consumer Price Index (CPI) Conversion Factors to Convert into 2002 dollars,” http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/cv2002rs.pdf

[10] Quoted in Weiner, Blank Check, 218.

[11] Quoted in Weiner, Blank Check, 219.

[12] Quoted in Weiner, Blank Check, 220-21.

[13] Quoted in Weiner, Blank Check, 222. Richardson v. U.S. 465 F. 2d 844, 853, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, 1972.

[14] For the courts ruling as well as dissenting opinions, see U.S. v. Richardson (418 U.S. 166) 167-202.

[15] For further discussion see “The CIA’s Secret Funding and the Constitution,” 84 Yale Law Journal 613 (1975).

[16] See Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Whether Disclosure of Funds for the Intelligence Activities of the United States Is in the Public Interest, Report No. 95-274, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, June 16, 1977 (Government Printing Office, 1977). Also quoted in Weiner, Blank Check, 137-38

[17] See Weiner, Blank Check, 138.

[18] FOIA was enacted in 1966 as Title 5 of the United States Code, section 552. For online information, see http://www.usdoj.gov/04foia/referenceguidemay99.htm

[19] See “FAS Sues CIA for Intelligence Budget Disclosure,” http://www.fas.org/sgp/foia/ciafoia.html

[20] For a copy of the lawsuit, see “FAS Sues CIA for Intelligence Budget Disclosure,” http://www.fas.org/sgp/foia/ciafoia.html . For a website describing the Intelligence Community, go to http://www.intelligence.gov/ .

[21] See Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1998, Amendment No.416 Congressional Record: June 19, 1997 (Senate) p. S5963-S5978]; Available online at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/s858.html

[22] “House Debate on Intelligence Budget Disclosure,” Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1998, Congressional Record: July 9, 1997 (House)] p. H4948-H4985. Available online at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/hbudg.html

[23] See “Statement of the Director of Central Intelligence Regarding the Disclosure of the Aggregate Intelligence Budget for Fiscal Year 1997,” http://www.fas.org/sgp/foia/victory.html

[24] Marchetti and Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (Alfred Knopf, 1974) 61, 81.

[25] Wise, The American Police State (Random House, 1976) 185.

[26] See Federation of Atomic Scientists, http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/budget1.htm

[27] The conversion ration is 0.908 to convert from 1998 to 2002, see “Consumer Price Index (CPI) Conversion Factors to Convert into 2002 dollars,” http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/cv2002rs.pdf

[28] See Mari Kane, “On the Money Trail: The dangerous world of Catherine Austin Fitts,” North Bay Bohemian, September 5-11, 2002: http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.05.02/fitts-0236.html

[29] See Kane, “On the Money Trail,” North Bay Bohemian (September 5-11, 2002). Available online at: http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.05.02/fitts-0236.html

[30] See Kane, “On the Money Trail,” http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.05.02/fitts-0236.html

[31] See Kane, “On the Money Trail,” http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.05.02/fitts-0236.html

[32] See Uri Dowbenky, “HUD Fraud, Spooks and the Slumlords of Harvard,” Bushwacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracies (National Liberty Press, 2003) 1-18. Available online at: http://www.conspiracydigest.com/bushwhacked.html

[33] Paul M. Rodriquez, “Mortgage Scandal - HUD Gives Up With Fitts,” Insight On the News, available online at: http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=161204

[34] See Fitts, “Summary of Events As of February, 2001: http://www.solari.com/media/summary.html

[35] Catherine Austin Fitts, “Experience with FHA-HUD Background Information for Unanswered Questions,” June 2003. Available online at: http://solari.com/gideon/fhalist.htm

[36] See Kelly Patricia O’Meara, “Why Is $59 Billion Missing From HUD?” Insight on News (Nov 6, 2000). Available online at: http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=246245

[37] Susan Gaffney , “Audit Results for the Department of Housing and Urban Development," Testimony before a hearing of the Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology (March 22, 2000 1999). Available online at: http://www.whereisthemoney.org/59billion.htm and http://www.hud.gov/offices/oig/data/reform.pdf

[38] Quoted in Kelly Patricia O’Meara, “Why Is $59 Billion Missing From HUD?” Insight on News (Nov 6, 2000). http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=246245

[39] Quoted in Kelly Patricia O’Meara, “Why Is $59 Billion Missing From HUD?” Insight on News (Nov 6, 2000). http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=246245

[40] “HUD’s Financial Woes Continue,” Insight On the News (April 18, 2003). Available online at: http://www.insightmag.com/news/421370.html

[41] For discussion of the difficulties encountered by Fitts’ company, see Paul Rodriquez, “Thankless Task,” Insight on the News (May 21, 2001). Available online at: http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/210955.html

[42] Catherine Fitts, “The Myth of the Rule of Law or How Money Works: The Destruction of Hamilton Securities.” SRA Quarterly: Third Quarter Commentary (London, 2001) 2. Available online at: http://www.solari.com/gideon/q301.pdf

[43] Dowbenky, Bushwacked, available online at: http://www.conspiracydigest.com/bushwhacked.html

[44] Dowbenky, Bushwacked, available online at: http://www.conspiracydigest.com/bushwhacked.html

[45] Dowbenky, Bushwacked, available online at: http://www.conspiracydigest.com/bushwhacked.html

[46] See Fitts, “Summary of Events,” http://www.solari.com/media/summary.html

[47] For background information on Judge Sporkin, see “Stanley Sporkin, Bio & Selected CIA Iran Contra Background,” http://www.solari.com/media/SporkinBio.html

[48] Fitts’ own conclusion was that the CIA was indeed involved in the destruction of Hamilton, but her view was that HUD was being used to launder money from the illicit drug trade. Catherine Fitts, “The Myth of the Rule of Law or How Money Works,” SRA Quarterly, 5.

[49] Report of Senator Fred Thompson, Chairman, Committee on Governmental Affairs, on Management Challenges Facing the New Administration (US Senate, 2002) available online at: http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/vol1.pdf

[50] Special Access and Covert Access programs will be described later in this report.

[51] For history of OSS, See Michael Warner, “Office of Strategic Services,” http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/oss/foreword.htm

[52] See State Department history of Intelligence Services, http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/intel/intro.html

[53] See 50 U.S.C. 401

[54] The Intelligence Community website is: http://www.intelligence.gov/

[55] 50 U.S.C. 404(b).

[56] 50USC403-4(c)

[57] 50 U.S.C. 403-5(a)

[58] 50 U.S.C.403-6(a)

[59] Statistics on the estimated budgets and personnel of the different intelligence agencies are available online at: http://www.fas.org/irp/commission/budget.htm

[60] 10 USC114. Available online at: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/10/stApIch2.html

[61] The relevant Congressional statutes for SAPs is 10 U.S.C.119

[62] 50 U.S.C.403j (b)

[63] 50USC403q (b)(3)

[64] 5a U.S.C.3(a)

[65] 10 U.S.C.114. Available online at: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/10/stApIch2.html

[66] See Gary Webb, The Dark Alliance (Seven Stories Press, 1998). For online information on the connection between the CIA and the drug trade, see Michael Rupert’s ‘From The Wilderness’ website: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/

[67] For a brief summary of Rupert’s background, see “Opening Remarkks of Michael C. Rupert for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” available online at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/ssci.html

[68] “Written Statement of Celerino Castillo III (D.E.A., Retired) to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,” April 27, 1998. Celerino’s statement is available online at: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/contra1.html

[69] Castillo, “Written Statement,” available at: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/contra1.html

[70] See David Zucchino, The suicide files: Death in the military----last of a four part series,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 22, 1993. Available online at: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/suicide4.html . See also Gary Null, “The Strange Death of Col Sabow,” available online at: http://www.garynull.com/documents/sabow.htm

[71] Gary Null, “The Strange Death of Col Sabow,” http://www.garynull.com/documents/sabow.htm

[72] Lawrence E. Walsh, Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iraq/Contra Matters, Vol 1. (United States Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia Circuit, 1993) ch. 21. Available on line at: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_21.htm

[73] See Michael Ruppert, “A CIA Confession: Oliver North Exposed,” From the Wilderness, October 21, 1998. Available online at: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/volii.html

[74] Webb subsequently wrote the book, Dark Alliance (Seven Stories Press, 1998).

[75] See Robert Suro and Walter Pincus, “The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged Plot,” Washington Post, October 4, 1996. See also Webb, Dark Alliance, 448-50.

[76] See “Tale of CIA and Drugs Has Life of Its Own,” New York Times, October 20, 1996. The Los Angeles Times articles ran over three days beginning October 20. See also Webb, Dark Alliance, 452-55.

[77] See Webb, Dark Alliance, 461-65.

[78] Webb, Dark Alliance, 450-52.

[79] Inspector General, CIA, “Report of Investigation: Allegations of Connections Between CIA
and The Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States (Office of Inspector General Investigations Staff, CIA, January 29, 1998) Vols 1-2. Available online at: http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/cocaine/report/index.html

[80] Weiner, Blank Check, 178-79.

[81] Kelly Patricia O’Meara, “Government Fails Fiscal-Fitness Test,” Insight on the News (April 29, 2002). Available online at: http://www.insightmag.com/news/246188.html

[82] David K. Steensma, “Agency Wide Financial Statements. The Department of Defense Audit Opinion.” (February 26, 2002) The Report can be viewed online at: http://www.dodig.osd.mil/Audit/reports/fy02/02-055.pdf

[83] Kelly Patricia O’Meara, “Rumsfeld Inherits Financial Mess,” Insight on the News (Aug. 10, 2001). Available online at: http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=139530 . Another media report on the 1.1 trillion missing dollars is Tom Abate, Military waste under fire $1 trillion missing – Bush plan targets Pentagon accounting, San Francisco Chronicle (May 18, 2003. Available online at: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/DODtrillions.html#p6

[84] Independent Auditor's Report on the Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2002 Agency-Wide Principal Financial Statements (1/15/03) Project D2002FI-0104.000, part III, p. 225, http://www.dodig.osd.mil/Audit/reports/

[85] Independent Auditor's Report on the Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2001 Agency-Wide Financial Statements (02/26/02), Report No. D-2002-055, http://www.dodig.osd.mil/Audit/reports/

[86] Office of the Inspector General, Compilation of the FY 2000 DoD Agency-Wide Financial Statements -- Report No. D-2001-181(PDF)-Project No. D2001FI-0018.003 http://www.dodig.osd.mil/Audit/reports/

[87] Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General – Audit, “Department-Level Accounting Entries for FY 1999” Report No. D-2000-179 (PDF) http://www.dodig.osd.mil/Audit/reports/

[88] Testimony: Statement of Eleanor Hill, Inspector General, Department of Defense, Before the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support Senate Armed Services Committee, United States Senate on Defense Financial Management (04/14/99) http://www.dodig.osd.mil/Audit/reports/

[89] See Fitts, “Real Deal, Saving Tennessee,” Scoop UQ Wire (July 4, 2002). Available online at: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0207/S00031.htm#a

Fitts has a website with a number of resources describing how more than a trillion dollars are annually unaccounted for in a number of government agencies. Go to http://www.solari.com

[90] “Fiscal 2004 Department of Defense Budget Release,” Defense Link, February 03, 2003. Available online at: http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Feb2003/b02032003_bt044-03.html

[91] See Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (Da Capo Press, 1983).

[92] For an intriguing description of what the black budget funds and the ‘classified adversary’, see Catherine Fitts, “The $64 Question: What's Up With the Black Budget? – The Real Deal,” Scoop: UQ Wire (23 September, 2002). Available online at: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0209/S00126.htm . For a more conventional assessment of potential future adversaries, see Judy Chizek, “Military Transformation: Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance” (Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, May 2002). Available online at: http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL31425.pdf

[93] For an overview of the classification system, see Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy: 1997. Available online at: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/index.html

[94] Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy: 1997. Available online at: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/index.html

[95] Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, 26. Available online at: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/commissions/secrecy/index.html

[96] For a slightly though still excellent overview of oversight mechanisms for the CIA, see “The Need to Know: The Report of the Twenthieth Century Fund Task Force on Covert Action and American Democracy” (The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1992).

[97] Office of the Press Secretary, “White House Press Release: Classified National Security Information,” Executive Order #12958 (April 17, 1995) Section 4.4. Available online at: http://foia.state.gov/eo12958/part4.asp#rtt

[98] Executive Order #12958 (April 17, 1995). Available online at: http://foia.state.gov/eo12958/part4.asp#rtt

[99] “The Need to Know: The Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Covert Action and American Democracy,” 71.

[100] See, Director of Central Intelligence, “Controlled Access Program Oversight Committee,” Directive 3: 29 (June 1995) http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid3-29.html . For the DoD oversight body, see Deputy Secretary of Defense, “Special Access Program Oversight Committee,” Information Bulletin: November 1994. Available online at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/sapoc.html .

[101] For description of the functions of CAPOC see Director of Central Intelligence, “Controlled Access Program Oversight Committee,” Directive 3: 29 (June 1995) Article 3.3. Available online at: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid3-29.html.

[102] Director of Central Intelligence, “Controlled Access Program Oversight Committee,” Directive 3: 29 (June 1995) Article 2.4. Available online at: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid3-29.html.

[103] Director of Central Intelligence, “Controlled Access Program Oversight Committee,” Directive 3: 29 (June 1995) Article 3.2. Available online at: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid3-29.html.

[104] Joint Security Commission Redefining Security: A Report to the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence (Washington, D.C., February 28, 1994) http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/jsc/chap2.html

[105] John Helgerson, CIA Briefings with Presidential Candidates (Central Intelligence Agency, 1996,) ch. 5, available online at: http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/briefing/cia-8.htm

[106] See Harold Relyea, “Presidential Directives: Background and Overview,” available online at: http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/98-611.pdf

[107] For an overview of Presidential Directives and executive power to create new bodies and delegate authority without Congressional approval, see Harold Relyea, “Presidential Directives: Background and Overview” (Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, February 2003) Available online at: http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/98-611.pdf

America Was Founded as a Protectionist Nation [Ian Fletcher, Huffington Post 09/12/2010]

Contemporary American politics is conducted in the shadow of historical myths that inform our present-day choices. Unfortunately, these myths sometimes lead us terribly astray. Case in point is the popular idea that America’s economic tradition has been economic liberty, laissez faire, and wide-open cowboy capitalism. This notion sounds obvious, and it fits the image of this country held by both the Right, which celebrates this tradition, and the Left, which bemoans it. And it seems to imply, among other things, that free trade is the American Way. Don’t Tread On Me or my right to import.

It is, in fact, very easy to construct an impressive-sounding defense of free trade as a form of economic liberty on the basis of this myth. Unfortunately, this myth is just that: a myth, not real history. The reality is that all four of the four presidents on Mount Rushmore were protectionists. (Even the pseudo-libertarian Jefferson came around after the War of 1812.) Historically, protectionism has been, in fact, the real American Way.

This pattern even predates American independence. During the colonial period, the British government tried to force its American colonies to become suppliers of raw materials to the nascent British industrial machine while denying them any manufacturing industry of their own. The colonies were, in fact, the single biggest victim of British trade policy, being under Britain’s direct political control, unlike its other trading partners. The British knew exactly what they were doing: they were happy to see America thrive, but only as a cog in their own industrial machine. As former Prime Minster William Pitt, otherwise a famous conciliator of American grievances and the namesake of Pittsburgh, once said in Parliament,

If the Americans should manufacture a lock of wool or a horse shoe, I would fill their ports with ships and their towns with troops.

Thus the American Revolution was to some extent a war over industrial policy, in which the commercial elite of the Colonies revolted against being forced into an inferior role in the emerging Atlantic economy. This is one of the things that gave the American Revolution its exceptionally bourgeois character as revolutions go, with bewigged Founding Fathers rather than the usual unshaven revolutionary mobs.

It is no accident that after Independence, a tariff was the very second bill signed by President Washington. It is also no accident that the Constitution — which notoriously does not authorize a great many things our government does today — explicitly does give Congress the authority “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.” (Article I, Section 8.) This fact drives flag-draped libertarians crazy, but there it is.

Protectionism’s first American theorist was Alexander Hamilton — the man on the $10 bill, the first Treasury Secretary, and America’s first technocrat. As aide-de-camp to General Washington during the Revolution, he had seen the U.S. nearly lose due to lack of capacity to manufacture weapons. (France rescued us with 80,000 muskets and other war materiel.) He worried that Britain’s lead in manufacturing would remain entrenched, condemning the United States to being a producer of agricultural products and raw materials. In modern terms, a banana republic. As he put it in 1791:

The superiority antecedently enjoyed by nations who have preoccupied and perfected a branch of industry, constitutes a more formidable obstacle than either of those which have been mentioned, to the introduction of the same branch into a country in which it did not before exist. To maintain, between the recent establishments of one country, and the long-matured establishments of another country, a competition upon equal terms, both as to quality and price, is, in most cases, impracticable. The disparity, in the one, or in the other, or in both, must necessarily be so considerable, as to forbid a successful rivalship, without the extraordinary aid and protection of government.

Hamilton’s policies came down to about a dozen key measures. In his own words:

1. “Protecting duties.” (Tariffs.)

2. “Prohibition of rival articles or duties equivalent to prohibitions.” (Outright import bans.)

3. “Prohibition of the exportation of the materials of manufactures.” (Export bans on raw materials needed for industrialization here at home.)

4. “Pecuniary bounties.” (Export subsidies, like those provided today by the Export-Import Bank and other programs.)

5. “Premiums.” (Subsidies for key innovations. Today, we would call them research and development tax credits.)

6. “The exemption of the materials of manufactures from duty.” (Import liberalization for industrial inputs, so some other country can be the raw materials exporter and we can industrialize.)

7. “Drawbacks of the duties which are imposed on the materials of manufactures.” (Same idea, by means of tax rebates.)

8. “The encouragement of new inventions and discoveries at home, .and of the introduction into the United States of such as may have been made in other countries; particularly those, which relate to machinery.” (Prizes for inventions and, more importantly, patents.)

9. “Judicious regulations for the inspection of manufactured commodities.” (Regulation of product standards, as the USDA and FDA do today.)

10. “The facilitating of pecuniary remittances from place to place.” (A sophisticated financial system.)

11. “The facilitating of the transportation of commodities.” (Good infrastructure.)

Hamilton set forth his case in his Report on Manufactures, submitted to Congress in 1791. Perhaps the most startling thing about his suggested policies is how modern they are: few people realize that the R&D tax credit was first proposed in 1791!

Due in large part to the domination of Congress by Southern planters, who favored free trade, Hamilton’s policies were not all adopted right away. It took the War of 1812, which created a surge of anti-British feeling, disrupted normal trade, and drastically increased the government’s need for revenue, to push America firmly into the protectionist camp. But when war broke out, Congress immediately doubled the tariff to an average of 25 percent. After the war, British manufacturers undertook one of the world’s first cases of predatory dumping, whose purpose was, in the words of one Member of Parliament, to “stifle in the cradle, those rising manufactures in the United States, which the war had forced into existence.” In reaction, the American industrial interests that had blossomed because of the tariff lobbied to keep it, and had it raised to 35 percent in 1816. The public approved, and by 1820, America’s average tariff was up to 40 percent.

Fast-forward a few years. Gloss over a number of important tariff-related political struggles, such as the South Carolina Nullification Crisis of 1832, one of the precursors of the Civil War, in which South Carolina tried to reject a federal tariff. There was a brief free trade episode starting in 1846, coinciding with the aforementioned zenith of classical liberalism in Europe, during which America’s tariffs were lowered. But this was followed by a series of recessions, ending in the Panic of 1857, which brought demands for a higher tariff so intense that President James Buchanan—the last free-trade president for two generations—gave in and signed one two days before Abraham Lincoln took office in 1861.

Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and most of the other great names from American history were all protectionists. Protectionism was, in fact, Lincoln’s number two issue after slavery. As he put it in 1847,

Give us a protective tariff, and we will have the greatest nation on earth.

Revealingly, the only major exception to America’s protectionist consensus was the antebellum South, because free trade is the ideal policy for a nations that actually wants to be an agricultural slave state. An economy founded on slave-based agriculture has no hope of achieving competitive advantage in anything else, as slaves have proven unsuitable for industrialization since the time of Ancient Rome. Because the tariff was the main source of federal revenue in those pre-income tax days, the South also bore a disproportionate share of the nation’s tax burden. No wonder it was in favor of free trade—which the Confederate constitution eventually mandated.

Back when protectionism was American policy, it enjoyed a broad popular consensus. Only the left- and right-wing extremists of the day dissented. Extreme right wing Social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner—who published a fuming book in 1885 entitled Protectionism, the Ism That Teaches That Waste Makes Wealth—saw protectionism as a subsidy for the incompetent and an interference with the divine justice of the free market and the survival of the fittest. At the other extreme, Karl Marx, who was alive in those days and keenly watching American capitalism, wanted to see American capitalism break down and therefore favored free trade for its destructive potential.

Unfortunately for Marx, this was the golden age of American industry, when America’s economic performance surpassed the rest of the world by the greatest margin. It was the era in which the U.S. transformed itself from a promising mostly agricultural backwater, pupil at the knee of European industry, into the greatest economic power in the history of the world.

What happened to America’s long protectionist tradition? In the end, America only seriously turned away from protectionism as a Cold War gambit to prop up capitalist economies abroad and tie them to the U.S. Geopolitics trumped domestic economics.

Ironically, our old protectionist playbook for economic development is the same one, in many respects, that China and other nations are using against the United States today. Back when we were the ascending economic power in the late 19th century, it was Britain that complained about “unfair trade!” They were right, of course—but given that nobody forced free trade upon them, it was their own fault. Today, having forgotten our own history, we can’t even recognize the game being played against us, let alone figure out how to counter it. We will continue to pay a high price in lost jobs and declining industries until we wise up.

The Harvard Boys Do Russia [Janine R. Wedel in The Nation May 14, 1998]

After seven years of economic “reform” financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia’s wealth.

The architect of privatization was former First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, a darling of the U.S. and Western financial establishments. Chubais’s drastic and corrupt stewardship made him extremely unpopular. According to The New York Times, he “may be the most despised man in Russia.”

Essential to the implementation of Chubais’s policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development. Using the prestige of Harvard’s name and connections in the Administration, H.I.I.D. officials acquired virtual carte blanche over the U.S. economic aid program to Russia, with minimal oversight by the government agencies involved. With this access and their close alliance with Chubais and his circle, they allegedly profited on the side. Yet few Americans are aware of H.I.I.D.’s role in Russian privatization, and its suspected misuse of taxpayers’ funds.

At the recent U.S.-Russian Investment Symposium at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, made what might have seemed to many an impolite reference to his hosts. After castigating Chubais and his monetarist policies, Luzhkov, according to a report of the event, “singled out Harvard for the harm inflicted on the Russian economy by its advisers, who encouraged Chubais’s misguided approach to privatization and monetarism.” Luzhkov was referring to H.I.I.D. Chubais, who was delegated vast powers over the economy by Boris Yeltsin, was ousted in Yeltsin’s March purge, but in May he was given an immensely lucrative post as head of Unified Energy System, the country’s electricity monopoly. Some of the main actors with Harvard’s Russia project have yet to face a reckoning, but this may change if a current investigation by the U.S. government results in prosecutions.

The activities of H.I.I.D. in Russia provide some cautionary lessons on abuse of trust by supposedly disinterested foreign advisers, on U.S. arrogance and on the entire policy of support for a single Russian group of so-called reformers. The H.I.I.D. story is a familiar one in the ongoing saga of U.S. foreign policy disasters created by those said to be our “best and brightest.”

Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia’s economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of “shock therapy” to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock–not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent–than therapy. One result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of Russians. By November 1992, Gaidar was under attack for his failed policies and was soon pushed aside. When Gaidar came under seige, Sachs wrote a memo to one of Gaidar’s principal opponents, Ruslan Khasbulatov, Speaker of the Supreme Soviet, then the Russian parliament, offering advice and to help arrange Western aid and contacts in the U.S. Congress.

Enter Anatoly Chubais, a smooth, 42-year-old English-speaking would-be capitalist who became Yeltsin’s economic czar. Chubais, committed to “radical reform,” vowed to construct a market economy and sweep away the vestiges of Communism. The U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), without experience in the former Soviet Union, was readily persuaded to hand over the responsibility for reshaping the Russian economy to H.I.I.D., which was founded in 1974 to assist countries with social and economic reform.

H.I.I.D. had supporters high in the Administration. One was Lawrence Summers, himself a former Harvard economics professor, whom Clinton named Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in 1993. Summers, now Deputy Treasury Secretary, had longstanding ties to the principals of Harvard’s project in Russia and its later project in Ukraine.

Summers hired a Harvard Ph.D., David Lipton (who had been vice president of Jeffrey D. Sachs and Associates, a consulting firm), to be Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. After Summers was promoted to Deputy Secretary, Lipton moved into Summers’s old job, assuming “broad responsibility” for all aspects of international economic policy development. Lipton co-wrote numerous papers with Sachs and served with him on consulting missions in Poland and Russia. “Jeff and David always came [to Russia] together,” said a Russian representative at the International Monetary Fund. “They were like an inseparable couple.” Sachs, who was named director of H.I.I.D. in 1995, lobbied for and received U.S.A.I.D. grants for the institute to work in Ukraine in 1996 and 1997.

Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born émigré and already a tenured professor of economics at Harvard in his early 30s, became director of H.I.I.D.’s Russia project. Shleifer was also a protégé of Summers, with whom he received at least one foundation grant. Summers wrote a promotional blurb for Privatizing Russia (a 1995 book co-written by Shleifer and subsidized by H.I.I.D.) declaring that “the authors did remarkable things in Russia, and now they have written a remarkable book.”

Another Harvard player was a former World Bank consultant named Jonathan Hay, a Rhodes scholar who had attended Moscow’s Pushkin Institute for Russian Language. In 1991, while still at Harvard Law School, he had become a senior legal adviser to the G.K.I., the Russian state’s new privatization committee; the following year he was made H.I.I.D.’s general director in Moscow. The youthful Hay assumed vast powers over contractors, policies and program specifics; he not only controlled access to the Chubais circle but served as its mouthpiece.

H.I.I.D.’s first awards from U.S.A.I.D. for work in Russia came in 1992, during the Bush Administration. Over the next four years, with the endorsement of the Clinton Administration, the institute would be awarded $57.7 million–all but $17.4 million without competitive bidding. For example, in June 1994 Administration officials signed a waiver that enabled H.I.I.D. to receive $20 million for its Russian legal reform program. Approving such a large sum as a noncompetitive “amendment” to a much smaller award (the institute’s original 1992 award was $2.1 million) was highly unusual, as was the citation of “foreign policy” considerations as the reason for the waiver. Nonetheless, the waiver was endorsed by five U.S. government agencies, including the Treasury Department and the National Security Council, two of the leading agencies formulating U.S. aid policy toward Russia. In addition to the millions it received directly, H.I.I.D. helped steer and coordinate some $300 million in U.S.A.I.D. grants to other contractors, such as the Big Six accounting firms and the giant Burson-Marsteller P.R. firm.

A s Yeltsin’s Russian government took over Soviet assets in late 1991 and early 1992, several privatization schemes were floated. The one the Supreme Soviet passed in 1992 was structured to prevent corruption, but the program Chubais eventually carried out instead encouraged the accumulation of property in a few hands and opened the door to widespread corruption. It was so controversial that Chubais ultimately had to rely largely on Yeltsin’s presidential decrees, not parliamentary approval, for implementation. Many U.S. officials embraced this dictatorial modus operandi, and Jonathan Hay and his associates drafted many of the decrees. As U.S.A.I.D.’s Walter Coles, an early supporter of Chubais’s privatization program, put it, “If we needed a decree, Chubais didn’t have to go through the bureaucracy.”

With help from his H.I.I.D. advisers and other Westerners, Chubais and his cronies set up a network of aid-funded “private” organizations that enabled them to bypass legitimate government agencies and circumvent the new parliament of the Russian Federation, the Duma. Through this network, two of Chubais’s associates, Maxim Boycko (who co-wrote Privatizing Russia with Shleifer) and Dmitry Vasiliev, oversaw almost a third of a billion dollars in aid money and millions more in loans from international financial institutions.

Much of this largesse flowed through the Moscow-based Russian Privatization Center (R.P.C.). Founded in 1992 under the direction of Chubais, who was chairman of its board even while head of the G.K.I., and Boycko, who was C.E.O. for most of its existence, the R.P.C. was legally a private, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization. In fact, it was established by another Yeltsin decree and helped carry out government policy on inflation and other macroeconomic issues and also negotiated loans with international financial institutions. H.I.I.D. was a founder of the R.P.C., and Andrei Shleifer served on the board of directors. Its other members were recruited by Chubais, according to Ira Lieberman, a senior manager in the private-sector development department of the World Bank who helped design the R.P.C. With H.I.I.D.’s help, the R.P.C. received some $45 million from U.S.A.I.D. and millions from the European Union, individual European governments, Japan and other countries, as well as loans from the World Bank ($59 million) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development ($43 million), which must be repaid by the Russian people. One result of this funding was the enrichment, political and financial, of Chubais and his allies.

H.I.I.D. helped create several more aid-funded institutions. One was the Federal Commission on Securities, a rough equivalent of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.). It too was established by presidential decree, and it was run by Chubais protégé Dmitry Vasiliev. The commission had very limited enforcement powers and funding, but U.S.A.I.D. supplied the cash through two Harvard-created institutions run by Hay, Vasiliev and other members of the Harvard-Chubais coterie.

One of these was the Institute for Law-Based Economy, funded by both the World Bank and U.S.A.I.D. This institute, set up to help develop a legal and regulatory framework for markets, evolved to encompass drafting decrees for the Russian government; it got nearly $20 million from U.S.A.I.D. Last August, the Russian directors of I.L.B.E. were caught removing $500,000 worth of U.S. office equipment from the organization’s Moscow office; the equipment was returned only after weeks of U.S. pressure. When auditors from U.S.A.I.D.’s inspector general’s office sought records and documents regarding I.L.B.E. operations, the organization refused to turn them over.

The device of setting up private organizations backed by the power of the Yeltsin government and maintaining close ties to H.I.I.D. was a way of insuring deniability. Shleifer, Hay and other Harvard principals, all U.S. citizens, were “Russian” when convenient. Hay, for example, served alternately and sometimes simultaneously as aid contractor, manager of other contractors and representative of the Russian government. If Western donors were attacked for funding controversial privatization practices of the state, the donors could claim they were funding “private” organizations, even if these organizations were controlled or strongly influenced by key state officials. If the Chubais circle came under fire for misuse of funds, they could claim that Americans made the decisions. Foreign donors could insist that the Russians acted on their own.

Against the backdrop of Russia’s Klondike capitalism, which they were helping create and Chubais and his team were supposedly regulating, the H.I.I.D. advisers exploited their intimate ties with Chubais and the government and were allegedly able to conduct business activities for their own enrichment. According to sources close to the U.S. government’s investigation, Hay used his influence, as well as U.S.A.I.D.-financed resources, to help his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hebert, set up a mutual fund, Pallada Asset Management, in Russia. Pallada became the first mutual fund to be licensed by Vasiliev’s Federal Commission on Securities. Vasiliev approved Pallada ahead of Credit Suisse First Boston and Pioneer First Voucher, much larger and more established financial institutions.

After Pallada was set up, Hebert, Hay, Shleifer and Vasiliev looked for ways to continue their activities as aid funds dwindled. Using I.L.B.E. resources and funding, they established a private consulting firm with taxpayer money. One of the firm’s first clients was Shleifer’s wife, Nancy Zimmerman, who operated a Boston-based hedge fund that traded heavily in Russian bonds. According to Russian registration documents, Zimmerman’s company set up a Russian firm with Sergei Shishkin, the I.L.B.E. chief, as general director. Corporate documents on file in Moscow showed that the address and phone number of the company and the I.L.B.E. were the same.

Then there is the First Russian Specialized Depository, which holds the records and assets of mutual fund investors. This institution, funded by a World Bank loan, also worked to the benefit of Hay, Vasiliev, Hebert and another associate, Julia Zagachin. According to sources close to the U.S. government’s investigation, Zagachin, an American married to a Russian, was selected to run the depository even though she lacked the required capital. Ostensibly, there was to be total separation between the depository and any mutual fund using its services. But the selection of Zagachin defied this tenet of open markets: Pallada and the depository were run by people with ties to each other through H.I.I.D. Thus the very people who were supposed to be the trustees of the system not only undercut the aid program’s stated goal of building independent institutions but replicated the Soviet practice of skimming assets to benefit the nomenklatura.

Anne Williamson, a journalist who specializes in Soviet and Russian affairs, details these and other conflicts of interest between H.I.I.D.’s advisers and their supposed clients–the Russian people–in her forthcoming book, How America Built the New Russian Oligarchy. For example, in 1995, in Chubais-organized insider auctions of prime national properties, known as loans-for-shares, the Harvard Management Company (H.M.C.), which invests the university’s endowment, and billionaire speculator George Soros were the only foreign entities allowed to participate. H.M.C. and Soros became significant shareholders in Novolipetsk, Russia’s second-largest steel mill, and Sidanko Oil, whose reserves exceed those of Mobil. H.M.C. and Soros also invested in Russia’s high-yielding, I.M.F.-subsidized domestic bond market.

Even more dubious, according to Williamson, was Soros’s July 1997 purchase of 24 percent of Sviazinvest, the telecommunications giant, in partnership with Uneximbank’s Vladimir Potanin. It was later learned that shortly before this purchase Soros had tided over Yeltsin’s government with a backdoor loan of hundreds of millions of dollars while the government was awaiting proceeds of a Eurobond issue; the loan now appears to have been used by Uneximbank to purchase Norilsk Nickel in August 1997. According to Williamson, the U.S. assistance program in Russia was rife with such conflicts of interest involving H.I.I.D. advisers and their U.S.A.I.D.-funded Chubais allies, H.M.C. managers, favored Russian bankers, Soros and insider expatriates working in Russia’s nascent markets.

Despite exposure of this corruption in the Russian media (and, far more hesitantly, in the U.S. media), the H.I.I.D.-Chubais clique remained until recently the major instrument of U.S. economic aid policy to Russia. It even used the high-level Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, which helped orchestrate the cooperation of U.S.-Russian oil deals and the Mir space station. The commission’s now-defunct Capital Markets Forum was chaired on the Russian side by Chubais and Vasiliev, and on the U.S. side by S.E.C. chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Andrei Shleifer was named special coordinator to all four of the Capital Markets Forum’s working subgroups. Hebert, Hay’s girlfriend, served on two of the subgroups, as did the C.E.O.s of Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch and other powerful Wall Street investment houses. When The Nation contacted the S.E.C. for information about Capital Markets, we were told to call Shleifer for comment. Shleifer, who is under investigation by U.S.A.I.D.’s inspector general for misuse of funds, declined to be interviewed for this article. A U.S. Treasury spokesman said Shleifer and Hebert were appointed to Capital Markets by the Chubais group–specifically, according to other sources, by Dmitry Vasiliev.

In fact, H.I.I.D. projects were never adequately monitored by U.S.A.I.D. In 1996, a General Accounting Office report described U.S.A.I.D.’s management and oversight of H.I.I.D. as “lax.” In early 1997, U.S.A.I.D.’s inspector general received incriminating documents about H.I.I.D.’s activities in Russia and began investigating. In May Shleifer and Hay lost their projects when the agency canceled most of the $14 million still earmarked for H.I.I.D., citing evidence that the two managers were engaged in activities for “private gain.” The men had allegedly used their positions to profit from investments in the Russian securities markets and other private enterprises. According to sources close to the U.S. investigation, while advising the Russian government on capital markets, for example, Hay and his father allegedly used inside information to invest in Russian government bonds. Hay and Shleifer may ultimately face criminal and/or civil prosecution. Shleifer remains a tenured professor at Harvard, and Hay continues to work with members of the Chubais clique in Russia. Sachs, who has stated he never invests in countries where he advises and who is not implicated in the current U.S. government investigation, remains head of H.I.I.D. After Yeltsin’s Cabinet shakeup in March, Chubais was moved to a new position of prominence. His role in Russia’s political-economic affairs had been tarnished by reports of personal enrichment. Two examples:

§ In February 1996, Chubais’s Foundation for the Protection of Private Property received a five-year, $2.9 million unsecured interest-free loan. According to the pro-Yeltsin, pro-reform Izvestia, Stolichny Bank, an institution that enjoys lines of credit from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank, made the loan in return for a small percentage of the Sibneft oil company when it was sold at auction, and for later control of one of the state’s largest banks. Chubais defended himself by saying such practices were common in the West, but failed to provide any reasonable explanation for some $300,000 in 1996 income not accounted for by his government salary.

§ During Yeltsin’s 1996 presidential campaign, security officials apprehended two close associates of Chubais as they were walking out of a main government building with a box containing more than $500,000 in cash for Yeltsin’s campaign. According to tapes of a later meeting recorded by a member of one of Russia’s security services, Chubais and his cronies strategized about burying evidence of any illegal transaction, while publicly claiming that any allegations of chicanery were the work of political enemies. A protracted, lackadaisical investigation began but was eventually dropped–more evidence of Chubais’s remarkable resilience. He remained valuable to Yeltsin largely because of his perceived ability to deal with the West, where many still regard him as a symbol of Russian reform.

During the five years that the Chubais clique presided over Western economic aid and policy in Russia, they did enormous harm. By unconditionally backing Chubais and his associates, the Harvard operatives, their U.S. government patrons and Western donors may have reinforced the new post-Soviet oligarchical system. Shleifer acknowledged as much in Privatizing Russia, the book he wrote with Chubais crony Maxim Boycko, who with his patron would later be caught in another financial indiscretion involving taking a “veiled bribe” in the form of advances on a book on the history of Russian privatization. “Aid can change the political equilibrium,” they said, “by explicitly helping free-market reformers to defeat their opponents.”

Richard Morningstar, U.S. aid coordinator for the former Soviet Union, stands by this approach: “If we hadn’t been there to provide funding to Chubais, could we have won the battle to carry out privatization? Probably not. When you’re talking about a few hundred million dollars, you’re not going to change the country, but you can provide targeted assistance to help Chubais.” In early 1996, after he was temporarily removed from high office by Yeltsin because he represented unpopular economic policies, H.I.I.D. came to his rescue by placing him on its U.S.A.I.D.-funded payroll, a show of loyalty that former U.S.A.I.D. assistant administrator Thomas Dine says he supported. Western policy-makers like Morningstar and Dine have depicted Chubais as a selfless visionary battling reactionary forces. In the spring of 1997, Summers called him and his associates a “dream team.” With few exceptions, the U.S. mainstream media have promulgated this view.

United States policy toward Russia requires a full-scale Congressional investigation. The General Accounting Office did investigate H.I.I.D.’s Russian and Ukrainian projects in 1996, but the findings were largely suppressed by the agency’s timid management. The audit team concluded, for example, that the U.S. government exercised “favoritism” toward Harvard, but this conclusion and the supporting documentation were removed from the final report. Last fall Congress asked the G.A.O. to look into Eastern European aid programs and Shleifer’s role in the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission. Such questions need to be answered, but any serious inquiry must go beyond individual corruption and examine how U.S. policy, using tens of millions in taxpayer dollars, helped deform democracy and economic reform in Russia and helped create a fat-cat oligarchy run amok.   

Wilson the Worst [Jeff Taylor in the Huffington Post]

The new biography of Woodrow Wilson by A. Scott Berg casts the 28th president as a great, if imperfect, political leader. Berg recently told Stephen Colbert that Wilson was the nation’s best president and suggested that he was a role model for contemporary progressives. I disagree. In my view, Wilson was the worst president in U.S. history. He was the man largely responsible for leading Democratic liberalism into the wilderness of statism, elitism, and imperialism.

In choosing the worst chief executive, there are many good candidates, but I vote for Woodrow Wilson. Betrayer of the Jefferson-Jackson-Bryan tradition in the Democratic Party. Enemy of racial equality. Opponent of woman suffrage. Architect of centralized government. Bellhop of Wall Street. Father of the Federal Reserve. Enthusiast of World War I. Violator of civil liberties. Champion of the League of Nations. Mentor of Franklin Roosevelt. The damage he did to the nation and the world was immense.

Blessed with a fine education and considerable talent, Wilson generally used his powers for evil rather than good. It’s fitting that Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize, while true peacemakers of their generation, men like Tolstoy and Bryan, were snubbed. Actual peace is not toasted among the fashionable set of the world. As Dylan puts it, “We live a political world, where peace is not welcome at all. It’s turned away from the door to wander some more, or put up against the wall.” Pseudo-piety is part of Wilson’s longstanding appeal for certain types. War is peace. Power as service. Special interest masquerading as common good. Realpolitik cloaked in idealism.

Elected governor of New Jersey in 1910, he was running for president a year later. When presidents seemingly come out of nowhere, with little experience and no big accomplishments, something is afoot. There are powerful men behind the scenes who discreetly sponsor the fresh-faced dark horse who will embody more of the same while promising change.

That’s another reason to detest Wilson. After 16 years of Republican presidents, a Democrat was elected . . . who then ruled like a Hamiltonian Republican. Another in a long line of bait and switch, but it came at a particularly crucial time in history. A real change was needed, but instead the unholy alliance between big government and big business was cemented, empire was solidified, and the opposition party was co-opted. This story, among others, can be found in Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism.

George W. Bush was channeling Wilson when he launched wars and pledged to end tyranny in our world. Neoconservatives are neither new nor conservative. They are direct descendants of Wilson, with some Trotsky DNA thrown in for bad measure. When Julian Assange of Wikileaks is threatened with prosecution under the Sedition Act, that’s a legacy of Wilson from 1918. Woodrow Wilson is the awful gift that keeps on giving.

Of course, it’s easy to cast aspersions on a famous person’s reputation by using quips and generalities. If I’m disagreeing with the conclusions of a large book (800+ pages), I should at least give some specifics. So I will pull some information from my large-but-somewhat-less-so book (600+ pages).

During the first decade of the twentieth century, writer Herbert Croly proposed a novel synthesis of ideology: use of Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. While The Promise of American Life glorifies “democracy,” Croly was more influential as a publicist on behalf of Hamiltonian government. Early in the book, he writes, “I shall not disguise the fact that, on the whole, my own preferences are on the side of Hamilton rather than of Jefferson.” While conceding that Hamilton was responsible for baleful effects and theoretical perversions, Croly calls him, in comparison to Jefferson, “much the finer man and much the sounder thinker and statesman.”

Croly’s views affected both the Republican and Democratic parties, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were influenced by his writings and counsel. The New Republic—edited by Croly and Walter Lippmann, founded by J.P. Morgan partner Willard Straight, and financed by Standard Oil heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight—became the premier publication of this new type of progressivism in the mid-1910s. Jeffersonian purists rejected the Croly synthesis as oxymoronic and unsustainable, arguing that methods cannot be isolated from goals. To use an analogy: The vehicle you take and the direction you travel will likely determine whether or not you successfully reach your intended destination. In the judgment of old-school liberals, the new liberalism was likely to lead to self-delusion or frustration at best, co-optation or deception at worst.

While the names William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson are often linked in histories of the Democratic Party and annals of liberal politics, they were distinct entities who often clashed as a result of ideological differences. Thomas Jefferson had never been a hero for Wilson prior to his 1912 presidential candidacy. In 1906, Wilson declared, “[Democrats do not] seek to be governed by Jefferson’s opinions or search among his policies for measures to suit our own times.” Political scientist R. Jeffrey Lustig observes that the tenor of Wilson’s career prior to the 1912 campaign “had always been closer to Hamilton’s thinking than to Jefferson’s.” Historian Gabriel Kolko points out that President Wilson’s reliance on Jeffersonian doctrine was “more verbal than genuine.” Sociologist E. Digby Baltzell points out that Wilson “always called himself a Federalist in private.”

Wilson was a conservative Cleveland Democrat until he reinvented himself in 1912 as a liberal in an attempt—ultimately successful—to woo Bryan Democrats and to undercut the candidacy of Champ Clark. Bryan played a key role in the nomination and election of Wilson in 1912 and 1916, and Wilson appointed Bryan to be his secretary of State. Nonetheless, philosophical differences between the two men caused problems for both throughout their political careers. Prior to making his decision to run for President in 1912, Wilson was an overtly anti-Bryan Democrat. He voted against Bryan in 1896 (voting instead for Palmer, the Gold Democrat), expressed the hope in 1907 that Bryan would be “knocked into a cocked hat,” and refused to speak on the same platform with Bryan in 1908. Even as he courted Bryan and used him in his quest to gain the presidency, Governor Wilson felt disdain for the Great Commoner. Wilson was used by “Eastern conservative Democrats” to eliminate the threat of Bryan being nominated in 1912, and his nomination and election “represented the triumph of Eastern Democracy over Bryanism.”

Wilson’s 1912 and 1916 campaigns were largely financed by Wall Street and its corporate offspring. For the most part, rather than being hurt or restrained by the New Freedom, investment bankers and big businessmen grew in power and influence during Wilson’s years in office. Bryan resigned from the cabinet in 1915 because he opposed Wilson’s pro-war policies. In 1921, Bryan was asked to serve on a committee to raise funds for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. He declined, saying that he could not “endorse with enthusiasm” Wilson’s entire record. Among specific objections, Bryan mentioned Wilson’s rejection of League of Nations reservations, militaristic stances, and “turning over the [Federal] Reserve Bank to the control of Wall Street.”

During this same period, liberal ex-Senator Richard Pettigrew (R-SD) gave this assessment: “Woodrow Wilson was not a Democrat after 1896. In that year he left the party for the same reason that I joined it. He came back and voted for Parker in 1904, and for the same reason that led me not to vote for Parker. Wilson did not support Bryan in 1908. At no time was he an advocate of the principles of progressive democracy.”

In his history of U.S. entry into World War I, Justus Doenecke mentions President Wilson’s hand-wringing to Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. We are told that Wilson “warned” Daniels that if war came “Big business will be in the saddle.” This anecdote comes from Daniels’ memoirs. Daniels took Wilson’s words at face value. But Daniels was a close friend and ally of W.J. Bryan. He was a populist and one of the more peace-minded members of the Wilson cabinet. It is possible that Wilson was telling Daniels what Daniels wanted to hear. To say that big business would be in the saddle implies that if the president became commander-in-chief he would have less power. That is the opposite of how the system works.

We know that big business, as exemplified by J.P. Morgan & Co., entered into an open partnership with the Wilson administration after the war began. One need only look at the events surrounding the Paris Peace Conference and Treaty of Versailles. Who allowed this to happen? Wilson. Wilson’s argument that war would mean the loss of every gain since 1912 was also self-serving. It was predicated on the assumption that he had spent five years battling big business. The record does not indicate this. On balance, the big corporations were helped more than hurt by federal regulation under Wilson. The alternative to regulation was antitrust—restoring competition by breaking up the monopolistic corporations. In other words, being genuinely anti-big business. Despite the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, Wilson for the most part refused to go that route.

Rebutting Bryan’s claim that the U.S. was being pushed into war by eastern financiers to protect loans to the Allies, Doenecke comments, “Wilson himself did not think in economic terms. Preserving Wall Street’s stake in the Allied effort was far from his mind. He was no friend of big business, which had recently fought his reelection.” In fact, we do not know what Wilson was thinking or what was far from his mind. How can any of us presume to know what is in someone’s mind—especially someone as intelligent and politically savvy as Woodrow Wilson?

We do know the economic affiliations of the men who financed and managed Wilson’s meteoric rise to power (i.e., major contender for president after serving only one year as governor—the first political position he ever held). Cleveland Dodge, Cyrus McCormick, Thomas Fortune Ryan, and George Harvey were examples of big business. Their friendship with Wilson was mutual. As the Wilson presidency unfolded, the affiliations of his friends grew even bigger: New York Federal Reserve Bank President Benjamin Strong (Bankers Trust), War Industries Board Chairman Bernard Baruch (Wall Street), Assistant Secretary of War John Ryan (Anaconda Copper), Assistant Secretary of War Edward Stettinius (J.P. Morgan), Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Russell Leffingwell (soon-to-be J.P. Morgan), Emergency Fleet Corporation Director General Charles Schwab (Bethlehem Steel), National War Savings Committee Chairman Frank Vanderlip (National City Bank), Paris Peace Conference Treasury Department Representative Thomas W. Lamont (J.P. Morgan), et cetera.

Wilson’s mentor George Harvey, Whitney-Ryan-Morgan man, later reflected on the 1912 campaign by writing that big businessmen accepted his election “without serious misgivings” and “felt no animosity toward Mr. Wilson for such of his utterances as they regarded as radical and menacing to their interests.” Why? According to Harvey, “He had simply played the political game.”

In his classic 1960 journal article “Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism,” historian Martin Sklar disagrees with Arthur Link’s dividing of Wilson’s presidency into two periods: the New Freedom of fighting big business and restoring competition, and then the post-1914 approach of embracing big business and regulating the economy: “Finding that Wilson’s thought and policies often deviated from the ideal model, many historians have concluded superficially that Wilson was a ‘hypocrite’ or a conservative in liberal’s clothing.” Instead, Sklar sees consistency.

Wilson mirrored the thought of Herbert Croly throughout his presidency. The New Deal would also exemplify Croly in some ways. In other words, Wilson and his protégé FDR represented neo-Hamiltonianism. Sklar’s is a compelling argument, although we must wonder if there was not an element of conscious bait-and-switch with the Wilson campaign of 1912. He would not have attracted the public support of Bryan and private preference of La Follette if he had campaigned openly as a Hamiltonian elitist. So his populist rhetoric does seem to have been new and possibly disingenuous.

The use of rhetoric by Wilson has been analyzed by political scientist Christopher West. According to West, Wilson’s approach to presidential leadership was “akin to Federalism and the nineteenth century Whig movement” because it “married a hope in nationalism and state-building to a leadership cadre of virtuous trustees who, like Hamilton, sought to win over the parochial attachments of a democratic people to their more transcendent interests in the glory and security of the modern commercial republic.” The competing approach was “a republican tradition with Anti-Federalist and Jeffersonian roots,” which “favored local and decentralized authority structures, and distrusted the alienation of sovereignty to a distant representative, especially one with executive power.”

West continues, “Wilson would see his mission as an attempt to inoculate the transformation of American democracy from the latter to the former with a conservative version of the rhetoric of Jeffersonians, Jacksonians and Populists.” Never an actual Jeffersonian, Wilson referred to himself throughout his academic career as a “Federalist.” Political scientist Ronald Pestritto notes that Wilson rejected the concept of natural rights as the foundation of government and argues that he redefined Jefferson according to his own terms.

West comments, “As Bryan and others called the people back to an old Jeffersonian understanding of society and its constitution, Wilson would call the people forward to a new one, but with the words and images of the old order.” Like Theodore Roosevelt, “Wilson feared the populist and radical brands of democratic oratory that he saw in [Andrew] Jackson and his followers, and more immediately, in William Jennings Bryan.” Referring to the scholarship of Robert Alexander Kraig, West writes, “As Kraig highlights in his study of Wilson’s campaign rhetoric of 1912, he uses generously populist imagery and the imagery of the farm and small town employed by his targets of conservative ridicule: Jefferson, Jackson and Bryan. Here he co-opts the language of the Democracy , but now for chiefly Hamiltonian ends.”

Regardless of Wilson’s motivations or strategies, Sklar is certainly right in arguing that the Wilsonian and Theodore Rooseveltian variants of progressivism “signified, if not the birth, then the coming of age, of twentieth century liberalism, whose present-day fundamentals, converging upon large-scale corporate capitalism at home and economic expansion abroad, remain genetically true to the components of Wilson’s world-view, their immediate parental source.”

In comparison to traditional liberals such as Robert La Follette and William Jennings Bryan, modern liberals like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt entered far more fully into the elite zeitgeist (spirit of the age). La Follette and Bryan were progressive in the sense of wanting to make the world a better place—specifically, more just, more free, and more peaceful—but they did not belong to the cult of progress in the same way as did Wilson and the Roosevelt cousins. La Follette and Bryan recognized that not every change is an advance and they knew that some of the best American political values are rooted in the past. Unlike many modern liberals, they were not willing to sacrifice morality for the sake of efficiency. Power was not an end in itself. The corrupting nature of power was recognized—whether private or public, it was a tool with great potential for both good and evil.

Early-twentieth-century elitist emphases on Social Darwinism, selective human breeding (eugenics), scientific management (Taylorism), economic modernization, and centralized government-approaching-totalitarianism were mostly missing in the thought and practice of Bryan and La Follette. La Follette was attracted to expertise but his belief in democracy and identification with the common people kept him from becoming an elitist. Wilson and FDR never personally identified with the common man so their elitism was natural and abiding. Historian Ronald Schaffer points out, “Wilson became the world’s most celebrated champion of democracy. In private, he was a snob, bored by the ordinary citizens of his country. He told his fiancée during his first term that the great majority of people who came to his office, the majority or even the minority of congressmen, and most American voters were ‘not of our kind.’”

A supporter of centralized power at home and abroad, Wilson presided over the creation of what Schaffer calls the “war welfare state.” President Wilson, with the support of comparable-but-rival Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt, pushed a reluctant if not resistant nation into World War I. Even after the U.S. entered the war, much of the country was unenthusiastic about “the war to end all wars,” despite a steady stream of propaganda and repression from Washington, D.C. The marketing campaign and civil liberties violations were necessary precisely because the war was not particularly popular with the masses. This is why the Wilson administration had been so opposed to a proposal by liberal populists La Follette and Bryan to put the question of war to a vote by the American people through a nationwide referendum. Wilson insisted that “the world must be made safe for democracy” but was unwilling to subject his chosen instrument (war) to true democracy at home. Imposition of a military draft—the first ever used to wage war against a foreign power—was needed because relatively few Americans volunteered in the weeks after war was declared.

Finally, in an age when self-described American progressives have abandoned virtually every traditional progressive principle but “political correctness” still holds sway, it is surprising that educated Democrats can glorify an open bigot like Woodrow Wilson. (To his discredit, W.J. Bryan also absorbed the dominant white southern racial bias of his ancestors and had a poor record when it came to social and political inclusiveness for African Americans. However, the actual harm he inflicted was far less than that done by Wilson. Yet Wilson, as a “great man of history,” is ultimately given a pass while Bryan remains discredited in the shadows for his popularity among rural rednecks.)

President Wilson brought Jim Crow to Washington, D.C. in a way that it had not previously known, including full segregation of the federal government. Wilson grew up in the South. His father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was a pro-slavery Presbyterian theologian who believed in white supremacy and supported the CSA. As a scholar, Wilson was an apologist for the original Ku Klux Klan. As president, he invited a showing of the pro-KKK film The Birth of a Nation in the White House. One of the title cards in the silent movie—based on the novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan by Thomas Dixon Jr. of North Carolina—was a pro-Klan quote from Wilson’s History of the American People (1901). The film apparently helped to revive the KKK, which went on to wield great political power in the nation in the early 1920s.

To speak in cliché: Ideas have consequences. Patterns are important. History matters. Those of us who believe that small is beautiful, that community-based economics are good, that the Green Party value of decentralization has merit, that politics ought to be on a human scale, should not be looking to men like Woodrow Wilson as our role models. More often than not, big government and big business work hand-in-hand against the common good. Wilson was a pivotal part of the problem. Those of us who believe in natural rights, social justice, and world peace need to set aside convenient myths about power brokers and war makers. We need to seek inspiration elsewhere.

FDR’s Sorry Domestic Spying Record [Justus D. Doenecke in The Daily Beast]

In June 2013 the Department of Justice indicted Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, for releasing countless classified documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, he was subject to 30 years in prison. Though the United States government revoked his passport, the Russian government granted him asylum. Because the documents revealed that the NSA was retaining millions of emails of American private citizens, not to mention those of foreign leaders, the incident caused considerable controversy. Snowden's opponents accused him of endangering U.S. security while his defenders claimed he had a duty to expose a government apparatus that had run amok.

Accusations of intimidation have long been levied against the federal government. During the Red Scare of 1919, the Justice Department’s Radical Bureau and the Labor Department's Immigration Bureau coerced confessions from suspected radicals, thereby subjecting many to deportation. During the Cold War, the Federal Bureau of Investigation fed information concerning alleged subversives to Senator Joseph McCarthy and other enemies of the Truman administration. Revelations made during the ’70s showed that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had cast an extremely wide net, illegally wiretapping such figures as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and infiltrating such organizations as the Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the Congress of Racial Equality. According to a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency had assembled files on 300,000 Americans.

Even the much-touted administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt possessed less than a sterling record. Indeed, some on the right use FDR’s administration to justify Snowden’s indictment. Hence the FDR presidency is important to examine, for in reality it showed the extremes to which even a liberal leadership can go.

Americans have long been familiar with the internment of all Japanese Americans, whether citizens or not, who in 1942 were taken from their homes on the West Coast to concentration camps in the interior for the sole offense of carrying “enemy chromosomes.” Though most would admit that the internment was the greatest violation of citizenship in the nation’s entire history, other negative aspects of the Roosevelt leadership remain hidden.

Although memories of World War II are rapidly fading, with many survivors now in their 90s, the conflict is generally perceived as a most positive experience, in which a noble and enlightened leadership successfully defeated evil and alien forces while violating few, if any, rights of fellow-citizens.

Certainly, in comparison to the nation’s record in World War I, the U.S. conducted itself with admirable restraint. During the Great War, as it was first called, the Wilson administration banned radical and Socialist journals from the mails, jailed the leader of the Socialist party (who had drawn almost 900,000 votes when he ran for president in 1912), and encouraged vigilante intimidation of German Americans. In April 1918, a Socialist coal miner was lynched near East St. Louis for making derogatory remarks about the president.

To claim, however, that little intimidation existed during the years 1939-45 would be far from the truth. With the fall of Norway, the Low Countries, and France in the spring of 1940, and with the Battle of Britain still in doubt, many Americans felt most jittery. In Manhattan and Seattle, two men killed themselves upon learning that France was defeated. New York’s colorful mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, griped that his government could not even protect Coney Island. A foundry worker, disliking the water given to him by a friend, murdered the man as a traitor. Illinois farmers demanded antitank guns to protect their cornfields. Everywhere defense corps and rifle clubs appeared. Sixty members of a gun club in Pittsburgh sought official status as paratroops shooters. Navaho Indians banned subversive activities among tribe members.

In the early ’40s, the hysteria against right-wing supervision so penetrated American society that the left, practically paranoid concerning incipient fascism, lost its traditional commitment to civil liberties. In The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (1983), historian Leo P. Ribuffo goes so far as to find a “Brown Scare” analogous to the “Red Scare” of 1919-20. To such private vigilante groups as the Friends of Democracy, Inc. and such sensationalist writers as John Roy Carlson, whose Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America (1943) was a bestseller, a fascist coup was in the immediate offing, with a tiny right wing prepared to strike. Although no serious danger existed, diverse liberals and radicals first exaggerated the power of native rightists, then called for restrictions on their rights.

In the minds of certain American journalists, the reverses of the Allies in spring 1940 could only have been caused by a “fifth column.” The term, which emerged during the Spanish Civil War, referred to civilian traitors who acted as the Trojan horse of General Francisco Franco, causing the defeat of the republic by sabotage and defeatism. In mid-June Life magazine ran a story under the headline “Signs of Nazi Fifth Column.” At about the same time George Britt, a reporter for the New York World-Telegram, published a book entitled The Fifth Column Is Here (1940). The mayor of San Antonio even equipped his police force with machine guns to stop any fifth-columnists approaching from Mexico.

Roosevelt did not discourage such hysteria. Rather he took advantage of such myths to promote his interventionist agenda—conscription, Lend-Lease, convoys to Britain, occupation of Iceland and Greenland, and extension of term of service for draftees. In To Save a Nation: American Countersubversives, the New Deal, and the Coming of World War II (1973), historian Geoffrey S. Smith finds the president deliberately seeking to identify all critics of his foreign policy with external forces threatening national security.

In mid-May 1940, in asking Congress for additional defense appropriations, Roosevelt referred to “treacherous use of the fifth column,” noting in particular the possibility that refugees were enemy agents. In accepting the nomination for a third term, he claimed that he was duty-bound to lead the nation amid the threat of “unbelievable types of espionage and national treachery.”

In January 1941, while seeking public support for the Lend-Lease bill, he accused those encouraging “skepticism,” promoting “disunity,” or advocating “appeasement” as being fifth columnists. He warned against “those American citizens, many of them in high places,” who were often unwittingly “aiding and abetting” the work of destructive foreign agents.

Little wonder certain prominent administration members portrayed administration critics as fascist dupes, sometimes as little better than Nazis. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, for example, called prominent FDR critics Nazi fellow-travelers. In Roosevelt & the Isolationists, 1932-45 (1983), historian Wayne S. Cole aptly points to a “guilt-by-association” approach, a phrase usually associated with the later tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Words were matched by deeds as the president mobilized the resources of the federal government against critics. His leading instrument was the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, a holdover from the Republican administration of Calvin Coolidge. To ingratiate himself with the Democrat FDR, Hoover used the bureau to discredit political opposition. He hoped that he would discover subversive activity among those Roosevelt’s foes who opposed conscription, massive aid to the Allies, and the convoying of lend-lease munitions.

Declassified FBI files, researched by historian Douglas M. Charles (J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939-1945, 2007), reveal this collaboration with great precision, showing clearly how the FBI employed illegal observation solely for political purposes. At times the bureau worked in tandem with British intelligence, who supplied it with information, much of it far from reliable. Though lacking evidence of ties with Axis agents or even sympathizers, the FBI targeted leading anti-interventionists. (The term “anti-interventionist” is preferable to “isolationist,” for while they opposed FDR’s foreign policy, particularly in regard to Europe, they never sought “isolation” from the rest of the world.)

Although the Communications Act of 1934 outlawed federal wiretapping, the bureau tapped the phones of Charles A. Lindbergh, the most charismatic leader among FDR’s foreign policy critics. Admittedly, Lindbergh had taken an extreme position by publicly hoping that neither side in the global struggle would obtain a complete victory. He also invited attack in September 1941 by charging American Jews with manipulating the media in an interventionist direction.

The FBI also engaged in illegal wiretapping of the New York chapter of the America First Committee (AFC), the nation’s leading anti-interventionist organization. (In October 1941, a month and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, Hoover wrote General Robert E. Wood, AFC chairman, falsely denying that the FBI had ever “directly or indirectly at [any] place in the United States tapped the wires, interfered with the mails, or checked the membership lists of the America First Committee.”)

Yet in no case did the bureau produce evidence of subversion. The same holds true for surveillance of such outspoken anti-interventionist leaders as Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald P. Nye, and David Walsh; Congressman Hamilton Fish; and historian Harry Elmer Barnes, at the time best known for his revisionist history of the causes of World War II.

Political use of enforcement mechanisms did not stop with the FBI but reached into the entire Department of Justice, which harassed groups and individuals on both the left and right. The most prominent case was the indictment of Harry Bridges, an Australian immigrant who in 1941 led a strike of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union in San Francisco. Because Bridges was a strong Communist sympathizer who was hindering defense preparations, from 1941 to 1945 the Justice Department sought his deportation in vain.

In October 1939 a U.S. marshal arrested Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party, for using aliases on his passport when he had visited the Soviet Union in the ’20s. The party had just endorsed the German-Soviet pact that had enabled Hitler to attack Poland with impunity, a event that triggered World War II. Browder was sentenced to the Atlanta penitentiary, his sentence being commuted by FDR only in May 1942, when the president obviously sought Communist Party backing.

The Roosevelt administration was equally successful in the case of the “Minneapolis Reds.” In October 1941 the Justice Department indicted 29 leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party for planning a strike that would shut down more than 30 defense contractors. It accused the defendants of advocating the overthrow of the government by force and violence, something made illegal by the 1940 Smith Act. When the defense pointed to the inconsequential size of the alleged conspiracy, the presiding judge said it was well to remember that Hitler “went around in a greasy raincoat in his early days and was belittled for his efforts.” Twelve defendants were sentenced to 16 months imprisonment; others received a year and a day.

Because certain African-American groups criticized the war effort, they, too, faced administration scrutiny, including in some cases trial for sedition. The Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World, the House of Israel in Newark, and certain street preachers endorsed an Axis victory, expressed pro-Japanese sentiments (seeking to bond with other “people of color”), or, more significantly, urged resistance to the draft. In Free Speech in the Good War (1999), Richard W. Steele notes that even if the prosecutors had discovered truly seditious utterances and were relatively free of prejudice, the question remains: Were the activities of such black nationalists sufficiently grave as to warrant such punishment?

In some cases, Roosevelt’s Justice Department was defeated. In 1940 Attorney General Frank Murphy sought to convict 17 street thugs. Organized first in Brooklyn and located in various cities, they called themselves the Christian Front and were murkily tied to the demagogic radio priest Charles E. Coughlin. Evidence of their conspiracy to overthrow the United States included an old cavalry saber and a broken 1873 Springfield rifle. Murphy was unable to prove the Front was part of a plot aimed at establishing Nazi rule in America.

The administration also failed in its efforts to deport members of the German-American Bund, a militantly pro-Nazi organization composed of between 10,000 and 25,000 recent German immigrants who would parade in brown shirts and carry swastika flags. Engaging in a process long used to rid the U.S. of Communists, the Justice Department petitioned federal judges to void a Bundist’s certificate of naturalization on the grounds that one’s words and associations had violated one’s oath of allegiance. A Bundist could be held responsible for activity committed after naturalization, not just before. In 1943, however, the Supreme Court rescued Bundists from such a fate. In the case of Schneiderman v. U.S., which involved an immigrant who became leader of the California Communist party, the court ruled that events and writings involving William Schneiderman since he had become a citizen had little relevance in establishing his earlier state of mind. The prosecution now had to prove clearly that Bundists had taken their oath of allegiance with reservations, something well nigh impossible to establish.

Possibly the greatest setback came during the “Great Sedition Trial” of 1944-45, when the Justice Department indicted 30 native fascists, rightist extremists, and anti-Semites for conspiring with each other and with Nazi Germany. The defendants were accused of disseminating antidemocratic and pro-Axis propaganda and with seeking to impair the loyalty of the armed forces, a violation of the Smith Act. Obviously many of the defendants’ statements were hateful and divisive, but the government could not prove that they sought to incite a revolution, foster dissatisfaction in the military, or resist the draft. The death of the presiding judge in early December 1944 led to a mistrial and in December 1946 the Truman administration dropped all charges.

One should note that all of FDR’s attorneys general during World War II could be perceived as liberals. Frank Murphy, who held office in 1939, spoke out in defense of labor and ethnic and religious minorities. Robert H. Jackson, attorney general from January 1940 to June 1941, had opposed American entry into World War I and believed in government restraint. Francis Biddle, who occupied the position for the rest of Roosevelt’s term, belonged to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Yet all three caved in to pressure from FDR and J. Edgar Hoover. In December 1939 Murphy suggested that something like the Palmer raids, in which Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general had organized a roundup of radical aliens, would be more than acceptable. Jackson ended up accepting the need to investigate, even prosecute (the law permitting), people suspected of subversive beliefs and associations. Biddle’s case was possibly the most tragic, for by backing the Bridges deportation and the sedition case, he had betrayed his own libertarian principles. Only 20 years after the Minnesota Reds case did he admit that this handful of political deviants never constituted a “clear and present danger” to the government. At the time of the trial, he claimed that their prosecution struck a blow for free speech!

Ironically, during this time, there was little if any “clear and present danger.” Because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of late August 1939, the Communist Party was more discredited than ever. American fascism was moribund. Father Coughlin has lost access to major radio networks. The German-American Bund was close to extinction, suffering a nearly fatal blow when its leader, Fritz Kuhn, was imprisoned in December 1939 for misappropriating funds. In the congressional debates over FDR’s foreign policy, the anti-interventionists were always defeated.

Yet, in all its activities, the government offered the rationale of “national security,” claiming that internal dangers were sufficient to discard constitutional guarantees. In responding to criticism over the prosecution of the Christian Front, Hoover had retorted: “It took only 23 men to overthrow Russia.” Administration reasoning in World War II set a precedent for far more massive government spying during the Cold War, particularly against civil rights organizations and opponents of the Vietnam conflict. The very Smith Act used in 1944 against domestic fascists was used with far more severity against Communists during the Cold War, the law’s scope only being limited by the Supreme Court in 1957.

Of course, aside from the Nisei internment, the Roosevelt record could have been worse. Historian Steele can write that the system worked, though just barely. Yet World War II can no longer be seen uncritically as “the good war,” but rather as an object lesson on how even the most enlightened liberals can go astray.

American exceptionalism, from Stalin with love [By Ian Tyrrell posted on aeon.co]

Every time a public figure uses the term ‘American exceptionalism’, ordinary Americans turn to my website. It’s number one for a quick answer to the question: ‘What is American exceptionalism?’ My latest benefactor was Hillary Clinton, who used the term in a speech on 31 August. My website hits spiked. Until about 2010, few Americans had heard the term. Since then, its use has expanded exponentially. It is strange that such an inelegant term should be adopted by two major political parties when so many people had not a clue what it meant. Of course, one doesn’t have to use the term to believe in the underlying concept. But the phrase has a history that helps us to understand the current hyperbolic use.

American exceptionalism is not the same as saying the United States is ‘different’ from other countries. It doesn’t just mean that the US is ‘unique’. Countries, like people, are all different and unique, even if many share some underlying characteristics. Exceptionalism requires something far more: a belief that the US follows a path of history different from the laws or norms that govern other countries. That’s the essence of American exceptionalism: the US is not just a bigger and more powerful country – but an exception. It is the bearer of freedom and liberty, and morally superior to something called ‘Europe’. Never mind the differences within Europe, or the fact that ‘the world’ is bigger than the US and Europe. The ‘Europe’ versus ‘America’ dichotomy is the crucible in which American exceptionalist thinking formed.

Some presume that the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville invented the term in the 1830s, but only once did de Tocqueville actually call American society ‘exceptional’. He argued that Americans lacked culture and science, but could rely on the Anglo-Saxons in Britain to supply the higher forms of civilisation. This is not what Americans mean by ‘exceptionalism’ today.

American exceptionalism is an ideology. The ‘ism’ is the giveaway. De Tocqueville examined US institutions and moral behaviours as structural tendencies of democratic societies. He did not see US democracy as an ideology. To him, the US was the harbinger of a future that involved the possible democratisation of Europe, not an unrepeatable outlier of civilisation. He studied the US as a model of democratic society, whose workings needed to be understood, because the idea was spreading.

Some think that Werner Sombart, the German socialist of the early 1900s, invented the term, but he did not. Sombart claimed only that US capitalism, and its abundance, made the country temporarily unfavourable terrain for the development of socialism. It was actually Joseph Stalin, or his minions, who, in 1929, gave the idea its name. It is surely one of the ironies of modern history that both major US political parties now compete to endorse a Stalinist term.

Orthodox communists used the term to condemn the heretical views of the American communist Jay Lovestone. In the late 1920s, Lovestone argued that the capitalist economy of the US did not promote the revolutionary moment for which all communists waited. The Communist Party expelled Lovestone, but his followers and ex-Trotskyites in the US embraced the exceptionalist epithet and, eventually, the idea that the US would permanently avoid the socialist stage of development.

After the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, as well as later during the Cold War, many of these US Marxists jettisoned their old political allegiances but retained the mindset that the economic success of the US buried class struggle in their nation – permanently. As the leader of the free world, the chief victor in the Second World War over ‘totalitarian’ Germany, and by far the world’s most prosperous economy, the US seemed in all these ways an exceptional nation. Seymour Martin Lipset, the eminent Stanford political sociologist, made a career investigating the many factors that led to this American exceptionalism. Until his death in 2006, Lipset continued to hold that the US was not subject to the historical norms of all other nations.

No one did more than Ronald Reagan to amplify and popularise the US as exceptional. Refusing to accept the doldrums of the Jimmy Carter presidency or the transgressions of Richard Nixon as the best that Americans could do, Reagan promoted the image of the US as a shining ‘city upon a hill’. This reference is to a 1630 sermon by John Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Winthrop was calling on the new Pilgrim settlers heading for Massachusetts to stick to the narrow path of Puritanism.

Reagan and his followers wrongly attributed American exceptionalism to this Puritan injunction, and added ‘shining’ to the original, which gave the phrase a distinctly different connotation. Nor was Winthrop referring to any nation, but rather a discrete community of English Protestant believers. Notably, Winthrop’s sermon had been neglected for centuries. It was resurrected only in the 1940s by a few Harvard academics who were engaged in an intellectual rehabilitation of Puritan thought. In a 1961 speech, John F Kennedy, who had been a Harvard student and was influenced by that university’s Americanists, used the ‘city upon a hill’ phrase. The idea of the US as a ‘city upon a hill’, however, really gained purchase in political rhetoric in the 1970s and ’80s, as Reagan sought to reinvent the country.

Without question, Reagan saw the US as an exceptional nation. The language of exceptionalism, however, derived from Marxism, not God. The idea of a morally superior and unique civilisation destined to guide the world did not come under the banner of an orthodox ‘ism’ until very recently, until the 21st century. In the wake of 9/11, the speeches of George W Bush and his supporters asserted the radical distinctiveness of the US with a new belligerence. We have all heard it: it is ‘our freedoms’ that Islamic terrorists hated; they wished to kill Americans because they envied this exceptional inheritance.

The global financial crisis of 2007-10 added to the geopolitical turmoil that followed 9/11. Though the US economy expanded in the 1990s and early 2000s, economic inequality that began to grow in the Reagan era also became worse. In the post-1945 age, when academics first posed American exceptionalism as a coherent doctrine, the idea also became linked to global US military and political hegemony. In the past two generations, since the Reagan era, Americans have not prospered to the same extent, and American exceptionalism has been increasingly linked only to military hegemony.

Decline is, in fact, the midwife to the ideology of American exceptionalism. The less exceptional that circumstances in the US appear, the louder defenders of exceptionalism insist on orthodoxy. When the nation was indisputably powerful and its people prosperous, Americans did not collectively require an ‘ism’ to serve as a guiding light. In these more polarised times, when the fates of Americans become based more on their class and less on their shared nationality, the ideological orthodoxy of American exceptionalism has emerged on a political level. A previously obscure academic term became a rallying cry for a political agenda.

When Hillary Clinton joins the exceptionalist bandwagon, it reflects a political consensus that Donald Trump denies. In wanting to make America great again, Trump implicitly accepts that it is not currently ‘great’, and never was exceptional. No longer is the Republican Party the chief cheerleader of American exceptionalism. But the Democrats have picked up the mantle, and the language of exceptionalism continues to rally a party and a country.

Sir Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics, and Policymaking in the 21st Century  [By Christopher J. Fettweis]

The world today hardly resembles the one that Sir Halford Mackinder examined in 1904, when he first wrote about the advantages of central positioning on the Eurasian landmass. His theories would have influence throughout the century, informing and shaping US containment policy throughout the Cold War. Today, almost a century after his "Heartland" theory came into being, there is renewed interest in the region that Mackinder considered the key to world dominance. The Heartland of the Eurasian landmass may well play an important role in the next century, and the policy of today's lone superpower toward that region will have a tremendous influence upon the character of the entire international system. 

Eurasia, the "World Island" to Mackinder, is still central to American foreign policy and will likely to continue to be so for some time. Conventional wisdom holds that only a power dominating the resources of Eurasia would have the potential to threaten the interests of the United States. Yet that conventional wisdom, as well as many of the other assumptions that traditionally inform our policy, has not been subjected to enough scrutiny in light of the changed international realities. Many geopolitical "truths" that have passed into the canon of security intellectuals rarely get a proper reexamination to determine their relevance to the constantly evolving nature of the system. Were the world system static, no further theorizing would be necessary. Since it is not, we must constantly reevaluate our fundamental assumptions to see whether or not any "eternal" rules of the game, geopolitical and otherwise, truly exist.

Geopolitics is traditionally defined as the study of "the influence of geographical factors on political action,"[3] but this oft-cited definition fails to capture the many meanings that have evolved for the term over the years. Dr. Gearoid Ó Tuathail, an Irish geographer and associate professor at Virginia Tech, has identified three main uses of "geopolitics" since the end of World War II. First, it is sometimes used to describe a survey of a particular region or problem, to "read the manifest features of that which was held to be `external reality.'"[4] Geopolitics, according to this usage, is a lens through which to survey a problem: "The Geopolitics of X, where X is oil, energy, resources, information, the Middle East, Central America, Europe, etc." Second, geopolitics can be synonymous with realpolitik, which according to Ó Tuathail is "almost exclusively the legacy of Henry Kissinger."[5] Kissinger used the term to describe his attempts to maintain a "favorable equilibrium" in world politics, and his singular ability to see the proper course and set sail for it. His Machiavellian approach was infamously devoid of ideology (or "sentimentality"), and as such caused the term geopolitics to fall out of favor with many of the foreign policy practitioners who followed. Last, and most important for our purposes, geopolitics has become synonymous with grand strategy, "not, as in Kissinger, about the everyday tactical conduct of statecraft."[6] Theorists like Colin Gray place geography in the center of international relations and attempt to decipher the fundamental, eternal factors that drive state action. This belief traces its roots directly back to Sir Halford Mackinder and his theories of the Heartland.

A Brief History of Geopolitics in Theory and Policy

To the early 20th-century British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, world history was a story of constant conflict between land and sea powers. In the past, during what he described as the Columbian Epoch, increased mobility that the sea provided put naval powers at a distinct advantage over their territorial adversaries. The classic example of this advantage was the Crimean War, in which Russia could not project power to the south as effectively as the sea-supplied French and British, despite the fact that the battlefields were far closer to Moscow than to London. But the Columbian Epoch was coming to a conclusion at the turn of the 20th century when Mackinder was first writing, as evolving technology, especially the system of railroads, allowed land powers to be nearly as mobile as those of the sea. Because land powers on the World Island had a smaller distance to travel than the sea powers operating on its periphery, any increase in their mobility would tip the balance of power in their favor. These "interior lines" gave the power with the "central position" on the World Island the ability to project power anywhere more rapidly than the sea powers could defend. Thus, who ruled the Heartland would have the possibility of commanding the entire World Island.

Mackinder believed that the world had evolved into what he called a "closed system." There was no more room for expansion by the end of the 19th century, for colonialism had brought the entire world under the sway of Europe. Power politics of the future, Mackinder speculated, would be marked by a competition over the old territories rather than a quest for new ones. His Heartland concept recalled the 18th-century strategists' notion of the "key position" on the battlefield,[7] the recognition of which was crucial to victory. Traditional military strategists thought that control of the key position on the map was crucial to winning the war, and since Mackinder recognized that the round world was now one big battlefield, identification and control of the key position would lead to global supremacy.

Mackinder's theories might have faded into irrelevance were it not for their apparent influence on the foreign policy of Nazi Germany. A German geopolitician and devotee of Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, spent the interwar period writing extensively about the Heartland and the need for Lebensraum (additional territory deemed essential for continued national well-being) for the German people. One of Haushofer's pupils was Rudolph Hess, who brought his teacher into the inner intellectual circles of the Reich. Haushofer was appointed by Hitler to run the German Academy in Berlin, which was "more a propagandic institution than a true academy in the continental European sense,"[8] according to one observer. The actual effect of his teachings upon German policy is open to debate--Haushofer may have had an enormous effect on Hitler through his pupil,[9] or he may have been "a neglected and slighted man who would certainly enjoy learning about the hullabaloo raised by his doctrine" in the United States.[10] It cannot be proven that the Drang nach Osten (eastward push) was affected by a desire to control the Heartland. Here policy may just overlap with, rather than be dictated by, geotheory. But the possibility that there was a secret master plan at work in Berlin created a whole new interest in geopolitics and what Mackinder and geopolitics had to say.

Haushofer's ideas probably had a larger influence upon American strategic studies during the war than they did on German policy. Wartime paranoia fed an image of a secret German science of geopolitik that was driving Nazi action, bringing Mackinder and Haushofer onto the American intellectual radar screen. In 1942 Life magazine ran an article titled "Geopolitics: The Lurid Career of a Scientific System which a Briton Invented, the Germans Used, and the Americans Need to Study,"[11] which captured the mood of the period, imagining a cabal of foreign policy "scientists" dictating policy for the dictator. Opinions differed between those who prescribed rapid acceptance of geopolitik and those who dismissed it as pseudoscience. The latter opinion was strengthened, of course, by Germany's eventual defeat.

From Hot War to Cold

The most influential American geopolitician to emerge out of the furor created by Haushofer and the quest for Lebensraum was Yale University professor Nicholas Spykman. Spykman, considered one of the leading intellectual forefathers of containment, speculated about power projection into and out of the Heartland. Whereas Mackinder assumed that geographical formations made for easiest access from the east, Spykman argued that the littoral areas of the Heartland, or what he called the "Rimland," was key to controlling the center. He updated Mackinder, positing, "Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world."[12] Spykman put an American twist on geopolitical theory, and laid the intellectual foundation for Kennan and those who argued that the Western powers ought to strengthen the Rimland to contain the Soviet Union, lest it use its control of the Heartland to command the World Island.[13]

Geopolitics as grand strategy was one of the important intellectual foundations for the West's Cold War containment policy. Canadian geographer Simon Dalby recognizes it as one of the "four security discourses (the others being sovietology, strategy, and the realist approach to international relations) which American `security intellectuals' have drawn on in constructing the `Soviet threat.'"[14] According to one of the preeminent historians of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, in the late 1940s "there developed a line of reasoning reminiscent of Sir Halford Mackinder's geopolitics, with its assumption that none of the world's `rimlands' could be secure if the Eurasian `heartland' was under the domination of a single hostile power."[15] Gaddis describes how the containment policy evolved from countering Soviet expansion at every point in the rimlands to concentration of defense on a few key points, especially Western Europe and Japan.

While Mackinder's warnings of the advantages inherent in central positioning on the Eurasian landmass certainly became incorporated into Cold War American strategic thought and policy, some observers seem to believe that the principle architects of US foreign policy throughout the Cold War era must have been carrying Mackinder in their briefcases. Colin Gray wrote:

By far the most influential geopolitical concept for Anglo-American statecraft has been the idea of a Eurasian `heartland,' and then the complementary idea-as-policy of containing the heartland power of the day within, not to, Eurasia. From Harry S Truman to George Bush, the overarching vision of US national security was explicitly geopolitical and directly traceable to the heartland theory of Mackinder. . . . Mackinder's relevance to the containment of a heartland-occupying Soviet Union in the cold war was so apparent as to approach the status of a cliché.[16]

Indeed, many policymakers came from the world of academia, where they were certainly exposed to Mackinder's geopolitical theories. As was described above, Henry Kissinger used the term geopolitics to denote any policy dependent upon power principles at the expense of ideology and "sentimentality." Kissinger's worldview was less dependent upon geographical realities than some of the other Cold Warriors, especially Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Carter's National Security Advisor and a graduate-school mentor of Madeleine Albright. Brzezinski has made Eurasia the focus for US foreign policy in all of his writing, consistently warning of the dangerous advantages that the Heartland power had over the West.[17]

It is of course very difficult to trace the progression of ideas into policy. But theories and assumptions, whether articulated or not, provide the frameworks which guide decisionmaking. Without those frameworks, the proper course for the nation, or the national interest itself, cannot be identified or pursued. So while it is possible that geopolitics and containment simply coincided, it is highly unlikely that Western policymakers could look at a map of the world, see the red zone in the Heartland, and not remember the warning from Mackinder's cherub.[18]

After the Cold War

One might expect that geopolitics would have faded into the intellectual background with the end of the Cold War and the defeat of the Heartland power. Strangely, though, Mackinder received a fresh look by some scholars in the 1990s, both in the United States and abroad, and especially in the Heartland itself.[19] In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Charles Clover identified the growing discussion of geopolitics among some circles in Russia today:

Many Russian intellectuals, who once thought their homeland's victory over the world would be the inevitable result of history, now pin their hope for Russia's return to greatness on a theory that is, in a way, the opposite of dialectical materialism. Victory is now to be found in geography, rather than history; in space, rather than time. . . . The movement envisions the Eurasian heartland as the geographic launching pad for a global anti-Western movement whose goal is the ultimate expulsion of "Atlantic" (read: "American") influence from Eurasia.[20]

Clover argues that the modern Russian geopolitik is being used as the glue to form bonds between the ultra-left and ultra-right, hinting at a "red-brown" coalition that could become dominant in Russian politics in the years ahead, with ominous implications for international stability.

This eventuality would of course be quite problematic for an America that still views Eurasia as the chessboard upon which the game of global control will be played. The World Island is still the central focus of US policy, and the Russians are still considered to have the most fortunate position on the map. Yet is there now, or was there ever, any reason to believe that the Heartland of Eurasia bestows any sort of geopolitical advantage to the power that controls it?

Examining Mackinder

Mackinder's theories have been attacked from many directions over the years, but their remnants persist in our intellectual memory. Mackinder (and the geopoliticians who have followed) thought that geography favored the Heartland power for five key reasons: the Heartland was virtually impenetrable to foreign invasion; technological changes offered increased mobility which favored land powers; the Heartland was in the central position on the World Island, giving it shorter, interior lines of transportation and communication than a power defending the Rimland; the Heartland was loaded with natural resources waiting to be exploited that could give the area the highest productivity on earth; and, last, the Eurasian World Island, being the home to the majority of the world's land, people, and resources, was the springboard for global hegemony. Every one of these assumptions collapses under even the most cursory scrutiny.

Impregnability

"The Heartland is the greatest natural fortress on earth," Mackinder wrote. He envisioned it being guarded by natural geographical formations that make it almost impregnable to attack, specifically the "ice-clad Polar Sea, forested and rugged Lenaland [Siberia east of the Yenisei River], and the Central Asiatic mountain and arid tableland."[21] The fortress had one weakness, Mackinder concluded: there was an opening in the west, between the Baltic and Black Seas, which was not blocked geographically. This gap in the natural defenses led to the famous conclusion that whoever ruled Eastern Europe would be in an advantageous position to rule the Heartland, and therefore the World Island, and therefore the world.

Mackinder seemed to ignore the fact that to the extent these geographical formations protected a Heartland power, they also prevented it from projecting outward. Walls tend to keep residents in as effectively as they keep invaders out. The geographical boundaries of the Heartland, to the extent that they were ever obstacles, would have hampered any attempt to use it as a springboard for hemispheric dominance.

But more important, the Heartland can be considered a fortress only by standards of 19th-century technology. A modern army, should it want to attack the Heartland, would have little trouble bypassing "Lenaland," or slicing right through Central Asia. Even its most seemingly impenetrable boundary, the Polar Sea, offers little protection from attack from the sky by planes and missiles. The greatest natural fortress on earth is certainly vulnerable to 21st-century weaponry, offering little inherent advantage to the power within.

The essential irrelevance of the "natural defenses" of the Heartland was pointed out during the first stages of debate on Mackinder during World War II. In debunking geopolitics as a "pseudoscience," Ralph Turner made the seemingly obvious point in 1943 that "the high mobility of land power on the steppes . . . is now amplified or offset by the far greater mobility of air power."[22] Yet many geopoliticians remain unconvinced. Colin Gray, perhaps the leading geopolitician of our time, has responded to this argument by saying, "That technology has canceled geography contains just enough merit to be called a plausible fallacy."[23] He then argues from a tactical standpoint, pointing out that logistical factors make geography's influence permanent. Surely he is correct when he points out that "it mattered enormously" that the Falklands were islands and Kuwait a desert, and geography still has a great impact upon military tactics and how battles are fought. But it has a decreasing impact upon determinations of when states choose to fight or who prevails. Gray does not make the case for the permanence of geographical factors upon grand strategy. The experiences in the disparate conditions of the Falklands and Kuwait show that technology can indeed overcome the geographical boundaries of any natural fortress, including those of the Heartland.

Perhaps the projection of power out of the Heartland was not crucial to Mackinder's concept. Perhaps the important point was that geographical defenses would allow the Heartland power to exploit its resources and consolidate its power, uninterrupted by conquest and devastation. But even by this conception, the Heartland falls far short. Russia has been devastated time and again throughout history. Mongols, Turks, Arabs, Persians, Swedes, French, Germans, and many other groups have penetrated the walls of the fortress, repeatedly laying waste to the area and inhibiting long-term, steady growth. The Heartland was not impenetrable to the technologies of the last two millennia, much less those of the next.

Mobility

To Mackinder, the Heartland power had a distinct geopolitical advantage at the end of the Columbian Epoch because changes in technology allowed for rapid troop movement and power projection. The railroad put land powers on equal footing with those of the sea, and the vast flat steppes put the Heartland in the best position to exploit that new technology and mobility, especially since the Heartland afforded shorter, interior lines of movement.

But, as was discussed above, technological advancement did not stop with the railroad. The mobility that air power brings changes all the calculations of Mackinder. There is no longer an advantage to being able to choose the point of attack, for armed forces can be airlifted between any two points on the globe in a matter of hours. Rail mobility offered a tremendous advantage before the advent of air travel, but not nearly so much since.

Gray and others argue that planes have to land, and therefore geographical positioning is still vital. But this too is rapidly becoming obsolete. Mackinder clearly did not anticipate, and Gray does not take into account, the implications of bombers that can take off from Missouri, drop their bombload on Kosovo, and land back in Missouri. In our rapidly shrinking world, where air power can now be projected around the world from any position, the geographical location of bases (and indeed geography itself) is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Central Position

Mackinder would have us believe that central positioning is an advantage to a Heartland power, for it allows shorter, internal lines of transportation with which the Heartland power can choose the point of attack. To Cold War strategists, this central positioning made containment a nightmare, for it necessitated defense of the enormous littoral rimlands.

Mackinder might have been the first strategist in history to suggest that the surrounded have the advantage. When has central positioning ever been advantageous to any nation? No one spoke of the "interior lines of communication" of the Third Reich, for instance. Germany has always been at a disadvantage because of her position in the heart of Europe. Similarly, the central positioning of the Heartland of Eurasia has never been geopolitically advantageous to its inhabitants. Rather than providing a springboard to attack in any direction, central positioning has rendered the Heartland power vulnerable on all sides. Rather than providing a heightened security, this position actually heightens the Heartland's insecurity. Indeed, Russian history is filled with attacks from the east, west, and south, feeding an insecurity and a paranoia to which Americans, historically protected by vast oceans, cannot relate.

Central positioning is an advantage only to a Heartland power bent of expansion. Realpolitik and geopolitik informed the West that while their intentions in the Rimland were benign (or at least not offensive in nature), the Soviets had imperial designs on every region of the world. To the West, the Soviets were not threatened from all directions, but rather were threatening to all directions. This assumption of the eternality of Russian imperialism continues to affect our policy today, and we continue to see the Russian littoral as threatened by its vast neighbor.

The inability to understand the other's view is one of the great historical features of US foreign policy. We still are not able to understand that the quest for empire in Russian history is at least in part an attempt to bolster the insecurity that its position has always entailed. Russia's imperial outposts in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and elsewhere provided buffer zones against the attacks that have periodically devastated Russian land. Central positioning has led to a state of permanent insecurity, which has poisoned Russia's relations with its neighbors. The West clumsily heightens that sense of insecurity with every new foray into the Rimlands.

Productivity

Ironically, the real reason behind the ability of the Heartland to resist attack also guarantees that it will never be able to live up to Mackinder's forecast. In order to dominate the World Island, a Heartland power would have to exploit its vast resources. But since virtually all of the pivot area lies latitudinally above the continental United States, the harsh climate makes mining difficult, growing seasons brief, and successful attack nearly impossible.

Large sections of the Heartland are not and will never be productive. So it is hard to imagine that the productivity of the region will ever match Sir Halford's key condition for dominance of the World Island.

"Who rules the World Island commands the World"

Using Mackinder's own qualifications, it appears that he has placed the key geographical position in the wrong part of the world. It does not appear true that the Eastern Hemisphere bestows any strategic advantage over the Western. In fact, control over the Western Hemisphere has allowed the United States to rise to an unprecedented position of power, for many of the very reasons Mackinder identified with the Heartland. The oceans provide it with heretofore virtually impregnable boundaries, and it has command over a collection of resources far greater than any Eurasian power could effectively exploit, given climatic realities. It seems hard to argue that geographical factors favor Mackinder's Heartland over the American, or to see why so many strategists continue to put Eurasia as the center of the world. Heterogeneity alone seems to predestine the Eastern Hemisphere to infighting, and to disadvantages when compared to the Western.

The point here is not to reinvent the Heartland, however, or to argue that "who rules North America commands the world." Rather it is to show that even by the terms he used, Mackinder's Heartland never was capable of bestowing any extraordinary advantages upon its inhabitants. If anything, it was and is a disadvantage, especially when compared to other, more manageable, geographical positions.

Implications for Policy and Theory

One of the reasons that Mackinder is being resurrected yet again is because policymakers are searching for ways to conceptualize and deal with the heart of his Heartland--Central Asia and the Caspian Sea--which is a region that has the potential to become a major source of great-power contention in the next century. Some analysts estimate that the fossil fuels in the region will transform it into a "new Saudi Arabia" in the coming decades.[24] Its vast deposits made the Soviet Union one of the largest exporters of oil during the last decades of the Cold War, and new reserves have been discovered through intensive exploration since. An apparent power vacuum within the region is once again the subject of rivalry from without, and a new "great game" (an analogy to which we will return) seems to be unfolding, with Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, and the United States as the players. Desire for fossil fuels and the wealth they create has the potential to damage relations between the global and regional powers, if diplomacy is mishandled.

Russian behavior toward the states of Central Asia, and indeed toward all the other former Soviet nations, is often seen to be a bellwether of its new nature. Some observers assume that Russian meddling in the affairs of the states on its periphery is an inevitable sign of neoimperialism, which is a permanent characteristic of its eternal national character. To head off any return to empire, many feel that the West must be firm in discouraging a growth in Russian influence in the new states. Thus the United States is interested in projecting power into Central Asia in the belief that filling power vacuums is necessary to prevent the Russians from doing so, and to keep the Cold War from recurring. Russia and China today are regional powers that seek influence only in their littoral; the United States projects power everywhere. The three overlap in Central Asia, which is the only region where the Cold War tradition of "triangular diplomacy" may well become a reality again if geopolitical concerns dominate our strategy.

The heart of the Heartland is floating on top of a sea of oil. Before we decide on the nature of our policy toward the region, we must examine some of the assumptions that we bring into the debate. The theories of Mackinder and the geopoliticians still linger, affecting the ways that our policy is made, despite the fact that the foundations upon which those theories are built are intellectually shaky at best.

Geopolitics and Eternal Realities

Geopoliticians, by all uses of that term, seem to claim to understand the eternal and fundamental geographical realities in a way that automatically places their analyses above those of ordinary strategists. Mackinder, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Gray, and the rest all would have us believe that they can see the proper course for policy because they understand the "eternal" realities that the earth provides, despite the fact that their assumptions are often baseless or archaic. Ó Tuathail has described this phenomenon, and his remarks are worth quoting at some length:

To understand the appeal of formal geopolitics to certain intellectuals, institutions, and would-be strategists, one has to appreciate the mythic qualities of geopolitics. Geopolitics is mythic because it promises uncanny clarity and insight in a complex world. It actively closes down an openness to the geographical diversity of the world and represses questioning and difference. The plurality of the world is reduced to certain "transcendent truths" about strategy. Geopolitics is a narrow instrumental form of reason that is also a form of faith, a belief that there is a secret substratum and/or a permanent set of conflicts and interests that accounts for the course of world politics. It is fetishistically concerned with "insight," and "prophecy."

Formal geopolitics appeals to those who yearn for the apparent certitude of "timeless truths." Historically, it is produced by and appeals to right-wing countermoderns because it imposes a constructed certitude upon the unruly complexity of world politics, uncovering transcendent struggles between seemingly permanent opposites ("landpower" versus "seapower," "oceanic" versus "continental," "East" versus "West") and folding geographical difference into depluralized geopolitical categories like "heartland," "rimland," "shatterbelt," and the like. Foreign policy complexity becomes simple(minded) strategic gaming. [Ó Tuathail makes reference to Brzezinski here] Such formal geopolitical reasoning is . . . a flawed foundation upon which to construct a foreign policy that needs to be sensitive to the particularity and diversity of the world's states, and to global processes and challenges that transcend state-centric reasoning.[25]

As unsettling as it may be, there are no "timeless truths" in world politics. The international system changes as fast as we can understand its functions, and often much faster. It seems to be natural for the human mind to use analogies and slogans to comprehend situations that are difficult to grasp. If policymakers indeed simplify the world into frameworks to make it comprehensible, then they must beware not to base those frameworks on outdated and intellectually sloppy assumptions of geopolitics.

Analogies and Policy

Policy is driven by analogy, both historical and theoretical. One common, and dangerous, analogy that drives US Eurasian policy is "the game." Brzezinski speaks of chess; Central Asian policy is the "new great game"; Kissinger and Nixon used game analogies throughout their reign and in their writings afterward.[26] Impenetrably complex problems are simplified to games, which was problematic enough during the Cold War but is acutely poisonous today.

Take Brzezinski's chess analogy. Chess has two players, and one opponent; it is zero-sum, and to the finish; there is a winner and a loser, with no middle ground. The opponent of the United States to Brzezinski is, and has always been, Russia. If we approach Eurasia as if it were a chessboard, then we will be met by opponents, and cooperation and mutual benefit would be removed from our calculations. If the leaders of the most powerful nation on earth were to conceptualize foreign policy as a chess game, it would virtually ensure that other nations would as well. A Eurasian alliance to counteract growing US influence would be virtually inevitable.

Mackinder's Heartland theory is a another example of inappropriately applied analogy. Sir Halford took Britain's traditional fear of the dominance of the resources of continental Europe by one power and extended it to encompass the entire world. To many geopoliticians, the United States is an island power, peripheral to the crucial and decisive land of Eurasia. The only way America can be safe is if the continent does not unify against her.

England's fear of a united European continent in the 19th century was understandable, because only a continental power unconcerned with land enemies would be able to concentrate its resources to challenge the Royal Navy. The analogy with the World Island and the United States falls apart, for no nation that dominates that continent would ever be able to threaten our hemisphere. Even if it were conceivable that one power could dominate Eurasia (which of course it is not), such an imbalance would not necessarily threaten American interests, and the dominant power presumably would not be able to project power over the oceans. Any imaginable alliance of Eurasian powers would be too unwieldy and disparate to operate effectively. Some fear that a Eurasian alliance would be capable of shutting off trade with the United States, ruining our economy and standard of living. While this may have had some relevance when there was the potential for the rest of the world to be dominated by the communists, as long as the great powers of the World Island continue to be wedded to the free market (and do not perceive US power to be threatening), then there is little danger of their voluntarily shutting their doors to the American market and investment structure.

Paradoxically, our attempts to prevent a Eurasian anti-American alliance may make that outcome more likely. As Steven Walt has persuasively shown, imbalances of threat, not imbalances of power, drive alliances together.[27] Our attempts to project power into the Heartland, if done clumsily, can heighten threat perceptions in its capitals, making such counterproductive alliances more attractive.

British uneasiness with the European Union is reflective of this fear of continental alliances. But is there really any threat of a state marshaling forces against the British Isles? Analogies, and their accompanying "eternal interests," tend to persist long after their useful life is over. Sometimes we fail to perceive the end of that intellectual shelf life.

Frameworks for Grand Strategies

The Clinton Administration has been criticized from the beginning for running a foreign policy that is at best reactive and at worst rudderless and confused. While this characterization may not be entirely accurate or even fair, it is apparent that running a foreign policy without the framework provided by a global rival can appear to be unfocused and ad hoc. Without a vision of what the next century ought to look like, no policies can be formulated to bring it about.

During the Cold War, foreign policy decisions were never easy, but at least the Soviet Union provided an enemy to be opposed. Conventional wisdom recommended countering every Soviet move, no matter how trivial. Today the United States is at a unipolar position in every possible sense--militarily, economically, culturally, politically, and on and on. The world looked to the United States at the end of the Cold War to lead a new century, to redefine the rules by which the system operates. As Fareed Zakaria has noted, after the last two world wars, "America wanted to change the world, and the world was reluctant. But in 1999, the world is eager to change--along the lines being defined by America--but now America is reluctant."[28]

American policymakers have continuously underestimated the impact that a hegemon can have on the "rules of the game" because they are wedded to the archaic realist and geopolitical notion that those rules do not change. Yet as disconcerting as it may seem, the rules evolve as quickly as "the game" itself, and policymakers must have the vision to anticipate that evolution and adjust accordingly. The end of the Cold War has provided the United States an unprecedented opportunity to shape the nature of the system. In order to do so it is necessary to jettison antiquated and baseless concepts like geopolitics once and for all.

Conclusion

"Eternal" geopolitical realities and national interests are mirages. The idea that a Heartland power has any advantages due to its position on the map cannot be historically or theoretically justified; the notion that an imbalance of power in Eurasia (even if it were conceivable) would somehow threaten the interests of the United States is not tenable; and the idea that geographic "realities" of power can operate outside of the context of ideology, nationalism, and culture is pure fantasy. Worse than mirages, these ideas can cripple the way we run our foreign policy in the new century.

Debunking the fundamental assumptions of geopolitics is an important task when one considers how policy is made. Policymakers operate with a set of assumptions and frameworks through which they interpret international events. As Richard Neustadt and Ernest May have persuasively argued, historical (and often wildly inappropriate) analogies, banal slogans, and outdated theories often become the driving forces in policymaking.[29] One of these outdated theories that persists in our intellectual memory is Sir Halford Mackinder's geopolitics.

Policymakers in the United States vastly underestimate the hegemon's potential to shape the nature of the international system. Intellectuals wedded to old ideas about the unchanging nature of power have so far failed to lead the world in the new directions that it expected. The unparalleled unipolar position that the United States found itself in when the Cold War abruptly ended is being wasted by politicians with no vision for shaping the future. The debate that occasionally resurfaces over the "isolationist" nature of the United States misses a key dimension: if nothing else, America has certainly been intellectually isolationist in the post-Cold War era, hiding behind walls and refusing to lead the world in new directions that its unprecedented power has made possible. The rules that govern international relations evolve. No so-called permanent interests, or eternal geographical realities, exist. The only way that the next century can be better than the one we are leaving is with a reevaluation of the assumptions and attitudes that underlie our actions. A prolonged investigation into the utility of all geopolitical theory would be a good place to start.

________________________________________

NOTES
1. Halford Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962 [original publication 1919]), p 150.
2. Charles Clover, "Dreams of the Eurasian Heartland," Foreign Affairs, 78 (March/April 1999), 9.
3. From Jean Gottman, "The Background of Geopolitics," Military Affairs, 6 (Winter 1942), 197.
4. Gearoid Ó Tuathail, "Problematizing Geopolitics: Survey, Statesmanship and Strategy," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 19 (1994), 261.
5. Ibid., p. 263.
6. Ibid., p. 267.
7. For more on this, see Alfred Vagts, "Geography in War and Geopolitics," Military Affairs, 7 (Summer 1943), 85-86.
8. Ibid., p. 87.
9. For this perspective, and summation of Haushofer's writings, see Hans W. Weigert, Generals and Geopolitics (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942).
10. Vagts, p. 87.
11. J. Thorndike, "Geopolitics: The Lurid Career of a Scientific System which a Briton Invented, the Germans Used, and the Americans Need to Study," Life, 21 December 1942.
12. Nicholas J. Spykman, The Geography of Peace (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1944), p. 43.
13. For more on Spykman, and his links to Mackinder and Kennan, see Michael P. Gerace, "Between Mackinder and Spykman: Geopolitics, Containment, and After," Comparative Strategy, 10 (October-December 1991), 347-64.
14. Simon Dalby, "American Security Discourse: the Persistence of Geopolitics," Political Geography Quarterly, 9 (April 1990), 171.
15. John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 57.
16. Colin S. Gray, "The Continued Primacy of Geography," Orbis, 40 (Spring 1996), 258.
17. See, for instance, Brzezinski's Cold War writings like Game Plan: A Geostrategic Framework for the Conduct of the U.S.-Soviet Contest (Boston: the Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) and The Grand Chessboard (New York: Basic Books, 1997) from after it was over.
18. For an analysis of the effect of geopolitics, Mackinder, and the Heartland on US Cold War foreign policy, see G. R. Sloan, Geopolitics in United States Strategic Policy, 1890-1987 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), esp. pp. 127-239; and Colin S. Gray, The Geopolitics of Superpower (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1988).
19. See, in addition to those works already cited, reviews of the current literature in Colin S. Gray, "Geography and Grand Strategy," Comparative Strategy, 10 (October-December 1991) 311-29; David Hansen, "The Immutable Importance of Geography," Parameters, 27 (Spring 1997), 55-64; John Hillen and Michael P. Noonan, "The Geopolitics of NATO Enlargement," Parameters, 28 (Autumn 1998), 21-34; and Gerald Robbins, "The Post-Soviet Heartland: Reconsidering Mackinder," Global Affairs, 8 (Fall 1993), 95-108.
20. Charles Clover, "Dreams of the Eurasian Heartland," Foreign Affairs, 78 (March/April 1999), 9.
21. Halford J. Mackinder, "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace," Foreign Affairs, 21 (July 1943), 603.
22. Ralph Turner, "Technology and Geopolitics," Military Affairs, 7 (Spring 1943), 14.
23. Colin S. Gray, "The Continued Primacy of Geography," Orbis, 40 (Spring 1996), 251.
24. Carl Goldstein, "Final Frontier," Far Eastern Economic Review, 10 June 1993, p. 54.
25. Geraoid Ó Tauthail, "Understanding Critical Geopolitics: Geopolitics and Risk Society," Internet, http://www.majbill.vt.edu/geog/facul...stratstud.html.
26. Ó Tuathail documents Kissinger's usage of the game metaphor in "Problematizing Geopolitics," pp. 266-67.
27. See Steven M. Walt, The Origin of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987).
28. Quoted in Thomas Freidman, "The War Over Peace," The New York Times, 17 October 1999, op-ed.
29. Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986).

James Burnham: The First Cold Warrior [By Francis P. Sempa in American Diplomacy Vol. V, No. 4 Fall 2000 (Nov 30)]

A piece on the cynical thougth of James Burnham written by a neoconservative fanboy. Of course it totally neglects to mention the real consequences, foreign and domestic, of America embracing Burnhams ideas: the globalization of poverty, rise of religious fundamentalism and the collapse of the living standards of the American working class.

DURING THE EARLY post-Second World War years, James Burnham, a leading American Trotskyite in the 1930s, emerged as a chief critic of the policy of containment as articulated by the Department of State’s policy planning chief, George F. Kennan, and implemented by the Truman Administration. At this time, Burnham was a prominent liberal anticommunist associated with the journal Partisan Review who had worked for the Office of Strategic Services during the war. In three books written between 1947 and 1952, and in hundreds of articles written over a twenty-five-year period for the conservative magazine National Review, Burnham criticized containment from the ideological Right, arguing for a more aggressive strategy to undermine Soviet power. That strategy, which Burnham called “liberation” and others called “rollback,” was widely ridiculed at the time and subsequently, even though, ironically, Kennan in his memoirs termed it “persuasive.”1 Decades later, however, the Reagan Administration’s confrontational style and offense-oriented policies during the 1980s, an approach which arguably resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War, can be said to have vindicated Burnham’s strategic views.

Burnham was born in Chicago in 1905. His father, Claude George Burnham, who emigrated as a child to the United States from England, was an executive with the Burlington Railroad. James attended Princeton University where he studied English literature and philosophy, and graduated first in his class, delivering his valedictory address in Latin. Burnham earned a masters degree at Balliol College, Oxford University, in 1929; later that year he accepted a teaching position in the philosophy department of New York University. He remained on the faculty of NYU until 1953.

From 1930-1933, Burnham co-edited (with Philip Wheelwright) Symposium, a review devoted to literary and philosophical criticism. In 1932, he and Wheelwright wrote a textbook entitled Introduction to Philosophical Analysis. During his editorship of Symposium, Burnham became acquainted with Sidney Hook, a colleague in the Philosophy Department at NYU. According to Hook, their relationship became “quite friendly” when Symposium published Hook’s essay “Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx.” Burnham’s articles in Symposium impressed Hook and other readers, including Soviet exile Leon Trotsky.

During the 1930s, with the country in the throes of a great economic depression, Burnham joined the Trotskyite wing of the international communist movement. He had read Marx and Engels while living in France in 1930, and was later greatly impressed by Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. His move to the far left, however, was not without detours along the way. For example, in the April 1933 issue of Symposium, Burnham described the communist party as “ridiculously utopian” and “barbaric.” John P. Diggins, one of Burnham’s biographers, believes that three principal factors persuaded Burnham to join the communist movement: an article by Sidney Hook on Marx; Adolf Berle’s and Gardiner Means’s book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property; and Burnham’s tour of the country in the summer of 1933 where, in Diggins’s words, “he encountered the first stirrings of an authentic class struggle.”

In 1933, Burnham helped Hook, A.J. Muste, and J.B.S. Hardman organize the American Workers Party. The next year, the party merged with the Trotskyite Communist League of America to form the Socialist Workers Party. Burnham, according to Hook, emerged as the Party’s most admired and “most distinguished intellectual figure.” Samuel Francis, another Burnham biographer, notes that during that time Burnham was considered a “leading spokesman” of the Trotskyite branch of the international communist movement. Diggins goes further, describing Burnham as Trotsky’s “chief spokesman” within American intellectual circles. Burnham became an editor of the Party’s monthly journal, New International, wherein he defended Trotsky from Stalinist verbal attacks. Initially, Burnham viewed Stalinism as an “aberration of Bolshevism.” He saw Trotsky as Lenin’s true heir, and Trotskyism as the fulfillment of the ideals of the Bolshevik revolution. After the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939, however, Burnham began distancing himself from Trotsky (who defended the pact). In May 1940 Burnham resigned from the Socialist Workers Party, ended his involvement in the international communist movement, and began to write regularly for Partisan Review, the leading journal of the non-communist left.2

Burnham emerged as a Cold War strategist in 1944 upon writing an analysis of Soviet post-war goals for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. The seeds of his intellectual evolution from Trotskyite to anticommunist cold warrior were planted during the time period between his break with communism and the beginning of the Cold War. It was then that Burnham formulated his “science of politics” and began viewing the world through a geopolitical prism. This intellectual evolution began in 1941 with the publication of his The Managerial Revolution, a study in which he theorized that the world was witnessing the emergence of a new ruling class, “the managers,” who would soon replace the rule of capitalists and communists alike. The book was an instant best-seller and was translated into most major foreign languages. It received critical acclaim from the New York Times, Time, The New Leader, Saturday Review, and leading opinion-makers of the day. John Kenneth Galbraith recalled that The Managerial Revolution was “widely read and discussed” among policymakers in Washington in 1941. William Barrett remembered it as “an original and brilliant book when it appeared” which “anticipated by a good number of years the discovery of the ‘New Class’.”3

The Managerial Revolution is mostly remembered as a political and socioeconomic work, which in part it was. What is often overlooked, or at least understated, is that the study was Burnham’s first intellectual foray into global geopolitics. In it he sketched an emerging post-war world divided into “three strategic centers for world control”:

1. the northern two-thirds of the Western Hemisphere;
2. north-central Europe, west Asia and northern Africa; and
3. the “Asiatic center,” east Asia and the off-shore islands.

“Geography,” he explained, “gives certain advantages to each of the contestants in certain areas: to the United States in the northern two-thirds of the two Americas; to the European center in Europe, the northern half of Africa and western Asia; to the Asiatic center in most of the rest of Asia and the islands nearby.”

A key factor that conditioned Burnham’s selection of those regions as “strategic centers” was their concentrations of modern industry. Burnham predicted that “the world political system will coalesce into three primary super-states, each based upon one of these three areas of advanced industry,” and the “nuclei of these three super-states are… Japan, Germany and the United States.” Russia, he believed, would break up as a result of the war, “with the western half gravitating toward the European base and the eastern toward the Asiatic.” Somewhat more presciently, he predicted the dissolution of the British Empire resulting from “the consolidation of the European Continent….” Burnham explained that England’s dominant position depended on its ability to “balance Continental nations against each other” and that “the balance of power on the Continent is possible only when the Continent is divided up into a number of genuinely sovereign and powerful states.”

Burnham was right, of course, about the fact of the collapse of British power, but wrong about its cause. The British Empire broke up because after the war Britain lacked the resources and, more importantly, the will to maintain it. The whole European Continent was not consolidated as Burnham had predicted; instead, the Continent was strategically divided between two super-states. Burnham was correct in predicting that the war would produce a world struggle for power among “super-states.” Whereas he foresaw the emergence of three super-states, however, the war’s outcome produced only two, the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead of three “strategic centers,” there were only two — the northern two-thirds of the Americas and the Asiatic center.

Although in The Managerial Revolution Burnham clearly underrated the staying power of the Soviet regime, he accurately forecast the role of the United States in the post-war world. “The United States,” he wrote, “…constitutes naturally the nucleus of one of the great super-states of the future. From her continental base, the United States is called on to make a bid for maximum world power as against the super-states to be based on the other…central areas.” He even foresaw that the United States would become “the ‘receiver’ for the disintegrating British Empire.4

By this time Burnham’s break with communism was complete. In The Managerial Revolution he noted that “all evidence indicates that the tyranny of the Russian regime is the most extreme that has ever existed in human history, not excepting the regime of Hitler.” He no longer believed, as he had in his Trotskyite days, that Stalinism was an aberration from true Marxism-Leninism. “Stalinism,” he wrote, “ is what Leninism developed into…without any sharp break in the process of development.”5

In 1943, to his growing anti-communism and geopolitical world view, Burnham added a “science of politics” based on the ideas and concepts of thinkers that he called “the Machiavellians.” The Machiavellians, according to Burnham, studied and analyzed politics in an objective, dispassionate manner in an effort to arrive at certain fundamental truths about “political man.” From the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels, and Vilfredo Pareto, Burnham deduced that:

1. All politics is concerned with the struggle for power among individuals and groups;
2. genuine political analysis involves correlating facts and formulating hypotheses about the future without reference to what ought to happen;
3. there is a distinction between the "formal" and "real" meaning of political rhetoric, which can only be discovered by analyzing the rhetoric in the context of the actual world of time, space, and history;
4. “political man” is primarily a “non-logical” actor driven by “instinct, impulse and interest;”
5. rulers and political elites are primarily concerned with maintaining and expanding their power and privileges;
6. rulers and elites hold power by “force and fraud;”
7. all governments are sustained by “political formulas” or myths;
8. all societies are divided into a “ruling class” and the ruled; and
9. in all societies the “structure and composition” of the ruling class changes over time.6

The Machiavellians is the most complete exposition of Burnham’s approach to the study and analysis of politics. Samuel Francis judges it to be his "most important book,” and opines that “virtually all of Burnham’s writing since The Machiavellians must be understood in reference to it.” Brian Crozier agrees, calling The Machiavellians “the most fundamental of Burnham’s books,” and “the key to everything he wrote subsequently." Joseph Sobran calls the book “the key to Burnham’s thought.” John B. Judis believes that Burnham’s approach to analyzing power politics as set forth in The Machiavellians “informed his tactical understanding of the Cold War….”7

In the Spring of 1944, a year after writing The Machiavellians and just three years after The Managerial Revolution, Burnham used his “science of politics,” his understanding of the nature of Soviet communism, and his grasp of global geopolitical realities to prepare an analysis of Soviet post-war goals for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).8 Although there is some lack of clarity on just when it was written, according to Diggins and Christopher Hitchens, Burnham’s analysis was prepared for the U.S. delegation to the Yalta Conference. His study of Soviet intentions was later incorporated in his first Cold War book, The Struggle for the World (1947). As Burnham noted in the opening essay of The War We Are In (1967), “The analysis of communist and Soviet intentions in Part I of The Struggle for the World was originally part of a secret study prepared for the Office of Strategic Services in the spring of 1944 and distributed at that time to the relevant Washington desks.”9 In his OSS paper, The Struggle for the World, and in two essays that appeared in the spring of 1944 and early 1945 in Partisan Review, Burnham warned that the Soviet Union was aiming at no less than domination of the Eurasian land mass. He identified the communist-inspired mutiny in the Greek Navy at Alexandria in April 1944 as the beginning of what he called the “Third World War.” The mutiny was quickly crushed by the British, but Burnham saw larger forces at work. The mutineers were members of the ELAS, the military wing of the Greek Communist Party-controlled EAM, which in turn was directed by the Soviet Union. The incident, therefore, was fundamentally a clash between Britain and the Soviet Union, at the time ostensibly allies in the still-raging Second World War. To Burnham, this meant that the Greek mutiny was a skirmish in another and different war. Events in China, too, indicated to him that supposed allies in the war against Japan — Chiang Kai-shek’s army and the communist Chinese forces led by Mao Tse-tung — were battling each other as much or more than they were opposing Japanese forces. From these events he concluded that “the armed skirmishes of a new war have started before the old war is finished.”10

The new phase of Soviet policy evidenced by Greek and Chinese events, according to Burnham, was the sixth major period in Soviet policy since 1917. The first period, “War Communism,” lasted from 1918 to 1921. It was succeeded by the New Economic Policy (NEP) which continued until 1928. The years 1928 to 1935 marked the “Third Period,” which encompassed the first Five Year Plans and the forced collectivization of agriculture. The fourth period, which Burnham called the “Popular Front,” lasted the next four years, and was followed by the “Hitler Pact,” from 1939-1941. After an “interregnum” between 1941 and 1943 when the very survival of the regime was at stake, the sixth or “Tehran” period commenced. Writing in the spring of 1944, Burnham concluded that “the object of the present (Tehran) period is to end the European phase of the war on a basis favorable to the perspectives of the Soviet ruling class, i.e., in de facto Stalinist domination of the Continent.”11

Burnham believed Stalin’s foreign policy was driven by a “geopolitical vision” that corresponded to the theories and concepts of the great British geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder.12 “Out of this war,” explained Burnham, “…Stalin has translated into realistic political perspective the dream of theoretical geopolitics: domination of Eurasia.” Borrowing Mackinder’s terminology, Burnham warned that, “Starting from…the Eurasian heartland, the Soviet power…flows outward, west into Europe, south into the Near East, east into China, already lapping the shores of the Atlantic, the Yellow and China seas, the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf.…”13 The goals of Soviet foreign policy as he saw them were:

1. The political consolidation of Eurasia under Soviet control;
2. the weakening of all non-communist governments; and
3. a Soviet-controlled world empire.

Burnham’s OSS study perceptively identified the post-war geopolitical structure that was then emerging from the ashes of the Second World War. It did so a full two years before George Kennan wrote his “Long Telegram” from Moscow and Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. It even predated Kennan’s lesser-known papers, “Russia—Seven Years Later” (September 1944) and “Russia’s International Position At the Close of the War With Germany” (May 1945), that predicted future difficulties between the United States and Soviet Union. No one foresaw or recognized the emergence of the Cold War more accurately, more comprehensively, or earlier than James Burnham.14

“The Sixth Turn of the Communist Screw” and “Lenin’s Heir,” which appeared in Partisan Review in the summer of 1944 and early 1945, respectively, were the first public indications of Burnham’s altered focus (the OSS study remained secret). The Soviet Union, he asserted, was positioned to extend its political control from the Heartland to the remaining key power centers of the Eurasian continent. Moreover, Soviet goals would not likely change after Stalin because Stalinism was “a triumphant application” of Leninism. “There is nothing basic that Stalin has done… from the institution of terror as the primary foundation of the state to the assertion of a political monopoly, the seeds and even the shoots of which were not planted and flourishing under Lenin.” “Stalin,” wrote Burnham, “is Lenin’s Heir. Stalinism is communism.” Burnham’s linking of Stalin to Lenin produced, according to the historian Richard H. Pells, “a painful reexamination of socialist doctrine among American intellectuals in the immediate postwar years.” Many on the anti-Stalinist Left still believed that Stalinism had betrayed, not fulfilled Leninism. As William Barrett recalled, “Hitherto, the name of Lenin had been protected almost as a holy relic; the blame for any miscarriage of the Russian Revolution had been shunted over entirely on the head of Stalin, who thus provided a ready-made excuse for not locating the fault within the nature of Marxist doctrine itself.” Most of the anti-Stalinist Left, however, was not ready to so drastically and fundamentally change the premises of their political beliefs.15

Any lingering doubts in the intellectual community about James Burnham’s shifting intellectual focus were dispelled by the publication in 1947 of The Struggle for the World. There, for the first time in the United States and the West, was a broad, comprehensive analysis of the beginning of the Cold War, the nature of the Soviet communist threat to the world, and a strategy for U.S. and Western victory. Over the next five years, Burnham expanded and refined his analysis in two more books, The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950) and Containment or Liberation? (1952). Those books present a penetrating and lucid trilogy on the early years of the Cold War. Burnham’s admirers, such as Brian Crozier, Samuel Francis, and John O’Sullivan, have treated the three books as essentially a single three-volume work. O’Sullivan, in a brilliant, reflective essay in National Review, demonstrated that the fundamental geopolitical vision informing Burnham’s Cold War trilogy is traceable to The Managerial Revolution.

These three works by Burnham span the time period from 1944 to 1952 and can be analytically divided into three broadly defined topics:

1. The global context of the struggle and the nature of the Soviet communist threat;
2. estimates and critiques of then existing U.S. and Western policies for dealing with the threat; and
3. proposals or strategies to effectively respond to the threat and achieve ultimate victory.

Each book of the trilogy discusses, with varying emphases, those three topics; when considered together, they show Burnham’s ability to respond to specific events and changes within a larger, consistent intellectual framework.

All three works also manifest the continued influence on Burnham’s thought of “the Machiavellians” and the geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder. He described the Soviet Union of 1945 as controlling the vast interior of Eurasia that Mackinder termed the Heartland of the “World-Island” (the Eurasian-African land mass). The Soviet position, wrote Burnham, “is…the strongest possible position on earth.” [T]here is no geographical position on earth which can in any way be compared with [the Soviet] main base.” The Heartland, he explained, is “the most favorable strategic position of the world.” From its Heartland base, the Soviet Union was positioned to expand into Europe, the Middle East, and Eastern and Southern Asia. 16

The United States and North America, according to Burnham (here he borrowed from both Mackinder and Yale University’s Nicholas Spykman), constitute “an island lying off the shores of the great Eurasian land mass.” Geopolitically, the United States was to Eurasia what Britain was to Europe — an island facing a great continental land mass. Both Mackinder and Spykman made this precise analogy. (Spykman judged the power potential of coastal Eurasia — Europe, the Middle East and East Asia, which he termed the “Rimland” — to be greater than that of the Heartland.) Burnham agreed with Mackinder that “potentially, the Heartland controls the Eurasian land mass as a whole, and, for that matter, the…African Continent.” It was “an axiom of geopolitics,” Burnham explained, “that if any one power succeeded in organizing the Heartland and its outer barriers, that power would be certain to control the world.” (Mackinder had written in 1919 that control of the Heartland and command of the World-Island would lead to world dominance.) Air power and atomic weapons, Burnham believed, “upset the certainty of this…axiom,” but the “facts of geography” still gave the Soviet Union an incomparable advantage in the post-war struggle because “[g]eographically, strategically Eurasia encircles America, overwhelms it.”17

Burnham pictured the Soviet geopolitical position as a “set of concentric rings around an inner circle.”18 (Mackinder’s 1904 world map consisted of the Russian-occupied heartland or “pivot state” bordered by an “inner or marginal crescent” and far removed from an “outer or insular crescent”.) Burnham’s inner circle was the Soviet Union. The first concentric ring contained the Kuriles, South Sakhalin Island, Mongolia, Turkish regions, Bessarabia and Bukovina, Moldavia, Ukraine, East Poland, East Prussia, the Baltic States and Finnish regions — territories already absorbed or soon to be absorbed by Soviet power. The second ring included Korea, Manchuria, North China, the Middle East, the Balkans, Austria, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, and Finland — territories within range of Soviet domination. The third ring contained Central and Southern China, Italy, France, smaller western European states, and Latin America — areas where Soviet influence or neutralization was possible. The fourth and final circle included England and the British Commonwealth and the United States and its dependencies— territories forming the rival base of global power.

This geographical setting formed the surroundings for a clash between two major power centers or, as Burnham referred to them in The Managerial Revolution, super-states. The clash, according to Burnham, proceeded “simultaneously and integrally along political, economic, ideological, sociological and military lines.” It “affects and is affected by events in all parts of the earth,” opined Burnham, and was zero-sum in nature.19 A U.S. or Western defeat was a Soviet or communist gain, and vice-versa.

The Soviet enemy, wrote Burnham, was the head of “a world-wide conspiratorial movement for the conquest of a monopoly of power.” Conspiracy, deception, and terror were integral and essential aspects of Soviet communism. Soviet leaders and their clients conducted “a political, subversive, ideological, religious, economic, . . guerrilla, sabotage war, as well as a war of open arms” against the West. The communists exerted external pressure on target countries and sought to infiltrate those countries’ trade union movements, technical and scientific establishments, and media enterprises. The ultimate goal of Soviet policy, as manifested in official documents, speeches, and a plethora of Soviet actions since 1944, was “the conquest of the world.”20

The United States from 1945 to 1952, as we know, reacted to this global challenge by gradually positioning itself in opposition to Soviet encroachments. Thus emerged the policy of containment that was explained most succinctly by George F. Kennan, the State Department’s Policy Planning Chief, in his famous “X” article in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. Even before Kennan’s highly influential article appeared, Burnham accurately perceived the broad contours and direction of early post-war American foreign policy. In The Struggle for the World, Burnham noted that during the latter stages of the Second World War, U.S. policy amounted to “appeasement” of her wartime Soviet ally. The United States ceded to the Soviets the Kurile Islands, South Sakhalin Island, Darien, Port Arthur, Manchuria, northern Korea, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, eastern Germany, and part of Austria, all in an effort to “get along” with Russia. The United States coerced Chiang Kai-shek into joining a coalition government with the communists in China, “when we should have aided Chiang," Burnham wrote, "to block communist domination of…the Eastern Coastland of Eurasia.” United States policy, Burnham lamented, “has not hindered but furthered communist expansion on Eurasia; it has not combated but aided communist infiltration all over the world….” Those policy failures, he believed, resulted from “a completely false estimate of communism and…of the communist dominated Soviet Union.” American statesmen mistakenly believed that Soviet Russia was a normal, traditional nation-state and that Soviet leaders could be influenced by demonstrations of good intentions by the United States. Those flawed judgments and beliefs, Burnham thought, resulted from even more fundamental U.S. handicaps: political immaturity and ineptness; a provincialism and ignorance of world affairs; a misconception about human nature; and a tendency toward “abstract, empty and sentimental…idealism.” Judging by the evidence of its policies up to 1946, Burnham believed that it was “unlikely that the United States will adopt any sustained, consistent, long-term world policy,” but instead would follow a “policy of vacillation.”21

Burnham’s view of U.S. policy became somewhat more optimistic when the Truman Administration moved forcefully to block Soviet threats to Iran, Turkey, Greece, Berlin, and Italy, and Tito moved Yugoslavia out of the Soviet orbit. In The Coming Defeat of Communism, he wrote that “Our general diplomacy and foreign policy could be judged, compared to our past performances, reasonably strong and intelligent.”22 He applauded what he viewed as a shift in policy from appeasement to containment. But he viewed containment favorably only as a temporary defensive policy to block communist expansion. As a long term policy, containment, wrote Burnham, was incapable of achieving victory in the Cold War. He identified four principal defects in the policy:

1. It was not “sufficiently unified,” i.e., it was not being applied consistently by all U.S. policy makers and agencies;
2. it was too narrow in that it overemphasized the military aspect of the struggle to the detriment of the political, economic, ideological, and sociological aspects;
3. it was wholly defensive in nature; and
4. it lacked an objective, i.e., it did not seek the “destruction of communist power.”

The most serious defect of containment, according to Burnham, was the policy’s defensive nature. This criticism appeared in all three books of Burnham’s Cold War trilogy, and it was the major theme of Containment or Liberation? (1952). A “defensive strategy, because it is negative, is never enough,” he wrote. It left unsolved the “intolerable unbalance of world political forces.” Containment, he explained, “leaves the timing to the communists. They have the initiative; we react …. Our policy, as a consequence, is subordinated to, determined by, theirs …. They select the issues, the field, and even the mood of combat.” “Containment doesn’t threaten anyone,” Burnham explained, “it doesn’t ask anyone to give up what he’s already got.” Furthermore, wrote Burnham, the effort to contain communism “is as futile as to try to stop a lawn from getting wet by mopping up each drop from a rotating sprinkler…. [T]o stop the flow we must get at the source.”23

Even if containment could be successfully implemented by the United States, which Burnham doubted, it would not prevent a Soviet victory in the Cold War. “If the communists succeed in consolidating what they have already conquered,” he explained, “then their complete world victory is certain.” “The threat,” he wrote further, “does not come only from what the communists may do, but from what they have done…. The simple terrible fact is that if things go on as they are now, if for the time being they merely stabilize, then we have already lost.”24 Here Burnham was simply taking Mackinder’s geopolitical theories to their logical conclusion. At the time Burnham wrote those lines, the Soviet Empire and its allies controlled the Heartland, Eastern and part of Central Europe, China, northern Korea, and parts of Indochina. Political consolidation of such a base, coupled with effective organization of that base’s manpower and resources, would give the Soviets command of Mackinder’s World Island.25 “That is why,” warned Burnham, “the policy of containment, even if 100 percent successful, is a formula for Soviet victory.”26

The Truman Administration’s focus on Western Europe and the Republican Party’s advocacy of what he called an “Asian-American strategy” were both misguided according to Burnham because they excluded efforts to penetrate the Soviet sphere. No positive gains could result from those wholly defensive strategies. At most they would buy time until the Soviets completed their consolidation and organization of their great continental base, after which, to borrow Mackinder’s phrase, “the end would be fated.” Burnham’s strategic vision, however, consisted of more than simply a critique of the policy of containment. He also set forth in some detail an alternative grand strategy that he called “the policy of liberation.” That policy, wrote Burnham in The Struggle for the World, must seek to “penetrate the communist fortress,” to “reverse the direction of the thrust from the Heartland,” to “undermine communist power in East Europe, northern Iran, Afghanistan, Manchuria, northern Korea, and China.” The United States should seek to exploit Soviet economic and cultural weaknesses. The Western powers should launch a world-wide propaganda offensive against the communist powers. As a result, predicted Burnham, “the communists will be thrown back on the political defensive ….The walls of their strategic Eurasian fortress…would begin to crumble. The internal Soviet difficulties, economic and social, would be fed a rich medium in which to multiply.”27

Burnham became more forceful and specific in his policy proposals three years later in The Coming Defeat of Communism (1950). He called for America to adopt a policy of “offensive political-subversive warfare” against the Soviet Empire. America should aim, he advised, to increase Soviet economic troubles; to stimulate discontent among the Soviet masses; to encourage more Tito-like defections from the Soviet orbit; to facilitate the “resistance spirit” of the enslaved satellite nations of the empire; to foment divisions within the Soviet elite; and to recruit from behind the Iron Curtain “cadres of liberation.” He was too much of a realist, however, to expect the complete achievement of every U.S. and Western goal in the struggle against communism. In a remarkable chapter in this volume entitled “A Deal With Russia,” Burnham set forth five specific conditions that would allow the United States to claim victory in the Cold War without militarily defeating the Soviets:

1. An end to the world wide communist subversive apparatus;
2. an end to the world wide Soviet propaganda offensive;
3. the withdrawal of the Soviet army and security services to the pre-1939 Soviet borders;
4. full sovereignty for those territories conquered or annexed by the Soviets since 1939; and
5. the modification of the Soviet governmental structure to permit unrestricted travel, a free press and international inspection of scientific-military facilities.28

Half a century later, most of Burnham’s conditions for victory either are in place or in the process of being achieved.

In Containment or Liberation? (1952), Burnham identified Eastern Europe as the crucial target of U.S. strategy. U.S. policy, he wrote, must shift its focus from protecting Western Europe to liberating Eastern Europe. “A strategy which had Eastern Europe as its geopolitical focus — Europe from the Iron Curtain to the Urals — would best serve the American objective,” he explained.29 Eastern Europe, he repeatedly asserted, was the key to the world struggle. Here again we see the influence of Mackinder. In his 1919 classic, Democratic Ideals and Reality, Mackinder, too, emphasized the importance of preventing a single power from controlling both Eastern Europe and the Heartland. In perhaps the book’s most famous passage, Mackinder recommended that an “airy cherub” should whisper to British statesmen the following warning:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:
Who rules the World-Island commands the World.30

When Burnham was writing Containment or Liberation?, the Soviet Union controlled the Heartland, Eastern Europe, and was allied to China. Mackinder’s geopolitical nightmare was a fact of international life. From Mackinder’s 1919 analysis, it logically followed that the only way to prevent Soviet world hegemony was to undermine Soviet positions in Eastern Europe. That is precisely what Burnham’s proposed policy of liberation was designed to do.

Kennan, according to Peter Grose in a new book titled Operation Rollback, secretly proposed during the Truman Administration an ambitious program of organized political warfare against the Soviets, which included sabotage and subversive operations, propaganda, and help to resistance forces throughout the Soviet empire. Kennan’s flirtation with a liberation policy ended, according to Grose, when the Truman Administration’s attempts to implement the strategy failed. Dulles abandoned “rollback” after U.S. responses to the East German, Polish, and Hungarian uprisings of the 1950’s demonstrated to the world America’s unwillingness to support resistance forces within the communist bloc. There is no evidence that either Kennan or Dulles was directly influenced by Burnham’s ideas; given his prominence at the time in intellectual circles and his connections with the intelligence community, it is likely that both Kennan and Dulles were familiar with his writings.31

Public reaction to Burnham’s Cold War trilogy was mixed. Henry Luce gave The Struggle for the World prominent play in Time and Life. Luce even urged President Truman’s press aide, Charles Ross, to persuade the president to read it. The Christian Century speculated that the book was the intellectual foundation for the Truman Doctrine announced during the same week that Burnham’s book was published. The American Mercury published excerpts from all three books. Liberal anticommunist reviewers, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., accepted Burnham’s analysis of the Soviet threat but dissented from his call for an offensive policy. For conservative anti-communists, however, Burnham’s Cold War trilogy achieved almost Biblical status. As George Nash pointed out in his study of the American conservative movement, “More than any other single person, Burnham supplied the conservative intellectual movement with the theoretical formulation for victory in the cold war.”32

Other reviewers were less kind. Charles Clayton Morrison called The Struggle for the World a “blueprint for destruction.” Harry Elmer Barnes called it a “most dangerous and un-American book.” George Soule in The New Republic asserted that Burnham wanted “reaction abroad and repression at home.” George Orwell accused Burnham of worshiping power. The Coming Defeat of Communism received strong criticism from, among others, James Reston, David Spitz, R.H.S. Crossman and Louis Fischer. Containment or Liberation? received even harsher treatment. The editors of Foreign Affairs commented that Burnham’s “temper at times outruns his argument.” The Atlantic Monthly described the book as “permeated with absolutist thinking.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the book a “careless and hasty job, filled with confusion, contradictions, ignorance and misrepresentation.” It was, wrote Schlesinger, “an absurd book by an absurd man.”33

Burnham’s relations with his colleagues on the non-communist Left suffered as a result of his Cold War trilogy. Where once there was widespread acclaim for The Managerial Revolution, now his colleagues on the Left disdained him as a warmonger who advocated atomic war. For many liberals (and some conservatives) Burnham’s geopolitical vision was too sweeping and apocalyptic. To many, a policy of “liberation” was simply too dangerous in the nuclear age. The non-communist Left sought, at most, to contain the Soviet Union while searching for areas of accommodation. Burnham did not think that accommodation with communism was a long-term possibility. For Burnham, the Cold War was a systemic conflict that would only end when one or the other system changed or was defeated.

His final and lasting break with the non-communist Left, however, resulted not from his proposed strategy of “liberation,” but from his views toward domestic communism and what came to be known as “McCarthyism.” Burnham, unlike many intellectuals of the time, believed the testimony of Whittaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and other ex-communists who identified and described the activities of a Soviet espionage apparatus that operated in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. He supported the congressional investigations of domestic communism and even testified before investigating committees. He also called for outlawing the Communist Party of the United States.

As Senator Joseph McCarthy became increasingly reckless in his accusations of communist infiltration of government agencies, including the military, the non-communist Left condemned the very idea of loyalty oaths and congressional investigations of American citizens and their ideological affiliations. This was too much for Burnham. Condemning specific erroneous accusations by Senator McCarthy was one thing, but ignoring the reality of communist penetration of the government was potentially suicidal.

Burnham broke with Partisan Review and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (an organization of anticommunist intellectuals) over this issue. He began writing for The Freeman, a conservative journal of opinion. In 1954, with his wife’s help, he wrote an analysis of communist penetration of the government entitled The Web of Subversion.34 That book, based largely on testimony before congressional committees and the revelations of Chambers, Bentley, and other communist defectors, makes interesting reading today in light of the “Venona project” disclosures which support many of the charges of communist infiltration and subversion that were made in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In addition to writing books and articles about the Cold War, Burnham lectured at the National War College, the Naval War College, the School for Advanced International Studies, and the Air War College. He was a consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency and is reputed to have had a hand in the successful plan to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh and install the Shah in power in Iran in the early 1950s.

Having severed ties to the anticommunist Left, Burnham found his permanent intellectual home in the pages of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review, where for twenty-three years he provided the magazine’s readers with a running commentary on the events and personalities of the Cold War. In his regular column, originally called “The Third World War” and later changed to “The Protracted Conflict,” Burnham brought his “encyclopedic mind” to bear on specific events as they occurred, but also fitted those events into the larger global geopolitical context. The extent of his knowledge and learning was formidable. A typical Burnham column would include insightful references to Thucydides, Gibbon, Kant, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Tocqueville, Trotsky, Faulkner, Palmerston, Toynbee, J.F.C. Fuller, Clausewitz, Liddell Hart, Mahan, Sun Tzu, Lincoln, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Churchill, and, of course, Mackinder and the “Machiavellians.” Burnham, like all great thinkers, understood that he stood on the shoulders of giants.

Burnham demonstrated in his columns an ability to relate seemingly disparate events within a single strategic framework. He showed, for example, how Soviet moves in Cuba and Latin America might affect Berlin and Western Europe; how our Middle East policy could impact on the solidarity of NATO; how our defeat in Indochina, the loss of U.S. nuclear superiority, the rapid de-colonization in Asia and Africa, the French loss of Algeria, and the British pull-out from Suez and Aden amounted to a general Western global retrenchment, and how the resulting power vacuum could be filled by Soviet expansion. He also showed an ability to view world events from a Soviet or communist perspective. Here, he benefited from his Trotskyite past. Several of his most perceptive columns were written from the perspective of a fictional Soviet intelligence officer. Burnham was yet another example of how ex-communists often make the most intelligent and realistic anti-communists.

He had a tendency in some of his writings to be too schematic in his analysis of world events. Not everything that happened in the world significantly affected the Cold War, but Burnham sometimes gave the impression that it did. He also at times portrayed Soviet leaders as almost perfect strategists who nearly always made flawless political and strategic calculations. He sometimes gave Soviet strategists too much credit for causing or influencing world events. He occasionally overrated the strategic stakes involved in local and regional conflicts. The consequences of some of our defeats in the Cold War were not as catastrophic as Burnham thought they would be. But, unlike many other Western observers, at least he understood that there would be negative consequences to those defeats.

Burnham was frequently controversial. In some columns he suggested using nuclear or chemical weapons in Vietnam. Although not anti-Israel, he favored a more balanced U.S. policy in the Middle East, on one occasion writing that if Americans had to choose between oil and Israel they should choose oil. He heaped scorn upon the “peace movement” in the United States, viewing it as a composition of pro-communists and “useful idiots.” However well intentioned a “peacenik” was, thought Burnham, the political and strategic effect of his conduct benefited the nation’s enemies. He refused unambiguously to condemn Joe McCarthy and he defended congressional investigations of domestic communists. He viewed the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a U.S. defeat and a retreat from the Monroe Doctrine. Although he recognized there was a Sino-Soviet dispute and recommended that the United States exploit the differences between the two communist giants, he dismissed the notion that the dispute was ideological, maintaining that both countries were part of the world communist enterprise and, therefore, enemies of the United States. He viewed superpower summits and arms control efforts as dangerous Western illusions. Finally, he used his column to attack liberal icons such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, George Kennan, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Linus Pauling.

In his National Review columns Burnham was not a predictable conservative. He had a soft spot for Robert McNamara, repeatedly defending him from critics on the Left and Right. He criticized libertarian conservatives who opposed the draft and the welfare state, and other conservatives who sought ideological purity in their political candidates. He wrote in opposition to ballistic missile defenses. He advocated ending U.S. control of the Panama Canal and favored granting diplomatic recognition to communist China. He also criticized those conservatives who overestimated the military, technological, and economic prowess of the Soviet Union.

What is most striking about Burnham’s National Review columns, however, is how often he got things right. Consider Vietnam. As early as March 1962, Burnham predicted a U.S. defeat in Indochina. He criticized Kennedy’s policy of confining military activities to South Vietnam. Fighting a war in this manner, he argued, was “senseless butchery.” Four months later he criticized the concept of “escalation” warfare, which became a key aspect of America’s failed Vietnam policy. In a January 1963 column, he wrote that the nation was losing the war in Vietnam, and he predicted that for Americans the war was “likely to get much dirtier before it is over.” That year, he scathingly attacked the “qualitative and quantitative” restrictions on U.S. military activity in Vietnam, and he predicted that a unwillingness to attack the enemy’s base of operations (North Vietnam) would lead to the United States pulling out of Indochina.

In a September 1964 column, Burnham argued that we had two options in Vietnam: use enough force and an appropriate strategy to win or get out. Two months later Burnham wrote that Lyndon Johnson would be a war president. By 1966, Burnham was criticizing Johnson for wasting American lives by forbidding troops the use of weapons and methods that could win the war. He also perceived that the North Vietnamese communists viewed the United States, not Indochina, as “the principal front in the war.” In a February 1968 piece, Burnham noted that television coverage was negatively impacting war effort. A month later, he pronounced the U.S. strategy of “gradual escalation” a failure. By August 1968, Burnham recognized that the domestic political debate over Vietnam was now a debate about “how to get out.” In a July 1969 column, Burnham foresaw that the communists would only agree to a “settlement” that guaranteed their takeover of South Vietnam. A year later, he accurately characterized Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy as a “policy of withdrawal.” As negotiations intensified and the 1972 election drew nearer, Burnham wrote that the United States had effectively lost the war; what Nixon and Kissinger were calling an “honorable peace” was nothing more than a defeat. By April 1972, Burnham predicted that South Vietnam would not survive as an independent nation, and he viewed our failure there as resulting from the “self-imposed strategic prison” of containment. After the peace agreement was signed to much public acclaim, Burnham noted the uncomfortable facts that South Vietnam was encircled and infiltrated by the enemy, and predicted that the U.S. would not muster the political will to intervene again to prevent the now certain communist takeover of the South.35

Burnham’s prescience in his columns was not limited to Vietnam. He dismissed unsupported claims of Soviet technological superiority in the wake of Sputnik. He criticized Western observers who uncritically accepted Soviet disinformation regarding economic achievements, military power, and technological advances. In September 1962, he correctly guessed that the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. He was an early critic of the “détente” policy with its accompanying emphasis on arms control, summitry, and trade concessions. In the early 1970s, he wrote about the “internationalization of terrorism” and noted the links between the various terrorist groups, anticipating by several years the more detailed analysis of this phenomenon by Claire Sterling in The Terror Network. He also anticipated Jeane J. Kirkpatrick’s analysis in Commentary of the important distinctions between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. He even foresaw the rise in the United States of an imperial presidency that would upset the delicate constitutional balance established by the Founding Fathers, a topic he discussed at length in his much neglected book, Congress and the American Tradition (1959).36

The most important thing Burnham got right was a strategy for winning the Cold War. The essence of that strategy was to wage political, psychological, and economic warfare against the Soviet Empire and thereby weaken and eventually break Soviet control over Eastern and Central Europe. The strategy’s key elements were the following:

1. An ideological and propaganda offensive against Soviet rule;
2. assisting dissident and resistance groups within the Soviet Empire;
3. using U.S. economic and technological strength to put strains on the vulnerable Soviet economy;
4. utilizing psycho-political warfare to encourage fear and divisions among the Soviet elite;
5. using trade and other economic weapons to further weaken the Soviet economy; and
6. forcing the Soviets onto the geopolitical defensive.

During the 1980s, as Peter Schweizer, Jay Winik, Andrew Busch, and others have described, the Reagan Administration formulated and implemented an offensive geopolitical strategy designed to undermine Soviet power.37 While there is no evidence that Reagan or his advisers consciously sought to apply Burnham’s precise strategy of “liberation,” Reagan’s strategy consisted of policies that in a fundamental sense were remarkably similar to Burnham’s proposals. Reagan launched a vigorous ideological and propaganda offensive against the Soviets, calling Soviet leaders liars and cheats, predicting the Soviets’ near-term demise, and daring its leader to tear down the Berlin Wall. Reagan provided aid and encouragement to Poland’s Solidarity movement and the Afghan rebels, two resistance movements within the Soviet Empire. Reagan built up U.S. military forces, deployed intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe, and announced the plan to develop the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), thus putting additional pressure on the already strained Soviet economy, thus serving to convince the Soviets that they could not win an arms race with the United States.

The so-called “Reagan Doctrine” placed the Soviets on the geopolitical defensive throughout the world. Less than a year after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall came down, the enslaved nations of Eastern Europe revolted, and the Soviet Empire was on its way to dissolution. Burnham, it turns out, was right all along. Containment was not enough to win the Cold War. It took an offensive geopolitical strategy to undermine Soviet power. And, as Burnham had argued, Eastern Europe was the key to victory.

Burnham had little confidence that such a strategy as his would ever be implemented by the United States. His pessimism in this regard was most profoundly expressed in his 1964 book, Suicide of the West. Burnham argued that since reaching the apex of its power in 1914, Western civilization had been contracting, most obviously in a geographical sense. Burnham described the contraction in terms of “effective political control over acreage.” Because the West continued to possess more than sufficient relative economic, political, and military power to maintain its ascendancy, the only explanation for the contraction was an internal lack of will to use that power. Hence, the West was in the process of committing “suicide.” In the book he was highly critical of modern liberalism, but the author did not claim, as some have stated, that liberalism caused or was responsible for the West’s contraction. “The cause or causes,” he wrote, “have something to do…with the decay of religion and with an excess of material luxury; and…with getting tired, worn out as all things temporal do.” Liberalism, instead, was “the ideology of Western suicide.” It “motivates and justifies the contraction, and reconciles us to it.” He expressed his belief that the collapse of the West was probable, although not inevitable. He acknowledged the possibility of a “decisive change” resulting in a reversal of the West’s contraction.38

Suicide of the West provided a good analysis and explanation of historical events and trends, but its main conclusion is wrong. This is so not because Burnham misunderstood historical events or misjudged current trends; his mistake derived from his apparent unwillingness in this instance to be more open to the possibility that things might change. The Western contraction did stop, at least temporarily. The United States found the will to use its resources and adopt an offensive strategy to win the Cold War.

In 1978 Burnham suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered. His last column for National Review was an analysis of the potential impact of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David Accord on U.S.-Soviet relations in the Middle East. In 1983, Ronald Reagan, who presided over the West’s victory in the Cold War, presented the United States’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to James Burnham, who had envisioned a strategy for that victory nearly forty years before. The citation reads:
As a scholar, writer, historian and philosopher, James Burnham has profoundly affected the way America views itself and the world. Since the 1930’s, Mr. Burnham has shaped the thinking of world leaders. His observations have changed society and his writings have become guiding lights in mankind’s quest for truth. Freedom, reason and decency have had few greater champions in this century than James Burnham.

At the end of July 1987, James Burnham died of cancer. Two years later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, his vision became reality.           

Making the World Safe From Evil [Bruce Cumings in The Nation October 10, 2002]

So this is the way the cold war finally ends: not with a whimper but a bang. Ever since Mikhail Gorbachev chose not to mobilize massive Soviet armies on the soil of East Germany and other Communist states to save them from their own people, thus sealing the fate of the Soviet empire and bestowing a virtually bloodless victory on the containment doctrine, analysts and pundits have been vying to define the post-cold war era, and incidentally to become the next George Kennan: an end to history, back to the future, a clash of civilizations, Jihad vs. McWorld, the Lexus and the Olive Tree.

But the cunning of history dashed their ambitions and gave us instead an unexpectedly muscle-bound and imperial “Mr. X”: George W. Bush. No passive containment or pusillanimous deterrence for His Accidency: Now we will have pre-emptive attacks, “counterproliferation” for everyone (except ourselves and our allies), untold billions for the Pentagon to dissuade any and all comers from “a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States,” and endless wars into the disappearing and newly darkening future to “rid the world of evil.”

Where does this “National Security Strategy” document come from? In the first instance, from the shop of NSC Adviser Condoleezza Rice, which perhaps accounts for its breathless and quasi-academic quality, although some of its logic would flunk even a freshman class: as in, pre-emptive attacks are OK for us, but other nations “should [not] use pre-emption as a pretext for aggression.” Pre-emption, Rice later opined to reporters, is “anticipatory self-defense,” that is, the right of the United States to attack a country that it thinks could attack it first. (It is hard to believe the State Department actually signed off on this Bush League document, but Rice is right that it’s not a new strategy: In the early months of 1964 Lyndon Johnson in “the utmost secrecy” agonized over whether to take out China’s Lop Nor nuclear facilities in a pre-emptive strike before they produced a bomb.)

Of course, the driving forces behind the Bush doctrine include more than just one Bush adviser; George W., like Ronald Reagan in the first two years of his presidency, is surrounded by ideologues, hawks and extremists. They talk loudly and carry a big stick, but it isn’t clear that they will ultimately prevail.

Bush’s pet doctrine is not just about foreign policy, however; it’s also about domestic politics, and a Republican administration that is both motivated and flummoxed by deeper conflicts that go to the heart of the party and its historic foreign policy stance. In the short run, “anticipatory self-defense” aroused a perfect storm for Karl Rove, who wants Bush to talk about the evildoers until the November elections so no one will remember that the economy is tanking and Bush’s CEO buddies are in handcuffs. More important, however, is that this has been the first Republican administration to so fully embody the Republican right’s foreign policy views on a host of issues: arms control, the environment, the United Nations, post-Soviet Russia, China, North Korea, Iraq and the presumed failings of our traditional allies. The massive outflow of commentary and punditry on Bush’s new doctrine somehow never got around to this fundamental point, until Al Gore (the name Bush dares not speak) stood before the Commonwealth Club on September 23 and said that Bush has been trying “to please the portion of [his] base that occupies the far right.” Everyone knows this is Rove’s daily bread for domestic policy, but Gore linked the new doctrine to a “go-it-alone, cowboy-type” foreign policy–and not since Saddam moved into Bush’s gun sights, but since the day after he won the 2000 election, five to four.

The new doctrine embodies phrases and nuances that are the stock in trade of right-wing pundits like Charles Krauthammer, who have long called for a new American imperialism. But there is also a back-to-the-future quality; it recalls the onset of the cold war and the formidable critique of containment by Republicans like James Burnham, co-founder with William Buckley of National Review. Like Bush, Burnham assumed that “the unparalleled supremacy” of the American military would continue into the indefinite future. In 1947 he denounced internationalism as appeasement and error, containment as too passive (Bush says the United States “can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture”) and isolationism as a political-economic impossibility. Instead, the United States should pursue a “World Empire,” based on its monopoly of atomic weapons. Why not wield the bomb to “make politically possible…the domination of the world by a single sufficiently large state”? (That monopoly lasted exactly two more years.) In 1950, in The Coming Defeat of Communism (which like the Bush doctrine was applauded at the time by many centrists of both parties), he urged Washington to “join the offensive”: American policy should aim “not at the defeat of Russia, but at its liberation.” Like Burnham, the Bush document prefers “liberation” to containment, but treats September 11 as if that watershed event founded the new strategy.

Those attacks did indeed come from an implacable and diabolical enemy: Nothing will deter it, and it passionately loves suicide. Containment wouldn’t scare Osama bin Laden, to say the least, even if we could find him. But little can be done about that threat, the past year of the “war on terrorism” notwithstanding; it is still child’s play to conjure up variations on what calamity Al Qaeda might think of next. Bush’s doctrine is about a lover of homicide, Saddam Hussein, the other charter members of the “axis of evil” and anyone else who might dare to threaten American might and power–anywhere, anytime, for eternity. And it is about fissures that go to the heart of the Republican Party.

That party has long embraced two tendencies, the free-trade multilateralism and Atlanticism of the Eastern wing, and the expansionist, unilateralist Western Republicans, symbolized by the “Asia firsters” of the 1950s. The former was hegemonic on the British model, taking the world economy as its main arena of action; the latter was imperialist, beholden to the myths and realities of the frontier, the cowboy and the cavalry, unilateral expansion to the West, the subjugation of the Philippines and eventually of China (always, to these foreign affairs naïfs, the “China” of their imagination). The reigning hero of this tendency was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a classic man on horseback, brutalizing the Bonus Marchers, ruling the Philippines, defeating Japan thus to become its benign emperor for six years, only to have his measure taken by a Sino-Korean peasant army in 1950.

For most of the postwar era, Republican centrists like John Foster Dulles, Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger agreed with cold war liberals in the Democratic Party on just about everything beyond the water’s edge; there was a seamless consensus inside the Beltway on containment, internationalism, the NATO and US-Japan alliances, and the iron necessity to consult with our allies at the UN, the IMF and the World Bank. (This is what made Gore’s sharp critique, delivered in a moment of crisis, so extraordinary.) Often the result was unilateralism disguised as multilateralism (Korea, Vietnam), but everyone bespoke the internationalist mantras, and knew that the only lasting, sustainable hegemony is a consensual partnership, with the United States as first among would-be equals.

The defining moment of this consensus was not World War II but Korea, when American forces marched up to the Yalu River to “liberate” North Korea and started a war with China. At the time, only one prominent “wise man” urged Truman not to convert the defense of South Korea into a war to roll back the Communist North: Mr. X himself, George Kennan. After the Chinese intervened, however, everyone learned Kennan’s lesson well: Republicans like Dulles and Nixon merged with Democrats like Dean Acheson on the central importance of containment. Liberation, or “rollback,” had failed miserably, and had raised the specter of World War III; thereafter Dulles used the rhetoric of liberation only to sate the appetites of the Republican far right [see Cumings, “Reckoning With the Korean War,” October 25, 1986]. Out of that centrist unity came an unprecedented bipartisan commitment to gigantic peacetime military budgets, regardless of fiscal discipline.

An uneasy coalition between the Eastern and Western wings persisted into the 1960s, punctuated by the humiliation of Rockefeller at the Goldwater-dominated 1964 Republican convention, and Richard Nixon’s choosing to move from California to New York City as the 1968 election campaign drew near. But since then the stronger tendency has clearly been the West, bringing to the fore Sunbelt Republicans like Reagan, who were ostensible libertarians and fiscal conservatives but who had no qualms about using military Keynesianism to lubricate the enormous government-corporate complex nourished by huge military spending in the Sunbelt states. (Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, of course, are poster boys for how to work this military-industrial nexus to one’s best career advantage.) The most successful Republicans tried to ride both circuits, but there has really been only one master at this: Tricky Dick–a classic Western Republican at one point in his career, an Eastern internationalist at another.

As a Westerner, by the 1960s Nixon understood the demographics of political realignment: Air conditioning and massive water works made life livable for large populations in the vast humid or arid reaches of the Sunbelt, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act had opened the entire South to any demagogue who wanted to use racist code words to separate the Democrats from their longtime base in the segregationist states. This “Southern strategy” brought Nixon into the Oval Office, and ushered in decades of Democratic ineffectiveness. But on foreign policy Nixon was a centrist, and paid no attention to the Republican lunatic fringe. After his first two years, neither did Reagan.

Then, suddenly, the cold war ended. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Soviet Union collapsed. Sometimes history has a sense of humor–who could have imagined that George Herbert Walker Bush would preside over these momentous events and would mainly be remembered for two phrases, “read my lips, no new taxes” and “the new world order.” By reneging on the first and championing the second, he confirmed the worst fears of the Republican right.

Bush Senior is a thoroughly Eastern Republican, raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, combining internationalist foreign policy with great wealth and aristocratic privilege. His Texas credentials, honed since he moved there in the 1940s, never fooled anybody. His career in government was that of a charter member of the internationalist consensus. George W. is not his father; he is the real thing, a Yankee who went Texan with a vengeance–and this is the dilemma in this Administration. George II is a tabula rasa, straddling two wings of the same party, like a feckless cowboy on two horses. In domestic policy he cultivates a conservative right wing that cannot elect him (Bush I was right about that), but he does so because of Karl Rove’s dictum that Daddy failed them and thus lost the 1992 election. In foreign policy, however, his team of horses runs–always strenuously–in various and often opposite directions, stretching the logic of his diplomacy to the breaking point. He bolts first in one direction and then in another; his staggering around puts our best friends on the permanent defensive, as Al Gore noted, wondering what comes next, while doing little damage to our adversaries and not nearly enough to the demonic Al Qaeda.

The homing tendency of this Administration has been an inveterate unilateralism, with a brief nod to internationalism only after 9/11. It is not a coherent or logical unilateralism, however; it lurches off in one direction after another. It isn’t that the Bush prima donnas don’t like consulting with our allies in Europe and Asia (even though they don’t); they don’t like consulting with each other, either. Powell announces one policy and Cheney undercuts him the next day. O’Neill denounces bailouts, then unloads tens of billions on Brazil when it looks like Lula might win the presidency. Rumsfeld carries on as if he answers to no one, even refusing to speak to a German diplomat as if he were Zhou En-lai and Rumsfeld were John Foster Dulles. Powell declares his support for engagement with North Korea; the next day Bush denounces Kim Jong Il.

Usually the point of foreign affairs is to keep your allies happy and your enemies off balance: Bush has invented a way to fire up and miss on all cylinders, while pushing our allies to their wits’ end. The result is the most incoherent US foreign policy in recent memory. The idea of a bipartisan consensus in foreign affairs seems not to have occurred to this crew; Democrats are also the enemy. By repudiating Clinton’s proactive diplomacy, Bush has alienated two critical allies: Junichiro Koizumi, who broke with US policy in an unprecedented way to hold a successful summit with Kim Jong Il in September, and Gerhard Schröder, whose vocal opposition to an invasion of Iraq has “poisoned” American relations with Germany (according to Pentagon Czar Rumsfeld). In August these strains caused a huge falling out among Republicans, with Brent Scowcroft, Henry Kissinger and James Baker attempting in different ways and with different arguments and nuances to warn Bush about the consequences of attacking Iraq.

This is really the gang that can’t shoot straight–now taking aim at everyone. Bush prides himself on staff loyalty and discipline, having arrived with three foreign policy bigwigs and one hallowed CEO in tow: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and O’Neill. That this experienced crew would tower over the President was a foregone conclusion, but who could have imagined that they would form independent kingdoms and fashion their own policies, while George jogs and lifts weights? It is inconceivable for this President actually to make a foreign policy decision based on his own superior judgment, as against Cheney or Rumsfeld or Powell. This is not to say that it doesn’t happen, just that it’s impossible to conceive of it happening, given the paucity of evidence that Bush knows or cares much about the rest of the world, and his apparent lack of a Harry Truman-like seat-of-the-pants common sense.

The absence of wise and steady presidential leadership is one key to this Administration’s foreign policy chaos. A bigger problem is that the old guard doesn’t work well together, and is more often at cross purposes. This gives space and standing to the multitude of independent kingdoms. Each man thinks himself capable of running everything, that is, of being the President. And so Rumsfeld stars as the Administration spokesman on war, Powell on diplomacy and foreign relations (if there is any; who could have imagined that Powell would be such a doormat?), Cheney on foreign and domestic policy, and O’Neill on foreign economic policy (although he barely has one, and neither does the White House).

Will Bush invade Iraq? History tells us that when push comes to shove in foreign affairs, the multilateralism of the Eastern wing always wins–at least it has since 1945. In the next several months Bush will finally have to make a critical decision (safely after the November elections). I believe that decision will reveal him to be a Connecticut Yankee after all. Reality bites George W. only in the face of crisis (as happened when our spy plane crash-landed in China last year). Daddy and Scowcroft will prevail and Saddam will remain in Baghdad. Bush will execute the kind of backflip that New York Times columnist Frank Rich believes to be his trademark. The Republican right will stew, Richard Perle will ventilate and Paul Wolfowitz may immigrate back to the private sector.

But even if war is averted, the Bush doctrine is real and it is dangerous. Saddam is a bête noire from central casting; that’s more useful than a post-Saddam Iraq in ruins. The greater danger is that a restive world may present a sudden and unexpected crisis, for example with North Korea, where containment and deterrence could abruptly give way once again to pre-emption and disaster.

George Kennan, a 98-year-old major leaguer, gave a little-noticed interview to Albert Eisele on the day before Gore’s September speech. Bush’s new doctrine was “a great mistake in principle,” he said; anyone who has studied history “knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind,” but you end up fighting for things “never thought of before.” Launching a second war with Iraq “bears no relation to the first war against terrorism,” he thought, and anyway a decision for war “should really rest with Congress.” But Congressional Democrats have been “shabby and shameful,” he said, not to mention “timid,” in their reaction to Bush’s war plans. Not so Al Gore, however: Out there in California, Mr. X might as well have been his ventriloquist.  

Origins of the Police [By David Whitehouse]

In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades — roughly from 1825 to 1855.

The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime,    before and since the invention of police,    has been for someone to tell them who did it.

Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s

— strikes in England,
— riots in the Northern US,
— and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.

So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.

I will be focusing a lot on who these crowds were, how they became such a challenge. We’ll see that one difficulty for the rulers, besides the growth of social polarization in the cities, was the breakdown of old methods of personal supervision of the working population. In these decades, the state stepped in to fill the social breach.

We’ll see that, in the North, the invention of the police was just one part of a state effort to manage and shape the workforce on a day-to-day basis. Governments also expanded their systems of poor relief in order to regulate the labor market, and they developed the system of public education to regulate workers’ minds. I will connect those points to police work later on, but mostly I’ll be focusing on how the police developed in London, New York, Charleston (South Carolina), and Philadelphia.

* * * * *

To get a sense of what’s special about modern police, it will help to talk about the situation when capitalism was just beginning. Specifically, let’s consider the market towns of the late medieval period, about 1,000 years ago.

The dominant class of the time wasn’t in the towns. The feudal landholders were based in the countryside. They didn’t have cops. They could pull together armed forces to terrorize the serfs — who were semi-slaves — or they could fight against other nobles. But these forces were not professional or full-time.

The population of the towns was mostly serfs who had bought their freedom, or simply escaped from their masters. They were known as bourgeois, which means town-dweller. The bourgeoisie pioneered economic relations that later became known as capitalism.

For the purposes of our discussion, let’s say that a capitalist is somebody who uses money to make more money. At the beginning, the dominant capitalists were merchants. A merchant takes money to buy goods in order to sell them for more money. There are also capitalists who deal only with money — bankers — who lend out a certain amount in order to get more back.

You could also be a craftsman who buys materials and makes something like shoes in order to sell them for more money. In the guild system, a master craftsman would work alongside and supervise journeymen and apprentices. The masters were profiting from their work, so there was exploitation going on, but the journeymen and apprentices had reasonable hopes of becoming masters themselves eventually. So class relations in the towns were quite fluid, especially in comparison to the relation between noble and serf. Besides, the guilds operated in ways that put some limits on exploitation, so it was the merchants who really accumulated capital at that time.

In France, in the 11th and 12th centuries, these towns became known as communes. They incorporated into communes under various conditions, sometimes with the permission of a feudal lord, but in general they were seen as self-governing entities or even city-states.

But they didn’t have cops. They had their own courts — and small armed forces made up of the townsmen themselves. These forces generally had nothing to do with bringing people up on charges. If you got robbed or assaulted, or were cheated in a business deal, then you, the citizen, would press the charges.

One example of this do-it-yourself justice, a method that lasted for centuries, was known as the hue and cry. If you were in a marketplace and you saw somebody stealing, you were supposed to yell and scream, saying “Stop, thief!” and chase after the thief. The rest of the deal was that anybody who saw you do this was supposed to add to the hue and cry and also run after the thief.

The towns didn’t need cops because they had a high degree of social equality, which gave people a sense of mutual obligation. Over the years, class conflicts did intensify within the towns, but even so, the towns held together — through a common antagonism to the power of the nobles and through continued bonds of mutual obligation.

For hundreds of years, the French carried an idealized memory of these early commune towns — as self-governing communities of equals. So it’s no surprise that in 1871, when workers took over Paris, they named it the Commune. But that’s jumping a little farther forward than we should just yet.

* * * * *

Capitalism underwent major changes as it grew up inside feudal society. First of all, the size of capital holdings grew. Remember, that’s the point — to make smaller piles of money into bigger piles of money. The size of holdings began to grow astronomically during the conquest of the Americas, as gold and silver were looted from the New World and Africans were kidnapped to work on plantations.

More and more things were produced for sale on the market. The losers in market competition began to lose their independence as producers and had to take wage jobs. But in places like England, the biggest force driving people to look for wage work was the state-endorsed movement to drive peasants off the land.

The towns grew as peasants became refugees from the countryside, while inequality grew within the cities. The capitalist bourgeoisie became a social layer that was more distinct from workers than it used to be. The market was having a corrosive effect on solidarity of craft guilds — something I’ll take up in more detail when I talk about New York. Workshops got bigger than ever, as a single English boss would be in command of maybe dozens of workers. I’m talking about the mid-1700s here, the period right before real factory industrialization began.

There still weren’t cops, but the richer classes began to resort to more and more violence to suppress the poor population. Sometimes the army was ordered to shoot into rebellious crowds, and sometimes the constables would arrest the leaders and hang them. So class struggle was beginning to heat up, but things really began to change when the Industrial Revolution took off in England.

* * * * *

At the same time, the French were going through a political and social revolution of their own, beginning in 1789. The response of the British ruling class was to panic over the possibility that English workers would follow the French lead. They outlawed trade unions and meetings of more than 50 people.

Nevertheless, English workers put together bigger and bigger demonstrations and strikes from about 1792 to 1820. The ruling class response was to send in the army. But there are really only two things the army could do, and they’re both bad. They could refuse to shoot, and the crowd would get away with whatever it came to do. Or they could shoot into the crowd and produce working-class martyrs.

This is exactly what happened in Manchester in 1819. Soldiers were sent charging into a crowd of 80,000, injuring hundreds of people and killing 11. Instead of subduing the crowd, this action, known as the Peterloo Massacre, provoked a wave of strikes and protests.

Even the time-honored tactic of hanging the movement’s leaders began to backfire. An execution would exert an intimidating effect on a crowd of 100, but crowds now ranged up to 50,000 supporters of the condemned man, and the executions just made them want to fight. The growth of British cities, and the growth of social polarization within them—that is, two quantitative changes — had begun to produce qualitatively new outbreaks of struggle.

The ruling class needed new institutions to get this under control. One of them was the London police, founded in 1829, just 10 years after Peterloo. The new police force was designed specifically to inflict nonlethal violence upon crowds to break them up while deliberately trying to avoid creating martyrs. Now, any force that’s organized to deliver violence on a routine basis is going to kill some people. But for every police murder, there are hundreds or thousands of acts of police violence that are nonlethal — calculated and calibrated to produce intimidation while avoiding an angry collective response.

When the London police were not concentrated into squads for crowd control, they were dispersed out into the city to police the daily life of the poor and working class. That sums up the distinctive dual function of modern police: There is the dispersed form of surveillance and intimidation that’s done the name of fighting crime; and then there’s the concentrated form of activity to take on strikes, riots, and major demonstrations.

That’s what they were invented for — to deal with crowds — but what we see most of the time is the presence of the cop on the beat. Before I talk about the evolution of police in New York, I want to explore the connection between these two modes of police work.

*****

I’ll begin with the more general topic of class struggle over the use of outdoor space. This is a very consequential issue for workers and the poor. The outdoors is important to workers

— for work
— for leisure and entertainment
— for living space, if you don’t have a home
… and for politics.

First, about work. While successful merchants could control indoor spaces, those without so many means had to set themselves up as vendors on the street. The established merchants saw them as competitors and got the police to remove them.

Street vendors are also effective purveyors of stolen goods because they’re mobile and anonymous. It wasn’t just pickpockets and burglars who made use of street vendors this way. The servants and slaves of the middle class also stole from their masters and passed the goods on to the local vendors. (By the way, New York City had slavery until 1827.) The leakage of wealth out of the city’s comfortable homes is another reason that the middle class demanded action against street vendors.

The street was also simply where workers would spend their free time — because their homes were not comfortable. The street was a place where they could get friendship and free entertainment, and, depending on the place and time, they might engage in dissident religion or politics. British Marxist historian EP Thompson summed all this up when he wrote that 19th century English police were

impartial, attempting to sweep off the streets with an equable hand street traders, beggars, prostitutes, street-entertainers, pickets, children playing football and freethinking and socialist speakers alike. The pretext very often was that a complaint of interruption of trade    had been received from a shopkeeper.

On both sides of the Atlantic, most arrests were related to victimless crimes, or crimes against the public order. Another Marxist historian Sidney Harring noted: “The criminologist’s definition of ‘public order crimes’ comes perilously close to the historian’s description of ‘working-class leisure-time activity.’”

Outdoor life was — and is — especially important to working-class politics. Established politicians and corporate managers can meet indoors and make decisions that have big consequences because these people are in command of bureaucracies and workforces. But when working people meet and make decisions about how to change things, it usually doesn’t count for much unless they can gather some supporters out on the street, whether it’s for a strike or a demonstration. The street is the proving ground for much of working-class politics, and the ruling class is fully aware of that. That’s why they put the police on the street as a counter-force whenever the working class shows its strength.

Now we can look at the connections between the two major forms of police activity — routine patrols and crowd control. The day-to-day life of patrolling gets police accustomed to using violence and the threat of violence. This gets them ready to pull off the large-scale acts of repression that are necessary when workers and the oppressed rise up in larger groups. It’s not just a question of getting practice with weapons and tactics. Routine patrol work is crucial to creating a mindset among police that their violence is for the greater good.

The day-to-day work also allows commanders to discover which cops are most comfortable inflicting pain — and then to assign them to the front lines when it comes to a crackdown. At the same time, the “good cop” you may meet on the beat provides crucial public-relations cover for the brutal work that needs to be done by the “bad cops.” Routine work can also become useful in periods of political upheaval because the police have already spent time in the neighborhoods trying to identify the leaders and the radicals.

* * * * *

Now we can jump back into the historical narrative and talk about New York City.

I’ll begin with a couple of points about the traditions of crowds before the revolution. During the colonial period, people got rowdy sometimes, but it was often formalized in ways that the colonial elite would approve or at least tolerate. There were various celebrations that fell in the category of “misrule,” in which social positions were reversed and the lower orders could pretend that they were on the top. This was a way for the subordinate classes to blow off steam by satirizing their masters — a way that acknowledged the right of the elite to be in charge on every other day of the year. This tradition of symbolic misrule was especially prominent around Christmas and New Year’s. Even slaves would be allowed to participate.

There was also a yearly celebration of Pope Day, in which members of the Protestant majority would parade around with effigies, including one of the Pope — until they burned them all at the end. A little sectarian provocation, “all in good fun,” all approved by the city fathers. At that point, Pope Day didn’t usually lead to violence against actual Catholics because there were only a few hundred in New York and not a single Catholic church before the revolution.

These crowd traditions were loud and even riotous, but they tended to reinforce the connection between the lower orders and the elite, not to break that connection.

The lower orders were also bound to the elite by constant personal supervision. This applied to slaves and house servants, of course, but apprentices and journeyman craftsmen also lived in the same house with the master. So there were not a lot of these subordinate people roaming around the streets at all hours.

This situation left sailors and day laborers as unsupervised, potentially disruptive elements. Already by 1638, as historian Selden Bacon notes, the elite of New Amsterdam (the Dutch colony that later became New York) had seen    a need    to    head off the disorder that could originate from the waterfront:

The first ordinances to be found of a police nature have to do with the vessels in the harbor, restricting the visiting of the inhabitants, forbidding sailors to remain on shore in the night, ordering the ships’ captains to enforce these rules. The purpose of this was to insure against smuggling as much as to keep rowdy sailors from the streets at night. All workers were commanded to go to and from their work at fixed hours and the master carpenters and overseers of workman were commanded to enforce this. (Vol. 1, 16.)

This, of course, is an example of policing without    a    police agency. New Amsterdam’s    elite was commanding employers to    supervise waterfront    workers    during    off-work hours, much as masters would oversee their slaves, servants and apprentices. The colonial authorities could see that unattached, free wage laborers — even in fairly small numbers —    could disrupt the norms of this patrician society. Their response was to make these laborers less free by trying to “attach” them to their bosses.

Under circumstances like these, where most people in the colony were already supervised during the day, there was no need for regular police force. There was a night watch, which looked out for fires, tried to guard against vandalism and arrested any Black person who couldn’t prove that s/he was free. The watch was not professional in any way. All of them had day jobs and rotated into watch duty temporarily, so they didn’t patrol regular beats — and everybody hated doing it. The rich bought their way out of it by paying for substitutes.

During the day, a small number of constables were on duty, but they didn’t patrol. They were agents of the court who executed writs like summonses and arrest warrants. They did not do detective work. In the 1700s and well into the 1800s, the system relied almost entirely on civilian informants who were promised a portion of any fine that the offender might have to pay.

* * * * *

The revolutionary period changed a few things about the role of crowds and the relation between classes. In the 1760s, beginning with the agitation against the Stamp Act, the elite of merchants and property-holders endorsed new forms of popular mobilization. These were new loud demonstrations and riots that borrowed from existing traditions, obviously in the use of effigies. Instead of burning the Pope, they’d burn the governor, or King George.

I don’t have time to go into detail about what they did, but it’s important to note the class composition of these crowds. Members of the elite might be there themselves, but the body of these crowds was the skilled workers, collectively known as the mechanics. That means that a master would be out in the crowd with his journeymen and apprentices. People of higher social rank tended to view the master craftsmen as their lieutenants for mobilizing the rest of the mechanics.

As the conflict with Britain intensified, the mechanics became more radicalized and organized themselves independently from the colonial elite. There was friction between the mechanics and the elite, but never a complete breach.

And, naturally, when the British were defeated and the elite set up their own government, they had had enough of all this street agitation. There continued to be rebellions and riots in the new independent United States, but they were taking new shapes — partly because economic development was breaking up the unity of the mechanics themselves.

* * * * *

I’ll turn now to those developments that followed the revolution — changes that produced a new working class out of a conflicted hodgepodge of social elements.

Let’s start with the skilled workers. Even before the revolution, the division between masters and journeymen had sharpened. To understand this, we should look more closely at the lingering influence of the guild system; formal guilds did not exist in United States, but some of their traditions lived on among skilled workers.

The old guilds had essentially been cartels, unions of workers who had a monopoly on a particular skill that allowed them to manage the market. They could set customary prices for their goods and even decide beforehand how big the market was going to be.

The managed market allowed for some customary stability of relations among workers of the same trade. A master acquired an apprentice as an indentured servant from his parents in return for a promise of teaching him a skill and giving him room and board for seven years. Apprentices graduated to become journeymen, but often continued to work for the same master as long as there is no slot for them to become masters themselves. Journeymen received customary wages with long-term contracts. This meant that pay would keep coming in despite seasonal variations in the amount of work. Even without the formal structure of guilds, much of this customary set of relations was still in place in the pre-revolutionary period.

From about 1750 to 1850, however, this corporative structure within the skilled trades was falling apart because the external relation — the tradesmen’s control of the market — was also beginning to break down. Trade that came from other cities or from overseas would undermine the masters’ ability to set prices, so workshops were thrown into competition with each other in a way that’s familiar today.

Competition drove the masters to become more like entrepreneurs, seeking out labor-saving innovation and treating their workers more like disposable wage workers. Enterprises became larger and more impersonal — more like factories, with dozens of employees.

In the first decades of the 19th century, employees were not only losing their long-term contracts, but they also were losing their place to live in the masters’ households. The apprentices found this to be a liberating experience, as young men got out from under the authority of their parents and their masters. Free to come and go as they pleased, they could meet young women and create their own social life among their peers. Working women were employed mostly in household service of various types unless they were prostitutes.

Outdoor life became transformed as these young people mingled with the other parts of the population that comprised the developing working class.

The mingling wasn’t always peaceful. Irish Catholic immigration expanded after 1800. By 1829, there were about 25,000 Catholics in the city — one person out of eight. The Irish were segregated by neighborhood, often living alongside Blacks, who themselves were now about 5 percent of the population. In 1799, Protestants burned an effigy of St. Patrick, and the Irish fought back. These battles recurred over the next few years, and it was clear to the Irish that the constables and the watch were taking sides against them.

So, before there were even modern police forces, the lawmen were doing racial profiling. The city’s elite took note of the Irish lack of respect for the watch — their open combativeness — and responded by expanding the watch and making its patrols more targeted. This went along with increasing police attention to Africans, who lived in the same areas and often had the same attitude toward the authorities.

Underlying the sectarian and racial divisions were economic competition, since Irish workers were generally less skilled and drew lower wages than craft workers. At the same time, masters were trying to de-skill the jobs in the workshops. In this way, Anglo apprentices became part of a real labor market as they lost their long-term contracts. When this happened, they found themselves just a rung above Irish immigrants on the wage scale. Black workers, who performed domestic service or worked as general laborers, were a further rung or two down the wage scale from the Irish.

At the same time, the older unskilled part of the wage-working class, centered around the docks and building construction, was expanding because trade and construction both expanded after the Revolution.

Overall, population expanded rapidly. New York was 60,000 in 1800, but it doubled in size by 1820. In 1830, New York had more than 200,000 people — and 312,000 by 1840.

* * * * *

That’s a rough profile of the New York’s new working class.

In these decades, all sections of the class went into collective action on their own behalf. It’s quite a complicated story, because of the number of actions and the fragmentation of the class. But we could start with a generalization that the most common form of struggle was also the most elementary — the riot.

Now some specifics. From 1801 to 1832, Black New Yorkers rioted four times to prevent former slaves from being sent back to their out-of-town masters. These efforts generally failed, the watch responded violently, and the participants received unusually harsh sentences. White abolitionists joined in the condemnations of these riots. So these riots illustrate popular self-activity despite elite disapproval — not to mention racial disparity in the application of the law.

There was also white harassment of Black churches and theaters, sometimes rising to the level of riots. Poor immigrants were involved, but sometimes rich whites and the constables themselves took part. One anti-Black riot raged for three days in 1826, damaging Black houses and churches — along with houses and churches of white abolitionist ministers.

But there wasn’t just conflict between Black and white workers. In 1802, white and Black sailors struck for higher wages. As with most strikes during this period, the method was something that historian Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot.” In this case, strikers disabled the ships that were hiring at the lower wages. Dockworkers also united across racial and sectarian lines for militant strikes in 1825 and 1828.

Job actions by skilled workers like journeymen didn’t usually need to resort to such physical coercion, because they possessed a monopoly on the relevant skills. Journeymen nevertheless became more militant in these years. Strikes in the skilled trades happened in 3 waves, starting in 1809, 1822 and 1829. Each wave was more militant and coercive than the previous — as they targeted other skilled workers who broke solidarity. In 1829, the journeymen led a movement to limit the workday to 10 hours and created the Workingmen’s Party. The party collapsed in the same year, but it led to the founding the General Trade Union in 1833.

While workers grew more conscious of themselves as a class, they also began to engage in more and more “run-of-the-mill” riots wherever crowds gathered, in taverns or in theaters or in the street. Such riots may have had no clear economic or political objective, but they were still instances of collective self-assertion by the working class—or by ethnic and racial fractions of the class. In the opening decades of the century, there was one of these riots about four times a year, but in the period from 1825 to 1830, New Yorkers rioted at a rate of once per month.

One of these riots in particular alarmed the elite.    At New Year’s of 1828, a    noisy crowd of about 4,000 young Anglo workers brought out their drums and noisemakers and headed toward Broadway where the rich lived. They “procured an enormous Pennsylvania [covered] waggon” and pulled it with “a large rope several rods in length [1 rod = 16.5 feet],” according to an anonymous report in the Evening Post.    On the way, they busted up an African church and beat the church members. The watch arrested several of the rioters, but the crowd rescued them and sent the watch running.

The crowd    drew in more revellers    and turned toward the commercial district, where they busted up some    stores. At the Battery, they broke windows in some of the city’s richest homes. Then they headed back up Broadway, where the rich were having their own celebration at the City Hotel.

The street became in a short time blocked up with an impenetrable crowd, and the hackney coaches conveying home the ladies and gentlemen, were obstructed and not suffered to pass. The inconvenience became so great, that a strong party of watchman was collected with a view of taking into custody the leaders, and dispersing the rest.

The leaders of the crowd called a five-minute truce. This allowed the watch to think about the fight that they were about to get into. By that time, the crowd was cutting up the    long wagon rope and arming the front ranks with “pieces of about three feet in length.” When the five minutes were up, the watch stepped aside, “and the multitude passed noisily and triumphantly up Broadway.”

This spectacle of working-class defiance took place in full view of the families that ran New York City. Newspapers called    for a major expansion of the watch. The 1828 riot — and a year of major riots in 1834 — accelerated a set of incremental reforms that finally led to the creation the New York City Police Department in 1845.

The reforms of 1845 enlarged the police force, professionalized them, and centralized them with a more military chain of command. The watch was expanded to 24 hours, and policemen were forbidden from taking a second job. The pay was increased, and police no longer received a portion of the fines that were extracted from offenders.

This meant the cops were no longer going out on patrol looking for how they were going to make a living, a process that could lead to a strange selection of prosecutions. Eliminating the fee system gave commanders greater freedom to set policy and priorities — and thus made the department more responsive to the shifting needs of the economic elite.

That’s how the New York police got started.

*****

The story of police in the South is a bit different, as you might expect.

One of the world’s    first modern-type police forces developed    in Charleston, South Carolina, in the years before New York force became fully professional. The precursor of the Charleston’s police force was not a set of urban watchmen but slave patrols that operated in the countryside. As one historian put it, “throughout all of the [Southern] states [before the Civil War], roving armed police patrols scoured the countryside day and night, intimidating, terrorizing, and brutalizing slaves into submission and meekness.”

These were generally volunteer forces of white citizens (often reluctant volunteers) who provided their own weapons. Over time, the slavemasters adapted the rural system to city life. Charleston’s population did not explode like New York’s. In 1820, there were still only about    25,000 people — but more than half of them were African American.

Charleston was a commercial center, beginning in colonial times as South Carolina’s main site    for the export of indigo and rice. The city was also a major port    for    the arrival    of Africans for sale — either directly from Africa or from Caribbean slave colonies.

After Congress    banned the import of slaves in 1808, Charleston picked up as a major trans-shipment and sales center for slaves bound from Virginia and the Carolinas    to Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. These three states of the “Deep South” needed a steady influx of enslaved workers to keep up with the 19th-century demand for cotton. The textile mills in Britain and New England were driving the Industrial Revolution, and the    slave labor of the Deep South was an    integral    part of the boom.

Charleston did not lie on the main axis of this boom, which was anchored by burgeoning cities such as New Orleans and Birmingham, England. Nevertheless, Charleston’s city life — both economic and social — was linked to the development of capitalist economic relations in other port cities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Many of South Carolina’s    large plantation owners kept a home in Charleston, so the state’s major slavemasters also dominated the politics of the state’s major city. Like the ruling classes of other Atlantic commercial cities, Charleston’s elite needed a    workforce that could    expand, contract and adapt according to the ups and downs    of the market. Slavery, however, is a rigid    way to organize workers, since slaves    need to be fed and    clothed whether or not there’s work for them to do; in slack times, slaves just become an expense for the master.

For this reason, the masters in Charleston and other slave cities began — even in colonial    times — to put    slaves to work in wage jobs. Some slaves were owned directly by factory owners, especially in the South’s most industrial city, Richmond. Most of Charleston’s    slaves, however, were owned by white town-dwellers who used some of them for personal service and “hired    out” the rest to wage-paying employers. A    couple of Charleston rice mills owned the slaves they used, but they also hired out their slaves to others    when the mills weren’t pushed to    full capacity.

At first the masters found the jobs for their slaves and took all of the wages for themselves. But many masters soon    found it most convenient to let their slaves find their own jobs while collecting a flat fee from the slave for the time spent away from the master.    A master could take in    an annual return of 10 to 15 percent of a    slave’s purchase price by hiring him or her out.

This new set of arrangements fundamentally altered the relation between slaves and their masters, not to mention the relations among the slaves themselves. Slaves got out from under the direct supervision of their masters for long stretches of time, and many slaves could make cash for themselves above and beyond the fees they paid their masters. Black Charlestonians began to refer to the fees as “freedom dues.”

Many African Americans could even afford to “live out” —    finding housing outside    their masters’ households. Slaves could marry and cohabit independently. Some skilled slave artisans even began hiring wage workers themselves. This included some women, who worked as seamstresses and dominated the city’s garment trade. Most slaves engaged in wage work were men, however, who worked in several skilled trades, short-term unskilled labor, and the transport of goods.    Women, who formed the majority of Black Charlestonians, worked mostly as household slaves.

By the first decades of the 19th century, Charleston had a predominantly Black suburb known as “Charleston Neck,”    populated mostly by slaves alongside some free    people of color. Charleston is built on the southward-pointing tip of a peninsula between two rivers, and residents referred to the unincorporated northern part of the peninsula as “The Neck.” In 1850, and almost certainly    before, more than one-quarter of Charleston’s Blacks lived in    housing    without white supervision: They were either free or were slaves who “lived out.” Outside the city’s jurisdiction, bar owners in the Neck ignored various    laws and served a multiracial clientele.

The South’s white population, both in town and country, lived in constant fear of slave insurrection. In the countryside, however, Blacks were under constant surveillance, and there were few opportunities within the grueling work regime for slaves to develop wide social connections. But in Charleston, as whites frequently remarked with annoyance or alarm, Blacks established a collective life of their own. In 1818, more than 4,000 free Blacks and slaves seceded from the city’s mixed-race Methodist churches and built a chapter of the new African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Charleston Neck.

*****

Because conditions in the urban South were dramatically freer than on the plantations,    the state had to step in to do the job of repression that the slavemasters had usually taken care of themselves.    

The Charleston Guard and Watch developed by trial and error into a recognizably modern city-run police force by the 1820s, performing both nightly    harassment of the Black population and staying on call for rapid mobilization to control crowds. Blacks, even free Blacks, caught out after curfew without an acceptable excuse were subject to overnight arrest by the Guard and up to 39 lashes after a magistrate looked at the case in the morning. This practice went back to colonial days and mirrored the methods of the rural slave patrols. The first major difference, even early on, was that the Guard was a paid force rather than a group of conscripted citizens.

The City Guard also did daylight duty on holidays and Sundays, when it policed the weekly markets, which were operated in large part by Black slave women. Black crowds, especially on market day, could be quite raucous, as historian Bernard Powers notes: One white citizen wrote in the 1840s that he was    “constantly annoyed, especially on Sundays, with most unruly and profane mobs; setting all law at defiance, and, if dispersed from one vicinity, re-collecting, with increased numbers, at another.”

City authorities saw the    AME church as a troubling    expression of Black autonomy. In the church’s first year, 1818, the City Guard raided the    church and arrested 140 members, citing a seldom-used law that prohibited the gathering of seven or more Black men outside the presence of whites. In both free and slave states, the AME church quickly became an important center for Black discussion of abolition, even though    congregations were far from united on what steps    to take toward freedom.

David Walker, a member of the AME in    Boston    and the author, in 1829, of the militant    Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, was probably a member of the Charleston AME in the early 1820s. Many of Walker’s views, including scriptural arguments for    the rights of slaves to rise up and take their freedom, correspond to the views attributed to Denmark Vesey, a Charleston free Black carpenter who was accused of planning a massive insurrection in 1822.

The threat of revolt put Charleston’s whites into a panic. The city    elite, led by the Intendant (the mayor), ordered the torture of    suspected    conspirators, who then produced confessions that implicated several others. Within weeks, a second set of tortured suspects implicated dozens more.    Guilty or not — capable historians disagree over whether there was any plot at all — Vesey and 34    other Black men were hanged, and 27 were exiled.

Vesey and other accused conspirators had been class leaders in the AME church. After    their execution,    a mob of white citizens burned the church down. Members of the congregation continued to meet in secret right through the Civil War. (After emancipation in 1865, Denmark Vesey’s son, also a carpenter, designed the first new AME church building.)

In the midst of 1822 panic, white citizens accused the City Guard of laxity and called for professionalization and enlargement of the force. The Guard went onto 24-hour duty and was centralized    under the direct command of the intendant. As the panic subsided, legislators    repealed these two measures within a few months,    although they did approve    the enlargement of the force.

What’s more, the state of South Carolina responded to the Vesey affair by building a garrison and arsenal in Charleston at its border with Charleston    Neck. This building, devoted to the repression of the Black population, became known as The Citadel — and by 1842, housed the military academy that still bears that name. The troops of the Citadel were available to    operate in Charleston, but along with a state militia known as the “Neck Rangers,” they also were to keep order in the Neck.

In the mid-1820s, whites blamed a series of fires on Black arson, and the council responded by restoring a small    daytime force, while also providing six    horses to speed up    communication and mobilization. Charleston thus set out    24-hour police patrols    three years before the foundation of London’s police in 1829.

By    the mid-1830s, legislators restored the measure that they    first passed in panic in 1822 — centralization of city government (and of the Guard) under a full-time    mayor. Following    the 1836 reforms, the city fielded a Guard force of 118, including 94 privates and four musicians. The nightly watch numbered one    guard    for every    263 city residents, far ahead of Boston’s coverage (one officer per 815 residents) and New York’s (one per 771).

The elite achieved further centralization by annexing Charleston Neck in 1849, thus putting it under the jurisdiction of the City Guard. Previous to that, the Rangers and Citadel troops who    policed the Neck represented a    middle ground between rural slave patrols and modern police. Putting the Neck under the jurisdiction of    the    Guard set the stage for completely replacing the last citizen militia-men with uniformed patrols of    paid city employees.

Even before the 1820s, the Southern force was more militarized than police in the North. The    Guards    operated within a military hierarchy of several ranks, and unlike the first Northern police,    they    carried guns — with bayonets. In the first decades of the century, New York’s night watch did not go out on constant patrol, but Charleston’s did, typically in squads of five or more. Throughout the pre– Civil War    years, visitors to the city frequently wrote about the Guard’s uniquely    intimidating presence.

The specific history of police forces varied from one American city to another, but they all tended to converge on similar institutional solutions. The nature of the police comes from the nature of the “problem”: an urban working population that has developed some    economic autonomy as wage workers and artisans and has thus been able to create    a    self-assertive, collective life of its own. The Southern experience also reinforces the point that was already clear in the North: Anti-Black racism was built into American police work from the very first day.

* * * * *

Toward the end, I’ll say a few words about Philadelphia, but before that, I’m going to draw out some themes that apply to all of these cases.

First of all, we need to put policing in the context of a bigger ruling-class project of managing and shaping the working class. I said at the beginning that the emergence of workers’ revolt coincided with a breakdown of old methods of constant personal supervision of the workforce. The state stepped in to provide supervision. The cops were part of that effort, but in the North, the state also expanded its programs of poor relief and public schooling.

Police work was integrated with the system of poor relief, as constables worked on registration of the poor and their placement in workhouses. That’s even before the police were professionalized—the constables were sorting out the “deserving poor” from the “undeserving poor.” If people were unemployed and unable to work, constables would direct them toward charity from churches or the city itself. But if folks were able to work, they were judged to be “idlers” and sent off to the horrors of the workhouse.

The system for poor relief made a crucial contribution to the creation of the market for wage labor. The key function of the relief system was to make unemployment so unpleasant and humiliating that people were willing to take ordinary jobs at very low wages just to avoid unemployment. By punishing the poorest people, capitalism creates a low baseline for the wage scale and pulls the whole scale downward.

The police no longer play such a direct role in selecting people for relief, but they do deliver a good deal of the punishment. As we know, lots of police work has to do with making life unpleasant for unemployed people on the street.

The rise of modern policing also coincides with the rise of public education. Public schools    accustom children to the discipline of the capitalist workplace; children are separated from their families to    perform a series of tasks    alongside others, under the direction of an authority figure, according to a schedule ruled by a clock. The school reform movement of the 1830s and 40s also aimed to shape the students’ moral character. The effect of this was supposed to be that students would willingly submit to authority, that they would be able to work hard, exercise self-control, and delay gratification.

In fact, the concepts of good citizenship that came out of school reform movement were perfectly aligned with the concepts of criminology that were being invented to categorize people on the street. The police were to focus not just on crime but on criminal types—a method of profiling backed up by supposedly scientific credentials. The “juvenile delinquent,” for example, is a concept that is common to schooling and policing—and has helped to link the two activities in practice.

This ideology of good citizenship was supposed to have a big effect inside the heads of students, encouraging them to think that the problems in society come from the actions of “bad guys.” A key objective of schooling, according to reformer Horace Mann, should be to implant a certain kind of conscience in the students—so that they discipline their own behavior and begin to police themselves. In Mann’s words, the objective was for children to “think of duty rather than of the policeman.”

Needless to say, an analytic scheme for dividing society between good guys and bad guys is perfect for identifying scapegoats, especially racial ones. Such a moralistic scheme was (and is) also a direct competitor to a class-conscious worldview, which identifies society’s basic antagonism as the conflict between exploiters and exploited. Police activity thus goes beyond simple repression—it “teaches” an ideology of good and bad citizenship that dovetails with the lessons of the classroom and the workhouse.

The overall point here is that the invention of the police was part of a broader expansion of state activity to gain control over the day-to-day behavior of the working class. Schooling, poor relief and police work all aimed to shape workers to become useful to—and loyal to—the capitalist class.

* * * * *

The next general point is about something we all know, and that’s this:

There is the law … and then there’s what cops do.

First, a few words about the law: Despite what you may have learned in civics class, the law is not the framework in which society operates. The law is a product of the way society operates, but it doesn’t tell you how things really work. The law is also not a framework for the way that society should operate, even though some people hold out that hope.

The law is really just one tool among others, in the hands of those who are empowered to use it, to affect the course of events. Corporations are empowered to use this tool because they can hire expensive lawyers. Politicians, prosecutors and the police are also empowered to use the law.

Now, specifically about cops and the law. The law has many more provisions than they actually use, so their enforcement is always selective. That means that they are always profiling what part of the population to target and choosing which kinds of behavior they want to change. It also means that cops have a permanent opportunity for corruption. If they have discretion over who gets picked up for a crime, they can demand a reward for not picking somebody up.

Another way to see the gap between the law and what cops do is to examine the common idea that punishment begins after conviction in a court. The thing is, anybody who’s dealt with the cops will tell you that punishment begins the moment they lay hands on you. They can arrest you and put you in jail without ever filing    charges. That’s punishment, and they know it. That’s not to mention the physical abuse you might get, or the ways they can mess with you even if they don’t arrest you.

So the cops order people around every day without a court order, and they punish people every day without a court judgment. Obviously, then, some of the key social functions of the police are not written into the law. They’re part of police culture that cops learn from each other with encouragement and direction from their commanders.

This brings us back to a theme that I started with at the very beginning. The law deals with crimes, and individuals are charged with crimes. But the police were really invented to deal with what workers and the poor had become in their collective expressions: Cops deal with crowds, neighborhoods, targeted parts of the population—all collective entities.

They may use the law as they do this, but their broad directives come to them as policy from their commanders or from their own instincts as experienced cops. The policy directives frequently have a collective nature—say, to gain control of an unruly neighborhood. They decide to do that, and then they figure out what laws to use.

That’s the meaning of “zero tolerance” policies, “broken windows” policies—policies that, in the past, might have been frankly termed “uppity nigger” policies. The aim is to intimidate and assert control over a mass of people by acting on a few. Such tactics have been built into police work from the very beginning. The law is a tool to use on individuals, but the real goal is to control the behavior of the larger mass.

* * * * *

I’ll use my last few minutes to talk about some alternatives.

One of them is a justice system that existed in the United States before the rise of the police. It’s well documented for Philadelphia, so that’s the place I’ll discuss. Colonial Philadelphia developed a system called the minor courts in which most criminal prosecutions took place. The mayor and the aldermen served as the judges—the magistrates. Poor people would save up money so they could pay a fee to the magistrate to hear a case.

Then, as now, most crime was committed by poor people against poor people. In these courts, the victim of assault, theft, or defamation would act as prosecutor. A constable might get involved in order to bring in the accused, but that’s not the same thing as a cop making an arrest. The whole action was driven by the victim’s desires, not the state’s objectives. The accused could also counter-sue.

There were no lawyers involved on either side, so the only expense was the fee to the magistrate. The system wasn’t perfect, because the judge might be corrupt, and the life of the poor didn’t stop being miserable when they won a case. But the system was quite popular and continued operating for some time even after a system of modern police and state prosecutors developed in parallel.

The rise of the police, which came along with the rise of the prosecutors, meant that the state was putting its thumb on the scales of justice. In court, you might hope to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. Before you get to court, though, you have to pass through the hands of the cops and prosecutors who certainly don’t treat you like you’re innocent. They have a chance to pressure you or torture you into a confession—or nowadays a confession in the form of a plea bargain—before you ever get to court.

However unfair the system came to be as it was dominated by cops and prosecutors, the minor courts had shown Philadelphians that an alternative was possible that looked a lot more like dispute resolution among equals.

That’s the key—we can make an alternative available again if we abolish the unequal social relations that that police were invented to defend. When the workers of Paris took over the city for two months in 1871, they established a government under the old name of the Commune. The beginnings of social equality in Paris undercut the need for repression and allowed the Communards to experiment with abolishing the police as a separate state force, apart from the citizenry. People would elect their own officers of public safety, accountable to the electors and subject to immediate recall.

This never became a settled routine because the city was under siege from day one, but the Communards had the right idea. In order to overcome a regime of police repression, the crucial work was to live up to the name of the Commune—that is, to build a self-governing community of equals. That’s still pretty much what we need to do.

* * * * *

This    is an edited text of a talk I gave in Chicago in late June 2012 at the annual Socialism conference. Audio of the talk is available at wearemany.org, but the text here corrects some mistakes I made back then, and I made a substantial revision to the section on Charleston after I visited there in March 2016.

Special thanks to South Carolinians    Mary Battle, Alphonso Brown, Nic Butler, Sara Daise, Curtis Franks, Harlan Greene and Christine Mitchell for enlightening discussions    of this history.

I’m now    working on a book-length treatment of the subject    for Haymarket Books.

* * * * *

Some sources.

On law and order in the European Middle Ages:

Tigar, Michael. Law and the Rise of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

On the working class and the police in England:

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage, 1966.

Farrell, Audrey. Crime, Class and Corruption. Bookmarks, 1995.

For some history in the US and insight into the functions of the police:

Williams, Kristian. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Revised Edition. South End Press, 2007.

Silberman, Charles E. Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice. First Edition. New York: Vintage, 1980.

The key source on the evolution of the police in the major cities of the US:

Bacon, Selden Daskam. The Early Development of American Municipal Police: A Study of the Evolution of Formal Controls in a Changing Society. Two volumes. University Microfilms, 1939.

Specific sources on New York and Philadelphia:

“New Year’s Amusements,” New York    Evening Post, January 2, 1828.

Gilje, Paul A. The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834. The University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Steinberg, Allen. The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800-1880. 1st edition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Specific sources on the South:

Chapman, Anne W. “Inadequacies of the 1848 Charleston Census,”    The South Carolina Historical Magazine,    vol. 81, No. 1 (January 1980), 24-34.

Hinks, Peter P.    To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Powers, Bernard E.    Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822-1885. University of Arkansas Press, 1994.

Schweninger, Loren. “Slave independence and enterprise in South Carolina, 1780–1865,”    The South Carolina Historical Magazine,    vol. 93, No. 2 (April 1992), 101–125.

Wade, Richard C. Slavery in the Cities: The South 1820–1860. Oxford University Press, 1964.

On the early years of public schooling in the US:

Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. Schooling In Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. Reprint. Haymarket Books, 2011.

The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt [Carl Oglesby in CovertAction Information Bulletin, Fall, 1990]

Page 48, Figure 12 of the Nazi War Crimes & Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group Final Report of April 2007. Click HERE to download the full report.

William Shirer closed his 1960 masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with the judgment that the Nazi regime “had passed into history,”1 but we cannot be so confident today. On the contrary, the evidence as of 1990 is that World War II did not end as Shirer believed it did, that Nazism did not surrender unconditionally and disappear, that indeed it finessed a limited but crucial victory over the Allies, a victory no less significant for having been kept a secret from all but the few Americans who were directly involved.

The Odessa and its Mission

Hitler continued to rant of victory, but after Germany’s massive defeat in the battle of Stalingrad in mid-January 1943, the realists of the German General Staff (OKW) were all agreed that their game was lost. Defeat at Stalingrad meant, at a minimum, that Germany could not win the war in the East that year. This in turn means that the Nazis would have to keep the great preponderance of their military forces tied down on the eastern front and could not redeploy them to the West, where the Anglo-American invasion of Italy would occur that summer. Apparently inspired by the Soviet victory, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced at Casablanca, on January 24, 1943, their demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender and the complete de-Nazification of Europe. 2

Within the German general staff two competing groups formed around the question of what to do: one led by Heinrich Himmler the other by Martin Bormann.3 Himmler was chief of the SS (Schutzstaffel, “protective echelon”), the blackshirted core of the Nazi party that emerged as Hitler’s bodyguard in the late 1920s and grew into the most powerful of the Nazi political institutions. After the failure of the attempted military coup of July 20, 1944, which wounded but did not kill Hitler, the SS seized all power and imposed a furious blood purge of the armed services in which some seven thousand were arrested and nearly five thousand executed. 4 The SS was at that point the only organ of the Nazi state.

Himmler and Bormann.

Himmler’s plan for dealing with the grim situation facing Nazism found its premise in Hitler’s belief that the alliance between “the ultra-capitalists” of the U.S. and “the ultra- Marxists” of the Soviet Union was politically unstable. “Even now they are at loggerheads,” said Hitler. “If we can now deliver a few more blows, this artificially bolstered common front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder.”5 Himmler believed that this collapse would occur and that the U.S. would then consider the formation of a new anti-soviet alliance with Nazi Germany. The Nazis would then negotiate “a separate peace” with the United States, separate from any peace with the USSR, with which Germany would remain at war, now joined against the Soviets by the United States.

But Martin Bormann, who was even more powerful than Himmler, did not accept the premise of the separate-peace idea. Bormann was an intimate of Hitler’s, the deputy fuhrer and the head of the Nazi Party, thus superior to Himmler in rank. Bormann wielded additional power as Hitler’s link to the industrial and financial cartels that ran the Nazi economy and was particularly close to Hermann Schmitz, chief executive of I.G. Farben, the giant chemical firm that was Nazi Germany’s greatest industrial power.

With the support of Schmitz, Bormann rejected Himmler’s separate-peace strategy on the ground that it was far too optioptimistic.6 The Allied military advantage was too great, Bormann believed, for Roosevelt to be talked into a separate peace. Roosevelt, after all, had taken the lead in proclaiming the Allies’ demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender and total de-Nazification. Bormann reasoned, rather, that the Nazi’s best hope of surviving military defeat lay within their own resources, chief of which was the cohesion of tens of thousands of SS men for whom the prospect of surrender could offer only the gallows.

Bormann and Schmitz developed a more aggressive self-contained approach to the problem of the looming military defeat, the central concept of which was that large numbers of Nazis would have to leave Europe and at least for a time, find places in the world in which to recover their strength. There were several possibilities in Latin America, most notably Argentina and Paraguay; South Africa, Egypt, and Indonesia were also attractive rear areas in which to retreat.7

After the German defeat in the battle of Normandy in June 1944, Bormann took the First external steps toward implementing concrete plans for the Nazis’ great escape. An enormous amount of Nazi treasure had to be moved out of Europe and made safe. This treasure was apparently divided into several caches, of which the one at the Reichsbank in Berlin included almost three tons of gold (much of it the so-called tooth- gold from the slaughter camps) as well as silver, platinum, tens of thousands of carats of precious stones, and perhaps a billion dollars in various currencies. 8

There were industrial assets to be expatriated, including large tonnages of specialty steel and certain industrial machinery as well as blue-prints critical to the domination of certain areas of manufacturing. Key Nazi companies needed to be relicensed outside Germany in order to escape the reach of war-reparations claims. And tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, almost all of them members of the SS, needed help to escape Germany and safely regroup in foreign colonies capable of providing security and livelihoods.

For help with the first three of these tasks, Bormann convened a secret meeting of key German industrialists on August 10, 1944, at the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg. 9 One part of the minutes of this meeting states:

The [Nazi] Party is ready to supply large amounts of money to those industrialists who contribute to the post-war organization abroad. In return, the Party demands all financial reserves which have already been transferred abroad or may later be transferred, so that after the defeat a strong new Reich can be built.10

The Nazi expert in this area was Hitler’s one-time financial genius and Minister of the Economy, Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, available to Bormann even though he was in prison on suspicion of involvement in the anti-Hitler coup of 1944. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report of 1945, at least 750 enterprises financed by the Nazi Party had been set up outside Germany by the end of the war. These firms were capable of generating an annual income of approximately $30 million, all of it available to Nazi causes. 11 It was Schacht’s ability to finesse the legalities of licensing and ownership that brought this situation about. 12

Organizing the physical removal of the Nazis’ material assets and the escape of SS personnel were the tasks of the hulking Otto Skorzeny, simultaneously an officer of the SS, the Gestapo and the Waffen SS as well as Hitler’s “favorite commando. “13 Skorzeny worked closely with Bormann and Schacht in transporting the Nazi assets to safety outside Europe and in creating a network of SS escape routes (“rat lines”) that led from all over Germany to the Bavarian city of Memmingen, then to Rome, then by sea to a number of Nazi retreat colonies set up in the global south.

The international organization created to accommodate Bormann’s plans is most often called “The Odessa,” a German acronym for “Organization of Veterans of the SS.” It has remained active as a shadowy presence since the war and may indeed constitute Nazism’s most notable organizational achievement. But we must understand that none of Bormann’s, Skorzeny’s, and Schacht’s well-laid plans would have stood the least chance of success had it not been for a final component of their organization, one not usually associated with the Odessa at all but very possibly the linchpin of the entire project.

Enter Gehlen

This final element of the Odessa was the so-called Gehlen Organization (the Org), the Nazi intelligence system that sold itself to the U.S. at the end of the war. It was by far the most audacious, most critical, and most essential part of the entire Odessa undertaking. The literature on the Odessa and that on the Gehlen Organization, however, are two different things. No writer in the field Of Nazi studies has yet explicitly associated the two, despite the fact that General Reinhard Gehlen was tied politically as well as personally with Skorzeny and Schacht. Moreover, Gehlen’s fabled post-war organization was in large part staffed by SS Nazis who are positively identified with the Odessa, men such as the infamous Franz Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg of the Wannsee Institute. An even more compelling reason for associating Gehlen with the Odessa is that, without his organization as a screen, the various Odessa projects would have been directly exposed to American intelligence. If the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had not been neutralized by the Gehlen ploy, the Odessa’s great escape scheme would have been discovered and broken up.

At 43, Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen was a stiff, unprepossessing man of pounds when he presented himself for surrender at the U.S. command center in Fischhausen.

But there was nothing small about his ego. “I am head of the section Foreign Armies East in German Army Headquarters,” he announced to the Gl at the desk. “I have information to give of the highest importance to your government.” The Gl was not impressed, however, and Gehien spent weeks stewing in a POW compound before an evident Soviet eagerness to find him finally aroused the Americans’ attention. 14

Gehlen became chief of the Third Reich’s Foreign Armies East (FHO), on April 1, 1942. He was thus responsible for Germany’s military intelligence operations throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. His FHO was connected in this role with a number of secret fascist organizations in the countries to Germany’s east. These included Stepan Bandera’s “B Faction” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN/B),15 Romania’s Iron Guard, 16 the Ustachis of Yugoslavia, 17 the Vanagis of Latvia18 and, after the summer of 1942, “Vlassov’s Army, “19 the band of defectors from Soviet Communism marching behind former Red hero General Andrey Vlassov. Later on in the war, Gehien placed one of his top men in control of Foreign Armies West, which broadened his power; and then after Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was purged and his Abwehr intelligence service cannibalized by the SS, Gehien became in effect Nazi Germany’s over-all top intelligence chief.

The Great Escape

In December 1943, at the latest, Gehlen reached the same conclusion about the war that had come upon Bormann, Schacht, Skorzeny, and Himmler. Germany was losing and could do nothing about it. Several months later, Gehlen says, he began quietly discussing the impending loss with a few close associates. As he writes in his memoir: “Early in October 1944 I told my more intimate colleagues that I considered the war was lost and we must begin thinking of the future. We had to think ahead and plan for the approaching catastrophe. “21

Gehlen’s strategic response to Gotterdammerung was a kind of fusion of Himmler’s philosophy with Bormann’s more pessimistic Odessa line: “My view,” he writes, “was that there would be a place even for Germany in a Europe rearmed for defense against Communism. Therefore we must set our sights on the Western powers, and give ourselves two objectives: to help defend against Communist expansion and to recover and reunify Germany’s lost territories. “22

Just as Bormann, Skorzeny, and Schacht were beginning to execute their escape plans, so too was Gehien: “Setting his sights on the Western powers,” and in particular on the United States. Gehien pursued the following strategic rationale: When the alliance between the United States and the USSR collapsed, as it was bound to do upon Germany’s defeat, the United States would discover a piercing need for a top-quality intelligence service in Eastern Europe and inside the Soviet Union. It did not have such a service of its own, and the pressures of erupting East-West conflict would not give it time to develop one from scratch. Let the United States therefore leave the assets assembled by Gehien and the FHO intact. Let the United States not break up Gehlen’s relationship with East European fascist groups. Let the United States pick up Gehlen’s organization and put it to work for the West, the better to prevail in its coming struggle against a Soviet Union soon to become its ex-ally.

Gehlen brought his top staff people into the planning for this amazing proposal. Together, during the last months of the war, while Hitler was first raging at Gehlen for his “defeatist” intelligence reports, then promoting him to the rank of brigadier general, then at last firing him altogether (but promoting into the FHO directorship one of Gehlen’s co-conspirators), Gehlen and his staff carefully prepared their huge files on East Europe and the Soviet Union and moved them south into the Bavarian Alps and buried them. At the same time, Gehlen began building the ranks of the FHO intelligence agents. The FHO in fact was the only organization in the whole of the Third Reich that was actually recruiting new members as the war was winding down. 23

SS men who knew they would be in trouble when the Allied forces arrived now came flocking to the FHO, knowing that it was the most secure place for them to be when the war finally ended. 24 When Gehlen’s plans were complete and his preparations all concluded, he divided his top staff into three separate groups and moved them (as Skorzeny was doing at the same time) into prearranged positions in Bavaria. Gehlen himself was in place before the German surrender on May 7, hiding comfortably in a well-stocked chalet in a mountain lea called Misery Meadow. Besides Gehlen, there were eight others in the Misery Meadow group, including two wounded men and three young women. For three weeks, maintaining radio contact with the two other groups, Gehlen and his colleagues stayed on the mountain, waiting for the American army to appear in the valley far below.

“These days of living in the arms of nature were truly enchanting,” he wrote. “We had grown accustomed to the peace, and our ears were attuned to nature’s every sound. “25

Destruction of the OSS

Gehlen was still communing with nature when William Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), arrived in Nuremberg from Washington, dispatched by the new president to assist Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Harry S. Truman had made Jackson the United States’s chief prosecutor with the International Military Tribunal (IMT), established to try the Nazis’ principal military leaders. Donovan’s OSS was to function as an investigative arm of the IMT.

By the last half of the war if not before, President Roosevelt and Donovan were convinced that the U.S. needed a permanent intelligence service and that this service, like the OSS, should be civilian rather than military. They were convinced too that the OSS should be its foundation. On October 31, 1944, Roosevelt directed Donovan to prepare a memo on how such a service should be organized. 26

William Joseph (“Wild Bill”) Donovan (January 1, 1883 – February 8, 1959) was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat. Donovan is best remembered as the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II. He is also known as the “Father of American Intelligence” and the “Father of Central Intelligence”. “The Central Intelligence Agency regards Donovan as its founding father,” according to journalist Evan Thomas in a 2011 Vanity Fair profile.

Donovan consulted on this assignment with his colleague Allen Dulles, a force unto himself as wartime chief of OSS operations in Bern. Dulles advised Donovan to placate the military by proposing that the new agency be placed automatically under military command in time of war.27 Donovan’s proposal incorporated this idea, 28 but only in order to state all the more strongly the case for civilian control and for making the OSS the basis of the new organization. As he wrote in his memo to Roosevelt of November 18, 1944, “There are common-sense reasons why you may desire to lay the keel of the ship at once…. We now have [in the OSS] the trained and specialized personnel needed for such a task, and this talent should not be dispersed. “29

Donovan proposed establishment of a civilian intelligence service responsible directly to the President and the Secretary of State, the chief mission of which would be to support the President in foreign policy. Except for the civilian Secretaries of War and the Navy, Donovan’s plan did not even include a place for military representation on the advisory board, and he was careful to specify that the advisory board would merely advise and not control. The new service was to be all-powerful in its field, being responsible for “coordination of the functions of all intelligence agencies of the Government.” The Donovan intelligence service, in other words, would directly and explicitly dominate the Army’s G-2 and the Navy’s ONI. 30.

Naturally, therefore, the Donovan plan drew an intense attack from the military. One G-2 officer called it “cumbersome and possibly dangerous. “31 Another referred to the OSS as “a bunch of faggots. “32 Nor was the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover silent. Hoover had fought creation of the OSS perhaps more bitterly than the military and had insisted throughout the war on maintaining an FBI intelligence network in Latin America despite the fact that this was supposed to be OSS turf. 33

Certain elements within Army intelligence were not only opposed to Donovan’s plan but were also beginning to formulate their own notions of what a post-war intelligence system should be like. Roosevelt sent the Joint Chiefs of Staff ultra-secret copies of Donovan’s proposal along with Roosevelt’s own draft executive order to implement it. On January 1, 1945, the Chiefs formally reported to Roosevelt their extreme dissatisfaction with this scheme and leaked Donovan’s memo to four right-wing newspapers, which leapt to the attack with blaring headlines accusing FDR and Donovan of conspiring to create “a super Gestapo.” This attack put the Donovan plan on hold, and the death of FDR on April 12, 1945 destroyed it. 34

In early May 1945, president for less than a month, Truman made the OSS the American component of the investigative arm of the IMT. It is one of the fascinating conjunctions of this story that Donovan should have left for Nuremberg just as Gehlen was coming down from his mountain. It is one of its riper ironies that Donovan would soon resign from Jackson’s staff in a disagreement over trying German officers as war criminals, which Donovan objected to but Jackson and Truman supported. 35

Had Donovan lent his energies to the trial of Nazis within the German officer corps, he might have confronted the very adversaries who would shortly take his place in the American intelligence system, not only militarizing it, but Nazifying it as well.

Gehlen Makes his Move

Gehlen had been on the mountain for exactly three weeks and the war had been over for almost two weeks when he decided on May 19 that it was time to make contact. He left the three women and the two wounded men at Misery Meadow and with his four aides began the decent to the valley town of Fischhausen on Lake Schliersee.

On the same day Soviet commissioners far to the north at Flensburg demanded that the United States hand over Gehlen as well as his files on the USSR. This was the first the U.S. command had heard of Gehlen. 36 Gehlen and company took their time, staying three days with the parents of one of his aides and communicating by radio with those who had remained at Misery Meadow.

On May 22, Gehlen at last decided the moment was right. He and his aides marched into the Army command center and represented themselves to the desk officer, a Captain John Schwarzwalder, to whom Gehlen spoke his prepared speech:

“I am head of the Section Foreign Armies East in German Army headquarters. I have information to give of the highest importance to your government.”

Schwarzwalder had Gehlen and his group jeeped to Miesbach where there was a[n] OSS detachment. There Gehlen once again gave his speech, this time to a Captain Marian Porter: “I have information of the greatest importance for your supreme commander.”

Porter replied, “So have they all,” and shunted him and his cohorts off to the prison camp at Salzburg. Gehlen’s disappointment at this reception was keen and his biographers all say he never forgot it, “lapsing,” as one puts it, “into near despair” as he “presented the strange paradox of a spy-master thirsting for recognition by his captors. “37

Recognition was inevitable, however, since the CIC was trying to find him. By mid June at the latest, his name was recognized by a G-2 officer, Colonel William H. Quinn, who had Gehlen brought to Augsburg for his first serious interrogation. Quinn was the first American to whom Gehlen presented his proposal and told of his staff dispersed at several camps in the mountains as well as the precious buried archives of the FHO.

Unlike Captain Porter, Colonel Quinn was impressed. He promptly passed Gehlen up the command chain to General Edwin L. Sibert. Sibert later recalled, “I had a most excellent impression of him at once.” Gehlen immediately began educating him as to the actual aims of the Soviet Union and its display of military might.” As Sibert told a journalist years later, “With her present armed forces potential, he [Gehlen] continued, Russia could risk war with the West and the aim of such a war would be the occupation of West Germany.”38

Acting without orders, Sibert listened to Gehlen for several days before informing Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith. 39 Smith and Sibert then continued to develop their relationship with Gehlen secretly, choosing not to burden Eisenhower with knowledge of what they were doing “in order not to compromise him in his relations with the Soviets. “40

Eisenhower in fact had strictly forbidden U.S. fraternization with Germans. Gehlen was encouraged to resume contact with his FHO comrades who were still at large in Bavaria, releasing them from their vow of silence. Gehlen was sufficiently confident of his American relationships by this time that he dug up his buried files and, in special camps, put his FHO experts to work preparing detailed reports on the Red Army for his American captors.

Well before the end of June he and his comrades were “discharged from prisoner of war status so that we could move around at will. “42 They were encouraged to form a unit termed a “general staff cell” first within G-2’s Historical Research Section, then later in the Seventh Army’s Intelligence Center in Wiesbaden, where they worked in private quarters and were treated as VIPs. 43

Indeed, a partly declassified CIA document recapitulated this story in the early 1970s, noting at this time:

Gehlen met with Admiral Karl Dognitz, who had been appointed by Hitler as his successor during the last days of the Third Reich. Gehlen and the Admiral were now in a U.S. Army VIP prison camp in Wiesbaden; Gehlen sought and received approval from Doenitz too!44

In other words, the German chain of command was still in effect, and it approved of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans. Gehlen’s biographers are under the impression that it took six weeks for someone in European G-2 to notice and recognize Gehlen in the POW cage, that Sibert did not tell Smith about finding him until the middle of August, and that it was much later still before Sibert and Smith conspired to circumvent Eisenhower to communicate their excitement about Gehlen to someone at the Pentagon presumably associated with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.45 But documents released in the 1980s show that this part of Gehlen’s story raced along much more quickly. Already on June 29, in fact, the Pentagon had informed Eisenhower’s European command that the War Department wanted to see Gehlen in Washington. 46

It was a fast time. By no later than August 22, one of Gehlen’s top associates, Hermann Baum was forming what would become the intelligence and counterintelligence sections of Gehlen’s new organization. Gehlen himself, with retinue, was departing for Washington in General Bedell Smith’s DC-3 for high-level talks with American military and intelligence officials. And the whole concept of the deal he was about to offer his conquerors had been approved by a Nazi chain of command that was still functioning despite what the world thought and still does think was the Nazis’ unconditional surrender.47

Gehlen arrived in Washington on August 24 with six of his top FHO aides and technical experts in tow. 48 World War II had been over about a week, the war in Europe about three and a half months.

The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt

As Gehlen and his six men were en route from Germany to Washington, Donovan’s OSS troubles became critical. On August 23, Admiral William Leahy, chief of the JCS, the President’s national security adviser and a man who despised Donovan, advised Truman to order his budget director Harold Smith to begin a study of the intelligence question. Stating: “this country wanted no Gestapo under any guise or for any reason. “49 Truman may not have known that the Gestapo’s Odessa heirs were landing in the lap of the Pentagon even as he spoke. Smith in any case responded to Truman’s directive by asking Donovan for his OSS demobilization plans. Now, too late,. Donovan tried to fight.

The Gehlen party, “Group 6,” was checking out its very comfortable accommodations at Fort Hunt at the very moment at which Donovan, writing from a borrowed Washington office, fired back a memo to Smith defending the OSS and its right to live: “Among these assets [of the OSS] was establishment for the first time in our nation’s history of a foreign secret intelligence service which reported information as seen through American eyes. As an integral and inseparable part of this service, there is a group of specialists to analyze and evaluate the material for presentation to those who determine national policy.”50

Much more significant than the question of the adequacy of U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union, however, was the question of civilian versus military control of the intelligence mission. Germany and England had fought this battle in the 19th century, the military capturing the intelligence role in Germany and the civilians maintaining a position in England. Throughout the summer and fall of 1945, this same battle raged in the U.S. government. 51 The battle for intelligence control was indeed the background for the arrival of Gehlen and his six aides at Fort Hunt, where Gehlen’s party was housed and Gehlen himself provided with an NCO butler and several white-jacket orderlies. 52

Battery Mount Vernon, Fort Hunt Park, Fairfax County, VA.

A momentous relationship was established at Fort Hunt, one that had the profoundest effects on the subsequent evolution of United States foreign policy during an exceptionally difficult passage of world history. The period of the Cold War as a whole, and more especially its early, formative years – from Gehlen’s coming aboard the American intelligence service until he rejoined the West German republic in 1955 — was laden with the peril of nuclear war. On at least one occasion, in 1948,53 Gehlen almost convinced the United States that the Soviet Union was about to launch a war against the West and that it would be in the U.S. interest to preempt it.

Clearly it is important to know who made and authorized the decisions that led to our national dependency on a network of underground Nazis, yet because the relevant documents are still classified this central part of the Gehlen story still cannot be reconstructed.

From the handful of published books about the Gehlen affair (none of which cite their sources on this point) we can list only seven Americans who were said to be involved with Gehlen at Fort Hunt: Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff end Truman’s national security advisor. Allen Dulles, OSS station chief in Bern during the war. Sherman Kent, head of OSS Research and Analysis Branch and a Yale historian. General George V. Strong, head of Army G-2. Major General Alex H. Bolling of G-2. Brigadier General John T. Magruder, first head of the Army’s Strategic Services Unit, a vulture of OSS. Loftus E. Becker, a lawyer assc. with G-2 and the Nuremberg war-crimes operation; the CIA’s first deputy director.

We do not know if these people were involved as a committee, if they talked with Gehlen and his six aides a lot or a little, separately or all at once, or if they sent their own aides to work out the details. We do not know how a POW-interrogation was transformed into a bargaining process. Above all, we do not know what kind of communication the U.S. participants in the Fort Hunt-Gehlen talks had with the political authorities to whom they were responsible. Leahy is the only one who had obvious contact with President Truman. But there is nothing in the revealed record to indicate that he ever discussed Gehlen or the Fort Hunt deal with Truman, or took the least trouble to explain to Truman the implications of hiring a Nazi spy network. We have no idea, for that matter, how Leahy himself saw it.

What we do know is the outlines of the Gehlen deal itself, however it was hammered out and however it was or was not ratified by legal, political authority. That is because Gehlen himself laid out its terms in his autobiography, The Service. Gehlen says in this work (which has been attacked for its inaccuracies) that the discussion ended with “a gentleman’s agreement,” that the terms of his relationship with the United States were “for a variety of reasons never set down in black and white.” He continues, “Such was the element of trust that had been built up between the two sides during this year of intensive personal contact that neither had the slightest hesitation in founding the entire operation on a verbal agreement and a handshake. “54

According to Gehlen, this agreement consisted of the following six basic points. His language is worth savoring. “I remember the terms of the agreement well,” he wrote:

“1. A clandestine German intelligence organization was to be set up. using the existing potential to continue information gathering in the East just as we had been doing before. The basis for this was our common interest in a defense against communism.”

“2. This German organization was to work not ‘for’ or ‘under’ the Americans, but ‘jointly with the Americans.”

“3. The organization would operate exclusively under German leadership, which would receive its directives and assignments from the Americans until a new government was established in Germany.”

“4. The organization was to be financed by the Americans with funds which were not to be part of the occupation costs, and in return the organization would supply all its intelligence reports to the Americans.” (The Gehlen Organization’s first annual budget is said have been $3.4 million. 55)”

“5. As soon as a sovereign German government was established, that government should decide whether the organization should continue to function or not. But that until such time the care and control (later referred to as ‘the trusteeship’) of the organization would remain in American hands.”

“6. Should the organization at any time find itself in a position where the American and German interests diverged, it was accepted that the organization would consider the interests of Germany first. “56 Gehlen acknowledges that the last point especially might “raise some eyebrows” and make some think that the U.S. side “had gone overboard in making concessions to us.” He assures his readers that actually “this point demonstrates better than any other Sibert’s great vision: he recognized that for many years to come the interests of the United States and West Germany must run parallel. “57 Gehlen and his staff left Fort Hunt for Germany on July 1, 1946, having been in the United States for almost a year. They were temporarily based at Oberursel then settled into a permanent base in a walled-in, self-contained village at Pullach near Munich. Gehlen set up his headquarters in an estate originally built by Martin Bormann.58

There a start-up group of 50 began to turn the “gentlemen’s agreement” of Fort Hunt into reality. The first order of business being staff, Gehlen’s recruiters were soon circulating among the “unemployed mass” of “former” Nazi SS men, the Odessa constituency, to find more evaluators, couriers and informers. 59 Gehlen had “solemnly promised in Washington not to employ SS and Gestapo men, “60 although it will be noted that Gehlen includes no such provision in his list of terms. There is not the least question that he did recruit such men, supplying them with new names when necessary. Two of the worst of them were Franz Six and Emil Augsburg. Six was a key Nazi intellectual, and both Six and Augsburg were associated with the Wannsee Institute, the Nazi think-tank in Berlin where SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, in January 1942, announced “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Both of them had commanded extermination squads roving in East Europe in pursuit of Jews and communists, and both had gone underground with the Odessa when the Third Reich crumbled. Augsburg hid in Italy, then returned in disguise when Gehlen called. Six was actually captured by Allied intelligence, tried at Nuremberg and imprisoned, only to be sprung to work with Augsburg running Gehlen’s networks of East European Nazis. 61

From the edge of total defeat Gehlen now moved into his vintage years, more powerful, influential and independent than he had been even in the heyday of the Third Reich. Minimally supervised first by the War Department’s Strategic Services Unit under Fort Hunt figure Major General John Magruder, and then by the SSU’s follow-on organization, the Central Intelligence Group under Rear Admiral Sidney Souers,62 the Org grew to dominate the entire West German intelligence service. Through his close ties to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s chief minister, Hans Globke, Gehlen was able to place his men in positions of control in West Germany’s military intelligence and the internal counterintelligence arm. When NATO was established he came to dominate it too. By one estimate “some 70 percent” of the total intelligence take flowing into NATO’S military committee and Allied headquarters (SHAPE) on the Soviet Union, the countries of East Europe, the rest of Europe, and indeed the rest of the world was generated at Pullach.63

Not even the establishment of the CIA in 1947 and the official transfer of the Pullach operation into the West German government in 1955 (when it was retitled the Federal Intelligence Service, BND) lessened the reliance of American intelligence on Gehlen’s product.64 From the beginning days of the Cold War through the 1970s and beyond, the United State’s, West Germany’s, and NATO’s most positive beliefs about the nature and intentions of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and world communism would be supplied by an international network of utterly unreconstructed SS Nazis whose primary purposes were to cover the escape of the Odessa and make the world safe for Naziism.

The Cost of the Fort Hunt Treaty

Gehlen’s story has many branchings beyond this point. These include several spy scandals that exposed his operation as dangerously vulnerable to Soviet penetration. They include the pitiful spectacle of U.S. CIC agents pursuing Nazi fugitives on war- crimes charges only to see them summarily pardoned and hired by Gehlen. They include the dark saga of Klaus Barbie, the SS “Butcher of Lyon” who worked with the Gehlen Organization and boasted of being a member of the Odessa. They include assets of Operation Paperclip, in which right-wing forces in the U.S. military once again savaged the concept of de-Nazification in order to smuggle scores of SS rocket scientists into the United States. They include continuation of the civilian-vs. -military conflict over the institution of secret intelligence and the question of politically motivated covert action within the domestic interior. They include above all the story of the enormous victory of the Odessa in planting powerful Nazi colonies around the world — in such countries as South Africa where the enactment of apartheid laws followed; or several countries in Latin America that then became breeding grounds for the Death Squads of the current day; and indeed even in the United States where it now appears that thousands of wanted Nazis were able to escape justice and grow old in peace.

In making the Gehlen deal, the United States did not acquire for itself an intelligence service. That is not what the Gehlen group was or was trying to be. The military intelligence historian Colonel William Corson put it most succinctly, “Gehlen’s organization was designed to protect the Odessa Nazis. It amounts to an exceptionally well-orchestrated diversion. “65 The only intelligence provided by the Gehlen net to the United States was intelligence selected specifically to worsen East-West tensions and increase the possibility of military conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was exactly as the right-wing pairs had warned in 1945 when they were aroused by Donovan’s proposal for a permanent intelligence corps, warning their readers that a “super spy unit” could “determine American foreign policy by weeding out, withholding or coloring information gathered at his direction. “66 It was exactly as Truman had warned when he demobilized the OSS with the observation that the U.S. had no interest in “Gestapolike measures.” The fact that this lively concern for a police-state apparatus should have been focused on the relatively innocuous OSS while at the same time the red carpet was being rolled out for Gehlen’s gang of SS men must surely count as one of the supreme wrenching ironies of the modern period.

Another dimension of the cost the Gehlen deal is the stress it induced within American institutions, weakening them incalculably. The Gehlen Organization was the antithesis of the Allied cause, its sinister emergence on the scene of post-war Europe the very opposite of what the western democracies thought they had been fighting for.

Perhaps at least we can say that, despite Gehlen and despite the military, the United States did after all finally wind up with a civilian intelligence service. The National Security Act of 1947 did embody Donovan’s central point in creating a CIA outside the military. But in fact the Gehlen Org substantially pre-empted the CIA’s civilian character before it was ever born. The CIA was born to be rocked in Gehlen’s cradle. It remained dependent on the Org even when the Org turned into the BND. Thus, whatever the CIA was from the standpoint of the law, it remained from the standpoint of practical intelligence collection a front for a house of Nazi spies.

The room in the “little red schoolhouse” in Reims, France, where Germany signed the Instrument of Surrender that ended the Second World War in Europe, May 7, 1945. | Ralph Morse, Life Magazine

The Org was not merely military, which is bad, not merely foreign, which is much worse, and not merely Nazi, which is intolerable; it was not even professionally committed to the security of the U.S. and Western Europe. It was committed exclusively to the security of the Odessa. All the Gehlen Org ever wanted the U.S. to be was anti- communist, the more militantly so the better. It never cared in the least for the security of the United States, its Constitution or its democratic tradition.

It is not the point of this essay that there would have been no Cold War if the Odessa had not wanted it and had not been able, through the naive collaboration of the American military Right to place Gehlen and his network in a position that ought to have been occupied by a descendant of the OSS. But it was precisely because the world was so volatile and confusing as of the transition from World War II to peacetime that the U.S. needed to see it, as Donovan put it in his plaintive appeal to Truman in the summer of 1945, “through American eyes.” No Nazi eyes, however bright, could see it for us without deceiving us and leading us to the betrayal of our own national character. Second, there was no way to avoid the Cold War once we had taken the desperate step of opening our doors to Gehlen. From that moment on, from the summer of 1945 when the Army brought him into the United States and made a secret deal with him, the Cold War was locked in.

A number of Cold War historians on the left (for example D.F. Fleming and Gabriel Kolko) have made cogent arguments that from the Soviet point of view the Cold War was thrust upon us by an irrational and belligerent Stalin. The story of the secret treaty of Fort Hunt exposes this “history” as a self-serving political illusion. On the contrary, the war in the Pacific was still raging and the United States was still trying to get the Soviet Union into the war against Japan when General Sibert was already deep into his relationship with Gehlen.

The key point that comes crashing through the practical and moral confusion about this matter, once one sees that Gehlen’s Organization was an arm of the Odessa, is that, whether it was ethical or not, the U.S. did not pick up a Gift Horse in Gehlen at all; it picked up a Trojan Horse.

The unconditional surrender the Germans made to the Allied command at the little red schoolhouse in Reims was the surrender only of the German armed services. It was not the surrender of the hard SS core of the Nazi Party. The SS did not surrender, unconditionally or otherwise, and thus Nazism itself did not surrender. The SS chose rather, to seek other means of continuing the war while the right wing of the United States military establishment, through fears and secret passions and a naivete of its own, chose to facilitate that choice. The history that we have lived through since then stands witness to the consequences.

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References: Carl Oglesby is the author of several books, notably The Yankee and Cowboy War. He has published a variety of articles on political themes. In 1965 he was the President of Students for a Democratic Society. He is the director of The Institute for Continuing de- nazification. For information on the Institute write to: 294 Harvard Street, #3, Cambridge. MA 02139.

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), p. 1140. Ibid., p. 1033 fn. Enunciation of this policy surprised and upset some U.S. military leaders who feared it would prolong the war. See, for example, William R. Corson (USMC ret.), The Armies of Ignorance: The Rite of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press, 1977), pp. 8-10. William Stevenson, The Bormann Brotherhood: A New Investigation of the Escape and Survival of Nazi War Criminals (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). Op. cit. n. 1, p. 1072. Ibid., pp. 1091-92

This discussion of Bormann’s strategy is based mainly on Glenn B. Infield, Skorzeny: Hitler’s Commando (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); and op. cit., n. 3. My summary of the Nazi survival plan is based on op. cit., n. 3; Infield, op. cit., n. 6; Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974); Charles Higham, American Swastika (New York: Doubleday, 1985); Brian Bunting, The Rise of the South African Reich (New York: Penguin, 1964); and Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). On “neo- Nazi” colonies in the Near and Middle East and South America, see Wiesenthal, pp. 78- 95. Infield, op. cit., n. 6. p. 192. Ibid., p. 179; and Wiesenthal, op. cit., n. 7. pp. 87-88. Wiesenthal, op. cit., n. 7, p. 88. Also quoted in Infield, op. cit., n. 6, p. 183. Infield, op. cit., n. 6, p. 183.

Schacht, who had lost favor with Hitler in 1938, was acquitted of war-crimes charges by the Nuremberg Tribunal. He was later convicted of being a “chief Nazi offender” by the German de-Nazification court at Baden-Wurttemberg, but his conviction was overturned and his eight-year sentence lifted on September 2, 1 948. Infield, op cit., n. 6.

Infield, op cit., n. 6, p. 16.

Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zoliing, The General Was A Spy (New York: Richard Barry, Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), p. 54; and E.H. Cookridge, Gehlen, Spy of the Century (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 120. Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 160 ff. Simpson’s is the best book on the Gehlen matter so far published.

Ibid., pp. 254-55.

Ibid., pp. 180, 193.

Ibid., pp. 10, 207-08.

Ibid., pp. 18-22. Also see Hohne and Zoliing, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 35-37; Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 56-58.

Cookridge op. cit., n. 14, p. 79. Reinhard Gehlen, The Service (New York: World, 1972), ‘ p. 99.

Ibid., p. 107.

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 103, 106. I do not know of an estimate of the size of the Foreign Armies East (FHO) as of the end of the war. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 161, says that by 1948, when the Gehlen Organization was probably back up to war-time speed, its key agents “exceeded four thousand.” Each agent typically ran a net of about six informants, Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 167. Thus, the total Gehlen net might have numbered in the range of 20,000 individuals.

Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 1 15.

Corson, op. cit., n. 2, pp. 6, 20; Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero, Wild Bill Donovan (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 625; U.S. Senate, “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” Book IV, Supplementary Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence (known as, The Church Report), p. 5.

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p.130.

Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 626.

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 131.

William M. Leary, ed., The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (Atlanta: University of Atlanta Press, 1984), pp. 123-25; Corson, op cit., n. 2, pp. 214-17; Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 625. Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 627.

Ibid., p. 170.

Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Pocket Books, 1 981 ), p. 31 .

Ibid.

Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 744. This account of Gehlen’s surrender is based on Hohne and Zoliing, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 52-56; Cookridge, op cit., n. 14, pp. 118-21; op. cit., 3, pp. 89-90; op cit., n. 15, pp. 41- 43; and the BBC documentary, Superspy: The Story of Reinhard Gehlen, 1974. There are many trivial discrepancies in these four accounts but they are in perfect agreement as to the main thrust.

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 120.

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58. As to breaking orders, Gehlen is effusive in his praise of “Sibert’s great vision…. I stand in admiration of Sibert as a general who this this bold step — in a situation fraught with political pitfalls — of taking over the intelligence experts of a former enemy for his own country…. The political risk to which Sibert was exposed was very great. Anti-German feeling was running high, and he had created our organizations without any authority from Washington and without the knowledge of the War Department.”

Op. cit., n. 21, p. 123.

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58. Ibid., pp. 58-59. Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 120.

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58. Undated CIA fragment with head, “Recent Books,” apparently published circa 1972, partly declassified and released in 1986 in response to a Freedom of Information (FOIA) suit.

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 56, 58-59.

U.S. Army document SHAEF D-95096, September 15, 1946, declassified FOIA release. The routing of this cable through SHAEF HQ raises a question as to whether Eisenhower was really kept in the dark about Gehlen. As Gehlen was about to leave for the United States, he left a message for Baun with another of his top aides, Gerhard Wessel: “I am to tell you from Gehlen that he has discussed with [Hitler’s successor Admiral Karl] Doenitz and [Gehlen’s superior and chief of staff General Franz] Haider the question of continuing his work with the Americans. Both were in agreement.”

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61. There is variance in the literature concerning how many assistants Gehlen took with him to Washington.

John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 92;

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 125; and op. cit., n. 15, p. 42, say it was three while Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61, say four. A U.S. Army note of August 28, 1945 (a 1986 FOIA release) refers to “the 7 shipped by air last week” and that no doubt is the correct number. Another FOIA release, an unnumbered Military Intelligence Division document dated September 30, 1945, originated at Fort Hunt, labels the Gehlen party as “Group 6” and names seven members: Gehlen, Major Alberg Schoeller, Major Horst Hiemenz, Colonel Heinz Herre, Colonel Konrad Stephanus, and two others whose rank is not given, Franz Hinrichs and Herbert Feukner. The number is important for what it says about the nature of Gehlen’s trip, Three might be thought of as co-defendants but six constitute a staff. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 125, says Gehlen made the trip disguised in the uniform of a one-star American general, his aides disguised as U.S. captains. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 60-61, inflate the rank to two stars but then call the story spurious. Gehlen’s memoir says nothing about it.

Corson, op. cit., n. 2, p. 239.

Ibid., p. 240.

Ranelagh, op. cit., n. 48, p. 102ff.

BBC documentary, Superspy, op. cit., n. 36. Corson, in an interview with the author, said the butler and the orderlies must have been CIC agents. Still, the detail rankles.

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, 203; op. cit., n. 15. p. 1 36.

Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 1 21 .

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 1 4. p. 64, say that the details of this “gentlemen’s agreement” were put into writing by the CIA in 1949.

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 65.

Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 122. Ibid., pp. 122-23.

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 119;

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 155,

BBC documentary, Superspy, op. cit., n. 36.

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 67.

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 144.

Op. cit., n. 15, pp. 17, 46-47, 166, 225;

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 242-43.

Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 133.

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 218.

Ibid., p. 128.

Author’s interview with Corson, May, 1986.

Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 131.

The Strategist and the Philosopher [By Alain Frachon et Daniel Vernet in Le Monde, April 16, 2003]

Who are the neoconservatives playing a vital role in the US president’s choices by the side of Christian fundamentalists? And who were their master thinkers, Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss?

It was said in the tone of sincere praise: “You are some of our country’s best brains”. So good, added George W. Bush, “that my government employs around twenty of you.” The president was addressing the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC on February 23 (quote from an article published in Le Monde, March 20, 2003). He was paying homage to a think tank that is one of the bastions of the American neoconservative movement. He was saluting a school of thought that has marked his presidency, avowing everything he owes to an intellectual stream whose influence is now predominant. He was also acknowledging the fact of being surrounded by neoconservatives, and giving them credit for the vital role they play in his political choices.

At the outset of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy recruited professors from the center-left, from Harvard University especially. They were chosen among the “best and the brightest”, in the words of the essayist David Halberstam who coined the phrase. As for President George W. Bush, he would go on to govern with precisely those who, since the Sixties, began to rebel against the then-dominant center consensus colored as it was with a hue of social democracy.

Who are they and what is their history? Who were their master thinkers? Where do the intellectual origins of Bushian neoconservatism lie?

The neoconservatives must not be confused with Christian fundamentalists who are also found in George W. Bush’s entourage. They have nothing to do with the renaissance of protestant fundamentalism begun in the southern Bible Belt states, which is one of the rising powers in today’s Republican Party. Neoconservatism is from the East Coast, and a little Californian as well. Those who have inspired them have an ‘intellectual’ profile. Often they are New Yorkers, often Jewish, having their beginnings ‘on the Left’. Some still call themselves Democrats. They have their hands on literary or political reviews, not the Bible. They wear tweed blazers, not the navy blue double-breasted suits of Southern TV-evangelists. Most of the time, they profess liberal ideas on questions related to society and social trends. Their objective is neither to prohibit abortion nor to make school prayer obligatory. Their ambition lies elsewhere.

The peculiarity of the Bush administration, as Pierre Hassner explains, is to have ensured the junction of these two streams. George W. Bush has brought the neoconservatives and Christian fundamentalists to co-exist. The latter are represented in government by a man like John Ashcroft, the Attorney General. The former have one of their stars in the position of Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. George W. Bush, who led his campaign on the center-right without any very specific political anchorage, has performed a stunning and explosive ideological cocktail. It weds Wolfowitz and Ashcroft, neoconservatives and born-again Christians, planets diametrically opposed.

Ashcroft has taught at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, an academically unknown college though a stronghold of Protestant fundamentalism. The kind of talk one overhears there brushes on anti-Semitism. Jewish and from a family of teachers, Wolfowitz is for his part a brilliant product of East Coast universities. He has studied with two of the most eminent professors of the 1960s. Allan Bloom, the discipline of the German-Jewish philosopher, Leo Strauss, and Albert Wohlstetter, professor of mathematics and a specialist in military strategy. These two names would end up counting. The neoconservatives have placed themselves under the tutelary shadow of the strategist and the philosopher.

‘Neoconservative’ is a misnomer. They have nothing in common with those striving to guarantee the established order. They reject just about all the attributes of political conservatism as it is understood in Europe. One of them, Francis Fukuyama, who became famous from his book on The End of History, insists: “In no way do the neoconservatives want to defend the order of things such as they are, i.e. founded on hierarchy, tradition and a pessimistic view of human nature” (Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2002).

As idealist-optimists convinced of the universal value of the American democratic model, they want to bring the status quo and soft consensus to an end. They believe in the power of politics to change things. On the domestic front, they have worked out the critique of the welfare state created by Democratic and Republican presidencies (Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, respectively), which has belabored to resolve social problems. On foreign policy, they denounced 1970s Détente, which, they claimed, had benefited the USSR more than the West. As critics of the Sixties’ balance sheet who are opposed to Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic realism, they are anti-establishment. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, the founders of Commentary and two of neoconservatism’s New-York godfathers, come from the Left. And it was from the Left that they formulated their condemnation of Soviet communism.

In Ni Marx, ni Jesus (Neither Marx nor Jesus) (Robert Laffont, 1970), Jean-François Revel described the USA plunged in the turmoil of the 1960s social revolution. More recently, he has explained neoconservatism as a backlash, above all on the domestic front. The neoconservatives criticize the cultural and moral relativism of the Sixties in the wake of Leo Strauss. In their view, relativism culminated in the ‘politically correct’ movement of the 1980s.

Another high-ranking intellectual wages the battle at this point. Allan Bloom from the University of Chicago was depicted by his friend Saul Bellow in the novel Ravelstein (Which Books, 2000). In 1987 in The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom assails the university community for having given everything equal merit: “Everything has become culture”, he wrote. “Drug culture, Rock culture, Street Gang culture and so on without the least discrimination. The failure of culture has become culture.”

For Bloom, who was an important interpreter of the classic works of literature, very much in the image of his mentor Strauss, a part of the legacy of the 1960s “ends up as contempt of Western civilization for itself,” explains Jean-François Revel. “In the name of political correctness, all cultures are of equal merit. Bloom questioned the students and professors who were perfectly disposed to accept non-European cultures that often stood against liberty, while at the same time protesting with extreme harshness against Western culture to such a point as to refuse any acknowledgement of it as superior in any respect.”

While political correctness gave the impression of holding the high ground, neoconservatives were making headway. Bloom’s book was a major best-seller. Within US foreign policy, a true neoconservative school was taking shape. Networks were set up. In the 1970s, the Democratic Senator from Washington State, Henry Jackson (d. 1983) criticized the major treaties on nuclear disarmament. He helped shape a generation of young lions keenly interested in strategy, in which one comes across Richard Perle and William Kristol. The latter had attended Allan Bloom’s lectures.

From within the administration and from without, Richard Perle would meet up with Paul Wolfowitz when they both worked for Kenneth Adelman, another contrarian of Détente policies, or Charles Fairbanks, Under-Secretary of State. In strategic matters, their guru was Albert Wohlstetter. A researcher at the RAND Corporation, Pentagon advisor and a gastronomy connoisseur nevertheless, Wohlstetter (d. 1997) was one of the fathers of the American nuclear doctrine.

More precisely, he engaged in the early attempts to reformulate the traditional doctrine that had been the basis for nuclear deterrence: the so-called MAD or “Mutual-Assured Destruction”. According to that theory, as both blocs had the capacity to inflict irreparable damage onto each other, their leaders would think twice before unleashing a nuclear attack. For Wohlstetter and his students, MAD was both immoral–due to the destruction it would inflict on civilian populations–and ineffective: it would end up in a mutual neutralization of nuclear arsenals. No sane head of state, or at any rate no American president, would decide on “reciprocal suicide”. To the contrary, Wohlstetter proposed “staggered deterrence”, i.e. accepting limited wars that would eventually use tactical nuclear weapons with high-precision “smart” bombs capable of striking at the enemy’s military apparatus.

He criticized the joint nuclear weapons control policy with Moscow. According to him, it amounted to bridling US technological creativity in order to maintain an artificial balance with the USSR.

Ronald Reagan heard him out, and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), baptized “Star Wars”. It is the ancestor of the Antimissile Defense System pursued by Wohlstetter’s students. They would be the partisans warmest to the idea of a unilateral renunciation of the ABM Treaty, which in their view prevented the US from developing other defense systems. And they managed to convince George W. Bush.

In Perle and Wolfowitz’s tracks, one meets Elliott Abrams, these days in charge of the Middle-East at the National Security Council, and Douglas Feith, an Under-Secretary of Defense. They all share unconditional support for the policies of the State of Israel, whatever government sits in Jerusalem. This unwavering support explains how they have stoically sided with Ariel Sharon. President Ronald Reagan’s two mandates (1981 and 1985) gave many of them the opportunity to exercise their first responsibilities in government.

In Washington DC, the neoconservatives have woven their web. Creativity is on their side. Throughout the years, they have marginalized intellectuals from the Democratic center and centre-left to hold a preponderant place where the ideas that dominate the political scene are forged. Among their fora are reviews such as the National Review, Commentary, the New Republic, headed for a time by the young ‘Straussian’ Andrew Sullivan; the Weekly Standard, once under the ownership of the Murdoch group, whose Fox News television network takes care of broadcasting the vulgarized version of neoconservative thought. Under Robert Bartley’s charge, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal have also fallen into neoconservatist activism without qualms. Their hunting grounds are also the research institutes and think tanks such as the Hudson Institute, the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. Families play a role as well: Irving Kristol’s son, the very urbane William Kristol runs the Weekly Standard; one of Norman Podhoretz’s sons worked for the Reagan administration; the son of Richard Pipes–a Polish Jew who emigrated to the US in 1939 to become a Harvard University professor and one of the major critics of Soviet communism–Daniel Pipes has denounced Islamism as a new totalitarianism threatening the West.

These men are not isolationists, on the contrary. They are usually very well-educated, having vast knowledge of foreign countries whose languages they have often mastered. They share nothing with Patrick Buchanan’s reactionary populism, which espouses a US retreat to deal with its domestic problems.

The neoconservatives are internationalists, partisans of a resolute US activism in the world. Their ways do not resemble those of the GRAND Old Republican party (Nixon, George Bush Sr.), trusting in the merits of a Realpolitik and caring little about the nature of the regimes with which the US was doing business to defend their interests. Someone like Kissinger, for example, is an anti-model for them. Yet they are not internationalists in the Wilsonian democratic tradition (in reference to president Woodrow Wilson, the unfortunate father of the League of Nations), that of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. The latter are deemed naive or angelic for counting on international institutions to spread democracy.

After the strategist, introducing the philosopher. There are no direct links existing between Albert Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss (d. 1973) prior to the official emergence of neoconservatism. But within the neoconservative network, some of them have spawned bridges between the teachings of these two men, despite the fundamental difference separating their fields of research.

Either by filiation or capillary action (Allan Bloom, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and so on), Strauss’s philosophy has served as neoconservatism’s theoretical substratum. Strauss hardly ever wrote on current political affairs or international relations. He was read and recognized for his immense erudition of the classical Greek texts and Christian, Jewish and Islamic scriptures. He was feted for the power of his interpretive method. “He grafted classical philosophy to German profundity in a country lacking a great philosophical tradition”, explains Jean-Claude Casanova who was sent to study in the US by his mentor, Raymond Aron. Aron admired Strauss greatly, whom he had met in Berlin before the war. He advised many of his students, like Pierre Hassner or Pierre Manent a few years later, to turn toward him.

Leo Strauss was born in Kirchain, Hesse, in 1899 and left Germany on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power. After a short stint in Paris and then in England, he left for New York where he taught at the New School for Social Research before founding the Committee on Social Thought in Chicago, which would become the ‘Straussian’ crucible.

It would be simplistic and reductive to trace back to Strauss’s teaching a few principles from which the neoconservatives in George W. Bush’s entourage may have drawn. After all, neoconservatism plunges its roots in traditions other than the Straussian school. But the reference to Strauss forms a pertinent background to the neoconservatism currently at work in Washington. It allows one to understand how neoconservatism is not the simple caprice of a few Hawks. It leans on theoretical bases that are perhaps debatable, though hardly mediocre. Neoconservatism sits at the crossroads of two thoughts present in Strauss’ thinking.

The first is linked to his personal experience. As a young man, Strauss lived through the decay of the Weimar Republic under the converging thrusts of Communists and Nazis. From this experience, he concluded that democracy had no chance of being imposed were it to remain weak, even if that meant refusing to bolster itself against tyranny. Expansionist by nature, tyranny might have to be confronted by resorting to the use of force: “The Weimar Republic was weak. It had only one moment of strength if not greatness: its violent reaction to the assassination of the Jewish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Walther Rathenau, in 1922, ” wrote Strauss in a foreword to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (1966, trans. 1980). “All in all, Weimar showed the spectacle of justice without force, or of a justice incapable of resorting to force.”

The second thought results from his frequentation of the ancients. What is most fundamental for them, as it is for ourselves, is the kind of political regime that ends up shaping the character of people. Why had the 20th century engendered two totalitarian regimes, which Strauss preferred to call “tyrannies” in reference to Aristotle’s terminology? To this question that has not ceased provoking contemporary intellectuals, Strauss answered: for modernity caused a rejection of moral values, of the virtue that is the basis for democracies, and a rejection of the European values of Reason and Civilization.

Strauss argued that this rejection had its roots in the Enlightenment. The latter produced historicism and relativism as quasi-necessities, which means as a refusal to admit the existence of a Higher Good reflected in concrete, immediate and contingent goods, but irreducible to them. This Good was an unattainable Good that is the measure for real goods.

Translated into the terms of political philosophy, the extreme consequence of this relativism was the USA-USSR convergence theory, very much in vogue during the 1960s and 1970s. It amounted to eventually acknowledging a moral equivalence between American democracy and Soviet communism. Admittedly for Leo Strauss, there exist good and bad regimes. Political thought must not be deprived of casting value judgments. Good regimes have the right–even duty–to defend themselves against evil ones. It would be simplistic to immediately transpose this idea with the “axis of Evil” denounced by George W. Bush. But it is very clear, indeed, that it proceeds from the same source.

This central notion of regime as political philosophy’s matrix was developed by the Straussians who developed an interest in the Constitutional history of the United States. Strauss himself–also an admirer of the British Empire and Winston Churchill as an example of the will-driven statesman–was inclined to think that American democracy was the least-worst case of political systems. Nothing better had been found for the flourishing of mankind, even were there a tendency for special interests to replace virtue as the regime’s foundations.

His students, Walter Bens, Hearvey Mansfield or Harry Jaffa, were especially the ones to fill the ranks of the American Constitutionalist school. In the institutions of the United-States they saw much more than merely the application of the thought of the US’ Founding Fathers. They saw the living performance of higher principles, or indeed, for a man like Harry Jaffa, of Biblical teachings. In any case, religion, eventually civil religion, must serve as the cement to bind institutions and society. This call to religion was not foreign to Strauss. But the atheist Jew “enjoyed covering his tracks”, in Georges Balandier’s words. He considered religion as useful to upkeep illusions for the many, without which order could not be maintained. By contrast, the philosopher must conserve a critical spirit to address the few in a coded language as matter to be interpreted and intelligible only to a meritocracy founded on virtue.

Advocating a return to the ancients against the trappings of modernity and illusions of progress, Strauss nonetheless defended liberal democracy as the Enlightenment’s daughter–and American democracy as its quintessence. A contradiction? Doubtless, but a contradiction he tackles in the tradition of other thinkers on liberalism (Montesquieu, Tocqueville). For the critique of liberalism, which runs the risk of losing itself in relativism schematically speaking: the search for Truth loses value is indispensable for its survival. For Strauss, the relativism of the Good results in an inability to react against tyranny.

This active defense of democracy and liberalism reappears in the political vulgate as one of the neoconservative’s favorite themes. The nature of political regimes is much more important than all of the institutions and international arrangements to maintain world peace. The greatest threat comes from States that do not share the values of (American) democracy. Changing these regimes and working for the progress of democratic values are the surest ways to reinforcing security (of the US) and peace.

The importance of political regimes, praise for militant democracy, quasi-religious exaltation of American values and firm opposition to tyranny: any number of these themes, which are the stock and trade of the neoconservatives populating the Bush administration, may be drawn from Strauss’s teachings. At times, they are reviewed and corrected by second-generation ‘Straussians’. Yet one thing separates them from their putative mentor: the Messianic-tainted optimism the neoconservatives unfold to bring freedoms to the world (to the Middle East tomorrow, to Germany and Japan yesterday), as though political voluntarism could change human nature. This is yet another illusion that is perhaps good enough to spread to the masses, but by which the philosopher must not be fooled.

Still, a riddle remains: How does ‘Straussism’, which was first founded on an oral transmission largely tributary of the master thinker’s charisma and expressed in austere books, texts on texts, come to seat its influence in a presidential administration? Pierre Manent, who directs the Raymond-Aron Research Center in Paris, puts forward the idea that the ostracism to which Leo Strauss’s pupils were subject in the American university milieu propelled them toward public service, think tanks and the press. They are relatively over-represented in all of these domains.

Another–complementary–explanation holds to the intellectual void that followed the Cold War which the ‘Straussians’, and in their wake the neoconservatives, seemed best prepared to fill. The fall of the Berlin Wall showed they were right insofar as Reagan’s strong-armed policies with respect to the USSR triggered its downfall. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks confirmed their thesis on the vulnerability of democracies faced with tyranny’s diverse forms. From the war on Iraq, the neocons will be tempted to draw the conclusion that toppling “evil” regimes is possible and desirable. Faced with this temptation, calls to international law may claim moral legitimacy. What is lacking, as things stand today, are the powers of conviction and constraint.

Fascism and the primacy of the political  [By Dick Pels in Telos; Winter 98 Issue 110, p39, 32p]

Politics vs. Economics

One of the core convictions informing radical right-wing thought has been that politics should take precedence over economics and that the power question was more fundamental than the property question.[1] With the purpose of resolving the economic and cultural crisis, fascists and national socialists typically demanded a restoration of the primacy of the political and a repoliticization of economic life, which both liberal and Marxist theory had promoted to the status of an ontological "last instance." Speaking in March 1933, at the height of the political Gleichschaltung following the January coup, Hitler was characteristically straightforward about his intentions: "We want to restore the primacy of the political." In Mein Kampf (1924) he had already pleaded a reversal of the relation between economics and the state, advising that "industry and commerce recede from their unhealthy leading position and adjust themselves to the general framework of a national economy of balanced supply and demand." Capital was to remain "the handmaiden of the state" and not fancy itself "the mistress of the nation." A strong state was needed to act as "intelligence" and "organizer" of national production; economics was only one among its instruments and could never be its cause or aim.[2]

In their famous 1932 encyclopedia article "The Doctrine of Fascism," Mussolini and Gentile likewise asserted that "everything is in the state and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the state." In a broadside against both liberalism and historical materialism, they added that it was absurd to maintain that "economic improvements" sufficed to explain human history to the exclusion of all other factors. It was the totalitarian State, embodying the conscience and ethical will of all citizens, which was called upon to organize the Nation and thus logically also "claimed for itself the field of economics."[3] Gentile's neo-idealism, while advocating a reversal of Marx back toward Hegel, delineated the all-powerful state as both the highest embodiment of the citizens' ethical consciousness and economic activity as essentially subordinate to this ethical force. While liberals and Marxists had accepted economic principles as abstract, universally applicable laws, only fascist corporate economists had recognized that they should be controlled and regulated from a higher ethical-political viewpoint.[4]

This self-image has to some extent been ratified by outside observers, both neutral and inimical. The postwar political sociology of totalitarian regimes characteristically has operated from the assumption, in Talmon's words, that totalitarianism "recognizes ultimately only one plane of existence, the political," and tends to widen the scope of politics to embrace the whole of human existence.[5] Neo-Marxist theories of fascism,[6] in relaxing the rigid hold of the reductionary "iron guard of capital" interpretation, have likewise acknowledged the primacy of the political in fascist regimes, although under the sign of an expanded concept of economic determination in the "last" instance. In an early (1941) analysis of the national socialist regime as a form of state capitalism, Friedrich Pollock argued that the Third Reich was presently constructing a new economic order "in which market was replaced by command." Poulantzas' subsequent elaboration of the Marxian model of "Bonapartism" similarly emphasized the enhanced autonomy of the political vis-a-vis the economic sphere.[7] In an equally influential work, Mason explained the political disenfranchisement of the propertied classes and the ensuing "primacy of politics" in National Socialist Germany as necessarily ensuing from the inability of"capital" to bring about the recovery of the economy and the reproduction of civil society, which required a strong government to forge a new social and economic compromise.[8]

To take fascism and National Socialism seriously as intellectual systems, however, let alone to take fascist professions of continuity with specific varieties of socialism seriously, remains a hotly contested "revisionist" view which many students of the radical Right consider dangerously close to euphemizing a politics of irrationalism and radical evil. Traditionally, fascist ideologues could not be taken "at their word," since even the smallest suspicion of their alleged "rationality" engendered revulsion and unease; that fascist movements were anti-spiritual, that their sparse ideas were only negative and that, on balance, ideology did not carry much weight, long remained common conviction to both laymen and expert historians.[9] In the present context, this long-standing conviction easily translates into the claim that the "primacy of the political" did not constitute an intellectual conviction worthy of substantive analysis but constituted no more than the specious signature of an irrational and inexhaustible scramble for power.

Since the early 1960s, however, "revisionist" political historians such as Stem, Nolte, Gregor and Sternhell have begun to recognize that fascism did indeed feature a complex, systematic and coherent ideological doctrine, which reflected a respectable historical ancestry and was decisive for practical politics. Accordingly, fascist ideology was not nihilistic but founded on authentic forms of intellectual idealism. Neither was it conservative, at least not in the traditional sense; it represented an authentic revolutionary impulse.[10] Intellectual historians are also increasingly acknowledging that fascism provided reasonably coherent answers to evident weaknesses, gaps and paradoxes in rival ideologies such as liberalism and socialism --especially in its Marxist and anarchist variants. Perhaps this critical relation has been especially close with Marxism, which fascist and national socialist thinkers consistently targeted as their most formidable competitor. Apart from elaborating an extended critique of Marxist scientific rationalism, fascist ideologues also cornered defects in its theory about the role of political elites and cultural leadership, and criticized the silences and biases in its concepts of social class (specifically concerning the position of the alienated middle classes and the peasantry) in its theory about national sentiment and in its concepts of political power and the state. So far, however, fascism has hardly been given a serious hearing as a theoretical competitor of Marxism, or as an ideology which was pitched at an intellectual level comparable to its rival. It is still rare, in this context, to acknowledge the intellectual failures of socialism and Marxism themselves, and the concomitant attractions which were exercised by the counter-ideology of fascism.

The Fascist Equation

Writing in 1933, both as a former syndicalist Marxist and as the most prestigious political scientist of the Mussolini regime, Robert Michels outlined the relation between Marxism and fascism as follows: "Fascism cannot be comprehensively understood without an understanding of Marxism. This is true not only because contemporary phenomena cannot be adequately understood without a knowledge of the facts that preceded them in time (and with which they are linked dialectically), but also because of the points of contact which, in spite of everything, remain. That which, to its advantage, distinguishes Italian Fascism from German National Socialism, is its painful passage through the purgatory of the socialist system, with its impressive heritage of scientific and philosophical thought from Saint-Simon through Marx and Sorel."[11]

Leading thinkers of the "Conservative Revolution" in Weimar Germany chose to picture their indebtedness to Marxist thought in more agonistic terms. Moeller van den Bruck, author of the prophetic Das dritte Reich (1923), claimed to counter internationalist, democratic and proletarian socialism by a truly "German" socialism, which was to be nationalist, elitist and authoritarian in inspiration; it would hence "begin where Marxism ended" in order to eliminate all traces of liberalism in the spiritual history of mankind.[12] Hans Freyer, a well-known sociologist and author of the influential pamphlet Revolution von Rechts, suggested that the very demise of the revolution of the Left was presently creating room for a revolution from the Right; this volkische revolution, directed by the State as its conscious and organizational vanguard, would finally emancipate the State from its century-long entwinement in societal interests.[13] In the preface to his synoptic pro-Nazi work, Deutscher Sozialismus, Werner Sorebart, while recommending an intimate knowledge of Marxism as an "ineluctable demand" for any participant in politics, considered it his duty "to direct the apparently strong forces that work for a completion of the national socialist idea in its socialist aspect."[14]

In Weimar Germany, as in France and Italy before WWI, revolutionary conservatism thus partly developed through a critical confrontation with and digestion of Marxist socialism, which one way or the other counted among the most significant cultural roots of fascist ideology. Under this aspect, fascism can be truthfully described as socialism's "dark side." Anticipated by Burnham and Hayek,[15] this thesis about the peculiar relation between Marxism and fascism is encountered in contemporary historical disputes with different shades of emphasis. For Nolte, fascism represents a radical counter-ideology, which in its "hostile proximity" remains deeply indebted to its polar opposite. In his familiar definition, fascism is "anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy."[16] For Gregor, fascism represents not so much a reversal of Marxism as a radical heresy emerging from crisis-ridden classical Marxism, which "was sufficiently vague and porous to accommodate all the theoretical elements later put together by Mussolini and the first Fascists to fashion their revolutionary ideology." Along with many others in his political environment, the young Mussolini was a Marxist intellectual heretic who should be taken seriously in that capacity. Indeed, fascism itself should be taken seriously as "a variant of classical Marxism" rather than as its metaphysical opposite.[17]

Sternhell has carved out a position that mediates between the opposite exaggerations of Nolte and Gregor. According to him, fascism neither constitutes the "long shadow" or mirror image of Marxism, nor can it be simply seen as one of its heretical branches. The "fascist equation," instead, emerges from the synthesis of a specific anti-rationalist and anti-materialist revision of Marxism (the anarcho-syndicalist school of Sorel, Lagardelle, Michels, Berth and others) and of a newly developed "integral" and revolutionary nationalism, elaborated in France by Barres, Maurras and Valois and in Italy by former syndicalists such as Labriola, Panunzio, Corradini, Michels and Mussolini. In this respect, a revision of Marxism in a revolutionary syndicalist direction (or a "revolutionary revisionism," as Michels termed it) formed at least one of the two crucial tributaries to ideological fascism.[18] This "revolutionary revisionism" considered itself anti-bourgeois, anti-parliamentarian and anti-party, glorifying a revolutionary spirit of combat without privileging the proletariat as world-historical actor. It embraced socialism less as an outcome of objectively determined economic coordination than as a matter of ethical choice; and it squarely acknowledged the "authoritarian" fact of leadership by political intellectuals, grounding its utopian expectations on a novel union between this radical managerial intelligentsia and the broad ranks of the "people" or "nation."

Fascist ideology thus emerged, at least in part, from a novel confluence of Marxism and anarchism, or more precisely: from an anarcho-syndicalist revision of Marxist orthodoxy which increasingly distanced itself from the latter's economistic, deterministic and egalitarian premises. French revolutionary syndicalism always placed more emphasis on the role of ethical sentiment and political will, on myth and intuition, and on the autonomy of intellectual and political elites; its Italian counterpart, drifting away even further from classical anarchist principles, gradually accentuated authoritarian notions about revolutionary organization, discipline and vanguard leadership, while simultaneously exchanging traditional internationalist views for a closer recognition of the irrepressible fact of nationality. In the first decade of the present century, syndicalists such as Panunzio, Olivetti and Michels, invoking Engels' familiar remarks on the necessity of authority for all types of social organization, came to describe revolutionary syndicalism as essentially "authoritarian" in character and the syndicalist elite as a "new aristocracy" charged with the historic mission of educating the passive working masses toward a new moral and political consciousness. By 1909, Michels advanced the notion of an "iron law of elites," arising from the necessity of organizing for group and class conflicts, especially of a revolutionary nature.[19] In the same vein, Mussolini called Pareto's theory of elites "perhaps the most ingenuous sociological conception of modem times," and went on to describe himself as an "authoritarian" and "aristocratic" socialist.[20]

In a further development, dominated by the experiences of war and economic crisis in an industrially backward nation such as Italy, the syndicalist emphasis on the role of revolutionary elites substituting for an absent or immature proletariat was blended with a growing emphasis on the priority of developing the forces of production within the national framework. This emphasis, if stamped with the revolutionary urgency constitutive of syndicalist ideology, logically led to a reinforced "nationalization" and "statization" of its framework of analysis, which finally overturned what still remained of anarchist anti-authoritarian principles. Italy, to the syndicalists, was a "proletarian nation" which had first to traverse the stage of industrial development and throw off the tutelage of the more advanced capitalist nations before it was able to complete something like a Marxian revolution. What was needed was a strong "developmental" state that would harmonize the classes and organize a productivist revolution from above.[21] Pioneered in Italy by Corradini, Panunzio and Michels, this "proletarian nationalism" or "state syndicalism," by proclaiming an end to the disruptive class war and seeking the "total mobilization" of all productive forces in the nation under the guidance of a dynamic, innovatory and entrepreneurial state, subsequently re-emerged both in "conservative revolutionary" and "national Bolshevik" thought in Weimar Germany and in that of Belgian and French neosocialisme. In claiming the sovereignty of state politics over economic production, "national socialism," in this specific "developmental" version, simultaneously affirmed the primacy of the political and conceded the essentially secondary nature of the property question; property rights were henceforth defined as socially functional and contingent upon the demands of state-directed economic development. Not surprisingly, fascism's comparative "leniency" toward private property was precisely the master criterion which its Marxist adversaries required in order to "prove" its essentially reactionary nature as a handmaiden of capitalism.[22] Anarchism, of course, had been dismissed as a "petty-bourgeois luxury" on precisely the same ground.

"German Socialism" as Power Theory

It is a curious coincidence that one of the most detailed and influential polemics written against state socialist views by the founders of historical materialism can be plausibly read as an anticipatory critique of the fascist and national socialist affirmation of the primacy of the political. This polemic was directed against the "German socialism" of Eugen-Karl Duhring and written by Engels in 1877-78 in order to combat the growing influence of the former's ideas in the socialist movement of his day. A Berlin philosopher and economist, Duhring combined a defence of free competition with the notion of creating a strong national state expressive of the general will of the German Volk, which would establish an autarkic political economy and supervise a nationalized culture built on class harmony. This "German socialism"[23] was strongly contrasted with the "Jewish" socialism of Marx and his associates.

Duhring, of course, is one among the select army of thinkers who seems solely remembered today because Marx and Engels at one time considered it worth their while to consign to the scrapheap of intellectual history.[24] While major figures such as Stirner and Proudhon have meanwhile successfully shaken off this Marxian shadow, Duhring is still almost exclusively known through the abbreviated title of Engels' exhaustively and consistently malevolent Anti-Duhring. His views are only briefly outlined here because his vision of a nationalist and state-directed "German" socialism largely anticipated the revolutionary-conservative thinking as it emerged from the ordeal of the Great War and the intellectual ferment of Weimar in the 1920s and early 1930s. In the wartime and postwar writings of Plenge, Sombart, Spengler, Junger, Freyer and Schmitt, much of the debate with Marxism was once again condensed in the analytical dilemma about the subordination of the political vis-a-vis the economic. A considerable part of Engels' polemic against Duhring was likewise devoted to a critical dissection of the latter's "theory of force," seeking to reverse his conviction that the constitution of political relations was historically fundamental and that economic dependencies were only an effect or a special case and hence invariably constituted "facts of secondary importance." Some of the newer socialist systems, Duhring stated, had totally reversed the order of priority by deriving political phenomena from economic conditions. Although such secondary, retroactive effects were indeed present, the primitive fact had to be located in immediate political force and not in indirect economic power. The original "fall from grace," when Robinson Crusoe enslaved Friday, from which all subsequent history took its departure, was an act of force; and all property was therefore Gewalteigentum, since it rested upon this original act of political subjection.[25]

Duhring's own example, Engels riposted, clearly demonstrated that force was only the means, while economic advantage (the surplus labor extracted from Friday) constituted the end; which made the economic aspect of the relation historically more fundamental than the political one. In order to enslave Friday, Robinson Crusoe had to dispose of the tools and material objects of labor as well as the means for the slave's own subsistence, which presupposed a certain level of productivity and distributive inequality. In this fashion, Duhring stood the entire relation on its head. Everywhere private property emerged from changes in relations of production and exchange in which the role of force did not enter. The entire necessary movement toward monopolization of the means of production and subsistence in the hands of a restricted class and the attendant demotion of the vast majority to the status of propertyless proletarians could be explained from purely economic causes without having to invoke phenomena such as theft, force, state action or any other kind of political involvement. Force remained universally dependent upon Money, which could only be generated by economic production; it was the economic situation which ultimately furnished Force with the equipment it required.[26]

If Duhring, as Michels later reported,[27] was temporarily "buried alive" by Engels' massive polemic, it would not be long before ideas closely resembling his volkische socialism caught the imagination of an entire generation of German "anti-intellectual" and anti-Marxist intellectuals. From around 1910, but especially spurred by the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, authors such as Sombart, Plenge, Spengler, Junger, Van den Bruck, Freyer and Schmitt were to crystallize similar ideas into what became known as the "German socialism" of the "Conservative Revolution."[28] Roughly a decade after the incubation period of Italian national syndicalism, the "conservative revolutionaries" reinvented and deepened in all important respects its conceptual merger of intransigent nationalism and radical anticapitalism. The "primacy of the political over the economic" stood out as one major common theme. Thus, in Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911), Sombart, already renowned as a left-wing sociologist and historian of capitalism, expounder the view that the primacy of the economy over all other spheres of social life had been the special contribution of the "Jewish spirit."[29] The capitalist domination of money and abstraction was Jewish in its essence; Jews represented everything that was universal, rootless, international and abstract in contrast to all that was local, rooted, nationalist and concrete. Two souls, in fact, lived in the breast of the capitalist entrepreneur: the "German" one of dynamic risk-taking and rational planning of production and the "Jewish" one of calculating for financial gain. While the "German" entrepreneur was an inventor, organizer and leader, "a hero of production," the "Jewish" merchant was exclusively interested in commercial profit and remained indifferent to the product itself.

Sombart's wartime pamphlet Handler und Helden (1915) extrapolated this opposition between the spirit of commercialism and the spirit of organization -- and between the exemplary types of economic and political man -- to the national contest between Germany, a nation of social order and political hierarchy, and England, the historical guardian of the merchant capitalist spirit. English commercial civilization had to be countered by the "German idea of the state," as pioneered by Fichte, Lassalle and Rodbertus, which requested subordination of individual interests to the higher interests of the popular community.[30] The outbreak of the war had triggered a broad stream of patriotic polemics revolving around what Johann Plenge, a neo-Hegelian sociologist, had influentially styled the "Ideas of 1914." 1789 and 1914 symbolized the two grand principles in the history of political thought battling for pre-eminence: the ideal of individual freedom, which was the essence of liberal capitalism, and the ideal of social organization, which constituted the essence of socialism. Whereas the 19th century had been an atomized, critical and disorganized century, the 20th century was to be dominated by the idea of "German organization," which was commissioned to establish the popular community of a national socialism. In Der Krieg und die Volkswirtschaft (1915) Plenge, like Sombart, extrapolated the opposition between capitalism and socialism toward the war of the West against Germany; first realized as a war economy, German socialism would consolidate a state-regulated Volkswirtschaft after the inspirational example of Fichte's "closed commercial state." It was high time to recognize that "socialism must be power policy, because it is to be organization. Socialism has to win power, never blindly destroy it."[31]

Spengler's Preussentum und Sozialismus (1919) was perhaps the most stirring conservative-revolutionary call to arms issuing from this wartime intellectual ferment. Like Sombart and Plenge, he divined an implacable opposition between the "English" liberal spirit of society, profit and competition and the "Prussian" instinct of order, community, hierarchy, duty and labor. This opposition had unfolded into a heroic life-or-death clash between two dominating "world ideas": the dictatorship of money and that of organization, which defined the world alternatively "as booty or as state, wealth or authority, success or profession." Would in the future, Spengler rhetorically asked, "commerce govern the state or the state govern commerce?"[32] To decide this issue, German socialism had to be liberated from Marx, who had merely invented a kind of "inverted capitalism," and install an authoritarian socialism -- a socialism of the civil servant and the organizer, which was prepared to use to the full the economic authority of the state. The essence of socialism did not reside in the opposition between rich and poor, but in the fact that rank, performance and competence would rule life. In Spengler's projected state corporatism, property would not be seen as private booty but as a procuration of the whole community; not as an expression and means of personal power but as a trust or fief for which the proprietor owed accountability to the state. In this respect, socialization was not so much a matter of nominal possession but of technique of administration. Socialism, in brief, meant "power, power and yet again power. Plans and thoughts are nothing without power."[33]

Freyer, Junger, Sombart

Three other texts are worthy of attention here, since together they consolidated the intellectual framework of German socialism as a theory of power rather than one of property: Freyer's Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft im philosophischen Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts (1921), Junger's Der Arbeiter (1932) and Sombart's Deutscher Sozialismus (1934). Freyer's Habilitations-schrift fleshed out ideas about the commercial and "marketing" spirit of the 19th century, adopted from his teachers Plenge and Sombart, in a broadly conceived intellectual history of the "naturalization" or autonomization of the "economic" frame of mind. Liberal political economy and the socialist tradition shared the same basic concept of the abstract law-like autonomy and the primordial value of economic life, which Marx had even elevated into an ontologically grounded essence -- a "cause of causes" in the interplay of cultural moments.[34] With the avowed purpose of reframing this economic rationalism in a new communitarian ethics and politics of the people state, Freyer invoked the Romantic tradition of national economy, especially Adam Muller's Elemente der Staatskunst, whose idea of a corporatist Volkswirtschafi, in which each function partook of "the spiritual whole of the politicized economy," had received further elaboration at the hands of authors such as List, Rodbertus, Hildebrand and Schaffle. "Economic life," Freyer summed up, "is not necessarily the commercial contest of atomized interests, which it is at present. It is a spiritual concern of the state community."[35] Recently this tradition of historical, ethical (and truly political) economy had tended more strongly in a state socialist direction. Extrapolating this trend, Freyer harmonized this tradition's shared neo-Hegelian concept of the ethical state with that of volkische political nationalism by identifying it as "the acme, in which the people become historical," both anticipating his subsequent laudation of the state as the ultimate perfection of spiritual development in Der Staat (1926) and his ringing expression about the state as "the politicized people" in Revolution von Rechts (1931).[36]

Following Spengler and Sombart, at the beginning of the 1930s Junger developed a spectacular metaphysic of war, discipline and total mobilization which has accurately been described as a "conservative anarchism."[37] His portentous essay "Die totale Mobilmachung" (1930) and his book Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (1932) -- which carried a memorable dedication to Spengler -- became foundational for National Bolshevik tendencies as formulated by his friend Niekisch, for younger conservative revolutionaries around the journal Die Tat and for the "left-wing" national socialist tendency represented by the young Goebbels and the Strasser brothers within the NSDAP. Developing earlier suggestions by Plenge and Moeller van den Brock, these circles saw the insurrection of "young," "proletarian" nations such as Soviet Russia and Germany against the "old" capitalist powers as requiring a national and autarkic "war socialism" geared toward a total mobilization of all of the nation's human and material resources. Germany's military defeat, Moeller van den Brock had argued after Versailles, should be exploited as an "educational" challenge. Since, like the proletariat, Germany now possessed little more than its chains, it should not fear the coming world revolution, but could spearhead the war of liberation of the expropriated nations against the world bourgeoisie. Junger, Niekisch, Edgar Jung, the Tatkreis intellectuals[38] and the Strasserites within (and soon to be drummed out of) the NSDAP all echoed this alarming conversion of the Marxist idea of the economic alienation of the proletariat into that of the spiritual-political contamination of the nation.

Reversing Rathenau's dictum that, in the modem world, not politics but economics had acquired the force of fate, Junger outlined a universal trend toward state-directed mobilization and planned organization of economic life, which forced everyone and everything into the harsh mold of an all-enveloping logic of power.[39] It was instructive to notice, for instance, that in the Soviet planning experiment the economic mode of thinking had superseded itself and evolved into an outright deployment of power. The world war had essentially been a gigantic labor process, fusing the Warrior and the Worker into a single form, which sharply contrasted with that of the bourgeois, the typical representative of liberal disorganization.[40] Editors of Die Tat such as Fried and Wirsing likewise emphasized this inevitable drive toward state organization of economic life in terms of an autarkic planned economy, which was prefigured in the war economy but remained imperative in order to shield Germany from the havoc of a collapsing world economy. By pressing the economy into its service, the state would simultaneously "grow together" with the working masses and, in fusing state and people, it would realize the perfection of democracy. In this new frame of things, the place of economic science would once again be taken by the political sciences.[41]

Junger's Der Arbeiter (1932) further detailed the worker-soldier as the archetypal "political man" and torchbearer of a totalitarian industrial dictatorship, over against the liberal and Marxist conception of the worker as "product of industry" and a merely "economic quality."[42] The emancipation of the laborer from the economic world implied his subordination to a higher law of struggle. It meant that the pivotal point of the worker's insurrection was neither economic freedom nor economic power, but power as such. In contrast with the security-minded bourgeois, the worker enjoyed "a new relation with the elementary, with freedom and power;" the will to power was the truest representation of his form.[43] Property and labor power stood under state protection and hence were essentially limited in their freedom of movement. Indeed, "in terms of an investigation of the worker" the question of private property was much less interesting than current ideology presumed. Different from the world of liberal economy, it did matter much less in the world of labor whether property was considered moral or immoral; what counted was whether it could be included into a general labor plan. More important was the manner in which the state instituted and circumscribed property as a subordinate fact; its value would rather be assessed in terms of its contribution to the realization of total mobilization, or what Junger synonymically referred to as the mobilization of labor.[44]

Speaking around the same time at the Fascist Congress of Corporations at Ferrara, Sombart once again summed up what had become the central credo of the Conservative Revolution: that the previous century had been the century of economics, in which economic interests weighed heavier than all other factors of culture, but that the future was going to be a political epoch, in which politics would once again reign supreme.[45] Sombart's Deutscher Sozialismus, published a year after the Hitler coup, was similarly written as a comprehensive indictment of the primacy of the economic as the most essentially negative characteristic of the time. Repeating and systematizing all the major themes developed over the decade by himself and other writers of the radical Right, he insisted that economic rationalization had conjured up the triple disease of intellectualization, objectification and uniformity. Bourgeois class formation, the proletarian class struggle and hence also proletarian socialism were actually "true children of the economic age": Marx's metaphysics of history incorrectly generalized this particularity of the economic into a defining characteristic of human history. Meanwhile the "idea of the state" had gradually faded away and finally disappeared. German socialism was therefore nothing other than "the renunciation of the economic age in its totality." Because it targeted the general spirit of this age, it was far more radical than other movements. While proletarian socialism, more specifically, was only "capitalism with a negative sign," German socialism was truly anti-capitalist.[46]

After much preliminary footwork, Sorebart went on to identify socialism as a "social normativism" set over against the "social naturalism" of economizing thought, explaining that obligatory norms originated from the "general reason" rooted in the political community as represented by its state. Socialism was hence not confined to the economy, but had to be understood as "the total order of the German people," a total ordering of all sectors of culture born from a uniform spirit and issuing from a single center. Because this popular socialism realized itself within the national framework, the only powers which were able to carry it through were state powers. Invoking the heritage of Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Rodbertus and Lassalle, Sombart consequently insisted on the need for a strong state which would govern a corporate, organic and hierarchical social order which recognized the primacy of the political.[47] The planned economy of German socialism would be at once comprehensive, single-minded and differentiated. The private economy would not need to be liquidated, as long as it was incorporated in a larger meaningful whole directed by the popular will embodied in the state. The property question, Sombart stipulated, was indeed "not an independent issue" for German socialism. For it, the bitterly embattled alternative of private vs. communal property did not exist. Private property was not unlimited in scope, but remained socially committed after the model of feudal tenure.[48] The core issue was that property rights no longer determined the foundations of economic activity, but that the (political) foundations of economic activity henceforth determined the scope and character of property rights.[49]

Dialectics of the Political: Schmitt and Others

In their totalizing conceptualizations of power, the political and the state, ideologists of the radical Right tended to retain a cognitive pattern typical of the intellectual systems they sought to reverse: the dialectic of the "last instance." The subtle Marxist scenario of over-determined reciprocity remained in place, resulting in a dialectic of constitution which similarly articulated the social whole into relatively autonomous spheres, even if the status of ontological "category of origin" now fell on the political. Curiously, this reversed dialectic derived as much from a politicized recapitulation of the Hegelian notion of the ethical state, interpreted as the culmination of the entire idealist tradition, as nourished by a duly collectivized and nationalized version of Nietzsche's will to power. If the Conservative Revolution was virtually "unthinkable" without Nietzsche,[50] the work of Spengler, Freyer and Sombart -- and, in the Italian context, that of Gentile, Spirito, Panunzio, Olivetti and Michels -- was there to verify the enduring legacy and converging influence of the accredited father of the dialectic.

Appropriated by Moeller van den Bruck in his pioneering article "Nietzsche und der Sozialismus" (1919), the Nietzschean metaphysic of power also infiltrated Spengler's Preussentum und Sozialismus (1919) and its call for "hardness," for a class of "socialist supermen," and for "power, power and yet again power."[51] If Spengler could affirm, in the first part of The Decline of the West (1918), that "all of life is politics," the latter was again taken in the transcendental Nietzschean sense and closely identified with "life," "action," and "war;" while his concept of the "state" tendentially encompassed all human activity, the connecting tissue of its living whole, in the long tradition that connected Muller to Fichte and Hegel. For his part, Gentile was clear about adopting Mazzini's inclusive concept of the political "in that overall sense which is indistinguishable from morality, religion, or any other conception of life." As a totalitarian doctrine with its center of gravity in political matters, fascism was therefore not simply concerned with the political order but sought to encompass the nation's "will, thought and feelings." As supreme creator of rights and liberties, the power of the stato etico was coextensive with social order and constituted the individual's true moral reality; state and individual should accordingly be considered "inseparable terms of an essential synthesis."[52]

Freyer's Der Staat (1926) laid out this political dialectic in terms of a world-historical progression of three stages directed by the development of objective Spirit, which he described as belief, style and state. The final stage, in which spirit took a "political turn," represented the ultimate telos and perfection of cultural development. Here spirit realized its ultimate objectification in the state, which would henceforth politicize all elements of culture; it was truly "the spirit of the age."[53] The stage of style, although it had proliferated the manifold expressions of human creativity, had not been able to unify them; the essential quality of the state, by contrast, was its ability to forge living humanity with all its forces into a unity. The world could only be changed through power, which remained "one of the integrative and formative forces of the human world." Power created form out of the flux of life and molded the individual into "a necessary link in the exalted whole of the Reich."[54] Freyer's totalizing concepts of power and domination found a clear resonance in Junger's Der Arbeiter and many other writings of the radical Right.[55]

In subsequent work, such as the 1933 essay Herrschaft, Planung und Technik, Freyer not only repeated his criticism of the Marxist tendency to "shift the fact of domination toward the economic" and interpret it as a mere form of exploitation, but also explicitly drew on Max Weber's "realistic" account of the ubiquity of domination in all types of social organization.[56] In this essay he also specified that, unlike classical liberal (and presumably, Marxist) thought, structural differentiation and stratification could well originate from the state, which could even actively create new estates or classes with functions of domination, such as the noblesse de robe or a proprietory bourgeoisie. This emphasis was repeated in somewhat different form in "Das Politische als Problem der Philosophic" (1935), which lamented 19th-century philosophy's dogmatic "neutralization" of the political, pleading philosophical recognition of the fact that the political belonged to the essence and destiny of mankind, that it signified no less than mankind's "second creation." Virtually reversing the Marxist dialectics of economic constitution, Freyer intoned that the political was the true soil from which culture grew, adding in Hegelian fashion that the state constituted the "totality of the systems of the objective spirit," the sum of its own social articulations. These systems were "not just regulated or protected or historically represented by it, but constituted and brought into existence as its moments, even in their capacity as autonomous spheres."[57]

So far there has been hardly any mention of the major intellectual figure whose influential concept of the political[58] perhaps offered the most clear-cut example of this reversal of ontological terms.[59] Indeed, Schmitt's vivid defence of the autonomy of the political against liberal and Marxist "neutralizations" and "depoliticizations"[60] notoriously slipped into a far more offensive claim about the political as first and last constitutive instance, which acted as a totalizing force, even while the specificity of alternative instances was to some extent preserved. The political was essentially autonomous, not in the sense of marking out a new area laterally positioned vis-a-vis others (such as morality, culture, economics, or religion), but as a self-revealing essence not reducible to any one of them but that could operate in all. Because it was oriented toward the emergency or the state of exception, the specifically political distinction -- between friend and enemy -- marked the highest degree of intensity of a social association or dissociation. As a matter of tension rather than extension, it had no substance of its own; the specifically "political" might be reached from all areas as soon as indigenous conflicts were fueled into a high degree of polarity. The political logic was hence always foundational and the political entity always the decisive entity, sovereign in the sense of being determinant in the decisive instance. The state was therefore the determinant condition of a people, "its status as such," the societas perfecta of this nether world.[61] In a democratically organized community, state and society mutually penetrated and fused, inaugurating the "total state" of the "identity between state and society," in which politically neutral areas ceased to exist. Even if "state-free" societal spheres were reconstituted, they were conditionally demarcated by the totalizing and functionalizing state.[62] As Schmitt declared, not only should one acknowledge that "the political" was "the total," but also that the decision about whether something is unpolitical invariably entails a political decision.[63]

Such theoretical preferences lent a peculiar significance to Schmitt's apercu, in The Concept of the Political, with regard to the "19th century German tension of state and society, politics and economy." As backdrop to a rather specific critique of Oppenheimer's liberal sociology of the state, which emphatically reversed the Hegelian order of evaluation, this insight also appeared to have wider validity for interpreting similar reversals by anarchist, syndicalist and Marxist thinkers. While Hegel, as Schmitt explained, set the state as the realm of ethical perfection and objective reason high above society, Oppenheimer's radical liberalism instead privileged economic society as the sphere of peaceful justice and equal exchange, degrading the state as a region of violent immorality, "extraeconomic" force, thievery and conquest. While the roles were reversed, the apotheosis remained.[64] Despite such unusual perceptiveness about "knowledge-political" rivalries between foundational concepts and intellectual systems, Schmitt himself, however, did not reflexively withdraw from the grand polemic and the grand binary but manifestly reinforced them by once again celebrating a grand apotheosis of the political.

Whereas, for Oppenheimer as for radical Marxists, the state would wither away and everything would become "societal" or "economic" -- since both the liberal and the communist state coincided with the associated producers -- everything would turn political in Schmitt's homogeneous people's state. The sovereignty of the economy (and of political economy as master science) was once again exchanged for the sovereignty of the political (and of political philosophy). This structural affinity turned Oppenheimer, Marx and Schmitt into "last instance" theorists with comparable ambitions: spokesmen who permitted themselves to be carried by "their" instances and by the science which lent them a socio-ontological primacy. Indeed, ira specific instance is claimed to be "sovereign," "decisive," or "inescapable," this is metonymically valid for the theory and the theorist that cultivate it as such.

The Intellectuals' Socialism of the Right

If for many intellectuals on the radical Right "the political" operated as a dialectical category of origin, allowing a permanent slippage between a partial, domanial concept and more totalizing and foundational ones, it also opened vast possibilities for what can be called the "metonymic fallacy of the intellectuals."[65] As radical spokesmen for the higher interests of state sovereignty, national homogeneity and cultural identity, the political intellectuals of the Right consistently insinuated their partial concerns into their missionary definitions of the "general will" and the world-historical project of the nation. The identitarian dialectic of power reflected their aspiration to emerge as the "part" that would empower the "whole"; it enabled them to read their own desired fate (to be prime movers and final causes of social action) into the objective hierarchy and causality of the world. The logic of substitution, according to which the people was defined as coming to reflexive self-consciousness in its state, also reflected a politics of knowledge through which the intellectuals molded both people and state after their own missionary self-image. Their oscillatory, "emanative," systematically overflowing concept of sovereignty, domination and the state silently suggested that intellectual spokesmen were legitimately everywhere and could substitute for all other interests. The claim about the ontological primacy of the political performatively but obliquely supported the more subterranean claim about the political primacy of the intellectuals themselves.

As an initial illustration of this knowledge-political double play, we may call attention to the obverse side of the right-wing intellectuals' politicization of the intellect, which was consistently balanced with a distinctly spiritualist or intellectualist definitions of the state and the political themselves. Extrapolating the long lineage of idealist philosophy and Romantic historiography which culminated in the Hegelian idea of objective spirit, the state was preferably circumscribed as a "spiritual form," a rational state in which the people became a subject-for-itself, attaining reflexive self-consciousness about its moral will and historical mission. The Hegelian ethical state was not only the moralizing but simultaneously the reasoning or rational state, the "social brain" which would act as a dynamic unifier and mobilizer of all human and physical resources. Gentile's neo-idealist statism was as spiritualist as Freyer's, which eulogized the state early on as the "spiritually conceived subject of history"[66] and as "the spirit as a goal,"[67] carefully stipulating that only those who knew the true direction of Geist had a right to historical action. Adding to a theme which had already attained prolific dimensions on the radical Right, Freyer also portrayed political action as a creative act and the political leader as a creative artist, who gave form to his people as an artist lent form to his work of art.[68] The "political turn" of spirit was hence consistently accompanied by a "spiritual turn" in the definition of the political itself; the newly projected synthesis of reason and power, far from implying a linear reduction of the former to the latter, simultaneously represented a bid for a spiritualized politics and a bid for power on the part of the "spiritual men" themselves.

The core notion of a knowledgeable, moralizing and entrepreneurial state also included an ambition toward the spiritualization of economic life, once again to be taken in the triple sense of rationalization, moratization and politicization. This cluster of virtual synonyms focussed what became one of the most persistent thematics in the discourse of the intellectual Right: the contrast between the Germanic "spirit of organization," inherently partial to rational planning and socialism, and the un-German (English, Jewish or generically foreign) spirit of capitalist individualism and disorganization. While the Italian fascist idea of the state as supreme consciousness and universal will of the nation could in this respect build on the tradition of political syndicalism, the Hitlerian conception of the strong state as "intelligence" and "organizer" of national production extended and repeated what was already fully contained in the "ideas of 1914," which had dramatized the world-historical contest between the "idea of money" and the "idea of organization," and prophesied the coming rule of "the socialism of the civil servant and the organizer."[69] This Saint-Simonian form of the intellectual organizer also moved up front in the "developmental," mobilizing regimes as they were projected in the planning utopias of the Italian syndicalists or those of Junger, Freyer and the Tatkreis.[70] Total mobilization of labor, to Junger, was clearly suggestive of the novel power of organizational thinking.[71] His warrior-worker, moreover, was evidently metonymic for the political technician or the "organizing" intellectual (such as Junger himself), whose existential condition and missionary aspirations had also inspired the (equally self-referring) profile of the class-conscious proletarian fighter according to Marx. In a broader intellectual context, indeed, the national syndicalist and conservative-revolutionary concepts of a state-directed "organization of labor" were definitely reminiscent of and parasitic on leftwing socialist concepts, as formulated much earlier by, e.g., Proudhon and Blanc.

Predictably, this idea of the "organization of labor" also encircled a persistent theme in corporatist thought, both in its more etatist and its more democratic "societal" versions.[72] As Manoilescu phrased it in his influential Le siecle du corporatisme, the economically defined dominance of labor and capital was presently receding into the past, while political "organization" was emerging as a novel autonomous force, inaugurating a regime of order, unity and competence. In the new functionalist order, authority would dominate property, which was essentially a rent in the general interest, to be guarded by a dynamically innovating and coordinating state. Appealing to Saint-Simon as an inspiring precursor and emphasizing the radical differences separating the corporatist project from both liberalism and communism, Manoilescu prefigured the organizer as the true prototype of the coming corporatist state.[73] Similar concepts about a corporatist technocracy and a "new aristocracy" of technicians and political intellectuals were current in the writings of Italian syndicalists and nationalists such as Michels, Rocco, Spirito and Panunzio.[74] They also resonated in German-Romantic utopias about an organically articulated people's economy, in which all occupations would be defined as civic duties and in which a managerial elite of engineers, industrialists and volkische intellectuals would institute rational order within the framework of the national community.

Clearly, there was a significant fight-wing, "national-socialist" variant of the traditionally Left-identified, "Saint-Simonian" vision of the political calling of a new managing elite and the significance of fascist ideology cannot be fully grasped independently of this elitist claim. The history of this multifaceted, politically diversified "socialism of the intellectuals," even if it was promoted by self-styled "anti-intellectual intellectuals" critical of Enlightenment values, at least sensitizes to some peculiar aspects of the still widely tabooed intellectual proximity between radical Left and radical Right, whose shared technocratic ideals sometimes offered a bridgehead for mutual intellectual exchanges and even crossovers from one side to the other. The viability and ubiquity of this shared "technocratic dream" was nowhere more clear than in the fateful itinerary of "crossover" intellectuals such as Mussolini, Michels, Lagardelle and other Sorelians in early-century France and Italy, represented more rarely in Germany by thinkers such as Sombart and epitomized perhaps most dramatically by Marcel Deat in France and Hendrik de Man in Belgium in the mid- and late 1930s.

"Crown princes" both of their respective parties, the SFIO and the BWP and influential revisionists of the orthodox Marxism embraced by their patrons Blum and Vandervelde, during the 1930s Deat and De Man slowly drifted toward premises and political tactics approximating notions about the strong state, a "national socialism," a state-directed economy and the rule of an intellectual technocracy also current at the other end of the political spectrum. Opposing Blum's "economistic" and "fatalist" policies in the summer of 1933, Deat and his associates capped their defence of a radically activist neosocialisme with the ringing slogan "Order, Authority, Nation," pleading a shift from class to national policy and the necessity of first organizing the economy within the national framework. De Man's plan of labor, enthusiastically adopted by the BWP at its Christmas Congress in the same year, similarly propounded a novel doctrine of socialization, according to which national implementation (or "socialism in one country") was to take priority over the shady prospect of internationalism. In a far-reaching reversal, the essence of socialization was located less in the transfer of ownership than in that of authority, which implied that control now took precedence over possession.[75] Anticipating Burnham, Berle and other managerialists, both De Man and Deat theorized that property and power were in the process of separating in the modem shareholding economy, which transformed the problem of socialism into one of organization and management rather than ownership of the means of production. In Perspectives socialistes (1930), Deat explicitly overturned the Marxist scenario by proposing to tackle first the power of capitalism, subsequently to take over profit and finally to socialize capitalist property. To be sure: the idea that socialization was no longer a question of ownership but of "technique of administration," as a result of the developing fissure between ownership and management, could already be found in conservative revolutionaries from Spengler to Fried and can be traced even further back to French and Italian syndicalism.[76]

In the late 1930s, the embryonic concept of the strong state common to both neo-socialism and planism, which presumed at least some degree of autonomy of the political vis-a-vis the economic, gradually evolved into a fully-fledged doctrine of state primacy and "authoritarian democracy," according to which the political state was to carry through a socialist revolution "from above" against the powers of capitalist finance and institute a corporatist regime to be run by an elite of intellectual technicians. Distancing themselves ever further from liberal parliamentarian politics, both Deat and De Man came to distinguish between what the latter called a "true, social and proletarian democracy" and a "false, only parliamentary and formal bourgeois democracy."[77] After the Nazi victory in early 1940, they both stood convinced that the demise of capitalist democracy was final and that the war inaugurated a revolutionary period which offered new promises for socialism. In a notorious manifesto of June 1940, De Man advised his fellow socialists to join "the movement of national insurrection" in order to realize "the sovereignty of labor" under the guidance of a single party and a totalitarian state. Somewhat later, he acknowledged German National Socialism as "the German form of socialism" and pleaded cooperation with the Reich "within the framework of a unified Europe and a universal socialist revolution."[78] Like De Man, whose collaborationist adventure was comparatively brief, Deat in 1940 placed his considerable powers of intellect in the service of the National-Socialist revolution and entered the collaborationist regime of Vichy.[79]

Reinventing the Political

Half a century after the defeat of the fascist regimes, the intellectual horizon is in many respects dramatically altered. Precisely as a result of the indissoluble association between the heritage of the radical Right and the agonizing memories of the Holocaust, "fascism" has become a universal term of political abuse, eclipsing its ideological stature and pedigree and censuring its intellectual content as being unworthy of serious analysis. Given the persistence of this ideological void on the Right, radical assertions about a "primacy of the political" in the postwar period tended to originate from the Left and were often clad in the confusingly indirect Marxist vocabulary of the "primacy of the economic." However, some major new schools of Marxist theorizing that emerged in the early 1960s permitted a secular, if initially subterranean, conflation of the two vocabularies, following from an increasingly explicit "Gramscian" recognition of the specificity if not primordiality of political and cultural causation, which pressed against the limits of extension of the logic of "last instance" economic determination. While theorists such as Althusser and Poulantzas already stretched the Marxian logic of causality to its breaking point, post-Marxists such as Foucault, Deleuze, Lefort, the "new philosophers," and Laclau and Mouffe extrapolated this tendency even further, ending up by emphatically reinstating the political at the center of critical attention. Their efforts were parallelled by a massive "defection" of feminist theorists from a Marxist-inspired "political economy of sex" toward generalized notions about the "politics of the personal," "the politics of (gender) identity" and the "politics of discourse." Other intellectual currents, such as ecology or constructivist science and technology studies, similarly abandoned the apparent constrictions of economic repertoires in order to clear the field for a "politics of nature" and a "politics of things."

There is a coldly ironic, disquieting aspect of deja-vu in this novel omnipresence of the political on the political Left, which to some extent exhibits an involuntary "return of the repressed," insofar as it actually recycles many of the critical arguments previously advanced against Marxist and liberal economism by intellectuals of the prewar political Right. Some theorizations come rather close to reinventing the "conservative revolutionary" reversal of priorities by substituting ontological concepts of the political for previous concepts of the economic that continue to resemble the transcendental mechanics of the "last instance." Three such examples may be briefly cited here as collectively exemplifying the latter-day paradox of a Right-inspired search for a new Left-oriented political paradigm. Many are also sufficiently impressed, especially by Schmitt's razor-sharp critique of traditional liberalism, to honor him with recalcitrant or inverse readings of his political theory. The journal Telos has long stood in the forefront of this critical acclaim.[80] Introducing a special issue on the French New Right, for instance, its editor, Paul Piccone, identifies the "bureaucratic centralism" of the former Soviet Union and Western "liberal technocracy" as variations of the same basic Enlightenment model which "by defining all conflicts in economic terms, has successfully occluded a more pervasive logic of domination beyond labor/capital conflicts and predicated on the political power and obtaining between the rulers and the ruled, the experts and the masses, the administrators and the administrated." The main implication of this theory about a newly emerging New Class of politicians, intellectuals and bureaucrats, for Piccone, is "the displacement of economic conflicts between labor and capital as the deus ex machina of social dynamics, in favor of political conflicts between those possessing a 'cultural capital' redeemable as social and political power and those with mere 'cultural liabilities.'" The inspiration for this political analysis of cultural class is quarried both from Left theoreticians such as Gouldner and Konrad and Szelenyi and from the critique of (leftwing) intellectuals by the New Right.[81]

Laclau and Mouffe's writings offer another singular illustration of the internal groundswell which has swept Gramscian Marxism toward a Schmittian invocation of the primordiality of the political. While some commentators already saw Laclau's early Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) as drifting toward a "power conception of class,"[82] Laclau and Mouffe's "post-Marxist" work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, more emphatically distanced itself from the orthodox reductionist and essentialist economic paradigm in order to affirm "the new articulatory and recomposing logic of hegemony" as an autonomous political logic which itself structured the space of the economic.[83] Crossing the Marxist threshold in an even more decisive manner, Mouffe's appropriately entitled The Return of the Political further extends their collaborative project by entering upon a close engagement with the legacy of Schmitt, with a view to articulating a radical project of "agonistic" pluralism which is set squarely against the "anti-political" rationalism of Rawlsian political philosophy. Adopting Schmitt's conviction that "the political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society," she chooses to understand it "as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition." In doing so, she closely follows Lefort's call for a new political philosophy, as well as his expansive understanding of politics as "a specific mode of institution of the social," as the "disciplinary matrix" of social life.[84]

Perhaps it is Lefort's political theory of democracy which provides the closest and most comprehensive approximation to Schmittian concerns, even while it is likewise formulated in the strictest opposition to all totalitarian presumptions of identity.[85] The "great swerve" from sophisticated Marxist economism towards political philosophy repeats itself in the history of Castoriadis' and Lefort's Socialisme ou Barbaric group, which gradually emancipated itself from a Trotskyitc critique of "bureaucratic collectivism" toward a recognition of new politically based forms of exploitation and domination, carrying the questioning step by step "to the heart of Marxist certainty."[86] Socialist thought, Lefort estimated, had insufficiently liberated itself from the liberal problematic, which proclaimed that reality "was to be disclosed at the level of the economy" and thus repressed the question of the political. Marxism's rejection of the political, its "refusal to think in political terms," resulted not simply in a deficient theory of the state, but more profoundly, in a complete lack of a concept of political society, including the nature of totalitarian regimes instituted under the aegis of Marxism itself. Hence the need for a new political philosophy that was able to rehabilitate the political beyond its "positivist" delineation as sector or domain in the social structure toward a broader recognition of it as a generative, originary principle of society, after the model of the Platonic politeia.[87] "Politics," as specific domanial activity, should be differentiated from "the political," which defined the primal dimensionality of the social, configuring society's overall schema and governing the articulation of its various levels or dimensions. It was precisely the focus on narrower "politics," Lefort argued, that obscured the broader acting of "the political" as the formative impulsive primal giving-form of society, taken in the double sense of giving it meaning and location.[88] In democratic societies, this political configuration of the social crucially implied a disentangling of state and society, a separation of the autonomous spheres of power, law and knowledge. Henceforth, the locus of power no longer constituted a substance but an "empty space"; it could not be occupied or appropriated and no individual or group could be consubstantial with it. This strictly opposed the democratic political configuration to the identitarian logic of totalitarianism, which strove to recover power as a substantial reality with the purpose of reunifying society as a homogenous social body governed by a supreme, sovereign power.[89] In this fashion, a totalizing concept of the political closely resembling Schmitt's was paradoxically deflected against the Schmittian politics of homogeneity, subverting its totalitarian temptation by means of a "divisive" vision of democratic difference.

Fifty years after the fascist defeat, this left-wing reinvention of the political is also seconded by parallel reactivating efforts issuing from the New Right. The repressed has also returned under its own flag, aided by the natural obliviousness that belongs to a new generational experience. The fact remains that criticism directed at the universal "marketing" or "economization" of existence and the triumphant proclamation of the liberal "end of history" is no longer solely operated from the Left but is also nurtured by a new radicalism of the Right, which is increasingly implicated in a process of intellectual rationalization. This new intellectualization of the Right implies, among other things, an intense rereading of the neglected legacy of the Conservative Revolution, including its prominent theme of the "primacy of the political." Aschheim has observed that, while the resuscitation of Nietzsche into something like a "European vogue figure" required that he emigrate to France in order to "catch" the poststructuralist revolution of the 1970s, there are signs that he is presently emigrating back and is reappropriated by a new German intellectual Right.[90] In France, however, Benoist has from an early date incorporated Nietzsche's legacy, as well as that of Schmitt, Niekisch and other conservative revolutionaries, in his synthetic project of a New Right;[91] his "Aristotelian" and communitarian conceptions of democracy and citizenship run largely parallel to conservative-revolutionary vindications of the primordial nature of the political. Among the leftist ideas also appropriated in the mid-1970s was Gramsci's converging theory of cultural and political hegemony,[92] thus compounding the spectacle of a Right-inspired leftism with the reverse one of a Left-inspired paradigm of the Right.

In this fashion, the radical-conservative version of the "primacy of the political" may be celebrating an unexpected return. Intellectuals such as Junger, Heidegger, Freyer and Schmitt once again figure as house gods of right-wing intellectual journals such as the German Junge Freiheit or Etappe, or the Russian Elementy, which not only communicate with Benoist but also negotiate with the thought of Foucault and other representatives of French poststructuralism.[93] Significantly, the new conservatism has also joined forces with radical political ecology and its apocalyptic sense of a civilization in disarray, boosting its penchant for totalizing and authoritarian solutions. "Eco-fascism" (or what is sometimes referred to as Blut und Boden ecology) calls for a strong state in order to protect the ecological "commonwealth" and its "natural order" from destruction both through natural disasters and through overpopulation and contamination, which collectively threaten the identity and integrity of the people and its natural habitat. Calls for a "patriotic protection of the environment," as phrased in the 1990 program of the Republikaner Party, are not far from more radical proposals such as entertained by former Green ideologist Herbert Gruhl, who activates familiar Schmittian themes in emphasizing the ecological "state of exception," which is necessarily governed by "martial law," the imperative need for an authoritarian state to plot a strategy of survival and implement it with force, and the concomitant need for abolishing democratic procedure in favor of a dictatorship -- in the present context, of an elite of the ecologically enlightened.[94]

Notes:

See Herman Lebovics, Social Conservatism and the Middle Class in Germany 1914-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 219; Jeffrey Heft, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar Germany and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 2, 4 and 227; Andrew Vincent, Modern Political Ideologies (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), p. 167. This article is part of a larger work, Property or Power? A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (forthcoming, 1998), dealing with the long-standing rivalry between "property theory" and "power theory" in Western thought.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, ed. by D.C. Watt (London: Hutchinson, 1969), pp. 127, 137 and 190. See also Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1978), p. 138.

Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, "The Doctrine of Fascism," in Adrian Lyttleton, ed., Italian Fascisms. From Pareto to Gentile (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 41-43, 48, 55-56.

H.S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), pp. 46-49, 234, 235.

J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Sphere Books, 1970), p. 2.

Friedrich Pollock, "Ist der Nationalsozialismus eine neue Ordnung?" [1941], in Helmut Dubiel and Alfons Sollner, eds., Wirtschaft, Recht, und Staat im Nationalsozialismus. A nalysen des Instituts fur Sozialforschung 1939-1942 (Frankfurt: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1981), p. 118. See also Franz Neumann's trajectory from his rather traditionally designed Behemoth (1942) to The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 257ff., where there is more room for the autonomy, if not for the outright primacy of the political over the economic.

Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: New Left Books, 1974).

Tim Mason, "The Primacy of Politics -- Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany" (1969), in his Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 14; Dick Pels, "The Dark Side of Socialism. Hendrik de Man and the Fascist Temptation," in History of the Human Sciences (May 1993), Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 65-95. According to A. J. Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 96, "Of all the folk wisdom surrounding Fascism, the conviction that it was no more than opportunistic, anti-ideological, antirational and consequently devoid of programmatic and strategic content, is both significantly untrue and most difficult to dispel."

Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, op. cit., pp. 46-48.

A.J. Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 1.

Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken, op. cit., p. 276; Otto-Ernst Schuddekopf, National-Bolschewismus in Deutschland 1918-1933 (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1972), p. 35.

Hans Freyer, Revolution yon Rechts (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1931), pp. 55, 61.

Werner Sorebart, Deutscher Sozialismus (Berlin: Buchholz & Weisswange, 1934), pp. xiii and xvi.

James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Harmondswoth: Penguin Books, 1945 [1941]); F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986 [1944]), pp. 124ff.

Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1965), p. 40.

A.J. Gregor, Young Mussolini, op. cit., p. xi. See also his The Ideology of Fascism (New York: The Free Press, 1969).

Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Zeev Stemhell (with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri), The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

See Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship, op. cit., pp. 47ff.

Gregor, Young Mussolini, op. cit., pp. 47 and 57.

L. Rosenstock-Franck, L 'Economie corporatiste fasciste en doctrine et en fait (Paris: Camber, 1934), pp. 16ff; Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship, op. cit., pp. 83ff. and 113ff.

Representative of this view is, e.g., Ralph Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1973), p. 81, which critically quotes Mussolini's 1934 Senate speech: "The corporatist economy respects the principle of private property. Private property completes the human personality. It is a right. But it is also a duty. We think that property ought to be regarded as a social function; we wish therefore to encourage not passive property, but active property, which does not confine itself to enjoying wealth, but develops it and increases it." Mussolini here only repeats a view typical of the entire tradition of Sorelian revolutionary syndicalism. A Marxist historian such as Sternhell still fastens on this "lenient" stance on property as primary criterion of (negative) judgment.

See Robert Michels, Masse, Fuhrer, Intellektuelle. Politisch-Soziologische Aufsatze 1906-1933 (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1987), pp. 128-29; and George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), op. cit., pp. 71, 131-32 and 277.

An exception is Haselbach's reading of Duhring as a precursor of the "liberal socialism" of Oppenheimer and Nelson. See Dieter Haselbach, Franz Oppenheimer Soziologie, Geschichtsphilosophie und Politik des "Liberalen Sozialismus" (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1988).

Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Duhring's Umwalzung der Wissenschaft, in MarxEngels Werke Vol. 20 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972 [1878]), p. 147.

Ibid., pp. 148-52, 166-71 and 154-55.

Michels, Masse, Fuhrer, Intellektuelle, op. cit., p. 129.

Lebovics, Social Conservatism, op. cit., p. 219; Heft, Reactionary Modernism, op. cit., pp. 36-37; Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), p. 59ff. Breuer has recently questioned whether the Conservative Revolution constitutes a clearly definable group sharing a minimum of common themes, aims and methods. Given the issue at hand, however, his deconstructive effort seems to fail, insofar as all the authors discussed at least tend to acknowledge this primacy of the political over the economic. Breuer judiciously demonstrates the large intellectual distance between 'rightwingers' such as Spengler and Moeller van den Bruck, who insisted upon preserving private property and entrepreneurial discretion and 'leftwingers' such as Junger and Niekisch, who pleaded a form of state socialism. However, a case can be made that the issue of balancing politically functionalized property rights against the supreme rights of an organizing, planning state was common ground to the conservative-revolutionary Left, Right and Center. As is clear from Breuer's own material, while the "National-Bolshevik" tendency never went as far as advocating an integral "abolition" or collectivization of private property, the "national-liberal" tendency never disputed its political functionalization. The use of the term "socialism" in, e.g., "German socialism," is therefore less a matter of "conceptual confusion" than Breuer indicates (pp. 59-70). See also fn. 39 on the "mediating" position of Die Tat.

See Herf, op. cit., pp. 136-37. On Sombart, see Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sorebart 1863-1941. Eine Biographie (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1994). Lenger shows how Sombart anticipated all the main themes of the revisionist critique of Marx and embraced a brand of reformist state socialism which enabled him gradually to "cross over" to autarkic" German" socialism. The latter strongly influenced the ideologists of the Conservative Revolution.

Herr, op. cit., p. 144; Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, op. cit., p. 126.

Cited in Hayek, op. cit., pp. 127-28.

Oswald Spengler, "Preussentum und Sozialismus," in Politische Schriften (Munich and Berlin: Beck, 1934), pp. 69, 103.

Ibid., pp. 47-49, 92-95 and 105. Spengler's The Decline of the West, part I (1918) bristles with statements announcing an apocalyptic straggle between "power" and "money," resulting in the inevitable triumph of the former. In this battle, the powers of a dictatorial money economy stand against the "purely political will toward order" of a new authoritarian state. Politics rather than economics is decisive; hence, a new primacy of politics over the economy will emerge. See Heft, op. cit., pp. 57-58 and 62; Frits Boterman, Oswald Spengler. Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1992).

Hans Freyer, Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft im philosophischen Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim: George Olms, 1966 [1921]), pp. 75-75 and 94. See also Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God that Failed. Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 81ff.

Freyer, Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft, op. cit., pp. 37ff, 51.

Ibid., p. 119. "The economy is recalcitrant and must be taken in stronger hand, both in order to subordinate it to the organized people as its collective work and to serve as a set of instruments for its new political subject. Never has the tension between the political principle of formation and the content to be formed been stronger as in this case. That is why this tension with the forming force must be raised to the maximum (auf starkste angezogen werden)." See Hans Freyer, Der Staat (Leipzig: Ernst Wiegandt, 1926), p. 177.

Hans Peter Schwartz, Der Konservative Anarchist. Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst dangers (Freiburg: Rombach, 1962)

Schuddekopf, National-Bolshewismus in Deutschland, op. cit., pp. 35, 254. The importance of Die Tat is not only suggested by the journal's unprecedented circulation in the early 1930s, far exceeding the readership of any other competitor on the intellectual Right (an estimated 30,000 copies in 1932 and most probably more than one reader per copy), but also by the fact that it successfully "centered" itself between the "rightwing" and the "leftwing" limits of the Conservative Revolution, as demarcated by Spengler's nostalgic Prussianism and Niekisch's National Bolshevism; as such offering an attractive platform for the more "centrist" convictions of major intellectuals such as Sombart, Freyer and Schmit. See Lebovics, op. cit., pp. 172 and 210; Kurt Sontheimer, "Der Tatkreis," in Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte (July 1959), Vol. 7, No. 3.

In The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt provided the following typical reaction to Rathenau's statement: "It would be more exact to say that politics continues to remain the destiny, but what has occurred is that economics has become political and thereby the destiny." See his The Concept of the Political, ed. by George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996 [1932]), p. 78. In 1917, Rathenau himself had already written: "Now, at the beginning of the second year of the war, the realization that all economic life is based on the state is fading, that state politics precedes business activity, that anyone who has property and can obtain it is indebted to everyone." See his Von Kommenenden Dingen (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1917), p. 89.

Ernst Junger, "Die totale Mobilmachung," in Werke Vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, n.d.), pp. 132 and 140.

Ferdinand Fried, Das Ende des Kapitalismus (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1931), p. 23.

According to Herf, op. cit., p. 92, Junger's figure of the worker-soldier offered "one of the most enduring of reactionary modernist symbols"

Ernst Junger, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932), pp. 28, 34 and 70.

Ibid., pp. 246-747, 274-75, 284. See Schmitt's consideration of the claim of the fascist state to act as a "dominant" or "neutral third," rather than as a servant of economic or social interests. Only a weak state, he argued, remained the servant of private property. Every strong state demonstrated its strength not against the weak but against the economically and socially strong. Hence the entrepreneurial class could never fully trust the fascist state, which tended to develop "in the direction of a workers' state with a planned economy." See Carl Schmitt, Positionen und Begriffe im Karnpf mit Weimar-Genf-Versailles (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1988), pp. 113-14. In 1931, he explicitly picked up Junger's notion of "total mobilization" in order to describe the turn toward the (potentially) total state and its tendency to identify state and society. Ibid., p. 152; Der Huter der Verfassung (Tubingen: Mohr, 1931), p. 79. Freyer curiously wedded Junger and Schmitt in describing Machiavelli's view of the Roman battle order as symbolizing a people "capable of joining together in an emergency and of total mobilization in a crisis," adding in conclusion that "the ideal constitution is the people armed." Preussentum und Aufklarung und Andere Studien zu Ethik und Politik, ed. by Elfriede Uner (Weinheim: VCH, 1986), p. 179.

Michail Manoilescu, Le Siecle du Corporatisme (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1934), p. 42.

Sombart, Deutscher Sozialismus, op. cit., pp. 20-1, 24, 43, 112 and 160.

Ibid., pp. 219ff, and 224.

Sombart here adopted Spann's view that, formally, there was no private property but only communal property.

Ibid, p. 324.

Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932 (Darmstadt: Wissenschafiliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972), pp. 29 and 87. See also Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 128ff.

Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, op. cit., pp. 195-98.

Giovanni Gentile, "The Origins and Doctrine of Fascism," in Lyttleton, Italian Fascisms, op. cit., pp. 301-302 and 306-307; Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, op. cit., p. 236.

Freyer, Der Staat, op. cit., p. 20.

Ibid, p. 143. See also Muller, op. cit., p. 111.

Breuer, op. cit,, pp. 96ff.

Hans Freyer, Herrschaft, Planung, und Technik, ed. by Elfriede Uner (Weinheim: VCH, 1987), pp. 31-33 and 65-66.

Ibid,pp. 62-63.

As respectfully acknowledged by, e.g., Freyer, Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft, op. cit., p. 118; Herschaft, Planung, und Technik, op, cit., p. 24; as well as by Sombart, Deutscher Sozialismus, op. cit., p. 171.

Although Schmitt's being part of the Conservative Revolution is in dispute, there is ample reason to include him in this current of thought. See Joseph W. Bendersky, "Carl Schmitt and the Conservative Revolution," in Telos 72 (Summer 1987), pp. 27-42; Annin Mohler, "Carl Schmitt und die 'Konservative Revolution.' Unsystematische Beobachtungen," in Helmut Quartsch, ed., Complexio Oppositorum. Uber Carl Schmitt (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988); Jerry Z. Muller, "Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer and the Radical Conservative Critique of Liberal Democracy in the Weimar Republic," in History of Political Thought (Winter 1991), Vol. 12, No. 4).

This neutralizing drive was once again primarily accounted for in terms of the progress of economic rationalism. Virtually reversing the Smithian materialist "four stages" theory and closely verging on Comte's idealistic three-stage theory, Schmitt pictured historical development as advancing through four stages: theological, metaphysical, moralist and economic, each of which identified a specific central area and a specific mentality of its leading elite. The 19th century was characterized as "essentially economistic," while the 20th was described as the "age of technology" which, by pushing the drift towards neutrality to its logical extreme, would (necessarily? dialectically?) reinstate the political. See Carl Schmitt, "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations," in Telos 96 (Summer 1993); Richard Wolin, "Carl Schmitt. The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror," in Political Theory (August 1992), Vol. 20 ,No. 3, pp. 438-440).

Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, op. cit., pp. 19-22, 26-27 and 44; Positionen und Begriffe, op. cit., p. 186. See also Sombart, op. cit., p. 171.

Here I disagree with De Wit's view that Schmitt's concept of the reconstitution of "state-free" domains was "surprisingly liberal in character." See Theo de Wit, De onontkoombaarheid van de politiek (Ubbergen: Pomppers, 1992), pp. 168, 489 and 491.

Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Munich & Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1934 [1922]), p. 6; and Staat, Bewegung, Volk (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1935), p. 17.

Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, op. cit., pp. 76-78.

See also Dick Pels, "Strange Standpoints, or: How to Define the Situation for Situated Knowledges," in Telos 108 (Summer 1996), pp. 65-92.

Freyer, Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft, op. cit., p. 119.

Freyer, Der Staat, op. cit., p. 20.

Ibid., p. 109.

Spengler, "Preussentum und Sozialismus," op. cit., p. 47.

See Freyer's suggestions concerning an elite of physicians, teachers, engineers and poets (Der Staat, op. cit, pp. 170-180) and his explicit references to Saint-Simon (Herrschaft, Planung, und Technik, op. cit., pp. 21, 26) and the "organization of labor" (Der Staat, op. cit., pp. 146ff). On Zehrer's notion of a "revolution of the intellectuals" and his borrowings from Mannheim, see Dick Pels, "Missionary Sociology between Left and Right. A Critical Introduction to Mannheim," in Theory, Culture and Society (August 1993), Vol. 10, No. 3.

Junger, "Die totale Mobilmachung," op. cit., p. 140.

For this distinction see Philippe Schmitter, "Still the Century of Corporatism?" in Review of Politics (1977), Vol. 36, No. 1.

Manoilescu, Le siecle du corporatisme, op. cit., pp. 44-45, 102-3 and 361.

Rosenstock-Franck, op. cit., p. 16; Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship, op. cit.

Dick Pels, "Hendrik de Man and the Ideology of Planism," in International Review of Social History (1987), Vol. 32, No. 3.

Spengler, "Preussentum," op. cit., p. 95; Fried, Das Ende des Kapitalismus, op. cit., pp. 142ff. In a kind of "cultural socialism" influenced by De Man, Jacques de Kadt also chose to call the fascist order of culture-politics-economics "the only acceptable and healthy" ordering, whereas the reverse Marxist ordering of economics-politics-culture represented "an unworthy and dishonorable sequence." See Dick Pels, Het dernocratisch verschil. Jacques de Kadt en de nieuwe elite (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1993), p. 82.

Cited in Pels, "Hendrik de Man and the Ideology of Pleonasm," op. cit., p. 226.

Cited in Pels, "The Dark Side of Socialism," op. cit., pp. 89-90.

See Stanley Grossman, Neo-Socialism. A Study in Political Metamorphosis (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, 1969); and Emily H. Goodman The Socialism of Marcel Deat (Ph.D. Stanford University, 1973).

See the special issue on Schmitt, Telos 72 (Summer 1987), e.g., the contributions by the editors and by former Althusserian Paul Hirst; and the section on Schmitt in the Spring issue of the same year. Since then Telos has regularly translated and discussed Schmitt as well as New Right polymath Alain de Benoist. On the latter and the New Right more generally, see extensively Telos 98-99 (Winter 1993/Spring 1994). See also the special issue on Schmitt of Benoist's journal Nouvelle Ecole 44 (Spring 1987).

Paul Piccone, "Confronting the French New Right: Old Prejudices or a New Political Paradigm?" in Telos 98-99 (Winter-Spring 1993-94), pp. 8-11. See also the discussions concerning Telos's 'populist' and 'Schmittian' turn in Telos 107 (Spring 1996), pp. 121-168, especially Piccone's "Is There a Telos Right?" Piccone recalls that, in the mid-1980s, the Telos editors split into what he calls a "New Class" wing, which stuck to the primacy of economic analysis, and a "populist" wing, which emphasized the primacy of politics and culture, relegating economic questions to an instrumental level. See "The Tribulations of Left Social Criticism: Reply to Palti," p. 145n. See also pp. 157ff.

Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick, "Property, Power and Class," in Socialist Review (1986), Vol. 16, No. 2, p. 108.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: New Left Books, 1985), pp. 4 and 75ff.

Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 3, 11, 18ff, 51-52.

See De Wit, op. cit., pp. 479ff.

Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p. 297.

Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), pp. 2-3.

Ibid., pp. 11 and 219: "The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible."

Ibid, p. 233.

Aschheim, op. cit., pp. 305-306.

Alain de Benoist Aus Rechter Sicht, Vol. 1 (Tubingen: Grabert Verlag, 1983), pp. 7ff.; idem, Vol. 2 (1984), pp. 7ff.; idem, "Democracy Revisited," in Telos 95 (Spring 1993); Pierre-Andre Taguieff, "Discussion or Inquisition? The Case of Alain de Benoist," Telos 98-99 (Winter-Spring 1993-94).

Piccone, op. cit., p. 9; Mark Wegierski, "The New Right in Europe," Telos 98-99 (Winter-Spring 1993-94), p. 63.

See Goran Dahl, "Will the 'Other God' Fail Again? On the Possible Rerum of the Conservative Revolution," in Theory, Culture and Society (February 1996), Vol. 13, No. 1.

Thomas Jahn and Peter Wehling, Okologie yon Rechts (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1991).

The Secret Contacts - Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933 - 1941 [By Klaus Polkehn]

Anti-Semitism became official German government policy when Hitler was named Chancellor of the German Reich on January 30, 1933. The spring of 1933 also witnessed the beginning of a period of private cooperation between Zionism and the German regime to increase the inflow of German Jewish immigrants and capital to Palestine. The Zionist authorities succeeded in keeping this cooperation a secret for a long period, and only since the beginning of the 1960's have criticisms of it been expressed here and there. The Zionist reaction has usually consisted of declarations that their onetime contacts with Germany were undertaken solely to save the lives of Jews. But the contacts were all the more remarkable because they took place at a time when many Jews and Jewish organizations demanded a boycott of German goods.

On the occasion of the Sixteenth Convention of the Israeli Communist Party, a paper was submitted at the outset of the conference in which it was stated that "after Hitler's taking of power in Germany, when all anti-National Socialist forces in the world and the great majority of the Jewish organizations proclaimed a boycott against Germany, contacts and collaboration existed between Zionist leaders and the Hitlerite government." (Information Bulletin, Communist Party of Israel, 3-4, 1969, p. 196) The paper quoted the Zionist official Eliezer Livneh (who had been editor of the Haganah organ during the Second World War) as declaring, during a symposium organized by the Israeli newspaper Maariv in 1966, "that for the Zionist leadership the rescue of Jews was not an aim in itself, but only a means" (i.e., to establishing a Jewish state in Palestine). To question the reaction of the Zionist movement to German regime, which in the course of its twelve-year rule murded many Jews, is a taboo in the eyes of the Zionist leaders. Only rarely is it possible to come across authentic evidence or documents concerning these occurrences. The following enquiry consists of information gathered up to this date about some important aspects of the cooperation between the Zionists and the German regime. It remains in the nature of things that this enquiry does not present a complete picture. This can only be possible when the archives (above all those in Israel), in which the documents concerning these events are under lock and key, are made available for scholarly research.

The Advent of Hitler

To the Zionist leaders. Hitler's assumption of power held out the possibility of a flow of immigrants to Palestine. Previously, the majority of German Jews, who identified themselves as Germans, had little sympathy with Zionist endeavours. German statistics compiled prior to the assumption of power by NSDAP, classified the Jewish minority only under the heading "Religious Faith," and it was left to the legislators to introduce the concept "race'' as a characteristic and thereby include even the long-assimilated descendants of members of the Jewish community as Jews.

According to the statistics, in 1933 there lived in Germany 503,000 Jews, constituting 0.76% of the total population. 31% of all German Jews lived in the capital, Berlin, where they made up 4.3% of the city's population. German statistics also indicate that the population of the Jews in Germany decreased in the years between 1871 and 1933 from 1.05% to 0.76%.

These German Jews were overwhelmingly non- or anti-Zionist, and prior to 1937, the Zionist Union for Germany Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (henceforth ZVFD) experienced great difficulty in gaining a hearing. Amongst the Jews of Germany counted in the year 1925, there were, for example, only 8739 persons (not even 2%) eligible to vote in the Zionist Conventions (that is, as members of Zionist organizations). At the regional elections of the Jewish community in Prussia that were held in February 1925, only 26 members out of 124 elected belonged to Zionist groups. A report by the Keren Hayesod submitted to the twenty-fourth session of the ZVFD in July, 1932 said : "In the course of evaluating the Keren Hayesod work in Germany, it should never be forgotten that we in Germany have to reckon not only with the indifference of extensive Jewish circles but also with their hostility." (quoted from Kurt Loewenstein, Die innerjüdische Reaktion auf die Krise der deutschen Demokratie -The internal Jewish reaction to the Crisis of German Democracy-, in "The Crucial Year 1932," p. 363)

Thus at the time of the Hitler takeover the Zionists were a fundamentally small and insignificant minority with little influence and it was the non-Zionist organizations that played the dominant role amongst the Jews. At their head was the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens - CV, or Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, founded in 1893, which, as its name implies, considered German Jews as Germans and regarded its chief duty as being to combat anti-Semitism.

Corresponding to this fundamental position, the CV also declared its sharp rejection of Zionism. Thus a resolution passed by the main council of the CV on April 10, 1921, concluded with the words : "If the work for settlement in Palestine were nothing more than a task of aid and assistance, then from the point of view of the Centralverein nothing would be said against the promotion of this work. However, the settlement in Palestine is in the first place an object of national Jewish policy and hence its promotion and support should be rejected." (Quoted from Dr. Alfred Wiener, Kritische Reise durch Palästina -Critical Journey through Palestine-, Berlin, 1927, p. 8) Consequently, it was the CV above all which, in the years prior to Hitler's assumption of power, stood in the forefront of parties and organizations in their fight against anti-Semitism. Regarding this attitude, the Jewish author Werner E. Mosse remarked : "While the leaders of the CV saw it as their special duty to represent the interests of the German Jews in the active political struggle, Zionism stood for... systematic Jewish non-participation in German public life. It rejected as a matter of principle any participation in the struggle led by the CV." (Werner E. Mosse, Der Niedergang der deutschen Republik und die Juden -The fall of the German Republic and the Jews- in "The Crucial Year 1932 " p. 38)

The attitude of the Zionists towards the encroaching menace of National Socialists domination in Germany was determined by some common ideological assumptions : the National Socialists as well as the Zionists believed in unscientific racial theories, and both met on the same ground in their beliefs in such mystical generalizations as "national character (Volkstum) and race", both were chauvinistic and inclined towards "racial exclusiveness." Thus the Zionist official Gerhart Holdheim wrote in 1930 in an edition of the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, dedicated to the Jewish question (a publication in which, amongst others, leading anti-Semites aired their views) : "The Zionist program encompasses the conception of a homogeneous, indivisible Jewry on a national basis. The criterion for Jewry is hence not a confession of religion, but the all-embracing sense of belonging to a racial community that is bound together by ties of blood and history and which is determined to keep its national individuality." (Gerhard Holdheim, Der Zionismus in Deutschland -Zionism in Germany- in Süddeutsche Monatshefte 12/1930, p. 855) That was the same language, the same phraseology, as the National Socialists used. No wonder then that the German National Socialists welcomed the conceptions of the Zionists, with Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the NSDAP, writing : "Zionism must be vigorously supported so that a certain number of German Jews is transported annually to Palestine or at least made to leave the country." (Alfred Rosenberg, Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten -The Trail of the Jew in the Changing Ages-, Munich, 1937, p. 153) With an eye on such statements, Hans Lamm later wrote : "...it is indisputable that during the first stages of their Jewish policy, the National Socialists thought it proper to adopt a pro-Zionist attitude." (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, London, 1963, p. 53) The CV remarked that the recognition by the Zionists of "certain postulates of the German nationalists" provided the anti-Semites with ammunition, and in a declaration of policy made by the CV, there was even talk of Zionism having dealt the movement a "stab in the back" in the struggle against National Socialism. (CV-Zeitung, IX, July 11, 1930) But the Zionists saw that only Hitler was likely lo push the anti-Zionist German Jews into the arms of Zionism. Robert Weltsch, who was then editor-in-chief of the German Zionist paper, Jüdische Rundschau, declared on January 8, 1933 (three weeks after Hitler's assumption of power) during the meeting of the local ZVFD Council "The anti-liberal character of German nationalism meet with the anti-liberal position of Zionism and here we are faced with the chance of finding, not a basis for understanding but one for discussion." (Minutes of the Session are in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, quoted by Kurt Loewenstein in "The Crucial Year 1932," p. 388)

The call to Hitler on January 30, 1933 to become the head of government was followed by the take-over of all positions of authority by the National Socialist Parly, which meant that sworn anti-Semites were now in power. The German Jews contemplated these happenings with deep misgivings, for the programme of the NSDAP included the demand to strip the Jews of citizenship (Point 5) and the removal of all Jews from public offices (Point 6), as well as the expulsion of all the Jews who had immigrated to Germany after August 2, 1914 (Point 8). Only the Zionists saw some benefit in this turn of events. The British historian Christopher Sykes, certainly no anti-Zionist, gives us his opinion "that the Zionist leaders were determined at the very outset of the Nazi disaster to reap political advantage from the tragedy." (Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, London, 1965; German edition -Kreuzwege nach Israel-, Munich, 1967, p. 151) The first public expression of this came from the Berlin Rabbi, Dr. Joachim Prinz, who was a committed Zionist and who directly after January 30, 1933, described the Hitler takeover as the "beginning of the Jew's return to his Judaism". In reference to the mounting National Socialist terror against the German Jews, Prinz wrote : "No hiding place hides us any longer. Instead of assimilation, we wish for the recognition of the Jewish nation and the Jewish race." This was definitely not the view of an isolated individual. The Jüdische, Rundschau, the official organ of the ZVFD, wrote on June 13, 1933 : Zionism recognizes the existence of the Jewish question and wants to solve it in a generous and constructive manner. For this purpose, it wants to enlist the aid of all peoples; those who are friendly to the Jews as well as those who are hostile to them, since according to its conception, this is not a question of sentimentality, but one dealing with a real problem in whose solution all peoples are interested.

By employing this argument, Zionism was adopting the same political line as National Socialists.

On June 21,1933, there was finally an official Zionist declaration of policy regarding the fascist takeover of power : "The Declaration of the Zionist Union for Germany in Reference to the Position of the Jews in the New Germany." In one section of this extensive document, it was emphasized that "In our opinion one of the principles of the new German state of national exaltation would make a suitable solution possible." (quoted from In zwei Welten, Siegfried Moses zum 75 Geburtstag -In Two Worlds, For the 75th birthday of Siegfried Moses-, Tel Aviv, 1962, pp. 118) The ZVFD, in its document, then cast a historic glance back at the position of the Jews in Germany, using such National Socialist terms as "ties of blood and race" and exactly like Hitler, postulating a "special soul" for the Jews. Then the Zionists stated : "For the Jew, too, origin, religion, common destiny and self-consciousness must be of crucial significance in shaping his life. This calls for the surmounting of the egoistical individualism that arose in the liberal age, and this should be achieved through the acquisition of a sense of common unity and a joyful assumption of responsibility." (Äusserung der Zionistischen Vereinigung für Deutschland zur Stellung der Juden im neuen deutschen Staat, -Statement of the Zionist Union for Germany regarding the State of the Jews in the new German State, published in Zwei Welten, Siegfried Moses zum 75 Geburtstag, Tel Aviv, 1962, p. 118)

After this avowal and reiteration of National Socialist theses there followed open recognition of the state : "On the soil of the new state, which drew up the race principle, we want to arrange the whole structure of our community in such a way, that for us, too, a fruitful application for the fatherland can be made possible in the sphere allotted to us." In conclusion, the Zionists condemned the struggle against the Hitler regime of the "anti-Hitler" forces, which in the spring of 1933 had called for an economic boycott against Hitlers Germany. "The boycott propaganda which they are making against Germany is in its very nature un-Zionist, since Zionism does not want to fight, but to persuade and to build."

In order to grasp the full significance of this declaration by the ZVFD, one must again remember what had preceded it. The persecution of the Jews had already started and reached its first climax in a big pogrom on April 1, 1933, that encompassed all Germany. In the first days of March 1933, German Jewish citizens were mistreated in German cities (for example, Jewish shops in Brunswick were ransacked on March 11, 1933, and on March 13, Jewish lawyers were manhandled in front of the Hall of Justice in Breslau). The Natinal Socialist authorities issued the "Law for the Restoration of the Character of Vocational Professions," which, amongst other things, led to the removal of 2000 Jewish scientists and scholars from German universities. The Eighteenth Zionist Congress, which convened in the Summer of 1933, was nevertheless cool about this : when, during the session of the Zionist Congress taking place on August 24, 1933, the position of the German Jews was to be discussed, the Congress Presidium moved to prevent the discussion. (See Joseph B. Schechtman, Fighter and Prophet. The Vladimir Jabotinsky Story, New York/London, 1961, p. 194) It also strenuously and successfully attempted to prevent the introduction of a resolution calling for the boycott of German goods, and placed great emphasis instead on the need to arrange the emigration of the German Jews. Protests against the events in Germany were kept to an absolute minimum.

The National Socialists rewarded the Zionists for their "restraint" and allowed the ZVFD to go on with its work unhindered. At the same time, the National Socialists placed all kinds of obstacles in the path of the non-Zionist organizations. These hindrances struck at the CV above all, for prior to 1933 the National Socialists had already seen the CV as "their chief Jewish opponents," as is indicated by numerous examples from the press. The CV had always charged the Zionists with showing little interest in the "struggle.... and that [Zionism] followed a policy of indifference because it did not feel itself involved."

On March 1, 1933 the SA troops occupied the central office of the CV and closed it. On March 5, 1933, the CV in Thuringia was banned because of "high treasonous intrigues." At the same time the new government turned against other non-Zionist Jewish organizations, which, like the "League of Jewish Veterans of the Reich" for instance, represented a Jewish German nationalist position. Also banned was the "Union of National German Jews."

With this official support, the leaders of the Zionist Union for Germany were able to obtain a leading position amongst the German Jews for the first time. In the autumn of 1933, the "Reich Deputation of German Jews" was founded and all large Jewish organizations including the CV and the ZVFD participated in it. The leader of the Reich Deputation was Rabbi Dr. Leo Baeck in whose person the divided attitude of the Reich Deputation towards Zionism was mirrored; Baeck was at the same time a member of the main council of the CV as well as the president of the Zionist settlement fund "Keren Hayesod" in Germany. The newly-created Reich Deputation offered the Zionist leaders a broader platform for their activity.

Ball-Kaduri writes : "So it came about that the establishment of the Reich Union took place without any interference from the state; with the establishment process completed, this was simply reported to the Reich Ministry of the Interior - the Gestapo did not show any interest at all." It was only on July 4, 1939 that the ordinance regarding the compulsory establishment of the Reich Union of Jews in Germany was issued, changing the organization's name from Deputation to Union. This ordinance made it obligatory for all Jews to become members of the Reich Union. Paragraph 2 of this ordinance also fulfilled the Zionist aims by saying : "The Reich Union has as its goal the promotion of the emigration of all Jews."

The higher echelons of the NSDAP allowed various kinds of political activity. In this regard, for example, the Bavarian political police noted on July 9, 1935 : The Zionist organizations have for some time been collecting donations from their members and sympathizers with the intention of promoting emigration, the buying of land in Palestine, and the gaining of support for settlement in Palestine. These collections do not require government permission as they are held in closed Jewish circles. Moreover, on the part of the state police there is no objection against these arranged meetings since they deal with such funds as are meant to promote the practical solution of the Jewish problem.

After 1933, the National Socialists permitted the Zionists to continue with their propaganda. While all the newspapers in Germany were placed directly under the supervision of the Ministry of Propaganda (the newspapers published by the Communists or the Social Democratic Party or the trade unions and other progressive organizations were banned) the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau was allowed to appear unhindered until 1939.

Winfried Martini, the then correspondent in Jerusalem of the Deutsche Ailgemeim Zeitung who, according to his own testimony, had ''close personal ties with Zionism" remarked later on the "paradoxical fact" that "of all papers, it was the Jewish (i.e. Zionist) press that for years retained a certain degree of freedom which was completely withheld from the non-Jewish press." (Winfried Martini, "Hitler und die Juden" -Hitler and the Jews- in Christ und Welt Stuttgart, June 16, 1961) He added that, in the Jüdische Rundschau there was very frequently to be found a critical view of the NSDAP without this in any way leading to the banning of the paper. Only with the end of the year 1933 onwards did it lead to a ban on selling this paper to non-Jews. The Jews should, according to the wish of the National Socialists, be converted to Zionism, even if this were done with arguments directed against the NSDAP. In this fashion, the circulation of this Zionist paper, which had until then been small, underwent a rapid swing upwards.

That the Zionist newspaper could congratulate itself on being in the good books of the National Socialist leaders is understandable, when the position of the paper vis-a-vis the boycott of the Jews on April 1, 1933, is considered. This organized pogrom against Jewish citizens in Germany which aroused indignation all around the world and anger and revulsion in all decent Germans was not condemned outright by the paper; rather it was evaluated as a confirmation of Zionist views : "the fatal error of many Jews that one can represent Jewish interests under another cloak is removed," wrote the Jüdische Rundschau referring to the pogrom : "The First of April 1933 can be a day of Jewish awakening and Jewish renaissance." (Jüdische Rundschau, April 4, 1933)

The freedom of activity for the Zionists included the publishing of books as well as the newspaper. Until 1938, many publishing houses (among others, the Jüdische Verlag in Berlin-Charlottenburg and the Schochen-Verlag, Berlin) could publish Zionist literature unhindered. Thus there appeared with complete legality in Hitler Germany works by Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Arthur Ruppin.

The first days of NSDAP domination in Germany also brought about the beginning of economic collaboration between National Socialists and Zionists. In May 1933 the Zionist citrus-planting company "Hanotea" in Palestine was already applying to the Reich Ministry of the Economy for permission to transfer capital from Germany, thereby paving the way for the Haavara agreement that came later.

The "Hanotea" bought the German goods that it required, paying for them from the German bank accounts of Jewish emigrants. The emigrants then left Germany and received the equivalent value of the payments in real estate. (See Werner Feilchenfeld, Adolf Michaelis, Ludwig Pinner, Haavara-Transfer nach Palästina und Einwanderung deutscher Juden, 1933-1939, -Haavara Transfer to Palestine and the Immigration of German Jews, 1933-1939-, Tübingen, 1973) As the experiences of the "Hanotea" seemed successful to the Zionist leaders, negotiations were carried out in the summer of 1933 between the Zionist side and the German Ministry of the Economy, leading to the signing of the so-called Haavara agreement.

The Haavara negotiations of 1933 were one of the occasions of Zionist history over which a veil has been drawn, since they constituted an instance of economic cooperation at a time when others were attempting to lead a boycott against Hitler Germany. In commenting on these efforts, Nahum Goldmann, who then occupied a leading position in the Zionist movement, later wrote : However, many Jewish groups refused to participate [in the boycott], either because many Jewish firms happened to be the business agents of German enterprises, or because some Jewish organizations, namely those in the United States, look up the position that it was unpatriotic to organize a boycott against a country with whom one's country maintained normal trade relations. (The Autobiography of Nahum Goldmann)

This argument may be valid in detail, but it veils the truth nevertheless, for those who broke the boycott were in the first place the Zionists themselves.

A matter of such importance could not be born of private initiative, and it could not be set in motion without the authorization of Zionist institutions. Indeed it can be seen from other publications that the negotiations were handled in Berlin by the then chief of the political department of the Jewish Agency : Chaim Arlosoroff. (This is at least what the chairman of the Commission for Foreign and Security Affairs of the Israeli Knesset, Meir Argov said in a parliamentary debate over the reparations agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, minutes of the Knesset on June 30, 1959) Finally, the agreement of 1935 was officially approved by the World Zionist Congress.

In the words of Ball-Kaduri, the Haavara agreement was concluded "in the form of a letter addressed to Herr Hoofien by the Reich Ministry of the Economy. The negotiations were carried out in a smooth way, as the NSDAP was at that time still 'Zionist' inclined."

As a result of the agreement reached in Berlin, two companies were established : the Haavara company in Tel Aviv, and a sister company named PalTreu in Berlin. The procedure was carried out in the following manner : the Jewish emigrant paid his money (the minimum sum was a thousand pounds sterling) into the German account of the Haavara at the Wassermann Bank in Berlin or at the Warburg Bank in Hamburg. With this money, the Jewish importers could purchase German goods for export to Palestine, while paying the equivalent value in Palestinian pounds into the Haavara account at the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Palestine. When the emigrant arrived in Palestine, he received from this account the equivalent value of the sum he had paid in Germany at which point Ball-Kaduri remarks : "after remitting the rather high expenses."

In connection with the emigration to Palestine that had been caused by the Haavara agreement, the Zionists established their own Palestine Shipping Company, which bought the German passenger ship "Hohenstein" [former Polynesia] and renamed it "Tel Aviv."

This ship embarked on its first trip from the German port of Bremerhaven to Haifa at the beginning of 1935. On this trip, the ship bore on its stern the Hebrew letters of the new name "Tel Aviv" while from the mast fluttered the swastika; "a combination of metaphysical absurdity" wrote one of the passengers later. (Winfried Martini, "Hebräisch unterm Hakenkreuz," -Hebrew under the Swastika- in Die Welt, Hamburg, January 10, 1975.) The captain of the ship, Leidig, was a registered member of NSDAP.

The Haavara agreement doomed the attempt at an economic boycott of German goods to failure and assured the German economy an extensive and unbroken export market in a situation where world trade still suffered from the traces of the economic depression of 1929. (Nevertheless, in a report analyzing German exports that was laid before Hitler towards the end of May 1933, it was concluded that : "The prospects for the sale of German goods abroad are extremely bad. The situation is not only politically unsatisfactory, but also economically so", quoted in Kurt Patzold's Faschismus, Rossenwahn, Judenverfolgerung -Fascism, Racial Madness, Persecution of the Jews-, Berlin, 1975, p. 123) This was emphasized in a memorandum by Stuckart, the German State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of the Interior. In this memorandum dated December 17, 1937, it was stated: "The main advantages [of the Haavara agreement] are the following : the influence of the Haavara group in Palestine has led to the unusual but hoped-for contingency wherein of all places, Palestine is the country in which German goods are not boycotted by the Jewish side..."

At the same time, the Haavara procedure made possible a broadening of the Jewish emigration movement from Germany to Palestine, leading to the strengthening of the Zionist position in Palestine. The immigrants from Germany brought with them a higher degree of economic knowhow, among other things.

This also resulted in "selectiveness." As the agreement demanded a minimum payment of a thousand pounds from the immigrant, only members of the Jewish bourgeoisie were able to avail themselves of its advantages, while workers of Jewish origin were left to their fate. (According to statements from Kennzeichen J, the annual number of Jews leaving Germany was : 1934 about 23,000; 1935 - 20,000; 1937 - 23,000; and from January 1938 to September 1939 [start of WW2] - 157,000. Despite the efforts of the Zionists, only a part of this total emigrated to Palestine (in 1934, 37%; in 1935, 36% and 1937, 10.8%). Feilchenfeld, Michaelis and Pinner give in their already-mentioned book the number of Jewish Germans who immigrated to Palestine by way of the Haavara transfer as being 50,000. The paper Tagesspiegel, which appears in Berlin, estimated the total number of German emigrants to Palestine between 1933 and 1940 as being 70,000 (Tagesspiegel, February 15, 1974). According to Zionist statements the immigrants from Germany made up in this period around 25% of the total of Jewish immigrants in Palestine. Working out the Haavara transfers in the context of the social strata of immigration gives an idea of immigrants according to their financial standing. The proportion of immigrants possessing more than a thousand Palestinian pounds increased from 10.3% of all immigrants in the year 1933 to 18.1% in the year 1936, while the number of immigrating Jewish workers sank in the same period from 35.8% to 17.2%. (See Dr. T. Canaan, Conflict in the Land of Peace, Jerusalem 1936, p. 41) Thus in a recent examination of National Socialist racial policy, the following evaluation of the Haavara agreement can be considered perfectly just : "The solidarity principle that required the Jews in Germany to stand against their persecutors was torn asunder by capitalist interests. Meanwhile, the measures undertaken by Jewish contractors with the sole aim of bringing capital out of Hitler Germany to Palestine were receiving a high degree of consecration. It was claimed that the capital brought over to the Near East was placed at the service of the Jews. In reality however, in Palestine it served the same purpose as it did before in Germany : the profit interests of its Zionist owners. (Kurt Pätzold, op. ct., p. 190) The same book affirms that "the Zionist International wanted the Jewish emigrants from Germany to arrive on Palestinian soil not as have-nots, but as owners of capital that would help in the building of a capitalist state. Out of this desire, grew the Zionist interest to unite themselves with the anti-Semites all over Europe.

Indeed, prior to the founding of Israel, the Haavara transfer was a huge booster for the Zionist economy in Palestine. Zionist sources speak of a sum of 139.6 million Reichsmark - an enormous sum for that timebeing transferred from Germany to Palestine. Another source gives the amount transferred as eight million pounds sterling. (Meyer Weisgal and Joel Carmichael (Editors), Chaim Weizmann, A Biography by Several Hands, New York, 1961, p. 232) The capitalist Zionist economy thus grew. It was not a coincidence that the most important projects in Israel were founded or directed by immigrants from Germany. The largest Palestinian foundry and the cement industry were founded by the onetime director of the Berlin electricity and water company, Dr. Karl Landau. Dr. Arnold Barth of Berlin, Dr. Siegfried Sahlheine of Hamburg and Herbert Förder of Breslau were the first organizers of the Bank Leumi. Fritz Naphtals of Berlin and Georg Josephthal of Nürnberg made a giant enterprise out of the insignificant "Arbeiterbank." Some of the most important of Israeli firms were founded by Yekutiel and Sam Federmann of Chemnitz; Yekutiel's entry in Who's Who in Israel (1962) describes him as "founder, the 'Israel Miami Group' (Dan Hotel); Israel partner of 'Isasbest'; founder and partner 'Israel Oil Prospectors Corp. Ltd.'; started the first oil drilling 'Mazal I', president of numerous other companies"

The economic agreements between the Zionists and the German State were approved by NSDAP. The Foreign Office had already taken up a pro-Zionist attitude on many occasions before 1933. (There were meetings between Chaim Weizmann and State Secretaries von Schubert and von Bülow.) Only after the outbreak of the Palestinian Arab rebellion of 1936 did the first difference of opinion set in amongst the various Natinal Socialist institutions about the usefulness of continuing the Haavara transfers. The Foreign Office now realized that the de facto support for Zionist policy would alienate Arabs against Hitler Germany - a prospect that was not in the interest of the Reich. Döhle, the German Consul-Gcneral in Jerusalem, was spokesman for this point of view, and in an extensive memorandum dated March 22, 1937, he declared that "Through our promotion of Jewish immigration... the position that was again captured by the Germans... would come to grief." In taking this stand, Döhle was naturally not moved by concern for the Arabs as much as he was anxious about the political interests of Germany. He added that Germany need "not worry unduly about the sympathies of Palestinian Arabs regarding Germany, since what is required is not even a question of an active Arab policy so much as the need to avoid the conspicuous promotion lent to the building of the Jewish national home." Döhle feared ''that the Arab mood might turn around, and that we might be accused of actively participating in the fight against them." (Heinz Tillmann, op. cit,. p. 65) Döhle's fears were shared by other National Socialist authorities. Thus the Office for Foreign Trade at the Auslandsorganisation of the NSDAP (the party office in charge of foreign affairs) stated in all frankness : "Politically, it [the Haavara transfer] means giving valuable support to the establishment of a Jewish national home with the help of German capital." (Memorandum by the Office of the Chief of the Foreign Affairs Organization of the NSDAP, dated June 5, 1937, quoted by Tillmann, op, cit.. p. 67) On December 17, 1937 it was stated in the already quoted memorandum of State Secretary Stuckart of the Reich Ministry of the Interior that since the beginning of the Arab rebellion in Palestine "the advantages of the [Haavara] procedure have grown smaller while the disadvantages are becoming larger."

Stuckart was of the opinion that if the establishment of a Jewish state was unavoidable, then "everything that would promote the growth of such a state should be refrained from." Then Stuckart declared clearly : "There is no doubt that the Haavara procedure has made the greatest contribution to the tremendously rapid building of Palestine. The procedure did not only come up with the largest sums of money (from Germany!), it also provided the most intelligent men amongst the immigrants, and finally, provided the necessary machines and industrial equipment - also from Germany." (Kennzeichen J, p. 133)

The fears of these officials (which, as we shall see, contradicted the views of the SS and the Gestapo) were finally brought before Hitler. Hitler, as is seen in a memorandum of the Political Trade Department of the Foreign Office, dated January 27, 1938, decided that the Haavara procedure should be continued. (See: Tllmann, op. cit, p. 69) This positive stand taken by Hitler vis-a-vis the strengthening of the Zionist colonization of Palestine stayed unchanged in the face of complaints emanating from the Foreign Office and the Auslandsorganisation of the NSDAP about the rising hostility of the Palestinians to Germany. Thus the office of the Auslandsorganisation at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded anew in a memorandum dated November 12, 1938 that "an initiative should be undertaken for the overdue cancellation of the Haavara agreement." (Heinz Tillmann, op, cit., p. 30) Jon and David Kimche confirm the fact that Hitler, "with unambiguous determination, ordered the promotion of mass immigration to Palestine," (Jim and David Kimche, Des Zornes und des Herzens Wegen -Secret Roads-, Berlin, 1956. p. 26.) and that Hitler laid down the fundamental decision that the "Jewish emigration should be further promoted by all available means. There can thus be no question about the Führer's opinion that such emigration should be above all channelled towards Palestine." (Kimche, op. cit., p. 28) Finally, even Winfried Martini confirms the pro-Zionist position of leading National Socialist circles during the Arab revolt of 1936-39. He writes that as a correspondent of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung in Palestine, his reports about the revolt "were rather clearly favourable to the Jewish side," and that this did not draw any objections from any NSDAP officials. (Winfried Martini, "Hitler und die Juden," in Christ und Welt, Stuttgart, June 6, 1961) Hitler thus remained the guarantor of the Haavara transfers, which were only halted at the outbreak of the Second World War. (The emigration of Jews from Germany was prohibited in 1941 by order of SS Chief Himmler; see Leon Poliakov and Joseph Wulff, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden -The Third Reich and the Jews-, Berlin, 1935. p. 89)

During the first days of National Socialist domination in Germany, the Zionists held a direct line to the National Socialist repression apparatus which developed into loose collaboration between the Zionist leadership and the Gestapo, and the SS. Before 1933, the Zionist official, Leo Plaut, already "had a connection" with the political police and with the police official Oberregierungsrat Rudolf Diels (supposedly a schoolfriend of Plaut). When Diels was first appointed chief of the secret police in 1933, he retained his connection with Plaut. "Indeed Plaut even had the secret telephone number of Diels and could call him anytime." (Ball-Kaduri op. cit., p. 118) One can only speculate about the details of these contacts because the documents regarding them are kept under lock and key at the Yad-Vashem archives in Jerusalem. However, it is to be supposed that it was through these contacts that a meeting was arranged between the then Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Goering (later sentenced lo death by the Nürnberg International Tribunal as a war criminal) and the leaders of German Jewish organizations. The meeting took place on March 26, 1933. Among the representatives of the Zionists taking part was the official, Kurt Blumenfeld, but he was silent about this episode in his memoirs. (Kurt Blumenfeld, Erlebte Judenfrage -The Jewish Question Experienced-, Stuttgart, 1962)

Such contacts were conducted covertly, but evidence exists pointing to preparations then underway for cooperation between the Zionists and the SS (the organization that dominated the whole police and secret service apparatus of the German state). Not long after the takeover of power by the National Socialists, the paper Der Angriff, published by chief NSDAP propagandists, carried a travel report from Palestine, which presented Zionist colonization in Palestine in positive terms. The report, entitled "A Nazi travels to Palestine," was almost devoid of criticism.

The writer's pseudonym of "Lim" concealed the identity of SS Untersturmführer (equivalent in army rank to lieutenant) Leopold von Mildenstein. Mildenstein was active in the SD (the security service of the SS) which was originally established as the internal secret service organization of the NSDAP, but which from 1934 ceased to be merely the party police and police-command instrument, and developed into the dominant internal political secret service of Germany. It also became the organization for the political command and cadreformation body of the German security police. That Mildenstein should have been the man to write an outspokenly pro-Zionist series of articles was no mere coincidence, since in 1934 in Office II of the SD (inland) there had been born Department II-112, the so-called "Judenreferat" (Office for Jewish Affairs) presided over by himself. According to Martini Mildenstein was "discreetly advised by the Zionist officials" during his Palestine trip. (Winfried Martini in Christ und Welt op. cit.) Mildenstein's department was in charge of the Jewish policy until 1938. This policy was formulated by the official organ of the SS, Das Schmarze Korps, in the following words : "The time may not be far distant when Palestine once again receives the sons whom it lost a thousand years ago. Our wishes along with the good will of the state accompany them." (Das Schwarze Korps, Berlin, May 15, 1935) There have been attempts to depict the pro-Zionist policy of the SS as being the personal attitude of Mildenstein, rather than the reflection of an official entente between Zionists and Natinal Socialists. But not only does the quotation from Das Schwarze Korps contradict this; Mildenstein himself, a few years later, extracted his Palestine travel report from the Angriff to publish it in book form.

The Zionist leaders who had ''discreetly advised" the director of the SD "Judenreferat" during his Palestine trip, continued their contacts with the SS and SD. Naturally, few details are known about these contacts, the record of which is highly classified material. One of the few documents about these occurrences that is available is a memorandum by Professor Franz Six, (Professor Dr. Franz-Alfred Six, born in December 8, 1909, was a member of the NSDAP from 1930. In 1936 he was appointed SS Hauptsturmführer to the post of director of the Central Department of the Press and Library at the SD main office. Then he took over the directorship of the Department II (inland) in the SD main office. Six was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for war crimes by an American tribunal in April 1948. In January 1951 this sentence was reduced to ten years and on September 30, 1952 he was released. The Israelis who are always on the hunt for Nazi war criminals have not shown any interest in exposing Six, who was privy to the collaboration between the Zionists and the National Socialists.

This document is kept in the archives of the American Commission for the Study of War Documents in Alexandria, Virginia, USA - These documents were also made available on microfilm to other archives (exact designation : Records of the Reich leader of the SS and Chief of German Police, Washington, 1958). The documents quoted here are available on the RFSS film roll 411, frames 2936012 and 2936069. Alwin Ramme writes in his book Der Sicherheitsdienst der SS on page 21 : "The evaluation of these films is made difficult because of their bad quality in parts. Documents which are especially revealing are often photographed badly and rendered dificult to read this having been done not unintentionally by those in charge." National Archives, Washington) This memorandum contains information about a visit of the Zionist emissary Feivel Polkes to Berlin. Polkes was a member of the general staff of the Zionist underground army, the Haganah, with the rank of a commander. (According to recent information, Feivel Polkes today lives in Haifa. Tuvia Friedmann, author of the book Ich Jagte Eichmann -I Hunted Eichmann- and director of the Institute for Documentation in Haifa, stated in a letter dated January 25, 1970 that the documents concerning Polkes' visit to Berlin have been known in Israel since 1947; he also stated that he had talked to Polkes about these events and Polkes had declared that it was all "a misunderstanding." Friedmann further wrote that it was allegedly not possible to cheek this complicated matter further since only copies were available and not the original documents) SS-Oberscharführer Herbert Hagen, who succeeded Mildenstein as director of the Judenreferat, claimed in his papers that Polkes held the "leadership of the whole self-defense apparatus of the Palestinian Jews."

In Palestine, Polkes had been in close contact with the correspondent of the ''German News Agency," Dr. Reichert, who was active in the Palestine espionage network of the SD. This ring was directed by the SD agent Otto von Bodelschwingh, who lived in Haifa as a salesman. It was Dr. Reichert who acquired an entry visa for Polkes to visit Germany.

Polkes stayed in Berlin from February 26 to March 2, 1937, holding several meetings with SD agents representing the NSDAP regime, two of which were with SS-Hauptscharführer Adolf Eichmann (Eichmann had by then taken up work at the "Judenreferat"). Here, Polkes offered to collaborate with the German regime telling Eichmann that he was interested above all in ''accelerating Jewish immigration to Palestine, so that the Jews would attain a majority over the Arabs in his country. For this purpose, he worked together with the secret services of England and France and he also wanted to cooperate with Hitler's Germany." (Quoted from Heinz Höhne, Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf, -Order under the Skull-,Gütersloh, 1967, p. 309.) Hagen noted further in his report about Polkes' visit to Berlin : "He also declared his readiness to provide Germany with services in the form of information, so long as that did not conflict with his personal objectives... He would, among other things, vigorously support the foreign interests of Germany in the Middle East..." (Memorandum by Hagen, RFSS film roll 111 . p. 4.) Höhne commented on Polkes' offer with the words : "...behind it there clearly stands the immigration policy of the Haganah." (Heinz Höhne, op. cit., p. 330)

The SS immediately awarded Polkes' cooperative intentions with the instructions put forth by Six. "Pressure is being exerted on the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany in order to compel Jews emigrating from Germany to head only to Palestine and not to any other country." That was exactly what the Zionists wanted, but Six added : "Such a measure lies entirely in the German interest and it is already being put into effect by the Gestapo." (Memorandum by Six in RFSS film roll 411)

Feivel Polkes, the Haganah commander, went out of his way to help in the development of cooperation between Zionists and National Socialists; he even extended an invitation to Eichmann to visit Palestine as guest of the Haganah. Six noted : "In the work of making contacts, the name of SS-Hauptscharführer Eichmann of Department 11-112 comes to mind before any other. He had talks with Polkes during the latter's stay in Berlin and he was invited by him ro visit the Jewish colonies in Palestine under his guidance."

The trip to Palestine undertaken by Eichmann and Hagen is only an episode in the history of collaboration between Zionism and Hitlers Germany. But it was both a meaningful and revealing one that has become the subject of considerable falsification. Rather than admit the fact that the infamous and notorious murderer of the Jews, Adolf Eichmann, was at one time invited to Palestine by the Haganah, Zionist writers reversed the blame and claimed that the purpose of Eichmann's visit was to make contact with the Palestinian rebels, or even to conspire with the Mufti ofJerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini. The inventor of this story seems to be the well-known Zionist Simon Wiesenthal, who by 1947 was already making the claim that Eichmann had planted a network of agents in the Palestinian settlement of Sarona and had taken up "contact with the Grand Mufti." (Simon Wiesenthal, Grossmufti - Grossagent der Achse -Grand Mufti - Grand Agent of the Axis-, Salzburg, Vienna, 1947, p. 12) In 1951 Leon Poliakov published a similar version in Die Welt, (Loon Poliakov, Breviaire de la Haine, Paris, 1951) and Gerald Reitlinger borrowed it two years later for his book The Final Solution (Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution, London, 1953) in which Eichmann was supposedly sent to Palestine "in order to make contact with the Arab rebels." From then onwards the legend grew, with the American Quentin Reynolds even claiming that Eichmann had paid a visit to the Grand Mufti. (Quentin Reynolds, Minister of Death (New York, 1960, pp. 77-78) Eichmann's biographer Comer Clarke went so far as to claim that Eichmann carried with him 50,000 dollars in "Nazi gold to offer to the Palestinian rebels. (Comer Clarke, Eichmann - The Man and his Crimes, New York. I960, pp. 35-37)

When such myths are compared with the actual events, one reason why the Israeli government was so anxious about holding the trial of Eichmann in Israel and in no other place becomes clear; only in Israel could Zionist contacts with the Nazis be kept out of public view. (The prosecution in the Eichmann trial produced a document that was allegedly writien by Haj Amin al-Husseini, and which referred to Eichmann as "a jewel for the Arabs." This "piece of evidence" was such a crude falsification that even the pro-Israeli Allgemeine Zeitung concluded on June 28, 1961 that "the value of this document is questionable." Hannah Arendt writes in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem that one of the motives for holding the Trial in Israel was "to ferret out other Nazis - for example the connection between the Nazis and some Arab rulers" (p.8.) But Hannah Arendt finally came to the conclusion that the claims over Eichmann's contacts with Haj Amin al-Husseini "were unfounded", p. 10) Only there would there be enough pressure for Eichmann on trial for his life, to make false declarations before the court. "It is true," said Eiehmann during his trial, "that one of the purposes of my Palestine trip in 1937 was to take up contact with Mufti al-Husseini." (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zürich, July 12, 1961) But the travel report of Eichmann and Hagen found in the secret archives of SS Chief Himmler paints a different picture. (RFSS film roll 411) This is the gist of the travel report : Eichmann and Hagen left Berlin on September 26, 1937, in the guise of editors of the Berliner Tageblatt, arriving in Haifa on October 2, 1937, on the ship Romania. As the British authorities refused to allow the two SS emissaries to disembark (pointing to the Arab revolt), Eichmann and Hagen went on to Egypt. Here they met not Haj Amin al-Husseini, (According to Gerald Reitlinger's claim, see Die Endlösung, Berlin. 1955, p. 29) but their old acquaintance, Feivel Polkes the Haganah officer.

The travel report of Hagen and Eichmann contains an exact rendering of the conversations with Polkes which took place on October 10 and 11, 1937 in Cairo's Cafe Groppi. Polkes at once laid out the Zionist plans in complete frankness before the SS men. Polkes' statements as noted down by Eichmann and Hagen are not only interesting in connection with Zionist-National Socialist cooperation, but are also important as testimony to the expansionist policy of the Zionists : "The Zionist state must be established by all means and as soon as possible so that it attracts a stream of Jewish emigrants to Palestine. When the Jewish state is established according to the current proposals laid down in the Peel Paper," (A Royal Commission under Lord Peel examined the situation in Palestine in 1937 after the outbreak of the Arab revolt and discussed a first plan to divide Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state) and in line with England's partial promises, then the borders may be pushed further outwards according to one's wishes."

Polkes then praised the results of the anti-Jewish terror in Germany : "Nationalist Jewish circles expressed their great joy over the radical German policy towards the Jews, as this policy would increase the Jewish population in Palestine, so that one can reckon with a Jewish majority in Palestine over the Arabs in the foreseeable future."

Polkes once again pointed to the necessity of accelerating the removal of Jews from Germany, and repeated his readiness to provide the SD with secret information. He did come up with two pieces of "information" immediately, as Eichmann noted in his travel report. The first was designed to arouse Natinal Socialist hostility against the Arab nationalist movement. Eichmann noted : "According to Polkes' information, the Pan-Islamic World Congress convening in Berlin is in direct contact with two pro-Soviet Arab leaders : Emir Shekib Arslan and Emir Adil Arslan." The second item which Eichmann registered in his travel report concerned the German Communist Party. "The illegal Communist broadcasting station whose transmission to Germany is particularly strong, is, according to Polkes' statement, assembled on a lorry that drives along the German-Luxembourg border when transmission is on the air." (This information offers an interesting insight into where the Zionist leaders saw their allies and where their opponents.)

The meetings between Eichmann and Polkes were not isolated accidental events. They fall into a longer-term framework of cooperation between National Socialists and Zionists. Following the trip of Eichmann and Hagen, the collaboration was cemented by the "Mossad Aliyah Beth," which had been created by the Maganah as an illegal immigration organization, after Britain had throttled Jewish immigration to Palestine as a result of the Peel paper. At the end of 1937, i.e., a few months after Eichmann's trip, emissaries of the Mossad were taking up activity in the house of the Reichsvereinigung (Reich Union) at Meineckestrasse 10, Berlin-Charlottenburg, (Heinz Höhn, op. cit., p. 319) with the permission of the NS authorities in Berlin. The two emissaries, Pina Ginsburg and Moshe Auerbach, had travelled to Germany from Palestine for this purpose.

Jon and David Kimche, in their book Secret Roads dated Ginsburg's arrival in Berlin in the summer of 1938. (Jon and David Kimche, Des Zornes und des Herzens Wegen, op. cit., p. 13) Ginsburg had introduced himself officially to the Gestapo as emissary of the "Union of Communal Settlements," declaring that he was there on a special mission, and that his task converged with the intentions of the National Socialist government, his objective being the organization of the emigration of German Jews to Palestine. Only with the support of the NS leaders could the project be carried through on a large scale. The Gestapo had then discussed with Ginsburg "how to promote and expand illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine against the will of the British mandate government."

The National Socialist authorities had in the meantime begun to change their methods of pressure on the German Jews. They no longer left it up to the Zionist organizations alone to arrange emigration to Palestine. In Vienna (Austria had been occupied by Hitlers Germany in March 1938), the "Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established and placed under the charge of Adolf Eichmann. In the early summer of 1938 Eichmann had met another emissary of the Mossad, Bar-Gilead, in Vienna. The latter requested permission to establish training camps for emigrants so that they could be prepared for their work in Palestine (even this meeting plays no part in the Eichmann trial). After passing on this request to Berlin, Eichmann granted permission and supplied all the requirements for the establishment of training camps. By the end of 1938, around a thousand young Jews had been trained in these camps.

In the meantime, Ginsburg in Berlin was able, with the help of the Nazi authorities, to establish similar training camps. Jon and David Kimche wrote : "The Palestinian [Ginsburg], who had come to Berlin prepared for anything, had no pangs of conscience against supping with the devil and securing his own portion of the meal." (Ibid., p. 14)

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt commented in reviewing the information of the Kimches : ...these Jews from Palestine spoke a language not totally different from that of Eichmann... they had been sent to Europe by the communal settlements in Palestine, and they were not interested in rescue operations - that was not their job. They wanted to select "suitable material" and their chief enemies... were not those who made life impossible for Jews in the old countries, Germany and Austria, but those who barred access to the new homeland; that enemy was definitely Britain, not Germany... they were probably among the first Jews to talk openly about mutual interests... (Hannah Arendt, op. cit., pp. 55-56)

The Proposal for a War Alliance with Hitler

While the majority group in the Zionist movement, the wing of the "Labour" party (Ben Gurion, etc.) and the "General Zionists" (Weizmann and others), carefully camouflaged their contacts with the National Socialists, and spoke in public against them, the right wing of Zionism, the Revisionist party (the forerunner of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi and the later Herut party in Israel; had openly expressed its admiration on many occasions before 1933 for people like Hitler and Mussolini. An example of this is found in a trial held in Jerusalem in 1932 when the lawyer Cohen, a member of the Revisionist party, declared in defending the perpetrators of outrages in the university : "Yes, we entertain great respect for Hitler. Hitler has saved Germany. Without him it would have perished four years ago. And we would have gone along with Hitler if he had only given up his anti-Semitism." (Die Weltbühne, Berlin, May 31, 1932)

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the then leader of the Revisionists, who maintained good relations with the National Socialist movement, was also accused of attempting to seek a close relationship with Hitler's Germany. (For a time the Italian dictator Mussolini had supported the Revisionists and permitted them to establish in Italy a school for training navy soldiers. Jabotinsky had in 1932 made the proposal that the mandate over Palestine should go to Italy because Mussolini would be more amenable to furthering the cause of the Jewish state than Britain was.) There was now clearly a competition among different Zionist factions to achieve private collaboration with National Socialists while publicly denouncing each other's similar activity. (Reference should be made to the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Chaim Arlosoroff.) The Zionist paper Davar in July 1933 published an article by David Ben Gurion which contained a strong charge : "...Just after Hitler's accession to power in Germany, when the persecutions of Jews and Marxists were at their height, Mr. Vladimir Jabotinsky arrived in Berlin and in a public address incited against Marxists and Communists in Zionism and in Palestine." (Joseph Schechtmann, op. cit., p. 215) If that was the case, then it meant that Jabotinsky wanted to torpedo the Zionist-German negotiations in order to bring himself into the game as a negotiating partner with the National Socialists. Nonetheless, Jabotinsky strove to refute Ben Gurion's charge by pointing out that he had spoken on Radio Warsaw on April 28, 1933 and demanded the setting up of a worldwide economic boycott of Germany, simultaneously with the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish state "as the only adequate answer to the Hitlerite menace." There was an obvious allusion here to the Zionist majority's Haavara negotiations. But Jabotinsky could not dispute the fact that the Revisionist paper Hazit Haam, appearing in Palestine, "was allegedly treating this movement [NS] with a pronounced slant of sympathetic understanding. The editors of the paper... he was told, though aware of Hitler's rabid anti-Semitism, saw in National Socialism elements of a genuine movement of national liberation."

For Germanys government, collaboration with the Zionist majority was undoubtedly more important than cooperation with the Revisionist "opposition." Nonetheless, even the Revisionists were allowed to continue their political activities in Germany. The members of the Revisionist youth organization "Brit Trumpeldor" (about whom Schechtmann mentions reports that it "was adapting itself to certain features of the Nazi regime") was the only non-NS organization in Germany to receive from the National Socialists the permission to wear uniform.

It was, finally, members of the Irgun, who, in their intention of collaborating with the German National Socialists a year and a half after the outbreak of the Second World War went so far as to make the National Socilaist authorities an incredible offer of cooperation. (The Irgun, which split from the Haganah and then rejoined forces with it in 1948, has been an integral part of the State of Israel since then; its longtime leader Menahem Begin, born 1913 in Brest-Litowsk, served in the Israeli government as a minister from 1967 to 1970 and was the leader of the Likud bloc in the Israeli parliament and Prime Minister from 1977 to 1983.)

A few months before the cooperation offer of January 1941, a split had taken place between the then minority faction of the Irgun which supported Britain against Germany in the war, and the grouping in the Irgun that was opposed to any such pro-British policy. Irgun committee member Abraham Stern played a prominent role in this latter grouping which was supported at the time of the split by most Irgun members. It was by the anti-British activists of this group that the offer of Irgunist collaboration was made. The offer that was extended is contained in a document whose full details have until now been very secret. It is taken from a report by the Naval attache at the German Embassy in Turkey - an official who was in charge of secret missions there. This report, which is still kept in a locked archive in Britain, tells of contacts the attache had with emissaries of the "Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization - NMO)." A memorandum dated January 11, 1941 speaks of "Fundamental Features of the Proposal" by the Irgun "concerning the solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the active participation of the NMO on the side of Germany." The note's text is as follows : It is often stated in the speeches and utterances of the leading statesmen of National Socialist Germany that a New Order in Europe requires as a prerequisite the radical solution of the Jewish question through evacuation. ("Judenreines Europa") The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historic boundaries.

After confirming their joint fundamental views of Zionism and National Socialism in this fashion, the Irgun activists offered their organization as an ally, as the document went on to say : The solving in this manner of the Jewish problem and thus the bringing about with it of the liberation of the Jewish people once and for all, is the objective of the political activity and the years long struggle of the Jewish freedom movement : the National Military Organization (Irgun Zvai Leumi) in Palestine. The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans - [one should notice in this respect the National Socialist-Zionist cooperation in the years stretching between 1933 and 1939] - is of the opinion that :

1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.

2. Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed Hebrew nation (völkisch-nationalen-Hebräertum) would be possible and

3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis and bound by a treaty with the German Reich would be in the interest, of maintaining and strengthening the future German position of power in the Near East.

Thus what was on offer was no more and no less than the establishment of a totalitarian Jewish state in Palestine as an ally of German National Socialism !

"Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine offers to take an active part in the war on Germany's side, provided the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Jewish liberation movement are recognized by the German Reich government."

After thus proposing to participate actively with German National Socialism in the fight against the anti-Hitler bloc, the Irgun Zionists went on to make their proposal even more specific in the document :

- This offer by the NMO, whose validity extends over the military, political and information levels, inside and also according to certain organizational preparations outside Palestine, would be bound to the military training and organizing of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fighting to conquer Palestine, in case such a front is formed.

- The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the drawing up of the New Order in Europe, already in its preparatory stage, would be connected with a positively radical solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Jewish people. This would strengthen to an uncommon degree the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of the entire world.

- The cooperation of the Israeli freedom movement would also be in line with one of the recent speeches of the German Reich Chancellor in which Herr Hitler stressed that any combination and any alliance would be entered into in order to isolate England and defeat it.

This astonishing document requires no further comment. It need only be added that the anti-Semitism and the World War prevented German National Socialism from accepting this alliance offer. But two years later, the lrgun was embarking on terrorist raids against British institutions in the Near East, thereby actively weakening the anti-Hitler alliance in its fight against Germany, a fight that would also lead to the rescue of many European Jews.

Conclusion

Whenever the story of National Socialist-Zionist cooperation is revealed, Zionist writers use the ready excuse that contact with the National Socialists was only taken up with a view to saving the lives of Jews. Even though some of the above-mentioned facts contradict this argument, there are still two questions to be raised :

1. Was there really no other way to save the European Jews ?

2. Was this the real motive of the Zionists as they dealt with the devil ?

There can be no question about the fact that the only possibility of preventing millions of Jews from being murdered (as well as preventing the Second World War, which cost the lives of millions) lay in overthrowing the Hitler dictatorship when it was just at the beginning of its period of domination. But the Zionist leaders were uninterested in this - their sole objective was to increase the number of the Jewish population in Palestine. As they shared the anti-assimilationist views of NSDAP concerning the Jewish race, the Hitler dictatorship was no tragedy for them, but a confirmation of their position. As David Ben Gurion put it : "What Zionist propaganda for years could not do, disaster has done overnight." (David Ben Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel, New York, 1954, p, 41)

The Zionist leaders not only did nothing against National Socialism; they even took action that sabotaged the anti-German front (through the prevention of an economic boycott by their Haavara agreement). In practice, they also rejected attempts to save the German Jews which did not have as their aim the settlement of the Jews in Palestine. The following example is from the Evian Conference : When after 1933 the majority of western countries refused to take in Jewish refugees from Germany, the American President, Roosevelt, called for a world conference on refugees to convene in the Swiss town of Evian. This conference took place between June 6-15, 1938, with 32 western countries attending. The conference failed, since the participants refused to take in Jewish refugees. One would assume that the Zionist movement, which was also represented in Evian, would have attempted to exert pressure on the governments to lift the restrictions. But, on the contrary, the Zionist leaders tabled a motion at the beginning of the conference calling for the admission of 1.2 million Jews into Palestine. They were not interested in other solutions and, as Christopher Sykes later commented : "'They looked on the whole thing with indifferent hostility from the very beginning... the truth of the matter was that what was being attempted in Evian in no way conformed with the idea of Zionism." (Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel, London. 1965)

Thus the Zionist leaders share the responsibility for the failure to rescue a greater number of European Jewry. One should in all justice remember that those Jews who survived the war owed their lives to the soldiers of the anti-Hitler bloc.

Zionist leaders falsify history when they claim today that no one during the years of Hitler stood by the side of the persecuted Jews except the Zionists. Robert Weltsch, who himself had in the year 1933 taken up no clear stand against Hitler, advanced the thesis that no one at all in Germany had taken up the cause of the Jews. During the Nineteenth Zionist Congress in Lucerne in 1935 Chaim Weizmann stated : "The only dignified answer to all that has been done to the Jews in Germany is a large and a beautiful and a just home in Eretz Israel - a strong home." (Chaim Weizmann, Reden and Aufsätze,- Speeches and Essays -, Berlin, 1937, p. 259)

The "phantom battle" that led to war; can it happen again? [William Rust in U.S. News & World Report July 23, 1984]

Just 20 years ago, the seeds were sown for today's running conflict between president Reagan and Congress over the use of U.S. military power – from Central America to Lebanon and the Persian Gulf.

It began with one of the century's strangest events: A "phantom battle" in the Gulf of Tonkin that enabled President Johnson to exact from Congress the total power to go to war.

Historians have long debated that elusive incident. did the battle really occur?

Did the President know the facts – and if so, did he keep them from lawmakers?

Now comes fresh insight from the magazine's reporters, who for years studied once secret documents and questioned key leaders of the Vietnam era.

On Aug. 4, 1964, daylight was fading over the Gulf of Tonkin when an urgent message reached the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy on patrol in hostile waters off Communist-ruled North Vietnam.

It was a warning: The National Security Agency's monitors had intercepted enemy messages to two North Vietnamese gunboats and one PT boat, giving them the location of the two American warships and ordering preparations for combat.

Only two days earlier, PT boats had ambushed the Maddox, inflicting trivial damage while losing one of their craft to heavy gunfire from the destroyer and carrier aircraft. What happened on the night of August 4, however, was something far different.

Within 95 minutes, the fire and thunder of naval gunnery shattered the gulf's evening calm. Its waters roiled with the frantic zigzagging of America's destroyers as they sought to escape unseen enemy vessels and torpedoes – 26 in all – as reported by radar and sonar crews. In pitch-black darkness, naval gunfire and missiles launched by U.S. carrier aircraft pierced the murky skies with fiery trails on their way to designated enemy targets.

Within 2 hours, it was all over. No casualties or damage were reported by the Maddox and Turner Joy. Yet that brief and mysterious encounter has generated bitter arguments among historians, and raised sensitive questions: Did enemy vessels actually attack the two destroyers – or did commanders fall prey to overheated imagination in a frightening and confusing situation? If there was an enemy attack, was it unprovoked? Were key facts being withheld from the U.S. public – and did President Lyndon Johnson seize on a questionable incident to expand his powers and speed America toward all-out war in Vietnam?

What the President, like his slain predecessor, John F. Kennedy, had been confronting for months was an unyielding question: Was it time for the U.S. either to abandon its ally, South Vietnam – or to plunge U.S. troops into full-scale war against North Vietnam?

That dilemma had only worsened in the nine months of growing instability in South Vietnam after the overthrow and murder of its autocratic leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Johnson's advisers were drafting a congressional resolution giving him the freedom to go to war if he so decided.

Though doubt quickly surfaced about the realities of the Tonkin Gulf naval incident, Johnson called congressional leaders to the White House to ask for a resolution that would make him surrogate for the warmaking authority reserved for Congress by the Constitution.

In three days, both houses passed the resolution with near unanimity. It was a historic yielding of their prerogative to the White House.

What emerges from new evidence is a chronicle of confusion and bad judgments – and duplicity in high places – that guided the nation into a cruel and unpopular war that would cost 58,000 U.S. lives and immerse Americans in years of disillusionment as seldom, if ever, before. And there came, too, hard lessons on the wrenching difficulties of sharing warmaking power between the President and Congress in nuclear war – difficulties that have been only too apparent in recent controversies over American military involvement in Lebanon, Central America and the Persian Gulf.

The Escalation Gambit

November, 1963: In Saigon and Washington, in the aftermath of presidential assassinations, a fresh chapter opened under new leadership in the long and frustrating involvement of America in South Vietnam.

In Saigon, a military junta that succeeded the slain Ngo Dinh Diem found itself mired in intrigue that would produce another regime in the next three months – even as Communist guerrillas overran growing chunks of countryside with help from North Vietnam's Marxist rulers.

In Washington, the benumbing murder of John F. Kennedy brought into the Presidency and global policymaking JFK's Vice President, Lyndon Johnson.

Here was a powerful politician with a Texas-size drive that combined guile and ruthlessness, sentimentality and cold practicality; a man, moreover, who often disagreed with Kennedy's vacillations in handling the Vietnam issue – and whose opinions were seldom sought.

Now, characteristically, he set out immediately to find new answers with the help of a few key advisers to the late President. His most important deputy: Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, whose dazzling intelligence had earned admiration of both Kennedy and Johnson, though critics thought his passion for numbers often overlooked the intangibles of politics and war. "He really believed that 'men plus money plus materiel equals victory,"' a veteran observer of U.S. dealings with the Vietnamese recalled later.

Acting swiftly, Johnson told planners to develop a series of covert operations against North Vietnam to discourage its aggressive policies. They came up with OPLAN 34A, which included more than 2,000 separate operations ranging from clandestine intelligence collection to coastal commando raids. Both the military and the Central Intelligence Agency doubted the plan would succeed, but they conceded that it might help.

It didn't, and, as the situation in Vietnam worsened, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended "bolder action."

While McNamara opposed bombing North Vietnamese military and industrial targets, he did recommend that the U.S. "be in a position on 30 days' notice to initiate the program of 'graduated overt military pressure' against North Vietnam."

On May 25, 1964, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy drafted the proposal of Johnson's closest advisers: A program of "selected and carefully graduated military force against North Vietnam," designed "to hurt but not destroy." Their hope: That the threat of larger destruction would curb Hanoi's support of insurgencies in South Vietnam and Laos.

Would air strikes bring a military response from China or the Soviet Union? Its backers thought not, but nonetheless they warned the President of "the risk of escalation toward major land war or the use of nuclear weapons." They also recommended that Congress approve a resolution authorizing wider military action in Southeast Asia. Bundy wrote: "The preliminary consensus is that such a resolution is essential before we act against North Vietnam, but that it should be sufficiently general in form not to commit you to any particular action ahead of time."

All this would add up to major escalation of a conflict where 16,000 U.S. servicemen were still technically advisers. Johnson, however, ruled out air strikes against North Vietnam in the near future. One reason was that 1964 was a presidential-election year, and Vietnam had become a political football. Against the backdrop of the Kennedy legend, Johnson's popularity was untested, and he was determined to campaign as a man of restraint – a reassuring contrast to the trigger-happy image of his likely opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.).

As the summer progressed, the Joint Chiefs and the Pacific Command headed by Adm. U.S. Grant Sharp refined their concept of air operations against North Vietnam. Settling on 94 enemy military and industrial targets, they began drafting detailed plans for massive air action.

At that point, the strategy of escalation swung suddenly to a new focus – the Gulf of Tonkin.

On July 15, Admiral Sharp requested approval of an intelligence-gathering patrol, code-named Desoto, along North Vietnam's coast. "The objective of the mission was to update our overall intelligence picture in case we had to operate against North Vietnam," Sharp later admitted.

The Joint Chiefs and civilian authorities promptly approved Desoto; on July 17, the destroyer Maddox received orders to locate and identify radar transmitters, collect navigational information and conduct electronic surveillance along the North Vietnamese shoreline.

The instruction to approach no closer than 8 nautical miles to the coast, and 4 miles to the offshore islands, had a provocative edge: Although Hanoi had never publicly announced the width of its territorial waters, naval-intelligence officials suspected that Hanoi would claim the 12-mile limit observed by other Communist nations. In effect, the Maddox had the delicate task of stimulating coastal defenses without provoking an attack.

Because of the mission's obvious risks, the destroyer was equipped with a special communications van packed with sensitive electronic equipment to intercept North Vietnamese communications. A team of five Marines and 10 sailors manned the "comvan" around the clock under the leadership of Lt. Gerrell Moore of the Naval Security Group Command. Moore, 28, had orders to warn the Maddox of impending danger and to collect communications intelligence of strategic interest.

Cmdr. Herbert Ogier, 41, an Annapolis graduate, was the skipper of the Maddox, but on this mission he was outranked by Capt. John J. Herrick, 44, commander of the Seventh Fleet's Destroyer Division 192. Herrick later speculated that the Navy "put a four-striper aboard for a little more mature judgment."

As a veteran of a Desoto patrol along the coast of China, Herrick did not expect anything dramatic to occur. At Taiwan Defense Command Headquarters, he learned that five months earlier the U.S.S. Craig had patrolled along the North Vietnamese coast without incident. "We were told . . . it was like a Sunday cruise," Herrick recalled.

"This Is Not a Drill"

Minutes after 9 a.m., Friday, July 31, the Maddox maneuvered toward the tanker Ashtabula to refuel in the southern approach to the Gulf of Tonkin. On the horizon, the crews of both ships spotted four patrol boats – "friendlies" – speeding southward to their bases at Da Nang, South Vietnam.

During the night, they had bombarded enemy military and radar installations on the offshore islands of Hon Me and Hon Nieu. Under OPLAN 34A, the covert raids wereplanned and organized by an elite American military-aid-and-intelligence group specializing in unconventional warfare – a task force engaged in clandestine operations. Nominally South Vietnamese, the raids had been executed by European and Asian mercenaries.

Steaming north after refueling, the 20-year-old Maddox followed a prearranged track along the North Vietnamese coast. The first inkling of trouble came Saturday night, when the comvan intercepted an enemy naval message. Lieutenant Moore, roused from sleep, scanned the translated intercept. "It burned in your memory," he recalled two decades later. "It indicated that the [North] Vietnamese had decided to attack, imminently, that night."

Moore immediately took the intercept to Captain Herrick. Although the message was ambiguous about the precise identity of the "enemy," a second intercept confirmed that the Maddox was the intended target.

Darkened except for navigational lights, the destroyer continued the patrol with a third of her weapons manned. Near Vinh, some 150 miles north of the demilitarized zone between the two Vietnams, a lighthouse that the Maddox had been using as a navigational aid suddenly went out. Soon, hundreds of junks, some with visible radio antennas, massed ahead. Said Herrick later: "The North Vietnamese had some kind of paramilitary control over those junks – they'd just appear and disappear as if by magic."

The Desoto patrol commander suspected that one of the junks might try to detonate explosives alongside the ship – a hunch supported by a third, somewhat ambiguous North Vietnamese naval message that suggested an attempt to mine or ram the ship before dawn.

"Unacceptable risk." A little before 3 a.m., Sunday, August 2, the destroyer sounded general quarters, picked up speed and cruised into the gulf. "Consider continuance of patrol an unacceptable risk," Herrick cabled the Seventh Fleet.

After first light, the Maddox secured from general quarters. Having skirted the area where the junks had massed, Herrick allowed the crew to get into the usual Sunday holiday routine. It was clear and hot, and many of the men sunbathed on the decks.

Then, about 11:30 a.m., the Maddox sighted five North Vietnamese patrol boats speeding toward Hon Me, where the destroyer's radar tracked them into a cove on the northern side of the island. "At that time," Herrick recalled, "it could have been just normal movement of ships, which wouldn't have bothered us."

The "phantom battle" that led to war; can it happen again?

What did bother him was an intercepted message ordering the patrol-craft commander to attack the destroyer. Transmitted from a high-level North Vietnamese naval headquarters, the order was crystal clear. "It was not some trigger-happy" decision of a local commander, Moore said later. "He had orders from on high to go out and attack."

At 2 p.m., three high-speed radar contacts 30 miles from the Maddox pulled away from a junk fleet to intercept the destroyer. Changing course to a southeasterly heading, the Maddox increased speed in a futile effort to escape the enemy craft. As the boats closed to within 20 miles of the destroyer, the voice of the bosun's mate boomed over the Maddox's speakers: "General quarters! General quarters! This is not a drill!"

There was immediate commotion as sunbathers and those resting below deck slipped on dungarees, donned life jackets and grabbed steel helmets. Gunners stuffed pant legs into socks and rolled down sleeves to prevent flash burns during combat. At 2:40 p.m., the Maddox alerted the Seventh Fleet: "I am being approached by high-speed craft with apparent intention of torpedo attack. I intend to open fire in self-defense."

Approaching in column formation, three Soviet-built P-4 motor torpedo boats charged the Maddox at 50 knots, almost twice the top speed of the destroyer. When the 82-foot-long North Vietnamese craft, each armed with two 18-inch torpedoes, closed to 9,800 yards, the Maddox opened fire with three shots from her 5-inch guns. As the Communist warships edged closer, the destroyer opened up with a withering hail of continuous fire. In all, the Maddox fired 250 or more 3-inch and 5-inch shells.

A 5-inch round from the Maddox scored a direct hit on the second PT boat, which immediately launched both torpedoes. Swerving to port in almost a complete circle, the Communist craft limped away to the north. Meanwhile, the Maddox promptly changed course. Officers on the bridge watched parallel torpedo wakes pass harmlessly by, some 200 yards to starboard.

The lead PT boat closed to within a mile before taking a direct hit. One of its torpedoes, either launched or blown over the side, failed to run. Turning under the destroyer's stern, the enemy craft raked the ship with 12.7-mm machine-gun fire. One bullet inflicted the only damage suffered by the Maddox: A half-inch hole in the aft director platform, which electronically sighted the 3-inch guns.

At about 3:30 p.m., four F-8E Crusader aircraft from the U.S. carrier Ticonderoga roared over the Maddox and began attacking the fleeing PT boats. Armed with air-to-surface Zuni rockets and 20-mm guns, the fighters had been practicing coordinated strikes some 300 miles to the southeast. Diverted to the destroyer, the jets had climbed to 32,000 feet to conserve fuel and streaked toward the ship at just under the speed of sound.

Looking down, the pilots saw a half-mile-long cloud of gunpowder smoke hovering over the gulf. "The sea was very disturbed," recalled Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Southwick, one of the section wingmen. "It was obvious from the tracks there had been a great deal of maneuvering going on."

Herrick ordered the pilots "to attack and destroy" the enemy warships. Although narrowly missing with their visually guided rockets, the Crusaders scored repeatedly on their strafing runs. "The bullets started hitting in front of the boat and then on it," said Southwick of one run. "I was so fascinated with what was happening in front of me that I almost ran right into the boat. I don't think I cleared it by more than 20 or 30 feet."

Fifteen minutes after arriving, the fighters broke off the attack. Low on fuel and ammunition, they left one PT boat dead in the water and the other two fleeing north. Meanwhile, the Maddox, which had remained in the area to help damaged or downed aircraft, steamed to the southeast to rendezvous with the Turner Joy.

The skirmish, the first direct combat between U.S. and North Vietnamese forces, had lasted exactly 37 minutes.

The Stage Is Set

Ten thousand miles to the east, as most of Washington slept in the predawn hours of Sunday, August 2, "flash" cables and situation reports from the Pacific poured into the watch offices of the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA. A duty officer at the White House prepared a brief summary of the incident for delivery to Lyndon Johnson's bedroom:

"Mr. President:

"Early this morning the U.S.S. Maddox was attacked by three DRV [Democratic Republic of Vietnam] PT boats while on patrol approximately 30 miles off the North Vietnamese coast in the Gulf of Tonkin. . . ."

In the Oval Office, just before noon, Johnson listened to more-complete accounts of the seemingly inexplicable ambush. In the past, the U.S. had conducted patrols along the North Vietnamese coast without incident. Perhaps, the assembled officials tentatively concluded, Hanoi had made some sort of miscalculation. Under Secretary of State George Ball later recalled that some of Johnson's advisers wanted immediate retaliatory action – but the President wanted an "even stronger record" before striking back.

Seeking neither to provoke nor retreat, Johnson ordered resumption of the Desoto patrol, but pushed back the closest authorized approach to North Vietnam from 8 nautical miles to 11 miles. During daylight hours, carrier aircraft would provide the Maddox and Turner Joy with continuous air coverage, but hover to the seaward side of the destroyers to avoid overflying North Vietnam. Like so many finely calibrated U.S. "signals" to Hanoi, the intent of these gestures was probably lost on the fanatical North Vietnamese leadership.

Although angered by the ambush and annoyed by the Navy's failure to destroy all the attacking PT boats, Johnson played down the incident's importance. For much of the meeting, he talked mainly about domestic legislation.

On Monday, August 3, pressure mounted on Johnson to order retaliation for the attack. South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Khanh urged the U.S. to demonstrate that it was not a "paper tiger." Maxwell D. Taylor, the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, emphatically agreed: "It is not adequate to local minds (nor indeed to ours) to state that attack was repelled and that patrol will continue."

A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and an advocate of "flexible response," Taylor proposed several retaliatory actions, including attacking North Vietnamese patrol craft in international waters and mining the approaches to their bases.

Despite calls for reprisals, Johnson maintained his posture of restrained resolution. Calling newsmen into his office, he read a brief statement. Without mentioning the Maddox's mission, the President announced that the patrol in the Tonkin Gulf would continue and warned that U.S. forces would destroy any attackers.

Johnson's public firmness was balanced by a private effort to keep Congress from whipping up the incident into a crisis. Behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, Secretaries Rusk and McNamara and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, briefed 25 senators from the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees. McNamara revealed that prior to the attack on the Maddox the South Vietnamese had fired on two offshore North Vietnamese islands. Conceding U.S. knowledge of and support for the raids, he stressed that the destroyer, engaged in a routine patrol in international waters, had been unaware of them.

After the meeting, Senator Richard Russell (D-Ga.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters the North Vietnamese may have been "confused" by South Vietnamese naval activity in the Gulf of Tonkin. Secretary Rusk, when questioned by newsmen, said: "It remains to be seen" whether the attack was an isolated incident.

Rusk's remark reflected his innate caution as much as it did the real prospects of further conflict in the Gulf of Tonkin. A growing consensus within the government believed that the enemy had assumed the Desoto patrol was associated with the OPLAN 34A raids. Michael V. Forrestal, a special assistant to the Secretary of State and director of the interagency Vietnam Task Force, warned Rusk of the possibility that "Hanoi deliberately ordered the attack in retaliation for the harassment of the islands." Suggesting closer coordination between the two operations, Forrestal informed Rusk that "other 34A actions are scheduled for August 3-5."

Despite the risks, Johnson and his advisers had no thought of ending either the destroyer patrol or the covert raids. After a Monday-night session with the President, McNamara and Wheeler, Rusk informed Taylor about "significant additions" to the target list for covert operations: "We believe that present OPLAN 34A activities are beginning to rattle Hanoi and Maddox incident is directly related to their effort to resist these activities. We have no intention [of] yielding to pressure."

That determination would soon be put to the test. On August 4 at 8:14 a.m. Washington time, as dusk was descending on the Gulf of Tonkin halfway around the world, a secure telephone rang at the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon. A brief message from the NSA warned of "imminent" North Vietnamese naval action, possibly against the Maddox and Turner Joy as they patrolled in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Before the phone call had ended, a copy of an NSA field report from South Vietnam came in over a special cable channel for sensitive information. According to intercepted North Vietnamese communications, Communist patrol boats had been given the coordinates of two "enemy" vessels and ordered to "make ready for military operations."

Immediately, photocopies of the report were made and distributed to top Pentagon officials. General Wheeler received a briefing on the intelligence warning at 8:50 a.m. Twenty minutes later, Secretary McNamara informed the President of apparent North Vietnamese intentions to attack the two U.S. destroyers on the faraway Gulf of Tonkin.

First Tonkin Incident (July 31-Aug. 2)

1. Evening of Aug. 1, Maddox cruises near Hon Nieu and Hon Me, North Vietnamese islands shelled during clandestine raids 40 hours earlier.

2. Changes her intended course after interception of North Vietnamese communications that indicated an attack.

3. On Aug. 2, resumes her intelligence-gathering patrol near Thanh Hoa.

4. Reverses course while tracking North Vietnamese PT boats into cove at Hon Me.

5. At 2 p.m., heads southeast to escape rapidly closing PT boats.

6. At 3:08 p.m., opens fire on three attacking PT boats.

7. After sinking at least one craft, retires to the southeast to rendezvous with destroyer Turner Joy.

Second Tonkin Incident (Aug. 4)

1. Destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy cruise toward North Vietnamese coast at 7 a.m.

2. At noon, they wheel south.

3. Instructed to remain north of the 19th parallel to avoid interference with U.S.-sponsored raids against North Vietnamese coastal installations, patrol heads back to night steaming area.

4. At 7:15 p.m., Maddox receives an NSA warning of a possible attack. After detecting images on their surface radars, both ships retire to the southeast.

5. At 9:34 p.m., Turner Joy begins firing on a radar contact.

6. All action ceases at 11:45 p.m.

A Naval Inferno

Washington's worry and bustle lagged behind a scenario of tension that had already begun to escalate many hours earlier in Vietnam.

As dawn broke on Tuesday, August 4, Capt. John Herrick apprehensively contemplated the day's patrol. Intercepted enemy communications indicated that Hanoi considered the Maddox and Turner Joy enemy ships directly involved with OPLAN 34A raids along the coast. While unaware of details of the previous night's shelling of enemy military and radar bases, Herrick had been told to remain north of the 19th parallel "to avoid interference" with the attacks.

Compounding the danger was the patrol's planned track past the island of Hon Me, site of the July 31 raid and an operating base for North Vietnamese PT boats. An ambush near the island, Herrick reasoned, would leave little time for spotting and tracking the attackers. Moreover, the curbs on engagement, prohibiting hot pursuit closer than 11 miles to shore, would sharply limit the operating area for U.S. aircraft. "Under these conditions 15 minutes reaction time for obtaining air cover unacceptable," Herrick advised the Seventh Fleet. "Cover must be overhead and controlled by [the destroyers] at all times."

Steaming in column formation, the Turner Joy 1,000 yards astern of the Maddox, the warships neared the enemy coast 200 miles above the demilitarized zone. Under overcast skies, the destroyers wheeled south and cruised parallel to North Vietnam, coming no closer than 16 miles to shore. Because the ships were some 200 miles away from the carrier Ticonderoga, there was only intermittent air cover. A few radar contacts shadowed the patrol, but without incident.

After completing the assigned track, the Maddox and Turner Joy cruised east toward their night steaming site, a 24-square-mile area in the middle of the gulf. Then, at 7:15 p.m., Herrick received an NSA warning of a possible attack. According to North Vietnamese communications, two Communist Swatow gunboats and one PT boat had been given the destroyers' coordinates and ordered to prepare for combat.

Although this NSA report convinced Herrick that attack was "imminent" and had triggered immediate retaliatory preparations in Washington, North Vietnamese intent remains in dispute to this day. George Allen, a senior analyst in the Saigon CIA station, interpreted the intercepted message as an order to investigate – not attack – the destroyers. His view: "There was no unequivocal indication that the North Vietnamese had been ordered to initiate combat action."

Thirty minutes after the NSA alert, the Maddox detected a surface radar contact some 35 miles away. Because of its high speed, the "skunk" was presumed to be a North Vietnamese patrol craft. Moments later, two more radar blips appeared to the northeast. Herrick suspected an ambush: "We had night-steamed in the same area the night before, so they probably suspected that that's where we'd go this time. . . . They seemed to be setting up a sort of three-cornered trap out there for us."

Using maximum boiler power, the destroyers fled to the southeast to reduce the distance to the Ticonderoga. By now, low clouds and thunderstorm activity on the moonless night hampered visibility. Ens. Noel Allen, a new graduate of the Naval Academy and on duty in the Maddox's combat-information center, thought the night the darkest he had ever seen, "as if you were living your life in a coffin."

At 8 p.m., both destroyers sounded general quarters. Spotting at least three more surface contacts, the patrol asked the Ticonderoga for air support; immediately, it launched two F-8E Crusaders and two A-4 Skyhawks. Arriving 50 minutes later, the jets were directed by the Maddox to investigate three suspected patrol boats moving in close formation. The pilots found nothing.

It was 9:40 p.m. when the shooting began. The Turner Joy, having locked onto a radar contact 7,000 yards to starboard, opened fire with her 5-inch guns. Charging the destroyer at 50 knots, the contact made a sharp fishhook turn. At that moment, the Maddox sonarman reported a torpedo bearing. It was flashed by intership radio to the Turner Joy. Both ships turned hard to starboard. Lt. (j.g.) John Barry, a 24-year-old gunnery specialist, and three other crewmen on the Turner Joy said they spotted a torpedo wake 500 feet to port. "It was moving from aft forward on a parallel course to this ship," Barry later reported.

Immediately after the evasive action, the Maddox sonarman reported another torpedo. In plain, uncoded text, Herrick began issuing a frantic stream of "flash" cables:

"Am under continuous torpedo attack."

"Torpedoes missed. Another fired at us. Four torpedoes in water. And five torpedoes in water."

Have . . . successfully avoided at least six torpedoes."

Column of smoke. At 10:25 p.m., the Turner Joy's fire-control radar locked onto a contact, 2,500 yards off the starboard bow and closing at 48 knots. After 5-inch rounds buried the target, the Turner Joy's skipper, Cmdr. Robert C. Barnhart, Jr., observed "a column of black smoke rising from the surface of the water." By the time Barnhart maneuvered the ship to investigate the smoke, the radar contact had disappeared – presumably sunk.

The pilots circling overhead were bewildered by the frenzied voices heard on their radios. "[The destroyers] were calling out where they thought the torpedo boats were," recalled Cmdr. Wesley McDonald, an A-4 squadron commander. "But I could never find the damn torpedo boats."

The Turner Joy asked the planes to strafe the general area of an "intermittent contact." The pilots watched as the destroyer's gunners tried to mark the spot with 5-inch rounds. Although he saw neither patrol boats nor their wakes, McDonald gamely slammed his pod of visually guided rockets into the blackness below. The water swallowed them up without a trace.

Lt. Cmdr. Donald Hegrat, flying his second combat photo-reconnaissance mission in two days, saw the destroyers and their wakes very clearly, but no patrol boats. The photographs later confirmed his visual impressions.

Just before midnight, the Turner Joy recorded the last radar contact of the action. For 2 hours, the destroyers had weaved, dodged and zigzagged at 30 knots. They had fired 400 rounds from their 3-inch and 5-inch guns into the black night, dropped depth charges set shallow to destroy trailing enemy craft and, at one point, tried to ram their invisible attackers. "It got pretty tiresome after a while," Herrick later admitted. "It was just getting a little ridiculous to believe."

Herrick and skipper Ogier were especially skeptical of the 26 reported torpedoes – an incredible number since North Vietnam's estimated 12 PT boats could carry only two each. Equally suspicious, the Maddox had reported all of the torpedoes; the sonarman on the Turner Joy had heard none.

After the engagement, Herrick and Ogier did an experiment – putting the Maddox into high-speed full turns, after which their sonarman immediately reported hearing torpedoes. "It was the echo of our outgoing sonar beam hitting the rudders, which were then full over, and reflected back into the receiver," said Herrick. "Most of the Maddox's, if not all of the Maddox's, reports were probably false."

At 12:30 a.m, August 5, Herrick radioed a flash message to CINCPAC: "Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. . . . Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken." Twenty minutes later, he wired: "Entire action leaves many doubts except for apparent attempted ambush at the beginning. Suggest thorough reconnaissance in daylight by aircraft."

Reconnaissance, however, was far from the minds of the President and his advisers. What they were planning were retaliatory air strikes against North Vietnam; Herrick soon found himself bombarded with pleas for verification of the attack. "Certain that original ambush was bona fide," the patrol commander decided at nearly 2 a.m. "Details of action following present a confusing picture."

Taking On the Enemy

Even before messages began to flow in from the Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson was outraged by the impending action. Two days earlier, he had exercised restraint in the U.S. response to the attack on the Maddox. Now, he shared the view of military advisers that tougher action was necessary. House Majority Leader Carl Albert (D-Okla.), who was in the Oval Office that morning, overheard Johnson's orders to the Pentagon: "I not only want retaliation, I want to go all the way into the shore establishments that support these PT boats and bomb them out of existence."

The President also decided the time was ripe for a congressional resolution. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy suggested that perhaps they should not move so quickly on such an important decision. But Johnson's mind was made up, according to Bundy: "It became very clear that he was in no mood for discussion."

At 11:06 a.m., McNamara phoned the President to confirm the sea battle they had anticipated. "Flash" messages from the Tonkin Gulf indicated that the two destroyers were under continuous torpedo attack. As reports of a fantastic nighttime naval engagement streamed into the capital, Johnson and his closest advisers refined their military and political plans over lunch at the White House.

It was a little after 2 p.m. when doubts as to whether there had been an attack first surfaced in Washington. After the Tonkin Gulf action had ceased, Captain Herrick, as commodore of the destroyer patrol, suggested that "freak weather effects" and "overeager sonarmen" might have accounted for the improbable number of reported radar contacts and torpedoes. He also admitted there had been "no actual visual sightings" by the Maddox and recommended a "complete evaluation before any further action."

Herrick's doubts about the attack did little to slow the retaliatory juggernaut. McNamara announced to the Joint Chiefs the President's agreement with their recommendation to bomb five patrol-boat bases and an oil complex in North Vietnam. In addition, Johnson wanted the air strikes timed for 7 p.m., Washington time, when he would make a televised announcement of his decision to institute retaliatory measures against North Vietnam.

Meantime, Defense Secretary McNamara impatiently awaited situation reports from the Gulf of Tonkin. Because of the warships' lack of automatic encrypting transmitters, each outgoing classified message had to be manually encoded, so McNamara breached military principles of chain of command by trying to establish direct voice contact with the patrol. Though technically possible, the request offended Vice Adm. Roy L. Johnson, commander of the Seventh Fleet, who flatly replied that it could not be arranged. "I did stretch the truth a bit," he later admitted.

While the Joint Chiefs prepared the "strike execute" order, McNamara sought confirmation of the attack.

At 4:08 p.m., he queried Admiral Sharp in Honolulu about the latest reports from the destroyers. According to a Pentagon chronology, feisty, 58-year-old "Oley" Sharp reported that the latest message from the destroyers "indicates a little doubt on just exactly what went on." Was there a possibility that no attack occurred? McNamara asked. "Yes," Sharp replied, "I would say that there is a slight possibility." Noting there was still time to determine the attack's authenticity, McNamara ordered Sharp to "get the pilots briefed, get the planes armed, get everything ready to go."

After editing the JCS strike execute order, which called for "one-time maximum effort" against five North Vietnamese targets, McNamara convened a meeting at the Pentagon to evaluate evidence of the Tonkin Gulf action. Despite Herrick's doubts, there had been visual sightings of enemy cockpit lights and automatic-weapons fire. Admiral Sharp's conviction that an attack had occurred carried particular weight. But the evidence deemed most conclusive – both then and later – were enemy naval communications intercepted during the battle. Paraphrased, they read: "Have engaged enemy and shot down two planes. Starting out on hunt and waiting to receive assignment. Morale is high as men have seen damaged ships."

Unable to positively identify sender or receiver, the NSA believed the messages were sent from North Vietnamese Naval Headquarters in Haiphong to an operating unit in the field. Although the substance of the messages did not jibe with U.S. reports from the Pacific, it seemed obvious to McNamara and other officials that the North Vietnamese Navy had, at the very least, engaged the American destroyers.

Challenged later about the validity of the August 4 attack, McNamara called these intercepts "unimpeachable" evidence. Yet many intelligence officials are unconvinced.

The communications intelligence of August 2 had been intercepted by several NSA field stations – but only a single listening post in Phu Bai, South Vietnam, intercepted the August 4 messages.

Even more disconcerting was the timing of the intercepts. Many years after the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, Ray S. Cline, a former CIA deputy director of intelligence and director of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, took a hard, unhurried look at the evidence. He came to this conclusion: "I began to see that the [intercepts] which were being received at the time of the second attack almost certainly could not have referred to the second attack because of the time differences involved. Things were being referred to which, although they might have been taking place at that time, could not have been reported back so quickly."

The most plausible explanation of the August 4 intercepts is that they were a boastful summary of the August 2 attack, which somehow had been delayed in transmission. In early 1972, Louis Tordella, deputy director of the NSA, told staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there was no doubt in his mind that references in the August 4 intercepts to "enemy planes" and "damaged ships" pertained to the August 2 skirmish.

Still, in Washington's crisis atmosphere on August 4, policymakers preferred quick action to close analysis. Before leaving the Pentagon for a meeting at the White House, McNamara passed the word on the reprisal strikes: "[The] show is now on the road."

At 6:15 p.m., President Johnson presided over a typically perfunctory meeting of the National Security Council, which generally confirmed and validated decisions already made. Presidential Press Secretary George Reedy sensed the meeting was "a last-minute touching of base, to be certain that everything was in place."

McNamara outlined the attack and planned retaliatory strikes – while admitting to problems in learning "the exact situation." According to minutes of the meeting, Johnson asked CIA Director John McCone if the North Vietnamese "want a war by attacking our ships in the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin?"

"No," replied the gray-haired, bespectacled McCone, "the North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attacks on their offshore islands. They are responding out of pride and on the basis of defense considerations. The attack is a signal to us that the North Vietnamese have the will and determination to continue the war. They are raising the ante."

U.S. Information Agency Director Carl Rowan, bothered by incomplete evidence, asked: "Do we know for a fact that a North Vietnamese provocation took place? Can we nail down exactly what happened? We must be prepared to be accused of fabricating the incident." With minutes ticking away for launching the retaliatory bombing, McNamara replied: "We will know definitely in the morning."

After the 25-minute NSC meeting, Johnson met in the Cabinet Room with congressional leaders, from whose ranks he had emerged with an awesome reputation for artful persuasion and manipulative skill. Pleading for secrecy, Johnson remarked with Texas-size hyperbole: "Some of our boys are floating around in the water."

At the President's request, McNamara summarized the incident and the planned reprisals. Rusk added: "We are trying to get across two points. One, leave your neighbors alone. Second, if you don't, we will have to get busy."

As support for the air strikes began to grow, Johnson declared: "We can tuck our tails and run, but if we do, these countries will feel that all they have to do to scare us is to shoot the American flag."

He then read aloud the televised statement he intended to make to the nation right after the meeting – timed to coincide with the bombing of North Vietnam bases. His references to the attack as a "limited response" triggered mild criticism from Republican leaders. Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.) suggested putting "the word limited in [the] deep freeze. It connotes we would be like sitting ducks."

"Not going to take it." Johnson explained: "We want them [the North Vietnamese] to know we are not going to take it lying down, but we are not going to destroy their cities."

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), who, in talks earlier with both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had been critical of deepening U.S. involvement in Vietnam, now voiced again his general opposition to the proposed course. A former Marine and professor of Far Eastern history, Mansfield presciently warned of risking a costly war in "a minor, third-rate state."

After a brief, awkward silence, Johnson asked Mansfield the same question he would repeatedly ask other doubters and dissenters in Washington: Can you give me a formula for pulling out that would not be internationally and domestically catastrophic? Mansfield's ideas for taking the matter to the United Nations and reconvening the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indo-China seemed a wholly inadequate response to an attack on U.S. ships on the high seas.

The President also found congressional leaders receptive to his proposed resolution, which had been refined after shuttling back and forth all day between State Department lawyers and White House aides. Although the wording of the resolution bore little resemblance to the drafts of the previous spring, it retained the crucial authorization to "take all necessary steps, including the use of armed forces," to prevent further North Vietnamese aggression. "I think it would be very damaging to ask for it and not get it," Johnson told lawmakers.

Making a masterful pitch to lawmakers, Johnson played down the importance of a document that would become his legal authority for waging war in Vietnam: "I don't think any resolution is necessary, but I think it is a lot better to have it in the light of what we did in Korea."

Although assured of almost unanimous support, Johnson went around the table, forcing each congressman to make a stand one way or another. It was his favorite ploy to place doubtful legislators on the spot. There were reservations voiced, but no dissent. Senator George Aiken (R-Vt.) summed up the consensus: "By the time you send it up, there won't be anything for us to do but support you."

Because of delays, it was not until several hours later that reprisal bombings of North Vietnam bases finally began on the other side of the globe – hours after the President's televised speech. Naval aircraft from the U.S. carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation flew 64 sorties against four North Vietnamese patrol-boat bases and a supporting oil complex. Of the 30 boats sighted, eight were destroyed and 20 others damaged in retaliation for the supposed August 4 attack. The oil depot at Vinh – representing 10 percent of North Vietnam's total petroleum-storage capacity – was 90 percent destroyed. During the reprisal strikes, two U.S. aircraft were shot down and a third damaged. One pilot, 26-year-old Lt. (j.g.) Everett Alvarez, was captured afloat in the Gulf of Tonkin – the first of 826 Americans, of whom more than 100 died in captivity, known to have become a prisoner of war at the hands of the North Vietnamese. He was released after 8½ years.

A Presidential Triumph

At 9:05 a.m., Thursday, Aug. 6, 1964, the Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and Armed Services met in executive session to consider President Johnson's proposed legislation. Officially titled Joint Resolution to Promote the Maintenance of International Peace and Security in Southeast Asia, but soon dubbed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the 300-word document briefly outlined U.S. policy and authorized "the use of armed force" to resist North Vietnamese aggression.

Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and the resolution's floor manager, presided over the hearings. A Rhodes scholar and lawyer, the 59-year-old "egghead from the Ozarks" was Lyndon Johnson's close political ally and personal friend. Persuaded by the President that speedy passage would enhance the resolution's psychological impact, Fulbright asked his colleagues to limit their "questions to somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 minutes."

Secretary of State Dean Rusk spoke first for the administration. He observed that the language of the legislation closely resembled the authority granted in previous resolutions regarding Formosa, the Middle East and Cuba. Departing briefly from his prepared statement, Rusk underscored the "primary purpose" of the resolution: "[To] make it quite clear to the entire world that we are prepared to take the steps that may be required to insure the security of those to whom we are committed, and to bring such aggression to a halt."

Rusk's remarks were a short, unexceptional statement of U.S. policy, which raised few questions then or later. Defense Secretary McNamara's testimony, however, would become one of the wider chasms in the Johnson administration's "credibility gap." At the height of the Vietnam War, congressional critics of the conflict charged they had been misled by McNamara's account of the attacks.

McNamara's testimony portrayed the complex, ambiguous incidents in the Tonkin Gulf as a simple case of unprovoked aggression against U.S. ships on the high seas. His prepared statement made no mention of the destroyers' mission, the OPLAN 34A raids along the North Vietnamese coast or Captain Herrick's doubts about the second attack. Moreover, while most knowledgeable Johnson administration officials had concluded the attacks were retaliation for the OPLAN 34A raids, McNamara was at a loss to explain enemy motives for the attacks. "I personally consider the action of the North Vietnamese a form of suicide," he said.

Most senators uncritically accepted McNamara's testimony, with one vocal exception: Senator Wayne Morse (D-Oreg.). A scathing critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam, Morse was a mustachioed, 59-year-old former law professor who held the Senate record for the longest continuous oration. Spurred by a tip from an anonymous Pentagon source, Morse relentlessly tried to link the OPLAN 34A raids with the attacks on the U.S. destroyers. "I think what happened is that Khanh got us to backstop him in open aggression against the territorial integrity of North Vietnam," he speculated.

Stung by Morse's charges, McNamara combatively denied them: "First, our Navy played no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of, any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any. I want to make that very clear to you. The Maddox was operating in international waters, was carrying out a routine patrol of the type we carry out all over the world at all times. It was not informed of, was not aware of, had no evidence of, and so far as I know today has no knowledge of any possible South Vietnamese actions in connection with the two islands that Senator Morse referred to."

Morse's colleagues were not inclined to pursue his line of questioning. Instead, they innocuously asked McNamara about the strength of the North Vietnamese Navy, contingencies for a challenge by Communist China and the 64 retaliatory sorties that pounded four North Vietnamese patrol-boat bases and a supporting oil-storage depot. "They did not ask the right questions," reflected Pat Holt, a Foreign Relations Committee staffer. "They asked very few questions at all. That could partially be explained on the grounds that they didn't know what questions to ask at that point. But that's a pretty lame excuse. If you're not sure which questions to ask, you better start asking a lot, and then you will hit on the right one."

Led by Fulbright, most senators praised the President's prompt, firm but restrained reaction to the North Vietnamese attacks. "As much as I would like to be consulted with on this kind of thing," observed Senator Russell Long (D-La.), "the less time you spend consulting and the quicker you shoot back, the better off you are."

By a tally of 31 to 1, the committee members voted to report the resolution to the full Senate. Wayne Morse was the only dissenter. After the 100-minute meeting, Rusk, McNamara and General Wheeler crossed over to the other side of Capitol Hill, where the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 29 to 0 in favor of the resolution.

Fulbright, before the Senate, conceded that the resolution granted the President tremendous discretionary authority but was confident of Johnson's good judgment and willingness to consult with Congress on any major change in policy. Like most of his colleagues, he regarded the resolution as "an exhibition of solidarity," not a blank check for war.

One senator after another rose to support the resolution. Some voiced nagging doubts about the U.S. course in Vietnam, but nearly all rallied around the flag. "There is something very magical about an attack on an American ship on the high seas," White House aide Chester Cooper later reflected. "An attack on a military base or an Army convoy doesn't stir up that kind of emotion. An attack on an American ship on the high seas is bound to set off skyrockets and the 'Star-Spangled Banner' and 'Hail to the Chief' and everything else."

Thirty minutes before the voting deadline on Friday, August 7, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) proposed an amendment. Disturbed by varying interpretations placed on the resolution, he suggested adding language that would make clear that Congress was not authorizing a change in the U.S. advisory mission in South Vietnam or a substantial expansion of the U.S. commitment.

Fulbright, who had no objection to the substance of the amendment, rejected it – claiming the addition would create confusion and cause delay. At that point, a clerk announced that the House had just approved the resolution by a vote of 416 to 0. With the Senate voting deadline quickly nearing, Senator Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) stated his opposition to the resolution. A former newspaper editor, Gruening considered U.S. retaliation for the attacks "justifiable and proper," but objected to the sweeping power granted in the resolution, which he characterized as "a predated declaration of war."

Finally, Senator Morse rested his case against the resolution before the bar of history: "I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake."

With only Morse and Gruening opposed, the resolution passed by a margin of 88 to 2. Ten senators were absent.

Thus did Lyndon Johnson receive full authority to set his course in Vietnam. Two sentences of the resolution tell of the abridgment of the balance of war powers that the Constitution had bestowed on Congress and the Presidency:

Congress approves and supports the determination of the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression. . . . The United States is, therefore, prepared, as the President determines, to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.

The resolution did leave to Congress the right to repeal the resolution – a right it exercised, without fanfare or sorrow, in 1971 as an amendment to an unrelated bill.

On the night of September 18, a virtual replay of the August 4 incident occurred when Communist patrol craft apparently ambushed two U.S. destroyers – the Edwards and the Morton – in the Tonkin Gulf. The American warships again fired hundreds of rounds at radar contacts, and top officials in Washington again began to plan retaliatory air strikes. But this time President Johnson was extremely skeptical. Was this a tacit admission of a misjudgment on the August 4 action? According to Under Secretary of State George Ball, Johnson had voiced his doubts within days after August 4. "Hell," he told Ball, "those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish."

The Rolling Thunder

Surrounded by key lawmakers in the East Room of the White House, President Johnson signed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on Monday, August 10. With his prompt military and political reply to the Communists, Johnson had not only increased his power to act but also effectively neutralized Vietnam as a campaign issue.

He still maintained a claim to restraint and moderation. Johnson told advisers he didn't "wish to escalate just because the public liked what happened last week. We would have to pick our own ground. . . . [Instead] of letting the other side have the ball, we should be prepared to take it."

At the same time, he invited prompt suggestions from his advisers for military initiatives with "maximum results and minimum danger." After a month, the advisers advanced several short-term plans, including renewed Desoto patrols and OPLAN 34A covert operations – clearly dissociated from one another – plus limited South Vietnamese cross-border raids against enemy infiltration routes in the Laotian panhandle.

For the long haul, many advisers favored bombing North Vietnam, setting Jan. 1, 1965, as the target date. Despite this official consensus, Johnson was still not ready for the U.S. to abandon its advisory role and become a co-belligerent in the conflict. In addition to Saigon's chronic political instability and election-year politics at home, Johnson simply did not believe bombing would work. "Every time I get a military recommendation, it seems to me that it calls for large-scale bombing," he observed to Ambassador Taylor in December, 1964. "I have never felt that this war will be won from the air."

Johnson hoped the answer might lie in more-effective use of U.S. Rangers, Special Forces and Marines in South Vietnam. But counterinsurgency by small, elite units no longer sufficed. By the end of 1964, Viet Cong forces numbered some 34,000 conventional troops plus 72,000 irregulars. And, unknown to Washington, the first organized North Vietnamese units had begun infiltrating into the South.

In late January, 1965, McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara jointly informed the President that time had run out on 15 years of limited U.S. involvement in Vietnam; they called it "first aid to squabbling politicos and passive reaction to events we do not try to control." Both suggested either direct U.S. military operations – or negotiations without any further escalation. "Bob and I tend to favor the first course," wrote Bundy, "but we believe that both sides should be carefully studied."

The President's top advisers got their answer the next month when Johnson authorized a limited bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Code-named Rolling Thunder, it was the first real test of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Apparently uncertain of the extent of his congressional mandate, Johnson asked former President Dwight D. Eisenhower whether the resolution was "strong enough and ample" to permit sustained bombing of North Vietnam. Evading a direct answer, Eisenhower observed that it resembled his Formosa Resolution, which allowed a large area of presidential "discretion and flexibility."

In July, Johnson cashed his Tonkin Gulf blank check by ordering the deployment of 100,000 U.S. ground troops to Vietnam. By not using reserves, he avoided a congressional confrontation over his commitment to a land war in Asia.

Still, Senator Fulbright felt he had been sandbagged. As floor manager of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, he had assured colleagues that the President intended to consult with Congress on any major change in policy. "I should have been much more skeptical," he admits ruefully. "I allowed my personal attachment for Johnson, I think, to override my better judgment."

By Lyndon Johnson's reckoning, however, his administration had made the resolution's aim perfectly clear to Congress. Several congressmen agreed with him. Said Representative Dante Fascell (D-Fla.): "As a member who voted for that resolution, I understood it. I was not duped or misled. There was no ambiguity. That resolution was a full grant of complete power to the President to conduct any action he wanted to in Southeast Asia."

As the war escalated in 1966 and 1967, the Johnson administration's version of the August 4 incident in the Gulf of Tonkin became increasingly suspect to lawmakers.

Press stories and leaks from U.S. officials suggested that McNamara's 1964 testimony was at best incomplete and at worst part of an elaborate – if improbable – conspiracy. The Foreign Relations Committee began investigating the Gulf of Tonkin action. Appearing before Fulbright's committee in February, 1968, McNamara tenaciously defended his earlier testimony. Now, however, many senators joined Morse in disputing the Defense Secretary's account. "I feel that I have been misled," Senator Albert Gore (D-Tenn.) declared, "and that the American people have been misled."

When the resolution was finally repealed in 1971, American troops in Vietnam, once numbering nearly 500,000, had dwindled to 150,000, and a divided nation waited for the seemingly interminable conflict to just go away. Four years later, during Saigon's final agony, the last vestige of U.S. involvement in Vietnam ended in a helter-skelter scramble of soldiers and civilians for passage home.

In the 20 years since the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the struggle between Congress and successive Presidents over the use of military forces abroad has continued unremittingly. Embittered by President Johnson's exploitation of the resolution, Congress in 1973 reacted by passing the War Powers Act, curtailing the Chief Executive's authority to use military power. Thereafter, he would have to consult with Congress before committing U.S. forces to foreign combat – and to report to lawmakers when American troops were so used. This has prompted a charge from President Reagan: "In the last 10 years, the Congress has imposed about 150 restrictions on the President's power in international diplomacy. . . . I just don't think that a committee of 535 individuals, no matter how well intentioned, can offer what is needed."

In the shifting tide of war powers between the White House and lawmakers, however, no effective formula has been found for bringing together rivals with shared constitutional authority in military matters – the President as commander of the armed forces and Congress as the agency for declarations of war and raising the armed forces.

As a result, Americans are now mired in a durable and agonizing dilemma. Can a democracy cope with the challenge of today's swift-moving events and technology that raise risks: Nuclear devastation, left-wing movements that resort to brutal terrorism and Soviet power that profits from disorders in impoverished nations?

Under those pressures, the collision between a wary Congress and a confidently aggressive President has been worsening over the past three years.

White House resolve, too, has stiffened. Overt intervention by U.S. forces in the 1980s is increasing: Naval shelling and bombardment in Lebanon, occasional combat participation of U.S. "advisers" in El Salvador and – most challenging of all – a mine-laying operation in Nicaragua's key harbor.

Clearly, the long trail of top-level rivalry over war powers that sprang from a controversial naval action of 20 years ago is heading for a major showdown – with no more assurance than before of bringing stability and security to America in an increasingly volatile world.

The Last Days of the President - LBJ in retirement [Leo Janos in the July 1973 Issue of the Atlantic]

On the night before Christmas, 1971, Lyndon Baines Johnson played the most improbable role of his varied and controversial life. Protected from public view behind the gates of his Texas ranch, and no longer suffering the cloying presence of a battalion of White House reporters, Johnson donned a red suit and false beard, climbed aboard a small tractor, and drove to the hangar adjoining his airstrip. Assembled inside were the families of his ranch hands for what had become a traditional ceremony over the years: receiving greetings and gifts from LBJ. This time, they were so stunned at the sight of the former President ho-ho-hoing aboard a chugging tractor that they greeted his arrival with disbelieving silence. Undeterred, Johnson dismounted the tractor and unloaded a bag of toys for the children, sent to him for the occasion by an old friend, New York toy manufacturer Louis Marx, father of Patricia Marx Ellsberg.

"I'm going to enjoy the time I've got left," Johnson told friends when he left Washington in January, 1969, a worn old man at sixty, consumed by the bitter, often violent, five years of his presidency. He had never doubted that he could have won the 1968 election against Richard Nixon if he had chosen to run for another term. But in 1967 he launched a secret actuarial study on his life expectancy, supplying personal histories of all the males in the recent Johnson line, himself included. The men in the Johnson family have a history of dying young," he told me at his ranch in the summer of 1971, "My daddy was only sixty-two when he died, and I figured that with my history of heart trouble I'd never live through another four years. The American people had enough of Presidents dying in office." The prediction handed to Johnson was that he would die at the age of sixty-four. He did.

He returned to the Texas hill country so exhausted by his presidency that it took him nearly a full year to shed the fatigue in his bones. From the outset he issued the sternest orders to his staff that the press was to be totally off limits. "I've served my time with that bunch," he said, "and I give up on them. There's no objectivity left anymore. The new style is advocacy reporting—send some snotty-nosed reporter down here to act like a district attorney and ask me where I was on the night of the twenty-third. I'm always guilty unless I can prove otherwise. So to hell with it." His press grievances were usually accompanied by favorite examples of anti-Johnson stacked decks—among these, the flurry of comment generated when he had lifted his shirt to expose ample belly and fresh surgical scar. He explained: "Rumors were flying that I really had cancer. I had to prove I really had my gall bladder taken out." By contrast Nixon, he thought, had intimidated the press into fair treatment. "The damn press always accused me of things I didn't do. They never once found out about the things I did do," he complained with a smile. One result of such self-righteous bitterness was that the man who had been the world's most powerful and publicized ruler was simply swept down a hole of obscurity, surfacing only occasionally at University of Texas football games or at the funerals of old friends such as Hale Boggs and Harry Truman. A logical surmise was that Johnson was brooding in silence on his ranch porch, pouting at the unfriendly, unloving world beyond his guarded gates. But LBJ's temperament was more complicated than that: relaxed, easy, and friendly for days, he would suddenly lapse into an aloof and brooding moodiness, only to give way to a period of driving restlessness. He was a seesawing personality for as long as anyone could remember.

His first year in retirement was crowded with projects. He supervised nearly every construction detail of the massive LBJ Library complex on the University of Texas campus, which houses not only thirty-one million documents acquired over thirty-eight years in Washington, but also the LBJ School of Public Affairs. At one point, university regent Frank Erwin approached Johnson about an Indiana educator who was interested in running the LBJ School. Johnson frowned at the mention of the state which sent to the Senate one of Johnson's least favorite persons, and among the most vocal of his war critics, Vance Hartke. "Frank," Johnson responded, "I never met a man from Indiana who was worth a shit."

There was fresh bitterness over a series of hour-long interviews, with Walter Cronkite for which Johnson had contracted with CBS before leaving the White House. The first show, on Vietnam, had been a fiasco. "I did lousy," Johnson admitted, and raised hell over what he claimed had been an unfair CBS editing practice—Cronkite refilming new questions to answers he had originally given during the interview at the ranch. "Cronkite came down here all sweetness and light, telling me how he'd love to teach journalism at Texas someday, then he does this to me," he fumed. The critical reaction to his television interview on Vietnam reinforced Johnson's conviction that his presidential memoirs should be divided into two separate books, one on domestic policies, the other on foreign affairs. In this way, he reasoned, the Great Society would be spared from the critical response he anticipated to his explanations of Vietnam policy. His publishers talked him out of separate books, and Johnson cautiously began unfolding his version of his presidential years. Assisted by two trusted staff writers, Robert Hardesty and William Jorden, he issued only one firm guideline, that not one word should appear in the book that could not be corroborated by documentation. To aid in this effort, Johnson threw open to his writers every file and document from his White House years, including telephone conversations he had held as President, which were recorded and transcribed for history. (Exposure to this material was largely for his writers' background information; few revelations or previously unpublished documents appeared in Johnson's book.) Jorden, a former New York Times reporter who had worked as an assistant to Walt Rostow, was particularly impressed with his research reading. "My God," he said, "I thought I knew just about everything involving Vietnam during my White House days. I discovered that I had missed a lot."¹

William Jorden worked on the book's Vietnam chapters, which went to twenty drafts, and were read by McGeorge Bundy, Generals Earle Wheeler and William Westmoreland, and Abe Fortas, LBJ's pre-eminent confidant, among others, before receiving final approval. The result of all this effort was a fully researched but flat and predictable apologia of the Johnson years, most of its vital juices evaporated many drafts ago.

Hurt and disappointed by the adverse critical reaction to his book, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969, Johnson found solace working the land of his 330-acre ranch, which he bought in 1951. Under a fiery Texas sun, the Pedernales River runs clear and full. Fat cattle graze languidly in the shade of live oaks. Johnson knew that he owned some of the loveliest property in Texas, and unleashed his energies as a working rancher like a restless child entering a playpen. LBJ installed a complex irrigation system (and was observed clad only in paper shorts helping to lay pipe in the middle of the shallow Pedernales), constructed a large hen house, planted acres of experimental grasses sufficiently hardy to withstand severe hill country weather, and built up his cattle herds through shrewd purchases at the weekly cattle auctions near Stonewall. On one occasion, ranch foreman Dale Milenchek talked Johnson into purchasing an $8000 breeding bull. The massive animal impregnated only a few cows before suffering a fatal leg infection. Johnson complained, "Dale bought me the most expensive sausage in the history of Texas."

No ranch detail escaped his notice. Once, driving some friends around the spread, LBJ suddenly reached for his car radiophone, which crackled just as much in retirement as it had when he was President. "Harold, Harold, over," he barked. "Why is that sign about selling the Herefords still posted? You know we sold them last week. Get it down." At the LBJ State Park, across the road, Johnson enjoyed escorting his guests to a slide show and exhibit on the hill country. On another occasion, I observed Johnson watching a preview of a new slide show with increasing annoyance as the bearded face of a local Stonewall character appeared in various poses, slide after slide. Turning angrily to his park supervisor, Johnson exclaimed: "Will you please tell me why we need six slides of Hondo Crouch?" Another must on a Johnson-chauffeured tour was the family graveyard, a few hundred yards from his home. "Here's where my mother lies," he solemnly declared. "Here's where my daddy is buried. And here's where I'm gonna be too." Then, a sudden acceleration and the white Lincoln Continental would roar to the cow pastures.

Old friends invited to dine with the squire of the Pedernales would be advised that dinner was at eight. But not until ten or eleven would Johnson appear, happily tired and dung-booted, to regale his guests about the new calf or progress with his egg production. "He's become a goddamn farmer," a friend complained. "I want to talk Democratic politics, he only talks hog prices." Often, Johnson took friends to a favorite hill on his spread to watch the sunset. His Secret Service bodyguard, Mike Howard, unpacked an ice chest and glasses, and the group would relax and drink to the setting sun. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, cook Mary Davis, a keenly intelligent black lady, would begin pressuring Lady Bird to get Johnson and his guests back before dinner was ruined. "Another half hour and I simply cannot be responsible for this roast," Mary would complain. With a sigh, Lady Bird would begin the artful manipulation of her husband. Contacting him on the car radio, she would suggest: "Honey, why don't you take everyone over to Third Fork and show them the deer?" (Third Fork was only a quarter of a mile away, in the direction of home.) Such ploys often failed, however. "Damn it," Johnson would reply, "I'm not going to be pressured into keeping to anyone's schedule but my own."

He was still very much "Mr. President" to the retinue serving him in retirement, including three round-the-clock Secret Service protectors, a Chinese butler named Wong, brought to Texas from the White House, two secretaries, a dozen former White House staffers, who worked at the library but could be tapped for other duties when the occasion demanded, as well as a dozen or so ranch hands who were kept scrambling. A phone call would dispatch an Air Force helicopter to carry him forty miles from his ranch into Austin, where a landing pad had been built on the library roof. For longer trips he used his own twin-engine turboprop. A visitor expressed surprise that LBJ could still summon a helicopter to fly him around the Austin area. An aide responded, "He was living this way when he was in the Senate."

He took up golf, puttering around courses in Fredericksburg, and on trips to Mexico. One day, playing with a few aides and friends, Johnson hit a drive into the rough, retrieved it, and threw the ball back on the fairway. "Are you allowed to do that?" one of the wives whispered to a Secret Service agent. "You are," he replied, "if you play by LBJ rules."

Each December 21 he would host a rollicking party at the Argyle Club in San Antonio to celebrate his wedding anniversary. The guest list was limited to his closest friends, including a Texas businessman named Dan Quinn, who on the day of the wedding had had to run out and buy a ring for Lyndon to give to Lady Bird, since the groom had forgotten that particular detail. The hired band was instructed to play danceable music only, and Johnson, a classy ballroom dancer of the first rank, would dance with every lady present into the wee hours.

Each February Johnson would take over a seaside villa in Acapulco for a mouth's siege. The exquisite estate is owned by former Mexican President Miguel Alemán, a business partner with LBJ on several Mexican ranchland deals. Johnson would fly in family, friends, and aides, as well as his own cook, food, bottled water, and even air-conditioning units. He brought his own food, water, and liquor to Acapulco to avoid the embarrassment of his 1970 trip when nearly all of his guests developed classic cases of "Mexicali revenge" after being fed local produce. At night, films would be shown, courtesy of LBJ friend Arthur Krim, who would have the newest releases flown down. Johnson also loved to visit Alemán's ranch, Las Pampas, deep in the Mexican interior, enjoying the total isolation and rugged beauty of the place. He was moved by the poverty of some of the ranch hands, who almost invariably had large families. Using an interpreter, Johnson would lecture the wives about birth control and the need to have small families if you are poor. Back in Texas, he began sending the families packages of birth control pills, vitamins, clothing, and blankets. "If I became dictator of the world," he said, "I'd give all the poor on earth a cottage, and birth control pills—and I'd make damn sure they didn't get one if they didn't take the other."

Each Friday morning, a White House jet landed at the LBJ ranch, depositing foreign policy briefing papers prepared especially for Johnson by Henry Kissinger's staff. On two occasions Kissinger himself arrived at Johnson's door for personal briefings on the peace talks; twice he sent his deputy, General Alexander Haig. In all, LBJ's relations with the Nixon White House were cordial, although he sensed that the briefing papers told him only what Nixon wanted him to know. His death canceled plans he had negotiated with the White House to entertain Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in Texas, following her February meeting in Washington with Nixon. Johnson thought it would be a splendid idea to have Mrs. Meir participate in a question-and-answer session with the students of the LBJ School. Through an old supporter, New York industrialist Abe Feinberg, he queried Mrs. Meir on the matter and received word she would be delighted to visit with the students and attend a Johnson-hosted luncheon in Austin. The White House arranged to fly Mrs. Meir to Texas. A few weeks before Johnson's death, Richard Nixon called to tell him that a cease-fire was imminent. Johnson got in touch with his veteran speechwriter, Horace Busby, and asked him to prepare a statement on the cease-fire. "Get this thought in," Johnson instructed Busby. "No man worked harder or wanted peace more than I."

Johnson had decidedly mixed emotions about his successor. He was puzzled by Nixon's cold style ("Imagine not inviting one member of Congress to Tricia's wedding. If you don't respect them, they won't respect you") and aghast at some of Nixon's domestic policies. Shortly after leaving the White House, he remarked to a Texas businessman: "When I took over the presidency, Jack Kennedy had left me a stock market of 711. When I left the White House, it was over 900. Now look at it. That's what happens when the Republicans take over—not only Nixon, but any of them. They simply don't know how to manage the economy. They're so busy operating the trickle-down theory, giving the richest corporations the biggest break, that the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket." Amused staffers recall that on the trip back to Texas aboard Air Force One, Johnson went up and down the aisles giving financial advice: "Keep all your money in cash," he urged. "Nixon will have us in an inflationary recession before his first year is over." (He had also, he told me, given his outgoing Cabinet members a different, if equally sobering, kind of advice: "Each of you had better leave this town clean as Eisenhower's hound's tooth. The first thing Democrats do when they take power is find where the control levers are. But the first thing Republicans do is investigate Democrats. I don't know why they do it but you can count on it.")

Johnson gave Nixon "high grades" in foreign policy, but worried intermittently that the President was being pressured into removing U.S. forces too quickly, before the South Vietnamese were really able to defend themselves. "If the South falls to the Communists, we can have a serious backlash here at home," he warned. "When you think of what the South has been through, and what the government is up against, it is nothing short of a miracle that they have kept everything together for as long as they have. Thieu's no saint, but you have got to respect his ability to keep things together under the worst conditions imaginable." Over a lunch, at which I was a guest, a few days after the first installments of the Pentagon Papers appeared in the New York Times, Johnson ruminated about his own Vietnam policies. "We made a couple of key mistakes," he admitted. "To begin with, Kennedy should have had more than eighteen thousand military advisers there in the early 1960s. And then I made the situation worse by waiting eighteen months before putting more men in. By then, the war was almost lost. Another mistake was not instituting censorship—not to cover up mistakes, but to prevent the other side from knowing what we were going to do next. My God, you can't fight a war by watching it every, night on television."

He then launched into a long defense of his policies against the allegations and implications contained in the Times's articles. "All the time, in 1964, I really hoped we could negotiate our way out of a major war in Vietnam," he said. "The Russians shared our hope." As the situation deteriorated in Vietnam, he said, he tried, by proceeding with U.S. troop buildups quietly and slowly, to avoid inflaming hawk sentiment at home and, perhaps more important, forcing Hanoi to call on the Chinese for help. "I told my advisers, 'By God, don't come to me with any plans to escalate this war unless you carry with you a joint congressional resolution.' I wasn't going to follow Truman's mistake in Korea when he went in without congressional approval. They claim I used Tonkin Gulf as an excuse. Hell, the Communists hit us there twice. The first time their torpedo boats hit the day before, I did nothing, hoping it was either a mistake or the action would not be repeated. But when they hit us again the very next day, I was forced to act. And just about every member of Congress was marching right along with me." He was particularly ruffled by the accusation that he had been secretly planning to bomb the North at the time of the 1964 campaign, when Barry Goldwater was calling for precisely such an act. "It is absolutely untrue," Johnson said. "On at least five occasions I personally vetoed military requests for retaliation bombing raids in the North. Only late in 1965 did I reluctantly agree to it. Not one of my principal advisers—Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, and George Ball—opposed my decision not to rush into retaliation strikes. We had contingency plans to bomb in the North for retaliation for terrorist raids in the South. But I didn't want to do this. Finally, they attacked our base in Pleiku in February, 1965, destroying many planes and killing a lot of our men. I was forced to act. I felt I had no choice. All of my civilian advisers, every one of them, agreed with me. Dean Rusk told me, 'Mr. President, this is a momentous decision.' I suppose it was."

We were in a private dining room on the third floor of the LBJ Library. Across the hall was a replica of Johnson's White House office. A three-foot electric pepper mill sat at the head of the table, and butler Wong scurried in with a plate of steak and sweet corn. Johnson seated himself ahead of his guests, a presidential practice carried into retirement, and began to eat. Aides arrived to whisper in his ear about incoming calls. He either shook his head or left the table for many minutes. Secret Service agents haunted the surrounding corridors, walkie-talkies in hand. Déjà vu was a decorative theme: on one wall of the dining room were the framed photographs of heads of state whom Johnson visited during his years in office. "Here's my favorite," said Lady Bird, pointing to a photo of South Korea's President, General Chung Hee Park. "He was a real no-nonsense fellow." (Lady Bird was more conservative than the public ever realized.) LBJ laughed. "I remember our trip to Seoul. My God, I've never seen so many people lining the streets. I asked Park, through an interpreter, what would he estimate the crowd to be? The interpreter jabbers a bit and tells me, 'President Park, he say population of Seoul is one million. People on the streets is one million. That's all the people we have. So solly.'"

During coffee, the talk turned to President Kennedy, and Johnson expressed his belief that the assassination in Dallas had been part of a conspiracy. "I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he pulled the trigger." Johnson said that when he had taken office he found that "we had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean." A year or so before Kennedy's death a CIA-backed assassination team had been picked up in Havana. Johnson speculated that Dallas had been a retaliation for this thwarted attempt, although he couldn't prove it. "After the Warren Commission reported in, I asked Ramsey Clark [then Attorney General] to quietly look into the whole thing. Only two weeks later he reported back that he couldn't find anything new." Disgust tinged Johnson's voice as the conversation came to an end. "I thought I had appointed Tom Clark's son—I was wrong."

Johnson rarely worked at the LBJ Library, preferring instead to do business at his comfortable ranch office, where on the wall opposite his large desk hung a painting of a Texas landscape by artist Peter Hurd. At Lady Bird's behest, Hurd had been commissioned to paint the official presidential portrait, resulting in what Johnson called "the ugliest picture I ever saw." Reminiscing, Johnson explained: "He didn't follow the strict rules about size and style laid down about those portraits. I like his scenes much better."

In March, 1970, Johnson was hospitalized at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, after complaining of severe chest pains. Doctors reassured him that he had not suffered a heart attack; instead, the pains were caused by angina, a hardening of the arteries to the heart resulting in an insufficiency of blood to the body's most vital organ. Although there was little that could be done to cure the condition, Johnson was urged to lose considerable weight. He had grown dangerously heavier since leaving the White House, gaining more than twenty-five pounds and weighing around 235. The following summer, again gripped by chest pains, he embarked on a crash water diet, shedding about fifteen pounds in less than a month. But shortly before Christmas, 1971, he shocked his friends by suddenly resuming cigarette smoking, a habit he had discarded over fifteen years before, following his first, near fatal, heart attack. "I'm an old man, so what's the difference?" he explained. "I've been to the Mayo Clinic twice and the doctors tell me there is nothing they can do for me. My body is just aging in its own way. That's it. And I always loved cigarettes, missed them every day since I quit. Anyway, I don't want to linger the way Eisenhower did. When I go, I want to go fast." He quickly became a chain smoker.

In April, 1972, Johnson experienced a massive heart attack while visiting his daughter, Lynda, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Convinced he was dying, he browbeat Lady Bird and his doctors into allowing him to fly home to Texas. So, late in the night of his third day in intensive care, a desperately sick LBJ was rushed to the airport and ferried back to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. The departure was so sudden that the Charlottesville hospital director, hearing a rumor that Johnson might try to leave, rushed to the hospital only to find LBJ's empty wheelchair in the parking lot.

Miraculously he survived, but the remaining seven months of his life became a sad and pain-wracked ordeal. "I'm hurting real bad," he confided to friends. The chest pains hit him nearly every afternoon—a series of sharp, jolting pains that left him scared and breathless. A portable oxygen tank stood next to his bed, and Johnson periodically interrupted what he was doing to lie down and don the mask to gulp air. He continued to smoke heavily, and, although placed on a low-calorie, low-cholesterol diet, kept to it only in fits and starts.

Meanwhile, he began experiencing severe stomach pains. Doctors diagnosed this problem as diverticulosis, pouches forming on the intestine. Also symptomatic of the aging process, the condition rapidly worsened and surgery was recommended. Johnson flew to Houston to consult with heart specialist Dr. Michael De Bakey, who decided that Johnson's heart condition presented too great a risk for any sort of surgery, including coronary bypass of two almost totally useless heart arteries.

"I once told Nixon," he said, "that the presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hailstorm. You've got to just stand there and take it. That's what I'm doing now." But he was also busy preparing his estate for his death. During the four years of his retirement he had managed nearly to double his considerable estate, which included stock in at least nine Texas banks, television interests in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, a real estate and photographic supply company in Austin, 3700 acres of land in Alabama, and extensive property holdings in Mexico, the Caribbean, and five Texas counties.

The flagship of Johnson's business empire had been the Austin television station, KTBC, which Lady Bird had launched in 1952, nine years after she bought radio station KTBC. In September, 1972, LBJ engineered the station's sale to the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Corporation for nine million dollars, a premium price which impressed several of Texas' shrewdest horse traders. The sale provided Lady Bird with $4.7 million, and the two Johnson daughters with $1.3 million each. Working with his most trusted assistant, twenty-nine-year-old Tom Johnson, who had served as assistant White House press secretary (and is the newly appointed editor of the Dallas Times-Herald), LBJ negotiated with the National Park Service to take over his ranch home as a national museum after his death and when Lady Bird no longer desired to live there. Most poignant of all, he began a series of tough bargaining sessions with a Tulsa land company to sell the working portion of his beloved ranch. Surprisingly, these financial moves were made without the assistance of his lifelong business partner, Judge A. W. Moursund. "The judge and I have split the blanket," Johnson said. And that is all he would say.

Apparently the two had argued about the purchase of a bank, but, whatever the reason, Johnson and Moursund, a Blanco County judge whom LBJ had known since boyhood and who during LBJ's' presidential years had a direct White House line plugged into his hill country ranch, remained totally estranged for the last year of Johnson's life. The split-up offered a rare peek inside Johnson's complicated business empire. Holdings and liabilities jointly filed included more than $700,000 in loans from federal land banks in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Dividing property, Johnson received a 4000-acre ranch and 214 subdivision lots along Lake LBJ in Austin; while the judge received 3200 acres in Oklahoma and more than 2000 acres in a nearby Texas county. All of the loans were listed in the names of Moursund and his wife.

Sick and depressed, Johnson had hoped to attend the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, if only to stand up and take a bow. He needed some warmth and applause, but from Larry O'Brien and others the message filtered back that he had better stay home. The McGovern nomination disgusted him. Nixon could be defeated if only the Democrats don't go too far left," he had insisted. But to Johnson, party loyalty ranked with mother love, so he was far from pleased to find such old colleagues as George Christian, Leonard Marks, and former Commerce Secretary C. R. Smith working for Nixon against other old friends such as Liz Carpenter and Joe Califano, who campaigned for McGovern. Of John Connally, with whom his relationship had long been complicated, and who he thought would run on the GOP ticket as Nixon's running mate, Johnson remarked philosophically: "John sees a good opportunity." But when another close Texas confidant stretched his endorsement of Nixon to include active support for Texas Republican Senator John Tower, Johnson angrily called the offender and exploded: "You're a fat old whore."

Johnson's choice to beat Nixon was Edmund Muskie. In his view, Senator Muskie was "crucified by the press. They zeroed in on him because he was the front-runner and pounded him out, just like they did to Romney in 1964." His disappointment was mollified slightly by his own estimations of the Maine senator, which he had discussed with friends a few years before. "Muskie," he had said, "will never be President because he doesn't have the instinct to go for his opponent's jugular." Prior to the convention, Johnson held long telephone conversations with both Muskie and Chicago's Mayor Daley on the strategy to stop McGovern. He advised Muskie to stand firm and hold out to see whether there would be a second ballot. But he refused to act on Daley's plea that he, Johnson, take an initiative and speak out against McGovern. "Johnson knows that if he takes such a stand it will be counterproductive," a friend said at the time. "If he goes against McGovern, it will only boost McGovern's stock. Lyndon just doesn't carry any weight in the party anymore, and he knows it. It's a miserable fact for a man who only four years ago was President of the United States. But it is a fact."

So Johnson suffered the election in silence, swallowing his nitroglycerin tablets to thwart continual chest pains, endorsing McGovern through a hill country weekly newspaper, meeting cordially with the candidate at the ranch. The newspapers showed a startling picture of Johnson, his hair almost shoulder-length. Former aide Bob Hardesty takes credit for this development. "We were working together one day," Hardesty recalls, "and he said, in passing, 'Robert, you need a haircut.' I told him, 'Mr. President, I'm letting my hair grow so no one will be able to mistake me for those SOB's in the White House.' He looked startled, so I explained, 'You know, that bunch around Nixon—Haldeman, Ehrlichman—they all have very short hair.' He nodded. The next time I saw him his hair was growing over his collar."

During the final months of his life he was suffering terrible pain. One of his last public appearances, his dramatic speech at the Civil Rights Symposium at the LBJ Library, proved to be so exhausting that he spent the next two days in bed. He filmed a final interview with Cronkite, taking long rests between camera loadings. Against the urgings of his wife and friends, he attended the mass funeral of fourteen Austin youngsters killed in a bus crash. "Those people supported me when I needed them over the years," he insisted, "and I'm going to support them now."

Lady Bird noticed that he was unusually quiet on that cold January morning, but nothing seemed wrong, so she decided to drive into Austin for shopping. At mid-afternoon, on January 22, the Secret Service placed an urgent call to her via the car-telephone, and Lady Bird, in a shaking voice, called aide Tom Johnson at the television station. "Tom," she said, "this time we didn't make it. Lyndon is dead."

FOOTNOTE:

One of the more secretive Presidents, Johnson nevertheless was unexpectedly willing to open up portions of his archives to scholars as quickly as possible. At the time of his death, he had arranged for the LBJ Library curator to meet at the White House with Nixon's then chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to discuss declassification of Johnson's foreign policy papers. The basis of the meeting was Nixon's new executive order providing more flexible guidelines on declassifying documents. LBJ hoped his papers would meet these new guidelines.

Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, A Brief History [Lewis H. Lapham in Harper's Magazine, September 2004]

When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?  —Richard Hofstadter

In company with nearly every other historian and political journalist east of the Mississippi River in the summer of 1964, the late Richard Hofstadter saw the Republican Party's naming of Senator Barry Goldwater as its candidate in that year's presidential election as an event comparable to the arrival of the Mongol hordes at the gates of thirteenth-century Vienna. The "basic American consensus" at the time was firmly liberal in character and feeling, assured of a clear majority in both chambers of Congress as well as a sympathetic audience in the print and broadcast press. Even the National Association of Manufacturers was still aligned with the generous impulse of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, accepting of the proposition, as were the churches and the universities, that government must do for people what people cannot do for themselves.*

* With regard to the designation "liberal," the economist John K. Galbraith said in 1964, "Almost everyone now so describes himself." Lionel Trilling, the literary critic, observed in 1950 that "In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition." He went on to say that "there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation," merely "irritable mental

gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

And yet, seemingly out of nowhere and suddenly at the rostrum of the San Francisco Cow Palace in a roar of triumphant applause, here was a cowboy-hatted herald of enlightened selfishness threatening to sack the federal city of good intentions, declaring the American government the enemy of the American people, properly understood not as the guarantor of the country's freedoms but as a syndicate of quasi-communist bureaucrats poisoning the wells of commercial enterprise with "centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse." A band played "America the Beautiful," and in a high noon glare of klieg light the convention delegates beheld a militant captain of capitalist jihad ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!") known to favor the doctrines of forward deterrence and preemptive strike ("Let's lob a nuclear bomb into the men's room at the Kremlin"), believing that poverty was proof of bad character ("lazy, dole-happy people who want to feed on the fruits of somebody else's labor"), that the Democratic Party and the network news programs were under the direction of Marxist ballet dancers, that Mammon was another name for God.

The star-spangled oratory didn't draw much of a crowd on the autumn campaign trail. The electorate in 1964 wasn't interested in the threat of an apocalyptic future or the comforts of an imaginary past, and Goldwater's reactionary vision in the desert faded into the sunset of the November election won by Lyndon Johnson with 61 percent of the popular vote, the suburban sheriffs on their palomino ponies withdrawing to Scottsdale and Pasadena in the orderly and inoffensive manner of the Great Khan's horsemen retiring from the plains of medieval Europe.

$2 BILLION ASSETS CONSERVATIVE FOUNDATIONS (200I ASSETS)

(in $ Millions)

The Bradley Foundation                            584

Smith Richardson Foundation              494

Scaife Family (Four Foundations)              478.4

Earhart Foundation                                          84

John M. Olin Foundation                            71

Koch Family (Three Foundations)              68

Castle Rock (Coors) Foundation              50

JM Foundation                                          25

Philip M. McKenna Foundation              17.4

Departed but not disbanded. As the basic American  consensus has shifted over the last thirty years from a liberal to a  conservative bias, so also the senator from Arizona has come to he seen as  a prophet in the western wilderness, apostle of the rich man's dream of  heaven that placed Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and provides  the current Bush Administration with the platform on which the candidate  was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger,  the heavy law enforcement, and the paper elephants.* The speeches in  Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached  from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal—government  the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the  free market the answer to every maiden's prayer—and while listening  to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the  question that Hofstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas  both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?

* The rightward movement of the country's social and  political center of gravity isn't a matter of opinion or conjecture.  Whether compiled by Ralph Nader or by journalists of a conservative  persuasion (most recently John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in a book entitled The Right Nation) the numbers tell the same  unambiguous story—one in five Americans willing to accept identity as  a liberal, one in three preferring the term "conservative"; the  American public content with lower levels of government spending and higher levels of economic inequality than those pertaining in any of the Western European democracies; the United States unique among the world's developed nations in its unwillingness to provide its citizens with a decent education or fully funded health care; 40 million Americans paid less than $10 an hour, 66 percent of the population earning less than $45,000 a year; 2 million people in prison, the majority of them black and Latino; the country's largest and most profitable corporations relieved of the obligation to pay an income tax; no politician permitted to stand for public office without first professing an ardent faith in God.

About the workings of the right-wing propaganda mills in Washington and New York I knew enough to know that the numbing of America's political senses didn't happen by mistake, but it wasn't until I met Rob Stein, formerly a senior adviser to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that I came to fully appreciate the nature and the extent of the re-education program undertaken in the early 1970s by a cadre of ultraconservative and self-mythologizing millionaires bent on rescuing the country from the hideous grasp of Satanic liberalism. To a small group of Democratic activists meeting in New York City in late February, Stein had brought thirty-eight charts diagramming the organizational structure of the Republican "Message Machine," an octopus-like network of open and hidden microphones that he described as "perhaps the most potent, independent institutionalized apparatus ever assembled in a democracy to promote one belief system."

It was an impressive presentation, in large part because Stein didn't refer to anybody as a villain, never mentioned the word "conspiracy." A lawyer who also managed a private equity investment fund—i.e., a man unintimidated by spread sheets and indifferent to the seductions of the pious left—Stein didn't begrudge the manufacturers of corporatist agitprop the successful distribution of their product in the national markets for the portentous catch-phrase and the camera-ready slogan. Having devoted several months to his search through the available documents, he was content to let the facts speak for themselves—fifty funding agencies of different dimensions and varying degrees of ideological fervor, nominally philanthropic but zealous in their common hatred of the liberal enemy, disbursing the collective sum of roughly $3 billion over a period of thirty years for the fabrication of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

The effort had taken many forms—the publication of expensively purchased and cleverly promoted tracts (Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, Charles Murray's Losing Ground, Samuel Huntington's  The Clash of Civilizations), a steady flow of newsletters from more than 100 captive printing presses (among them those at The Heritage Foundation, Accuracy in the Media, the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture), generous distributions of academic programs and visiting professorships (to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford universities), the passing along of sound-bite slanders (to Bill O'Reilly and Matt Drudge), the formulation of newspaper op-ed pieces (for the  San Antonio Light and the  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as well as for the Sacramento Bee and the Washington Times). The prolonged siege of words had proved so successful in its result that on nearly every question of foreign or domestic policy in this year's presidential campaign, the frame and terms of the debate might as well have been assembled in Taiwan by Chinese child labor working from patterns furnished by the authors of ExxonMobil's annual report.

No small task and no mean feat, and as I watched Stein's diagrams take detailed form on a computer screen (the directorates of the Leadership Institute and Capital Research Center all but identical with that of The Philanthropy Roundtable, Richard Mellon Scaife's money dispatched to the Federalist Society as well as to The American Spectator), I was surprised to see so many familiar names—publications to which I'd contributed articles, individuals with whom I was acquainted—and I understood that Stein's story was one that I could corroborate, not with supplementary charts or footnotes but on the evidence of my own memory and observation.

The provenience of the Message Machine Stein traced to the recognition on the part of the country's corporate gentry in the late 1960s that they lacked the intellectual means to comprehend, much less quell or combat, the social and political turmoil then engulfing the whole of American society, and if I had missed Goldwater's foretelling of an apocalyptic future in the Cow Palace, I remembered my own encounter with the fear and trembling of what was still known as "The Establishment," four years later and 100 miles to the north at the July encampment of San Francisco's Bohemian Club. Over a period of three weeks every summer, the 600-odd members of the club, most of them expensive ornaments of the American haute bourgeoisie, invite an equal number of similarly fortunate guests to spend as many days as their corporate calendars permit within a grove of handsome redwood trees, there to listen to the birdsong, interest one another in various business opportunities, exchange misgivings about the restlessness of the  deutschmark and the yen.

In the summer of 1968 the misgivings were indistinguishable from panic. Martin Luther King had been assassinated; so had Robert Kennedy, and everywhere that anybody looked the country's institutional infrastructure, also its laws, customs, best-loved truths, and fairy tales, seemed to be collapsing into anarchy and chaos—black people rioting in the streets of Los Angeles and Detroit, American soldiers killing their officers in Vietnam, longhaired hippies stoned on drugs or drowned in the bathtubs of Bel Air, shorthaired feminists playing with explosives instead of dolls, the Scottsdale and Pasadena sheriffs' posses preparing their palomino ponies to stand firm in the face of an urban mob.

Historians revisiting in tranquility the alarums and excursions of the Age of Aquarius know that Revolution Now was neither imminent nor likely—the economy was too prosperous, the violent gestures of rebellion contained within too small a demographic, mostly rich kids who could afford the flowers and the go-go hoots—hut in the hearts of the corporate chieftains wandering among the redwood trees in the Bohemian Grove in July 1968, the fear was palpable and genuine. The croquet lawn seemed to be sliding away beneath their feet, and although they knew they were in trouble, they didn't know why. Ideas apparently mattered, and words were maybe more important than they had guessed; unfortunately, they didn't have any. The American property-holding classes tend to be embarrassingly ill at ease with concepts that don't translate promptly into money, and the beacons of conservative light shining through the liberal fog of the late 1960s didn't come up to the number of clubs in Arnold Palmer's golf bag. The company of the commercial faithful gathered on the banks of California's Russian River could look for succor to Goldwater's autobiography, The Conscience of a Conservative, to William F. Buckley's editorials in National Review, to the novels of Ayn Rand. Otherwise they were as helpless as unarmed sheepherders surrounded by a Comanche war party on the old Oklahoma frontier before the coining of the railroad and the six-gun.

The hope of their salvation found its voice in a 5,000-word manifesto written by Lewis Powell, a Richmond corporation lawyer, and circulated in August 1971 by the United States Chamber of Commerce under the heading Confidential Memorandum; Attack on the American Free Enterprise System. Soon to be appointed to the Supreme Court, lawyer Powell was a man well-known and much respected by the country's business community; within the legal profession he was regarded as a prophet. His heavy word of warning fell upon the legions of reaction with the force of Holy Scripture: "Survival of what we call the free enterprise system," he said, "lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations."

The venture capital for the task at hand was provided by a small sewing circle of rich philanthropists—Richard Mellon Scaife in Pittsburgh, Lynde and Harry Bradley in Milwaukee, John Olin in New York City, the Smith Richardson family in North Carolina, Joseph Coors in Denver, David and Charles Koch in Wichita—who entertained visions of an America restored to the safety of its mythological past—small towns like those seen in prints by Currier and Ives, cheerful factory workers whistling while they worked, politicians as wise as Abraham Lincoln and as brave as Teddy Roosevelt, benevolent millionaires presenting Christmas turkeys to deserving elevator operators, the sins of the flesh deported to Mexico or France. Suspicious of any fact that they hadn't known before the age of six, the wealthy saviors of the Republic also possessed large reserves of paranoia, and if the world was going rapidly to rot (as any fool could plainly see) the fault was to be found in everything and anything tainted with a stamp of liberal origin—the news media and the universities, income taxes, Warren Beatty, transfer payments to the undeserving poor, restraints of trade, Jane Fonda, low interest rates, civil liberties for unappreciative minorities, movies made in Poland, public schools.*

*The various philanthropic foundations under the control of the six families possess assets estimated in 2001 at $1.7 billion. Harry Bradley was an early and enthusiastic member of the John Birch Society; Koch Industries in the winter of 2000 agreed to pay $30 million (the largest civil fine ever imposed on a private American company under any federal environmental law) to settle claims related to 300 oil spills from its pipelines in six states.

Although small in comparison with the sums distributed by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the money was ideologically sound, and it was put to work leveraging additional contributions (from corporations as well as from other like-minded foundations), acquiring radio stations, newspapers, and journals of opinion, bankrolling intellectual sweatshops for the making of political and socioeconomic theory. Joseph Coors established The Heritage Foundation with an initial gift of $250,000 in 1973, the sum augmented over the next few years with $900,000 from Richard Scaife; the American Enterprise Institute was revived and fortified in the late seventies with $6 million from the Howard Pew Freedom Trust; the Cato Institute was set up by the Koch family in 1977 with a gift of $500,000. If in 1971 the friends of American free enterprise could turn for comfort to no more than seven not very competent sources of inspiration, by the end of the decade they could look to eight additional installations committed to "joint effort" and "united action." The senior officers of the Fortune 500 companies meanwhile organized the Business Roundtable, providing it by 1979 with a rich endowment for the hiring of resident scholars loyal in their opposition to the tax and antitrust laws.

The quickening construction of Santa's work-shops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted in the increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs, and background briefings intended to bring about the ruin of the liberal idea in all of its institutionalized forms—the demonization of the liberal press, the disparagement of liberal sentiment, the destruction of liberal education—and by the time Ronald Reagan arrived in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines were operating at full capacity. Well in advance of inauguration day the Christmas elves had churned out so much paper that had they been told to do so, they could have shredded it into tickertape and welcomed the new cowboy-hatted herald of enlightened selfishness with a parade like none other ever before seen by man or beast. Unshredded, the paper was the stuff of dreams from which was made Mandate for Leadership, the "bible" presented by The Heritage Foundation to Mr. Reagan in the first days of his presidency with the thought that he might want to follow its architectural design for an America free at last from "the tyranny of the Left," rescued from the dungeons of "liberal fascism," once again a theme park built by nonunion labor along the lines of Walt Disney's gardens of synthetic Eden.

Signs of the newly minted intellectual dispensation began showing up in the offices of Harper's Magazine in 1973, the manuscripts invariably taking the form of critiques of one or another of the absurdities then making an appearance before the Washington congressional committees or touring the New York literary scene with Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer. Over a period of several years the magazine published articles and essays by authors later to become well-known apologists for the conservative creed, among them George Gilder, Michael Novak, William Tucker, and Philip Terzian; if their writing in the early seventies was remarkable both for its clarity and wit, it was because they chose topics of opportunity that were easy to find and hard to miss.

* Paul Weyrich, the first director of The Heritage Foundation, and often described by his admirers as "the Lenin of social conservatism," seldom was at a loss for a military analogy: "If your enemy has weapons systems working and is killing you with them, you'd better have weapons systems of your own."

The liberal consensus hadn't survived the loss of the Vietnam War. The subsequently sharp reduction of the country's moral and economic resources was made grimly apparent by the impeachment of Richard Nixon and the price of Arab oil, and it came to be understood that Roosevelt's New Deal was no longer on offer. Acting on generous impulse and sustained by the presumption of limitless wealth, the American people had enacted legislation reflecting their best hopes for racial equality and social justice (a.k.a. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society"), but any further efforts at transformation clearly were going to cost a great deal more money than the voters were prepared to spend. Also a good deal more thought than the country's liberal-minded intelligentsia

were willing to attempt or eager to provide. The universities chose to amuse themselves with the crossword puzzles of French literary theory, and in the New York media salons the standard-bearers of America's political conscience were content to rest upon what they took to be their laurels, getting by with the striking of noble poses (as friends of the earth or the Dalai Lama) and the expression of worthy emotions (on behalf of persecuted fur-seals and oppressed women). The energies once contained within the nucleus of a potent idea escaped into the excitements of the style incorporated under the rubrics of Radical Chic, and the messengers bringing the good news of conservative reaction moved their gospel-singing tent show into an all but deserted public square.

NATIONAL "THINK TANKS"  (200I BUDGETS)

(in $ Millions)

The Heritage Foundation                            33

American Enterprise Institute                            25

Hoover Institution                                          25

Cato Institute                                                        17.6

Hudson Institute                                          7.8

Manhattan Institute                                          7.2

Citizens for a Sound Economy              5.4

Reason Foundation                                          4.9

National Center for Policy Analysis              4.7

Competitive Enterprise Institute              3.2

Free Congress Foundation                            2.7

Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis              2.5

Their chief talents were those of the pedant and the critic, not those of the creative imagination, but they well understood the art of merchandising and the science of cross-promotion, and in the middle 1970s anybody wishing to appreciate the character and purpose of the emerging conservative putsch could find no better informant than Irving Kristol, then a leading columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the author of well-received books (On the Democratic Idea in America and Two Cheers for Capitalism), trusted counselor and adjunct sage at the annual meetings of the Business Roundtable. As a youth in the late 1930s, at a time when literary name and reputation accrued to the accounts of the soi-disant revolutionary left, Kristol had proclaimed himself a disciple of Leon Trotsky, but then the times changed, the winds of fortune shifting from east to west, and after a stint as a CIA asset in the 1950s, he had carried his pens and papers into winter quarters on the comfortably upholstered bourgeois right.

On first meeting the gentleman at a literary dinner in New York's Century Club, I remember that I was as much taken by the ease and grace of his manner as I was impressed by his obvious intelligence. A man blessed with a sense of humor, his temperament and tone of mind more nearly resembling that of a sophisticated dealer in art and antiques than that of an academic scold, he praised Harper's Magazine for its publication of Tom Wolfe's satirical pieces, also for the prominence that it had given to the essays of Senator Daniel Patrick Monahan, and I was flattered by his inclination to regard me as an editor-of-promise who might be recruited to the conservative cause, presumably as an agent in place behind enemy lines. The American system of free enterprise, he said, was being attacked by the very people whom it most enriched i.e., by the pampered children of privilege disturbing the peace of the Ivy League universities, doing lines of cocaine in Manhattan discotheques, making decadent movies in Hollywood—and the time had come to put an end to their dangerous and self-indulgent nonsense. Nobody under the age of thirty knew what anything cost, and even the senior faculty at Princeton had forgotten that it was none other than the great Winston Churchill who had said, "Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production."

In the course of our introductory conversation Kristol not only referred me to other old masters whom I might wish to reread (among them Plutarch, Gibbon, and Edmund Burke); he also explained something of his technique as an intellectual entrepreneur. Despite the warning cries raised by a few prescient millionaires far from the fashionable strongholds of the effeminate east, the full membership of the American oligarchy still wasn't alive to the threat of cultural insurrection, and in order to awaken the management to a proper sense of its dire peril, Kristol had been traveling the circuit of the country's corporate boardrooms, soliciting contributions given in memory of Friedrich von Hayek, encouraging the automobile companies to withdraw their advertising budgets from any media outlet that declined to echo their social and political prejudices.

"Why empower your enemies?" he said. "Why throw pearls to swine?*

* Henry Ford II expressed a similar thought on resigning as a trustee of the Ford Foundation in late 1976. Giving vent to his confusion, annoyance, and dismay, he took the trouble to write a letter to the staff of the foundation reminding them that they were associated with "a creature of capitalism." Conceding that the word might seem "shocking" to many of the people employed in the vineyards of philanthropy, Mr. Ford proceeded to his defense of the old ways and old order:

"I'm not playing the role of the hard-headed tycoon who thinks all philanthropoids are Socialists and all university professors are Communists. I'm just suggesting to the trustees and the staff that the system that makes the foundation possible very probably is worth preserving."

Although I didn't accept Kristol's invitation to what he called the "intellectual counter-revolution," I often ran across him during the next few years at various symposia addressed to the collapse of the nation's moral values, and I never failed to enjoy his company or his conversation. Among all the propagandists pointing out the conservative path to glory, Kristol seemed to me the brightest and the best, and I don't wonder that he eventually became one of the four or five principal shop stewards overseeing the labors of the Republican message machine.

It was at Kristol's suggestion that I met a number of the fund-raising people associated with the conservative program of political correctness, among them Michael Joyce, executive director in the late seventies of the Olin Foundation. We once traveled together on a plane returning to New York from a conference that Joyce had organized for a college in Michigan, and somewhere over eastern Ohio he asked whether I might want to edit a new journal of cultural opinion meant to rebut and confound the ravings of The New York Review of Books. The proposition wasn't one in which I was interested, but the terms of the offer an annual salary of $200,000, to be paid for life even in the event of my resignation or early retirement—spoke to the seriousness of the rightist intent to corner and control the national market in ideas.*

* The proposed journal appeared in 1982 as The New Criterion, promoted as a "staunch defender" of high culture, "an articulate scourge of artistic mediocrity and intellectual mendacity wherever they are found." Joyce later took over direction of the Bradley Foundation, where he proved to he as deft as Weyrich and Kristol at what the movement conservatives liked to call the wondrous alchemy of turning intellect into influence.

The work went more smoothly as soon as the Reagan Administration had settled itself in Washington around the fountains and reflecting pools of federal patronage. Another nine right-thinking foundations established offices within a short distance of Capitol Hill or the Hay-Adams hotel (most prominent among them the Federalist Society and the Center for Individual Rights); more corporations sent more money; prices improved for ideological piecework (as much as $I00,000 a year for some of the brand-name scholars at Heritage and AEI), and eager converts to the various sects of the conservative faith were as thick upon the ground as maple leaves in autumn. By the end of Reagan's second term the propaganda mills were spending $I00 million a year on the manufacture and sale of their product, invigorated by the sense that once again it was morning in America and redoubling their efforts to transform their large store of irritable mental gestures into brightly packaged policy objectives—tort reform, school vouchers, less government, lower taxes, elimination of the labor unions, bigger military budgets, higher interest rates, reduced environmental regulation, privatization of social security, down-sized Medicaid and Medicare, more prisons, better surveillance, stricter law enforcement.

If production increased at a more handsome pace than might have been dreamed of by Richard Scaife or hoped for by Irving Kristol, it was because the project had been blessed by Almighty God. The Christian right had come into the corporate fold in the late I970s. Abandoning the alliance formed with the conscience of the liberal left during the Great Depression (the years of sorrow and travail when money was not yet another name for Jesus), the merchants of spiritual salvation had come to see that their interests coincided with those of the insurance companies and the banks. The American equestrian classes were welcome to believe that slack-jawed dope addicts had fomented the cultural insurrection of the I960s; Jerry Falwell knew that it bad been the work of Satan, Satan himself and not one of his students at the University of California, who had loosed a plague of guitarists upon the land, tempted the news media to the broadcast of continuous footage from Sodom and Gomorrah, impregnated the schools with indecent interpretations of the Bible, which then gave birth to the monster of multiculturalism that devoured the arts of learning. Together with Paul Weyrich at The Heritage Foundation, Falwell sponsored the formation of the Moral Majority in I979, at about the same time and in much the same spirit that Pat Robertson, the Christian televangelist, sent his congregation a fundraising letter saying that feminists encourage women to "leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." Before Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term the city of God signed a nonaggression pact with the temple of Mammon, their combined forces waging what came to be known as "The Culture War."

MASS MEDIA DISTRIBUTION

$300M CONSERVATIVE MESSAGE MACHINE

• TELEVISION

Pat Robertson's  700 Club

Fox News Channel

MSNBC's Scarborough Country

Oliver North's War  Stories

• RADIO

The Rush Limbaugh Show 

              The Cal Thomas Commentary 

              Radio  America

• PUBLISHING 

Eagle Publishing, Inc.

• NEWSPAPERS

The Washington Times 

The Wall Street journal

• WEBSITES 

              Townhall.com 

              AnnCoulter.com

The Cold War against the Russians was fading into safe and nostalgic memory, and the tellers of the great American fairy tale (the one about the precious paradise ever in need of an invincible defense) found themselves in pressing need of other antagonists to take the place of the grim and harmless ogre in the northern snow.

The Japanese couldn't play the part because they were lending the United States too much money; the Colombian drug lords were too few and too well connected in Miami; Manuel Noriega failed the audition; the Arab oil cartel was broke; and the Chinese were busy making shirts for Ralph Lauren.

In the absence of enemies abroad, the protectors of the American dream at home began looking for domestic signs of moral weakness rather than foreign shows of military strength; instead of examining the dossiers of distant tyrants, they searched the local newspapers for flaws in the American character, and the surveillance satellites over Leipzig and Sevastopol were reassigned stations over metropolitan Detroit and the Hollywood studios filming Dynasty and Dallas. Within a matter of months the conservative committees of public safety rounded up as suspects a motley crowd of specific individuals and general categories of subversive behavior and opinion—black male adolescents as well as elderly female Buddhists, the New York Times, multiculturalists of all descriptions, the I960s, welfare mothers, homosexuals, drug criminals, illegal immigrants, performance artists. Some enemies of the state were easier to identify than others, but in all instances the reactionary tellers of the tale relied on images seen in dreams or Arnold Schwarzenegger movies rather than on the lessons of their own experience.

For a few years I continued to attend convocations sponsored by the steadily proliferating agencies of the messianic right, but although the discussions were held in increasingly opulent settings—the hotel accommodations more luxurious, better food, views of the mountains as well as the sea—by 1985 I could no longer stomach either the sanctimony or the cant. With the coming to power of the Reagan Administration most of the people on the podium or the tennis court were safely enclosed within the perimeters of orthodox opinion and government largesse, and yet they persisted in casting themselves as rebels against "the system," revolutionary idealists being hunted down like dogs by a vicious and still active liberal prosecution. The pose was as ludicrous as it was false. The leftist impulse had been dead for ten years, ever since the right-wing Democrats in Congress had sold out the liberal portfolio of President Jimmy Carter and revised the campaign-finance laws to suit the convenience of their corporate patrons. Nor did the news media present an obstacle. By 1985 the Wall Street Journal had become the newspaper of record most widely read by the people who made the decisions about the country's economic policy; the leading editorialists in the  New York Times (A. M. Rosenthal, William Safire) as well as in the  Washington Post (George Will, Richard Harwood, Meg Greenfield) ably defended the interests of the status quo; the vast bulk of the nation's radio talk shows (reaching roughly 80 percent of the audience) reflected a conservative bias, as did all but one or two of the television talk shows permitted to engage political topics on PBS. In the pages of the smaller journals of opinion (National Review, Commentary, The American Spectator, The National Interest, The New Criterion, The Public Interest, Policy Review, etc.) the intellectual décor, much of it paid for by the Olin and Scaife foundations, was matched to the late-Victorian tastes of Rudyard Kipling and J. P. Morgan. The voices of conscience that attracted the biggest crowds on the nation's lecture circuit were those that spoke for one or another of the parties of the right, and together with the chorus of religious broadcasts and pamphlets (among them Pat Robertson's 700 Club and the publications under the direction of Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon), they enveloped the country in an all but continuous din of stereophonic, right-wing sound.

The facts seldom intruded upon the meditations of the company seated poolside at the conferences and symposia convened to bemoan America's fall from grace, and I found it increasingly depressing to listen to prerecorded truths dribble from the mouths of writers once willing to risk the chance of thinking for themselves. Having exchanged intellectual curiosity for ideological certainty, they had forfeited their powers of observation as well as their senses of humor; no longer courageous enough to concede the possibility of error or enjoy the play of the imagination, they took an interest only in those ideas that could be made to bear the weight of solemn doctrine, and they cried up the horrors of the culture war because their employers needed an alibi for the disappearances of the country's civil liberties and a screen behind which to hide the privatization (a.k.a. the theft) of its common property—the broadcast spectrum as well as the timber, the water, and the air, the reserves of knowledge together with the mineral deposits and the laws. Sell the suckers on the notion that their "values" are at risk (abortionists escaping the nets of the Massachusetts state police, pornographers and cosmetic surgeons busily at work in Los Angeles, farm families everywhere in the Middle West becoming chattels of the welfare state) and maybe they won't notice that their pockets have been picked.

So many saviors of the republic were raising the alarm of culture war in the middle eighties that I now can't remember whether it was Bob Bartley writing in the Wall Street Journal or William Bennett speaking from his podium at the National Endowment for the Humanities who said that at Yale University the students were wallowing in the joys of sex, drugs, and Karl Marx, disporting themselves on the New Haven green in the reckless manner of nymphs and satyrs on a Grecian urn. I do remember that at one of the high-end policy institutes in Manhattan I heard the tale told by Norman Podhoretz, then the editor at Commentary, the author of several contentious books (Making It  and Why We Were in Vietnam), and a rabid propagandist for all things antiliberal. What he had to say about Yale was absurd, which I happened to know because that same season I was teaching a seminar at the college. More than half the number of that year's graduating seniors had applied for work at the First Boston Corporation, and most of the students whom I'd had the chance to meet were so busy finding their way around the Monopoly board of the standard American success (figuring the angles of approach to business school, adding to the network of contacts in their Filofaxes) that they didn't have the time to waste on sexual digressions either literal or figurative. When I attempted to explain the circumstance to Podhoretz, he wouldn't hear of it. Not only was I misinformed, I was a liberal and therefore both a liar and a fool. He hadn't been in New Haven in twenty years, but he'd read William F. Buckley's book (God and Man at Yale, published in 1951), and he knew (because the judgment had been confirmed by something he'd been told by Donald Kagan in 1978) that the college was a sinkhole of depraved sophism. He knew it for a fact, knew it in the same way that Jerry Falwell knew that it was Satan who taught Barbra Streisand how to sing.

If Kristol was the most engaging of the agents provocateur whom I'd encountered on the conservative lecture circuit in the 1980s, Podhoretz was the dreariest—an apparatchik in the old Soviet sense of the word who believed everything he wished to prove and could prove everything he wished to believe, bringing his patrons whichever words might serve or please, anxious to secure a place near or at the boot of power. Unfortunately it was Podhoretz, not Kristol, who exemplified the character and tone of mind that edged the American conservative consensus ever further to the right during the decade of the 1990s.

The networks of reactionary opinion once again increased their rates of production, several additional foundations recruited to the cause, numerous activist organizations coming on line, together with new and improved media outlets (most notably Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and Weekly Standard) broadcasting the gospels according to saints Warren Harding and William McKinley. By 1994 the Conservative Political Action Conference was attracting as many as 4,000 people, half of them college students, to its annual weekend in Arlington, Virginia, there to listen to the heroes of the hour (G. Gordon Liddy, Ralph Reed, Oliver North) speak from stages wrapped in American flags. Americans for Tax Reform under the direction of Grover Norquist declared its intention to shrink the federal government to a size small enough "to drown," like one of the long-lost hippies in Bel Air, "in a bathtub."

STUDENTS AND SCHOLARS (200I ESTIMATES)

(in $ Millions)

George Mason University                            7

Harvard University                                          6

Intercollegiate Studies Institute              5.8

University of Chicago                                          5

Yale University                                          5

Washington University                            4

Stanford University                                          3

Institute for Humane Studies                            2.9

National Association of Scholars              1.2

Although as comfortably at home on Capitol Hill as in the lobbies of the corporate law firms on K Street, and despite their having learned to suck like  newborn lambs at the teats of government patronage (Kristol's son,  William, serving as public-relations director to Vice President Dan  Quayle; Podhoretz's son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, a highly placed official  within the Reagan Administration subsequently indicted for criminal  misconduct), the apologists for the conservative cause continued to pose  as embattled revolutionaries at odds with the "Tyranny of the  Left." The pretense guaranteed a steady flow of money from their  corporate sponsors, and the unexpected election of Bill Clinton in 1992  offered them yet another chance to stab the corpse of the liberal Goliath.  The smearing of the new president's name and reputation began as soon as  he committed the crime of entering the White House. The American  Spectator, a monthly journal financed by Richard Scaife, sent its  scouts west into Arkansas to look for traces of Clinton's semen on the pine trees and the  bar stools. It wasn't long before Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr  undertook his obsessive inspection of the president's bank records, soul, and penis. Summoning witnesses with the fury of a suburban Savonarola, Starr set forth on an exploration of the Ozark Mountains, questioning the natives about wooden Indians and painted women. For four years he camped in the wilderness, and even after he was allowed to examine Monica Lewinsky's lingerie drawer, his search for the weapon of mass destruction proved as futile as the one more recently conducted in Iraq.

Although unable to match Starr's prim self-righteousness, Newt Gingrich, the Republican congressman from Georgia elected speaker of the House in 1995, presented himself as another champion of virtue (a self-proclaimed "Teacher of the Rules of Civilization") willing to lead the American people out of the desolation of a liberal wasteland. Like Starr and Podhoretz (also like the newscasters who now decorate the right-wing television studios), Gingrich had a talent for bearing grudges. During his sixteen years in Congress he had acquired a reputation (not undeserved) for being nasty, brutish, and short, eventually coming to stand as the shared and shining symbol of resentment that bound together the several parties of the disaffected right—the Catholic conservatives with the Jewish neoconservatives, the libertarians with the authoritarians, the evangelical nationalists with the paranoid monetarists, Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition with the friends of the Ku Klux Klan. Within a few months of his elevation to the speaker's chair, Gingrich bestowed on his fellow-plaintiffs his Contract with America, a plan for rooting out the last vestiges of liberal heresy in the mind of government. As mean-spirited in its particulars as the Mandate for Leadership handed to Ronald Reagan in 1980, the contract didn't become law, but it has since provided the terms of enlightened selfishness that shape and inspire the policies of the current Bush Administration.

During the course of the 1990s I did my best to keep up with the various lines of grievance developing within the several sects of the conservative remonstrance, but although I probably read as many as 2,000 presumably holy texts (Peggy Noonan's newspaper editorials and David Gelernter's magazine articles as well as the soliloquies of Rush Limbaugh and the sermons of Robert Bork), I never learned how to make sense of the weird and too numerous inward contradictions.

EIGHT INFLUENTIAL BOOKS AND THE FOUNDATIONS WHO SPONSORED THEM

• Free to Choose, Milton Friedman — Scaife Foundation Olin Foundation

• The Naked Public Square, Richard John Neuhaus — Lilly Endowment Bradley Foundation Olin Foundation

• The Dream and the Nightmare, Myron Magnet — Scaife Foundation

• Losing Ground, Charles Murray — Olin Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation

• The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington — Bradley Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation

• Illiberal Education, Dinesh D'Souza — Olin Foundation

• Politics, Markets &America's Schools,  John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe — Olin Foundation

• The Tragedy of American Compassion, Marvin Olasky — Bradley Foundation

How does one reconcile the demand for small government with the desire for an imperial army, apply the phrases "personal initiative" and "self-reliance" to corporation presidents utterly dependent on the federal subsidies to the banking, communications, and weapons industries, square the talk of "civility" with the strong-arm methods of Kenneth Starr and Tom DeLay, match the warmhearted currencies of "conservative compassion" with the cold cruelty of "the unfettered free market," know that human life must be saved from abortionists in Boston but not from cruise missiles in Baghdad? In the glut of paper I could find no unifying or fundamental principle except a certain belief that money was good for rich people and bad for poor people. It was the only point on which all the authorities agreed, and no matter where the words were coming from (a report on federal housing, an essay on the payment of Social Security, articles on the sorrow of the slums or the wonder of the U.S. Navy) the authors invariably found the same abiding lesson in the tale—money ennobles rich people, making them strong as well as wise; money corrupts poor people, making them stupid as well as weak.

But if a set of coherent ideas was hard to find in all the sermons from the mount, what was not hard to find was the common tendency to believe in some form of transcendent truth. A religious as opposed to a secular way of thinking. Good versus Evil, right or wrong, saved or damned, with us or against us, and no light-minded trifling with doubt or ambiguity. Or, more plainly and as a young disciple of Ludwig Von Mises had said, long ago in the 1980s in one of the hospitality tents set up to welcome the conservative awakening to a conference on a beach at Hilton Head, "Our people deal in absolutes."

Just so, and more's the pity. In place of intelligence, which might tempt them to consort with wicked or insulting questions for which they don't already possess the answers, the parties of the right substitute ideology, which, although sometimes archaic and bizarre, is always virtuous.

Virtuous, but not necessarily the best means available to the running of a railroad or a war. The debacle in Iraq, like the deliberate impoverishment of the American middle class, bears witness to the shoddiness of the intellectual infrastructure on which a once democratic republic has come to stand. Morality deemed more precious than liberty; faith-based policies and initiatives ordained superior to common sense.

As long ago as 1964 even William F. Buckley understood that the thunder on the conservative right amounted to little else except the sound and fury of middle-aged infants banging silver spoons, demanding to know why they didn't have more—more toys, more time, more soup; when Buckley was asked that year what the country could expect if it so happened that Goldwater was elected president, he said, "That might be a serious problem." So it has proved, if not under the baton of the senator from Arizona then under the direction of his ideologically correct heirs and assigns. An opinion poll taken in 1964 showed 62 percent of the respondents trusting the government to do the right thing; by 1994 the number had dwindled to 19 percent. The measure can be taken as a tribute to the success of the Republican propaganda mill that for the last forty years has been grinding out the news that all government is bad, and that the word "public," in all its uses and declensions (public service, citizenship, public health, community, public park, commonwealth, public school, etc.), connotes inefficiency and waste.

The dumbing down of the public discourse follows as the day the night, and so it comes as no surprise that both candidates in this year's presidential election present themselves as embodiments of what they call "values" rather than as the proponents of an idea. Handsome images consistent with those seen in Norman Rockwell's paintings or the prints of Currier and Ives, suitable for mounting on the walls of the American Enterprise Institute, or in one of the manor houses owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, maybe somewhere behind a library sofa or over the fireplace in a dining room, but certainly in a gilded frame.

The Obama Doctrine [By Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, April 2016]

Friday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America's reign as the world's sole indispensable superpower-or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void-began with a thundering speech given on Obama's behalf by his secretary of state, John Kerry, in Washington, D.C. The subject of Kerry's uncharacteristically Churchillian remarks, delivered in the Treaty Room at the State Department, was the gassing of civilians by the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.

Obama, in whose Cabinet Kerry serves faithfully, but with some exasperation, is himself given to vaulting oratory, but not usually of the martial sort associated with Churchill. Obama believes that the Manichaeanism, and eloquently rendered bellicosity, commonly associated with Churchill were justified by Hitler's rise, and were at times defensible in the struggle against the Soviet Union. But he also thinks rhetoric should be weaponized sparingly, if at all, in today's more ambiguous and complicated international arena. The president believes that Churchillian rhetoric and, more to the point, Churchillian habits of thought, helped bring his predecessor, George W. Bush, to ruinous war in Iraq. Obama entered the White House bent on getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan; he was not seeking new dragons to slay. And he was particularly mindful of promising victory in conflicts he believed to be unwinnable. "If you were to say, for instance, that we're going to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and build a prosperous democracy instead, the president is aware that someone, seven years later, is going to hold you to that promise," Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national-security adviser, and his foreign-policy amanuensis, told me not long ago.

But Kerry's rousing remarks on that August day, which had been drafted in part by Rhodes, were threaded with righteous anger and bold promises, including the barely concealed threat of imminent attack. Kerry, like Obama himself, was horrified by the sins committed by the Syrian regime in its attempt to put down a two-year-old rebellion. In the Damascus suburb of Ghouta nine days earlier, Assad's army had murdered more than 1,400 civilians with sarin gas. The strong sentiment inside the Obama administration was that Assad had earned dire punishment. In Situation Room meetings that followed the attack on Ghouta, only the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough, cautioned explicitly about the perils of intervention. John Kerry argued vociferously for action.

"As previous storms in history have gathered, when unspeakable crimes were within our power to stop them, we have been warned against the temptations of looking the other way," Kerry said in his speech. "History is full of leaders who have warned against inaction, indifference, and especially against silence when it mattered most."

Kerry counted President Obama among those leaders. A year earlier, when the administration suspected that the Assad regime was contemplating the use of chemical weapons, Obama had declared: "We have been very clear to the Assad regime ... that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation."

Despite this threat, Obama seemed to many critics to be coldly detached from the suffering of innocent Syrians. Late in the summer of 2011, he had called for Assad's departure. "For the sake of the Syrian people," Obama said, "the time has come for President Assad to step aside." But Obama initially did little to bring about Assad's end.

He resisted demands to act in part because he assumed, based on the analysis of U.S. intelligence, that Assad would fall without his help. "He thought Assad would go the way Mubarak went," Dennis Ross, a former Middle East adviser to Obama, told me, referring to the quick departure of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in early 2011, a moment that represented the acme of the Arab Spring. But as Assad clung to power, Obama's resistance to direct intervention only grew. After several months of deliberation, he authorized the CIA to train and fund Syrian rebels, but he also shared the outlook of his former defense secretary, Robert Gates, who had routinely asked in meetings, "Shouldn't we finish up the two wars we have before we look for another?"

The current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who is the most dispositionally interventionist among Obama's senior advisers, had argued early for arming Syria's rebels. Power, who during this period served on the National Security Council staff, is the author of a celebrated book excoriating a succession of U.S. presidents for their failures to prevent genocide. The book, A Problem From Hell, published in 2002, drew Obama to Power while he was in the U.S. Senate, though the two were not an obvious ideological match. Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as "responsibility to protect," which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.

Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. "Samantha, enough, I've already read your book," he once snapped.

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush's national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft ("I love that guy," Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush's behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.

At the outset of the Syrian uprising, in early 2011, Power argued that the rebels, drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens, deserved America's enthusiastic support. Others noted that the rebels were farmers and doctors and carpenters, comparing these revolutionaries to the men who won America's war for independence.

Obama flipped this plea on its head. "When you have a professional army," he once told me, "that is well armed and sponsored by two large states"-Iran and Russia-"who have huge stakes in this, and they are fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict ..." He paused. "The notion that we could have-in a clean way that didn't commit U.S. military forces-changed the equation on the ground there was never true." The message Obama telegraphed in speeches and interviews was clear: He would not end up like the second President Bush-a president who became tragically overextended in the Middle East, whose decisions filled the wards of Walter Reed with grievously wounded soldiers, who was helpless to stop the obliteration of his reputation, even when he recalibrated his policies in his second term. Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was "Don't do stupid shit."

Obama's reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama's secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad's violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that "the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad ... left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled." When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton's assessment that "great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle," Obama became "rip-shit angry," according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how "Don't do stupid shit" could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that "the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro-stupid shit?' " The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. (Clinton quickly apologized to Obama for her comments, and a Clinton spokesman announced that the two would "hug it out" on Martha's Vineyard when they crossed paths there later.)

Syria, for Obama, represented a slope potentially as slippery as Iraq. In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention. These included the threat posed by al‑Qaeda; threats to the continued existence of Israel ("It would be a moral failing for me as president of the United States" not to defend Israel, he once told me); and, not unrelated to Israel's security, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. The danger to the United States posed by the Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges.

Given Obama's reticence about intervention, the bright-red line he drew for Assad in the summer of 2012 was striking. Even his own advisers were surprised. "I didn't know it was coming," his secretary of defense at the time, Leon Panetta, told me. I was told that Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly warned Obama against drawing a red line on chemical weapons, fearing that it would one day have to be enforced.

Kerry, in his remarks on August 30, 2013, suggested that Assad should be punished in part because the "credibility and the future interests of the United States of America and our allies" were at stake. "It is directly related to our credibility and whether countries still believe the United States when it says something. They are watching to see if Syria can get away with it, because then maybe they too can put the world at greater risk."

Ninety minutes later, at the White House, Obama reinforced Kerry's message in a public statement: "It's important for us to recognize that when over 1,000 people are killed, including hundreds of innocent children, through the use of a weapon that 98 or 99 percent of humanity says should not be used even in war, and there is no action, then we're sending a signal that that international norm doesn't mean much. And that is a danger to our national security."

It appeared as though Obama had drawn the conclusion that damage to American credibility in one region of the world would bleed into others, and that U.S. deterrent credibility was indeed at stake in Syria. Assad, it seemed, had succeeded in pushing the president to a place he never thought he would have to go. Obama generally believes that the Washington foreign-policy establishment, which he secretly disdains, makes a fetish of "credibility"-particularly the sort of credibility purchased with force. The preservation of credibility, he says, led to Vietnam. Within the White House, Obama would argue that "dropping bombs on someone to prove that you're willing to drop bombs on someone is just about the worst reason to use force."

American national-security credibility, as it is conventionally understood in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the cluster of think tanks headquartered within walking distance of the White House, is an intangible yet potent force-one that, when properly nurtured, keeps America's friends feeling secure and keeps the international order stable.

In White House meetings that crucial week in August, Biden, who ordinarily shared Obama's worries about American overreach, argued passionately that "big nations don't bluff." America's closest allies in Europe and across the Middle East believed Obama was threatening military action, and his own advisers did as well. At a joint press conference with Obama at the White House the previous May, David Cameron, the British prime minister, had said, "Syria's history is being written in the blood of her people, and it is happening on our watch." Cameron's statement, one of his advisers told me, was meant to encourage Obama toward more-decisive action. "The prime minister was certainly under the impression that the president would enforce the red line," the adviser told me. The Saudi ambassador in Washington at the time, Adel al-Jubeir, told friends, and his superiors in Riyadh, that the president was finally ready to strike. Obama "figured out how important this is," Jubeir, who is now the Saudi foreign minister, told one interlocutor. "He will definitely strike."

Obama had already ordered the Pentagon to develop target lists. Five Arleigh Burke-class destroyers were in the Mediterranean, ready to fire cruise missiles at regime targets. French President François Hollande, the most enthusiastically pro-intervention among Europe's leaders, was preparing to strike as well. All week, White House officials had publicly built the case that Assad had committed a crime against humanity. Kerry's speech would mark the culmination of this campaign.

But the president had grown queasy. In the days after the gassing of Ghouta, Obama would later tell me, he found himself recoiling from the idea of an attack unsanctioned by international law or by Congress. The American people seemed unenthusiastic about a Syria intervention; so too did one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She told him that her country would not participate in a Syria campaign. And in a stunning development, on Thursday, August 29, the British Parliament denied David Cameron its blessing for an attack. John Kerry later told me that when he heard that, "internally, I went, Oops."

Obama was also unsettled by a surprise visit early in the week from James Clapper, his director of national intelligence, who interrupted the President's Daily Brief, the threat report Obama receives each morning from Clapper's analysts, to make clear that the intelligence on Syria's use of sarin gas, while robust, was not a "slam dunk." He chose the term carefully. Clapper, the chief of an intelligence community traumatized by its failures in the run-up to the Iraq War, was not going to overpromise, in the manner of the onetime CIA director George Tenet, who famously guaranteed George W. Bush a "slam dunk" in Iraq.

While the Pentagon and the White House's national-security apparatuses were still moving toward war (John Kerry told me he was expecting a strike the day after his speech), the president had come to believe that he was walking into a trap-one laid both by allies and by adversaries, and by conventional expectations of what an American president is supposed to do.

Many of his advisers did not grasp the depth of the president's misgivings; his Cabinet and his allies were certainly unaware of them. But his doubts were growing. Late on Friday afternoon, Obama determined that he was simply not prepared to authorize a strike. He asked McDonough, his chief of staff, to take a walk with him on the South Lawn of the White House. Obama did not choose McDonough randomly: He is the Obama aide most averse to U.S. military intervention, and someone who, in the words of one of his colleagues, "thinks in terms of traps." Obama, ordinarily a preternaturally confident man, was looking for validation, and trying to devise ways to explain his change of heart, both to his own aides and to the public. He and McDonough stayed outside for an hour. Obama told him he was worried that Assad would place civilians as "human shields" around obvious targets. He also pointed out an underlying flaw in the proposed strike: U.S. missiles would not be fired at chemical-weapons depots, for fear of sending plumes of poison into the air. A strike would target military units that had delivered these weapons, but not the weapons themselves.

Obama also shared with McDonough a long-standing resentment: He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries. Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had "jammed" him on a troop surge for Afghanistan. Now, on Syria, he was beginning to feel jammed again.

When the two men came back to the Oval Office, the president told his national-security aides that he planned to stand down. There would be no attack the next day; he wanted to refer the matter to Congress for a vote. Aides in the room were shocked. Susan Rice, now Obama's national-security adviser, argued that the damage to America's credibility would be serious and lasting. Others had difficulty fathoming how the president could reverse himself the day before a planned strike. Obama, however, was completely calm. "If you've been around him, you know when he's ambivalent about something, when it's a 51-49 decision," Ben Rhodes told me. "But he was completely at ease."

Not long ago, I asked Obama to describe his thinking on that day. He listed the practical worries that had preoccupied him. "We had UN inspectors on the ground who were completing their work, and we could not risk taking a shot while they were there. A second major factor was the failure of Cameron to obtain the consent of his parliament."

The third, and most important, factor, he told me, was "our assessment that while we could inflict some damage on Assad, we could not, through a missile strike, eliminate the chemical weapons themselves, and what I would then face was the prospect of Assad having survived the strike and claiming he had successfully defied the United States, that the United States had acted unlawfully in the absence of a UN mandate, and that that would have potentially strengthened his hand rather than weakened it."

The fourth factor, he said, was of deeper philosophical importance. "This falls in the category of something that I had been brooding on for some time," he said. "I had come into office with the strong belief that the scope of executive power in national-security issues is very broad, but not limitless."

Obama knew his decision not to bomb Syria would likely upset America's allies. It did. The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, told me that his government was already worried about the consequences of earlier inaction in Syria when word came of the stand-down. "By not intervening early, we have created a monster," Valls told me. "We were absolutely certain that the U.S. administration would say yes. Working with the Americans, we had already seen the targets. It was a great surprise. If we had bombed as was planned, I think things would be different today." The crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who was already upset with Obama for "abandoning" Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, fumed to American visitors that the U.S. was led by an "untrustworthy" president. The king of Jordan, Abdullah II-already dismayed by what he saw as Obama's illogical desire to distance the U.S. from its traditional Sunni Arab allies and create a new alliance with Iran, Assad's Shia sponsor-complained privately, "I think I believe in American power more than Obama does." The Saudis, too, were infuriated. They had never trusted Obama-he had, long before he became president, referred to them as a "so-called ally" of the U.S. "Iran is the new great power of the Middle East, and the U.S. is the old," Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, told his superiors in Riyadh.

Obama's decision caused tremors across Washington as well. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the two leading Republican hawks in the Senate, had met with Obama in the White House earlier in the week and had been promised an attack. They were angered by the about-face. Damage was done even inside the administration. Neither Chuck Hagel, then the secretary of defense, nor John Kerry was in the Oval Office when the president informed his team of his thinking. Kerry would not learn about the change until later that evening. "I just got fucked over," he told a friend shortly after talking to the president that night. (When I asked Kerry recently about that tumultuous night, he said, "I didn't stop to analyze it. I figured the president had a reason to make a decision and, honestly, I understood his notion.")

The next few days were chaotic. The president asked Congress to authorize the use of force-the irrepressible Kerry served as chief lobbyist-and it quickly became apparent in the White House that Congress had little interest in a strike. When I spoke with Biden recently about the red-line decision, he made special note of this fact. "It matters to have Congress with you, in terms of your ability to sustain what you set out to do," he said. Obama "didn't go to Congress to get himself off the hook. He had his doubts at that point, but he knew that if he was going to do anything, he better damn well have the public with him, or it would be a very short ride." Congress's clear ambivalence convinced Biden that Obama was correct to fear the slippery slope. "What happens when we get a plane shot down? Do we not go in and rescue?," Biden asked. "You need the support of the American people."

Amid the confusion, a deus ex machina appeared in the form of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, which was held the week after the Syria reversal, Obama pulled Putin aside, he recalled to me, and told the Russian president "that if he forced Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that that would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike." Within weeks, Kerry, working with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, would engineer the removal of most of Syria's chemical-weapons arsenal-a program whose existence Assad until then had refused to even acknowledge.

The arrangement won the president praise from, of all people, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, with whom he has had a consistently contentious relationship.

The removal of Syria's chemical-weapons stockpiles represented "the one ray of light in a very dark region," Netanyahu told me not long after the deal was announced.

John Kerry today expresses no patience for those who argue, as he himself once did, that Obama should have bombed Assad-regime sites in order to buttress America's deterrent capability. "You'd still have the weapons there, and you'd probably be fighting ISIL" for control of the weapons, he said, referring to the Islamic State, the terror group also known as ISIS. "It just doesn't make sense. But I can't deny to you that this notion about the red line being crossed and [Obama's] not doing anything gained a life of its own."

Obama understands that the decision he made to step back from air strikes, and to allow the violation of a red line he himself had drawn to go unpunished, will be interrogated mercilessly by historians. But today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him.

"I'm very proud of this moment," he told me. "The overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom and the machinery of our national-security apparatus had gone fairly far. The perception was that my credibility was at stake, that America's credibility was at stake. And so for me to press the pause button at that moment, I knew, would cost me politically. And the fact that I was able to pull back from the immediate pressures and think through in my own mind what was in America's interest, not only with respect to Syria but also with respect to our democracy, was as tough a decision as I've made-and I believe ultimately it was the right decision to make."

This was the moment the president believes he finally broke with what he calls, derisively, the "Washington playbook."

"Where am I controversial? When it comes to the use of military power," he said. "That is the source of the controversy. There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It's a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses. Where America is directly threatened, the playbook works. But the playbook can also be a trap that can lead to bad decisions. In the midst of an international challenge like Syria, you get judged harshly if you don't follow the playbook, even if there are good reasons why it does not apply."

I have come to believe that, in Obama's mind, August 30, 2013, was his liberation day, the day he defied not only the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile playbook, but also the demands of America's frustrating, high-maintenance allies in the Middle East-countries, he complains privately to friends and advisers, that seek to exploit American "muscle" for their own narrow and sectarian ends. By 2013, Obama's resentments were well developed. He resented military leaders who believed they could fix any problem if the commander in chief would simply give them what they wanted, and he resented the foreign-policy think-tank complex. A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I've heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as "Arab-occupied territory."

For some foreign-policy experts, even within his own administration, Obama's about-face on enforcing the red line was a dispiriting moment in which he displayed irresolution and naïveté, and did lasting damage to America's standing in the world. "Once the commander in chief draws that red line," Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director and then as secretary of defense in Obama's first term, told me recently, "then I think the credibility of the commander in chief and this nation is at stake if he doesn't enforce it." Right after Obama's reversal, Hillary Clinton said privately, "If you say you're going to strike, you have to strike. There's no choice."

"Assad is effectively being rewarded for the use of chemical weapons, rather than ‘punished' as originally planned." Shadi Hamid, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote for The Atlantic at the time. "He has managed to remove the threat of U.S. military action while giving very little up in return."

Even commentators who have been broadly sympathetic to Obama's policies saw this episode as calamitous. Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, wrote recently that Obama's handling of this crisis-"first casually announcing a major commitment, then dithering about living up to it, then frantically tossing the ball to Congress for a decision-was a case study in embarrassingly amateurish improvisation."

Obama's defenders, however, argue that he did no damage to U.S. credibility, citing Assad's subsequent agreement to have his chemical weapons removed. "The threat of force was credible enough for them to give up their chemical weapons," Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia, told me. "We threatened military action and they responded. That's deterrent credibility."

History may record August 30, 2013, as the day Obama prevented the U.S. from entering yet another disastrous Muslim civil war, and the day he removed the threat of a chemical attack on Israel, Turkey, or Jordan. Or it could be remembered as the day he let the Middle East slip from America's grasp, into the hands of Russia, Iran, and ISIS.

I first spoke with Obama about foreign policy when he was a U.S. senator, in 2006. At the time, I was familiar mainly with the text of a speech he had delivered four years earlier, at a Chicago antiwar rally. It was an unusual speech for an antiwar rally in that it was not antiwar; Obama, who was then an Illinois state senator, argued only against one specific and, at the time, still theoretical, war. "I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein," he said. "He is a brutal man. A ruthless man ... But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors." He added, "I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda."

This speech had made me curious about its author. I wanted to learn how an Illinois state senator, a part-time law professor who spent his days traveling between Chicago and Springfield, had come to a more prescient understanding of the coming quagmire than the most experienced foreign-policy thinkers of his party, including such figures as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, not to mention, of course, most Republicans and many foreign-policy analysts and writers, including me.

Since that first meeting in 2006, I've interviewed Obama periodically, mainly on matters related to the Middle East. But over the past few months, I've spent several hours talking with him about the broadest themes of his "long game" foreign policy, including the themes he is most eager to discuss-namely, the ones that have nothing to do with the Middle East.

"ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States," he told me in one of these conversations. "Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don't do something about it." Obama explained that climate change worries him in particular because "it is a political problem perfectly designed to repel government intervention. It involves every single country, and it is a comparatively slow-moving emergency, so there is always something seemingly more urgent on the agenda."

At the moment, of course, the most urgent of the "seemingly more urgent" issues is Syria. But at any given moment, Obama's entire presidency could be upended by North Korean aggression, or an assault by Russia on a member of nato, or an ISIS-planned attack on U.S. soil. Few presidents have faced such diverse tests on the international stage as Obama has, and the challenge for him, as for all presidents, has been to distinguish the merely urgent from the truly important, and to focus on the important.

My goal in our recent conversations was to see the world through Obama's eyes, and to understand what he believes America's role in the world should be. This article is informed by our recent series of conversations, which took place in the Oval Office; over lunch in his dining room; aboard Air Force One; and in Kuala Lumpur during his most recent visit to Asia, in November. It is also informed by my previous interviews with him and by his speeches and prolific public ruminations, as well as by conversations with his top foreign-policy and national-security advisers, foreign leaders and their ambassadors in Washington, friends of the president and others who have spoken with him about his policies and decisions, and his adversaries and critics.

Over the course of our conversations, I came to see Obama as a president who has grown steadily more fatalistic about the constraints on America's ability to direct global events, even as he has, late in his presidency, accumulated a set of potentially historic foreign-policy achievements-controversial, provisional achievements, to be sure, but achievements nonetheless: the opening to Cuba, the Paris climate-change accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and, of course, the Iran nuclear deal. These he accomplished despite his growing sense that larger forces-the riptide of tribal feeling in a world that should have already shed its atavism; the resilience of small men who rule large countries in ways contrary to their own best interests; the persistence of fear as a governing human emotion-frequently conspire against the best of America's intentions. But he also has come to learn, he told me, that very little is accomplished in international affairs without U.S. leadership.

Obama talked me through this apparent contradiction. "I want a president who has the sense that you can't fix everything," he said. But on the other hand, "if we don't set the agenda, it doesn't happen." He explained what he meant. "The fact is, there is not a summit I've attended since I've been president where we are not setting the agenda, where we are not responsible for the key results," he said. "That's true whether you're talking about nuclear security, whether you're talking about saving the world financial system, whether you're talking about climate."

One day, over lunch in the Oval Office dining room, I asked the president how he thought his foreign policy might be understood by historians. He started by describing for me a four-box grid representing the main schools of American foreign-policy thought. One box he called isolationism, which he dismissed out of hand. "The world is ever-shrinking," he said. "Withdrawal is untenable." The other boxes he labeled realism, liberal interventionism, and internationalism. "I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can't, at any given moment, relieve all the world's misery," he said. "We have to choose where we can make a real impact." He also noted that he was quite obviously an internationalist, devoted as he is to strengthening multilateral organizations and international norms.

I told him my impression was that the various traumas of the past seven years have, if anything, intensified his commitment to realist-driven restraint. Had nearly two full terms in the White House soured him on interventionism?

"For all of our warts, the United States has clearly been a force for good in the world," he said. "If you compare us to previous superpowers, we act less on the basis of naked self-interest, and have been interested in establishing norms that benefit everyone. If it is possible to do good at a bearable cost, to save lives, we will do it."

If a crisis, or a humanitarian catastrophe, does not meet his stringent standard for what constitutes a direct national-security threat, Obama said, he doesn't believe that he should be forced into silence. He is not so much the realist, he suggested, that he won't pass judgment on other leaders. Though he has so far ruled out the use of direct American power to depose Assad, he was not wrong, he argued, to call on Assad to go. "Oftentimes when you get critics of our Syria policy, one of the things that they'll point out is ‘You called for Assad to go, but you didn't force him to go. You did not invade.' And the notion is that if you weren't going to overthrow the regime, you shouldn't have said anything. That's a weird argument to me, the notion that if we use our moral authority to say ‘This is a brutal regime, and this is not how a leader should treat his people,' once you do that, you are obliged to invade the country and install a government you prefer."

"I am very much the internationalist," Obama said in a later conversation. "And I am also an idealist insofar as I believe that we should be promoting values, like democracy and human rights and norms and values, because not only do they serve our interests the more people adopt values that we share-in the same way that, economically, if people adopt rule of law and property rights and so forth, that is to our advantage-but because it makes the world a better place. And I'm willing to say that in a very corny way, and in a way that probably Brent Scowcroft would not say.

"Having said that," he continued, "I also believe that the world is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy. And in order to advance both our security interests and those ideals and values that we care about, we've got to be hardheaded at the same time as we're bighearted, and pick and choose our spots, and recognize that there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that's terrible, but not believe that we can automatically solve it. There are going to be times where our security interests conflict with our concerns about human rights. There are going to be times where we can do something about innocent people being killed, but there are going to be times where we can't."

If Obama ever questioned whether America really is the world's one indispensable nation, he no longer does so. But he is the rare president who seems at times to resent indispensability, rather than embrace it. "Free riders aggravate me," he told me. Recently, Obama warned that Great Britain would no longer be able to claim a "special relationship" with the United States if it did not commit to spending at least 2 percent of its GDP on defense. "You have to pay your fair share," Obama told David Cameron, who subsequently met the 2 percent threshold.

Part of his mission as president, Obama explained, is to spur other countries to take action for themselves, rather than wait for the U.S. to lead. The defense of the liberal international order against jihadist terror, Russian adventurism, and Chinese bullying depends in part, he believes, on the willingness of other nations to share the burden with the U.S. This is why the controversy surrounding the assertion-made by an anonymous administration official to The New Yorker during the Libya crisis of 2011-that his policy consisted of "leading from behind" perturbed him. "We don't have to always be the ones who are up front," he told me. "Sometimes we're going to get what we want precisely because we are sharing in the agenda. The irony is that it was precisely in order to prevent the Europeans and the Arab states from holding our coats while we did all the fighting that we, by design, insisted" that they lead during the mission to remove Muammar Qaddafi from power in Libya. "It was part of the anti-free rider campaign."

The president also seems to believe that sharing leadership with other countries is a way to check America's more unruly impulses. "One of the reasons I am so focused on taking action multilaterally where our direct interests are not at stake is that multilateralism regulates hubris," he explained. He consistently invokes what he understands to be America's past failures overseas as a means of checking American self-righteousness. "We have history," he said. "We have history in Iran, we have history in Indonesia and Central America. So we have to be mindful of our history when we start talking about intervening, and understand the source of other people's suspicions."

In his efforts to off-load some of America's foreign-policy responsibilities to its allies, Obama appears to be a classic retrenchment president in the manner of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Retrenchment, in this context, is defined as "pulling back, spending less, cutting risk, and shifting burdens to allies," Stephen Sestanovich, an expert on presidential foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, explained to me. "If John McCain had been elected in 2008, you would still have seen some degree of retrenchment," Sestanovich said. "It's what the country wanted. If you come into office in the middle of a war that is not going well, you're convinced that the American people have hired you to do less." One difference between Eisenhower and Nixon, on the one hand, and Obama, on the other, Sestanovich said, is that Obama "appears to have had a personal, ideological commitment to the idea that foreign policy had consumed too much of the nation's attention and resources."

I asked Obama about retrenchment. "Almost every great world power has succumbed" to overextension, he said. "What I think is not smart is the idea that every time there is a problem, we send in our military to impose order. We just can't do that."

But once he decides that a particular challenge represents a direct national-security threat, he has shown a willingness to act unilaterally. This is one of the larger ironies of the Obama presidency: He has relentlessly questioned the efficacy of force, but he has also become the most successful terrorist-hunter in the history of the presidency, one who will hand to his successor a set of tools an accomplished assassin would envy. "He applies different standards to direct threats to the U.S.," Ben Rhodes says. "For instance, despite his misgivings about Syria, he has not had a second thought about drones." Some critics argue he should have had a few second thoughts about what they see as the overuse of drones. But John Brennan, Obama's CIA director, told me recently that he and the president "have similar views. One of them is that sometimes you have to take a life to save even more lives. We have a similar view of just-war theory. The president requires near-certainty of no collateral damage. But if he believes it is necessary to act, he doesn't hesitate."

Those who speak with Obama about jihadist thought say that he possesses a no-illusions understanding of the forces that drive apocalyptic violence among radical Muslims, but he has been careful about articulating that publicly, out of concern that he will exacerbate anti-Muslim xenophobia. He has a tragic realist's understanding of sin, cowardice, and corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes human behavior. And yet he consistently, and with apparent sincerity, professes optimism that the world is bending toward justice. He is, in a way, a Hobbesian optimist.

The contradictions do not end there. Though he has a reputation for prudence, he has also been eager to question some of the long-standing assumptions undergirding traditional U.S. foreign-policy thinking. To a remarkable degree, he is willing to question why America's enemies are its enemies, or why some of its friends are its friends. He overthrew half a century of bipartisan consensus in order to reestablish ties with Cuba. He questioned why the U.S. should avoid sending its forces into Pakistan to kill al-Qaeda leaders, and he privately questions why Pakistan, which he believes is a disastrously dysfunctional country, should be considered an ally of the U.S. at all. According to Leon Panetta, he has questioned why the U.S. should maintain Israel's so-called qualitative military edge, which grants it access to more sophisticated weapons systems than America's Arab allies receive; but he has also questioned, often harshly, the role that America's Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign-policy orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally. And of course he decided early on, in the face of great criticism, that he wanted to reach out to America's most ardent Middle Eastern foe, Iran. The nuclear deal he struck with Iran proves, if nothing else, that Obama is not risk-averse. He has bet global security and his own legacy that one of the world's leading state sponsors of terrorism will adhere to an agreement to curtail its nuclear program.

It is assumed, at least among his critics, that Obama sought the Iran deal because he has a vision of a historic American-Persian rapprochement. But his desire for the nuclear agreement was born of pessimism as much as it was of optimism. "The Iran deal was never primarily about trying to open a new era of relations between the U.S. and Iran," Susan Rice told me. "It was far more pragmatic and minimalist. The aim was very simply to make a dangerous country substantially less dangerous. No one had any expectation that Iran would be a more benign actor."

I once mentioned to Obama a scene from The Godfather: Part III, in which Michael Corleone complains angrily about his failure to escape the grasp of organized crime. I told Obama that the Middle East is to his presidency what the Mob is to Corleone, and I started to quote the Al Pacino line: "Just when I thought I was out-" "It pulls you back in," Obama said, completing the thought.

The story of Obama's encounter with the Middle East follows an arc of disenchantment. In his first extended spree of fame, as a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama often spoke with hope about the region. In Berlin that summer, in a speech to 200,000 adoring Germans, he said, "This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East."

The next year, as president, he gave a speech in Cairo meant to reset U.S. relations with the world's Muslims. He spoke about Muslims in his own family, and his childhood years in Indonesia, and confessed America's sins even as he criticized those in the Muslim world who demonized the U.S. What drew the most attention, though, was his promise to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was then thought to be the central animating concern of Arab Muslims. His sympathy for the Palestinians moved the audience, but complicated his relations with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister-especially because Obama had also decided to bypass Jerusalem on his first presidential visit to the Middle East.

When I asked Obama recently what he had hoped to accomplish with his Cairo reset speech, he said that he had been trying-unsuccessfully, he acknowledged-to persuade Muslims to more closely examine the roots of their unhappiness.

"My argument was this: Let's all stop pretending that the cause of the Middle East's problems is Israel," he told me. "We want to work to help achieve statehood and dignity for the Palestinians, but I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting-problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity. My thought was, I would communicate that the U.S. is not standing in the way of this progress, that we would help, in whatever way possible, to advance the goals of a practical, successful Arab agenda that provided a better life for ordinary people."

Through the first flush of the Arab Spring, in 2011, Obama continued to speak optimistically about the Middle East's future, coming as close as he ever would to embracing the so-called freedom agenda of George W. Bush, which was characterized in part by the belief that democratic values could be implanted in the Middle East. He equated protesters in Tunisia and Tahrir Square with Rosa Parks and the "patriots of Boston."

"After decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be," he said in a speech at the time. "The United States supports a set of universal rights. And these rights include free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to choose your own leaders ... Our support for these principles is not a secondary interest."

But over the next three years, as the Arab Spring gave up its early promise, and brutality and dysfunction overwhelmed the Middle East, the president grew disillusioned. Some of his deepest disappointments concern Middle Eastern leaders themselves. Benjamin Netanyahu is in his own category: Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect Israel's status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so. Obama has also not had much patience for Netanyahu and other Middle Eastern leaders who question his understanding of the region. In one of Netanyahu's meetings with the president, the Israeli prime minister launched into something of a lecture about the dangers of the brutal region in which he lives, and Obama felt that Netanyahu was behaving in a condescending fashion, and was also avoiding the subject at hand: peace negotiations. Finally, the president interrupted the prime minister: "Bibi, you have to understand something," he said. "I'm the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don't understand what you're talking about, but I do." Other leaders also frustrate him immensely. Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West-but Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian, one who refuses to use his enormous army to bring stability to Syria. And on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Wales in 2014, Obama pulled aside King Abdullah II of Jordan. Obama said he had heard that Abdullah had complained to friends in the U.S. Congress about his leadership, and told the king that if he had complaints, he should raise them directly. The king denied that he had spoken ill of him.

In recent days, the president has taken to joking privately, "All I need in the Middle East is a few smart autocrats." Obama has always had a fondness for pragmatic, emotionally contained technocrats, telling aides, "If only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this would all be easy."

The unraveling of the Arab Spring darkened the president's view of what the U.S. could achieve in the Middle East, and made him realize how much the chaos there was distracting from other priorities. "The president recognized during the course of the Arab Spring that the Middle East was consuming us," John Brennan, who served in Obama's first term as his chief counterterrorism adviser, told me recently.

But what sealed Obama's fatalistic view was the failure of his administration's intervention in Libya, in 2011. That intervention was meant to prevent the country's then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering the people of Benghazi, as he was threatening to do. Obama did not want to join the fight; he was counseled by Joe Biden and his first-term secretary of defense Robert Gates, among others, to steer clear. But a strong faction within the national-security team-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who was then the ambassador to the United Nations, along with Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony Blinken, who was then Biden's national-security adviser-lobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton's foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, "Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.") American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured and executed.

But Obama says today of the intervention, "It didn't work." The U.S., he believes, planned the Libya operation carefully-and yet the country is still a disaster.

Why, given what seems to be the president's natural reticence toward getting militarily ensnarled where American national security is not directly at stake, did he accept the recommendation of his more activist advisers to intervene?

"The social order in Libya has broken down," Obama said, explaining his thinking at the time. "You have massive protests against Qaddafi. You've got tribal divisions inside of Libya. Benghazi is a focal point for the opposition regime. And Qaddafi is marching his army toward Benghazi, and he has said, ‘We will kill them like rats.'

"Now, option one would be to do nothing, and there were some in my administration who said, as tragic as the Libyan situation may be, it's not our problem. The way I looked at it was that it would be our problem if, in fact, complete chaos and civil war broke out in Libya. But this is not so at the core of U.S. interests that it makes sense for us to unilaterally strike against the Qaddafi regime. At that point, you've got Europe and a number of Gulf countries who despise Qaddafi, or are concerned on a humanitarian basis, who are calling for action. But what has been a habit over the last several decades in these circumstances is people pushing us to act but then showing an unwillingness to put any skin in the game."

"Free riders?," I interjected.

"Free riders," he said, and continued. "So what I said at that point was, we should act as part of an international coalition. But because this is not at the core of our interests, we need to get a UN mandate; we need Europeans and Gulf countries to be actively involved in the coalition; we will apply the military capabilities that are unique to us, but we expect others to carry their weight. And we worked with our defense teams to ensure that we could execute a strategy without putting boots on the ground and without a long-term military commitment in Libya.

"So we actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion-which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess."

Mess is the president's diplomatic term; privately, he calls Libya a "shit show," in part because it's subsequently become an ISIS haven-one that he has already targeted with air strikes. It became a shit show, Obama believes, for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of America's allies and with the obdurate power of tribalism.

"When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong," Obama said, "there's room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya's proximity, being invested in the follow-up," he said. He noted that Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, lost his job the following year. And he said that British Prime Minister David Cameron soon stopped paying attention, becoming "distracted by a range of other things." Of France, he said, "Sarkozy wanted to trumpet the flights he was taking in the air campaign, despite the fact that we had wiped out all the air defenses and essentially set up the entire infrastructure" for the intervention. This sort of bragging was fine, Obama said, because it allowed the U.S. to "purchase France's involvement in a way that made it less expensive for us and less risky for us." In other words, giving France extra credit in exchange for less risk and cost to the United States was a useful trade-off-except that "from the perspective of a lot of the folks in the foreign-policy establishment, well, that was terrible. If we're going to do something, obviously we've got to be up front, and nobody else is sharing in the spotlight."

Obama also blamed internal Libyan dynamics. "The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected. And our ability to have any kind of structure there that we could interact with and start training and start providing resources broke down very quickly."

Libya proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. "There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa," he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. "That would be a basic, fundamental mistake."

President Obama did not come into office preoccupied by the Middle East. He is the first child of the Pacific to become president-born in Hawaii, raised there and, for four years, in Indonesia-and he is fixated on turning America's attention to Asia. For Obama, Asia represents the future. Africa and Latin America, in his view, deserve far more U.S. attention than they receive. Europe, about which he is unromantic, is a source of global stability that requires, to his occasional annoyance, American hand-holding. And the Middle East is a region to be avoided-one that, thanks to America's energy revolution, will soon be of negligible relevance to the U.S. economy.

It is not oil but another of the Middle East's exports, terrorism, that shapes Obama's understanding of his responsibilities there. Early in 2014, Obama's intelligence advisers told him that ISIS was of marginal importance. According to administration officials, General Lloyd Austin, then the commander of Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, told the White House that the Islamic State was "a flash in the pan." This analysis led Obama, in an interview with The New Yorker, to describe the constellation of jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria as terrorism's "jayvee team." (A spokesman for Austin told me, "At no time has General Austin ever considered ISIL a ‘flash in the pan' phenomenon.")

But by late spring of 2014, after ISIS took the northern-Iraq city of Mosul, he came to believe that U.S. intelligence had failed to appreciate the severity of the threat and the inadequacies of the Iraqi army, and his view shifted. After ISIS beheaded three American civilians in Syria, it became obvious to Obama that defeating the group was of more immediate urgency to the U.S. than overthrowing Bashar al-Assad.

Advisers recall that Obama would cite a pivotal moment in The Dark Knight, the 2008 Batman movie, to help explain not only how he understood the role of ISIS, but how he understood the larger ecosystem in which it grew. "There's a scene in the beginning in which the gang leaders of Gotham are meeting," the president would say. "These are men who had the city divided up. They were thugs, but there was a kind of order. Everyone had his turf. And then the Joker comes in and lights the whole city on fire. ISIL is the Joker. It has the capacity to set the whole region on fire. That's why we have to fight it."

The rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama's conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed-not on his watch, and not for a generation to come.

On a rainy Wednesday in mid-November, President Obama appeared on a stage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Manila with Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba, and a 31-year-old Filipina inventor named Aisa Mijeno. The ballroom was crowded with Asian CEOs, American business leaders, and government officials from across the region. Obama, who was greeted warmly, first delivered informal remarks from behind a podium, mainly about the threat of climate change.

Obama made no mention of the subject preoccupying much of the rest of the world-the ISIS attacks in Paris five days earlier, which had killed 130 people. Obama had arrived in Manila the day before from a G20 summit held in Antalya, Turkey. The Paris attacks had been a main topic of conversation in Antalya, where Obama held a particularly contentious press conference on the subject.

The traveling White House press corps was unrelenting: "Isn't it time for your strategy to change?" one reporter asked. This was followed by "Could I ask you to address your critics who say that your reluctance to enter another Middle East war, and your preference of diplomacy over using the military, makes the United States weaker and emboldens our enemies?" And then came this imperishable question, from a CNN reporter: "If you'll forgive the language-why can't we take out these bastards?" Which was followed by "Do you think you really understand this enemy well enough to defeat them and to protect the homeland?"

As the questions unspooled, Obama became progressively more irritated. He described his ISIS strategy at length, but the only time he exhibited an emotion other than disdain was when he addressed an emerging controversy about America's refugee policy. Republican governors and presidential candidates had suddenly taken to demanding that the United States block Syrian refugees from coming to America. Ted Cruz had proposed accepting only Christian Syrians. Chris Christie had said that all refugees, including "orphans under 5," should be banned from entry until proper vetting procedures had been put in place.

This rhetoric appeared to frustrate Obama immensely. "When I hear folks say that, well, maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims; when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who's fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted," Obama told the assembled reporters, "that's not American. That's not who we are. We don't have religious tests to our compassion."

Air Force One departed Antalya and arrived 10 hours later in Manila. That's when the president's advisers came to understand, in the words of one official, that "everyone back home had lost their minds." Susan Rice, trying to comprehend the rising anxiety, searched her hotel television in vain for CNN, finding only the BBC and Fox News. She toggled between the two, looking for the mean, she told people on the trip.

Later, the president would say that he had failed to fully appreciate the fear many Americans were experiencing about the possibility of a Paris-style attack in the U.S. Great distance, a frantic schedule, and the jet-lag haze that envelops a globe-spanning presidential trip were working against him. But he has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates. Even during the period in 2014 when ISIS was executing its American captives in Syria, his emotions were in check. Valerie Jarrett, Obama's closest adviser, told him people were worried that the group would soon take its beheading campaign to the U.S. "They're not coming here to chop our heads off," he reassured her. Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do. Several years ago, he expressed to me his admiration for Israelis' "resilience" in the face of constant terrorism, and it is clear that he would like to see resilience replace panic in American society. Nevertheless, his advisers are fighting a constant rearguard action to keep Obama from placing terrorism in what he considers its "proper" perspective, out of concern that he will seem insensitive to the fears of the American people.

The frustration among Obama's advisers spills over into the Pentagon and the State Department. John Kerry, for one, seems more alarmed about ISIS than the president does. Recently, when I asked the secretary of state a general question-is the Middle East still important to the U.S.?-he answered by talking exclusively about ISIS. "This is a threat to everybody in the world," he said, a group "overtly committed to destroying people in the West and in the Middle East. Imagine what would happen if we don't stand and fight them, if we don't lead a coalition-as we are doing, by the way. If we didn't do that, you could have allies and friends of ours fall. You could have a massive migration into Europe that destroys Europe, leads to the pure destruction of Europe, ends the European project, and everyone runs for cover and you've got the 1930s all over again, with nationalism and fascism and other things breaking out. Of course we have an interest in this, a huge interest in this."

When I noted to Kerry that the president's rhetoric doesn't match his, he said, "President Obama sees all of this, but he doesn't gin it up into this kind of-he thinks we are on track. He has escalated his efforts. But he's not trying to create hysteria ... I think the president is always inclined to try to keep things on an appropriate equilibrium. I respect that."

Obama modulates his discussion of terrorism for several reasons: He is, by nature, Spockian. And he believes that a misplaced word, or a frightened look, or an ill-considered hyperbolic claim, could tip the country into panic. The sort of panic he worries about most is the type that would manifest itself in anti-Muslim xenophobia or in a challenge to American openness and to the constitutional order.

The president also gets frustrated that terrorism keeps swamping his larger agenda, particularly as it relates to rebalancing America's global priorities. For years, the "pivot to Asia" has been a paramount priority of his. America's economic future lies in Asia, he believes, and the challenge posed by China's rise requires constant attention. From his earliest days in office, Obama has been focused on rebuilding the sometimes-threadbare ties between the U.S. and its Asian treaty partners, and he is perpetually on the hunt for opportunities to draw other Asian nations into the U.S. orbit. His dramatic opening to Burma was one such opportunity; Vietnam and the entire constellation of Southeast Asian countries fearful of Chinese domination presented others.

In Manila, at APEC, Obama was determined to keep the conversation focused on this agenda, and not on what he viewed as the containable challenge presented by ISIS. Obama's secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, told me not long ago that Obama has maintained his focus on Asia even as Syria and other Middle Eastern conflicts continue to flare. Obama believes, Carter said, that Asia "is the part of the world of greatest consequence to the American future, and that no president can take his eye off of this." He added, "He consistently asks, even in the midst of everything else that's going on, ‘Where are we in the Asia-Pacific rebalance? Where are we in terms of resources?' He's been extremely consistent about that, even in times of Middle East tension."

After Obama finished his presentation on climate change, he joined Ma and Mijeno, who had seated themselves on nearby armchairs, where Obama was preparing to interview them in the manner of a daytime talk-show host-an approach that seemed to induce a momentary bout of status-inversion vertigo in an audience not accustomed to such behavior in their own leaders. Obama began by asking Ma a question about climate change. Ma, unsurprisingly, agreed with Obama that it was a very important issue. Then Obama turned to Mijeno. A laboratory operating in the hidden recesses of the West Wing could not have fashioned a person more expertly designed to appeal to Obama's wonkish enthusiasms than Mijeno, a young engineer who, with her brother, had invented a lamp that is somehow powered by salt water.

"Just to be clear, Aisa, so with some salt water, the device that you've set up can provide-am I right?-about eight hours of lighting?," Obama asked."Eight hours of lighting," she responded.

Obama: "And the lamp is $20-"

Mijeno: "Around $20."

"I think Aisa is a perfect example of what we're seeing in a lot of countries-young entrepreneurs coming up with leapfrog technologies, in the same ways that in large portions of Asia and Africa, the old landline phones never got set up," Obama said, because those areas jumped straight to mobile phones. Obama encouraged Jack Ma to fund her work. "She's won, by the way, a lot of prizes and gotten a lot of attention, so this is not like one of those infomercials where you order it, and you can't make the thing work," he said, to laughter.

The next day, aboard Air Force One en route to Kuala Lumpur, I mentioned to Obama that he seemed genuinely happy to be onstage with Ma and Mijeno, and then I pivoted away from Asia, asking him if anything about the Middle East makes him happy.

"Right now, I don't think that anybody can be feeling good about the situation in the Middle East," he said. "You have countries that are failing to provide prosperity and opportunity for their people. You've got a violent, extremist ideology, or ideologies, that are turbocharged through social media. You've got countries that have very few civic traditions, so that as autocratic regimes start fraying, the only organizing principles are sectarian."

He went on, "Contrast that with Southeast Asia, which still has huge problems-enormous poverty, corruption-but is filled with striving, ambitious, energetic people who are every single day scratching and clawing to build businesses and get education and find jobs and build infrastructure. The contrast is pretty stark."

In Asia, as well as in Latin America and Africa, Obama says, he sees young people yearning for self-improvement, modernity, education, and material wealth.

"They are not thinking about how to kill Americans," he says. "What they're thinking about is How do I get a better education? How do I create something of value?"

He then made an observation that I came to realize was representative of his bleakest, most visceral understanding of the Middle East today-not the sort of understanding that a White House still oriented around themes of hope and change might choose to advertise. "If we're not talking to them," he said, referring to young Asians and Africans and Latin Americans, "because the only thing we're doing is figuring out how to destroy or cordon off or control the malicious, nihilistic, violent parts of humanity, then we're missing the boat."

Obama's critics argue that he is ineffective in cordoning off the violent nihilists of radical Islam because he doesn't understand the threat. He does resist refracting radical Islam through the "clash of civilizations" prism popularized by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington. But this is because, he and his advisers argue, he does not want to enlarge the ranks of the enemy. "The goal is not to force a Huntington template onto this conflict," said John Brennan, the CIA director.

Both François Hollande and David Cameron have spoken about the threat of radical Islam in more Huntingtonesque terms, and I've heard that both men wish Obama would use more-direct language in discussing the threat. When I mentioned this to Obama he said, "Hollande and Cameron have used phrases, like radical Islam, that we have not used on a regular basis as our way of targeting terrorism. But I've never had a conversation when they said, ‘Man, how come you're not using this phrase the way you hear Republicans say it?' " Obama says he has demanded that Muslim leaders do more to eliminate the threat of violent fundamentalism. "It is very clear what I mean," he told me, "which is that there is a violent, radical, fanatical, nihilistic interpretation of Islam by a faction-a tiny faction-within the Muslim community that is our enemy, and that has to be defeated."

He then offered a critique that sounded more in line with the rhetoric of Cameron and Hollande. "There is also the need for Islam as a whole to challenge that interpretation of Islam, to isolate it, and to undergo a vigorous discussion within their community about how Islam works as part of a peaceful, modern society," he said. But he added, "I do not persuade peaceful, tolerant Muslims to engage in that debate if I'm not sensitive to their concern that they are being tagged with a broad brush."

In private encounters with other world leaders, Obama has argued that there will be no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islam reconciles itself to modernity and undergoes some of the reforms that have changed Christianity.

Though he has argued, controversially, that the Middle East's conflicts "date back millennia," he also believes that the intensified Muslim fury of recent years was encouraged by countries considered friends of the U.S. In a meeting during apec with Malcolm Turnbull, the new prime minister of Australia, Obama described how he has watched Indonesia gradually move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation; large numbers of Indonesian women, he observed, have now adopted the hijab, the Muslim head covering.

Why, Turnbull asked, was this happening?

Because, Obama answered, the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have funneled money, and large numbers of imams and teachers, into the country. In the 1990s, the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam favored by the Saudi ruling family, Obama told Turnbull. Today, Islam in Indonesia is much more Arab in orientation than it was when he lived there, he said.

"Aren't the Saudis your friends?," Turnbull asked.

Obama smiled. "It's complicated," he said.

Obama's patience with Saudi Arabia has always been limited. In his first foreign-policy commentary of note, that 2002 speech at the antiwar rally in Chicago, he said, "You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East-the Saudis and the Egyptians-stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality." In the White House these days, one occasionally hears Obama's National Security Council officials pointedly reminding visitors that the large majority of 9/11 hijackers were not Iranian, but Saudi-and Obama himself rails against Saudi Arabia's state-sanctioned misogyny, arguing in private that "a country cannot function in the modern world when it is repressing half of its population." In meetings with foreign leaders, Obama has said, "You can gauge the success of a society by how it treats its women."

His frustration with the Saudis informs his analysis of Middle Eastern power politics. At one point I observed to him that he is less likely than previous presidents to axiomatically side with Saudi Arabia in its dispute with its archrival, Iran. He didn't disagree.

"Iran, since 1979, has been an enemy of the United States, and has engaged in state-sponsored terrorism, is a genuine threat to Israel and many of our allies, and engages in all kinds of destructive behavior," the president said. "And my view has never been that we should throw our traditional allies"-the Saudis-"overboard in favor of Iran."

But he went on to say that the Saudis need to "share" the Middle East with their Iranian foes. "The competition between the Saudis and the Iranians-which has helped to feed proxy wars and chaos in Syria and Iraq and Yemen-requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace," he said. "An approach that said to our friends ‘You are right, Iran is the source of all problems, and we will support you in dealing with Iran' would essentially mean that as these sectarian conflicts continue to rage and our Gulf partners, our traditional friends, do not have the ability to put out the flames on their own or decisively win on their own, and would mean that we have to start coming in and using our military power to settle scores. And that would be in the interest neither of the United States nor of the Middle East."

One of the most destructive forces in the Middle East, Obama believes, is tribalism-a force no president can neutralize. Tribalism, made manifest in the reversion to sect, creed, clan, and village by the desperate citizens of failing states, is the source of much of the Muslim Middle East's problems, and it is another source of his fatalism. Obama has deep respect for the destructive resilience of tribalism-part of his memoir, Dreams From My Father, concerns the way in which tribalism in post-colonial Kenya helped ruin his father's life-which goes some distance in explaining why he is so fastidious about avoiding entanglements in tribal conflicts.

"It is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism," he told me. "I understand the tribal impulse, and acknowledge the power of tribal division. I've been navigating tribal divisions my whole life. In the end, it's the source of a lot of destructive acts."

While flying to Kuala Lumpur with the president, I recalled a passing reference he had once made to me about the Hobbesian argument for strong government as an antidote to the unforgiving state of nature. When Obama looks at swathes of the Middle East, Hobbes's "war of all against all" is what he sees. "I have a recognition that us serving as the Leviathan clamps down and tames some of these impulses," Obama had said. So I tried to reopen this conversation with an unfortunately prolix question about, among other things, "the Hobbesian notion that people organize themselves into collectives to stave off their supreme fear, which is death."

Ben Rhodes and Joshua Earnest, the White House spokesman, who were seated on a couch to the side of Obama's desk on Air Force One, could barely suppress their amusement at my discursiveness. I paused and said, "I bet if I asked that in a press conference my colleagues would just throw me out of the room."

"I would be really into it," Obama said, "but everybody else would be rolling their eyes."

Rhodes interjected: "Why can't we get the bastards?" That question, the one put to the president by the CNN reporter at the press conference in Turkey, had become a topic of sardonic conversation during the trip.

I turned to the president: "Well, yeah, and also, why can't we get the bastards?"

He took the first question.

"Look, I am not of the view that human beings are inherently evil," he said. "I believe that there's more good than bad in humanity. And if you look at the trajectory of history, I am optimistic.

"I believe that overall, humanity has become less violent, more tolerant, healthier, better fed, more empathetic, more able to manage difference. But it's hugely uneven. And what has been clear throughout the 20th and 21st centuries is that the progress we make in social order and taming our baser impulses and steadying our fears can be reversed very quickly. Social order starts breaking down if people are under profound stress. Then the default position is tribe-us/them, a hostility toward the unfamiliar or the unknown."

He continued, "Right now, across the globe, you're seeing places that are undergoing severe stress because of globalization, because of the collision of cultures brought about by the Internet and social media, because of scarcities-some of which will be attributable to climate change over the next several decades-because of population growth. And in those places, the Middle East being Exhibit A, the default position for a lot of folks is to organize tightly in the tribe and to push back or strike out against those who are different.

"A group like ISIL is the distillation of every worst impulse along these lines. The notion that we are a small group that defines ourselves primarily by the degree to which we can kill others who are not like us, and attempting to impose a rigid orthodoxy that produces nothing, that celebrates nothing, that really is contrary to every bit of human progress-it indicates the degree to which that kind of mentality can still take root and gain adherents in the 21st century."

So your appreciation for tribalism's power makes you want to stay away?, I asked. "In other words, when people say ‘Why don't you just go get the bastards?,' you step back?"

"We have to determine the best tools to roll back those kinds of attitudes," he said. "There are going to be times where either because it's not a direct threat to us or because we just don't have the tools in our toolkit to have a huge impact that, tragically, we have to refrain from jumping in with both feet."

I asked Obama whether he would have sent the Marines to Rwanda in 1994 to stop the genocide as it was happening, had he been president at the time. "Given the speed with which the killing took place, and how long it takes to crank up the machinery of the U.S. government, I understand why we did not act fast enough," he said. "Now, we should learn from that. I actually think that Rwanda is an interesting test case because it's possible-not guaranteed, but it's possible-that this was a situation where the quick application of force might have been enough."

He related this to Syria: "Ironically, it's probably easier to make an argument that a relatively small force inserted quickly with international support would have resulted in averting genocide [more successfully in Rwanda] than in Syria right now, where the degree to which the various groups are armed and hardened fighters and are supported by a whole host of external actors with a lot of resources requires a much larger commitment of forces."

Obama-administration officials argue that he has a comprehensible approach to fighting terrorism: a drone air force, Special Forces raids, a clandestine CIA-aided army of 10,000 rebels battling in Syria. So why does Obama stumble when explaining to the American people that he, too, cares about terrorism? The Turkey press conference, I told him, "was a moment for you as a politician to say, ‘Yeah, I hate the bastards too, and by the way, I am taking out the bastards.' " The easy thing to do would have been to reassure Americans in visceral terms that he will kill the people who want to kill them. Does he fear a knee-jerk reaction in the direction of another Middle East invasion? Or is he just inalterably Spockian?

"Every president has strengths and weaknesses," he answered. "And there is no doubt that there are times where I have not been attentive enough to feelings and emotions and politics in communicating what we're doing and how we're doing it."

But for America to be successful in leading the world, he continued, "I believe that we have to avoid being simplistic. I think we have to build resilience and make sure that our political debates are grounded in reality. It's not that I don't appreciate the value of theater in political communications; it's that the habits we-the media, politicians-have gotten into, and how we talk about these issues, are so detached so often from what we need to be doing that for me to satisfy the cable news hype-fest would lead to us making worse and worse decisions over time."

As Air Force One began its descent toward Kuala Lumpur, the president mentioned the successful U.S.-led effort to stop the Ebola epidemic in West Africa as a positive example of steady, nonhysterical management of a terrifying crisis.

"During the couple of months in which everybody was sure Ebola was going to destroy the Earth and there was 24/7 coverage of Ebola, if I had fed the panic or in any way strayed from ‘Here are the facts, here's what needs to be done, here's how we're handling it, the likelihood of you getting Ebola is very slim, and here's what we need to do both domestically and overseas to stamp out this epidemic,' " then "maybe people would have said ‘Obama is taking this as seriously as he needs to be.' " But feeding the panic by overreacting could have shut down travel to and from three African countries that were already cripplingly poor, in ways that might have destroyed their economies-which would likely have meant, among other things, a recurrence of Ebola. He added, "It would have also meant that we might have wasted a huge amount of resources in our public-health systems that need to be devoted to flu vaccinations and other things that actually kill people" in large numbers in America.

The plane landed. The president, leaning back in his office chair with his jacket off and his tie askew, did not seem to notice. Outside, on the tarmac, I could see that what appeared to be a large portion of the Malaysian Armed Forces had assembled to welcome him. As he continued talking, I began to worry that the waiting soldiers and dignitaries would get hot. "I think we're in Malaysia," I said. "It seems to be outside this plane."

He conceded that this was true, but seemed to be in no rush, so I pressed him about his public reaction to terrorism: If he showed more emotion, wouldn't that calm people down rather than rile them up?

"I have friends who have kids in Paris right now," he said. "And you and I and a whole bunch of people who are writing about what happened in Paris have strolled along the same streets where people were gunned down. And it's right to feel fearful. And it's important for us not to ever get complacent. There's a difference between resilience and complacency." He went on to describe another difference-between making considered decisions and making rash, emotional ones. "What it means, actually, is that you care so much that you want to get it right and you're not going to indulge in either impetuous or, in some cases, manufactured responses that make good sound bites but don't produce results. The stakes are too high to play those games."

With that, Obama stood up and said, "Okay, gotta go." He headed out of his office and down the stairs, to the red carpet and the honor guard and the cluster of Malaysian officials waiting to greet him, and then to his armored limousine, flown to Kuala Lumpur ahead of him. (Early in his first term, still unaccustomed to the massive military operation it takes to move a president from one place to another, he noted ruefully to aides, "I have the world's largest carbon footprint.")

The president's first stop was another event designed to highlight his turn to Asia, this one a town-hall meeting with students and entrepreneurs participating in the administration's Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative. Obama entered the lecture hall at Taylor's University to huge applause. He made some opening remarks, then charmed his audience in an extended Q&A session.

But those of us watching from the press section became distracted by news coming across our phones about a new jihadist attack, this one in Mali. Obama, busily mesmerizing adoring Asian entrepreneurs, had no idea. Only when he got into his limousine with Susan Rice did he get the news.

Later that evening, I visited the president in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in downtown Kuala Lumpur. The streets around the hotel had been sealed. Armored vehicles ringed the building; the lobby was filled with swat teams. I took the elevator to a floor crowded with Secret Service agents, who pointed me to a staircase; the elevator to Obama's floor was disabled for security reasons. Up two flights, to a hallway with more agents. A moment's wait, and then Obama opened the door. His two-story suite was outlandish: Tara-like drapes, overstuffed couches. It was enormous and lonely and claustrophobic all at once.

"It's like the Hearst Castle," I observed.

"Well, it's a long way from the Hampton Inn in Des Moines," Obama said.

ESPN was playing in the background.

When we sat down, I pointed out to the president a central challenge of his pivot to Asia. Earlier in the day, at the moment he was trying to inspire a group of gifted and eager hijab-wearing Indonesian entrepreneurs and Burmese innovators, attention was diverted by the latest Islamist terror attack.

A writer at heart, he had a suggestion: "It's probably a pretty easy way to start the story," he said, referring to this article.

Possibly, I said, but it's kind of a cheap trick.

"It's cheap, but it works," Obama said. "We're talking to these kids, and then there's this attack going on."

The split-screen quality of the day prompted a conversation about two recent meetings he'd held, one that generated major international controversy and headlines, and one that did not. The one that drew so much attention, I suggested, would ultimately be judged less consequential. This was the Gulf summit in May of 2015 at Camp David, meant to mollify a crowd of visiting sheikhs and princes who feared the impending Iran deal. The other meeting took place two months later, in the Oval Office, between Obama and the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong. This meeting took place only because John Kerry had pushed the White House to violate protocol, since the general secretary was not a head of state. But the goals trumped decorum: Obama wanted to lobby the Vietnamese on the Trans-Pacific Partnership-his negotiators soon extracted a promise from the Vietnamese that they would legalize independent labor unions-and he wanted to deepen cooperation on strategic issues. Administration officials have repeatedly hinted to me that Vietnam may one day soon host a permanent U.S. military presence, to check the ambitions of the country it now fears most, China. The U.S. Navy's return to Cam Ranh Bay would count as one of the more improbable developments in recent American history. "We just moved the Vietnamese Communist Party to recognize labor rights in a way that we could never do by bullying them or scaring them," Obama told me, calling this a key victory in his campaign to replace stick-waving with diplomatic persuasion.

I noted that the 200 or so young Southeast Asians in the room earlier that day-including citizens of Communist-ruled countries-seemed to love America. "They do," Obama said. "In Vietnam right now, America polls at 80 percent."

The resurgent popularity of America throughout Southeast Asia means that "we can do really big, important stuff-which, by the way, then has ramifications across the board," he said, "because when Malaysia joins the anti-ISIL campaign, that helps us leverage resources and credibility in our fight against terrorism. When we have strong relations with Indonesia, that helps us when we are going to Paris and trying to negotiate a climate treaty, where the temptation of a Russia or some of these other countries may be to skew the deal in a way that is unhelpful."

Obama then cited America's increased influence in Latin America-increased, he said, in part by his removal of a region-wide stumbling block when he reestablished ties with Cuba-as proof that his deliberate, nonthreatening, diplomacy-centered approach to foreign relations is working. The ALBA movement, a group of Latin American governments oriented around anti-Americanism, has significantly weakened during his time as president. "When I came into office, at the first Summit of the Americas that I attended, Hugo Chávez"-the late anti-American Venezuelan dictator-"was still the dominant figure in the conversation," he said. "We made a very strategic decision early on, which was, rather than blow him up as this 10-foot giant adversary, to right-size the problem and say, ‘We don't like what's going on in Venezuela, but it's not a threat to the United States.' "

Obama said that to achieve this rebalancing, the U.S. had to absorb the diatribes and insults of superannuated Castro manqués. "When I saw Chávez, I shook his hand and he handed me a Marxist critique of the U.S.-Latin America relationship," Obama recalled. "And I had to sit there and listen to Ortega"-Daniel Ortega, the radical leftist president of Nicaragua-"make an hour-long rant against the United States. But us being there, not taking all that stuff seriously-because it really wasn't a threat to us"-helped neutralize the region's anti-Americanism.

The president's unwillingness to counter the baiting by American adversaries can feel emotionally unsatisfying, I said, and I told him that every so often, I'd like to see him give Vladimir Putin the finger. It's atavistic, I said, understanding my audience.

"It is," the president responded coolly. "This is what they're looking for."

He described a relationship with Putin that doesn't quite conform to common perceptions. I had been under the impression that Obama viewed Putin as nasty, brutish, and short. But, Obama told me, Putin is not particularly nasty.

"The truth is, actually, Putin, in all of our meetings, is scrupulously polite, very frank. Our meetings are very businesslike. He never keeps me waiting two hours like he does a bunch of these other folks." Obama said that Putin believes his relationship with the U.S. is more important than Americans tend to think. "He's constantly interested in being seen as our peer and as working with us, because he's not completely stupid. He understands that Russia's overall position in the world is significantly diminished. And the fact that he invades Crimea or is trying to prop up Assad doesn't suddenly make him a player. You don't see him in any of these meetings out here helping to shape the agenda. For that matter, there's not a G20 meeting where the Russians set the agenda around any of the issues that are important."

Russia's invasion of Crimea in early 2014, and its decision to use force to buttress the rule of its client Bashar al-Assad, have been cited by Obama's critics as proof that the post-red-line world no longer fears America.

So when I talked with the president in the Oval Office in late January, I again raised this question of deterrent credibility. "The argument is made," I said, "that Vladimir Putin watched you in Syria and thought, He's too logical, he's too rational, he's too into retrenchment. I'm going to push him a little bit further in Ukraine."

Obama didn't much like my line of inquiry. "Look, this theory is so easily disposed of that I'm always puzzled by how people make the argument. I don't think anybody thought that George W. Bush was overly rational or cautious in his use of military force. And as I recall, because apparently nobody in this town does, Putin went into Georgia on Bush's watch, right smack dab in the middle of us having over 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq." Obama was referring to Putin's 2008 invasion of Georgia, a former Soviet republic, which was undertaken for many of the same reasons Putin later invaded Ukraine-to keep an ex-Soviet republic in Russia's sphere of influence.

"Putin acted in Ukraine in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp. And he improvised in a way to hang on to his control there," he said. "He's done the exact same thing in Syria, at enormous cost to the well-being of his own country. And the notion that somehow Russia is in a stronger position now, in Syria or in Ukraine, than they were before they invaded Ukraine or before he had to deploy military forces to Syria is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in foreign affairs or in the world generally. Real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence. Russia was much more powerful when Ukraine looked like an independent country but was a kleptocracy that he could pull the strings on."

Obama's theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.

"The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do," he said.

I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

"It's realistic," he said. "But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there's always going to be some ambiguity." He then offered up a critique he had heard directed against him, in order to knock it down. "I think that the best argument you can make on the side of those who are critics of my foreign policy is that the president doesn't exploit ambiguity enough. He doesn't maybe react in ways that might cause people to think, Wow, this guy might be a little crazy."

"The ‘crazy Nixon' approach," I said: Confuse and frighten your enemies by making them think you're capable of committing irrational acts.

"But let's examine the Nixon theory," he said. "So we dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II, and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell. When I go to visit those countries, I'm going to be trying to figure out how we can, today, help them remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids. In what way did that strategy promote our interests?"

But what if Putin were threatening to move against, say, Moldova-another vulnerable post-Soviet state? Wouldn't it be helpful for Putin to believe that Obama might get angry and irrational about that?

"There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that that's how people respond. People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it's really important to somebody, and it's not that important to us, they know that, and we know that," he said. "There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years."

Obama went on to say that the belief in the possibilities of projected toughness is rooted in "mythologies" about Ronald Reagan's foreign policy.

"If you think about, let's say, the Iran hostage crisis, there is a narrative that has been promoted today by some of the Republican candidates that the day Reagan was elected, because he looked tough, the Iranians decided, ‘We better turn over these hostages,' " he said. "In fact what had happened was that there was a long negotiation with the Iranians and because they so disliked Carter-even though the negotiations had been completed-they held those hostages until the day Reagan got elected. Reagan's posture, his rhetoric, etc., had nothing to do with their release. When you think of the military actions that Reagan took, you have Grenada-which is hard to argue helped our ability to shape world events, although it was good politics for him back home. You have the Iran-Contra affair, in which we supported right-wing paramilitaries and did nothing to enhance our image in Central America, and it wasn't successful at all." He reminded me that Reagan's great foe, Daniel Ortega, is today the unrepentant president of Nicaragua.

Obama also cited Reagan's decision to almost immediately pull U.S. forces from Lebanon after 241 servicemen were killed in a Hezbollah attack in 1983. "Apparently all these things really helped us gain credibility with the Russians and the Chinese," because "that's the narrative that is told," he said sarcastically. "Now, I actually think that Ronald Reagan had a great success in foreign policy, which was to recognize the opportunity that Gorbachev presented and to engage in extensive diplomacy-which was roundly criticized by some of the same people who now use Ronald Reagan to promote the notion that we should go around bombing people."

In a conversation at the end of January, I asked the president to describe for me the threats he worries about most as he prepares, in the coming months, to hand off power to his successor.

"As I survey the next 20 years, climate change worries me profoundly because of the effects that it has on all the other problems that we face," he said. "If you start seeing more severe drought; more significant famine; more displacement from the Indian subcontinent and coastal regions in Africa and Asia; the continuing problems of scarcity, refugees, poverty, disease-this makes every other problem we've got worse. That's above and beyond just the existential issues of a planet that starts getting into a bad feedback loop."

Terrorism, he said, is also a long-term problem "when combined with the problem of failed states."

What country does he consider the greatest challenge to America in the coming decades? "In terms of traditional great-state relations, I do believe that the relationship between the United States and China is going to be the most critical," he said. "If we get that right and China continues on a peaceful rise, then we have a partner that is growing in capability and sharing with us the burdens and responsibilities of maintaining an international order. If China fails; if it is not able to maintain a trajectory that satisfies its population and has to resort to nationalism as an organizing principle; if it feels so overwhelmed that it never takes on the responsibilities of a country its size in maintaining the international order; if it views the world only in terms of regional spheres of influence-then not only do we see the potential for conflict with China, but we will find ourselves having more difficulty dealing with these other challenges that are going to come."

Many people, I noted, want the president to be more forceful in confronting China, especially in the South China Sea. Hillary Clinton, for one, has been heard to say in private settings, "I don't want my grandchildren to live in a world dominated by the Chinese."

"I've been very explicit in saying that we have more to fear from a weakened, threatened China than a successful, rising China," Obama said. "I think we have to be firm where China's actions are undermining international interests, and if you look at how we've operated in the South China Sea, we have been able to mobilize most of Asia to isolate China in ways that have surprised China, frankly, and have very much served our interest in strengthening our alliances."

A weak, flailing Russia constitutes a threat as well, though not quite a top-tier threat. "Unlike China, they have demographic problems, economic structural problems, that would require not only vision but a generation to overcome," Obama said. "The path that Putin is taking is not going to help them overcome those challenges. But in that environment, the temptation to project military force to show greatness is strong, and that's what Putin's inclination is. So I don't underestimate the dangers there." Obama returned to a point he had made repeatedly to me, one that he hopes the country, and the next president, absorbs: "You know, the notion that diplomacy and technocrats and bureaucrats somehow are helping to keep America safe and secure, most people think, Eh, that's nonsense. But it's true. And by the way, it's the element of American power that the rest of the world appreciates unambiguously. When we deploy troops, there's always a sense on the part of other countries that, even where necessary, sovereignty is being violated."

Over the past year, John Kerry has visited the White House regularly to ask Obama to violate Syria's sovereignty. On several occasions, Kerry has asked Obama to launch missiles at specific regime targets, under cover of night, to "send a message" to the regime. The goal, Kerry has said, is not to overthrow Assad but to encourage him, and Iran and Russia, to negotiate peace. When the Assad alliance has had the upper hand on the battlefield, as it has these past several months, it has shown no inclination to take seriously Kerry's entreaties to negotiate in good faith. A few cruise missiles, Kerry has argued, might concentrate the attention of Assad and his backers. "Kerry's looking like a chump with the Russians, because he has no leverage," a senior administration official told me.

The U.S. wouldn't have to claim credit for the attacks, Kerry has told Obama-but Assad would surely know the missiles' return address.

Obama has steadfastly resisted Kerry's requests, and seems to have grown impatient with his lobbying. Recently, when Kerry handed Obama a written outline of new steps to bring more pressure to bear on Assad, Obama said, "Oh, another proposal?" Administration officials have told me that Vice President Biden, too, has become frustrated with Kerry's demands for action. He has said privately to the secretary of state, "John, remember Vietnam? Remember how that started?" At a National Security Council meeting held at the Pentagon in December, Obama announced that no one except the secretary of defense should bring him proposals for military action. Pentagon officials understood Obama's announcement to be a brushback pitch directed at Kerry.

One day in January, in Kerry's office at the State Department, I expressed the obvious: He has more of a bias toward action than the president does.

"I do, probably," Kerry acknowledged. "Look, the final say on these things is in his hands ... I'd say that I think we've had a very symbiotic, synergistic, whatever you call it, relationship, which works very effectively. Because I'll come in with the bias toward ‘Let's try to do this, let's try to do that, let's get this done.' "

Obama's caution on Syria has vexed those in the administration who have seen opportunities, at different moments over the past four years, to tilt the battlefield against Assad. Some thought that Putin's decision to fight on behalf of Assad would prompt Obama to intensify American efforts to help anti-regime rebels. But Obama, at least as of this writing, would not be moved, in part because he believed that it was not his business to stop Russia from making what he thought was a terrible mistake. "They are overextended. They're bleeding," he told me. "And their economy has contracted for three years in a row, drastically."

In recent National Security Council meetings, Obama's strategy was occasionally referred to as the "Tom Sawyer approach." Obama's view was that if Putin wanted to expend his regime's resources by painting the fence in Syria, the U.S. should let him. By late winter, though, when it appeared that Russia was making advances in its campaign to solidify Assad's rule, the White House began discussing ways to deepen support for the rebels, though the president's ambivalence about more-extensive engagement remained. In conversations I had with National Security Council officials over the past couple of months, I sensed a foreboding that an event-another San Bernardino-style attack, for instance-would compel the United States to take new and direct action in Syria. For Obama, this would be a nightmare.

If there had been no Iraq, no Afghanistan, and no Libya, Obama told me, he might be more apt to take risks in Syria. "A president does not make decisions in a vacuum. He does not have a blank slate. Any president who was thoughtful, I believe, would recognize that after over a decade of war, with obligations that are still to this day requiring great amounts of resources and attention in Afghanistan, with the experience of Iraq, with the strains that it's placed on our military-any thoughtful president would hesitate about making a renewed commitment in the exact same region of the world with some of the exact same dynamics and the same probability of an unsatisfactory outcome."

Are you too cautious?, I asked.

"No," he said. "Do I think that had we not invaded Iraq and were we not still involved in sending billions of dollars and a number of military trainers and advisers into Afghanistan, would I potentially have thought about taking on some additional risk to help try to shape the Syria situation? I don't know."

What has struck me is that, even as his secretary of state warns about a dire, Syria-fueled European apocalypse, Obama has not recategorized the country's civil war as a top-tier security threat.

Obama's hesitation to join the battle for Syria is held out as proof by his critics that he is too naive; his decision in 2013 not to fire missiles is proof, they argue, that he is a bluffer.

This critique frustrates the president. "Nobody remembers bin Laden anymore," he says. "Nobody talks about me ordering 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan." The red-line crisis, he said, "is the point of the inverted pyramid upon which all other theories rest."

One afternoon in late January, as I was leaving the Oval Office, I mentioned to Obama a moment from an interview in 2012 when he told me that he would not allow Iran to gain possession of a nuclear weapon. "You said, ‘I'm the president of the United States, I don't bluff.' " He said, "I don't."

Shortly after that interview four years ago, Ehud Barak, who was then the defense minister of Israel, asked me whether I thought Obama's no-bluff promise was itself a bluff. I answered that I found it difficult to imagine that the leader of the United States would bluff about something so consequential. But Barak's question had stayed with me. So as I stood in the doorway with the president, I asked: "Was it a bluff?" I told him that few people now believe he actually would have attacked Iran to keep it from getting a nuclear weapon.

"That's interesting," he said, noncommittally.

I started to talk: "Do you-" He interrupted. "I actually would have," he said, meaning that he would have struck Iran's nuclear facilities. "If I saw them break out."

He added, "Now, the argument that can't be resolved, because it's entirely situational, was what constitutes them getting" the bomb. "This was the argument I was having with Bibi Netanyahu." Netanyahu wanted Obama to prevent Iran from being capable of building a bomb, not merely from possessing a bomb.

You were right to believe it," the president said. And then he made his key point. "This was in the category of an American interest."

I was reminded then of something Derek Chollet, a former National Security Council official, told me: "Obama is a gambler, not a bluffer."

The president has placed some huge bets. Last May, as he was trying to move the Iran nuclear deal through Congress, I told him that the agreement was making me nervous. His response was telling. "Look, 20 years from now, I'm still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it's my name on this," he said. "I think it's fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down."

In the matter of the Syrian regime and its Iranian and Russian sponsors, Obama has bet, and seems prepared to continue betting, that the price of direct U.S. action would be higher than the price of inaction. And he is sanguine enough to live with the perilous ambiguities of his decisions. Though in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in 2009, Obama said, "Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later," today the opinions of humanitarian interventionists do not seem to move him, at least not publicly. He undoubtedly knows that a next-generation Samantha Power will write critically of his unwillingness to do more to prevent the continuing slaughter in Syria. (For that matter, Samantha Power will also be the subject of criticism from the next Samantha Power.) As he comes to the end of his presidency, Obama believes he has done his country a large favor by keeping it out of the maelstrom-and he believes, I suspect, that historians will one day judge him wise for having done so.

Inside the West Wing, officials say that Obama, as a president who inherited a financial crisis and two active wars from his predecessor, is keen to leave "a clean barn" to whoever succeeds him. This is why the fight against ISIS, a group he considers to be a direct, though not existential, threat to the U.S., is his most urgent priority for the remainder of his presidency; killing the so-called caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is one of the top goals of the American national-security apparatus in Obama's last year.

Of course, ISIS was midwifed into existence, in part, by the Assad regime. Yet by Obama's stringent standards, Assad's continued rule for the moment still doesn't rise to the level of direct challenge to America's national security.

This is what is so controversial about the president's approach, and what will be controversial for years to come-the standard he has used to define what, exactly, constitutes a direct threat.

Obama has come to a number of dovetailing conclusions about the world, and about America's role in it. The first is that the Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests. The second is that even if the Middle East were surpassingly important, there would still be little an American president could do to make it a better place. The third is that the innate American desire to fix the sorts of problems that manifest themselves most drastically in the Middle East inevitably leads to warfare, to the deaths of U.S. soldiers, and to the eventual hemorrhaging of U.S. credibility and power. The fourth is that the world cannot afford to see the diminishment of U.S. power. Just as the leaders of several American allies have found Obama's leadership inadequate to the tasks before him, he himself has found world leadership wanting: global partners who often lack the vision and the will to spend political capital in pursuit of broad, progressive goals, and adversaries who are not, in his mind, as rational as he is. Obama believes that history has sides, and that America's adversaries-and some of its putative allies-have situated themselves on the wrong one, a place where tribalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and militarism still flourish. What they don't understand is that history is bending in his direction.

"The central argument is that by keeping America from immersing itself in the crises of the Middle East, the foreign-policy establishment believes that the president is precipitating our decline," Ben Rhodes told me. "But the president himself takes the opposite view, which is that overextension in the Middle East will ultimately harm our economy, harm our ability to look for other opportunities and to deal with other challenges, and, most important, endanger the lives of American service members for reasons that are not in the direct American national-security interest."

If you are a supporter of the president, his strategy makes eminent sense: Double down in those parts of the world where success is plausible, and limit America's exposure to the rest. His critics believe, however, that problems like those presented by the Middle East don't solve themselves-that, without American intervention, they metastasize.

At the moment, Syria, where history appears to be bending toward greater chaos, poses the most direct challenge to the president's worldview.

George W. Bush was also a gambler, not a bluffer. He will be remembered harshly for the things he did in the Middle East. Barack Obama is gambling that he will be judged well for the things he didn't do.

A-to-Z primer to spell out exactly what government tyranny means post 9/11 [Excerpt from John W. Whitehead posted on gadflyonline.com]

A is for the AMERICAN POLICE STATE. A police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

B is for our battered BILL OF RIGHTS. In the cop culture that is America today, where you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is rarely held accountable for violating your rights, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much.

C is for CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. The latest governmental scheme to deprive Americans of their liberties—namely, the right to property—is being carried out under the guise of civil asset forfeiture, a government practice whereingovernment agents (usually the police) seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then, whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property.

D is for DRONES. It is estimated that at least 30,000 drones will be airborne in American airspace by 2020, part of an$80 billion industry. Although some drones will be used for benevolent purposes, many will also be equipped with lasers, tasers and scanning devices, among other weapons—all aimed at “we the people.”

E is for ELECTRONIC CONCENTRATION CAMP. In the electronic concentration camp, as I have dubbed the surveillance state, all aspects of a person’s life are policed by government agents and all citizens are suspects, their activities monitored and regulated, their movements tracked, their communications spied upon, and their lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness dependent on the government’s say-so.

F is for FUSION CENTERS. Fusion centers, data collecting agencies spread throughout the country and aided by the National Security Agency, serve as a clearinghouse for information shared between state, local and federal agencies. These fusion centers constantly monitor our communications, everything from our internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected: the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police.

G is for GRENADE LAUNCHERS and GLOBAL POLICE. The federal government has distributed more than $18 billion worth of battlefield-appropriate military weapons, vehicles and equipment such as drones, tanks, and grenade launchers to domestic police departments across the country. As a result, most small-town police forces now have enough firepower to render any citizen resistance futile. Now take those small-town police forces, train them to look and act like the military, and then enlist them to be part of the United Nations’ Strong Cities Network program, and you not only have a standing army that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution but one that is part of a global police force.

H is for HOLLOW-POINT BULLETS. The government’s efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration stockpiling millions of lethal hollow-point bullets, which violate international law. Ironically, while the government continues to push for stricter gun laws for the general populace, the U.S. military’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy.

I is for the INTERNET OF THINGS, in which internet-connected “things” will monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free. The key word here, however, is control. This “connected” industry propels us closer to a future where police agencies apprehend virtually anyone if the government “thinks” they may commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

J is for JAILING FOR PROFIT. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by private corporations, this profit-driven form of mass punishment has given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep their privately run prisons full by jailing large numbers of Americans for inane crimes.

K is for KENTUCKY V. KING. In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can break into homes, without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home as long as they think they have a reason to do so. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between us and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by law enforcement officials.

L is for LICENSE PLATE READERS, which enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country. This data collected on tens of thousands of innocent people is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with fusion centers and private companies. This puts Big Brother in the driver’s seat.

M is for MAIN CORE. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation. As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. As of 2008, there were some 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

N is for NO-KNOCK RAIDS. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for routine police matters. In fact, more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually possession of some small amount of drugs.

O is for OVERCRIMINALIZATION. Thanks to an overabundance of 4500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. As a result of this overcriminalization, we’re seeing an uptick in Americans being arrested and jailed for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room.

P is for PATHOCRACY and PRECRIME. When our own government treats us as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, mistreated, and then jailed in profit-driven private prisons if we dare step out of line, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is apathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.” Couple that with the government’s burgeoning precrime programs, which will usefusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics in order to identify and deter so-called potential “extremists,” dissidents or rabble-rousers. Bear in mind that anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is now viewed as an extremist.

Q is for QUALIFIED IMMUNITY. Qualified immunity allows officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a police officer should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.

R is for ROADSIDE STRIP SEARCHES and BLOOD DRAWS. The courts have increasingly erred on the side of giving government officials—especially the police—vast discretion in carrying out strip searches, blood draws and even anal probes for a broad range of violations, no matter how minor the offense. In the past, strip searches were resorted to only in exceptional circumstances where police were confident that a serious crime was in progress. In recent years, however, strip searches have become routine operating procedures in which everyone is rendered a suspect and, as such, is subjected to treatment once reserved for only the most serious of criminals.

S is for the SURVEILLANCE STATE. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

T is for TASERS. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets and the like have been used by police as weapons of compliance more often and with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some instances, even causing death. These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over minor incidents that much more likely. A Taser Shockwave, for instance, can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button.

U is for UNARMED CITIZENS SHOT BY POLICE. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, often attributed to a fear for their safety. Yet the fatality rate of on-duty patrol officers is reportedly far lower than many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck driving, and even trash collection.

V is for VIPR SQUADS. So-called “soft target” security inspections, carried out by roving VIPR task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams, are taking place whenever and wherever the government deems appropriate, at random times and places, and without needing the justification of a particular threat.

W is for WHOLE-BODY SCANNERS. Using either x-ray radiation or radio waves, scanning devices and government mobile units are being used not only to “see” through your clothes but to spy on you within the privacy of your home. While these mobile scanners are being sold to the American public as necessary security and safety measures, we can ill afford to forget that such systems are rife with the potential for abuse, not only by government bureaucrats but by the technicians employed to operate them.

X is for X-KEYSCORE, one of the many spying programs carried out by the National Security Agency that targets every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. This top-secret program “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

Y is for YOU-NESS. Using your face, mannerisms, social media and “you-ness” against you, you can now be tracked based on what you buy, where you go, what you do in public, and how you do what you do. Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country.

Z is for ZERO TOLERANCE. We have moved into a new paradigm in which young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, often for engaging in little more than childish behavior. In some jurisdictions, students have also been penalized under school zero tolerance policies for such inane “crimes” as carrying cough drops, wearing black lipstick, bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades. The lesson being taught to our youngest—and most impressionable—citizens is this: in the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (politician, police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

Surveillance blowback: the making of the US surveillance state, 1898-2020 [By Alfred W. McCoy posted on July 17 2013 at opendemocracy.net]

The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped.   Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century, what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and surveillance apparatus.    Its future (though not ours) looks bright indeed.

In 1898, Washington occupied the Philippines and in the years that followed pacified its rebellious people, in part by fashioning the world’s first full-scale ‘surveillance state’ in a colonial land.   The illiberal lessons learned there then migrated homeward, providing the basis for constructing America’s earliest internal security and surveillance apparatus during World War I.   A half-century later, as protests mounted during the Vietnam War, the FBI, building on the foundations of that old security structure, launched large-scale illegal counterintelligence operations to harass antiwar activists, while President Richard Nixon’s White House created its own surveillance apparatus to target its domestic enemies.

In the aftermath of those wars, however, reformers pushed back against secret surveillance.  Republican privacy advocates abolished much of President Woodrow Wilson’s security apparatus during the 1920s, and Democratic liberals in Congress created the FISA courts in the 1970s in an attempt to prevent any recurrence of President Nixon’s illegal domestic wiretapping.

Today, as Washington withdraws troops from the Greater Middle East, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for the pacification of Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a twenty-first century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the past pattern that once checked the rise of a US surveillance state seems to be breaking down.  

Despite talk about ending the war on terror one day, President Obama has left the historic pattern of partisan reforms far behind. In what has become a permanent state of ‘wartime’ at home, the Obama administration is building upon the surveillance systems created in the Bush years to maintain US global dominion in peace or war through a strategic, ever-widening edge in information control.   The White House shows no sign - nor does Congress - of cutting back on construction of a powerful, global Panopticon that can surveil domestic dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied nations, monitor rival powers, counter hostile cyber strikes, launch preemptive cyberattacks, and protect domestic communications.

Writing for TomDispatch four years ago during Obama’s first months in office, I suggested that the War on Terror has “proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state - with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’"

That prediction has become our present reality - and with stunning speed. Americans now live under the Argus-eyed gaze of a digital surveillance state, while increasing numbers of surveillance drones fill American skies.   In addition, the NSA’s net now reaches far beyond our borders, sweeping up the personal messages of many millions of people worldwide and penetrating the confidential official communications of at least 30 allied nations. The past has indeed proven prologue. The future is now.

The coming of the information revolution

The origins of this emerging global surveillance state date back over a century to “America’s first information revolution” for the management of textual, statistical, and analytical data - a set of innovations whose synergy created the technological capacity for mass surveillance.

Here’s a little litany of “progress” to ponder while on the road to today’s every-email-all-the-time version of surveillance.

Within just a few years, the union of Thomas A. Edison’s quadruplex telegraph with Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter, both inventions of 1874, allowed for the accurate transmission of textual data at the unequalled speed of 40 words per minute across America and around the world.

In the mid-1870s as well, librarian Melvil Dewey developed the “Dewey decimal system” to catalog the Amherst College Library, thereby inventing the “smart number” for the reliable encoding and rapid retrieval of limitless information.

The year after engineer Herman Hollerith patented the punch card (1889), the US Census Bureau adopted his Electrical Tabulating machine to count 62,622,250 Americans within weeks - a triumph that later led to the founding of International Business Machines, better known by its acronym IBM.

By 1900, all American cities were wired via the Gamewell Corporation’s innovative telegraphic communications, with over 900 municipal police and fire systems sending 41 million messages in a single year.

A colonial laboratory for the surveillance state

On the eve of empire in 1898, however, the US government was still what scholar Stephen Skowronek has termed a “patchwork” state with a near-zero capacity for domestic security.   That, of course, left ample room for the surveillance version of modernization, and it came with surprising speed after Washington conquered and colonized the Philippines.

Facing a decade of determined Filipino resistance, the US Army applied all those American information innovations - rapid telegraphy, photographic files, alpha-numeric coding, and Gamewell police communications - to the creation of a formidable, three-tier colonial security apparatus including the Manila Police, the Philippines Constabulary, and above all the Army’s Division of Military Information.

In early 1901, Captain Ralph Van Deman, later dubbed “the father of US Military Intelligence,” assumed command of this still embryonic division, the Army’s first field intelligence unit in its 100-year history. With a voracious appetite for raw data, Van Deman’s division compiled phenomenally detailed information on thousands of Filipino leaders, including their physical appearance, personal finances, landed property, political loyalties, and kinship networks.

Starting in 1901, the first US governor-general (and future president) William Howard Taft drafted draconian sedition legislation for the islands and established a 5,000-man strong Philippines Constabulary.   In the process, he created a colonial surveillance state that ruled, in part, thanks to the agile control of information, releasing damning data about enemies while suppressing scandals about allies.

When the Associated Press’s Manila bureau chief reported critically on these policies, Taft’s allies dug up dirt on this would-be critic and dished it out to the New York press.   On the other hand, the Division of Military Information compiled a scandalous report about the rising Filipino politician Manuel Quezon, alleging a premarital abortion by his future first lady.   Quezon, however, served the Constabulary as a spy, so this document remained buried in US files, assuring his unchecked ascent to become the first president of the Philippines in 1935.

American blueprint

During the US conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America.   In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because   “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” Indeed, just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words, colonial police methods came home to serve as a template for the creation of an American internal security apparatus in wartime.

After the US entered World War I in 1917 without an intelligence service of any sort, Colonel Van Deman brought his Philippine experience to bear, creating the US Army’s Military Intelligence Division (MID) and so laying the institutional foundations for a future internal security state.

In collaboration with the FBI, he also expanded the MID’s reach through a civilian auxiliary organization, the American Protective League, whose 350,000 citizen-operatives amassed more than a million pages of surveillance reports on German-Americans in just 14 months, arguably the world’s most intensive feat of domestic surveillance ever.

After the Armistice in 1918, Military Intelligence joined the FBI in two years of violent repression of the American left marked by the notorious Luster raids in New York City, J. Edgar Hoover’s “Palmer Raids” in cities across the northeast and the suppression of union strikes from New York City to Seattle.

When President Wilson left office in 1921, incoming Republican privacy advocates condemned his internal security regime as intrusive and abusive, forcing the Army and the FBI to cut their ties to patriotic vigilantes. In 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, worrying that “a secret police may become a menace to free government,” announced “the Bureau of Investigation is not concerned with political or other opinions of individuals.” Epitomizing the nation’s retreat from surveillance, Secretary of War Henry Stimson closed the Military Intelligence cipher section in 1929, saying famously, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

After retiring at the rank of major general that same year, Van Deman and his wife continued from their home in San Diego to coordinate an informal intelligence exchange system, compiling files on 250,000 suspected “subversives.”   They also took reports from classified government files and slipped them to citizen anti-communist groups for blacklisting. In the 1950 elections, for instance, Representative Richard Nixon reportedly used Van Deman’s files to circulate “pink sheets” at rallies denouncing California Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, his opponent in a campaign for a Senate seat, launching a victorious Nixon on the path to the presidency.

From retirement, Van Deman, in league with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, also proved crucial at a 1940 closed-door conference that awarded the FBI control over domestic counterintelligence.   The Army’s Military Intelligence, and its successors, the CIA and NSA, were restricted to foreign espionage, a division of tasks that would hold, at least in principle, until the post-9/11 years. So armed, during World War II the FBI used warrantless wiretaps, “black bag” break-ins, and surreptitious mail opening to track suspects, while mobilizing more than 300,000 informers to secure defense plants against wartime threats that ultimately proved “negligible.”

The Vietnam years

In response to the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, the FBI deployed its COINTELPRO operation, using what Senator Frank Church’s famous investigative committee later called "unsavory and vicious tactics... including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths."

In assessing COINTELPRO’s 2,370 actions from 1960 to 1974, the Church Committee branded them a "sophisticated vigilante operation" that "would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity." Significantly, even this aggressive Senate investigation did not probe Director Hoover’s notorious “private files” on the peccadilloes of leading politicians that had insulated his Bureau from any oversight for more than 30 years.

After New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh exposed illegal CIA surveillance of American antiwar activists in 1974, Senator Church’s committee and a presidential commission under Nelson Rockefeller investigated the Agency’s “Operation Chaos,” a program to conduct massive illegal surveillance of the antiwar protest movement, discovering a database with 300,000 names.   These investigations also exposed the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, forcing the Bureau to reform.

To prevent future abuses, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, creating a special court to approve all national security wiretaps.   In a bitter irony, Carter’s supposed reform ended up plunging the judiciary into the secret world of the surveillance managers where, after 9/11, it  became a rubberstamp institution for every kind of state intrusion on domestic privacy.

How the global war on terror came home

As its pacification wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sank into bloody quagmires, Washington brought electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and unmanned aerial vehicles to the battlefields.   This trio, which failed to decisively turn the tide in those lands, nonetheless now undergirds a global US surveillance apparatus of unequalled scope and unprecedented power.

After confining the populations of Baghdad and the rebellious Sunni city of Falluja behind blast-wall cordons, the US Army attempted to bring the Iraqi resistance under control in part by collecting, as of 2011, three million Iraqi fingerprints, iris, and retinal scans.   These were deposited in a biometric database in West Virginia that American soldiers at checkpoints and elsewhere on distant battlefields could at any moment access by satellite link. Simultaneously, the Joint Special Operations Command under General Stanley McChrystal centralized all electronic and satellite surveillance in the Greater Middle East to identify possible al-Qaeda operatives for assassination by Predator drones or hunter-killer raids by Special Operations commandos from Somalia to Pakistan.

Domestically, post-9/11, the White House tried to create a modern version of the old state-citizen alliance for domestic surveillance. In May 2002, President Bush’s Justice Department launched Operation TIPS with "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others" spying on  fellow citizens. But there was vocal opposition from members of Congress, civil libertarians, and the media, which soon forced Justice to quietly kill the program.

In a digital iteration of the same effort, retired admiral John Poindexter began to set up an ominously titled Pentagon program called Total Information Awareness to amass a "detailed electronic dossier on millions of Americans." Again the nation recoiled, Congress banned the program, and the admiral was forced to resign.

Defeated in the public arena, the Bush administration retreated into the shadows, where it launched secret FBI and NSA domestic surveillance programs. Here, Congress proved far more amenable and pliable.   In 2002, Congress erased the bright line that had long barred the CIA from domestic spying, granting the agency the power to access US financial records and audit electronic communications routed through the country.

Defying the FISA law, in October 2001 President Bush ordered the NSA to commence covert monitoring of private communications through the nation's telephone companies without the requisite warrants. According to the Associated Press, he also “secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States” carrying the world’s “emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions, and more.” Since his administration had already conveniently decided that “metadata was not constitutionally protected,” the NSA began an open-ended program, Operation Stellar Wind, “to collect bulk telephony and Internet metadata.”

By 2004, the Bush White House was so wedded to Internet metadata collection that top aides barged into Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room to extract a reauthorization signature for the program.   They were blocked by Justice Department officials led by Deputy Attorney General James Comey, forcing a two-month suspension until that FISA court, brought into existence in the Carter years, put its first rubber-stamp on this mass surveillance regime.

Armed with expansive FISA court orders allowing the collection of data sets rather than information from specific targets, the FBI’s “Investigative Data Warehouse” acquired more than a billion documents within five years, including intelligence reports, social security files, drivers’ licenses, and private financial information.   All of this was accessible to 13,000 analysts making a million queries monthly. In 2006, as the flood of data surging through fiber optic cables strained NSA computers, the Bush administration launched the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to develop supercomputing searches powerful enough to process this torrent of Internet information.

In 2005, a New York Times investigative report exposed the administration’s illegal surveillance for the first time. A year later, USA Today reported that the NSA was “secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South.” One expert called it   "the largest database ever assembled in the world," adding presciently that the Agency's goal was "to create a database of every call ever made."

In August 2007, in response to these revelations, Congress capitulated.   It passed a new law, the Protect America Act, which retrospectively legalized this illegal White House-inspired set of programs by requiring greater oversight by the FISA court.   This secret tribunal - acting almost as a “parallel Supreme Court” that rules on fundamental constitutional rights without adversarial proceedings or higher review - has removed any real restraint on the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Internet metadata and regularly rubberstamps almost 100% of the government’s thousands of surveillance requests. Armed with expanded powers, the National Security Agency promptly launched its PRISM program (recently revealed by Edward Snowden).   To feed its hungry search engines, the NSA has compelled nine Internet giants, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, and Skype, to transfer what became billions of emails to its massive data farms.

Obama’s expanding surveillance universe

Instead of curtailing his predecessor’s wartime surveillance, as Republicans did in the 1920s and Democrats in the 1970s, President Obama has overseen the expansion of the NSA’s wartime digital operations into a permanent weapon for the exercise of US global power.

The Obama administration continued a Bush-era NSA program of “bulk email records collection” until 2011 when two senators protested that the agency’s “statements to both Congress and the Court... significantly exaggerated this program’s effectiveness.”   Eventually, the administration was forced to curtail this particular operation. Nonetheless, the NSA has continued to collect the personal communications of Americans by the billions under its PRISM and other programs.

In the Obama years as well, the NSA began cooperating with its long-time British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), to tap into the dense cluster of Trans-Atlantic Telecommunication fiber optic cables that transit the United Kingdom. During a visit to a GCHQ facility for high-altitude intercepts at Menwith Hill in June 2008, NSA Director General Keith Alexander asked, “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.”

In the process, GCHQ’s Operation Tempora achieved the “biggest Internet access” of any partner in a “Five Eyes” signals-intercept coalition that, in addition to Great Britain and the US, includes Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. When the project went online in 2011, the GCHQ sank probes into 200 Internet cables and was soon collecting 600 million telephone messages daily, which were, in turn, made accessible to 850,000 NSA employees.

The historic alliance between the NSA and GCHQ dates back to the dawn of the Cold War.   In deference to it, the NSA has, since 2007, exempted its “2nd  party” Five Eyes allies from surveillance under its “Boundless Informant” operation. According to another recently leaked NSA document, however, “we can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd  party foreign partners.”   This is clearly a reference to close allies like Germany, France, and Italy.

On a busy day in January 2013, for instance, the NSA collected 60 million phone calls and emails from Germany - some 500 million German messages are reportedly collected annually - with lesser but still hefty numbers from France, Italy, and non-European allies like Brazil. To gain operational intelligence on such allies, the NSA taps phones at the European Council headquarters in Brussels, bugs the European Union (EU) delegation at the UN, has planted a “Dropmire” monitor “on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy DC,” and eavesdrops on 38 allied embassies worldwide.

Such secret intelligence about its allies gives Washington an immense diplomatic advantage, says NSA expert James Bamford. “It’s the equivalent of going to a poker game and wanting to know what everyone’s hand is before you place your bet.” And who knows what scurrilous bits of scandal about world leaders American surveillance systems might scoop up to strengthen Washington’s hand in that global poker game called diplomacy.

This sort of digital surveillance was soon supplemented by actual Internet warfare.   Between 2006 and 2010, Washington launched the planet’s first cyberwar, with Obama ordering devastating cyberattacks against Iran's nuclear facilities. In 2009, the Pentagon formed the US Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with a cybercombat center at Lackland Air Base initially staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees. Over the next two years, by appointing NSA chief Alexander as CYBERCOM’s concurrent commander, it created an enormous concentration of power in the digital shadows.   The Pentagon has also declared cyberspace an “operational domain” for both offensive and defensive warfare.

Controlling the future

By leaking a handful of NSA documents, Edward Snowden has given us a glimpse of future US global policy and the changing architecture of power on this planet. At the broadest level, this digital shift complements Obama’s new defense strategy, announced in 2012, of reducing costs (cutting, for example, infantry troops by 14%), while conserving Washington’s overall power by developing a capacity for “a combined arms campaign across all domains - land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace.”

While cutting conventional armaments, Obama is investing billions in constructing a new architecture for global information control. To store and process the billions of messages sucked up by its worldwide surveillance network (totaling 97 billion items for March alone), the NSA is employing 11,000 workers to build a $1.6 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah, whose storage capacity is measured in “yottabytes,” each the equivalent of a trillion terabytes.   That’s almost unimaginable once you realize that just 15 terabytes could store every publication in the Library of Congress.  

From its new $1.8 billion headquarters, the third-biggest building in the Washington area, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency deploys 16,000 employees and a $5 billion budget to coordinate a rising torrent of surveillance data from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes, Global Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes, and orbiting satellites.

To protect those critical orbiting satellites, which transmit most US military communications, the Pentagon is building an aerospace shield of pilotless drones. In the exosphere, the Air Force has since April 2010 been successfully testing the X-37B space drone that can carry missiles to strike rival satellite networks such as the one the Chinese are currently creating.

For more extensive and precise surveillance from space, the Pentagon has been replacing its costly, school-bus-sized spy satellites with a new generation of light, low cost models such as the ATK-A200. Successfully launched in May 2011, this module is orbiting 250 miles above the Earth with remote-controlled, U-2 quality cameras that now provide the “US Central Command an assured ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) capability.”

In the stratosphere, close enough to Earth for audiovisual surveillance, the Pentagon is planning to launch an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones - each equipped with high-resolution cameras to surveil all terrain within a 100-mile radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications, and efficient engines for continuous 24-hour flight.

Within a decade, the US will likely deploy this aerospace shield, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and even vaster, more omnipresent digital surveillance networks that will envelop the Earth in an electronic grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield, atomizing a single suspected terrorist, or monitoring millions of private lives at home and abroad.

Sadly, Mark Twain was right when he warned us just over 100 years ago that America could not have both empire abroad and democracy at home.   To paraphrase his prescient words, by “trampling upon the helpless abroad” with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned, “by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.”

Meet the CIA’s 10 Favorite Drug Traffickers [Nick Alexandrov, posted on substance.com]

Attacking drug cartels. Dismantling organized crime. US officials argue that these are two of the core objectives driving Washington’s foreign policy. But the record of US conduct abroad since World War II tells a different story. Around the world, Washington has consistently backed prolific drug smugglers, provided these groups advance US governmental interests. Justifications for this support have morphed over the years—it was anti-Communism during the Cold War, anti-terrorism today—but these rationalizations mask a consistent set of policy outcomes.

The Central Intelligence Agency, created in 1947, oversaw the distribution of many of the billions the US spread around. This paper trail was clandestine, its secrecy justified by supposed national security concerns. But the reality was that the CIA’s aims aligned easily with brutal figures worldwide. Public awareness of its feats would have embarrassed the agency.

One result is that huge drug syndicates have emerged; another is that countries have transformed into major drug producers. Because drugs are illegal, traffickers use some of their ill-gotten riches to pay law enforcement to look the other way, if not get in on the action. Corruption and criminality corrode governments. Civilians suffer.

Is expanded drug smuggling the real “drug war” legacy? That’s one question the just-released, much-praised film Kill the Messenger, about San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb (played by Jeremy Renner), asks. Webb unearthed ties linking the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras to top drug barons bringing cocaine into the US. And that’s the question posed by this list of 10 of the CIA’s most favored drug traffickers, from World War II to the present.

The 1940s

Don Calogero Vizzini (The Sicilian Mafia)

The Sicilian Mafia was decimated by the start of World War II. Mussolini’s repression left it clinging to strongholds in Sicily.

The Allied occupation reversed this decline. The CIA’s precursor, the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), teamed with organized crime during the July 1943 invasion of Sicily. That was when the US Army appointed Don Calogero Vizzini, a local Mafia boss, mayor of Villalba. He was certain his US ties gave him impunity, so he murdered the local intrusive police chief. The US installed mayors like Vizzini throughout western Sicily, as the US-Mafia partnership persisted.

Italy’s Communist Party was gaining power as the war ended, and social reforms would have eroded Mafia power. Both Washington and the crime bosses intended to crush the Italian left.

In 1946, while the Mafia was rebuilding, the US freed top gangster Lucky Luciano from his New York prison, deporting him to Italy. He contacted his friend Vizzini upon arrival, and the two helped construct an enormous drug trafficking network. Law enforcement did not interfere with the project. Morphine base arrived from the Middle East and was made into heroin at a Palermo laboratory Vizzini ran—which fronted as a candy factory—then shipped to the US.

The number of addicts there was near 20,000 at the war’s conclusion. In 1952, two years before Vizzini died, it was 60,000. Heroin dependence plagued 150,000 US citizens by 1965.

The 1950s and 1960s

Li Mi (The Kuomintang Party, China)

The CIA formed in 1947. Its first allies included members of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chinese Nationalist (Kuomintang, or KMT) Party, which Mao kicked out of mainland China in 1949. KMT members were already seasoned drug smugglers, having brought opium and heroin into the US in the 1920s.

Among the KMT’s key North American contacts were Chinese residents of Mexico. The DEA’s predecessor, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, observed in 1946 that “in a recent Kuomintang Convention in Mexico City a wide solicitation of funds for the future operation of the opium trade was noted.” This future apparently was secured, as KMT opium continued entering the US from Mexico in 1947.

Mao’s victory came two years later. In its wake, some 12,000 KMT troops under General Li Mi fled to Burma. Journalist George Thayer writes in his 1970 book, The War Business, that “the CIA saw these troops as a thorn in Mao’s side and continued to supply them with arms and money,” even as Li’s forces secured control of Asia’s largest opium poppy fields. Reporters Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair explain, in their 1998 book, Whiteout, that “pilots working for the CIA carried loads of Li Mi’s opium on their return flights to Bangkok, where it was delivered to General Phao [Sriyanond, see below], head of the Thai secret police and a longtime CIA asset.” By the late 1950s, the region—known as the Golden Triangle—produced about half of the world’s annual raw opium output.

Washington awarded Li Mi the US Legion of Merit in 1946. He died in Taipei in March 1973.

Phao Sriyanonda (Thailand)

CIA-employed pilots carried Li Mi’s opium from Burma to Police General Phao Sriyanond in Bangkok, who later funneled weapons to Li Mi to aid a planned invasion of southern China. This elite Thai cop appointed himself head of the police department in the aftermath of a 1947 military coup. He then fortified his organization to the point where it rivaled the military by late 1950.

The CIA played a crucial role in this transformation. In August 1950, an agency team traveled to Bangkok where—with approval from the US State and Defense Departments—it worked out a deal to equip and train a Thai paramilitary force. US intelligence officials created a front entity, the Southeast Asia (SEA) Supply Company, as a cover for this operation.  Soon some 300 CIA advisers were on the SEA Supply payroll.  A few years later, from 1952 to 1953, the Thai police oversaw a harsh series of political purges. Generally Phao was seen as a merciless ruler who wouldn’t hesitate murder opponents, if doing so would help him advance.

And opium money fueled Phao’s rise to power throughout this period. He used police facilities for his drug smuggling, and employed a personal army of law enforcement officers. The Thai police became the country’s biggest opium-smuggling syndicate during the 1950s, as Thailand secured its position as a key player in heroin trafficking worldwide. The country relied so heavily on drug trafficking that when Thai officials proposed a ban on opium sales and use in 1956, the government balked, claiming it wouldn’t be able to find revenue sources to replace the lost funds.

Phao fled to Geneva after a 1957 coup.  He died there three years later.

Ouane Rattikone (Laos)

After some initial hesitation, Thailand did set to eradicating drug smuggling within its borders. In his 1972 study, The Politics of Heroin, Alfred W. McCoy writes that Thailand “unleashed a full military assault on the opium trade” in 1959. This crackdown coincided with the relocation, under pressure, of KMT forces from Burma to towns in northwestern Laos “that would soon become opium centers and CIA bases,” Peter Dale Scott explains in his 2003 book, Drugs, Oil & War.

US intelligence officials put down deeper roots in Laos in the 1960s. From 1960 to 1974, for example, they trained an army of 30,000 Hmong tribesmen who battled the native Pathet Lao Communists and guarded radar sites the US used in its North Vietnam bombing runs. The Hmong also grew opium for cash.

In 1965, General Ouane Rattikone became head of the military government in Laos, and tried to take over this local opium trade. He dispatched his troops in 1967 to secure KMT trafficking routes into Laos, and shut down the Corsicans who had flown opium out of the region on their own airlines.

But Laos couldn’t furnish enough aircraft in the Corsicans’ absence. The CIA filled this void, lending Hmong traffickers its own Air America planes so they could shift opium from rural villages to heroin labs in Laos or South Vietnam.

The 1960s and 1970s

José Miguel Battle, Sr. (The Corporation, Cuban Exiles)

Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba was an organized crime paradise. While he ruled, the Italian-American Mafia ran casinos and brothels, paying off government officials and cops to secure a loyal client base. José Miguel Battle, Sr., was one such policeman, and also served in Batista’s army.

Fidel Castro ruined this system when he toppled Batista on January 1, 1959. The gangsters and their Cuban affiliates fled the country, aiding Washington’s early campaigns to overturn the revolution. The CIA recruited Battle to play a key role in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

But this campaign failed—as did the well-known Mafia-aided attempt to murder Castro. Cuban exiles therefore had to adapt to life in the US. Battle and his associates formed La Compañía—the Corporation—basing it in Miami, but operating in California, Nevada, New Jersey New York and elsewhere in the US. The gang imported cocaine, heroin and marijuana en route to becoming a $45-million-a-year illicit gambling collective. It firebombed its way to power, torching competitors’ homes and businesses.

By the early ’80s, Battle was ready for a quieter life, and retired to a 30-acre ranch in the South Miami-Dade area. US officials arrested him for racketeering in March 2004, sentencing him in January 2007 to 20 years. He was out on $1 million bond when he died the following August after struggling with liver failure and cardiac problems.

The 1970s and 1980s

Juan Ramón Matta-Ballesteros (Honduras)

Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros grew up in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, trying to survive as a homeless child—and determined to change his fortune. Drug smuggling was one available escape. Matta pursued it, and as a young man, in 1970, US officials arrested him in Dulles Airport for possessing 24.5 kilograms of cocaine.

He escaped from prison and got back into trafficking. The DEA elected not to move in on him in 1973. Two years later Matta had reached the rank of go-between for Colombian and Mexican organizations moving cocaine into the US. With Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the kingpin of Mexico’s Guadalajara group—the term “cartel” wasn’t used much at the time—he became a top coke pusher, shifting the drug from Peru to Mexico.

He also moved $500 million in US-bound cocaine through Honduras each year. And with the proceeds, he financed a 1978 coup that installed General Policarpo Paz Garcia as the Honduran president. By that point, the Sandinista uprising in Nicaragua—along the south Honduran border—was well underway. It culminated in the overthrow of the US-allied Somoza dictatorship in 1979.

Washington responded by organizing anti-Sandinista forces—the Contras—along the Honduran border. Coke barons like Matta and Mexico’s Félix Gallardo helped fund this campaign to restore Somoza to power. In 1983, for example, Matta’s airline, SETCO, was the main transporter bringing guns and food to the Contras. The CIA awarded SETCO its contract even after the DEA and US Customs highlighted it as a trafficking enterprise.

And there was more evidence the DEA understood the situation. Its agent in Honduras, Thomas Zepeda, researched the scene and concluded that the Honduran military was in on Matta’s drug running. But this was an inconvenient truth. So in 1983 the DEA pulled Zepeda from the country, and closed its Tegucigalpa office.

Another DEA agent, Enrique Camarena, met a darker fate. He was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in 1985 while on assignment in Mexico—and Matta was one of the killing’s suspected masterminds. US and Honduran forces raided Matta’s Tegucigalpa home three years later, extraditing him to the US. Last May marked his 26th year in federal prison in the US.

Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo (The Guadalajara Group, Mexico)

Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo went beyond what earlier Mexican drug traffickers had dreamed possible. He started as a local cop in Sinaloa in the 1960s, climbing the ranks to become his governor’s bodyguard. By 1978 he was head of the Guadalajara group, a trafficking organization that dominated Mexico’s Pacific coast.

Like Matta, Félix Gallardo exploited his power at the time of the Nicaraguan Revolution to try to roll back the Sandinistas. When he wasn’t pushing four tons of cocaine per month into the US, he was proving the extent to which he was, as his pilot Werner Lotz put it, “a big supporter” of the Contras. Félix Gallardo once handed Lotz $150,000 to give to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan forces. On other occasions he bragged of how many guns he had sold them, or of how he had rallied his Mexican colleagues to the cause.

If this generosity made him a valuable CIA asset, Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate—a kind of hybrid CIA-FBI—had to be thanked for helping him realize his drug-running ambitions. In 1947, when Mexico’s drug trade was still small-scale and concentrated in Sinaloa, Washington had encouraged its southern neighbor to organize an intelligence agency. When the DFS formed, it began not only protecting smugglers—for a cut of the proceeds—but helping them expand their operations. It gave traffickers fake DFS badges, for example, so they could operate free of legal harassment. Early signs of today’s monstrous cartels can be detected during this period, throughout which the US and Mexican governments remained firm Cold War allies, as the CIA worked closely with the DFS.

Félix Gallardo was another kingpin implicated in Enrique Camarena’s 1985 murder. He was arrested in 1989, and is currently doing 40 years in “Altiplano,” a Mexican maximum-security prison.

Manuel Noriega (Panama)

Panama’s Manuel Noriega got on the CIA payroll in 1968. US intelligence officials discovered his drug trafficking ties in 1972. In 1981, CIA Director William Casey invited Noriega to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Their discussion was productive, amicable—the start of what Noriega termed his “cozier relationship” with Washington.

This partnership lasted for much of the ’80s, when Noriega became military dictator, dominating Panama. Noriega ran weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras as they worked to ruin the Sandinistas, and Panama transformed its Howard Air Force Base into a Contra training camp. This loyalty to Washington’s aims was what mattered to US officials. If Noriega remained obedient, he could keep moving drugs without any problems. His US allies would look away.

And they had to—evidence against Noriega kept surfacing. Senator Birch Bayh told Congress in 1978 he had information tying Noriega to Panamanian drug trafficking. The House Foreign Affairs Committee concluded, in 1985, that the dictator had poured funds into a narcotics lab on his country’s Colombian border. Then Seymour Hersh published a New York Times story the following June. The piece sketched an ugly portrait: Noriega laundered money for guerrillas and drug kingpins, and smuggled drugs himself. Senator Jesse Helms appeared on Meet the Press soon after and confirmed the charges.

These accusations didn’t undermine Washington-Panama cooperation. What did was Noriega’s disobedience—he passed information on the Contras to Cuba, for instance. So he had to be punished. President Bush, the former CIA director, attacked Panama in December 1989. The stated aim was to hold Noriega accountable for drug trafficking. “Operation Just Cause” leveled city blocks in a Panama City slum and killed its residents, who were dumped in a mass grave before the US military burned their remains—an effort to torch the evidence of Washington’s cynical campaign.

Noriega served 15 years of a 30-year sentence in the US for drug trafficking. He is now serving a 20-year sentence for murder in Panama.

The 1990s to the present

Carlos Castaño (the Colombian Paramilitaries)

Colombia is a major drug war front, and some consider Washington’s “Plan Colombia” a success. But US interests there align with paramilitary aims. And these groups—right-wing, heavily armed—have a record of deep complicity in drug trafficking.

“Comparatively little is known of the CIA’s role in Colombia,” Peter Dale Scott writes in Drugs, Oil & War. It is known, however, that the CIA taught terror tactics to Colombian police officers in the 1960s. And Human Rights Watch described how “a US Defense Department and CIA team worked with Colombian military officers on the 1991 intelligence reorganization that resulted in the creation of killer networks that identified and killed civilians suspected of supporting guerrillas.”

In 1993, Carlos Castaño, head of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC, in its Spanish acronym)—the main paramilitary entity—teamed with Colombian authorities and the CIA to topple Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar. Castaño estimated before his 2004 assassination that 70% of his funding derived from drug smuggling, and the DEA agreed. Its former deputy administrator, James Milford, cited Castaño’s links to the North Valle cartel and concluded that the paramilitary leader was a “major cocaine trafficker in his own right.” Another DEA official, Donnie Marshall, explained that the paramilitaries “raise funds through extortion, or by protecting laboratory operations in northern and central Colombia,” and that they “appear to be directly involved in processing cocaine. At least one of these paramilitary groups appears to be involved in exporting cocaine from Colombia.”

But the US targets the FARC guerillas—the enemies of paramilitary groups. The guerrillas aren’t traffickers. They work with coca growers, currently mediating between small producers and cocaine processors. Garry Leech, a reporter with extensive experience in Colombia, points out that the FARC pays higher prices than the paramilitaries for coca paste. He suggests that Washington’s policy, by empowering outfits like the AUC, will lower cocaine production costs, meaning that “the street price of cocaine in US cities will most likely remain unchanged or, if anything, decrease.” Another drug war “victory.”

The 2000s to the present

Ahmed Shah Masood  (The Northern Alliance, Afghanistan)

Drug prohibitionists could have seen their preferred policies pursued to an extreme in Afghanistan nearly 15 years ago. The Taliban banned opium production there in 2000, well before the US invaded after 9/11. Taliban militias destroyed heroin labs and imprisoned thousands of farmers to force the population’s compliance. The results were dramatic. Some 3,300 tons of opium were harvested in 2000, but that figure plummeted to 35 tons a year later.

In 2001, only one region in the country continued extensive cultivation: the 5% of territory the US-backed Northern Alliance controlled. When the Taliban stamped out opium farming, the Northern Alliance tripled their region’s yield. Ex-CIA analyst Melvin Goodman explains in his 2008 book, Failure of Intelligence, that the CIA teamed with “the Tajik-led Northern Alliance” to assault the Taliban after the 9/11 attacks—and before them, when agents “deployed teams to the Panjshir Valley of northern Afghanistan to meet with various tribal warlords, particularly with Ahmed Shah Masood, the head of the Northern Alliance.” At this time, Steve Coll writes in his 2004 book, Ghost Wars, “the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center reported that Massoud’s men continued to smuggle large amounts of opium and heroin into Europe.” But Washington would never let a little drug running prevent it from pursuing its foreign policy aims.

By 2005, Afghanistan was turning out some 90% of the world’s opium. And last spring, a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that Afghan opium farming occurs throughout the country at unprecedented levels. Opium poppies are now grown on well over 500,000 acres there—a 36% increase over the 2012 figure. The same report also found that in-country drug use rose from 2009, when 1 million Afghans were drug-dependent, to 2012, when the total had risen to 1.3 million.

The Afghan activist Malalai Joya summed up the US legacy: “Afghanistan, after eight years of occupation, has become a world center for drugs. The drug lords are the only ones with power.” It’s a familiar scene, in other words—at least for those attuned to the reality of Washington’s “drug war.”

The Global Banking 'Super-Entity' Drug Cartel: The "Free Market" of Finance Capital [by Andrew Gavin Marshall]

I would like to introduce you, the reader, to some realities of our global banking system, resting on the rhetoric of free markets, but functioning, in actuality, as a global cartel, a "super-entity" in which the world's major banks all own each other and own the controlling shares in the world's largest multinational corporations, influence governments and policy with politicians in their back pockets, routinely engaging in fraud and bribery, and launder hundreds of billions of dollars in drug money, not to mention arms dealing and terrorist financing. These are the "too big to fail" and "too big to jail" banks, the centre of our global economy, what we call a "free market," implying that the global banks — and corporations — have "free reign" to do anything they please, engage in blatantly criminal activities, steal trillions in wealth which is hidden offshore, and never get more than a slap on the wrist. This is the real "free market," a highly profitable global banking cartel, functioning as a worldwide financial Mafia.

Scientific Research Proves the Existence of a Global Financial "Super-Entity"

In October of 2011, New Scientist reported that a scientific study on the global financial system was undertaken by three complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. The conclusion of the study revealed what many theorists and observers have noted for years, decades, and indeed, even centuries: "An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy." As one of the researchers stated, "Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market… Our analysis is reality-based." Using a database which listed 37 million companies and investors worldwide, the researchers studied all 43,060 trans-national corporations (TNCs), including the share ownerships linking them.[1]

The mapping of 'power' was through the construction of a model showing which companies controlled which other companies through shareholdings. The web of ownership revealed a core of 1,318 companies with ties to two or more other companies. This 'core' was found to own roughly 80% of global revenues for the entire set of 43,000 TNCs. And then came what the researchers referred to as the "super-entity" of 147 tightly-knit companies, which all own each other, and collectively own 40% of the total wealth in the entire network. One of the researchers noted, "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network.
This network poses a huge risk to the global economy, as, "If one [company] suffers distress… this propagates." The study was undertaken with a data set established prior to the economic crisis, thus, as the financial crisis forced some banks to die (Lehman Bros.) and others to merge, the "super-entity" would now be even more connected, concentrated, and problematic for the economy.[2]

The top 50 companies on the list of the "super-entity" included (as of 2007): Barclays Plc (1), Capital Group Companies Inc (2), FMR Corporation (3), AXA (4), State Street Corporation (5), JP Morgan Chase & Co. (6), UBS AG (9), Merrill Lynch & Co Inc (10), Deutsche Bank (12), Credit Suisse Group (14), Bank of New York Mellon Corp (16), Goldman Sachs Group (18), Morgan Stanley (21), Société Générale (24), Bank of America Corporation (25), Lloyds TSB Group (26), Lehman Brothers Holdings (34), Sun Life Financial (35), ING Groep (41), BNP Paribas (46), and several others.[3]

In the United States, five banks control half the economy: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs Group collectively held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, which equals roughly 56% of the U.S. economy. This data was according to central bankers at the Federal Reserve. In 2007, the assets of the largest banks amounted to 43% of the U.S. economy. Thus, the crisis has made the banks bigger and more powerful than ever. Because the government invoked "too big to fail," meaning that the big banks will be saved because they are very important, the big banks have incentive to make continued and bigger risks, because they will be bailed out in the end. Essentially, it's an insurance policy for criminal risk-taking behaviour. The former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis stated, "Market participants believe that nothing has changed, that too-big-to-fail is fully intact." Remember, "market" means the banking cartel (or "super-entity" if you prefer). Thus, they build new bubbles and buy government bonds (sovereign debt), making the global financial system increasingly insecure and at risk of a larger collapse than took place in 2008.[4]

When politicians, economists, and other refer to "financial markets," they are in actuality referring to the "super-entity" of corporate-financial institutions which dominate, collectively, the global economy. For example, the role of financial markets in the debt crisis ravaging Europe over the past two years is often referred to as "market discipline," with financial markets speculating against the ability of nations to repay their debt or interest, of credit ratings agencies downgrading the credit-worthiness of nations, of higher yields on sovereign bonds (higher interest on government debt), and plunging the country deeper into crisis, thus forcing its political class to impose austerity and structural adjustment measures in order to restore "market confidence." This process is called "market discipline," but is more accurately, "financial terrorism" or "market warfare," with the term "market" referring specifically to the "super-entity." Whatever you call it, market discipline is ultimately a euphemism for class war.[5]

The Global Supra-Government and the "Free Market"

In December of 2011, Roger Altman, the former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton administration wrote an article for the Financial Times in which he explained that financial markets were "acting like a global supra-government," noting:

They oust entrenched regimes where normal political processes could not do so. They force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes. Their influence dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Indeed, leaving aside unusable nuclear weapons, they have become the most powerful force on earth.[6]

Altman continued, explaining that when the power of this "global supra-government" is flexed, "the immediate impact on society can be painful — wider unemployment, for example, frequently results and governments fail." But of course, being a former top Treasury Department official, he went on to endorse the global supra-government, writing, "the longer-term effects can be often transformative and positive." Ominously, Altman concluded: "Whether this power is healthy or not is beside the point. It is permanent," and "there is no stopping the new policing role of the financial markets."[7] In other words, the 'super-entity' global 'supra-government' of financial markets carries out financial extortion, overthrows governments and impoverishes populations, but this is ultimately "positive" and "permanent," at least from the view of a former Treasury Department official. From the point of view of those who are being impoverished, the actual populations, "positive" is not necessarily the word that comes to mind.

In the age of globalization, money — or capital — flows easily across borders, with banks, hedge funds, and other financial institutions acting as the vanguards of a new international order of global governance. Where finance goes, corporations follow; where corporations venture, powerful states stand guard of their interests. Our global system is one of state-capitalism, where the state and corporate interests are interdependent and mutually beneficial, at least for those in power. Today, financial institutions — with banks at the helm — have reached unprecedented power and influence in state capitalist societies. The banks are bigger than ever before in history, guarded by an insurance policy that we call "too big to fail," which means that despite their criminal and reckless behaviour, the government will step in to bail them out, as it always has. Financial markets also include credit ratings agencies, which determine the supposed "credit-worthiness" of other banks, corporations, and entire nations. The lower the credit rating, the riskier the investment, and thus, the higher the interest is for that entity to borrow money. Countries that do not follow the dictates of the "financial market" are punished with lower credit ratings, higher interest, speculative attacks, and in the cases of Greece and Italy in November of 2011, their democratically-elected governments are simply removed and replaced with technocratic administrations made up of bankers and economists who then push through austerity and adjustment policies that impoverish and exploit their populations. In the age of the "super-entity" global "supra-government," there is no time to rattle around with the pesky process of formal liberal democracy; they mean business, and if your elected governments do not succumb to "market discipline," they will be removed and replaced in what — under any other circumstances — is referred to as a 'coup.'

Banks and financial institutions provide the liquidity — or funds — for what we call "free markets." Free markets in principle would allow for free competition between companies and countries, each producing their own comparative advantage — producing what they are best at — and trading with others in the international market, so that all parties rise in living standards and wealth together. The "free market" is, of course, pure mythology. In practice, what we call "free markets" are actually highly protectionist, regimented, regulated, and designed to undermine competition and enforce monopolization. The "free markets" serve this purpose for the benefit of large multinational corporations and banks.

When we use the term "free markets" we are generally referring to the "real" economy, legitimate and legal. When it comes to illegitimate markets, for example, the global drug trade, we do not tend to refer to them as "free markets" but rather, "illegal" and run by "cartels." Cartels, like corporations, are hierarchically organized totalitarian institutions, where decisions and power and exercised from the top-down, with essentially no input going from the bottom-up. Large multinational corporations, like large international cartels, seek to control their particular market throughout entire nations, regions, and beyond. Often, co-operation between corporations allow them to function in an oligopolistic manner, where the collectively dominate the entire market, carving it up between them. Major oil companies, agro-industrial firms, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, military contractors and water management corporations are well-known for these types of activities.

Cartels have often been known to engage in a similar practice, though typically they are more competitive with each other. When interests are threatened — which is defined as when a corporation or cartel is at risk of losing its total dominance of its market in a particular region — conflict arises, and often violently so, with the potential for coups, assassinations, terror campaigns, and war. This is when the state intervenes to protect the market for the cartel or corporate interests. Thus, a market like the global drug trade functions relatively similar to those of the "legitimate" economy, pharmaceuticals, energy, technology, etc. The illicit trade in drugs is as much a "free market" as is the trade in automobiles or oil. And of course, the money ends up in the same place: the global supra-government of "financial markets."

Banking Cartel or Drug Cartel… or What's the Difference?

In 2009, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that billions of dollars in drug money saved the major banks during the financial crisis, providing much-needed liquidity. Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime stated that drug money was "the only liquid investment capital" available to banks on the brink of collapse, with roughly $325 billion in drug money absorbed by the financial system. Without identifying specific countries or banks, Costa stated that, "Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."[8]

In 2010, Wachovia Bank (now owned by Wells Fargo) settled the largest action ever under the U.S. bank secrecy act, paying a fine of $50 million plus forfeiting $110 million of drug money, of which the bank laundered roughly $378.4 billion out of Mexico. The federal prosecutor in the case stated, "Wachovia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations.” The fine that the bank paid for laundering hundreds of billions of dollars in drug money was less than 2% of the bank’s 2009 profit, and on the same week of the settlement, Wells Fargo’s stock actually went up. The bank admitted in a statement of settlement that, “As early as 2004, Wachovia understood the risk” of holding such an account, but “despite these warnings, Wachovia remained in the business.” The leading investigator into the money laundering operations, Martin Woods, based out of London, had discovered that Wachovia had received roughly six or seven thousand subpoenas for information about its Mexican operation from the federal government, of which Woods commented: “An absurd number. So at what point does someone at the highest level not get the feeling that something is very, very wrong?” Woods had been hired by Wachovia’s London branch as a senior anti-money laundering officer in 2005, and when in 2007 an official investigation was opened into Wachovia’s Mexican operations, Woods was informed by the bank that he failed “to perform at an acceptable standard.” In other words, he was actually doing his job. In regards to the settlement, Woods stated:

The regulatory authorities do not have to spend any more time on it, and they don't have to push it as far as a criminal trial. They just issue criminal proceedings, and settle. The law enforcement people do what they are supposed to do, but what's the point? All those people dealing with all that money from drug-trafficking and murder, and no one goes to jail?[9]

As the former UN Office of Drugs and Crime czar Antonio Maria Costa said, "The connection between organized crime and financial institutions started in the late 1970s, early 1980s… when the mafia became globalized," just like other major markets. Martin Woods added that, "These are the proceeds of murder and misery in Mexico, and of drugs sold around the world," yet no one went to jail, asking, "What does the settlement do to fight the cartels? Nothing — it doesn't make the job of law enforcement easier and it encourages the cartels and anyone who wants to make money by laundering their blood dollars. Where’s the risk? There is none." He added: "Is it in the interest of the American people to encourage both the drug cartels and the banks in this way? Is it in the interest of the Mexican people? It's simple: if you don't see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 30,000 people killed in Mexico, you're missing the point." Woods, who now runs his own consultancy, told the Observer in 2011 that, "New York and London… have become the world's two biggest laundries of criminal and drug money, and offshore tax havens. Not the Cayman Islands, not the Isle of Man or Jersey. The big laundering is right through the City of London and Wall Street."[10]

Just as the "too big to fail" program acts as an insurance policy for the big banks to engage in constant criminal activity, taking ever-larger financial risks with the guarantee that they will be bailed out, the settlements and lack of criminal prosecutions for banks laundering drug money provides the incentive to continue laundering hundreds of billions in drug money, because so long as the fine is smaller than the profit accrued from such a practice, it comes down to a simple cost-benefit analysis: if the cost of laundering drug money is less than the benefit, continue with the policy. The same cost-benefit analysis goes for all forms of criminal activity by banks and corporations, whether bribery, fraud, or violating environmental, labour and other regulations. So long as the penalty is less than the profit, the problem continues.

An article in the Observer from July of 2012 referred to global banks as "the financial services wing of the drug cartels," noting that HSBC, Britain's biggest bank, had been called before the U.S. Senate to testify about laundering drug money from Mexican cartels, holding one "suspicious account" for four years on behalf of the largest drug cartel in the world, the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico.[11] In fact, a multi-year investigation into HSBC revealed that the bank was not only a major international drug money-laundering conduit, but also laundered money for clients with ties to terrorism. In July of 2012, as the Senate was publicly investigating HSBC, Antonio Maria Costa stated, "Today I cannot think of one bank in the world that has not been penetrated by mafia money." The global drug trade is estimated to be worth roughly $380 billion annually, with most of the money made in the consumer markets of North America and Europe. Using the example of the $35 billion per year cocaine market in the United States, only about 1.5% of these profits make their way to the coca-leaf producers (mostly poor peasants) in South America (who became the target of our bombing and chemical warfare campaigns in the "war on drugs"), while the international traffickers get roughly 13% of the profits, with the remaining 85% earned by the distributors in the U.S. HSBC was accused of laundering the profits of the distributors.[12]

The U.S. Senate report concluded that HSBC had exposed the U.S. financial system to "a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing," including billions in "proceeds from illegal drug sales in the United States." HSBC acknowledged, in an official statement, that, "in the past, we have sometimes failed to meet the standards that regulators and customers expect." Among those "standards" that HSBC "sometimes failed to meet," according to the Senate investigation, were financing provided to banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh which were tied to terrorist organizations, while the bank’s regulator failed to take a single enforcement action against HSBC.[13] Among the terrorist organizations which potentially received financial assistance from HSBC through Saudi banks was al-Qaeda. HSBC put aside $700 million to cover any potential fines for such activities, which is not uncommon for banks to do. Banks like ABN Amro, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Lloyds and ING had all reached major settlements for admitting to facilitating transactions and engaging in money laundering for clients in Cuba, Iran, Libya, Myanmar and Sudan.[14]

As executives from HSBC appeared in the U.S. Senate, the bank's head of compliance since 2002, David Bagley, resigned as he testified before the committee, commenting, "Despite the best efforts and intentions of many dedicated professionals, HSBC has fallen short of our own expectations and the expectations of our regulators."[15] As Ed Vulliamy reported in the Observer, in May of 2012, a poor black man named Edward Dorsey Sr. was convicted of peddling 5.5 grams of crack cocaine in Washington D.C. and was given 10 years in jail. Meanwhile, just across the river from where Dorsey had committed his crime, executives from HSBC admitted before the U.S. Senate that they laundered billions in drug money, just as Wachovia had admitted to the previous year, with no one going to prison.[16] The lesson from this is clear: if you are poor, black, and are caught with a couple grams of crack-cocaine, you can expect to go to prison for several years (or in this case, a decade); but if you are rich, white, own a bank, and are caught laundering billions of dollars (or hundreds of billions of dollars) in drug money, you will be fined (but not enough to make such practices unprofitable), and may have to resign. Too big to fail is simply another way of saying "too big to jail."

Of course, it's not fair to put all the blame for international drug money-laundering on the shoulders of HSBC and Wachovia, as Bloomberg reported, Mexican drug cartels also funneled money through the Bank of America and even the banking branch of American Express, Banco Santander, and Citigroup.[17] Even the FBI has accused Bank of America of laundering Mexican drug cartel funds.[18] But it's not just drug money that banks launder; all sorts of illicit funds are laundered through major banks, many of which have been fined or are now being investigated for their criminal activities, including JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, Credit Suisse, Lloyds, Barclays, ING, and the Royal Bank of Scotland, among others.[19] Another major Swiss bank, UBS, has been very consistent in committing fraud and engaging in various conspiracies, a great deal of which was committed against Americans, though the bank was given "conditional immunity" from the U.S. Department of Justice.[20]

Financial Fraud and the 'Get Out of Jail Free Card'

The major banks of the world have been caught in conspiracies of ripping off small towns and cities across the United States, which allowed banks like JPMorgan Chase, GE Capital, UBS, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, Bear Stearns, and others, to steal billions of dollars from schools, hospitals, libraries, and nursing homes from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to a court settlement on the issue. The theft was done through the manipulation of the public bidding process, something that the Mafia has become experts in with regards to garbage and construction industry contracts. In short, the banking system actually functions like a Mafia cartel system, not to mention, taking money from the Mafia and cartels themselves.[21] Banks like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs engaged in bribery, fraud, and conspiracies which resulted in the bankruptcy of counties all across the United States.[22] Still, they continue to be 'respected' by the political class which refuses to punish them for their criminal activity, and instead, rewards them with bailouts and follows their instructions for policy.

Over the summer of 2012, another major banking scandal hit the headlines, regarding the manipulation of the London inter-bank lending rate known as the Libor. The Libor rate, explained the Economist, "determines the prices that people and corporations around the world pay for loans or receive for their savings," as it is used as a benchmark for establishing payments on an $800 trillion derivatives market, covering everything from interest rate derivatives to mortgages. Essentially, the Libor is the interest rate at which banks lend to each other on the short term, and is established through an "honour system" of where 18 major banks report their daily rates, from which an average is calculated. That average becomes the Libor rate, and reverberates throughout the entire global economy, setting a benchmark for a massive amount of transactions in the global derivatives market. Whereas the derivatives market is a massive casino of unregulated speculation, the Libor scandal revealed the cartel that owns the casino.

The scandal began with Barclays, a 300-year old bank in Britain, revealing that several employees had been involved in rigging the Libor to suit their own needs. More banks quickly became implemented, and countries all over the world began opening investigations into this scandal and the role their own banks may have played in it. By early July, as many as 20 major banks were named in various investigations or lawsuits related to the rigging of the Libor.[23]

Among the major global banks which are being investigated by U.S. prosecutors are Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, UBS, Bank of America, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Credit Suisse, Lloyds Banking Group, Rabobank, Royal Bank of Canada, Société Générale, and others. Prosecutors in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Japan were investigating collusion between the major banks on the manipulation of the Libor. In June of 2012, Barclays paid a fine to US and UK authorities, admitting its culpability in the rigging with a $450 million settlement.[24] With information and documents pouring out, implicating further banks and institutions in the scandal, a general consensus was emerging that the Libor had been manipulated since at least 2005, though, as one former Morgan Stanley trader wrote in the Financial Times, the rigging had began as early as 1991, if not before. The British Banker’s Association was responsible for setting the Libor rate by polling roughly 18 major banks on their highest and lowest rates daily. Thus, rigging by one bank would require the co-operating of at least nine other banks in purposely manipulating their rates in order to have any effect upon the Libor. Douglas Keenan, the former Morgan Stanley trader, wrote that, "it seems the misreporting of Libor rates may have been common practice since at least 1991."[25]

Rolf Majcen, the head of a hedge fund called FTC Capital told Der Spiegel that, "the Libor manipulation is presumably the biggest financial scandal ever." As regulators were using words like "organized fraud" and "banksters" to describe the growing scandal, it was becoming common to refer to the major banks as functioning like a "cartel" or "mafia."[26] The CEO of Barclays, Bob Diamond, resigned in disgrace, as did Marcus Agius, the Chairman of Barclays (who also serves as a director on the board of BBC, and is married into the Rothschild banking dynasty). The "cartel" manipulated the Libor for a great number of reasons, among them, to appear to be in better health by rigging their credit ratings upwards.[27] The Business Insider referred to the Libor rigging as a "criminal conspiracy" from the start, essentially designed to promote manipulation as the Libor was determined by an "honor system" for banks to properly report their rates.[28] Imagine giving a pile of credit cards to a group of credit card fraud convicts and establishing an "honour system." Could one truly be surprised if it didn't work out? Well, the Libor scandal is effectively based upon the same logic, except that the repercussions are global in scope.

Traders at the Royal Bank of Scotland referenced, in internal emails, to their participation in operating a "cartel" that made "amazing" amounts of money through the manipulation of interest rates, with a former senior trader at RBS writing that managers at the bank had "condoned collusion." The same trader, who was later hung out to dry by RBS as a scapegoat, wrote in an email to a trader at Deutsche Bank that, "It is a cartel now in London," where the Libor is established.[29]

The cartel, however, did not simply include the major banks, but also required the cooperation or at least negligence of regulators and central banks. Documents released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England show correspondence between then-President of the NY Fed Timothy Geithner (who is now Obama's Treasury Secretary) and Bank of England Governor Mervyn King discussing how Barclays was manipulating the Libor rates during the 2008 financial crisis. While the NY Fed corresponded with both the Bank of England and Barclays itself on the acknowledgment of interest rate manipulation, it never told the bank to stop the rigging practice. An official at Barclays even informed the NYFed in 2008 that the bank was under-reporting the rate at which it could borrow from other banks so that Barclays could "avoid the stigma" of appearing to be weaker than its peers, adding that "other participating banks were also under-reporting their Libor submissions."[30]

A Barclays employee told the New York Fed in an April 2008 phone call that, "We know that we're not posting um, an honest Libor… and yet we are doing it, because, um, if we didn't do it, it draws, um, unwanted attention on ourselves." The New York Fed official replied: "You have to accept it… I understand. Despite it's against what you would like to do. I understand completely." Several months later, a Barclays employee told a New York Fed official that the Libor rates were still "absolute rubbish."[31]

While the New York Fed expressed sympathy for the poor and helpless global banks need to engage in fraud and interest rate manipulation in order to lie and appear to be healthier than it was, the Bank of England went a step further, when Paul Tucker, the head of markets at the BoE wrote a note to Barclays CEO Bob Diamond in 2008 suggesting that Barclays lower its Libor rate, thus encouraging the rigging itself, instead of just expressing sympathy for the "need" to commit fraud.[32]

The main British banking lobby group, the British Banker's Association (BBA), which was responsible for overseeing the Libor rate process (no conflict of interest there, right?), was, in late September of 2012, stripped of its right to oversee the Libor, to be replaced with a formal regulator. The BBA's "oversight" of Libor dates back to 1984, when the City of London (Britain's Wall Street) had begun an experiment to establish a new way of setting interest rates, asking the banking lobby group to set the rate in 1986 when the Libor began.[33] The BBA's Foreign Exchange and Money Markets Committee is responsible for setting the Libor, and they meet every two months to review the process in secret without any minutes being published, and even the membership of the Committee is kept a secret. Spokespersons at Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS refused to comment on whether they had any representatives on the committee, while Barclays, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Bank of America and Citigroup didn’t even respond to emailed inquiries about their involvement with the committee, as Bloomberg reported. A British regulator, in the understatement of the century, stated, "There is an apparent lack of transparency," adding that the BBA's committee "doesn't appear to be sufficiently open and transparent to provide the necessary degree of accountability to firms and markets with a direct interest in being assured of the integrity of Libor."[34] When the fox guards the henhouse, it takes a great deal of stupidity to be "surprised" when some hens go missing.

In an April 2008 meeting with officials at the Bank of England, Angela Knight, the head of the British Banker's Association, suggested that the BBA perhaps should no longer be responsible for oversight of "the world's most important number," which had become too big for the BBA to manage. No one at the meeting cared enough to do anything about it, however, and so nothing changed.[35] Where was the incentive to change the system, after all? Yes, massive fraud was taking place, and this was well understood by the banks committing it, as well as the regulators and central banks overseeing it. But on the plus side, everyone was getting away with it. So indeed, there was no incentive to change the system. From the point of view of those managing it, the Libor was functioning as it should. A cartel was established because a cartel was desired. The fact that it was all highly illegal, fraudulent, and immoral was — and is — beside the point. Mexican drug cartels do not worry about the legality of their operations because they are, by definition, illegal. They worry simply about getting away with their illegal operations. The same can be said for the global banking cartel. So long as they get away with criminal cartel operations, there is no incentive to change the system, and instead, there is only an incentive to expand and further entrench the cartel's operations.

Canada's antitrust regulator began an investigation into the "international cartel" of banks rigging the Libor, focusing on the role played by banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Royal bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Citigroup, among others. A law professor at the University of Toronto who was hired by the regulator to study the case commented that, "international cartels are of a significant concern for the Canadian economy."[36] We have truly reached an impressive circumstance when the actual regulators of the banks refer to the banking system as an "international cartel."

A lawsuit was being filed by several homeowners in the U.S. who were attempting to sue some of the world’s largest banks for fraud, as the Libor manipulation sparked increases on their mortgages, resulting in illegal profits for banks. The class action lawsuit filed in New York in October of 2012 accused banks such as Bank of America, Citigroup, Barclays, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and others of fraud over a period of ten years.[37] For U.S. states and municipalities that bought interest-rate swaps before the financial crisis, the Libor rigging was poised to more than double their losses. Banks had sold roughly $500 billion of interest-rate swaps (in the derivatives market) to municipalities before the financial crisis, with roughly $200 billion of those swaps tied to the Libor. As one legal expert who studies derivatives told Bloomberg, "Almost all interest-rate swaps begin with Libor." This prompted several states in the U.S. to begin their own investigations into how the Libor-rigging may have negatively affected them.[38]

Punishing the World’s Population into Poverty: Life Under the Global Cartel

While the global cartel of criminal banks rig rates, launder drug money, fund terrorists, engage in bribery, fraud, and demand multi-trillion dollar bailouts from our governments (effectively selling their bad debts to the public), and then give themselves massive bonuses, they are also demanding — through what is called "market discipline" — that our governments deal with our debts by undertaking policies of "austerity" and "structural reform," which are euphemisms for impoverishment and exploitation. Thus, after the cartel helped create a massive financial crisis, and after our governments rewarded them for their criminal activity, the cartel now demands that our governments punish their populations into poverty and open their economies, resources and labour up for cheap and easy exploitation by banks and multinational corporations. This is referred to as the "solution" for getting out of the 'Great Recession,' and which is sure to great a Great Depression. Greece is now two and a half years into its "austerity" and "adjustment" reforms, with its debt growing as a result, poverty exploding, misery spreading, health, education, welfare rapidly declining, suicide rates and hunger increasing, as the Greek people are subjected to a program of "social genocide." Market discipline demands austerity and adjustment, or in other words, class warfare creates poverty and exploitation.[39]

Countries that refuse to implement programs of austerity and adjustment are subjected to financial terrorism by the "international cartel," as financial markets engage in "market discipline" by using the derivatives market to speculate against that particular country's ability to pay its interest or debt, thus making its credit ratings decrease and borrowing rates increase, plunging the country into a deeper crisis. In any other scenario, this is called terrorism or in the very least, extortion: do what I say or I will punish you and destroy you. This is what former U.S. Treasury official Roger Altman referred to in the Financial Times as the new "global supra-government" who can "force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes," and thus, "have become the most powerful force on earth."[40] Countries, regional, and international organizations all bow down to the dictates of the "international cartel” of the "global supra-government," and so countries like Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy, and Portugal, organizations like the European Union, European Central Bank, powerful states like Germany, France, Britain, and the U.S., and other international organizations like the IMF, Bank for International Settlements, and the OECD all demand and implement austerity measures and structural "reforms." Either they follow the orders of the "cartel" — which we commonly refer to as the "invisible hand" of the "free market" — or they directly challenge "the most powerful force on earth." In the global economy, a small country like Greece standing up to the "global supra-government" is much like a small Greek restaurant trying to stand up to the city Mafia.

In the U.S., states that were defrauded in the billions of dollars by the cartel, and took on major debts as a result, are now the harbingers of austerity in America. Beginning in 2010, roughly 20 states across the U.S. began implementing austerity measures, and have been doing much worse economically as a result (the predicted effect of austerity). Even the institutions which are the most militant in demanding austerity measures, such as the European Union and the IMF, have acknowledged in recent reports that countries which pursue austerity to supposedly reduce their debts end up getting much larger debts as a result, and that such measures are actually extremely damaging to economies. This is not news, of course, since there is a rather large sample of data from the past 30 years of forced austerity and adjustment measures across Africa, Asia, and Latin America (at the behest of the IMF, World Bank, western governments, and of course, the "cartel"), which show quite clearly the effect that austerity and adjustment have in rapidly expanding poverty and facilitating exploitation. As austerity is hitting several U.S. states, jobs are lost and poverty increases with debt, standards of living decline and the recession deepens into a depression. The population is essentially punished for the crimes of the global cartel, while public employees, pensioners, welfare recipients, teachers and workers get the blame.[41]

In late October of 2012, the CEOs of 80 major corporations and banks in the United States banded together (as any well functioning cartel does) in order to pressure Congress, regardless of who the next President is, to pursue an agenda of harsh austerity measures and structural reforms. In a statement to Congress signed by the 80 CEOs, the American branch of the global cartel (its most significant branch), demanded that policies be enacted immediately, though implemented gradually, "to give Americans time to prepare for the changes in the federal budget." Among the demands are to reform Medicare and Medicaid, healthcare, Social Security, increase taxes, and generally reduce spending. All of this amounts to a large federal program of austerity, to cut social spending and increase taxes on the population, thus impoverishing the population. This, in the words of the letter to Congress, "must be bipartisan and reforms to all areas of the budget should be included."[42] Among the signatories to the letter were the CEOs of AT&T, Bank of America, BlackRock, Boeing, Caterpillar, Dow Chemical Company, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Time Warner, and Verizon, among many others.[43]

This followed roughly one week after a group of 15 major global bank CEOs sent a letter to President Obama and the U.S. Congress lecturing the U.S. political class on "moral authority," giving their formal orders to the U.S. political establishment, that regardless of Democratic or Republican administrations, they are losing patience with the democratic apparatus of the state, and warned: "The solvency, productive capacity, and stability of the United States, as well as its moral authority as a global leader, require that its fiscal challenges be credibly met." Among the signatories to the letter were the CEOs of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. The Wall Street Journal, reporting on this letter, commented that even for "a dying democracy, it's embarrassing enough to see bankers telling our government what to do," but in this letter, "we even see foreign bankers telling our government what to do," as other CEOs of the global cartel signed the letter, from banks such as UBS, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank. The "consequences of inaction" on the U.S. debt, read the letter, "would be very grave." In other words, the U.S. political class has received a threat from the global cartel that it is now time to implement austerity and adjustment measures, or to face the consequences of financial terrorism.[44]

Hiding the Loot: The Offshore Economy in the Age of the Global Plutonomy

While people are being forced into poverty to pay off the bad debts of the "super-entity" global banking cartel of drug-money laundering banks which make up the "global supra-government," the richest people in the world have been hiding their wealth in offshore tax havens, and of course, with the help of those same banks. James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey, a major global consultancy, published a major report on tax havens in July of 2012 for the Tax Justice Network, compiling data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the IMF and other private sector entities which revealed that the world’s superrich have hidden between $21 and $32 trillion offshore to avoid taxation. Henry stated: "This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and — most importantly — to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of 'source' countries." John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network commented that, "Inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people… This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich." Roughly 92,000 of the super-rich, globally, hold at least $10 trillion in offshore wealth. In many cases, the worth of these offshore assets far exceeds the debts of the countries that they flow from, the same debts that are used to keep these countries and their populations in poverty and a constant state of exploitation.[45]

The estimated total of hidden offshore wealth amounts to more than the combined GDP of the United States and Japan, hidden in secretive financial jurisdictions like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. The process of hiding this wealth is largely facilitated by the major global banks, which compete with one another to attract the assets of the world's super-rich. James Henry explained that the wealth of the world's super-rich is "protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy;" more of that "free market" magic. The top ten banks in the world, which include UBS and Credit Suisse (based in Switzerland) as well as Goldman Sachs in the United States, collectively managed roughly $6.4 trillion in offshore accounts for 2010 alone. As the report revealed, "for many developing countries the cumulative value of the capital that has flowed out of their economies since the 1970s would be more than enough to pay off their debts to the rest of the world," debts which are largely illegitimate as it stands. This trend is exacerbated in the oil-rich states of the world such as Nigeria, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. The report stated: "The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments." With roughly half of the world's offshore wealth belonging to the top 92,000 richest individuals, they represent the top 0.001%, a far more extreme global disparity than that which is invoked by the Occupy movement's 1% paradigm. Henry commented: "The very existence of the global offshore industry, and the tax-free status of the enormous sums invested by their wealthy clients, is predicated on secrecy."[46] Remember, "free market" means that those who own the market (the global cartel), and free to do anything they please.

A 2005 report from Citigroup coined the term "plutonomy," to describe countries "where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few," and specifically identified the U.K., Canada, Australia, and the United States as four plutonomies. Keeping in mind that the report was published three years before the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, the Citigroup report stated: "Asset booms, a rising profit share and favourable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and become a greater share of the economy in the plutonomy countries," and that, "the rich are in great shape, financially."[47] It's only everyone else that is suffering, which by definition, is a "well functioning" economy. As the Federal Reserve reported, "the nation's top 1% of households own more than half the nation's stocks," and "they also control more than $16 trillion in wealth — more than the bottom 90%." The term 'Plutonomy' is specifically used to "describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality," and that they have three basic characteristics, according to the Citigroup report:

1. They are all created by "disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist friendly cooperative governments, immigrants…the rule of law and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity exploited best by the rich and educated of the time."

2. There is no "average" consumer in Plutonomies. There is only the rich "and everyone else." The rich account for a disproportionate chunk of the economy, while the non-rich account for "surprisingly small bites of the national pie." [Citigroup strategist Ajay] Kapur estimates that in 2005, the richest 20% may have been responsible for 60% of total spending.

3. Plutonomies are likely to grow in the future, fed by capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity and globalization.[48]

Kapur, who authored the Citigroup report, stated that there were also risks to the Plutonomy, "including war, inflation, financial crises, the end of the technological revolution and populist political pressure," yet, "the rich are likely to keep getting even richer, and enjoy an even greater share of the wealth pie over the coming years."[49]

In February of 2011, Ajay Kapur, the author of the Citigroup report who is now with Deutsche Bank, gave an interview in which he explained that, "the world economy is even more dependent on the spending and consumption of the rich," and that, "Plutonomist consumption is almost 10 times as volatile that of the average consumer." He further explained that increased debt levels are a sign of plutonomies:

We have an economy today where a large fraction of the population doesn't pay federal income taxes and, because of demand for entitlements, we have a system of massive representation without taxation. On the other hand, you have plutonomists who protect their turf and the taxation amounts are not enough to pay for everyone's demand. So I've come to the conclusion that budget deficits are biased toward getting bigger and bigger. Budget deficits are going to become a manifestation of a plutonomy.[50]

The plutonomy is largely characterized by a lack of a consuming and vibrant middle class. This is a trend that has been accelerating for several decades, particularly in North America and Britain, where the middle class population is heavily indebted. The middle class has existed as a consumer class, keeping the lower class submissive, and keeping the upper class secure and wealthy by consuming their products, produced with the labour of the lower class.

The most advanced plutonomies in the world are the most advanced industrial and technological nations, where the major corporations and banks are highly subsidized and protected by the state, as is typical for a state-capitalist society. While the industrial and rich northern state-capitalist societies were able to industrialize and grow rich through highly protectionist measures, the poor south of the world (Africa, Asia, Latin America) were subjected to "free market" policies which opened up their economies to be exploited and plundered by the rich northern nations. No country has ever become an industrial power by implementing free market policies, but rather, by doing the exact opposite: heavy subsidies and state protection for key industries, technologies, and corporate entities.

While the 'Third World' was forced to implement "free market" policies in order to get loans, the predictable result took place: mass impoverishment and exploitation. The 'Third World' states were run by tiny elites who dominated the countries politically and economically, and who hid their stolen wealth in foreign banks and offshore tax havens. Now, in the midst of the global economic crisis which has been ravaging the world for the past four years, the rich northern countries are themselves implementing the same "free market" policies, though designed to subject their populations to "market discipline" while maintaining — and in fact increasing — the protectionist and subsidized policies for the multinational corporations and banks. It is important to note that "market discipline" and actual "free market" policies are exclusively designed for the general population, not the elite. Workers, students, the elderly, the poor and the many are to be subjected to "market discipline" while the banks and multinational corporations continue to be heavily subsidized (as the largest national welfare recipients) and protected by the state. Thus, just as our banks and corporations have plundered the Third World with rapacious delight over the past three decades, now they will be able to do the same to the populations of the rich nations themselves. The state will transform, as it did in the 'Third World', into a typically totalitarian institution which is responsible for protecting the super-rich and controlling, oppressing, or, in extreme cases of resistance, eliminating the 'problem populations' (i.e., the people).

Welcome to the global plutonomy in the age of austerity, the result of living under — and tolerating — a global "super-entity" corporate-financial cartel. Truly, one must pause and, if only for a moment, appreciate the ability of this global cartel to function so effectively in spite of its blatant criminal activities, and face almost absolutely no repercussions. Something truly is wrong with a society when a poor black man caught with 5 grams of crack-cocaine goes to prison for ten years, while rich white bank executives admit to laundering billions of dollars in drug money and receive only a fine and a slap on the wrist (maybe).

The lesson is clear: if you are a thief, steal by the billions or trillions, and then no one can do anything about it. If you are in the drug trade: handle only billions (or hundreds of billions) in drug money, and then you will get away with it. If you don't want to pay taxes, be a member of the top 0.001% of the world's super-rich and hide your billions in offshore tax-free accounts. If you want more, create a global economic crisis, demand to be saved by the state to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars, and then, tell the state to punish their populations into poverty in order to pay for your mistakes.

In other words, if you want to indulge your criminal fantasies, lie and steal, profit from death and drugs, dominate and demand, be king and command, become the highly-functioning socially-acceptable sociopath you always knew you could be… think big. Think BANK. Serial killers, bank robbers and drug dealers go to jail; bankers get bailouts and get an unlimited insurance policy called "too big to fail."

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada, writing on a number of social, political, economic, and historical issues. He is also Project Manager of The People's Book Project. He also hosts a weekly podcast show, "Empire, Power, and People" on BoilingFrogsPost.com.

Notes

[1]       Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie, "Revealed — the capitalist network that runs the world," New Scientist, 24 October 2011:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

[2]       Ibid.

[3]       Ibid.

[4]       David J. Lynch, "Banks Seen Dangerous Defying Obama's Too-Big-to-Fail Move," Bloomberg, 16 April 2012:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-16/obama-bid-to-end-too-big-to-fail-undercut-as-banks-grow.html

[5]       Dean Baker, "The eurozone crisis is not about market discipline," Al-Jazeera, 18 December 2011:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011121874651469307.html

[6]       Roger Altman, "We need not fret over omnipotent markets," The Financial Times, 1 December 2011:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/890161ac-1b69-11e1-85f8-00144feabdc0.html

[7]       Ibid.

[8]       Rajeev Syal, "Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor," The Observer, 13 December 2009:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims

[9]       Ed Vulliamy, "How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs," The Observer, 3 April 2011:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs

[10]     Ibid.

[11]     Ed Vulliamy, "Global banks are the financial services wing of the drug cartels," The Observer, 21 July 2012:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/21/drug-cartels-banks-hsbc-money-laundering

[12]     John Paul Rathbone, "Money laundering: Taken to the cleaners," The Financial Times, 20 July 2012:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/702a64a6-d25e-11e1-ac21-00144feabdc0.html

[13]     Agustino Fontevecchia, "HSBC Helped Terrorists, Iran, Mexican Drug Cartels Launder Money, Senate Report Says," Forbes, 16 July 2012:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-helped-terrorists-iran-mexican-drug-cartels-launder-money-senate-report-says

[14]     Roberto Saviano, "Where the Mob Keeps its Money," The New York Times, 25 August 2012:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/where-the-mob-keeps-its-money.html

[15]     Dominic Rushe, "HSBC 'sorry' for aiding Mexican drugs lords, rogue states and terrorists," The Guardian, 17 July 2012:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/17/hsbc-executive-resigns-senate

[16]     Ed Vulliamy, "Global banks are the financial services wing of the drug cartels," The Observer, 21 July 2012:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/21/drug-cartels-banks-hsbc-money-laundering

[17]     Michael Smith, "Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal," Bloomberg, 29 June 2010:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/banks-financing-mexico-s-drug-cartels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal.html

[18]     Alexander Eichler, "Mexican Drug Cartel Laundered Money Through BofA, FBI Alleges," The Huffington Post, 9 June 2012:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/09/los-zetas-laundered-money-bank-america_n_1658943.html

[19]     Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Edward Wyatt, "In Laundering Case, a Lax Banking Law Obscured Money Flow," The New York Times, 8 August 2012:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/business/how-a-lax-banking-law-obscured-money-flow.html;

Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess, "Money-Laundering Inquiry Is Said to Aim at U.S. Banks," The New York Times, 14 September 2012:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/business/money-laundering-inquiry-said-to-target-us-banks.html

[20]     James B. Stewart, "For UBS, a Record of Averting Prosecution," The New York Times, 20 July 2012:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/business/ubss-track-record-of-averting-prosecution-common-sense.html

[21]     Matt Taibbi, "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia," Rolling Stone, 21 June 2012:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620

[22]     William D. Cohan, "How Wall Street Scams Counties Into Bankruptcy," Bloomberg, 1 July 2012:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-01/how-wall-street-scams-counties-into-bankruptcy.html

[23]     "The Libor Scandal: The Rotten Heart of Finance," The Economist, 7 July 2012:

http://www.economist.com/node/21558281

[24]     Shahien Nasiripour, "Nine more banks added to Libor probe," The Financial Times, 26 October 2012:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6f4e7960-1f1a-11e2-be82-00144feabdc0.html

[25]     Douglas Keenan, "My thwarted attempt to tell of Libor shenanigans," The Financial Times, 26 July 2012:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/dc5f49c2-d67b-11e1-ba60-00144feabdc0.html

[26]     "The Cartel: Behind the Scenes in the Libor Interest Rate Scandal," Der Spiegel, 1 August 2012:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/the-libor-scandal-could-cost-leading-global-banks-billions-a-847453.html

[27]     Matt Taibbi, "Why is Nobody Freaking Out About the LIBOR Banking Scandal?" Rolling Stone, 3 July 2012:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-is-nobody-freaking-out-about-the-libor-banking-scandal-20120703

[28]     Raúl Ilargi Meijer, "LIBOR Was A Criminal Conspiracy From The Start," Business Insider, 11 July 2012:

http://www.businessinsider.com/libor-was-a-criminal-conspiracy-from-the-start-2012-7

[29]     Steven Swinford and Harry Wilson, "RBS traders boasted of Libor 'cartel'," The Telegraph, 26 September 2012:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9568087/RBS-traders-boasted-of-Libor-cartel.html

[30]     Jill Treanor and Dominic Rushe, "Timothy Geithner and Mervyn King discussed Libor worries in 2008," The Guardian, 13 July 2012:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/13/tim-geithner-mervyn-king-libor

[31]     Mark Gongloff, "New York Fed's Libor Documents Reveal Cozy Relationship Between Regulators, Banks," The Huffington Post, 13 July 2012:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/13/new-york-fed-libor-documents_n_1671524.html

[32]     Chris Giles, "Libor scandal puts BoE in line of fire," The Financial Times, 17 July 2012:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/68605a86-d02a-11e1-bcaa-00144feabdc0.html

[33]     Jill Treanor, "British Bankers' Association to be stripped of Libor rate-setting role," The Guardian, 25 September 2012:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/sep/25/bba-libor-setting-role-stripped-banks

[34]     Liam Vaughan, "Secret Libor Committee Clings to Anonymity Following Scandal," Bloomberg, 21 August 2012:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-20/secret-libor-committee-clings-to-anonymity-after-rigging-scandal.html

[35]     David Enrich and Max Colchester, "Before Scandal, Clash Over Control of Libor," The Wall Street Journal, 11 September 2012:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443847404577631404235329424.html

[36]     Andrew Mayeda, "Canada Regulator Says Has Power to Probe Libor 'Cartel'," Bloomberg, 22 June 2012:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-22/canada-regulator-says-has-power-to-probe-libor-cartel-.html

[37]     Halah Touryalai, "Banks Rigged Libor To Inflate Adjustable-Rate Mortgages: Lawsuit," Forbes, 15 October 2012:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2012/10/15/banks-rigged-libor-to-inflate-adjustable-rate-mortgages-lawsuit

[38]     Darrell Preston, "Rigged Libor Hits States-Localities With $6 Billion: Muni Credit," Bloomberg, 9 October 2012:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-09/rigged-libor-hits-states-localities-with-6-billion-muni-credit.html

[39]     Andrew Gavin Marshall, "Austerity, Adjustment, and Social Genocide: Political Language and the European Debt Crisis," Andrewgavinmarshall.com, 24 July 2012:

http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2012/07/24/austerity-adjustment-and-social-genocide-political-language-and-the-european-debt-crisis

[40]     Roger Altman, "We need not fret over omnipotent markets," The Financial Times, 1 December 2011:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/890161ac-1b69-11e1-85f8-00144feabdc0.html

[41]     Ben Polak and Peter K. Schott, "America's Hidden Austerity Program," The New York Times, 11 June 2012:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/americas-hidden-austerity-program;

Jason Cherkis, "A Thousand Cuts: Austerity Measures Devastate Communities Around The World," The Huffington Post, 17 July 2012:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/12/austerity-measures-a-thousand-cuts_n_1666309.html;

Editorial, "The Austerity Trap," The New York Times, 23 October 2012:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/opinion/the-austerity-trap.html;

Derek Thompson, "American Austerity: Why the States Cutting Spending Are Doing Worse," The Atlantic, 21 June 2012:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/american-austerity-why-the-states-cutting-spending-are-doing-worse/258825

[42]     "CEOs Deficit Manifesto," The Wall Street Journal, 25 October 2012:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203937004578076254182569318.html

[43]     "Executives Who Signed the Fix the Debt Declaration," The Wall Street Journal, 25 October 2012:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203897404578077251928040508.html

[44]     Al Lewis, "Bankers Face the Abyss," The Wall Street Journal, 21 October 2012:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444734804578064840879262594.html

[45]     Heather Stewart, "Wealth doesn't trickle down — it just floods offshore, research reveals," The Observer, 21 July 2012:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/21/offshore-wealth-global-economy-tax-havens

[46]     Heather Stewart, "£13tn hoard hidden from taxman by global elite," The Observer, 21 July 2012:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/21/global-elite-tax-offshore-economy

[47]     We're living in a plutonomy, The Telegraph, 2 April 2006:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2935809/Were-living-in-a-plutonomy.html

[48]     Robert Frank, Plutonomics, The Wall Street Journal, 8 January 2007:

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2007/01/08/plutonomics

[49]     Ibid.

[50]     Gus Lubin, Deutsche Bank Says The 'Global Plutonomy' Is Stronger Than Ever, And That Means 10X More Volatility, Business Insider, 17 February 2011:

http://www.businessinsider.com/ajay-kapur-plutonomy-2011-2

Historic Documents

Freedom from Fear [Speech by Aung Sang Suu Kyi, 1990]

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. Most Burmese are familiar with the four a-gati, the four kinds of corruption. Chanda-gati, corruption induced by desire, is deviation from the right path in pursuit of bribes or for the sake of those one loves. Dosa-gati is taking the wrong path to spite those against whom one bears ill will, and moga-gati is aberration due to ignorance. But perhaps the worst of the four is bhaya-gati, for not only does bhaya, fear, stifle and slowly destroy all sense of right and wrong, it so often lies at the root of the other three kinds of corruption. Just as chanda-gati, when not the result of sheer avarice, can be caused by fear of want or fear of losing the goodwill of those one loves, so fear of being surpassed, humiliated or injured in some way can provide the impetus for ill will. And it would be difficult to dispel ignorance unless there is freedom to pursue the truth unfettered by fear. With so close a relationship between fear and corruption it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife corruption in all forms becomes deeply entrenched.

Public dissatisfaction with economic hardships has been seen as the chief cause of the movement for democracy in Burma, sparked off by the student demonstrations 1988. It is true that years of incoherent policies, inept official measures, burgeoning inflation and falling real income had turned the country into an economic shambles. But it was more than the difficulties of eking out a barely acceptable standard of living that had eroded the patience of a traditionally good-natured, quiescent people - it was also the humiliation of a way of life disfigured by corruption and fear.

The students were protesting not just against the death of their comrades but against the denial of their right to life by a totalitarian regime which deprived the present of meaningfulness and held out no hope for the future. And because the students' protests articulated the frustrations of the people at large, the demonstrations quickly grew into a nationwide movement. Some of its keenest supporters were businessmen who had developed the skills and the contacts necessary not only to survive but to prosper within the system. But their affluence offered them no genuine sense of security or fulfilment, and they could not but see that if they and their fellow citizens, regardless of economic status, were to achieve a worthwhile existence, an accountable administration was at least a necessary if not a sufficient condition. The people of Burma had wearied of a precarious state of passive apprehension where they were 'as water in the cupped hands' of the powers that be.

Emerald cool we may be

As water in cupped hands

But oh that we might be

As splinters of glass

In cupped hands.

Glass splinters, the smallest with its sharp, glinting power to defend itself against hands that try to crush, could be seen as a vivid symbol of the spark of courage that is an essential attribute of those who would free themselves from the grip of oppression. Bogyoke Aung San regarded himself as a revolutionary and searched tirelessly for answers to the problems that beset Burma during her times of trial. He exhorted the people to develop courage: 'Don't just depend on the courage and intrepidity of others. Each and every one of you must make sacrifices to become a hero possessed of courage and intrepidity. Then only shall we all be able to enjoy true freedom.'

The effort necessary to remain uncorrupted in an environment where fear is an integral part of everyday existence is not immediately apparent to those fortunate enough to live in states governed by the rule of law. Just laws do not merely prevent corruption by meting out impartial punishment to offenders. They also help to create a society in which people can fulfil the basic requirements necessary for the preservation of human dignity without recourse to corrupt practices. Where there are no such laws, the burden of upholding the principles of justice and common decency falls on the ordinary people. It is the cumulative effect on their sustained effort and steady endurance which will change a nation where reason and conscience are warped by fear into one where legal rules exist to promote man's desire for harmony and justice while restraining the less desirable destructive traits in his nature.

In an age when immense technological advances have created lethal weapons which could be, and are, used by the powefful and the unprincipled to dominate the weak and the helpless, there is a compelling need for a closer relationship between politics and ethics at both the national and international levels. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations proclaims that 'every individual and every organ of society' should strive to promote the basic rights and freedoms to which all human beings regardless of race, nationality or religion are entitled. But as long as there are governments whose authority is founded on coercion rather than on the mandate of the people, and interest groups which place short-term profits above long-term peace and prosperity, concerted international action to protect and promote human rights will remain at best a partially realized struggle. There will continue to be arenas of struggle where victims of oppression have to draw on their own inner resources to defend their inalienable rights as members of the human family.

The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution of the spirit, the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance and fear.

Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and to uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society. Among the basic freedoms to which men aspire that their lives might be full and uncramped, freedom from fear stands out as both a means and an end. A people who would build a nation in which strong, democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear.

Always one to practise what he preached, Aung San himself constantly demonstrated courage - not just the physical sort but the kind that enabled him to speak the truth, to stand by his word, to accept criticism, to admit his faults, to correct his mistakes, to respect the opposition, to parley with the enemy and to let people be the judge of his worthiness as a leader. It is for such moral courage that he will always be loved and respected in Burma - not merely as a warrior hero but as the inspiration and conscience of the nation. The words used by Jawaharlal Nehru to describe Mahatma Gandhi could well be applied to Aung San: 'The essence of his teaching was fearlessness and truth, and action allied to these, always keeping the welfare of the masses in view.'

Gandhi, that great apostle of non-violence, and Aung San, the founder of a national army, were very different personalities, but as there is an inevitable sameness about the challenges ofauthoritarian rule anywhere at any time, so there is a similarity in the intrinsic qualities of those who rise up to meet the challenge. Nehru, who considered the instillation of courage in the people of India one of Gandhi's greatest achievements, was a political modernist, but as he assessed the needs for a twentieth-century movement for independence, he found himself looking back to the philosophy of ancient India: 'The greatest gift for an individual or a nation . .. was abhaya, fearlessness, not merely bodily courage but absence of fear from the mind.'

Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be described as 'grace under pressure' - grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear ofdeath, fear oflosing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

The wellspring of courage and endurance in the face of unbridled power is generally a firm belief in the sanctity of ethical principles combined with a historical sense that despite all setbacks the condition of man is set on an ultimate course for both spiritual and material advancement. It is his capacity for self-improvement and self-redemption which most distinguishes man from the mere brute. At the root of human responsibility is the concept of perfection, the urge to achieve it, the intelligence to find a path towards it, and the will to follow that path if not to the end at least the distance needed to rise above individual limitations and environmental impediments. It is man's vision of a world fit for rational, civilized humanity which leads him to dare and to suffer to build societies free from want and fear. Concepts such as truth, justice and compassion cannot be dismissed as trite when these are often the only bulwarks which stand against ruthless power.

Lincoln suspends Habeas Corpus  

On Sept. 24, 1862, President Lincoln issued the following proclamation suspending the right to writs of habeas corpus nationwide.  

By The President of the United States of America:

A Proclamation

Whereas, it has become necessary to call into service not only volunteers but also portions of the militia of the States by draft in order to suppress the insurrection existing in the United States, and disloyal persons are not adequately restrained by the ordinary processes of law from hindering this measure and from giving aid and comfort in various ways to the insurrection;

Now, therefore, be it ordered, first, that during the existing insurrection and as a necessary measure for suppressing the same, all Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of United States, shall be subject to martial law and liable to trial and punishment by Courts Martial or Military Commission:

Second. That the Writ of Habeas Corpus is suspended in respect to all persons arrested, or who are now, or hereafter during the rebellion shall be, imprisoned in any fort, camp, arsenal, military prison, or other place of confinement by any military authority of by the sentence of any Court Martial or Military Commission.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington this twenty fourth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, and of the Independence of the United States the 87th.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

By the President:

WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.  

The Uses of Military Power [Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger on November 28, 1984 delivered before the National Press Club]

Thank you for inviting me to be here today with the members of the National Press Club, a group most important to our national security. I say that because a major point I intend to make in my remarks today is that the single most critical element of a successful democracy is a strong consensus of support and agreement for our basic purposes. Policies formed without a clear understanding of what we hope to achieve will never work. And you help to build that understanding among our citizens.

Of all the many policies our citizens deserve -- and need -- to understand, none is so important as those related to our topic today -- the uses of military power. Deterrence will work only if the Soviets understand our firm commitment to keeping the peace,... and only from a well-informed public can we expect to have that national will and commitment.

So today, I want to discuss with you perhaps the most important question concerning keeping the peace. Under what circumstances, and by what means, does a great democracy such as ours reach the painful decision that the use of military force is necessary to protect our interests or to carry out our national policy?

National power has many components, some tangible, like economic wealth, technical pre-eminence. Other components are intangible -- such as moral force, or strong national will. Military forces, when they are strong and ready and modern, are a credible -- and tangible -- addition to a nation's power. When both the intangible national will and those forces are forged into one instrument, national power becomes effective.

In today's world, the line between peace and war is less clearly drawn than at any time in our history. When George Washington, in his farewell address, warned us, as a new democracy, to avoid foreign entanglements, Europe then lay 2-3 months by sea over the horizon. The United States was protected by the width of the oceans. Now in this nuclear age, we measure time in minutes rather than months.

Aware of the consequences of any misstep, yet convinced of the precious worth of the freedom we enjoy, we seek to avoid conflict, while maintaining strong defenses. Our policy has always been to work hard for peace, but to be prepared if war comes. Yet, so blurred have the lines become between open conflict and half-hidden hostile acts that we cannot confidently predict where, or when, or how, or from what direction aggression may arrive. We must be prepared, at any moment, to meet threats ranging in intensity from isolated terrorist acts, to guerrilla action, to full-scale military confrontation.

Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, said that it is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies, or the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them. If it was true then, how much more true it is today, when we must remain ready to consider the means to meet such serious indirect challenges to the peace as proxy wars and individual terrorist action. And how much more important is it now, considering the consequences of failing to deter conflict at the lowest level possible. While the use of military force to defend territory has never been questioned when a democracy has been attacked and its very survival threatened, most democracies have rejected the unilateral aggressive use of force to invade, conquer or subjugate other nations. The extent to which the use of force is acceptable remains unresolved for the host of other situations which fall between these extremes of defensive and aggressive use of force.

We find ourselves, then, face to face with a modern paradox: the most likely challenge to the peace -- the gray area conflicts -- are precisely the most difficult challenges to which a democracy must respond. Yet, while the source and nature of today's challenges are uncertain, our response must be clear and understandable. Unless we are certain that force is essential, we run the risk of inadequate national will to apply the resources needed.

Because we face a spectrum of threats -- from covert aggression, terrorism, and subversion, to overt intimidation, to use of brute force -- choosing the appropriate level of our response is difficult. Flexible response does not mean just any response is appropriate. But once a decision to employ some degree of force has been made, and the purpose clarified, our government must have the clear mandate to carry out, and continue to carry out, that decision until the purpose has been achieved. That, too, has been difficult to accomplish.

The issue of which branch of government has authority to define that mandate and make decisions on using force is now being strongly contended. Beginning in the 1970s Congress demanded, and assumed, a far more active role in the making of foreign policy and in the decisionmaking process for the employment of military forces abroad than had been thought appropriate and practical before. As a result, the centrality of decision-making authority in the Executive branch has been compromised by the Legislative branch to an extent that actively interferes with that process. At the same time, there has not been a corresponding acceptance of responsibility by Congress for the outcome of decisions concerning the employment of military forces.

Yet the outcome of decisions on whether -- and when -- and to what degree -- to use combat forces abroad has never been more important than it is today. While we do not seek to deter or settle all the world's conflicts, we must recognize that, as a major power, our responsibilities and interests are now of such scope that there are few troubled areas we can afford to ignore. So we must be prepared to deal with a range of possibilities, a spectrum of crises, from local insurgency to global conflict. We prefer, of course, to limit any conflict in its early stages, to contain and control it -- but to do that our military forces must be deployed in a timely manner, and be fully supported and prepared before they are engaged, because many of those difficult decisions must be made extremely quickly.

Some on the national scene think they can always avoid making tough decisions. Some reject entirely the question of whether any force can ever be used abroad. They want to avoid grappling with a complex issue because, despite clever rhetoric disguising their purpose, these people are in fact advocating a return to post-World War I isolationism. While they may maintain in principle that military force has a role in foreign policy, they are never willing to name the circumstance or the place where it would apply.

On the other side, some theorists argue that military force can be brought to bear in any crisis. Some of these proponents of force are eager to advocate its use even in limited amounts simply because they believe that if there are American forces of any size present they will somehow solve the problem.

Neither of these two extremes offers us any lasting or satisfactory solutions. The first -- undue reserve -- would lead us ultimately to withdraw from international events that require free nations to defend their interests from the aggressive use of force. We would be abdicating our responsibilities as the leader of the free world -- responsibilities more or less thrust upon us in the aftermath of World War II -- a war incidentally that isolationism did nothing to deter. These are responsibilities we must fulfill unless we desire the Soviet Union to keep expanding its influence unchecked throughout the world. In an international system based on mutual interdependence among nations, and alliances between friends, stark isolationism quickly would lead to a far more dangerous situation for the United States: we would be without allies and faced by many hostile or indifferent nations.

The second alternative -- employing our forces almost indiscriminately and as a regular and customary part of our diplomatic efforts -- would surely plunge us headlong into the sort of domestic turmoil we experienced during the Vietnam war, without accomplishing the goal for which we committed our forces. Such policies might very well tear at the fabric of our society, endangering the single most critical element of a successful democracy: a strong consensus of support and agreement for our basic purposes.

Policies formed without a clear understanding of what we hope to achieve would also earn us the scorn of our troops, who would have an understandable opposition to being used -- in every sense of the word -- casually and without intent to support them fully. Ultimately this course would reduce their morale and their effectiveness for engagements we must win. And if the military were to distrust its civilian leadership, recruitment would fall off and I fear an end to the all-volunteer system would be upon us, requiring a return to a draft, sowing the seeds of riot and discontent that so wracked the country in the '60s.

We have now restored high morale and pride in the uniform throughout the services. The all-volunteer system is working spectacularly well. Are we willing to forfeit what we have fought so hard to regain?

In maintaining our progress in strengthening America's military deterrent, we face difficult challenges. For we have entered an era where the dividing lines between peace and war are less clearly drawn, the identity of the foe is much less clear. In World Wars I and II, we not only knew who our enemies were, but we shared a clear sense of why the principles espoused by our enemies were unworthy.

Since these two wars threatened our very survival as a free nation and the survival of our allies, they were total wars, involving every aspect of our society. All our means of production, all our resources were devoted to winning. Our policies had the unqualified support of the great majority of our people. Indeed, World Wars I and II ended with the unconditional surrender of our enemies.... The only acceptable ending when the alternative was the loss of our freedom.

But in the aftermath of the Second World War, we encountered a more subtle form of warfare -- warfare in which, more often than not, the face of the enemy was masked. Territorial expansionism could be carried out indirectly by proxy powers, using surrogate forces aided and advised from afar. Some conflicts occurred under the name of "national liberation," but far more frequently ideology or religion provided the spark to the tinder.

Our adversaries can also take advantage of our open society, and our freedom of speech and opinion to use alarming rhetoric and misinformation to divide and disrupt our unity of purpose. While they would never dare to allow such freedoms to their own people, they are quick to exploit ours by conducting simultaneous military and propaganda campaigns to achieve their ends.

They realize that if they can divide our national will at home, it will not be necessary to defeat our forces abroad. So by presenting issues in bellicose terms, they aim to intimidate western leaders and citizens, encouraging us to adopt conciliatory positions to their advantage. Meanwhile they remain sheltered from the force of public opinion in their countries, because public opinion there is simply prohibited and does not exist.

Our freedom presents both a challenge and an opportunity. It is true that until democratic nations have the support of the people, they are inevitably at a disadvantage in a conflict. But when they do have that support they cannot be defeated. For democracies have the power to send a compelling message to friend and foe alike by the vote of their citizens. And the American people have sent such a signal by re-electing a strong Chief Executive. They know that President Reagan is willing to accept the responsibility for his actions and is able to lead us through these complex times by insisting that we regain both our military and our economic strength.

In today's world where minutes count, such decisive leadership is more important than ever before. Regardless of whether conflicts are limited, or threats are ill-defined, we must be capable of quickly determining that the threats and conflicts either do or do not affect the vital interests of the United States and our allies. ... And then responding appropriately.

Those threats may not entail an immediate, direct attack on our territory, and our response may not necessarily require the immediate or direct defense of our homeland. But when our vital national interests and those of our allies are at stake, we cannot ignore our safety, or forsake our allies.

At the same time, recent history has proven that we cannot assume unilaterally the role of the world's defender. We have learned that there are limits to how much of our spirit and blood and treasure we can afford to forfeit in meeting our responsibility to keep peace and freedom. So while we may and should offer substantial amounts of economic and military assistance to our allies in their time of need, and help them maintain forces to deter attacks against them -- usually we cannot substitute our troops or our will for theirs.

We should only engage our troops if we must do so as a matter of our own vital national interest. We cannot assume for other sovereign nations the responsibility to defend their territory -- without their strong invitation -- when our freedom is not threatened.

On the other hand, there have been recent cases where the United States has seen the need to join forces with other nations to try to preserve the peace by helping with negotiations, and by separating warring parties, and thus enabling those warring nations to withdraw from hostilities safely. In the Middle East, which has been torn by conflict for millennia, we have sent our troops in recent years both to the Sinai and to Lebanon, for just such a peacekeeping mission. But we did not configure or equip those forces for combat -- they were armed only for their self-defense. Their mission required them to be -- and to be recognized as -- peacekeepers. We knew that if conditions deteriorated so they were in danger, or if because of the actions of the warring nations, their peace keeping mission could not be realized, then it would be necessary either to add sufficiently to the number and arms of our troops -- in short to equip them for combat,... or to withdraw them. And so in Lebanon, when we faced just such a choice, because the warring nations did not enter into withdrawal or peace agreements, the President properly withdrew forces equipped only for peacekeeping.

In those cases where our national interests require us to commit combat force we must never let there be doubt of our resolution. When it is necessary for our troops to be committed to combat, we must commit them, in sufficient numbers and we must support them, as effectively and resolutely as our strength permits. When we commit our troops to combat we must do so with the sole object of winning.

Once it is clear our troops are required, because our vital interests are at stake, then we must have the firm national resolve to commit every ounce of strength necessary to win the fight to achieve our objectives. In Grenada we did just that.

Just as clearly, there are other situations where United States combat forces should not be used. I believe the postwar period has taught us several lessons, and from them I have developed six major tests to be applied when we are weighing the use of U.S. combat forces abroad. Let me now share them with you:

(1) First, the United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies. That emphatically does not mean that we should declare beforehand, as we did with Korea in 1950, that a particular area is outside our strategic perimeter.

(2) Second, if we decide it is necessary to put combat troops into a given situation, we should do so wholeheartedly, and with the clear intention of winning. If we are unwilling to commit the forces or resources necessary to achieve our objectives, we should not commit them at all. Of course if the particular situation requires only limited force to win our objectives, then we should not hesitate to commit forces sized accordingly. When Hitler broke treaties and remilitarized the Rhineland, small combat forces then could perhaps have prevented the holocaust of World War II.

(3) Third, if we do decide to commit forces to combat overseas, we should have clearly defined political and military objectives. And we should know precisely how our forces can accomplish those clearly defined objectives. And we should have and send the forces needed to do just that. As Clausewitz wrote, "no one starts a war -- or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so -- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war, and how he intends to conduct it."

War may be different today than in Clausewitz's time, but the need for well-defined objectives and a consistent strategy is still essential. If we determine that a combat mission has become necessary for our vital national interests, then we must send forces capable to do the job -- and not assign a combat mission to a force configured for peacekeeping.

(4) Fourth, the relationship between our objectives and the forces we have committed -- their size, composition and disposition -- must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary. Conditions and objectives invariably change during the course of a conflict. When they do change, then so must our combat requirements. We must continuously keep as a beacon light before us the basic questions: "is this conflict in our national interest?" "Does our national interest require us to fight, to use force of arms?" If the answers are "yes", then we must win. If the answers are "no," then we should not be in combat.

(5) Fifth, before the U.S. commits combat forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress. This support cannot be achieved unless we are candid in making clear the threats we face; the support cannot be sustained without continuing and close consultation. We cannot fight a battle with the Congress at home while asking our troops to win a war overseas or, as in the case of Vietnam, in effect asking our troops not to win, but just to be there.

(6) Finally, the commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be a last resort.

I believe that these tests can be helpful in deciding whether or not we should commit our troops to combat in the months and years ahead. The point we must all keep uppermost in our minds is that if we ever decide to commit forces to combat, we must support those forces to the fullest extent of our national will for as long as it takes to win. So we must have in mind objectives that are clearly defined and understood and supported by the widest possible number of our citizens. And those objectives must be vital to our survival as a free nation and to the fulfillment of our responsibilities as a world power. We must also be farsighted enough to sense when immediate and strong reactions to apparently small events can prevent lion-like responses that may be required later. We must never forget those isolationists in Europe who shrugged that "Danzig is not worth a war," and "why should we fight to keep the Rhineland demilitarized?"

These tests I have just mentioned have been phrased negatively for a purpose -- they are intended to sound a note of caution -- caution that we must observe prior to committing forces to combat overseas. When we ask our military forces to risk their very lives in such situations, a note of caution is not only prudent, it is morally required.

In many situations we may apply these tests and conclude that a combatant role is not appropriate. Yet no one should interpret what I am saying here today as an abdication of America's responsibilities -- either to its own citizens or to its allies. Nor should these remarks be misread as a signal that this country, or this administration, is unwilling to commit forces to combat overseas.

We have demonstrated in the past that, when our vital interests or those of our allies are threatened, we are ready to use force, and use it decisively, to protect those interests. Let no one entertain any illusions -- if our vital interests are involved, we are prepared to fight. And we are resolved that if we must fight, we must win.

So, while these tests are drawn from lessons we have learned from the past, they also can -- and should -- be applied to the future. For example, the problems confronting us in Central America today are difficult. The possibility of more extensive Soviet and Soviet-proxy penetration into this hemisphere in months ahead is something we should recognize. If this happens we will clearly need more economic and military assistance and training to help those who want democracy.

The President will not allow our military forces to creep -- or be drawn gradually -- into a combat role in Central America or any other place in the world. And indeed our policy is designed to prevent the need for direct American involvement. This means we will need sustained Congressional support to back and give confidence to our friends in the region.

I believe that the tests I have enunciated here today can, if applied carefully, avoid the danger of this gradualist incremental approach which almost always means the use of insufficient force. These tests can help us to avoid being drawn inexorably into an endless morass, where it is not vital to our national interest to fight.

But policies and principles such as these require decisive leadership in both the Executive and Legislative branches of government -- and they also require strong and sustained public support. Most of all, these policies require national unity of purpose. I believe the United States now possesses the policies and leadership to gain that public support and unity. And I believe that the future will show we have the strength of character to protect peace with freedom.

In summary, we should all remember these are the policies -- indeed the only policies -- that can preserve for ourselves, our friends, and our posterity, peace with freedom.

I believe we can continue to deter the Soviet Union and other potential adversaries from pursuing their designs around the world. We can enable our friends in Central America to defeat aggression and gain the breathing room to nurture democratic reforms. We can meet the challenge posed by the unfolding complexity of the 1980's.

We will then be poised to begin the last decade of this century amid a peace tempered by realism, and secured by firmness and strength. And it will be a peace that will enable all of us -- ourselves -- at home, and our friends abroad -- to achieve a quality of life, both spiritually and materially, far higher than man has even dared to dream. 

ECONOMICS

The Right to an Income and the Right to Work [extract from Andre Gorz's Critique of Economic Reason (1989)]

The Right to an Income and The Right to Work 

When the production process demands less work and distributes less and less wages, it gradually becomes obvious that the right to an income can no longer be reserved for those who have a job; nor, most importantly, can the level of incomes be made to depend on the quantity of work furnished by each person. Hence the idea of guaranteeing an income to every citizen which is not linked to work, or the quantity of work done.

This idea haunts all the industrialized capitalist world of today. It has as many supporters on the Right as on the Left. To look only at recent history, it was (re)launched in the USA at the end of the 1950s by left Democrats and libertarians on the one hand and by neo-liberals (principally Milton Friedman) on the other. Since the end of the 1960s, several local experiments with a local basic income guarantee have been conducted in the USA. Richard Nixon tabled a bill to introduce a measure of this kind in 1972 and it was narrowly defeated. In the same year, George McGovern, the Democratic presidential candidate, included the guaranteed income in his programme. The object was to find a cure for poverty, which showed up more in the USA than elsewhere on account of the absence of a nationwide statutory social insurance system. The guaranteed income was meant as a substitute for such a scheme. European neo-liberals now dream of substituting such a basic income guarantee for the existing welfare-state institutions.

In Europe, discussion of an income dissociated from work revived in the early eighties. The Netherlands, Denmark and Great Britain had already implemented the idea. It was in the Federal Republic of Germany that the most sophisticated debate developed, after 1982, at the instigation of the Greens, who were soon joined in the debate by conservatives and social democrats. Everyone was agreed on the principle, formulated in these terms by Claus Offe: 'We must break with a development which has led the majority of the population to depend for their subsistence on the labour market.' The labour market, quite obviously, could no longer guarantee to everyone the possibility of earning their living. In other words, the right to an income could no longer be equated with the right to a wage. It was to be decided, however, whether the right to an income was also to be dissociated from the right to work (in the economic sense).

It was on this latter question that the Right/Left dichotomy gradually reappeared, at least in Germany. In France, where the guaranteed basic income was still being rejected, even in 1983, as utopian (in the pejorative sense of the term), the greater part of the Left, Right and centre suddenly found themselves in agreement on the necessity for it (if not on the form it should take): Aide a  Toute Detresse, the abbe Pierre, the 'Restaurants du Creur' and the increasing spread of begging and poverty had made their mark. There were men and women who had never worked, and others at 45 who would never work again; there were the handicapped, the sick, the unstable, single-parent families of varying sizes, and so on. They could not simply all be allowed to sink; something would therefore 'have to be done' and, since it was an emergency, one would have to attack the effects without trying to locate the causes.

The emergency thus served as an alibi for avoiding any debate on the societal implications' that are involved here: will the guaranteed minimum be a temporary palliative whilst we wait to see the policies of redistributing work come to fruition? Is it to begin the transition towards a society where work (in the economic sense) will become intermittent for all and where the second cheque will ensure a normal standard of living during the periods when one is not working? Or will it be the 'opium of the people which allows a third of the population to be reduced to inactivity and silence so that the other two thirds can between them enjoy society's wealth in peace'? Will it serve to render an extension of unemployment and marginality socially tolerable, these things being considered inevitable consequences (if not indeed conditions) of economic rationalization?

The question is as old as the industrial revolution itself or, in other words, as the disintegration of society by capitalism. For the first forms of guaranteed minima reach back as far as the beginnings of industrialization: to the Speenhamland decision in 1795 followed by the Poor Laws which took a great variety of forms over the years and the traces of which are still discernible in British social legislation today. These Poor Laws, introduced from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, were supposed to ensure each inhabitant of the rural parish received a minimum subsistence income indexed to the price of bread. Just like certain forms of social minimum envisaged by today's neo-liberals, the Speenhamland decision was accompanied by the suppression of the forms of social protection which the landless workers in the rural areas had enjoyed up to that point. They had in the past always had the right to grow a little grain and some vegetables on the common land and to graze a few sheep here. This right was taken away from them when common property was abolished and lands were enclosed and allotted to landowners. This measure had a dual objective: to develop commercial farming at the expense of the growing of foodstuffs for one's own consumption and to force the landless countryfolk to sell their labour to the landowners.

These latter had no need, however, to employ a permanent additional labour force. The Poor Laws would relieve them of the need to do this and, by ensuring the survival of the unemployed, spare them any bad conscience. There was an even worse side to it: whereas in the past the landowners had maintained a labour force that was large enough so that they would not be short of hands during ploughing or harvesting, the Poor Laws would allow them to replace their permanent workers with journeymen whom they packed off back home once the harvest was in to live on the subsistence minimum which the parish was required to pay to the poverty-stricken. We can see the parallel with the present situation. Today, too, the reduction of the proportion of permanent waged workers and the increase in the number of casual or temporary workers, consigned to unemployment for part of the year, presuppose that a subsistence minimum be paid to those men and women who cannot find work for long enough periods to qualify for unemployment benefit.

This is why the debate on the amount of the guaranteed minimum, however important it may be in the short term for the victims of 'rationalization', masks the deep significance of the very principle of this form of guarantee. It is not, in fact, paid out of solidarity, but as an act of institutional charity. And like every charitable institution, it is conservative in intention: instead of combating the segmentation and South Africanisation of society, it tends to make these things more acceptable. The guaranteed minimum functions as the wages of marginality and social exclusion. Unless it is explicitly presented as a transitional measure (and the end situation to which the transition was directed would have to be clearly specified), the guaranteed minimum is a Right-wing idea.
From this we may discern what the Left's alternative must consist of. It will not accept the growth of unemployment as something inevitable and will not accept that its goal must be to make this unemployment and the forms of marginalization it entails tolerable. It must be based on the rejection of a splitting of society into one section who are by rights permanent workers and another which is excluded. It is not therefore the guarantee of an income independent of work that will be at the centre of a Left project, but the indissoluble bond between the right to an income and the right to work. Each citizen must have the right to a normal standard of living; but every man and woman must also be granted the possibility (the right and the duty) to perform for society the labour-equivalent of what she or he consumes: the right, in short, to 'earn their living'; the right not to be dependent for their subsistence on the goodwill of the economic decision-makers. This indissoluble unity of the right to an income and the right to work is the basis of citizenship for every man and woman.

In effect, as I have shown in relation to work in the economic sense as emancipation, one belongs to society (more exactly to modern democratic and not slave-owning society) and one has rights in that society or is partially excluded from it according to whether or not one participates in the process of production organized on the scale of the whole society. The work one exchanges not with society as a whole but with the members of a particular community (one's family, habitat, village, district) remains particular work, subject to particular rules, which are themselves the result of a particular relation of forces, interests or particular bonds. Conversely, work in an economic sense, socially determined and remunerated, is governed by universal rules and relations which liberate the individual from particular bonds of dependence and define her or him as a universal individual, that is, as a citizen: her or his paid activity is socially recognized as work in general having a general social utility. I can sell this work to an indefinite number of enterprises without having to form any personal and private relationship with those who are paying me. They pay me for the general social utility of my skills and not for a personal service I am rendering. They are, in a sense, merely the intermediaries between an impersonal demand on the part of society as a whole (whether it be expressed through the market, the plan or an order from a public body) and the work by which I can contribute to satisfying that demand.

The emancipatory character of work in the economic sense derives from this: it confers upon me the impersonal reality of an abstract social individual, as capable as any other of occupying a function within the social process of production. And precisely because what is involved is a function which is impersonal in its essence, which I occupy as an interchangeable person among others, work does not, as is generally claimed, confer a 'personal identity' upon me, but the very opposite: I do not have to engage the whole of my person, the whole of my life in it; my obligations are circumscribed by the nature of my occupation, by my work contract and by social legislation. I know what l owe to society and what it owes me in return. I belong to it by virtue of social capacities which are not personal, during a limited number of hours specified by contract and, once I have satisfied my contractual obligations, I belong only to myself, to my own family, to my grassroots community.

We should never lose sight of the dialectical unity of these two factors: work in the economic sense, by its very impersonal abstractness, liberates me from particular bonds of dependence and reciprocal belonging that govern relations in the micro-social and private sphere. And this sphere can only exist as a sphere of sovereignty 'and voluntary reciprocity because it is the obverse of a clearly circumscribed sphere of clearly defined social obligations. If I am relieved of any social obligation and more precisely of the obligation to 'earn my living' by working, be it only for a few hours, I cease to exist as an 'interchangeable social individual as capable as any other': my only remaining existence is private and micro-social. And I cease to experience this private existence as my personal sovereignty because it is no longer the obverse of compelling social obligations. The customary balance of living in a macro-socially organized society is upset: I no longer negate myself as private individual by my 'work in general' nor do I negate myself as an individual in general by my private activity. My existence collapses into the private sphere where, being subject to no general social obligation, to no socially recognized necessity, I can only be or do or not do what I have decided myself, without anyone asking anything of me: 'Excluded from every group and every enterprise, a pure consumer of air, water and other people's labour, reduced to the boredom of living, an acute consciousness of my contingency', I am a 'supernumerary of the human species'.

This is the condition of those who are involuntarily unemployed; and the guarantee of a social minimum will do nothing to change that (nor indeed will giving him or her an unreal job, a job which is not needed by society, but which has deliberately been created to occupy people for whom there are no real jobs and to justify the allowance allocated to them). Whatever the size of the guaranteed minimum, it can do nothing to alter the fact that society expects nothing of me, thus denies me a reality as a social individual in general. It pays me an allowance without asking anything of me, thus without conferring any social rights upon me. By this payment, it holds me in its power: what it grants me today, it can take away bit by bit, or altogether, tomorrow, since it has no need of me, but I have need of it.

It is for all these reasons that the right to an income and the right to macro-social work must not be dissociated or -- which amounts to the same thing -- that the right to an income must be linked to the duty to work, however little, to produce that income. I do not propose this in order to save 'work-based society', the work ethic or biblical morality, but to maintain the indispensable dialectical unity between rights and duties. There can be no rights without corresponding obligations. My duty is the basis of my rights and to relieve me of all duties is to deny me the status of a person having rights. Rights and duties are always two sides of the same coin: my rights are the duties of others towards me; they imply my duty towards these others. In so far as I am one of them (one among others), I have fights over them; in so far as I am one of them, they have rights over me. It is through these rights -- and therefore through the duties they give me -- that they recognize me as one of them. In so far as I belong to society, it has the right to ask me to do my appropriate share of social labour. It is through the duties it gives me that it recognizes me as belonging to it. If it asks nothing of me, it rejects me.

The right to work, the duty to work and one's rights as a citizen are inextricably linked. 

In a Left conception, the point is therefore not to guarantee an income independent of any work; what must be guaranteed is both the income and the quantity of social labour corresponding to it. In other words, the point is to guarantee an income which does not diminish as socially necessary labour time is reduced. Income should not become independent of work itself, but of working time.
In this way, however intermittent work may become and however short the time spent on it, the income guaranteed to each person throughout their lives in exchange for a corresponding quantum of work will always be an earned income to which she or he has acquired a right by her or his labour.
I shall attempt to give a more precise account of this proposition in order to distinguish it from the forms of guaranteed minimum and universal grants.

(a) Guaranteed Income. Rightist Version 

The guaranteed minimum is an income granted by the state, financed by direct taxation. It starts out from the idea that there are people who work and earn a good living and others who do not work because there is no room for them on the job market or because they are (considered) incapable of working. Between these two groups, no lived relation of solidarity emerges. This absence of solidarity (this society deficit) is corrected by a fiscal transfer. The state takes from the one group and gives to the other.

The legitimacy of this transfer will always be more or less openly contested, since through it those who do not work appear to be making the others work in their stead. The state will therefore always be suspected of promoting parasitic behaviour and idleness. It will always tend to disarm that suspicion by spicing the right to a social income with more or less humiliating and harassing checks and controls. The recipients of these benefits will remain at the mercy of a taxpayers' revolt or a political change. And this will be the case even if the income guarantee takes the form of the universal, unconditional payment of a basic allowance, as the Charles Fourier collective and the German eco-libertarians have suggested. This basic income runs the risk, moreover, of serving as a pretext for the unchecked growth of low-grade and badly paid casual jobs, regarded by employers as a top-up income. It also runs the risk of serving as a justification for increased discrimination against women. There will be a tendency to confuse the guaranteed minimum with a 'wage for housework' or a maternal wage, justifying the confinement of women to the domestic sphere and (to borrow a formula used by Jacques Chirac in 1987) the official recognition of the 'profession of housewife and mother'.

The guaranteed minimum or universal grant thus form part of a palliative policy which promises to protect individuals from the decomposition of wage-based society without developing a social dynamic that would open up emancipatory perspectives for them for the future.

(b) Guaranteed income. Left version 

From a Left perspective, the guarantee of an adequate income to those whom society marginalizes must neither be the final goal nor the starting point of the political project. The starting point must be the diminution of the quantity of economically necessary labour; the objective must be to eliminate not only poverty and involuntary unemployment, but also the lack of time, harassing working conditions and the obligation to work full time throughout one's entire working life. The point is not to ensure that there are welfare benefits for those who are excluded from the production process, though these may have to be provided as a temporary measure. The point is to do away with the conditions which have led to the exclusion of those people.

This objective demands, as we have seen, a policy of redistribution of the economically necessary quantity of work. This will gradually, by stages, reduce the full-time norm from the current 1,600 hours per year to an average of 1,400, 1,200 and, finally, 1,000 in the space of some 15 to 20 years. These annual 1,000 hours will be considered the normal extent of full-time working and will entitle you to a normal wage which corresponds to your level of skills or qualifications, just as the current 1,600-hour year is considered the full-time norm and gives you the right to draw a full wage (which is four or five times greater in purchasing power than that received by a worker putting in some 3,200 hours per year at the beginning of the century).

I have demonstrated above that, as the length of annual working time decreases, work tends to become more and more intermittent. A thousand hours in a year may be done as two days' work a week, ten days a month, two fortnights every three months, one week in two, one month in two or sixth months a year, and so on, entitling you to a full wage (in the form of two cheques) throughout the year, just as you do today for 1,600 hours spread over two hundred days a year.

The idea of determining the number of working hours that entitles a person to receive a full income not over a year but over a five or ten year period follows logically from this new organization of time. This idea is not as 'utopian' (in the pejorative sense) as is commonly thought in France. The Swedish economist, Gosta Rehn, was the first to propose it on the occasion of the 1960 reform of the Swedish old-age-pension system: he proposed that everyone should be free to take an extended period of leave at any age which would be counted as an instalment of their retirement, the beginning of which would be correspondingly delayed. This "drawing right," he explained to me, "means the right to exchange one form of life for another during selected periods ... For me this means freeing man [woman] from the obligation to be 'economically productive' all the time."

It is precisely such a liberation which the determination of working hours on a yearly or five-yearly or career scale at last allows, when the norm for full-time working has greatly diminished. Just as 1,000 hours a year will be a normal full-time quota and will entitle you to a full income throughout the year, 3,000 hours over three years or 5,000 hours over five years will be a normal full-time quota entitling you to a full income for three or five years, even if the work concerned has been performed in a discontinuous fashion with breaks of six months of even two years. Your income during these breaks will be your normal income, sometimes paid in advance, sometimes in arrears, the income to which normal work entitles you, in no way different in principle from the income you are entitled to today during paid holidays for example, though the mode of financing it will be different. This possibility of periodically interrupting your working life for six months or two years at any age will enable anyone to study or resume their studies, to learn a new occupation, to set up a band, a theatre group, a neighbourhood cooperative, an enterprise or a work of art, to build a house, to make inventions, to raise your children, to campaign politically, to go to a Third World country as a voluntary worker, to look after a dying relative or friend, and so on. And the same reasoning which applies over the three-year or five-year period holds good over the period of one's entire life with its twenty or thirty years of work (20,000 to 30,000 hours): there is no reason not to envisage these being spread out over forty or fifty years of one's life or concentrated into ten or fifteen years. There is also no reason not to let people plan their lives or a second (or third) start in life.

One could elaborate endlessly upon this type of system, refine it and make provision for bonuses or penalties and for fiscal incentives or disincentives to work either uninterruptedly or intermittently. One could stipulate whether there would or would not be a ceiling to the amount of the second cheque, whether it would or would not be reduced if your break from work lasted beyond a certain time, and so forth. And one might also raise a whole host of objections: some may fear that this will require excessively cumbersome bureaucracy (quite wrongly, since the management of a work-time account is no different from the management of a pension fund, family allowances or a current bank account); or others might be concerned about 'those who just don't want to work at all' fearing that a guaranteed income linked to the right (and obligation) to work, however intermittently, will bring about 'compulsory labour', as if the right to be paid for doing nothing were a well-established constitutional right which I had somehow had the bad taste to violate. This last objection ('what will you do about those who don't want to work at all') could be raised in respect of any type of obligation (paying your restaurant bill, stopping at a red light, taking a shower before entering a swimming-pool). It is a particularly specious objection in this case since the compulsion in question is merely alleviated; it is not something new that would require new forms of surveillance or repression. If someone got particularly into arrears with his working hours, he would receive a first and possibly a second warning letter informing him that his right to receive his second cheque would expire on such and such a date. The letter would be sent by the computer managing the social account of the person concerned, which regularly sends him a statement just as one receives a monthly or bi-monthly statement for a bank account. Everyone knows the rules: you can't have an unlimited overdraft at your bank, nor could you at the social fund paying the second cheque. The openness and fairness of this rule mean that it cannot be considered oppressive and authoritarian. It is the rule for everybody. It seems to me greatly preferable to the blind constraints of anarcho-liberal non-society and to the social-statism which grants a 'civic income' to everyone and then leaves them to 'slug it out'.

The essential aspect of an obligation to work in exchange for a guaranteed full income is that this obligation provides the basis for a corresponding right: by obliging individuals to produce by working the income which is guaranteed to them, society obliges itself to guarantee them the opportunity to work and gives them the right to demand this. The obligation it imposes on them is the basis for the right they have over it, the right to be full citizens, individuals like any other, assuming their -- increasingly light -- share of the burden of necessities and free, by that very token, to be unique persons who, during the rest of their time, may develop their multiple capacities, if such is their desire. I do not claim here to have responded to all the questions and objections that may be raised. I do not know if there is a need to set an age limit for entry into active life; or whether the person who at 35 has already done all the work that is due must be discouraged from continuing at the same rate nor whether one should continue to advocate, as Gunnar Adler Karlsson does, a division into two economic sectors, a socialized sector ensuring that all necessities are provided in the most economical conditions for workers and users, and a free sector providing the optional goods and services and so on, but I know that the vision of a society where each person may earn their living by working, but by working less and less and increasingly intermittently, in which each person is entitled to the full citizenship which work confers and to a 'second life', whether private, micro-social or public, enables workers and the unemployed, the new social movements and the labour movement to join together in a common struggle.

Unlike the 'universal grant' or social assistance to non-workers, which depend entirely on central government, a project for a society in which everyone may work, but work less and less while having a better life, may be carried through by a strategy of collective action and popular initiatives. Unlike the formulas of the 'guaranteed minimum' or 'universal grant', this project does not break with the traditional logic of trade-union struggle, since full payment during occasional and annual holidays and during maternity or paternity leave and training periods or sabbaticals, and so on is prefigured in a number of collective agreements. And lastly, I know that a policy of a staged reduction in working hours, accompanied by a guaranteed income, cannot fail to enliven thinking, debate, experimentation, initiative and the self-organization of the workers on all the different levels of the economy and therefore to be more generative of society and democracy than any social-statist formula. This is the essential point: that control over the economy should be exercised by a revitalized society.
Here then is the reasoning behind my proposals. They are not the only possible proposals. You could make other ones based on other reasoning, but you could not avoid, in the name of realism, all debate about the future society which will no longer be a work-based society. Evading the issue and. the need for radical innovations and change implies that you simply accept the fact that society, as it decomposes, will go on engendering increasing poverty, frustration, irrationality and violence. 'If you don't want Gorz's model or mine', said Gunnar Adler Karlsson at a recent trade-union seminar, 'then build your own models. But please suggest something new. If you gave me one hundredth of the staff and the economists who are working on conventional employment theories to work out my theories and Gorz's, we would find solutions to a whole host of problems.'

Utilitarian Economics and the Corruption of Conservatism (Philip Pilkington in American Affairs Volume I, Number 3, Fall 2017)

The Oxford English Dictionary has two definitions of the word “conservatism.” The first defines it as a “commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation”; the second defines it as “the holding of political views that favor free enterprise, private ownership, and socially conservative ideas.” The former definition strikes me as the classical definition; the latter, a more modern invention—as those who supported private ownership and free enterprise, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, were in their own times thought of as progressive liberals.

But is there a conflict between the two? Not inherently. With the absolute monarchies either abolished or subordinated to the will of parliaments, private ownership and free enterprise have evolved into the status quo. Given this, one can see how someone who defends this state of affairs might see him or herself as conservative. But in defending this status quo, many who think themselves conservative have instead slipped into supporting a truly radical social doctrine—namely, utilitarianism—a doctrine that has subsequently morphed into neoclassical or marginalist economics.

This is a social doctrine that has very little concern for traditional values. Indeed, it often appears to be entirely nihilistic in its consideration of value and truth. Because utilitarianism in its modern form—neoclassical or marginalist economics—is often the primary doctrine used to defend private property and free enterprise, the two definitions from the Oxford dictionary mentioned earlier begin to clash with one another.

From Normative Doctrine to Positive Imperative

What is the essence of the utilitarian doctrine? At its heart, it is the conversion of the human being in all of his or her richness into simplistic, self-contained atoms that are motivated only by their reaction to pleasure and pain. The individual is viewed as a creature isolated from any community: All considerations of intersubjective dynamics are subordinated to atomistic subjective dynamics. Anything resembling intersubjectivity is, in the utilitarian doctrine, merely a product of atomistic desires. There is, as Margaret Thatcher once said, no such thing as society. Simultaneously, although the individual is stripped of all faculties but the ability to feel pleasure and pain, he or she is invested with the ability to perfectly calculate how to best maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Man is divested of his all-too-human nature and endowed with the extremes of animal desires and godlike, calculating omniscience.

The roots of utilitarianism can arguably be found in the writings of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Epicurus and his followers posited a normative doctrine that held that highly abstract, metaphysical values such as good and evil should be tossed aside in favor of maximizing contentment and minimizing pain. The Epicureans also viewed the world in a materialistic and atomistic fashion. That said, the Epicurean philosophy was not one of unbridled hedonism, as utilitarianism would become in the twentieth century, when marginalist economists began to view insatiable desire as a necessary condition in their models of man. Rather, the Epicureans counseled that people should try to reach a Zen-like state of contentment through the minimization of all pain.

Whereas Epicurean philosophy was a prescriptive doctrine advising people on how to lead their lives, utilitarianism proper emerged as a positive or quasi-scientific doctrine that claimed to uncover truths about the human being. The doctrine emerged in the modern era in the work of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham drew on empiricist thinkers like John Locke and David Hume and tried to formulate a wholly empirical theory of ethics. In Bentham’s doctrine, the line between “is” and “ought” is constantly blurred. Was utilitarianism for Bentham a positive description of the human being as a calculator of pleasure and pain, or was it a prescription for how society should be organized? Bentham was never quite clear.

For example, in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Bentham writes:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will only serve to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while.¹

This is clearly a strong positive claim: these, Bentham tells us, are the laws by which man is governed. But it is not long before the positive claims give rise to normative considerations. Bentham’s utilitarianism is always pregnant with the potential to shape the world in its image, for the “is” to become the “ought,” and for Bentham to rally us as “partisans” to his social vision.

A man may be said to be a partisan of the principle of utility, when the approbation or disapprobation he annexes to any action, or to any measure, is determined by, and proportioned to the tendency which he conceives it to have to augment or to diminish the happiness of the community.

Many moral philosophers strongly disagreed with the tendency to reduce man to his pleasures and pains. They pointed out that human beings are so much more complex; that societies often relied on individual sacrifices of various kinds; that temporary pleasures may lead to pain later, and that weighing this up was no simple task; and, of course, that happiness was not always synonymous with the maximization of pleasure.

Of Pseudoscience and Social Planning

But the world was entering an age of science, which privileged any doctrine that could claim the unquestioned authority of quantitative disciplines. Utilitarianism became just such a positivist pseudoscience in the late nineteenth century, when it was translated into neoclassical or marginalist economics. The key names in this development include William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras.

Jevons and Menger both arrived at the idea that human behavior should be mathematized in order to turn the study of man into a science proper. They found that the most promising framework for doing this was utilitarianism. By stripping man down to the simplest motivational structures—the atom pushed to and fro by his pleasures and pains—and by combining this with a notion of an economy that operated through exchange and flexible price, they found that they could form a coherent theoretical system that seemed, on its face, as elegant as Newtonian physics. Yes, man also had to be fitted with a supercomputer and limitless access to information to make the thought experiments work—he had to become God—but so much the better; these were men of Enlightenment, after all.

The elegance emanating from an encounter with the godhead was pursued with great gusto by Walras. He devised a clever system of equations that could be solved to produce what economists call a “general equilibrium.” This general equilibrium proved that—within the confines of the reductive thought experiment—a system of markets could distribute resources in such a way as to produce a final equilibrium or settling point. Later, Vilfredo Pareto went on to show that such a setup would prove “Pareto optimal,” meaning that market exchange, given the strict (and grossly unrealistic) marginalist assumptions, would produce a situation in which resources were distributed in such a way as to maximize the community’s “pleasure” and minimize its “pain.” This was the Benthamite social vision cast in the iron language of mathematics; Walras and Pareto were the “partisans”—or, perhaps, the disciples.

All of these men sought to mathematize the behavior of human beings, which appeared to be their prime motivation: yes, they probably found the utilitarian doctrine attractive in many ways, but their main goal was to use it to reduce human behavior to a formula. It should also be noted that, like many marginalist economists after them, many of these men were not particularly enthusiastic about the capitalist system. Walras, for example, was a socialist. Their systems had an air of social planning about them, because that was precisely what they were constructed for. Marginalist economics was a doctrine of social planning from the first, and one that had to reduce man to a hobbled caricature of himself and treat him as such. No values, no culture, and no heroes—only pleasures, profits, and prices.

Utilitarianism provided the early marginalists with a simplistic vision of man and his world. There was man, other men, pleasure, pain, and the ability to calculate this pleasure and pain. With only these variables, a simplistic, robot-like model of man could easily be constructed. He would process the “data” given to him by the world and optimize his behavior to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This made his behavior deterministic and rendered him predictable.

Take an example: You have fixed preferences in terms of, say, bananas and apples. There are various “baskets” of bananas and apples. You have a certain amount of money to spend on bananas and apples, which themselves have fixed prices. Given all this information, and assuming that you “maximize your utility”—in classic utilitarianese, you “maximize your pleasure”—a marginalist can figure out exactly which “basket” of apples and bananas you will buy.

In other words, the system is thoroughly deterministic. And this is where another difficulty arises in the claims made by its partisans: Many see the utilitarian doctrine as inherently liberationist and freedom-promoting. Some picked it up simply because they saw it as opposing communism and, ironically, intrusive social planning—in this basket fell pundits like William F. Buckley and Henry Hazlitt. Others, like Friedrich Hayek, realized early on that the doctrine tended toward scientistic technocracy but nevertheless continued to embrace it, dropping the mathematical pretenses in favor of theoretical mysticism and quasi-religious worship of the figure of the “entrepreneur.”² Finally, there were the full-throated marginalist social planners like Milton Friedman, singing from the hymn sheet of personal freedom when the troops needed to be rallied but reverting to the cold, dead language of utility maximization when the masses had to be controlled.

These intellectual revolutionaries, as morally radical as any Bolshevik, saw the marginalist doctrine as smashing through encrusted notions of good and bad and allowing people to make their own choices. “This doctrine promotes the idea that no one should tell me how to live,” they say, “and this means it allows me to do what I want.” But is this really the case? If I am correct, the main motivation for the marginalist transformation of utilitarianism was to render men, in their view, as determined and predictable as a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball. Where, then, is the space for freedom? Where is the space for choice? One would be forgiven for thinking that the freedom of utilitarian theory is not the freedom of the mind but the tyranny of the stomach. It is not hard to see how it promotes a vision of a society in which men are not encouraged to participate using their minds but rather to subordinate themselves to the system by way of their stomachs.

Robotic Is My Freedom

Can a theory that seeks to be deterministic really promote freedom? This is a serious question, and one not often enough asked. Marxists, for example, were apt to call for an increase in freedom, yet their doctrines portrayed human beings as being “overdetermined,” in the words of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. That is, these doctrines promoted a vision of human beings as objects pushed this way and that by the ebbs and flows of history. Yes, from time to time, Marx will wax romantic about events or individuals, but this flies in the face of his overarching doctrine—one which seeks to impose laws upon history and thus eliminates choice in the movement of history. With no choice, there is no freedom.

Conservatives used to complain that Marxism was gratuitous and objectifying, but these were often the same conservatives who championed the theory of marginal utility. A clear-sighted understanding of marginal utility theory reveals that it is just as gratuitous and objectifying as Marxist theory. Given prevailing prices, our budgets, and our fixed preferences—that is, our stomachs—our actions are thought to be predetermined. This is not freedom. Freedom is typically seen as overcoming an obstacle, whether internal or external, in one’s path. Contrary to the marginalist conception, true freedom would be to say “no” to one’s stomach for some higher moral or ethical reason.

What we are dealing with here, as should now be clear, are ethical or moral questions. We are not strolling down the path of “is” but wandering into the open field of “ought.” Some of the more reflective marginalists recognized this, too. Take, for example, this quote from the marginalist economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson:

I think that as far as the sociology of actual behavior is concerned simple axioms are unlikely to be realized to an appreciable degree of approximation. But aesthetically I think that there is much to be said for the Ramsey-Savage canons of consistent behavior. And that given time for reflection the would-be rational man would reproach themselves if it were called to their attention that they were showing inconsistencies as defined by the axioms of the theory. Speaking for myself, I know I would.³

Clearly this is a normative theory. Samuelson is sure that rational men would “reproach themselves” for behavior inconsistent with marginalist theory—at least, he knows he would. This is, it cannot be denied, how Samuelson believes that men should behave, and he does not even think it is how they are likely to behave. So much for positive science.

This approach is built into the foundations of modern marginalist economic theory. It is not often discussed because, as any student in a modern economics classroom will attest, value judgements are almost never discussed. They would occupy time that should be taken up with the dogmatic, rote learning of various mathematical puzzles. And, moreover, typical modern economists are not intellectually equipped to consider such things; discussions about moral philosophy render them uneasy and confused. The fact that Samuelson was able to articulate what he was doing is a testimony to the fact that he was a cut or two above his peers. But underlying everything that pours forth from the economics textbook is the same set of assumptions that undergirded Samuelson’s project. After all, Samuelson invented the modern economic textbook with the publication of his Economics in 1948. Here is what he had to say in that particular book (which, take note, went through nineteen editions):

What is assumed is that consumers are fairly consistent in their tastes and actions—that they do not flail around in unpredictable ways, making themselves miserable by persistent errors in judgement or arithmetic. If enough people act consistently, avoiding erratic changes in buying behavior, and generally choosing their most preferred commodities, our scientific theory will provide a reasonably good approximation of the facts.⁴

And woe to those who act with insufficient consistency so as to render Samuelson’s theory unscientific! Waiting for them is a veritable Samuelsonian hell of “persistent errors in judgement [and] arithmetic.” Dante would blush.

Properly understood, marginalist economics is the streamlining of the utilitarian doctrine into a pseudo-positive set of axioms. Thus, these axioms inevitably contain utilitarian normative judgements. The act of “unfreedom” in this theory is the same as the act of unfreedom in the Marxist theory: It tells you how to be free. In Marxism, if you do not submit to the tide of History and join the Movement, then you are not free. In marginalist utilitarianism, if you do not submit to the utility calculus and maximize material satiation, then you are not free.

Both theories are perfect material for authoritarian technocrats—and there is nothing quite like an authoritarian who knows what you want better than you do. After all, an authoritarian who simply wants to subordinate your will to his in order to benefit himself in some cynical way does not seek to actually break your inner will. But the authoritarian who knows what you want better than you do will not stop until the will is broken—or, in his mind, cleansed.

The marginalist theory is of this type. Are you a silly, sad sack who is not maximizing your utility sufficiently because you have higher moral principles? Well, then you are not “rational.” Do you suspect that the amount of information required to make the calculations that the marginalist doctrine requires is absolutely and ontologically impossible to attain?⁵ Certainly not “rational.” Do you think that even if this information were available, the likelihood that you and everyone else would be willing and able to undertake the complex calculations required would be extremely low? Not “rational,” sorry.

From Partial Equilibrium Nonsense to General Equilibrium Madness

The manner in which marginalist theory is introduced to people today is seemingly innocuous. Take N. Gregory Mankiw’s popular textbook Principles of Economics, first published in 1997. The first part of the book introduces the student to some axioms of utilitarian-marginalist economics. Often this is presented in a manner that commands assent. Take the example in which the idea of “opportunity cost” is introduced. Opportunity cost is, of course, the idea that the cost of one object is the amount of some other thing foregone in order to get the desired object. Mankiw provides a colorful example when he writes:

Basketball star Kobe Bryant understands opportunity cost and incentives. Despite good high school grades and SAT scores, he decided to skip college and go straight to the NBA, where he earned about $10 million over four years.⁶

This is perfectly reasonable, of course. What is not reasonable, however, is the notion that people make all decisions in this way—or, to go further, that people can possibly make all decisions in this way. Yet this is precisely what students are told to believe very soon after the seemingly innocuous basketball example. It is a big step from saying that my opportunity cost for having soup for lunch today was not having a sandwich—a clear decision that I probably did actually make in the manner presented—to saying that my entire budget is allocated in such a way that I carefully calculate all my opportunity costs for everything simultaneously, and that I do so using a marginal utility calculus. But this is precisely what Mankiw is telling us when he writes:

Rational people think at the margin. . . . When it’s time for dinner, the decision you face is not between fasting or eating like a pig, but whether to take that extra spoonful of mashed potatoes. . . . Individuals and firms can make better decisions thinking at the margin. A rational decisionmaker takes an action if and only if the marginal benefit of the action exceeds the marginal cost.⁷

Again, the dinner example seems obvious and likely has us nodding in bovine assent. But it is not long before these seemingly straightforward nuggets of life wisdom are scaled up into economic models that make strong claims about societies at large. The hokey, anecdotal examples that Mankiw gives of individual decision-making are soon converted into microeconomic supply-and-demand curves of the type so many are familiar with today. And from here it is only one step to Mankiw’s assuring the reader that:

Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity. . . . In any economic system, scarce resources have to be allocated among competing uses. Market economies harness the forces of supply and demand to serve that end. Supply and demand together determine the prices of the economy’s many different goods and services; prices in turn are the signals that guide the allocation of resources.⁸

What the reader is never told—not once—are the assumptions that are implied when we scale up a simple supply-and-demand model for apples, bananas, or scoops of mashed potatoes into a model of the economy at large and how it distributes resources to various ends. It is in these assumptions—the assumptions that ensure equilibrium in a single market is transmitted into equilibrium in the economy at large—where the authoritarian tendencies truly rear their ugly head. G. L. S. Shackle outlines these assumptions admirably:

Equilibrium is a means by which all persons in choosing their acts can be supposed to have equal and perfect relevant knowledge and equal freedom. Given a list of persons, besides himself, composing the society, and given for each of these persons a list of all the acts possible to that person, each person can be supposed to draw up a list of all the distinct combinations of acts, one or other of which combinations will constitute the circumstances surrounding his own act. For each of these combinations he can be supposed to specify the act that he himself would choose, in case he were assured that the combination in question would prevail. The conditional promises, one for each person, thus derived, can now be supposed to be treated as a system to be simultaneously solved.⁹

Did that passage make your head spin? This is what is required of our pleasure-robots if their actions are to result in general economic equilibrium of the sort that leads Mankiw to say that “markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity.” Is this remotely realistic? Of course not. But nothing less than this is required. Now, is it any surprise that those who want to realize this fanciful utopia will try to make society in the image of their perfect pleasure-robots to achieve it? Recall Samuelson again: he does not think that people act in line with his theories; rather, he thinks that they should. Those who push these theories may or may not be aware that people do not undertake the intellectual rocket launches that Shackle lays out when they make decisions—but you can be sure that they think everyone should.

This authoritarian tendency is manifest today in the policy sphere. It bubbles up any time an avid “free marketeer” chastises some working stiff for not appreciating the free movement of capital and labor—and the accompanying destruction of jobs and outsourcing that it brings. These boobs? They are simply not rational. They do not understand what is in their own self-interest. It manifests itself in even more virulent form in what can only be described as marginalist cults—such as the so-called libertarian philosophies like Ayn Rand’s objectivism (a moniker as self-assertive and imposing as the doctrine itself) or Ludwig von Mises’s praxeology (a mess of epistemological confusion that arbitrarily assigns a priori status to the a posteriori material of the empirical human being). These abstract intellectual constructions—usually half-understood—imbue their adherents with a mandate for social change. It gives them a bizarre anti-moral morality which they can take with them into the world and impose on the populace. Anyone who disagrees? They’re not rational.

The Morality of the Atom, the Ethics of the Void

And so we return to where we began: Ethics. Morals. Values. There is really no way of getting away from them. Let us be candid: When examining the behavior of men, there are only three possible paths. The first is for us to simply observe and record their behavior, in the hope that this gives us access to some truth about man generally. The second is to form a grand theory of how man will behave at all moments, in all societies, at all points in time. The third is to recognize that man is free to do as he chooses and to either recognize this freedom as a good in itself or to recognize that some sort of moral or ethical force must constrain this freedom to ensure that it is channeled in a satisfactory way.

The first path has some merit to it. We should be interested in how man behaves under certain conditions. This is what many behavioral psychologists and economists do today. It is also what, in an entirely different framework and a more hermeneutic mood, psychoanalysts and anthropologists do. But this path runs out quickly. We now know that there are serious epistemological problems. Reflexivity kicks in, for one. Does the fact that the observed is being observed lead them to behave differently than they would if they were not being observed? And then there are the empirical problems. How many times need we be shown that many psychological experiments are non-replicable before we admit that human behavior may be a lot more heterogeneous than the more naive empiricists allow for? Given these problems, the likelihood that anything positive can be drawn from experimental psychology seems rather small. But we must give credit where credit is due: experimental psychology works wonders to dispel certain illusions we may hold about the consistency and so-called rationality of human behavior.

The second path is the one we have been discussing with respect to utilitarianism. Unlike the first path, it is a manifestly bad idea. Man is simply too complex. Such an approach stumbles drunkenly across the line between the descriptive and the prescriptive, never quite sure which side it is on. When pushed by either the experimentalists or the ethicists to clarify what exactly they are saying, the proponents of this approach tend to simply fall over in the middle of the street. We will not hide our disapproval: an arrest for public disorder is most certainly advised.

The third path is obviously the strongest. This is the conclusion that most serious philosophers have arrived at since ancient times. “Everything that needs to be said has already been said,” counseled André Gide, “but since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” The problem today is not a lack of dusty books that reflect on the “ought”; rather, it is that we are scared of the “ought” and cling to the pseudo-certainty provided by the “is.” That is why we are seduced by glittery theories of human motivation: we derive from them the moral authority we crave without ever having to question the source. But what we lose in this devil’s bargain is the truth. When we allow our doubts to creep in, we soon find that the authority we sought is not a king but only a jester wearing a paper crown.

Again, let us be candid. If we want to pontificate on human behavior, then we must be prepared to address it from a moral and ethical standpoint. If we are not, then we would probably be best off remaining silent. Utilitarians of every stripe want moral authority—sometimes extraordinary moral authority—while eschewing the responsibility to cast their arguments in the mold of moral argument. This is irresponsible and disingenuous, and it must stop.

Whither Utilitarianism, Whither Economics?

The question that naturally arises here is whether in slaying the marginalist dragon we have destroyed the discipline of economics. Has the sweet-smelling baby of economic insight been tossed out with the bathwater of marginalist pseudoscience? It is an important question, but it presupposes that all economics must be based on the marginalist utility calculus—that all economics must be based on the notion of a playground filled with atomic pleasure-machines with unlimited information and computing power. In the parlance of modern economics, this is tied up with the idea that economics should be “microfounded”; that is, that the behavior of the economy should be explained with reference to the mathematized behavior of the individual economic agents. But is this all there is? If we remove this wonky leg, does the stool fall unceremoniously to the floor?

The answer is no. There is absolutely no need to undergird economic theory with haphazard visions of how man behaves. In fact, we need not think much about motivation at all. The reason for this is that interacting systems of individuals, no matter how they behave or why they behave the way that they do, generate what some call “emergent properties.” That is, these systems generate higher-order behavior that goes above and beyond the human individual and constrains them.

Let us take the illustrative example that I used in my recent book The Reformation in Economics (2016).¹⁰ Imagine a football pitch with one hundred seats lined up ten by ten. Now consider the dynamics of this setup: any one person can stand up in order to get a better view of the pitch, but in doing, so they can often block the view of others behind them. This provides a good analogy for how economic behavior can be seen to be constrained at a higher level of abstraction. In our example, we can also see that different people in different seats wield different degrees of power relative to their neighbors. Assuming that, if a person in front of another stands up, then the person behind him will also stand up to maintain his view, then the people in the front row have the ability to cause nine other people to stand up simply by standing themselves. The people in the back row, on the other hand, have no capacity to make anyone else stand up.

This may seem like a simple example, but it has powerful implications for the study of economics. It leads us away from the pseudo-psychology of human behavior that is microeconomics and into the epistemologically firm territory of macroeconomics proper. This “higher order” thinking allows us to capture interesting truths about the workings of the economic system.

Take the famous paradox of thrift, for example. A single person can decide to increase his savings, should he feel like doing so, but if everyone tries to increase his savings at the same time, then no one will succeed in increasing his savings. This is because in order to save, we all need income. And because my income is the expenditure of someone else, that means if that person cuts their expenditure by increasing their savings, then my income will fall and my attempt to save will prove impossible. When we study the economy from this “higher order” or macro perspective, we come across many such constraints on individual behavior. In so doing, we can learn an awful lot about the functioning of the economic system while shying away from positing necessarily silly “laws” of universal human behavior.

As we have seen throughout this essay, the interminable sin that the marginalists fell into was to try to render human behavior determinate—to subject it to laws that resemble the laws of physics. But a proper macroeconomic approach does not require this. Proper macroeconomics makes no a priori assumptions about people’s behavior. Indeed, it is not really interested in behavior as such. Rather, it is interested in potential coordination problems that may arise when people behave in a certain way. In a sense, macroeconomics is not so much a science as it is an exercise in social logistics. Macroeconomics studies the paradoxes that various individual decisions—such as the decision by individuals to save en masse—can generate for the economic system as a whole—in this case, the implications that such savings have for economy-wide income.

What’s more, this perspective opens up a great deal of space for freedom. Because we have dispensed with the irritating pleasure-robots and utility-maximizers, we can escape the prescriptive prison that they lock us into. The utilitarian-marginalist arguments in economics are usually set up so as to force upon us policy choices that are then deemed to be inevitable. It is only one or two steps from the assumption of the utility-maximizer to the argument that, say, free trade is inevitably the best arrangement, or that all markets should be thoroughly deregulated. But once the utility-maximizing assumption is dropped, these become far more open questions. And this is precisely where the question of morality comes back in.

This more open vision of economics that I have outlined allows for many different “optimal” worlds. “Optimality” itself becomes largely, but not totally, a normative question. A properly macroeconomic vision certainly says that there are constraints. You cannot have your cake and eat it. But it does not deny that there are many different paths to achieve nirvana. And because there are many different paths, these can be evaluated from a properly moral or ethical normative framework. This opens economics up to a plurality of moral views. Perhaps you are a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew, and you would like to organize your society along those lines. Perhaps you have given up on the extremist utilitarian framework but still like the freedom that a relatively laissez-faire market system provides. Or perhaps you have an aversion to too much market freedom, because you think it gives rise to social chaos and moral confusion. “Sure,” the macroeconomist would say, “but we will have to evaluate your plans to make sure that they are consistent.”

An obvious example today would be the question of unemployment. A simple solution to such unemployment would be for the government to simply hire the unemployed. But what are the constraints here? Can the government afford to hire them? If they are hired as service workers, might they put pressure on the trade balance—and could this prove problematic in the future? Will hiring the unemployed cause inflation? These are the questions that a proper macroeconomics, unconstrained from the stifling marginalist precepts, can serve to answer.¹¹

The first step on the road to theoretical recovery is to admit that the utilitarian-marginalist framework is bankrupt. But, despite what many economists today will tell you, this does not result in an uncontrolled descent into the void. Rather, it opens up many possible different worlds. It opens up a debate that can be accessed by everyone. No longer must people adhere to the axioms that currently play gatekeeper in the economics classroom. If you find these axioms absurd, then dump them. Replace them with your own vision of right and wrong. Then learn some proper macroeconomics and see if you can make your plans add up. If nothing else, it is far more compelling and interesting than “solving optimization problems in utility space.”

And conservatism? Any serious evaluation cannot but conclude that the principles of conservative philosophy were corrupted and debased by the utilitarian onslaught. Conservative publications like the National Review are literally drowning in pro-market scribblings. With recent missives like, “Conservatives have too often supported policies that don’t promote competition and free markets in the energy sector,” and, “A free market think tank sues Washington State over union bullying,” these publications have seemingly nailed their flag to the mast of the market. Conservatism today is increasingly seen as synonymous with some sort of mid-nineteenth-century radical liberalism. When the pages of a conservative publication like the National Review are barely indistinguishable from the pages of a radical utilitarian journal like the Economist, surely the world has been turned upside down.

Those who are interested in preserving any sort of tradition should not be worshiping at the temple of the market, which, as Marx rightly pointed out, bulldozes tradition and lays waste to any non-market social structure. The only question for thoughtful conservatives is this: How on earth could anyone have ever thought otherwise?

Notes

¹ Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1876).

² This is a strange footnote in the history of the marginalist takeover. Hayek and the Austrians saw the dangers of scientistic technocracy and so tried to recast the utilitarian/marginalist vision of the universe into something resembling a cultic tradition. See, for example, my essay “Libertarianism and the Leap of Faith: The Origins of a Political Cult,” Naked Capitalism, December 7, 2011, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/philip-pilkington-libertarianism-and-the-leap-of-faith-%E2%80%93-the-origins-of-a-political-cult.html.

³ Paul Samuelson to Maurice Allais, 20 October 1958, https://twitter.com/Undercoverhist/status/856527806280421377.

⁴ William Nordhaus and Paul Samuelson, Economics, 15th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995), 78.

⁵ Indeed, it requires either telepathy or some sort of connection to a hive mind.

⁶ Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Economics (Boston: South-Western, 2011), 7.

⁷ Ibid., 6–7.

⁸ Ibid., 88.

⁹ G. L. S. Shackle, A Scheme of Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 12–13.

¹⁰ If the reader is interested in exploring these arguments in more detail, this is done in my book, The Reformation of Economics: A Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Economic Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

¹¹ To give a concrete sense of the difference here, consider how a marginalist macroeconomics and non-marginalist macroeconomics would provisionally answer these questions at the time of writing. The marginalist would most likely say that the government may not be able to afford hiring them; that so long as trade is free and the currency is floating, it should not prove problematic; and that hiring them will generate substantial inflation. The non-marginalist would likely say that the government can afford to do any hiring it pleases; that if the workers are hired in such a way that increases imports and does not increase exports, that this may prove problematic in the long run; and that hiring the workers is unlikely to generate inflationary pressure.

How Capitalism Works [Excerpt from Eric Lerner's unpublished book Labor's Global Battle]

As everyone knows, the whole point of a capitalist economy is to make a profit -- to sell things for more than their total costs of production. And profit alone is not enough. For capitalism to function, profit must become new capital, be re-invested and generate still more profit, creating still more capital. All this seems pretty simple, if we are looking at a single capitalist, or a single corporation.

But if we look at the entire world capitalist economy, things look different. How can all capitalists, capitals as a whole, make a growing profit? The world economy is complicated, so let's first simplify it as much as possible. Imagine an island, with two capitalists, each having, say two workers. The first capitalist, call him General Mills, is an agro-businessman and employs his workers to grow wheat. The second, General Harvester, is a manufacturer and employs his workers to produce plows.

General Mills pays $200 a year in wages and has to buy $200 worth of plows each year, so to make a profit he prices his crop at $700 with the $300 above expenses going to his own consumption plus profit. General Harvester also pays $200 in wages, doesn't need much in the way of equipment, so he sells his years' production of plows for $500, with again a $300 profit. The workers spend their whole $400 wages on wheat.

But, at the end of the year, a crisis develops. General Harvester finds that he's only sold to General Mills $200 worth of plows -- the other three fifths of his production is unsold, and he has no profit at all -- not even enough to live on. General Mills is in the same fix. He has sold $400 of wheat, made no profit at all, and has $300 worth still on hand. He at least can eat some of it, but he can't make a profit either.

Multiply this little picture a hundred million times over, with many capitalists and millions of workers and, in a world of only capitalists and workers, profit is simply impossible. Capitalists invest their capital in the means of production -- the factories that make goods, the railroads that carry them, in raw materials, and in the means of consumption -- the goods needed to support a work force --housing, clothing, food, and so on. These means of consumption are not bought directly but are instead paid out in the form of wages to workers, who then buy these means of consumption. In the process of production, when the workers work in the factories and in the essential services like energy and transportation that support of production, what gets produced is, first of all, those goods necessary to replace those used up in the production process. This is first, the means of consumption that have been consumed; second, the raw materials -- iron ore, coal, oil ; and third; the means of production that have become worn out and must be replaced -- worn out machinery, dilapidated plants. But, in a functioning "normal" capitalist economy, something more had been produced -- a surplus of goods, both means of production and means of consumption that can go into expanding production, building new plants, hiring more workers. Once the entire product has been sold, the cost of the product is spent on replacing the means of consumption and production that have been used up, and the difference -- the money equivalent of the surplus-- is profit. This profit, together with the old capitals is reconverted into goods to start another, expanded cycle of production.

The problem is: how can this surplus be sold? Workers can buy the means of consumption , the capitalists themselves buy the replacement raw materials and means of production, but who buys the surplus? Workers have no income except the wages they get from capitals and how can capitalists make a profit from the money they themselves lay out? Nor can the capitalists make a profit by selling to themselves. Sure, one capitalist can gain at the expense of another's losses but there can be no overall net profit. Yet in the real world, in general there is a net profit for all capitals. Who, then, buys the surplus -- where does the profit come from?

The solution, as the socialist economist and revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg first pointed out in 1911, elaborating on earlier ideas of Karl Marx, is that capitalism has never existed in a world of only employers and wage earners. At all times, including today, the largest portion of the world's population is neither -- they are peasants, petty agricultural producers who are not employees, but neither are they capitalists because they don't accumulate capital -- they sell crops just to support themselves and their families. It is this external market that is crucial for the very survival of capitalism.

Taking capitalists as a whole, capital can only cover its costs by selling to itself (capitalists selling to capitalists) or to workers. Ford can sell cars at a profit to GM workers and GM can sell cars at a profit to Ford workers. But collectively, capitalists as a whole can only make a profit to the extent they sell to non-capitalist producers --farmers and peasants, in whatever country they are and other non-capitalist producers, such as state-owned factories. This is, as we'll see, the key to understand the development of capitalism and to the present crises.

Why is selling to non-capitalist producers different? Because they can pay not just with money they receive from capitalists, when they sell their agricultural products, but they have independent sources of wealth -- they possess means of production, their land (or today, state-owned enterprises have their factories). Initially, as capital first penetrated non capitalist areas, it absorbed the previously accumulated wealth of other societies -- of feudal Europe, of India, of China, vast countries that had for centuries settled affairs in gold and money. Second, when this source is exhausted, capital can loan money to these peasants and their governments -- with the collateral being their land and the mineral wealth beneath it. Of course capitalists can lend to workers. But such loans are limited because workers possess and can use as collateral only that which they've bought with capitalist wages -- houses, cars and so on. Nothing can be produced with them, they can just be resold. With non-capitalist layers, however, the land itself is the collateral, and as peasant families, or entire nations default on such loans, capital forecloses, seizing in the process vast real wealth, vast means of producing new wealth.

In our imaginary island example, if we had a population of ten or twenty natives originally living on the island, they first buy surplus plows and grain with their own, anciently accumulated, gold and silver, then they borrow money from General Mills and General Harvester, putting up their land as collateral. When they cannot pay back the loans, their land is lost and they go to work for the capitalists. The capitalists have realized their profit -- that is, sold their surplus -- and have, in return, the islanders' gold and silver and their land. Mills and Harvester then look for the next island.

What is crucial to their process is not just an external, non capitalist market, but an expanding non-capitalist market. Capital only exists to the extent that it grows -- makes a profit. Thus the capitalists have appropriated for themselves, after paying out wages and other costs of production, part of the product that the workers produced --this is the essence of capitalist exploitation of labor. If that fraction of goods is, say 10% of the costs, the initially invested capital, then the rate of profit is 10%. But this means, in turn, that in the next cycle of production, capital is 10% more, production is 10% larger and profit is 10% larger.

So, since the scale of profit realized is limited by sales to the external market, that market must grow and grow at a rate determined by the rate of profit. In rough terms an 10% annual rate of profit means a growth in capital, profit and everything else by 10% a year and thus an increase in the external market by 10% a year.

This necessity for the rapid expansion of the external market has driven the history of capitalism. For expanding the external market means seeking ever new populations of non-capitalist producers. This is because it is not possible to increase the value sold to any given set of peasants without limit. Initial reserves of money, accumulated over long periods of time in non capitalist economies, are soon exhausted. The peasant can raise new income by selling his own surplus product -- food or other agricultural raw materials either to the capitalists, or to other non-capitalist layers -- local townspeople for example. But the peasant's money income is also strictly limited. Even if he is able, with the help of new tools and technologies, to increase productivity and thus the volume of goods he sells, a process that takes time, he will not similarly increase the money value of his product. For as peasants produce more goods, the price of the goods declines. Thus, for example, the volume of grain produced world wide increased by 2.4 times over the past 40 years. Yet the total market value of the grain crop, in constant dollars, has actually fallen by 11%.

Under capitalism, over the long run, the prices of given types of goods are roughly proportional to the labor time (of average productivity) expended in making them. So over the long run, the total value produced by a given population of peasants is limited by the labor time available to them.

The only way to increase this value is for the peasants to increase their productivity over the world average, which is possible for individual groups of peasants, but not for peasants as a whole, since they represent the bulk of the world population.

Thus increasing the external market means increasing the number of peasants in the external market, and increasing it far more rapidly than the slow natural growth of population. Capitalism, in its insatiable drive for markets, forcibly opens to trade nation after nation, through war, revolutions and imperialism. The need for these new markets provides capitalism with its dynamic. And capitalism accelerates this process because it is continually eating away at these new markets. As peasants become progressively indebted, as their land is foreclosed, they are proletarianized, converted to part of the wage work force. So capitalism must be continuously replacing these peasants who are absorbed into the wage earning population, as well as finding new markets for the expansion of capital and production.

But at the same time, this very process of ransacking the earth for new markets provides capitalism with its other needs. By generating an ever growing supply of impoverished peasants forced from the land, capitalism forms a reserve army of labor, which applies downward pressure on all wages, at the same time allowing the work force, in boom times, to grow far faster than natural reproduction. This process is still at work today, as for example, Chinese peasants are driven off the land into factories to make goods for the world market at a fraction of the wages earned in the advanced countries, but in direct competition with their products. Without such a reserve army of unemployed, desperate for work, shortages of labor would have developed as capitalism expanded, forcing wages upwards and profits down.

Second, and equally important, the progressive incorporation of more and more of the earth into the capitalism market provides capital with the raw materials needed for production. Not only was the linen of English textile mills sold to Indian peasants, the cotton for it came from non-capitalist production: the slave plantations of the American South, and later the feudal plantations of Egypt. As more and more land is encumbered with capitalist debt, and subsequently foreclosed, the vast mineral wealth underneath falls into the hands of world capital.

Thus the process of expansion of the external market, the progressive incorporation of non-capitalist layers into that market, is essential for capitalism. And it is at the same time, the Achilles heel that dooms capitalism. For it is impossible to continuously expand the external market. At one point, a point reached some time ago, the entire world was incorporated into the capitalist market and it could no longer expand. At that point capitalism itself could no longer expand and entered a prolonged crisis.

SCIENCE

The Belief Engine [By James Alcock]

The following beliefs are strongly held by large numbers of people. Each of them has been hotly disputed by others:

Through hypnosis, one can access past lives.

Horoscopes provide useful information about the future.

Spiritual healing sometimes succeeds where conventional medicine fails.

A widespread, transgenerational Satanic conspiracy is afoot in society.

Certain gifted people have been able to use their psychic powers to help police solve crimes.

We can sometimes communicate with others via mental telepathy.

Some people have been abducted by UFOs and then returned to earth.

Elvis lives.

Vitamin C can ward off or cure the common cold.

Immigrants are stealing our jobs.

Certain racial groups are intellectually inferior.

Certain racial groups are athletically superior, at least in some specific sports.

Crime and violence are linked to the breakdown of the traditional family.

North Korea’s developing nuclear capability poses a threat to world peace.

Despite high confidence on the part of both believers and disbelievers, in most instances, neither side has much — if any — objective evidence to back its position. Some of these beliefs, such as telepathy and astrology, stand in contradiction to the current scientific worldview and are therefore considered by many scientists to be “irrational.” Others are not at all inconsistent with science, and whether or not they are based in fact, no one would consider them to be irrational.

Nineteenth-century rationalists predicted that superstition and irrationality would be defeated by universal education. However, this has not happened. High literacy rates and universal education have done little to decrease such belief, and poll after poll indicates that a large majority of the public believe in the reality of “occult” or “paranormal” or “supernatural” phenomena. Why should this be so? Why is it that in this highly scientific and technological age superstition and irrationality abound?

It is because our brains and nervous systems constitute a belief-generating machine, an engine that produces beliefs without any particular respect for what is real or true and what is not. This belief engine selects information from the environment, shapes it, combines it with information from memory, and produces beliefs that are generally consistent with beliefs already held. This system is as capable of generating fallacious beliefs as it is of generating beliefs that are in line with truth. These beliefs guide future actions and, whether correct or erroneous, they may prove functional for the individual who holds them. Whether or not there is really a Heaven for worthy souls does nothing to detract from the usefulness of such a belief for people who are searching for meaning in life.

Nothing is fundamentally different about what we might think of as “irrational” beliefs — they are generated in the same manner as are other beliefs. We may not have an evidential basis for belief in irrational concepts, but neither do we have such a basis for most of our beliefs. For example, you probably believe that brushing your teeth is good for you, but it is unlikely that you have any evidence to back up this belief, unless you are a dentist. You have been taught this, it makes some sense, and you have never been led to question it.

If we were to conceptualize the brain and nervous system as a belief engine, it would need to comprise several components, each reflecting some basic aspect of belief generation. Among the components, the following units figure importantly:

The Learning Unit

The learning unit is the key to understanding the belief engine. It is tied to the physical architecture of the brain and nervous system; and by its very nature, we are condemned to a virtually automatic process of magical thinking. “Magical thinking” is the interpreting of two closely occurring events as though one caused the other, without any concern for the causal link. For example, if you believe that crossing your fingers brought you good fortune, you have associated the act of finger-crossing with the subsequent welcome event and imputed a causal link between the two.

Our brain and nervous system have evolved over millions of years. It is important to recognize that natural selection does not select directly on the basis of reason or truth; it selects for reproductive success. Nothing in our cerebral apparatus gives any particular status to truth. Consider a rabbit in the tall grass, and grant for a moment a modicum of conscious and logical intellect to it. It detects a rustling in the tall grass, and having in the past learned that this occasionally signals the presence of a hungry fox, the rabbit wonders if there really is a fox this time or if a gust of wind caused the grass to rustle. It awaits more conclusive evidence. Although motivated by a search for truth, that rabbit does not live long. Compare the late rabbit to the rabbit that responds to the rustle with a strong autonomic nervous-system reaction and runs away as fast as it can. It is more likely to live and reproduce. So, seeking truth does not always promote survival, and fleeing on the basis of erroneous belief is not always such a bad thing to do. However, while this avoidance strategy may succeed in the forest, it may be quite dangerous to pursue in the nuclear age.

The learning unit is set up in such a way as to learn very quickly from the association of two significant events — such as touching a hot stove and feeling pain. It is set up so that significant pairings produce a lasting effect, while nonpairings of the same two events are not nearly so influential. If a child were to touch a stove once and be burned, then if the child were to touch it again without being burned, the association between pain and stove would not automatically be unlearned. This basic asymmetry — pairing of two stimuli has an important effect, while presenting the stimuli unpaired (that is, individually) has a much lesser effect — is important for survival.

This asymmetry in learning also underlies much of the error that colors our thinking about events that occur together from time to time. Humans are very poor at accurately judging the relationship between events that only sometimes co-occur. For example, if we think of Uncle Harry, and then he telephones us a few minutes later, this might seem to demand some explanation in terms of telepathy or precognition. However, we can only properly evaluate the co-occurrence of these two events if we also consider the number of times that we thought of Harry and he did not call, or we did not think of him but he called anyway. These latter circumstances — these nonpairings — have little impact on our learning system. Because we are overly influenced by pairings of significant events, we can come to infer an association, and even a causal one, between two events even if there is none. Thus, dreams may correspond with subsequent events only every so often by chance, and yet this pairing may have a dramatic effect on belief. Or we feel a cold coming on, take vitamin C, and then when the cold does not get to be too bad we infer a causal link. The world around us abounds with coincidental occurrences, some of which are meaningful but the vast majority of which are not. This provides a fertile ground for the growth of fallacious beliefs. We readily learn that associations exist between events, even when they do not. We are often led by co-occurring events to infer that the one that occurred first somehow caused the one that succeeded it.

We are all even more prone to error when rare or emotionally laden events are involved. We are always looking for causal explanations, and we tend to infer causality even when none exists. You might be puzzled or even distressed if you heard a loud noise in your living room but could find no source for it.

The Critical-Thinking Unit

The critical-thinking unit is the second component of the belief engine, and it is acquired — acquired through experience and explicit education. Because of the nervous-system architecture that I have described, we are born to magical thinking. The infant who smiles just before a breeze causes a mobile above her head to move will smile again and again, as though the smile had magically caused the desired motion of the mobile. We have to labor to overcome such magical predisposition, and we never do so entirely. It is through experience and direct teaching that we come to understand the limits of our immediate magical intuitive interpretations. We are taught common logic by parents and teachers, and since it often serves us well, we use it where it seems appropriate. Indeed, the cultural parallel of this developmental process is the development of the formal method of logic and scientific inquiry. We come to realize that we cannot trust our automatic inferences about co-occurrence and causality.

We learn to use simple tests of reason to evaluate events around us, but we also learn that certain classes of events are not to be subjected to reason but should be accepted on faith. Every society teaches about transcendental things — ghosts, gods, bogeymen, and so on; and here we are often explicitly taught to ignore logic and accept such things on faith or on the basis of other people’s experiences. By the time we are adults, we can respond to an event in either a logical, critical mode or in an experiential, intuitive mode. The events themselves often determine which way we will respond. If I were to tell you that I went home last night and found a cow in my living room, you would be more likely to laugh than to believe me, even though there is certainly nothing impossible about such an event. If, on the other hand, I were to tell you that I went into my living room and was startled by an eerie glow over my late grandfather’s armchair, and that the room went cold, you may be less likely to disbelieve and more likely to perk up your ears and listen to the details, possibly suspending the critical acumen that you would bring to the cow story. Sometimes strong emotion interferes with the application of critical thought. Other times we are cleverly gulled.

Rationality is often at a disadvantage to intuitive thought. The late psychologist Graham Reed spoke of the example of the gambler’s fallacy: Suppose you are observing a roulette wheel. It has come up black ten times in a row, and a powerful intuitive feeling is growing in you that it must soon come up red. It cannot keep coming up black forever. Yet your rational mind tells you that the wheel has no memory, that each outcome is independent of those that preceded. In such a case, the struggle between intuition and rationality is not always won by rationality.

Note that we can switch this critical thinking unit on or off. As I noted earlier, we may switch it off entirely if dealing with religious or other transcendental matters. Sometimes, we deliberately switch it on: “Hold it a minute, let me think this out,” we might say to ourselves when someone tries to extract money from us for an apparently worthy cause.

The Yearning Unit

Learning does not occur in a vacuum. We are not passive receivers of information. We actively seek out information to satisfy our many needs. We may yearn to find meaning in life. We may yearn for a sense of identity. We may yearn for recovery from disease. We may yearn to be in touch with deceased loved ones.

In general we yearn to reduce anxiety. Beliefs, be they correct or false, can assuage these yearnings. Often beliefs that might be categorized as irrational by scientists are the most efficient at reducing these yearnings. Rationality and scientific truth have little to offer for most people as remedies for existential anxiety. However, belief in reincarnation, supernatural intervention, and everlasting life can overcome such anxiety to some extent.

When we are yearning most, when we are in the greatest need, we are even more vulnerable to fallacious beliefs that can serve to satisfy those yearnings.

The Input Unit

Information enters the belief engine sometimes in the form of raw sensory experience and other times in the form of organized, codified information presented through word of mouth, books, or films. We are wonderful pattern detectors, but not all the patterns we detect are meaningful ones. Our perceptual processes work in such a way as to make sense of the environment around us, but they do make sense — perception is not a passive gathering of information but, rather, an active construction of a representation of what is going on in our sensory world. Our perceptual apparatus selects and organizes information from the environment, and this process is subject to many well-known biases that can lead to distorted beliefs. Indeed, we are less likely to be influenced by incoming information if it does not already correspond to deeply held beliefs. Thus, the very spiritual Christian may be quite prepared to see the Virgin Mary; information or perceptual experience that suggests that she has appeared may be more easily accepted without critical scrutiny than it would be by someone who is an atheist. It is similar with regard to experiences that might be considered paranormal in nature.

The Emotional Response Unit

Experiences accompanied by strong emotion may leave an unshakable belief in whatever explanation appealed to the individual at the time. If one is overwhelmed by an apparent case of telepathy, or an ostensible UFO, then later thinking may well be dominated by the awareness that the emotional reaction was intense, leading to the conclusion that something unusual really did happen. And emotion in turn may directly influence both perception and learning. Something may be interpreted as bizarre or unusual because of the emotional responses triggered.

Evidence is accumulating that our emotional responses may be triggered by information from the outside world even before we are consciously aware that something has happened. Take this example, provided by LeDoux (1994) in his recent article in Scientific American (1994, 270, pp. 50-57):

An individual is walking through the woods when she picks up information — either auditory, such as rustling leaves, or visual, such as the sight of a slender curved object on the ground — which triggers a fear response. This information, even before it reaches the cortex, is processed in the amygdala, which arouses the body to an alarm footing. Somewhat later, when the cortex has had enough time to decide whether or not the object really is a snake, this cognitive information processing will either augment the fear response and corresponding evasive behaviour, or will serve to bring that response to a halt.

This is relevant to our understanding of paranormal experience, for very often an emotional experience accompanies the putatively paranormal. A strong coincidence may produce an emotional “zing” that points us toward a paranormal explanation, because normal events would not be expected to produce such emotion.

Our brains are also capable of generating wonderful and fantastic perceptual experiences for which we are rarely prepared. Out-of-body experiences (OBEs), hallucinations, near-death experiences (NDEs), peak experiences — these are all likely to be based, not in some external transcendental reality, but rather in the brain itself. We are not always able to distinguish material originating in the brain from material from the outside world, and thus we can falsely attribute to the external world perceptions and experiences that are created within the brain. We have little training with regard to such experience. As children, we do learn to distrust, for the most part, dreams and nightmares. Our parents and our culture tell us that they are products of our own brains. We are not prepared for more arcane experiences, such as OBEs or hallucinations or NDEs or peak experiences, and may be so unprepared that we are overwhelmed by the emotion and come to see such experience as deeply significant and “real” whether or not it is.

Ray Hyman has always cautioned skeptics not to be surprised should they one day have a very strong emotional experience that seems to cry out for paranormal explanation. Given the ways our brains work, we would expect such experiences from time to time. Unprepared for them, they could become conversion experiences that lead to strong belief. When I was a graduate student, another graduate student who shared my office, and who was equally as skeptical as I was about the paranormal, came to school one day overwhelmed by the realism and clarity of a dream he had had the night before. In it, his uncle in Connecticut had died. It had been a very emotional dream, and was so striking that Jack told me that if his uncle died anytime soon, he would no longer be able to maintain his skepticism about precognition — the dream experience was that powerful. Ten years later, his uncle was still alive, and Jack’s skepticism had survived intact.

The Memory Unit

Through our own experience, we come to believe in the reliability of our memories and in our ability to judge whether a given memory is reliable or not. However, memory is a constructive process rather than a literal rendering of past experience, and memories are subject to serious biases and distortions.

Not only does memory involve itself in the processing of incoming information and the shaping of beliefs; it is itself influenced strongly by current perceptions and beliefs. Yet it is very difficult for an individual to reject the products of his or her own memory process, for memory can seem to be so “real.”

The Environmental Feedback Unit

Beliefs help us to function. They guide our actions and increase or reduce our anxieties. If we operate on the basis of a belief, and if it “works” for us, even though faulty, why would we be inclined to change it? Feedback from the external world reinforces or weakens our beliefs, but since the beliefs themselves influence how that feedback is perceived, beliefs can become very resistant to contrary information and experience. If you really believe that alien abductions occur, then any evidence against that belief can be rationalized away — in terms of conspiracy theories, other people’s ignorance, or whatever.

As mentioned earlier, fallacious beliefs can often be even more functional than those based in truth. For example, Shelley Taylor, in her book Positive Illusions, reports research showing that mildly depressed people are often more realistic about the world than are happy people. Emotionally healthy people live to some extent by erecting false beliefs — illusions — that reduce anxiety and aid well-being, whereas depressed individuals to some degree see the world more accurately. Happy people may underestimate the likelihood of getting cancer or being killed, and may avoid thinking about the ultimate reality of death, while depressed people may be much more accurate with regard to such concerns.

An important way in which to run reality checks on our perceptions and beliefs is to compare them with those of others. If I am the only one who interpreted a strange glow as an apparition, I am more likely to reconsider this interpretation than if several others share the same view. We often seek out people who agree with us, or selectively choose literature supporting our belief. If the majority doubts us, then even if only part of a minority we can collectively work to dispel doubt and find certainty. We can invoke conspiracies and coverups to explain an absence of confirmatory evidence. We may work to inculcate our beliefs in others, especially children. Shared beliefs can promote social solidarity and even a sense of importance for the individual and group.

In Conclusion

Beliefs are generated by the belief engine without any automatic concern for truth. Concern for truth is a higher order acquired cognitive orientation that reflects an underlying philosophy which presupposes an objective reality that is not always perceived by our senses.

The belief engine chugs away, strengthening old beliefs, spewing out new ones, rarely discarding any. We can sometimes see the error or foolishness in other people’s beliefs. It is very difficult to see the same in our own. We believe in all sorts of things, abstract and concrete — in the existence of the solar system, atoms, pizza, and five-star restaurants in Paris. Such beliefs are no different in principle from beliefs in fairies at the end of the garden, in ghosts in some deserted abbey, in werewolves, in satanic conspiracies, in miraculous cures, and so on. Such beliefs are all similar in form, all products of the same process, even though they vary widely in content. They may, however, involve greater or lesser involvement of the critical-thinking and emotional-response units.

Critical thinking, logic, reason, science — these are all terms that apply in one way or another to the deliberate attempt to ferret out truth from the tangle of intuition, distorted perception, and fallible memory. The true critical thinker accepts what few people ever accept — that one cannot routinely trust perceptions and memories. Figments of our imagination and reflections of our emotional needs can often interfere with or supplant the perception of truth and reality. Through teaching and encouraging critical thought our society will move away from irrationality, but we will never succeed in completely abandoning irrational tendencies, again because of the basic nature of the belief engine.

Experience is often a poor guide to reality. Skepticism helps us to question our experience and to avoid being too readily led to believe what is not so. We should try to remember the words of the late P. J. Bailey (in Festus: A Country Town): “Where doubt, there truth is — ‘tis her shadow.”    

Betrayers of the Truth ― Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science [By W. Broad and N. Wade]   

"Through experimental science we have been able to learn all these facts about the natural world, triumphing over darkness and ignorance to classify the stars and to estimate their masses, composition, distances, and velocities; to classify living species and to unravel their genetic relations. . . . These great accomplishments of experimental science were achieved by men .. . [who] had in common only a few things: they were honest and actually made the observations they recorded, and they published the results of their work in a form permitting others to duplicate the experiment or observation."

 So says The Berkeley Physics Course, an influential text that has been used across the United States to impress college students with both the substance and the tradition of modern physics.¹ As with nonscientific systems of belief, however, the elements insisted on most strongly are often those with the least factual reliability. The great scientists of the past were not all so honest and they did not always obtain the experimental results they reported.

・Claudius Ptolemy, known as "the greatest astronomer of antiquity," did most of his observing not at night on the coast of Egypt but during the day, in the great library at Alexandria, where he appropriated the work of a Greek astronomer and proceeded to call it his own.

・Galileo Galilei is often hailed as the founder of modern scientific method because of his insistence that experiment, not the works of Aristotle, should be the arbiter of truth. But colleagues of the seventeenth-century Italian physicist had difficulty reproducing his results and doubted he did certain experiments.

・Isaac Newton, the boy genius who formulated the laws of gravitation, relied in his magnum opus on an unseemly fudge factor in order to make the predictive power of his work seem much greater than it was.

・John Dalton, the great nineteenth-century chemist who discovered the laws of chemical combination and proved the existence of different types of atoms, published elegant results that no present-day chemist has been able to repeat.

・Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who founded the science of genetics, published papers on his work with peas in which the statistics are too good to be true.

・The American physicist Robert Millikan won the Nobel prize for being the first to measure the electric charge of an electron. But Millikan extensively misrepresented his work in order to make his experimental results seem more convincing than was in fact the case.

 Experimental science is founded on a paradox. It purports to make objectively ascertainable fact the criterion of truth. But what gives science its intellectual delight is not dull facts but the ideas and theories that make sense of the facts. When textbooks appeal to the primacy of fact, there is an element of rhetoric in the argument. Finding facts in actuality is less rewarded than developing a theory or law that explains the facts, and herein lies an enticement. In making sense out of the unruly substance of nature, and in trying to get there first, a scientist is sometimes tempted to play fast and loose with the facts in order to make a theory look more compelling than it really is.

 It is difficult for a nonscientist to appreciate the overriding importance to the researcher of priority of discovery. Credit in science goes only for originality, for being the first to discover something. With rare exceptions, there are no rewards for being second. Discovery without priority is a bitter fruit. In the clash of rival claims and competing theories, a scientist often takes active measures to ensure that his ideas are noticed, and that it is under his name that a new finding is recognized.

  The desire to win credit, to gain the respect of one's peers, is a powerful motive for almost all scientists. From the earliest days of science, the thirst for recognition has brought with it the temptation to "improve" a little on the truth, or even to invent data out of whole cloth, in order to make a theory prevail.

  Claudius Ptolemy, who lived during the second century A.D. in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the most influential scientists in history. His synthesis of early astronomical ideas resulted in a system for predicting the positions of the planets. The central assumption of the Ptolemaic system was that the earth was at rest and that the sun and other planets revolved around it in essentially circular orbits.

  For nearly 1,500 years, far longer than Newton or Einstein have held sway, Ptolemy's ideas shaped man's view of the structure of the universe. The Ptolemaic system prevailed without challenge throughout the Dark Ages, from the early years of the Roman empire until the late Renaissance. Arab philosophers, the guardians of Greek science during the Middle Ages, dubbed Ptolemy's writing the Almagest, from the Greek word for "greatest." He came to be regarded as the preeminent astronomer of the ancient world. It was not until Copernicus in 1543 put the sun instead of the earth at the center of the planetary system that Ptolemy's 1,500-year reign as the king of astronomers began to come to an end. Yet this titan of the heavens had feet of clay.

  In the nineteenth century, astronomers re-examining Ptolemy's original data began to notice some curious features. Back calculations from the present-day position of the planets showed that many of Ptolemy's observations were wrong. The errors were gross even by the standards of ancient astronomy. Dennis Rawlins, an astronomer at the University of California, San Diego, believes from internal evidence that Ptolemy did not make the observations himself, as he claims to have done, but lifted them wholesale from the work of an earlier astronomer, Hipparchus of Rhodes, who compiled one of the best star catalogs of ancient times.

 The island of Rhodes, where Hipparchus made his observations, is five degrees of latitude north of Alexandria. Naturally there is a five-degree band of southern stars that can be seen from Alexandria but not from Rhodes. Not one of the 1,025 stars listed in Ptolemy's catalog comes from this five-degree band. Also, every example given in the Almagest of how to work out spherical astronomy problems is given for a latitude the same as that of Rhodes. "If one didn't know better," says Rawlins in an ironic comment, "one might suspect (as did even Theon of Alexandria, Ptolemy's most placid, tireless admirer in the 4th century) that Ptolemy took the examples from Hipparchus."²

  Not only questions of theft hang over the head of antiquity's great astronomer. Ptolemy is also accused of a more modern scientific crime―that of having derived the data that he cites to support his theory from the theory itself instead of from nature. His chief accuser is Robert Newton, a member of the applied physics laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. In his book, The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy, Newton has assiduously collected scores, of instances in which Ptolemy's reported result is almost identical with what the Alexandrian sage wanted to prove and greatly different from what he should have observed.³ A striking example is that Ptolemy claimed he had observed an autumnal equinox at 2 P.M. on September 25, A.D. 132. He stressed that he had measured the phenomenon "with the greatest care." But, says Newton, back calculation from modern tables shows that an observer in Alexandria should have seen the equinox at 9:54 A.M. on September 24, more than a day earlier.

 In giving his date for the equinox, Ptolemy was trying to show the accuracy of the length of the year as determined by Hipparchus. Hipparchus too had measured an autumnal equinox, 278 years earlier, on September 27, 146 BC.. Newton shows that if 278 times Hipparchus' estimate of a year (which is excellent but not quite right) is added to the Hipparchus equinox, then the time arrived at is within minutes of the time reported by Ptolemy. In other words, Ptolemy must have worked backward from the result he was trying to prove instead of making an independent observation.

 Defenders of Ptolemy, such as historian Owen Gingerich, claim that modern scholars are being unfair in applying contemporary standards of scientific procedure to Ptolemy. Yet even Gingerich, who calls Ptolemy "the greatest astronomer of antiquity," concedes that the Almagest contains "some remarkably fishy numbers."⁴ But he insists that Ptolemy chose merely to publish the data that best supported his theories and was innocent of any intent to deceive. Whatever Ptolemy's intent, his borrowing of Hipparchus' work won him nearly two millennia of glory before being detected.

  The feature that supposedly distinguishes science from other kinds of knowledge is its reliance on empirical evidence, on testing ideas against the facts in nature. But Ptolemy was not the only scientist to neglect an observer's duties; even Galileo, a founding father of modern empiricism, is suspected of reporting experiments that could not have been performed with the results he claims.

  Galileo Galilei is perhaps best remembered as the patient investigator who dropped stones from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The story is probably apocryphal but it captures the quality that allegedly set Galileo apart from his medieval contemporaries―his inclination to search for answers in nature, not in the works of Aristotle. Galileo was persecuted by the Church for his defense of the Copernican theory and his trial is held up by today's scientific textbooks as a heroic object lesson in the battle of reason against superstition. Such textbooks naturally tend to stress Galileo's empiricism, in contrast to his opponents' dogmatism. "After Galileo," says one, "the ultimate proof of a theory would be the evidence of the real world."⁵ The textbook approvingly cites how Galileo painstakingly tested his theory of falling bodies by measuring the time it took for a brass ball to roll down a groove in a long board: in "experiments near a hundred times repeated," Galileo found that the times agreed with his law, with no differences "worth mentioning."

 According to historian I. Bernard Cohen, however, Galileo's conclusion "only shows how firmly he had made up his mind beforehand, for the rough conditions of the experiment would never have yielded an exact law. Actually the discrepancies were so great that a contemporary worker, Pre Mersenne, could not reproduce the results described by Galileo, and even doubted that he had ever made the experiment."⁶ In all likelihood, Galileo was relying not merely on his experimental skill but on his exquisite talents as a propagandist.⁷

  Galileo liked to perform "thought experiments," imagining an outcome rather than observing it. In his Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World, in which Galileo describes the motion of a ball dropped from the mast of a moving ship, the Aristotelian, Simplicio, asks whether Galileo made the experiment himself. "No," Galileo replied, "and I do not need it, as without any experience I can affirm that it is so, because it cannot be otherwise."

  The textbooks' portrayal of Galileo as a meticulous experimentalist has been reinforced by scholars. According to one translation of his works, Galileo reportedly said: "There is in nature perhaps nothing older than motion, concerning which the books written by philosophers are neither few nor small. Nevertheless, I have discovered by experiment some properties of it which are worth knowing and which have not hitherto been observed or demonstrated."⁸ The words "by experiment" do not appear in the original Italian; they have been added by the translator, who evidently had strong feelings on how Galileo should have proceeded.

  Unlike the textbook writers, some historians, such as Alexandre Koyre, have seen Galileo as an idealist rather than an experimental physicist; as a man who used argument and rhetoric to persuade others of the truth of his theories.⁹ With Galileo, the desire to make his ideas prevail apparently led him to report experiments that could not have been performed exactly as described. Thus an ambiguous attitude toward data was present from the very beginning of Western experimental science. On the one hand, experimental data was upheld as the ultimate arbiter of truth; on the other hand, fact was subordinated to theory when necessary and even, if it didn't fit, distorted. The Renaissance saw the flowering of Western experimental science, but in Galileo, the propensity to manipulate fact was the worm in the bud.

 Both sides of this ambiguous attitude to data reached full expression in the work of Isaac Newton. The founder of physics and perhaps the greatest scientist in history, Newton in his Principia of 1687 established the goals, methods, and boundaries of modern science. Yet this exemplar of the scientific method was not above bolstering his case with false data when the real results failed to win acceptance for his theories. The Principia met with a certain resistance on the Continent, especially in Germany where opposition was fomented by Newton's rival Leibniz, whose system of philosophy was at odds with Newton's theory of universal gravitation. To make the Principia more persuasive, Newton in later editions of his work improved the accuracy of certain supporting measurements. According to historian Richard S. Westfall, Newton "adjusted" his calculations on the velocity of sound and on the precession of the equinoxes, and altered the correlation of a variable in his theory of gravitation so that it would agree precisely with theory. In the final edition of his opus, Newton pointed to a precision of better than 1 part in 1,000, boldly claiming accuracies that previously had been observed only in the field of astronomy. The fudge factor, says Westfall, was "manipulated with unparalleled skill by the unsmiling Newton."

 The hiatus between lofty principle and low practice could not be more striking. As amazing as it is that a figure of Newton's stature should stoop to falsification, even more surprising is that none of his contemporaries realized the full extent of his fraud. Using his contrived data as a spectacular rhetorical weapon, Newton overwhelmed even the skeptics with the rightness of his ideas. More than 250 years passed before the manipulation was completely revealed. As Westfall comments, "Having proposed exact correlation as the criterion of truth, [Newton] took care to see that exact correlation was presented, whether or not it was properly achieved. Not the least part of the Principia's persuasiveness was its deliberate pretense to a degree of precision quite beyond its legitimate claim. If the Principia established the quantitative pattern of modern science, it equally suggested a less sublime truth―that no one can manipulate the fudge factor so effectively as the master mathematician himself."¹⁰

  Newton's willingness to resort to sleight of hand is evident in more than just falsification of data. He used his position as president of the Royal Society, England's premier scientific club, to wage his battle with Leibniz over who first invented calculus. What was shameful about Newton's behavior was the hypocrisy with which he paid lip service to fair procedure but followed the very opposite course." It would be an iniquitous judge "who would admit anyone as a witness in his own cause," announced the preface of a Royal Society report of 1712 which examined the question of priority in calculus. Ostensibly the work of a committee of impartial scientists, the report was a complete vindication of Newton's claims and even accused Leibniz of plagiary. In fact the whole report, sanctimonious preface included, had been written by Newton himself. Historians now believe that Leibniz' invention of calculus was made independently of Newton.

 Newton having set the standards, it is perhaps not so surprising to find other scientists using the truth to support their own theories in ways that make a mockery of the scientific method. Historians have raised substantial questions about the experiments of John Dalton, a towering figure in early nineteenth-century chemistry and a founder of the atomic theory of matter. From his belief that each element is composed of its own kind of atoms, Dalton developed his law of simple multiple proportions. The law holds that when two elements form a chemical. compound they do so in fixed proportions because the atoms of one element combine with a precise whole number-one, two, or more-of the atoms of the other element. Dalton supplied major evidence for this law from his study of the oxides of nitrogen, stating that oxygen would combine with a given amount of nitrogen only in certain fixed ratios.

 Modern inquiry raises considerable doubts about Dalton's data. For one thing, historians are now sure that Dalton first speculated on the law and then made experiments in order to prove it.¹² For another, he seems to have selected his data, publishing only the "best" results, in other words those that supported his theory. His best results are distinctly hard to duplicate. "From my own experiments I am convinced that it is almost impossible to get these simple ratios in mixing nitric oxide and air over water," says historian J. R. Partington.¹³

 Scientists' cavalier attitude toward data in the nineteenth century was sufficiently widespread that in 1830 the phenomenon was described in a treatise by Charles Babbage, inventor of a calculating machine that was the forerunner of the computer. In his book Reflections on the Decline o f Science in England, Babbage even categorized the different types of fraud that were prevalent.,, "Trimming," he wrote, "consists of clipping off little bits and there from those observations which differ most in excess from the mean, and in sticking them on to those which are too small." Though not approving of the practice, Babbage found that at times it might be less reprehensible than other types of fraud. "The reason of this is, that the average given by the observations of the trimmer is the same, whether they are trimmed or untrimmed. His object is to gain a reputation for extreme accuracy in making observations; but from respect for truth, or from prudent foresight, he does not distort the position of the fact he gets from nature."

Worse than trimming, in Babbage's view, was what he described as "cooking," a practice known today as selective reporting. "Cooking is an art of various forms," wrote Babbage, "the object of which is to give ordinary observations the appearance and character of those of the highest degree of accuracy. One of its numerous processes is to make multitudes of observations, and out of these to select those only which agree, or very nearly agree. If a hundred observations are made, the cook must be very unlucky if he cannot pick out fifteen or twenty which will do for serving up."

Most pernicious of all, wrote Babbage, is the scientist who pulls numbers out of thin air. "The forger is one who, wishing to acquire a reputation for science, records observations which he has never made. . . . Fortunately instances of the occurrence of forging are rare."

As the number of scientists increased throughout the nineteenth century, new varieties of deception came into being. Out of competitive zeal and the battle for scientific glory grew an altogether novel scientific sin, that of omitting to mention similar work that had preceded the unveiling of a new theory. Because of the importance of originality in science, tradition requires that a scientist acknowledge in his publications those whose work in the field preceded his. The mere absence of such acknowledgment constitutes a claim for originality. But even Charles Darwin, author of the theory of evolution, was accused of failing to give adequate acknowledgment to previous researchers.

According to anthropologist Loren Eiseley, Darwin appropriated the work of Edward Blyth, a little-known British zoologist who wrote on natural selection and evolution in two papers published in 1835 and 1837. Eiseley points to similarities in phrasing, the use of rare words, and the choice of examples. While Darwin in his opus quotes Blyth on a few points, notes Eiseley, he does not cite the papers that deal directly with natural selection, even though it is clear he read them.¹⁵ The thesis has been disputed by paleontologist Stephen J. Gould.¹⁶ But Eiseley is not the only critic of Darwin's acknowledgment practices. He was accused by a contemporary, the acerbic man of letters Samuel Butler, of passing over in silence those who had developed similar ideas. Indeed, when Darwin's On the Origin of Species first appeared in 1859, he made little mention of predecessors. Later, in an 1861 “historical sketch" added to the third edition of the Origin, he declineated some of the previous work, but still gave few details.Under continued attack, he added to the historical sketch in three subsequent editions. It was still not enough to satisfy all his critics. In 1879, Butler published a book entitled Evolution Old and New in which he accused Darwin of slighting the evolutionary speculations of Buffon, Lamarck, and Darwin's own grandfather Erasmus. Remarked Darwin's son Francis: "The affair gave my father much pain, but the warm sympathy of those whose opinions he respected soon helped him to let it pass into well-merited oblivion."¹⁷

  A champion of Darwin's evolutionary cause during the late nineteenth century, Thomas Henry Huxley, made a remark in a letter to a friend that well sums up the complexities in the struggle for recognition.¹⁸ "You have no idea of the intrigues that go on in this blessed world of science. Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity, though it should be. Merit alone is very little good; it must be backed by tact and knowledge of the world to do very much." Moreover, as Darwin himself admitted, the sheer approbation of his peers was not an irrelevant factor.¹⁹ "I wish I could set less value on the bauble fame, either present or posthumous, than I do, but not, I think, to any extreme degree." Though Eiseley's charges of theft are undoubtedly overstated, it is clear that Darwin was laggard in giving credit to earlier authors of theories of evolution.

 More serious than a mere breach of scientific etiquette is the charge raised against that other pillar of modern biology, the Abbé Gregor Mendel. By breeding plants and noting that certain traits were inherited in a discrete fashion, Mendel discovered the existence of what are now called genes. His analysis of inheritance in peas allowed him to identify what he called dominant and recessive characters, and the proportions in which these would be expected to appear in the offspring. The elegance of his insights, culled after many years of tedious experiment, earned Mendel a reputation in the twentieth century as the founder of the science of genetics.

 The extreme precision of his data, however, led the eminent statistician Ronald A. Fisher in 1936 to closely examine Mendel's methods.²⁰ The results were too good. Fisher concluded that something other than hard work must have been involved. "The data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel's expectations," wrote Fisher. He politely concluded that Mendel could not have "adjusted" the outcome himself but must have been "deceived by some assistant who knew too well what was expected." Geneticists who later looked at the problem were not so kind, deciding that Mendel must have selected data in order to make the best case. "The impression that one gets from Mendel's paper itself and from Fisher's study of it," wrote one historian of genetics, "is that Mendel had the theory in mind when he made the experiments. He may even have deduced the rules from a particulate view of heredity which he had reached before beginning work with peas."²¹ In 1966 geneticist Sewall Wright, in a brief but often quoted analysis, suggested that Mendel's only fault was an innocent tendency to err in favor of the expected results when making his tallies of peas with different traits: "I am afraid that it must be concluded that he made occasional subconscious errors in favor of expectation," concludes Wright.²²

 Wright's exculpation of the father of modern genetics did not win universal conviction. "Another explanation would be that Mendel performed one or two more experiments and reported only those results that agreed with his expectation," wrote B. L. van der Waerden in 1968. "Such a selection would, of course, produce a bias toward the expected values." But van der Waerden apparently saw nothing wrong with such methods: "I feel many perfectly honest scientists would tend to follow such a procedure. As soon as one has a number of results clearly confirming a new theory, one would publish these results, leaving aside doubtful cases."²³

  Academics may debate the precise nature of Mendel's misdeeds, but horticulturists have long since arrived at a verdict, if the following anonymous comment is anything to go by.²⁴ Entitled "Peas on Earth," it appeared in a professional journal: "In the beginning there was Mendel, thinking his lonely thoughts alone. And he said: `Let there be peas,' and there were peas and it was good. And he put the peas in the garden saying unto them `Increase and multiply, segregate and assort yourselves independently,' and they did and it was good. And now it came to pass that when Mendel gathered up his peas, he divided them into round and wrinkled, and called the round dominant and the wrinkled recessive, and it was good. But now Mendel saw that there were 450 round peas and 102 wrinkled ones; this was not good. For the law stateth that there should be only 3 round for every wrinkled. And Mendel said unto himself 'Gott in Himmel, an enemy has done this, he has sown bad peas in my garden under the cover of night.' And Mendel smote the table in righteous wrath, saying `Depart from me, you cursed and evil peas, into the outer darkness where thou shalt be devoured by the rats and mice,' and lo it was done and there remained 300 round peas and 100 wrinkled peas, and it was good. It was very, very good. And Mendel published."

 The debate over whether Mendel consciously or unwittingly improved upon his results cannot be resolved with certainty because many of his raw data do not exist. With twentieth-century scientists, it is more often possible to compare their published work with the raw material on which it was based. The comparison is necessary because it often reveals serious discrepancies between appearance and reality in the laboratory. As biologist Peter Medawar observes: "It is no use looking to scientific `papers,' for they not merely conceal but actively misrepresent the reasoning that goes into the work they describe. . . . Only unstudied evidence will do―and that means listening at a keyhole."²⁵

 Consider the case of Robert A. Millikan, a U.S. physicist who won the Nobel prize in 1923 for determining the electric charge on the electron. He became the most famous American scientist of his day, winning sixteen prizes and twenty honorary degrees before his death in 1953. In addition he was an adviser to Presidents Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A careful study of Millikan's notebooks has brought to light some bizarre procedures in the methods by which Millikan climbed to scientific fame and glory.

 As an unknown professor at the University of Chicago, Millikan published his first measurements of e, the electronic charge, in 1910. The measurements, which depended on introducing droplets of liquid into an electric field and noting the strength of field necessary to keep them suspended, were difficult to make and subject to considerable variation. In strict accordance with the ethos that demands full disclosure of data, Millikan used stars to grade the quality of his thirty-eight measurements from "best" to "fair," and noted that he had discarded seven entirely.

  The candor did not continue for long. Millikan's rival in measuring electric charge, Felix Ehrenhaft of the University of Vienna, Austria, immediately showed how the variability in Millikan's published measurements in fact supported Ehrenhaft's belief in the existence of subelectrons carrying fractional electronic charges. Battle was joined between Millikan and Ehrenhaft, and the question of subelectrons was discussed around the scientific world by leading physicists such as Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Erwin Schrodinger.

 To rebut Ehrenhaft, Millikan published an article in 1913 full of new and more accurate results favoring a single charge for the electron. He emphasized, in italics, that "this is not a selected group of drops but represents all of the drops experimented upon during 60 consecutive days."

 On the face of it, Millikan had achieved a brilliant rejoinder to Ehrenhaft and had proved beyond a doubt the correctness of his measure of the electron charge―all through the sheer power of scientific precision. However, a look through Medawar's keyhole shows a quite different situation. Harvard historian Gerald Holton went back to the original notebooks on which Millikan based his 1913 paper and found major gaps in the reporting of data.²⁶ Despite his specific assurance to the contrary, Millikan had selected only his best data for publication. The raw observations in his notebooks are individually annotated with private comments such as "beauty. publish this surely, beautiful!" and "very low, something wrong." The 58 observations presented in his 1913 article were in fact selected from a total of 140. Even if  observations are counted only after February 13, 1912, the date that the first published observation was taken, there are still 49 drops that have been excluded. ²⁷

Millikan had no need to worry that his deceit would be exposed, for, as Holton notes, the "notebooks belonged to the realm of private science. . . . Therefore he evaluated his data .. . guided both by a theory about the nature of electric charge and by a sense of the quality or weight of the particular run. It is exactly what he had done in his first major paper, before he had learned not to assign stars to data in public."

   Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Ehrenhaft and his colleagues assiduously published readings, good, bad, and indifferent. The picture that emerged from their work did not support the notion of a single, indivisible electronic charge. This view was contrary to prevailing theory at the time and, as Holton notes, "from Ehrenhaft's point of view it was, for just this reason, to be regarded as an exciting opportunity and challenge. In Millikan's terms, on the contrary, such an interpretation of the raw readings would force one to turn one's back on a basic fact of nature―the integral character of e―which clearly beckoned."

   For Millikan, the battle ended in a Nobel prize (which also cited his work on the photoelectric effect); for Ehrenhaft, in disillusionment and eventually a broken spirit. But Ehrenhaft, who had the more accurate equipment and made better measurements than Millikan, may yet be vindicated. Physicists at Stanford University using a similar methodology have recently found evidence of a kind of subelectronic charge.²⁸

   The example of Millikan and the other adepts of science who cut corners in order to make their theories prevail contains some alarming implications. Scientific history by its nature tends to record only the deeds of those few who have successfully contributed to knowledge and to ignore the many failures. If even history's most successful scientists resort to misrepresenting their findings in various ways, how extensive may have been the deceits of those whose work is now rightly forgotten?

   History shows that deceit in the annals of science is more common than is often assumed. Those who improved upon their data to make them more persuasive to others doubtless persuaded themselves that they were lying only in order to make the truth prevail. But almost invariably the real motive for the various misrepresentations in the history of research seems to arise less from a concern for truth than from personal ambition and the pursuit, as Darwin put it, of "the bauble fame." Newton wanted to persuade the skeptics of his ideas in France and Germany. Millikan misreported data in order to defeat a rival, not to make his work mirror more perfectly an ideal of scientific precision.

  The twentieth century has seen the development of science from a hobby to a career become almost complete. Galileo was supported in grand style by the Duke of Tuscany. Charles Darwin, born into the well-to-do Darwin and Wedgwood clans, never had to worry about making money from his scientific speculations. Gregor Mendel entered the Augustinian monastery in Brno where he was able to pursue his studies in complete freedom from financial worries. In the twentieth century, the cost of buying instruments and hiring technicians has put science almost entirely out of the amateur's reach. The tradition that kept curiosity about nature divorced from the generation of personal income has been left far behind. Almost all scientists nowadays pursue science as a career. Their vocation is also the source of their salary. Whether supported by government or industry, they work within a career structure that offers rewards for tangible, often short-term, success. Few scientists today can leave it to posterity to judge their work; their universities may deny them tenure, and the flow of grants and contracts from the federal government is likely to dry up quite quickly, unless evidence of immediate and continuing success is forthcoming.

 If the luminaries of scientific history would on occasion misrepresent their data for the personal vindication of seeing their ideas prevail, the temptations must be all the greater for contemporary scientists. Not only personal justification but also professional rewards depend on winning acceptance for an idea or theory or technique. Often an extra measure of acceptance can be won by minor misrepresentations. "Tidying up" data, making results seem just a little more clear-cut, selecting only the "best" data for publication-all these seemingly excusable adjustments may help toward getting an article published, making a name for oneself, being asked to join a journal's editorial board, securing the next government grant, or winning a prestigious prize.

 In short, careerist pressures are intense and unremitting. Many scientists, no doubt, refuse to let their work be distorted by them. Yet for those who do, the rewards for even deceitfully gained success are considerable and the chances of apprehension negligible. The temptations of careerism, and the almost total absence of credible deterrents to those who would cheat the system, are graphically demonstrated in the meteoric career of that uniquely twentieth-century scientist Elias Alsabti.

Notes

CHAPTER 2

DECEIT IN HISTORY

1. C. Kittel, W. D. Knight, M. A. Ruderman, The Berkeley Physics Course, Vol. 1, Mechanics (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965).

This passage, together with an interesting analysis of the scientific textbook writers' use of history, is quoted in an article by Stephen G. Brush, "Should the History of Science Be Rated X?" Science, 183, 1164-1172, 1974.

2. Dennis Rawlins, "The Unexpurgated Almajest: The Secret Life of the Greatest Astronomer of Antiquity," Journal for the History of Astronomy, in press.

3. Robert R. Newton, The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy (Johns Hopkins     University Press, Baltimore, 1977). For a summary of the argument see Nicholas Wade, "Scandal in the Heavens: Renowned Astronomer Accused of Fraud," Science, 198, 707-709, 1977.

4. Owen Gingerich, "On Ptolemy As the Greatest Astronomer of Antiquity," Science, 193, 476-477, 1976, and "Was Ptolemy a Fraud?" preprint No. 751, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, 1977. See also a news article summarizing an attempt to absolve Ptolemy, Scientific American, 3,90-93,1979.

5. Cecil J. Schneer, The Evolution of Physical Science (Grove Press, New York, 1960), p. 65.

6. I. Bernard Cohen, Lives in Science (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1957), p.14.

7. Some research has suggested that Galileo could have easily carried     out certain experiments, and that historians who claim they were all imaginary are overstating the case. See Thomas B. Settle, "An Experiment in the History of Science," Science, 133, 19-23, 1961. See also Stillman Drake, "Galileo's Experimental Confirmation of Horizontal Inertia: Unpublished Manuscripts," Isis, 64, 291-305, 1973. See also James MacLachlan, "A Test of an Imaginary Experiment of Galileo's," Isis, 64, 374-379, 1973.

8. Alexandre Koyre, "Traduttore-Traditore. A Propos de Copernic et de Galilee," Isis, 34, 209-210, 1943.

9. Alexandre Koyre, Etudes Galileennes (Hermann, Paris, 1966). This is a reprint of three articles published between 1935 and 1939.

10. Richard S. Westfall, "Newton and the Fudge Factor," Science, 179, 751-758, 1973. See also various letters in response in Science, 180, 1118, 1973.

11. William J. Broad, "Priority War: Discord in Pursuit of Glory," Science, 211, 465-467, 1981.

12. J. R. Partington, A Short History of Chemistry (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1960), p. 170. Also see Leonard K. Nash, "The Origin of Dalton's Chemical Atomic Theory," Isis, 47, 101-116, 1956.

13. J. R. Partington, "The Origins of the Atomic Theory," Annals of Science, 4, 278, 1939.

14. Charles Babbage, Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (Augustus M. Kelley, New York, 1970), pp. 174-183.

15. Loren Eiseley, Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1979).

16. Stephen J. Gould, "Darwin Vindicated," The New York Review of Books, August 16, 1979, p. 36.

17. Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (John Murray, London, 1887), p. 220.

18. L. Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (Macmillan, London, 1900), p. 97.

19. For this and other Darwin quotes on ambition see Robert K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 305-307.

20. R. A. Fisher, "Has Mendel's Work Been Rediscovered?" Annals of Science, 1, 115-137, 1936. For reprints of this and several other papers on Mendel see Curt Stern and Eva R. Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book (W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1966), pp. 1-175.

21. L. C. Dunn, A Short History of Genetics (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965), p. 13.

22. For Wright's analysis see Curt Stem and Eva R. Sherwood, The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book (W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1966), pp. 173-175.

23. B. L. van der Waerden, "Mendel's Experiments," Centaurus, 12, 275-288,1968.

24. Anonymous, "Peas on Earth," Hort Science, 7, 5, 1972.

25. Peter B. Medawar, The Art of the Soluble (Barnes & Noble, New York, 1968), p. 7.

26. Gerald Holton, "Subelectrons, Presuppositions, and the Millikan- Ehrenhaft Dispute," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 9,166-224,1978.

27. Allan D. Franklin, "Millikan's Published and Unpublished Data on Oil Drops," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 11, 185-201,1981.

28. For an account of the Stanford discoveries see "Fractional Charge," Science 81, April 1981, p. 6.

The evolution of creationism [David R. Montgomery from the Geological Society of America Today archives]

Introduction

The story of historical views on Noah’s Flood shows how there is far more to the story of the relationship between science and religion than the simple portrayal of a long-running feud (Gillespie, 1951; Glacken, 1967; Davies, 1969; Rudwick, 2005; Montgomery, 2012). By the end of the nineteenth century, conservative Christians generally accepted that there was no geological support for reading Noah’s Flood as a globe-wrecking deluge and that natural revelations established by science should guide biblical interpretation. Even the original fundamentalists accepted geologic evidence that contradicted the view of a six-day creation followed by Noah’s Flood as all there was to earth history (Numbers, 1993). But the forerunners of modern creationists chose to defend their preferred literal reading of scripture no matter what the rocks revealed. Dismissing the findings of geologists, they rejected reason in the name of faith. In this sense, modern creationism evolved in response to geological discoveries. The following brief review traces aspects of this story to illustrate how geological debates evolved into theological schisms anchored by creationist views with no scientific currency.

Faith in Nature

For the first millennium of Christianity, major theologians embraced knowledge of the natural world in order to defend against pagan challenges to biblical authority. Saint Augustine (354–413), Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and John Calvin (1509–1564) all endorsed reason as the way to learn about the world. Augustine was among the first to caution against advocating for biblical interpretations that conflicted with what one could observe for oneself. Centuries later, Aquinas praised the pursuit of knowledge and insight gained from experience reading God’s other book—nature.

Writing at the time of the Reformation, Calvin, too, considered the revelations of both nature and the Bible as fundamental truths. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), Calvin explicitly embraced the idea of respecting natural truths revealed through the study of nature: “If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God” (McNeill, ed., 1960, p.  273–274).

Calvin believed in keeping an open mind when it came to evaluating what we can learn about the natural world from observation and experience. In his view, closing one’s eyes to the way the world works was to close one’s eyes to God.

Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin all believed that Noah’s Flood was a global flood. They interpreted fossil seashells found in rocks as compelling proof—how else could the bones of marine creatures have ended up entombed in rocks high in the mountains?

Biblical interpretations accommodated new discoveries as knowledge of the natural world grew, because theologians adhered to the principle that God’s works in the natural world could not conflict with His Word in the Bible. Generation after generation of natural philosophers slowly uncovered facts inconsistent with a global flood, making it increasingly implausible to understand earth history in ways consistent with traditional literal interpretations of the Bible.

Finding Time

In 1669, when Steno, the venerated grandfather of geology, laid down his principles for reading the rock record, he interpreted his observations of the Tuscan landscape as recording six stages, one of which corresponded to Noah’s Flood (Fig. 1). Steno’s insights framed how to read earth history directly from the rocks. In arguing that the Flood laid down strata that subsequently collapsed to form today’s topography, Steno indirectly introduced the idea of tectonic controls on landforms, a foundational concept of modern geomorphology.

Fig. 1Figure 1

Steno’s six-stage model for the formation of the landscape around Florence, involving (1) precipitation of fossil-free sedimentary rocks into a universal ocean; (2) excavation by fire or water of great subterranean caverns; (3) collapse of undermined continents and the inundation of newly formed valleys in a great flood (Noah’s Flood); (4) deposition of layered sedimentary rocks containing fossils as the floodwaters receded; (5) renewed undermining of younger rocks in valleys; and (6) a final round of collapse to create modern topography. Letters serve to identify the same locations or rock layers in successive panels.

Steno’s little book, with its simple diagrams, formalized how to read earth history using the basic principles of geometry. The key wasn’t the underlying mathematical symmetry astronomers found in the heavens; it was simple rules based on what one could see for oneself. Before Steno, only a curious few read beyond the cover of nature’s great book to ponder the relationship between rocks and the lay of the land.

A century later, geologic history began to challenge theological tradition after discoveries like James Hutton’s unconformity, separating two distinct sandstones, at Siccar Point (Fig. 2) demonstrated that Earth’s history was too complicated to be accounted for by a single flood, no matter how big. Mainstream theologians willing to allow that there was more to the geological story than laid out in the Bible, and that the days of creation may have been allegorical, were less inclined to give up on the reality of a global flood. Many believed that the biblical flood inaugurated the most recent geological age. The lack of human remains in rocks thought to pre-date the flood was widely considered to confirm this view.

Fig. 2Figure 2

James Hutton’s unconformity at Siccar Point, Scotland—the contact between the gently inclined Devonian Old Red Sandstone and vertically dipping Silurian graywacke that established a compelling case for the vast scope of geologic time. The expanse of time required to uplift and erode the two mountain ranges that were the source for the sand in these deposits was unimaginable to Hutton. Photo by David R. Montgomery.

Although it is commonly assumed that eighteenth-century Christian theologians were opposed to science, some orthodox churchmen openly accepted the idea that Earth was ancient. In 1785, the Reverend James Douglas presented A Dissertation on the Antiquity of the Earth to the Royal Society. Douglas noted that sound geological observations supported the idea that the world was much older than the traditional 6000 years inferred from biblical interpretation: “Many well-informed persons have therefore been inclined to suppose that the earth was created in six expanses of time instead of six days” (p. 40).

By 1800, the question under debate among natural philosophers was whether Earth was tens of thousands or millions of years old. Some, however, refused to consider geologic evidence and simply rejected an old Earth outright. In his Genius of Christianity (1802), François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) argued that God “created the world with all the marks of antiquity and decay” (Roberts, 2007, p.  43). This new idea that God made the world to appear ancient—and therefore one could not investigate earth history by studying Earth itself—broke with tradition and garnered little support in the nineteenth century.

Testimony of the Rocks

In his influential Natural Theology (1802), Reverend William Paley echoed Aquinas and argued that because the Bible and nature shared the same author, scientific revelations that contradicted biblical interpretations provided natural guidance for better interpreting scripture. As realization grew that the world was unimaginably old, those seeking to reconcile biblical interpretation with geological findings employed two primary arguments. The day-age theory held that each day in the biblical week of creation corresponded to a geologic or cosmic age. The other theory, known as the gap theory, held that God created the world long ago but remodeled it for human use a few thousand years ago. The time in between wasn’t recorded in the Bible, creating an indeterminate gap between the first two verses of Genesis.

In 1807, London’s Geological Society was founded to promote the elevation of facts and observations over imaginative theories. Central to the issue of whether a global flood shaped the world was the question of what carved valleys. Did topography form beneath the waters of a great flood, or did rivers slowly cut their own paths? Studies of regional geology were seen as key to such fundamental questions.

In his inaugural address to the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812, Archibald Alexander (1772–1851) promoted the need for scientific literacy among those preparing for the ministry. Alexander noted that natural history, and geology in particular, could help resolve difficult or ambiguous Bible passages. He preached that Christians should respect truth in all its forms because failure to take heed of scientific knowledge would only breed contempt for believers and hinder the spreading of the Gospel.

At the same time, geologists moved the search for evidence of Noah’s Flood out of the rocks and up into surficial deposits and the form of topography as they continued to see the biblical deluge as a geologically significant event. In his Reliquiae Diluvianae (Relics of the Flood, 1823) Oxford’s first geology professor, Reverend William Buckland, gathered facts thought to demonstrate the reality of a global flood. He described great accumulations of bones he believed were deposited by an enormous flood “immediately antecedent to the formation of those superficial and almost universal deposits of loam and gravel, which seems impossible to account for unless we ascribe them to a transient deluge, affecting universally, simultaneously, and at no very distant period, the entire surface of our planet” (Buckland, 1823, p. 146).

Buckland went on to admire the way in which originally horizontal strata were inclined such that mineral deposits and coal were accessible to miners, as well as how convenient it was that fertile soils were found in flat valley bottoms. Like many of his contemporaries, he thought geological evidence confirmed the Genesis stories and showed how well the world was designed for human use.

After several decades studying Europe’s rocks and surficial deposits, Buckland eventually admitted to having let his imagination run wild in his zeal to defend a global flood. He formally reversed course when he was asked to prepare a volume in a series of treatises illustrating “the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation,” which was commissioned by the will of the Earl of Bridgewater. In his 1836 volume, Buckland acknowledged new geological discoveries that contradicted his earlier views. There was no geological evidence of a global flood after all.

Shortly after Buckland’s recantation, Louis Agassiz invoked stray boulders in the Swiss Alps, grooved rock outcrops, and scratches on the underside of a rock overhang near Edinburgh to convince geologists that most of the evidence traditionally interpreted as resulting from a global flood actually recorded a flood of ice.

Particularly compelling was Charles Lyell’s argument that the cinder cones of southern France were too fragile to have survived a global flood. Deep valleys were incised into hard lava flows that could be traced back to their volcanic source in the cinder cones. Thus, the valleys must have been carved after the cinder cones formed. Lyell reasoned that Noah’s Flood could not have carved the valleys because any flood capable of carving valleys into solid rock would have swept away the loose cinders that formed the volcanic cones.

In the third volume of his Principles of Geology (1833), Lyell concluded that Noah’s Flood must have been a local or regional affair rather than a global deluge. Perhaps, he proposed, catastrophic flooding of a low-lying area like the Caspian Sea may have been recorded in the biblical flood story.

By the late nineteenth century, educated Christians widely endorsed the idea of a local flood in response to new geologic evidence. Theologians across denominational bounds endorsed variants of Lyell’s Caspian Sea hypothesis as a reasonable way to generate a devastating flood in humanity’s ancestral homeland. In 1863, the Dictionary of the Bible dismissed the notion of a universal flood and argued that a local flood in the lower valley of the Euphrates River provided a reasonable interpretation compatible with scripture. Many nineteenth-century Christians—geologists and archaeologists among them—concluded that the biblical flood story described a devastating Mesopotamian flood.

Forerunners of modern creationists adopted a different approach. In 1857, Philip Henry Gosse, a leading British naturalist, published Omphalos (“bellybutton” in Greek), in which he argued that Earth’s apparent antiquity was an illusion. In his view, all the world’s strata, fossils, and even fossil footprints were created at the same time, along with glacial furrows and polished rocks, evidence for the retreat of Niagara Falls, and mammoth bones gnawed by wolves. Confident he had the answer for the geological problems of the age of the world and the effects of the Flood, like Chateaubriand, he too thought God simply made the world to look old. Geologic evidence of past epochs of earth history was created to appear as if “all the preceding eras of its history had been real” (Gosse, 1857, p. 351).

Gosse argued that because all organic life exists in a cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death, everything must have started somewhere within this cycle back at the Creation. Adam was not created as a fertilized embryo, for he had no mother. Gosse professed that as surely as the first man had a bellybutton, trees were created with rings and rocks with fossils. Victorian minds ridiculed mercilessly his idea that God preloaded fossils into rocks back at the original Creation.

The Roots of Creationism

The roots of modern creationism run directly back to George McCready Price (1870–1963), an amateur geologist with no formal training. In a book designed to look like a geology textbook, Price (1923) asserted that there was no order to the fossil record. Rejecting the idea of fossil succession, he argued that the succession of organisms that geologists read in the fossil record was really just a mixed-up sampling of communities that lived in different parts of the antediluvian world. He considered the fossil record too incomplete to confidently reconstruct the past, citing the occasional discovery of animals thought to be extinct and known only from fossils.

Leading fundamentalists praised Price’s book, calling it a “great and monumental” work of an “up-to-date scientist”—“a masterpiece of real science” by one of “the world’s leading Geologists,” and “the sanest, clearest and most irrefutable presentation of the Science of Geology from the standpoint of Creation and the Deluge, ever to see the light of day” (Numbers, 1992, p.  98). But even some of Price’s most ardent supporters had questions about his new flood geology. In a 1924 review in the evangelical journal Bibliotheca Sacra, the editor credited Price with throwing “a wrench into the smooth running machinery of the evolutionary theory” butwondered why it was that when fossils were found in the wrong order, they were always in exactly the reverse of that predicted by geologists (Numbers, 1992, p.  95). How could strata have gotten flipped upside down after Noah’s Flood laid them down if the Bible did not mention subsequent catastrophes? Despite such qualms, fundamentalist proponents of flood geology were inclined to assess Price’s credibility by the conclusions he reached rather than the strength of his arguments or evidence.

Byron Nelson (1893–1972), one of Price’s flood geology disciples, reviewed the history of thinking about flood geology in The Deluge Story in Stone (1931). In praising Buckland as an upstanding nineteenth-century catastrophist, and overlooking Buckland’s famous recantation of Noah’s Flood, Nelson glossed over the reasons mainstream geologists abandoned flood geology in the first place. He then blamed the demise of flood geology on education having passed into the hands of men “more or less lacking in religious convictions” (Young, 1995, p.  252).

Other fundamentalist theologians joined in steadfastly defending Price’s global flood. Herbert Leupold (1892–1972) dismissed all criticism related to the distribution and migration of animals to and from the ark as pointless. He thought that eruptions of vast amounts of subterranean water caused huge waves that deposited the entire fossil record, drowning mammoth, dinosaur, and man alike. Illustrating just how wide the communication gulf had become between geologists and fundamentalists by the mid-twentieth century, Leupold wondered “when will geologists begin to notice these basic facts?” (Young, 1995, p.  283). Such ignorance of how geologists had already considered, tested, and refuted a global flood helped keep flood geology alive in the twentieth century.

Despite the efforts of Price and his followers, during the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of Christians—and evangelical fundamentalists—continued to endorse attempts to reconcile geology and Genesis. Even prominent anti-evolution crusader Harry Rimmer (1890–1952) acknowledged that Earth was quite ancient and thought the biblical flood was a local affair rather than a global catastrophe. Twentieth-century fundamentalist circles split into young-Earth creationists, who defended a global flood, and old-Earth creationists, who acknowledged geological evidence that we live on an ancient planet but maintained that God fashioned it for eventual human use.

The Birth of Modern Creationism

Curiously, the founders of modern young-Earth creationism grounded their unorthodox views in a surprisingly perceptive critique of pre-plate tectonics geology (Montgomery, 2012). John Whitcomb and Henry Morris wrote The Genesis Flood (1961), the book that spawned the creationist revival and resurrected evangelical faith in a global flood. Whitcomb, an Old Testament teacher, and Morris, a hydraulic engineer, embraced literal biblical interpretation to argue that the world was a few thousand years old and that Noah’s Flood had laid down all the sedimentary rocks before carving the topography we know today. Their lack of geological training did not stop them from claiming that a global flood provided a better explanation for the geologic record than did the theories of geologists.

Following Price, Whitcomb and Morris argued that the stratigraphic column worked out by geologists was fiction because, they believed, it was based primarily on the illusion of fossil succession. Pointing out that if one stacked up the greatest thickness of sedimentary beds in every geological age, the pile would reach more than 100 miles high, they held this ridiculous height to invalidate the conventional geologic column. In coming to this conclusion, they breezed by the facts that the average thickness of the rocks of any geological age is only a fraction of its maximum thickness and that only a fraction of Earth’s dynamic history is preserved in any one region of the planet.

Whitcomb and Morris did not go so far as to suggest that Christians reject geological facts, but maintained that the long and complex history of the planet that geologists read in the rock record was fiction. In their zeal to dismiss conventional geology as a sham, they described it in terms that serve well to describe their own work: “Procrustean interpretations, pure speculation and dogmatic authoritarianism—a system purporting to expound the entire evolutionary history of the earth and its inhabitants, yet all the while filled with innumerable gaps and contradictions” (Whitcomb and Morris, 1961, p. 212).

In their view, the plain meaning of God’s words trumped anything science could throw at it. “The instructed Christian knows that the evidences for full divine inspiration of Scripture are far weightier than the evidences for any fact of science” (Whitcomb and Morris, 1961, p. 118).

They read the Bible to determine geologic history and then looked for scientific support for their views—and dismissed or ignored contradictory evidence. They were surprisingly forthright about it: “We take this revealed framework of history as our basic datum, and then try to see how all the pertinent data can be understood in this context” (Whitcomb and Morris, 1961; preface to the 6th printing).

Their view of earth history was based on a literal interpretation of Genesis. In the beginning, at the Creation, God made Earth’s core and some kind of crust. Rocks that display evidence of internal deformation, like folds or minerals that form only at high pressures or temperatures, date from the First Day. Over the next week, a tremendous amount of geological work was accomplished, especially on the Third Day, when mountains were thrust up and ocean basins were carved out in a great rush of water as the planet was remodeled into a suitable dominion for man (Fig. 3). All this erosion and deposition formed the non-fossil–bearing sedimentary rocks and carved mountains into them. Several thousand years later, the Flood ripped up the entire surface of the planet, killed everything not aboard the ark, and laid down fossil-bearing sedimentary rocks. Then the present geological era began after a brief Ice Age caused by all the snow accumulating on freshly uplifted mountains. As far as the appearance of great antiquity, it was just that. The world was created to seem old. Whitcomb and Morris simply dismissed fossil evidence for a long history of life “on the basis of overwhelming Biblical evidence” (1961, p. 457) and asserted that it was impossible to learn the age of the world through studying the operation of natural laws now in operation. The idea laughed out of Victorian England took root in Cold War America. Still, at the time, Morris admitted he knew few evangelicals who bought into their views (Numbers, 1992).

Fig. 3Figure 3

The third day of Creation as depicted in plate VI to illustrate Genesis 1:9–10 in Johann Scheuchzer’s Physica Sacra (Sacred Physics, 1731).

One of many awkward facts facing advocates of a global flood is that although most of the world’s sedimentary rocks are found on continents, a global flood would have preferentially deposited sediments in low spots, such as ocean basins. Many flood geology proponents adopted the ecological zonation theory of Price’s student Harold Clark, which held that geological strata with distinct fossil assemblages represented antediluvian ecological zones. While they argued that the sedimentary cover on the modern continents was eroded from the ocean basins, this begs the question of how whole ecological communities of organisms and coral reefs could be transported intact and without mixing across great distances to be deposited preserving their original ecological zonation.

Creationism Today

When nineteenth-century geologists shelved the idea of a global flood as the central event in earth history, even the original fundamentalists accepted that the opening book of the Bible could not wholly explain the past. Later, in waging war on evolution, reactionary evangelicals resurrected discredited seventeenth-century ideas to explain topography, rock formations, and earth history—invoking a mysterious vapor canopy that they held fell from the sky to trigger Noah’s Flood. The displays at the Creation Museum in Peterson, Kentucky, USA, explicitly reject reason, branding it the enemy of faith and invoking a centuries-long, ongoing conspiracy of scientists to mislead the faithful about the nature of the world. Despite centuries of geological research that contradicts creationist claims, Gallup tracking polls from 1982 to 2012 have consistently found that more than 40% of Americans believe that God created people fewer than 10,000 years ago (Gallup, 2012).

While struggles over the geological implications of biblical interpretations date back to the earliest days of the Church, the story of how naturalists wrestled over reconciling the biblical flood with a growing body of contradictory geological evidence shows that the twentieth-century revival of flood geology recycled ideas previously abandoned in the face of compelling evidence. In light of nineteenth-century scientific discoveries, it appeared reasonable to read the biblical account of the Flood as either allegorical or a story told from the perspective that the whole world appeared flooded from the ark. Time and again, Christians accommodated geologic findings by reinterpreting Genesis to preserve the integrity of both natural and scriptural truths.

Of course, there were significant holes in conventional geological theories when Whitcomb and Morris laid out their biblically inspired views on earth history. Plate tectonics did not yet provide an explanation for the origin and distribution of mountains and other geological problems, such as the presence of fossils of temperate and tropical creatures entombed in rocks at high latitudes. But when the plate tectonics revolution swept through the earth sciences and explained previously perplexing observations, creationists ignored what they considered yet another misguided geological theory.

While geological thought has evolved over the past several centuries, Christianity has too—to the point where several varieties of creationists now argue bitterly amongst themselves. Young-Earth creationists believe the world is fewer than 10,000 years old and that Noah’s Flood remodeled it into the topography we know today in one fell swoop a few thousand years ago. Old-Earth creationists accept geological evidence and endorse ideas such as the gap or day-age theories and progressive creationism (also known as theistic evolution), through which God guided evolution in creating the diversity of life. The latest step in the evolution of creationism is based on repackaging as intelligent design the inherently untestable assertion that God designed the world with a particular purpose or goal in mind. Today, after losing repeated court battles over efforts to teach creationist views in science classrooms, the creationist strategy appears to have shifted to promoting efforts to question evolution.

Generally left out of the resulting “debates” is the simple fact that creationists lack any independently supported geological evidence to support their views. The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould described a global flood as “the only specific and testable theory the creationists have offered,” noting that “the claim that creationism is a science rests above all on the plausibility of the biblical flood” (Gould, 1982, p. 12, 10). And yet, the geological case for a global flood that creationists offer as an alternative to evolution was discredited before Darwin set foot aboard The Beagle.

Geologists assess theories by how well they fit data, and creationists evaluate facts by how well they fit their theories. This simple distinction frames an unbridgeable intellectual rift. Nowhere is this divide deeper than over how to interpret the story of Noah’s Flood, for the ideas invoked to explain such an event have been refuted time and again, and there is no geologic evidence of a global deluge. Following Whitcomb and Morris, today’s creationists continue to pick and choose evidence to support beliefs their faith inspires. Given the ongoing conflict over what to teach in science classrooms, perhaps teaching the historical evolution of creationism offers a fresh way for students to learn about the history of geology, and thereby our knowledge of the world and how it works. How many creationists today know that modern creationism arose from abandoning faith that the study of nature would reveal God’s grand design for the world?

REFERENCES  CITED

Buckland, W., 1823, Reliquiae Diluvianae; or, Observations on the Organic Remains Contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel, and on Other Geological Phenomena, Attesting the Action of an Universal Deluge: London, John Murray.

Davies, G.L., 1969, The Earth in Decay: A History of British Geomorphology 1578 to 1878: New York, Elsevier Publishing, 390 p.

Douglas, J., 1785, A Dissertation on the Antiquity of the Earth, Read at the Royal Society, 12 May 1785: London, G. Nicol.

Gallup, 2012, In U.S., 46% hold creationist view of human origins: Gallup Inc., http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx (last accessed 14 Sept. 2012).

Gillespie, C.C., 1951, Genesis and Geology: New York, Harper & Row, 315 p.

Glacken, C., 1967, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Berkeley, University of California Press, 800 p.

Gosse, P.H., 1857, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot: London, J. Van Voorst, 376 p.

Gould, S.J., 1982, Creationism: Genesis vs. geology: The Atlantic, v. 250, no. 3 (Sept.), p. 10–17.

Lyell, C., 1833, Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, v. III: London, John Murray, 398 p.

McNeill, J.T., editor, 1960, Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559 translated edition (Institutio Christianae religionis by J. Calvin; trans. by F.L. Battles): Philadelphia, The Westminster John Knox Press, 1800 p.

Montgomery, D.R., 2012, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood: New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 302 p.

Nelson, B., 1931, The Deluge Story in Stone: Minneapolis, Augsburg Press, 190 p.

Numbers, R.L., 1992, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism: New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 458 p.

Paley, W., 1802, Natural Theology: Or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature: London, R. Faulder.

Price, G.M., 1923, The New Geology: A Textbook for Colleges, Normal Schools, and Training Schools; and For the General Reader: Mountain View, California, Pacific Press Publishing Association, 726 p.

Roberts, M.B., 2007, Genesis Chapter 1 and geological time from Hugo Grotius and Marin Mersenne to William Conybeare and Thomas Chalmers (1620–1825), in Piccardi, L., and Masse, W.B., eds., Myth and Geology: London, Geological Society Special Publication 273, p. 39–49.

Rudwick, M.J.S., 2005, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution: Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 708 p.

Scheuchzer, J.J., 1731, Kupfer-Bibel in Welcher die Physica Sacra oder Geheiligte Natur-Wissenschaft (Sacred Physics): Augsburg and Ulm.

Whitcomb, J.C., and Morris, H.M., 1961, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications: Philadelphia, The Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company, 518 p.

Young, D.A., 1995, The Biblical Flood: A Case Study of the Church’s Response to Extrabiblical Evidence: Grand Rapids, Michigan, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 341 p.

The Jung Talk: The Enigmatic Origins of the Jung Cult(?) [By Dr. Jan Garrett]

The following is a talk presented to the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship in Bowling Green KY in April 1999. It is primarily based on Richard Noll's two historical studies of Carl Jung and the origins of the Jungian movement:

The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton University Press, 1994), abbreviated TJC;

and
The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (Random House, 1997), abbreviated TAC.

I also make some use of Don McGowan, What's Wrong with Jung, (Prometheus, 1994), referred to as "McGowan."

A Few Biographical Points

Carl G. Jung was born in 1875, that is, one hundred twenty-five years ago. He died in 1961. Relatively little is known about his first sixty years. What many think they know, based on the semiautobiographical work Memories, Dreams and Reflections, is an image carefully cultivated by Jung and his disciples.

We know that in 1895 he matriculated in medical school. From 1900-1909 he worked as a psychiatrist at the Burghözli Mental Hospital. In 1905 he began lecturing at the University of Zürich. From 1907-13 he was active in the Freudian psychoanalytic movement. We have a record of the letters he sent Freud 1907-13.

Around 1914 Jung cuts himself off from all external professional activities, keeping only his private practice and his most devoted followers. But it is in this period, from 1913 through 1936 that Jung laid the foundations for his movement.(1)

1936 is a key year. At this time Hitler attacks German pagans who were not carefully controlled by his Nazi Party. From then on Jung downplays the Germanic pagan elements of his thinking, repackaging his view so as to keep his distance from the pagan followers of Hitler and ensure their attractiveness to English- speaking audiences likely to be hostile to Nazism.

Jung v. History; a Historical Study of Jung

Jung did not think that history is very important. Rather he thought that the past is important as a source for discovery of eternal truths about the self and the divine. Jung ignores the methods of historical reconstruction and holds out the promise that each of us can reach the eternal past by studying the unconscious inner kingdom. Since in Jung's view, everyone, or at least everyone who shares a certain racial background, has access to the same unconscious kingdom, little historical inquiry need be done. What is eternal is essentially unchanging. It is not so much a human past as a superhuman, transcendent kingdom. In Jung's view, our pagan ancestors had a more direct access to this kingdom, and we can now reach it through dreams and visions aided by Jungian analysis.

By contrast, Richard Noll wants to study Jung as a historical figure. He looks at Jung in his own context, a product of historical events and intellectual movements of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-speaking Europe.

THE CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE CREATION OF JUNGIANISM

Carl Jung's views emerged from the culture of the German speaking world of the nineteenth century. It is difficult to imagine how people thought at that time because the experience of Nazism and the defeat of Hitler brought about a dramatic change in German thinking.

German Romanticism

Large numbers of educated Germans believed there was something especially deep about the German soul. They were proud of their poets like Goethe, philosophers like Immanuel Kant, composers like Beethoven, theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher, and hordes of important historical and linguistic scholars. This work in the "sciences of the spirit"--the German name for what we call the humanities--was itself a sort of spiritual calling. Sharp thinkers at the time noted that German Romanticism was partly compensation for the fact that Germany lagged economically and politically behind the British and the French. Before 1871 Germany did not have any colonies , nor was it even a unified nation-state. The German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine exposed the Romantic German sentiment with this poem:

The land is held by the Russians and French,
the sea's by the British invested,
but in the airy realm of dreams
our sway is uncontested.

Dreams included not only literature and idealist philosophy, but also historical and theological scholarship. Looking for the historical Jesus, German scholars found that the Jesus of the gospels is the construction of later Christians who never knew him directly. Many drew the conclusion that Christianity lacked a special claim to truth. They began considering non-Christian spiritualities, including Asian religions and paganism.

The Fin de Siecle Pagan Counter-Culture

You might think that, apart from marginal tribal peoples paganism has been dead for centuries and revived only since the 1970's, say, with the women's spirituality movement. But this is not the first revival of paganism in modern times. Paganism was deliberately revived in the German-speaking world during the late 19th and early twentieth century. It was claimed that Christianity is a repressive religion, that paganism was inherently freer and more joyous. Paganism found its way into literature and art, for example, into Wagner's operas, and there was a significant non-Christian element to the turn of the century counter-cultural movement. There was even an environmental movement whose views in many ways anticipate the today's environmentalism. (2) But there were unique features too.

A century ago many people worried about hereditary degeneration. Whereas nowadays we are told to get in touch with old Christian family values that have fallen into disuse, the German movement said we must get in touch with suppressed pagan values to regenerate our souls. Germanic pagan cults were established to try to revive the German spirit, which had supposedly languished since forced conversion of the Germans to Christianity. Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that when Europe became Christian, European humanity became decadent. According to Nietzsche, Christianity so totally suppressed the body's vital impulses that humanity lost its creativity. Nietzsche taught what Jung was later essentially to repeat, that the irrational factor must neither be eliminated nor thoroughly tamed by order-seeking reason, but somehow integrated into our lives. Nietzsche's followers in the German counter-culture rejected conformity to social norms as so much bourgeois-Christian repression.

Nationalist Essentialism

In our discussion of 19th century German culture, we cannot ignore the notion of volkisch or national essences. A national essence is an alleged group of defining characteristics that is supposed to make, say, a British person British, a German person German, or a Jewish person Jewish. The philosopher Hegel talks about the essential Spirits of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans. Prior to modern genetic theories there was no clear distinction between biology and culture. It's easy to forget that the Darwinian revolution occurred before the discovery of the genetic mechanism. Thus even after publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1861) there was no guarantee that educated people could distinguish learned habits from biologically inherited characteristics.

Biologist Ernst Haeckel was the foremost German Darwinian in the late 19th century. He was also the founder of the only pantheist religious organization prior to 1997. His group, the Monist League, survived his death and lasted until the 1930's. Many of its members later joined Hitler's Nazi Party. This was possible because Haeckel's biology had a place for notions of national or racial essences.

As a biologist, Ernst Haeckel supplied a teaching that would turn out to be important in Jung's thinking. Haeckel coined the slogan: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Ontogeny is the development of the individual being. Phylogeny is the development of the species. Haeckel's slogan means that the growth of the individual embryo (ontogeny) essentially duplicates development of the species from earlier life forms (phylogeny). Now, Haeckel himself thought that this principle would yield results in psychology. It should be possible, he thought, to "trace the stages of the development of the soul of man from the soul of the brute" (TJC, 52). Thus Haeckel thoroughly blurs the line between biology and culture. Jung will continue this error and it will play a role in the formation of his idea of a collective unconscious.

Back to Jung

Now let us return to Jung the individual.

Carl G. Jung was born near Basel, son of Rev. Paul Jung. His mother's father was a Old Testament scholar who regularly spoke to spirits; his mother's mother would fall into trances and wake up babbling prophecies. By 19 Jung was convinced that there was an ancient personality in himself, somehow connected with the ancestors, the dead, and spiritual mysteries (TAC, 24). At 20, shortly after starting medical school Jung and a circle of female relatives met secretly to contact the spirit world, and what happened, with Jung's cousin Hellie Preiswerk acting as a medium, confirmed Jung's feeling view that it was possible to contact the spirits of the dead. (TAC, 26-28)(3)

Jung read widely in the literature of spiritualism and psychic research. His reading included protestant theology, historical Jesus research, Christian mysticism, spiritualism, Swedenborg. He absorbed the tradition of German Romantic nature philosophy (Goethe, Schelling) and studied biology (the works of Larmarck, Darwin, and Haeckel). Jung was not a very sophisticated student of philosophy (TAC, 31).(4) He read the great philosophers in search of proofs that survival after death might be possible.(5)

In his professional publications Jung refers to spirits as "unconscious personalities, splinter personalities, and complexes." But Noll is convinced that this is a facade: Jung really does believe that these spirits exist.

In 1905, in a more scientific moment, Jung showed that Nietzsche, in writing Also Sprach Zarathustra, had been inspired by an essay he had read in his youth but forgotten. This is cryptomnesia, in which one remembers the content of something to which one had been exposed without remembering the event of reading or seeing it before, so it seems that one is thinking of it for the first time. Jung soon ignored his own discovery. If he had remembered it, he might not have proposed his own idea of the collective unconscious. Jung began discovering pagan symbolism in the dreams of his patients, but he downplayed the fact that these symbols were widespread in the counter-cultural publications of the time. We can never rule out the possibility that patients whose dreams contained pagan symbols had seen them earlier in their personal lives.

Jung was familiar with 19th century spiritualism, which was "on one side a religious sect, on the other a scientific hypothesis" (his own words in 1905; TAC, 52). In launching his own movement he used this strategy himself. This accounts for the maddeningly slippery nature of Jung's writings. Noll states that Jung's "psychological" theories were "constructed deliberately, and somewhat deceptively...to make his own magical, polytheist, pagan world view more palatable to a secularized world conditioned to respect only those ideas that seem to have a scientific flair to them." (TAC, xv).(6)

Otto Gross and Jung's Attraction to Paganism

Our understanding of Jung would be incomplete without insight into his relations with women. His most important early disciples were female, although apparently today the majority of Jungian analysts are male. From recent history of charismatic religious cults we are familiar with the tendency of charismatic male religious leaders to act out personal power in unorthodox sexual behavior with parishioners (or even non-parishioners) other than their wives. Think of the scandals involving Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart about ten years ago...or the film The Apostle starring Robert Duvall as a charismatic preacher whose marriage was on the rocks from his womanizing. Jung may fit this mold.

But in 1907-1908 Jung was a doctor and a respectable bourgeois, already married, and, in spite of his Freudianism, at least a nominal Christian. How was he to accommodate this Dionysian tendency he recognized within himself, to justify transgression of Christian monogamy? The catalyst came in the charismatic person of Otto Gross, a psychoanalyst active in the pagan and free love movements of the period. Gross believed that "the true healthy state for the neurotic was sexual immorality." Gross tried to practice what he preached. Not only did he throw off sexual restraints but he began using morphine, cocaine, and opium. And he got addicted. At his wife's urging, Gross agreed to commit himself for treatment at an institution under Jung's care. Gross eventually escaped from the institution, uncured of his drug habit. But while there he analyzed Jung as much as Jung analyzed him, and Jung was more affected than Gross. Noll writes that

Gross captivated Jung with his theories of sexual liberation, his Nietzscheanism, and his utopian dreams of transforming the world through psychoanalysis...During these long hours he learned of Gross's sexual escapades in Heidelberg. He heard of the seductions of the von Richtofen sisters, of illegitimate children, of vegetarianism and opium and orgies. He learned of the Schwabing to Zurich to Ascona countercultural circuit and listened, amazed, as Gross informed him of neopagans, Theosophists, and sun worshipers who had formed their own colonies in Jung's Switzerland. (TAC, 84)

Gross had become convinced by a theory (defended in Das Mutterrecht by Johann Bachofen) that our ancestors had lived freely, instinctively, and polygamously in small nomadic bands that tended to be matriarchal. According to this theory, the early matriarchal stage was followed by patriarchy. Once patriarchy was established, all signs of the matriarchy were abolished. Gross concluded that polygamy was rooted in human nature. If our ancestors lived polygamously before patriarchy, then our natural tendencies towards polygamy were probably there, just under the surface. Polygamy is an ancestral impulse. Civilization injures humans by creating social conventions that require them to repress their true savage nature. The shackles of family, society, and (patriarchal) Deity must be broken. Live polygamously. This will release the ancient creative energies of the body and the unconscious and bring humans to a new level.

Jung opposed this view in 1908 when Gross arrived for treatment but by the time Gross escaped, Jung was convinced. According to Richard Noll, Jung tried to practice and promote what Bachofen and Gross preached "by founding a spiritualist mystery cult of renewal and rebirth--and by advocating polygamy for the rest of his life"(TAC, 87). Thus by 1912 Jung had rejected Christianity with its repressive orthodoxies. He found another model, pagan antiquity, that held sex sacred (Ibid.). Jung himself practiced his new religion in trysts with his mistress and disciple Toni Wolff in a special tower Jung had built. The walls of this tower were decorated with drawings portraying the mystical figures encountered in Jung's visionary journeys into the unconscious.

Jung's Visions

Jung's official autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections tells of Jung's visionary journeys of December 1913. But, according to Noll (TAC, 122-25) it omits the most important part of Jung's prescription: an experience of god through self-deification. Jung induced an altered state of consciousness and entered what he describes as the Land of the Dead. He met an old man named Elijah and a blind young girl named Salome. The initial descent was followed by a second. This time he saw Elijah on a rocky ridge, a ring of boulders, maybe a "Druidic sacred place." The old man went inside and climbed upon an altar--the wall grew larger while the altar and Elijah began to shrink. Jung noticed a tiny woman, who turned out to be Salome. He also saw a miniature snake and a house.

The walls kept growing. Jung was descending into the underworld. Salome became interested in him; she assumed he could cure her blindness. "She began to worship me. I said, ‘Why do you worship me?' She replied, ‘You are Christ.' Jung protested but Salome persisted.

Then I saw the snake approach me. She came close and began to encircle me and press me in her coils. These coils reached up to my heart. In the agony and the struggle, I sweated so profusely that the water flowed down on all sides of me. Then Salome rose, and she could see. While the snake was pressing me, I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal of prey, a lion or a tiger.

Jung explained to his disciples that his experience was similar to the ancient mysteries:

You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them...These images have so much reality that they recommend themselves, and such extraordinary meaning that one is caught. They form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact, it is such figures that made the mysteries.

Noll comments:

Jung's interpretation here is clear: his visions were an initiatory experience into the mysteries of pagan antiquity. These mystery cults provided all the symbols of transformation necessary for a personal renewal or rebirth. Further they were at the deepest level of the unconscious mind, available to one and all...

The climax, however, was "the mystery of deification," which Jung describes in this way:

The important part that led up to the deification was the snake's encoiling of me. Salome's performance was deification. The animal face which I felt mine transformed into was the famous [Deus] Leontocephalus (lion-headed god) of the Mithraic mysteries. It is the figure which is represented with a snake coiled around the man, the snake's head resting on the man's head, and the face of the man that of the lion. This statue has only been found in mystery grottoes (the underground churches, the last remnants of the catacombs).

Jung then identified this figure as Aion, or the eternal being (TAC, 124).

Jungian Paganism, Freud and the Jews

Jung believed that just as the human race all started out pagan and only later, having lost touch with its pagan roots, became rootless, "civilized" and Christian, so Germans start out, in infancy, as spontaneous pagans, but this spontaneous religion is overlaid with the artificial ideas of monotheism. Our loss of wholeness is a loss of contact with these roots. But we can reach these roots, not by the difficult work of historical research but by going inward, digging below the personal unconscious and uncovering the collective unconscious that had only been covered over.

When Jung discovered Freud's method of psychoanalysis, he quickly saw it as a tool to uncover hidden resources buried within. But while Freud welcomed Jung into the psychoanalytic movement, he soon noted that Jung was uncritical of myth. He began to fear Jung would compromise the attempt to assert scientific standing for psychoanalysis. This led eventually to the Freud-Jung split. Jung retained from Freud the cult atmosphere of the analytic movement and the lack of rigorous testing of hypotheses. Unlike Freud, Jung claimed that his analytic methods could investigate a inner realm with essentially religious meaning.

Jung explained the resistance of Freud and his close followers to Jung's version of analysis in an essentially racist way. The Freudians were mostly Jews, as was Freud himself. Freudians are uninterested in pagan myths, Jung decided, because they are mostly Jews. The Jews came from the Middle East, which was urbanized and thus depaganized at an early date. Jews had allegedly lost their pagan roots so long ago that they no longer had access to the collective unconscious. By contrast, Germanic peoples had lost their paganism at a relatively late date, roughly 500 to 1100 AD. Thus the pagan collective unconscious lay close enough to the psychological surface that it could still be dug up if only one were persistent enough. Since for Jung being in touch with the collective unconscious is a precondition for psychological health, Germanic types like himself are potentially healthier than Jews.

This idea is scientifically unsound, as it confuses what can be learned with what can be biologically inherited. It also links psychological health more to one ethnic group than another and could easily provide a rationale for anti- Semitism. Jung tended to think of the collective unconscious in racial terms until late in his life. About 1936, when he was already 60, he realized that a stress on this aspect of his thought would not go over well in the English speaking world where Jung thought he could find the greatest number of disciples. In fact, his views about an essentially Aryan collective unconscious put him close to the kinds of things that Hitler was saying.

The Letter to Constance Long

I am not making this up. Here is a letter he wrote December 17, 1921 to Constance Long, an important American disciple then living in England. (TAC, 258-59). Long had begun to come under the influence of exiled Russian mystic Ouspensky, and Jung correctly feared that he would lose her allegiance to Ouspensky at a time when she was important to his desire to expand his influence in the English speaking world. Jung wrote:

Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but the vegetable gods you have raised in your own garden are nourishing. They are perhaps less beautiful but they have [illegible].

You shall not make totems of foreign trees [ ]. No one shall keep you else you trespass your limits; but blessed be the place where we meet the beginning of our limitations. Beyond one's frontiers there is not but illusion and misery, because there you arrive in a country of the wrong ancestor spirits and the wrong charms . . .

Why do you look for foreign teachings [i.e., the Russian's]? They are poisons, they did not come out of your blood. You should be on your own feet, and you have your own rich earth below them. Why should you listen to the word of a man who is off his own soil [Ouspensky was in exile]? Truth is tree with roots. It is not words. Truth only grows in your own garden, nowhere else.

Only feeble men eat the food of a stranger. But your people need a strong man, one who gets his truth in his own roots and out of his own blood. . . . "

After Hitler, who also spoke incessantly of soil and blood and portrayed himself as a strong man, this document is an embarrassment for the most devout English-speaking Jungians. But there's no mistaking how Jung is thinking here. When he appeals to Long to be true to her own roots, he means the Aryan (or Indo-Germanic) roots. His point is not that Long should be loyal to her American or English roots, as distinct from Germanic roots. In fact Long was until then among Jung's most loyal disciples; and he is an ethnic German who happens to be a citizen of Switzerland.

Jung thought that Germans, English, and Anglo-Americans were all part of the Germanic family tree. The Jews, in his view, had been civilized too long--uprooted from the soil. The Russians were polluted by too much Asian/Mongolian blood. Jung thought his kind of analysis will get (Aryan) people in touch with their roots, still latent inside them, and restore their wholeness.

Jung shared these ideas with a number of individuals who became Nazis. This is not to say that Jung was a Nazi. But he made one of the same basic errors that Nazism made: he failed to distinguish acquired cultural characteristics from inherited biological ones. It is understandable that Jung, like many intelligent Germans, could be confused on this question early in the 20th century when the science of genetics was barely getting started. But he continued to believe in it into the 1950's, according to Noll; and this is strong evidence of the fundamentally problematic nature of his key concepts.

Jung's Sexism

Jung's thought is not only pervaded with notions hard to separate from racism but it has a marked sexist component. Although, according to Jung, the unconscious of the male contains the anima archetype and the unconscious of the female the animus archetype, far from providing a basis for overcoming traditional constricting gender roles, these archetypes are a threat: Jung thought it important to keep these opposite-gender principles in check.

McGowan cites the following statements from Jung's "Woman in Europe" (1928; 170-71: "a man should live as a man, and a woman as a woman." According to Jung, a woman who pursues "a masculine calling" introduces into any discussion "a whole host of argumentative biases which always go a little beside the point in the most irritating way, and which, furthermore, always inject a little something into the problem that is not really there ... which can even grow into downright daemonic passion that irritates and disgusts men...[and] smother[s] the charm and meaning of femininity...Such a development naturally ends in a deep, psychological division, in short, a neurosis." (McGowan, p. 100)

The Collective Unconscious

At the heart of Jungian religion is the notion of the collective unconscious. Whatever else one can say of it, this collective unconscious is supposed to be non- personal and therefore prior to the acquisition of culture. Now, as a Unitarian-Universalist, I support freedom to pursue religious inquiry in any direction whatsoever. If you want to believe in the existence of the collective unconscious, you have just as much right to believe in it as a traditional Christian does to believe in Heaven and Hell, or a Moslem in paradise, or a Catholic in purgatory, or Heaven's Gate in salvific Space Ships that ride comets' tails, or a traditional pagan in gods in the woods. But a reasonable person has just as much right to find these things unbelievable. The Jungian collective unconscious that you can access through dreams or visions seems to me on the same level as the land behind the Looking Glass in Lewis Carroll's Alice through the Looking Glass or the land behind the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis' stories The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Fun, as one of Unitarian-Universalist suggested in the humorous verse devoted to Jung that he composed to the "Old UU Religion" (sung to the tune of "Gimme that old time religion") . You can spend hours there as long as you are willing to suspend disbelief and you will never really be in any danger . . . unless you start taking it too seriously.

Jung was smart enough to know that he could not scientifically prove the existence of the collective unconscious. That is why he said occasionally that what he was doing was not science but art (McGowan, 99). This may seem like a moment of candor, an admission that his work on the archetypes and the unconscious was not science, but--if Noll is right--it is at the same time a failure to be completely candid: Jung is still describing his work not as what it was, an indirect attempt to found a new pagan religion, but rather as art, something considerably more respectable in middle-class circles than paganism, especially in the early 20th century.

It will be said that Jung amassed evidence for his claims. But you cannot make a theory scientific simply by trying to find facts that might be explained by the theory. You have to try to find facts that could only be explained by the theory, and this means that you should try to show that no rival theory could explain those same events. A theory is meaningfully proposed as a scientific theory only if the proposer is willing to look seriously at rival theories that have some claim to explain the same events, in order to determine whether those theories do not do a better job.

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

If the collective unconscious is a religious doctrine and not truly a theory of psychology as a science linked to biological science, then other tests are applicable. By their fruits ye shall know them. This is a good test of the validity of a faith position. How well does Jungianism stand up to this test? Well, we all know that some denominations are engaged in social service and social action of various kinds. There are progressive Catholics active in serving the poor in poverty-stricken areas. The Quakers and Unitarian Universalists have their service committees and are involved in numerous social causes. I have never, ever heard of a Jungian Service Committee or Jungians active as Jungians in support of gay rights. This is not surprising, since Jung believed that the divine kingdom was literally in your dreams and visions, not in the world of external relations with your fellow human beings. (7)

Jung and Plato, Jung and Jesus

Finally, I'd like to close with two comparisons, between Jung and Plato, and between Jung and Jesus. Plato is the first philosopher to theorize about archetypes. For him, these are the intelligible Forms or Ideas, such as Justice and Beauty, which only the philosopher kings will fully grasp and be able to define. But Plato is fairly clear about the method that one must use in order to understand these Forms or Ideas. In fact, his method was so sophisticated that it provided later philosophers with a way of criticizing and even overturning Plato's theory of archetypes in favor of better ideas that eventually gave rise to the modern notion of scientific law. But while Plato's archetypes are intelligible objects, subject to increasingly precise definition, Jung's archetypes are elusive divinities, personalities, whose nature and meaning is shifting and unclear. (For some people, Jungians in the "Catholic" model, the way to know them is through your Jungian analyst in whose Jungian spiritual connections you must believe. For others, Jungians in the "Protestant" model, the way to the inner kingdom is to study the Jungian texts and apply them oneself as one sees fit.)

Now, a few words on Jesus and Jung. The nature of the Kingdom of God appears to have been hard for Jesus' disciples to describe or keep clearly before their minds. What this suggests is that the Kingdom of God was meaningful during Jesus' ministry precisely because it was the expression of his powerful personality. He gave those around him the sense that they were able to tap into something infinitely powerful that they could not easily put into words. When his charismatic personality was removed from the scene after only a short ministry, the early Christians had as much difficulty transmitting his original message unaltered as the Jungians would have had if Jung had died in, say, 1920, and most of his disciples had been illiterate. Instead, Jung was able to connect up with some American wealth from a branch of the Rockefeller family and control the publication of many of his texts in English translation, and instead of dying young as Jesus did, he kept control of his own movement until relatively late in his long life. But as Jesus is supposed to be the way to the Kingdom of God for Christians, so for spiritual Jungians Jung is the way to the gods in the collective unconscious. As Jung's visions allegedly demonstrated, he even became a god. Jungianism is a religion. Let it sink or swim as a religion and not pretend to be something it is not, merely a slightly eccentric branch of psychological science.

Notes

1. Very little was known of this particular period until the appearance of the two books by Richard Noll. The Jung family refuses to release to scholars Jung's private diaries, a large number of letters, and his "Red Book" of paintings of his visions and discussions with the Dead. The family also refuses to release the personal papers and diaries of Jung's wife Emma, an important analyst in her own right but about whom very little is known. The family is also preventing release of the diaries and papers of Toni Wolff, Jung's collaborator and lover (TAC, xii).

2. I call your attention to a historical study by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudemeier which chronicles the overlap between environmental mysticism and the movements that gave rise to Nazism. What the article makes clear is that the ecological motif was continued right into the Hitler regime itself and it was combined with and in fact reinforced the most vigorous anti-Semitism.
Biehl-Staudemeier article on German ecofascism

It may not be easy at first for environmentalists among us to absorb the message of this study. As someone who would be sure to be gassed by Nazis should they take power in the United States, I consider that there is a line of blood between myself and Hitlerism. On the other hand, I have since 1970 identified myself with environmentalism and have been receptive to the ecological critique of industrialism and technoscience (though without ever abandoning a solid respect for genuine scientific method). I am probably not alone in this, so I anticipate that the message of this article will be as hard for some of my readers to take as it was initially for me. I saved the web address, however, and recently went back and read it, fairly carefully, all the way through.

One temptation should probably be avoided. The authors must have their own perspective to promote, right? Well, of course they do. They are social ecologists, not "deep ecologists," which is to say, at a minimum, that they believe that the environmental crisis is not merely a matter of technology v. nature, or humankind v. nature, or science v. nature. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, certain socioeconomic forms of organization of society, science, and technology v. nature. And by socioeconomic forms they mean something like "contemporary capitalism." This suggests that the authors are socialists of a sort, and of course socialists do not have all the answers to our problems. (True enough, but it does not make the history they are telling us false.)

Apolitical ecomysticism, on the one hand, and ecofascism, on the other, share with Jungianism an inattention to socioeconomic structures and the real beneficiaries of privilege in these structures. Thus ecomysticism, ecofascism, and Jungianism are natural allies, even if they do not recognize this connection. This makes it tempting to look for scapegoats for the problem, e.g., the Jews, supposedly rootless cosmpolitans who are allegedly incapable of love for the Earth and whose presence in powerful institutions supposedly corrupts everything we might try to do for the earth.

Two movements with which I am or have been recently associated, the Unitarian-Universalist movement and the Pantheists of the Pantheism-L list, naturally attract ecomystics. The more I learn about German culture in the pre-Nazi period, the more I am astounded by the uncanny (unheimlich) resemblances between the counterculture of that period and the non-Christian spirituality of our own time. So far the big difference is that the non-Christian spirituality of our own time is not in any clear way racist.

I would like to think that our culture has been irreversibly transformed by the experience of the Holocaust and the fight for equality by peoples of color so that it is not possible this time around to corrupt concern for ecology with racist assumptions. Perhaps one reason it is implausible to single out the Jews today is that in the industrialized countries nowadays relatively few people even among the non-Jews have farm experience in their immediate background. And yet . . . . and yet . . . history teaches us that no bad idea is ever permanently lost, that, to borrow from and transform a famous line from that old libertarian slaveowner Tom Jefferson whose life is a parable of ambiguity in itself, "the price of decency is eternal vigilance."

3. Noll writes (TAC, 23) "His experiences with spiritualism are far more important to his later world view and psychotherapeutic techniques than he would have wished those outside his inner circle to know."

4. Of philosophers he read Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus (the founder of Neo-Platonism), Kant, Schopenhauer, and by 1898 Nietzsche.

5. Immanuel Kant, for most people, is a philosopher identified with the Enlightenment and Reason. Jung was interested in Kant's (1766) essay Dreams of a Spirit Seer (about Swedenborg). As for Schopenhauer, Jung was interested in his minor work, Essay on Spirit Seeking (1851).

6. To which we might add that in his popular articles Jung has a habit of uttering unchallengeable psychological generalizations he could have culled from psychologists whose methods are more scientific than his own. He then inserts vague statements about the need for spirituality, the interest of other religions than Christianity, and finally a few untestable controversial claims about the inner realm and the collective unconscious.

7.This introverted feature of Jungian religion actually saved Jung from a closer association with Nazism. Had Jung's outlook been more extraverted, it would have been hard for Jung not to overtly welcome the Hitler triumph (associated as it was with many pagan elements). If he had done so, his chances of maintaining and increasing his number of followers in the English-speaking world would have suffered.

Reality Is A Shared Hallucination [April 12, 1997 by Howard Bloom]

The artificial construction of reality was to play a key role in the new form of global intelligence which would soon emerge among human beings. If the group brain's "psyche" were a beach with shifting dunes and hollows, individual perception would be that beach's grains of sand. However this image has a hidden snag — pure individual perception does not exist.

Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see, the thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. Don DeLillo

A central rule of large-scale organization goes like this: the greater the spryness of a massive enterprise, the more internal communication it takes to support the teamwork of the parts. For example, in all but the simplest plants and animals only 5% of DNA is dedicated to DNA's "real job," manufacturing proteins. The remaining 95% is preoccupied with organization and administration, supervising the maintenance of bodily procedures, or even merely interpreting the corporate rule book "printed" in a string of genes.

In an effective learning machine, the connections between internal elements far outnumber windows to the outside world. Take the cerebral cortex, roughly 80% of whose nerves connect with each other, not with sensory input from the eyes or ears. No wonder in human society individuals spend most of their time communicating with each other, not exploring beasts and plants which could make an untraditional dish. This cabling for "bureaucratic maintenance" has a far greater impact on what we "see" and "hear" than most psychological researchers suspect. For it puts us in the hands of a conformity enforcer whose power and subtlety are almost beyond belief.

In our previous episode we mentioned that the brain's emotional center — the limbic system — decides which swatches of experience to "notice" and store in memory. Memory is the core of what we call reality. Think about it for a second. What do you actually hear and see right now? This article. The walls and furnishings of the room in which you sit. Perhaps some music or some background noise. Yet you know sure as you were born that there's a broader world outside those walls. You are certain that your home, if you are away from it, is still there. You can sense each room, remember where most of your things are placed. You know the building where you work — its colors, layout, and the feel of it. Then there are the companions who enrich your life — family, the folks at the office, neighbors, friends, and even people you are fond of whom you haven't talked to in a year or more — few of whom, if any, are in the room with you. You also know we sit on a planet called the earth, circling an incandescent ball of sun, buried in one of many galaxies. At this instant, reading by yourself, where do these realities reside? Inside your mind. Memory in a very real sense is reality. What the limbic system decides to "see" and store away becomes an interior universe pretending to stretch so far outside that it can brush the edges of infinity.

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at. Guy de Maupassant

The limbic system is more than an emotive sifter of the relevant from the inconsequent. It is an intense monitor of others, using its social fixations to retool your perceptions and your memories. In short, the limbic system makes each of us a plug-in of the crowd.

Elizabeth Loftus, one of the world's premier memory researchers, is among the few who know how powerfully the group shapes what we think we know. In the late 1970s, Loftus performed a series of key experiments. In a typical example, she showed college students a moving picture of a traffic accident, then asked after the film, "How fast was the white sports car going when it passed the barn while traveling along the country road." Several days later when witnesses to the film were quizzed about what they'd seen, 17% were sure they'd spied a barn, though there weren't any buildings in the film at all. In a related experiment subjects were shown a collision between a bicycle and an auto driven by a brunette, then afterwards heard questions about the "blond" at the steering wheel. Not only did they remember the non-existent blond vividly, but when they were shown the sequence a second time, they had a hard time believing that it was the same incident they now recalled so graphically. One subject said, "It's really strange because I still have the blond girl's face in my mind and it doesn't correspond to her [pointing to the woman on the videotape]...It was really weird." In visual memory, Loftus concluded that hints leaked to us by fellow humans are more important than the scene whose details actually reach our eyes.

Though it got little public attention until the debates about "recovered" memories of sexual abuse in the early and mid 1990s, this avenue of research had begun at least two generations ago. It was 1956 when Solomon Asch published a classic series of experiments in which he and his colleagues showed cards with lines of different lengths to clusters of their students. Two lines were exactly the same size and two were clearly not — the mavericks stuck out like basketball players at a convention for the vertically handicapped. During a typical experimental run, the researchers asked nine volunteers to claim that two badly mismatched lines were actually the same, and that the actual twin was a total misfit. Now came the nefarious part. The researchers ushered a naive student into the room with the collaborators and gave him the impression that the crowd already there knew just as little as he did about what was going on. Then a white-coated psychologist passed the cards around. One by one he asked the pre-drilled shills to announce out loud which lines were alike. Each dutifully declared that two terribly unlike lines were perfect twins. By the time the scientist prodded the unsuspecting newcomer to pronounce judgement, he usually went along with the bogus acclamation of the crowd. Asch ran the experiment over and over again. When he quizzed his victims of peer pressure, it turned out that many had done far more than simply go along to get along. They had actually shaped their perceptions to agree, not with the reality in front of them, but with the consensus of the multitude.

To polish off the mass delusion, many of those whose perception had NOT been skewed became collaborators in the praise of the emperor's new clothes. Some did it out of self-doubt. They were convinced that the facts their eyes reported were wrong, the herd was right, and that an optical illusion had tricked them into seeing things. Still others realized with total clarity which lines were duplicates, but lacked the nerve to utter an unpopular opinion. Conformity enforcers had rearranged everything from visual processing to open speech, and had revealed a mechanism which can wrap and seal a crowd into a false belief.

Another experiment indicates just how deeply social suggestion can penetrate the neural mesh through which we think we see hard-and-solid facts. Students with normal color vision were shown blue slides. But one stooge in the room declared the slides were green. Only 32% of the students ended up going along with the vocal but misguided proponent of green vision. Later, however, the subjects were taken aside, shown blue-green slides and asked to rate them for blueness or greenness. Even the students who had refused to see green where there was none in the original experiment showed that the insistent greenies in the room had colored their perceptions. They rated the new slides more green than they would have otherwise. More to the point, when asked to describe the color of the afterimage they saw, the subjects often reported it was red-purple — the hue of an afterimage left by the color green. The words of one determined speaker had penetrated the most intimate sanctums of the eye and brain.

But this is just the iceberg's tip. Social experience literally shapes cerebral morphology. It guides the wiring of the brain through the most intensely formative years of human life, determining, among other things, which of the thinking organ's sections will be enlarged, and which will shrink.

An infant's brain is sculpted by the culture into which the child is born. Six-month olds can distinguish or produce every sound in virtually every human language. But within a mere four months, nearly two thirds of this capacity has been sliced away. The slashing of ability is accompanied by ruthless alterations in cerebral tissue. Brain cells are measured against the requirements of the physical and interpersonal environment. The 50% of neurons found useful thrive. The 50% which remain unexercised are literally forced to die. Thus the floor plan underlying the mind is crafted on-site to fit an existing framework of community.

When barely out of the womb, babies are already riveted on a major source of social cues. Newborns to four-month-olds would rather look at faces than at almost anything else. Rensselaer Polytechnic's Linnda Caporael points out what she calls "micro-coordination", in which a baby imitates its mother's facial expression, and the mother, in turn, imitates the baby's. Since psychologist Paul Ekman, as we'll see later in more detail, has demonstrated that the faces we make recast our moods, the baby is learning how to yoke its emotions to those of a social team. Emotions, as we've already seen, craft our vision of reality. There are other signs that babies synchronize their feelings to those of others around them at an astonishingly early age. Empathy — one of those things which bind us together intimately — comes to us early. Children less than a year old who see another child hurt show all the signs of undergoing the same pain.

After all, what is reality anyway? Nothin' but a collective hunch. Lily Tomlin

Cramming themselves further into a common perceptual mold, animal and human infants entrain themselves to see what others see. A four-month old human will swivel to look at an object his parent is staring at. A baby chimp will do the same. By their first birthday, infants have extended their input-gathering to their peers. When they notice that another child's eyes have fixated on an object, they swivel around to focus on that thing themselves. If they don't see what's so interesting, they look back to check the direction of the other child's gaze and make sure they've got it right. When one of the babies points to an item that has caught her fancy, other children look to see just what it is.

One year olds show other ways in which they soak up social pressure. Put a cup and something unfamiliar in front of them and their natural tendency will be to check out the novel object. But repeat the word "cup" and the infant will dutifully rivet its gaze on the drinking vessel. Children go along with the herd even in their tastes in food. when researchers put two-to-five-year olds at a table for several days with other kids who loved the edibles they loathed, the children with the dislike did a 180 degree turn and became zestful eaters of the item they'd formerly disdained. The preference was still going strong weeks after the peer pressure had stopped.

At six, children are obsessed with being accepted by the group and become incredibly sensitive to violations of group norms. They've been gripped by yet another conformity enforcer which structures their perceptions to coincide with those around them.

Even rhythm draws humans together in the subtlest of ways. William Condon of Pennsylvania's Western State Psychiatric Institute analyzed films of adult conversations and noticed a peculiar process at work. Unconsciously, the conversationalists began to coordinate their finger movements, eye blinks and nods. Electroencephalography showed something even more astonishing — their brain waves were moving together. Newborn babies already show this synchrony — in fact, an American infant still fresh from the womb will just as happily match its body movements to the speech of someone speaking Chinese as to someone speaking English. As time proceeds, these unnoticed synchronies draw larger and larger groups together. A student working under the direction of anthropologist Edward T. Hall hid in an abandoned car and filmed children romping in a school playground at lunch hour. Screaming, laughing, running and jumping, each seemed superficially to be doing his or her own thing. But careful analysis revealed that the group was moving to a unified rhythm. One little girl, far more active than the rest, covered the entire schoolyard in her play. Hall and his student realized that without knowing it, she was "the director" and "the orchestrator." Eventually, the researchers found a tune that fit the silent cadence. When they played it and rolled the film, it looked exactly as if each kid were dancing to the melody. But there had been no music playing in the schoolyard. Said Hall, "Without knowing it, they were all moving to a beat they generated themselves." William Condon was led to conclude that it doesn't make sense to view humans as "isolated entities." And Edward Hall took this inference a step further: "an unconscious undercurrent of synchronized movement tied the group together" into what he called a "shared organizational form."

No wonder input from the herd so strongly colors the ways in which we see our world. Students at MIT were given a bio of a guest lecturer. One group's background sheet described the speaker as cold, the other group's handout praised him for his warmth. Both groups sat together as they watched the lecturer give his presentation. But those who'd read the bio saying he was cold treated him as distant and aloof. Those who'd been tipped off that he was warm, rated him as friendly and approachable. In judging a fellow human being, students replaced external fact with input they'd been given socially.

The cues rerouting herd perception come in many forms. Sociologists Janet Lynne Enke and Donna Eder discovered that in gossip, one person opens with a negative comment on someone outside the group. How the rest of the gang goes on the issue depends entirely on the second opinion expressed. If the second prattler agrees that the outsider is disgusting, virtually everyone will chime in with a sound-alike opinion. If, on the other hand, the second commentator objects that the outsider has positive qualities, the group is far less likely to descend like a flock of harpies tearing the stranger's reputation limb from limb.

Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. The strangest come from choruses of the dead — cultural predecessors whose legacy has a dramatic effect on our vision of reality. Take the impact of gender stereotypes — notions developed over hundreds of generations, contributed to, embellished and passed on by literally billions of people during the long human march through time. In one study, parents were asked to give their impression of their brand new babies. Infant boys and girls are completely indistinguishable aside from the buds of reproductive equipment between their legs. Their size, texture, and the way in which newborns of opposite sex act are the same. Yet parents consistently described girls as softer, smaller and less attentive than boys. The crowds within us resculpt our gender verdicts over and over again. Two groups of experimental subjects were asked to grade the same paper. One was told the author was John McKay. The other was told the paper's writer was Joan McKay. Even female students evaluating the paper gave it higher marks if they thought was from a male.

The ultimate repository of herd influence is language — a device that not only condenses the influence of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on. Every word we use carries within it the experience of generation after generation of men, families, tribes, and nations, including their insights, value judgements, ignorance, and spiritual beliefs.

Experiments show that people from all cultures can see subtle differences between colors placed next to each other. But only those societies equipped with names for numerous shades can spot the difference when the two swatches of color are apart. At the turn of the century, The Chukchee had very few terms for visual hues. If you asked them to sort colored yarns, they did a poor job of it. But they had over 24 terms for patterns of reindeer hide, and could classify reindeer far better than the average European scientist, whose vocabulary didn't supply him with appropriate tools.

Physiologist/ornithologist Jared Diamond, in New Guinea, saw to his dismay that despite all his university studies of nature, the natives were far better at distinguishing bird species than he was. Diamond had a set of scientific criteria taught in the zoology classes back home. The natives possessed something better: names for each animal variety, and a set of associations describing characteristics Diamond had never been taught to differentiate — everything from a bird's peculiarities of deportment to its taste when grilled over a flame. Diamond had binoculars and state-of-the-art taxonomy. But the New Guineans laughed at his incompetence. They were equipped with a vocabulary each word of which compacted the experience of armies of bird-hunting ancestors.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Linnda Caporael points out that even when we see someone perform an action in an unusual way, we rapidly forget the unaccustomed subtleties and reshape our recalled vision so that it corresponds to the patterns dictated by language-borne conventionality. A perfect example comes from 19th century America, where sibling rivalry was present in fact, but according to theory didn't exist. The experts were blind to its presence, as shown by its utter absence from family manuals. In the expert and popular view, all that existed between brothers and sisters was love. But letters from middle class girls exposed unacknowledged cattiness and jealousy.

Sibling rivalry didn't begin to creep from the darkness of perceptual invisibility until 1893, when future Columbia University professor of political and social ethics Felix Adler hinted at the nameless notion in his manual for the Moral Instruction of Children. During the 1920s, the concept of jealousy between boys and girls finally shouldered its way robustly into the repertoire of conscious concepts, appearing in two widely quoted government publications and becoming the focus of a 1926 Child Study Association of America crusade. It was only at this point that experts finally coined the term "sibling rivalry." The formerly non-existent demon was blamed for adult misery, failing marriages, crime, homosexuality, and God knows what all else. By the 1940s, nearly every child-raising guide had extensive sections on this ex-nonentity. Parents writing to major magazines spotted the previously unseeable emotion almost everywhere.

The stored experience language carries can tweak the difference between life and death. It's been reported that one unnamed tribe used to lose starving mothers, fathers and children by the droves each time famine struck, despite the fact that a river flowed near them filled with fish. The problem: they didn't define fish as food. We could easily suffer the same fate if stranded in their wilderness, simply because our culture tells us that a rich source of nutrients is inedible too — insects.

The influence of the mob of those who've gone before and those who stand around us now can be mind-boggling. During the middle ages when universities first arose, a local barber/surgeon was called into the lecture chamber year after year to dissect a corpse for medical students gathered from the width and breadth of Europe. A scholar on a raised platform discoursed about the revelations unfolding before the students' eyes. The learned doctor would invariably describe a network of cranial blood vessels that were nowhere to be found. He'd report a shape for the liver radically different from the form of the organ sliding around on the surgeon's blood-stained hands. He'd verbally portray jaw joints which had no relation to those being displayed on the trestle below him. But he never changed his narrative to fit the actualities. Nor did the students or the surgeon ever stop to correct the book-steeped authority. Why? The scholar was reciting the "facts" as found in volumes over 1,000 years old — the works of the Roman master Galen, founder of "modern" medicine.

Alas, Galen had drawn his conclusions, not from dissecting humans, but from probing the bodies of pigs and monkeys. Pigs and monkeys do have the strange features Galen described. Humans, however, do not. But that didn't stop the medieval professors from seeing what wasn't there. For no more were they ruggedly individualistic observers than are you and I. Their sensory pathways echoed with voices gathered for a millennium, the murmurings of a mob composed of both the living and the dead. The world experts of those days and ours conjured up assemblies of mirage. Like ours, their perceptual faculties were unrecognized extensions of a collective brain.

FOOTNOTES

1.
M.J.C. Waller, personal communication, 5/96; M.J.C. Waller. "Organization Theory and the Origins of Consciousness." Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 19(1): 17-30; T. Burns and G.M. Stalker. The Management of Innovation. London: Tavistock Publications, 1961: 92-93, 233-234.

2.
Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World. New York: Viking, 1994: 73.

3.
Janos Szentagothai. "The 'Brain-Mind' Relation: A Pseudoproblem?" In Mindwaves: Thoughts on Intelligence, Identity and Consciousness. Edited by Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield, 330. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989; Rodney J. Douglas, Christof Koch, Misha Mahowald, Kevan A.C. Martin, Humbert H. Suarez. "Recurrent Excitation In Neocortical Circuits." Science, 18 August 1995: 981.

4.
Linnda R. Caporael. "SOCIALITY: COORDINATING BODIES, MINDS AND GROUPS." Psycoloquy. 1995-06-01.

5.
Bruce Bower. "Brain faces up to fear, social signs." Science News, December 17, 1994: 406; Eric R. Kandel and Robert D. Hawkins. "The Biological Basis of Learning and Individuality." Scientific American, September 1992: 78-87; Joseph E. LeDoux. "Emotion, Memory and the Brain." Scientific American, June 1994: 50-57; Sandra Blakeslee. "Brain Study Examines Rare Woman." New York Times, December 18, 1994: 35; Robert N. Emde. "Levels of Meaning for Infant Emotions: A Biosocial View." In Approaches to Emotion, edited by Klaus R. Scherer, Paul Ekman. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1984: 79; Kathleen Stein. "Mind Reading Among the Macaques: How the brain interprets the intentions of others." Omni, June 1994: 10.

6.
Elizabeth Loftus. Memory: Surprising New Insights Into How We Remember and Why We Forget. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1980: 45-49. Elizabeth Loftus. "When A Lie Becomes Memory's Truth: Memory Distortion After Exposure to Misinformation." Current Directions In Psychological Science, August, 1992: 121-123. Elizabeth F. Loftus. "Creating False Memories." Scientific American, September 1997: 70-75. Henry L. Roediger, "Memory Illusions." Journal of Memory and Language, April 1, 1996, v 35 n 2: 76; Henry L. Roediger III, Kathleen B. McDermott. "Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists." Journal of experimental psychology, July 1995, v 21 n 4: 803.

7.
Solomon E. Asch. "Studies of Independence and Conformity: I. A Minority of One against a Unanimous Majority." Psychological Monographs, 70:9 (1956): (Whole No. 416); Bertram H. Raven, Jeffrey Z. Rubin. Social Psychology. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983: 566-9, 575.

8.
C. Faucheux and S. Moscovici. "Le style de comportement d'une minorité et son influence sur les résponses d'une majorité." Bulletin du Centre d"Études et Recherches Psychologiques, 1967, 16: 337-360; S. Moscovici, E. Lage, and M. Naffrechoux. "Influence of a consistent minority on the responses of a majority in a color perception task." Sociometry, 32, 1969: 365-380; Bertram H. Raven, Jeffrey Z. Rubin. Social Psychology: 584-585.

9.
Eisenberg, L.: "The social construction of the human brain," American Journal of Psychiatry, 1995; 152(11): 1563-1575. Christiana M. Leonard, Linda J. Lombardino, Laurie R. Mercado, Samuel R. Browd, Joshua I. Breier, and O. Frank Agee, "Cerebral Asymmetry and Cognitive Development in Children: A Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study," Psychological Science, March 1996, p. 93. Goldman-Rakic, P., & Rakic, P. "Experimental modification of gyral patterns;" in N. Geschwind & A.M. Galaburda (Eds.), Cerebral dominance: The biological foundation (pp. 179-192); Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984. Pascual-Leone, A., & Torres, F. (1993); "Plasticity of the sensorimotor cortex representation of the reading finger in Braille readers," Brain, 116, pp. 39-52; Recanzone, G., C. Schreiner, and M. Merzenich. "Plasticity in the Frequency Representation of Primary Auditory Cortex Following Discrimination Training in Adult Owl Monkeys." Journal of Neuroscience, 13 (1993): 97-103.

10.
Janet F. Werker and Renee N. Desjardins. "Listening to Speech in the 1st year of life: Experiential Influences on Phoneme Perception." Current Directions in Psychological Science, June 1995: 76-81. Janet F. Werker. "Becoming a Native Listener." American Scientist, January-February 1989: 54-59. Janet F. Werker and Richard C. Tees. "The Organization and Reorganization of Human Speech Perception." Annual Review of Neuroscience, 15, 1992: pp. 377-402. J.F. Werker and J.E. Pegg. "Infant speech perception and phonological acquisition." Phonological Development: Research, Models and Implications, edited by C.E. Ferguson, L. Menn,, C. Stoel-Gammon: Parkton, MD, York Press, in press.

11.
L. Eisenberg. "The social construction of the human brain." American Journal of Psychiatry, 152 (11) 1995: 1563-1575. M.H. Segall, D.T. Campbell, M.J. Herskovitz. The Influence of Culture On Visual Perception. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill: 1966. Shi-xu. "Cultural Perceptions: Exploiting the Unexpected of the Other." Culture & Psychology, 1 1995: 315-342. J. Lucy. Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson. "The Mind of an Addicted Brain: Neural Sensitization of Wanting Versus Liking." Current Directions in Psychological Science, June 1995: 74. Jane B. Lancaster. "Primate Communication Systems and the Emergence of Human Language." Primates: Studies in Adaptation and Variability, edited by Phyllis C. Jay. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968: 451-453. Robert N. Emde. "Levels of Meaning for Infant Emotions: A Biosocial View." Approaches to Emotion: 79. Jay Belsky, Becky Spritz, and Keith Crnic. "Infant Attachment Security and Affective-Cognitive Information Processing at Age 3." Psychological Science, March 1996: 111-114. Bruce Bower. "Brain activity comes down to expectation." Science News, January 21, 1995: 38. Linnda R. Caporael. "SOCIALITY: COORDINATING BODIES, MINDS AND GROUPS." Psycoloquy. Downloaded from http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/cgi-bin/mfs/31/wachau/www/archives/Psycoloquy/1995.V6/0043.html?84#mfs, 95/6/01. R. Nisbett & L. Ross. Human inference: strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980. R.A. Shweder & R.G. D'Andrade. "The systematic distortion hypothesis." Fallible judgment in behavioral research. New Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral Science, 4 1980: 37-58.

12.
Elizabeth Gould. "The Effects of Adrenal Steroids and Excitatory Input on Neuronal Birth and Survival." In Hormonal Restructuring of the Adult Brain: Basic and Clinical Perspective, edited by Victoria N. Luine, Cheryl F. Harding. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 743: 73. New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1994. Wise Young and June Kume-Kick, Shlomo Constantini. "Glucorticoid Therapy of Spinal Chord Injury." In Hormonal Restructuring of the Adult Brain: Basic and Clinical Perspective: 247. Steve Nadis. "Kid's Brainpower: Use It or Lose It." Technology Review, November/December, 1993: 19-20. Daniel S. Levine. "Survival of the Synapses." The Sciences, November/December 1988: 51. Thomas Elbert, Christo Pantev, Christian Wienbruch, Brigitte Rockstroh, Edward Taub. "Increased Cortical Representation of the Fingers of the Left Hand in Stringed Players." Science, 13 October 1995: 305-307. Marsha Barinaga. "Watching the Brain Remake Itself." Science, 2 Dec 1994: 1475. A. Pascual-Leone, F. Torres. "Plasticity of the sensorimotor cortex representation of the reading finger in Braille readers." Brain, 116, 1993: 39-52. Constance Holden. "Sensing Music." Science, 13 October 1995: 237. Julius Korein, M.D. "Reality and the Brain: the Beginnings and Endings of the Human Being." In The Reality Club, edited by John Brockman. New York: Lynx Books, 1988: p. 94.

13.
Christiana M. Leonard, Linda J. Lombardino, Laurie R. Mercado, Samuel R. Browd, Joshua I. Breier, and O. Frank Agee. "Cerebral Asymmetry and Cognitive Development in Children: A Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study." Psychological Science, March 1996: 93. S. Scarr. "Theoretical Issues in Investigating Intellectual Plasticity." In Plasticity of Development, edited by S.E. Brauth, W.S. Hall, & R.J. Dooling. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991: 57-71; P. Goldman-Rakic, P. Rakic. "Experimental modification of gyral patterns." In Cerebral dominance: The biological foundation, edited by N. Geschwind & A.M. Galaburda. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984: 179-192.

14.
R.L. Fantz. "Visual perception from birth as shown by pattern selectivity." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 118, 1965: 793-814; Stanley Coren, Clare Porac, Lawrence M. Ward. Sensation and Perception. New York: Academic Press, 1979: 379-380.

15.
Linda R. Caporael. "SOCIALITY: COORDINATING BODIES, MINDS AND GROUPS."

16.
M.L. Hoffman. "Is altruism part of human nature?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40(1), 1981: 121-137; Bertram H. Raven, Jeffrey Z. Rubin. Social Psychology: 311-312.

17.
Herbert Terrace. "Thoughts Without Words." In Mindwaves: Thoughts on Intelligence, Identity and Consciousness. Edited by Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield, 128-129. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

18.
Jerome Bruner. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986: 60, 67-68. Uta Frith. "Autism." Scientific American, June 1993: 108-114.

19.
Jerome Kagan. Unstable Ideas: Temperament, Cognition and Self. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989: 185-186.

20.
Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert. "How Kids Learn." Newsweek, April 17, 1989: 53.

21.
Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor Books, 1977: 72-77.

22.
H.H. Kelley. "The warm-cold variable in first impressions of persons." Journal of Personality, 18, 1950: 431-439; Bertram H. Raven, Jeffrey Z. Rubin. Social Psychology.: 88-89.

23.
Donna Eder, Janet Lynne Enke. "The Structure of Gossip: Opportunities and Constraints on Collective Expression Among Adolescents." American Sociological Review, August 1991: 494-508.

24.
J.Z. Rubin, F,J. Provenzano, and Z. Luria. "The eye of the beholder: parents' views on sex of newborns." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 44, 1974: 512-519; Bertram H. Raven, Jeffrey Z. Rubin. Social Psychology: 512.

25.
P.A. Goldberg. "Are Women Prejudiced Against Women?" Transaction, April 1968: 28-30; Bertram H. Raven, Jeffrey Z. Rubin. Social Psychology: 518

26.
Jerome S. Bruner. Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing: 380-386; Paul van Geert. "Green, Red and Happiness: Towards a Framework for Understanding.

27.
W. Bogoras. The Chukchee. New York: G.E. Stechert, 1904-1909; Jerome S. Bruner. Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing.: 102-103.

28.
Jared Diamond. "This Fellow Frog, Name Belong-Him Dakwo." Natural History April 1989: 16-23.

29.
Peter N. Stearns. "The Rise of Sibling Jealousy in the Twentieth Century." In Emotion And Social Change: Toward a New Phsychohistory, edited by Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, 197-209. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988.

30.
For many examples of similar phenomena, see: Robert B. Edgerton. Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony. New York: Free Press, 1992.

31.
Daniel J. Boorstin. The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search To Know His World And Himself. New York: Vintage Books, 1985: 344-347.

PHILOSOPHY

The First Hegelians: an Introduction [by Lawrence Stepelevich]

As an identifiable philosophic movement, Young Hegelianism endured for less than two decades, from 1830 to 1848. It first appeared in Feuerbach’s ignored treatise,    Gedanken uber Tod und Unsterblichkeit, and it made its last coherent expression in Karl Schmidt’s    Das Verstandestum und das Individuum. This last work appeared anonymously in 1846, and caused as little concern as Feuerbach’s introductory work. By 1848, “the struggles of the school were ended, and it collapsed into itself, becoming insignificant in both intellectual and political life.”[1] In sum, the school existed between two politically eventful poles, being born in the revolutionary year of 1830, and dying in the revolution of 1848. At its rise, it shared the optimism of its older literary brother, Young Germany, for at that time the rebellion of the; French against the reactionary visions of their King, Charles X, had sent a spasm of romantic hope throughout the whole European intellectual community. German intellectuals were no exception, and Heine recalled that when the news of the revolution was received, “each item was a sunbeam, wrapped in printed paper, and together they kindled my soul into a wild glow . . . Lafayette, the tricolor, the Marseillaise, — it intoxicates me.,, Bold, ardent hopes spring up, like trees with golden fruit. . . “[2] The long-delayed promises of the first French revolution were finally to be realized Certainly, the students of Hegel were prepared to accept his charge that they “grasp the spirit of the time, and each in his own place — consciously to bring it. . . from its lifeless seclusion into the light of day.”[3]

In 1830, all who were to become the central figures of the Young Hegelian school were young men. At 28, Arnold Ruge was their senior member, Ludwig Feuerbach was 26, Max Stirner 24, David F. Strauss 22, Bruno Bauer 21. The rest, August von Cieskowski, Karl Schmidt, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Edgar, the brother of Bruno Bauer, were yet children. Of these, only the youngest members — as communists — would survive 1848 with some measure of social idealism. The older members, as their biographies indicate, found whatever solace they could in a pragmatic pessimism. Hegelianism itself would fade away, leaving only a trace in the persons of some prudent “Old Hegelians,” such as Johann Erdmann, who, in 1866, half-humorously referred to himself at the “letzten Mohikaner.”[4]

The hopes of these Hegelians to engage in a free-flowing theological and cultural dialogue was tempered, then turned into bitter anger or sour silence in the face of an adamant union between a defensive church and a reactionary monarchy. The German revolution of 1848 came too late for the Young Hegelians, and as it was not born out of hope but of despair, it left all sides dissatisfied. In this view, Young Hegelianism is not seen in its usual light — as a confused extrapolation of Hegel’s original thought carried on by visionary disciples of little originality – – but rather as a graduated philosophic response to a debilitating union of religious dogmatism and political power.

Hegel himself lived only long enough to experience the first few external criticisms and inner developments of his thought, a system of thought by which he had intended — against Kant — to restore the dignity of metaphysics, the ideal content of religion, and the primacy of civil order. And so, what then had been understood to be a “Restoration philosophy”[5] had yet to reveal its revolutionary potential. This unwelcome revelation of the esoteric “absolute”[6] revolutionary character of Hegelianism was the vocation of Young Hegelianism.

Just as Hegel’s original thought explicitly focused upon the restoration of metaphysics, speculative theology and conservative social and political theory, so the first arguments concerning the worth of Hegel’s legacy followed serially upon these same three features. A few years before and after Hegel’s death, until 1835 — the publication date of Strauss’    Leben Jesu    — the debate over the value of Hegelianism turned upon its metaphysical worth. After the    Leben Jesu, and until shortly after Friedrich Wilhelm IV ascended the Prussian throne in 1840, attention fixed upon the theological implications of Hegelianism. By the early 1840’s, the religious debate suddenly gave way to arguments concerning the political and social tent of original Hegelianism. By 1848, Hegelianism was no longer a subject deemed worth of any further interpretive efforts.

And so, within two decades, the “decomposition” — as Engels would have it — of the original Hegelian corpus was complete. It could well be at even Hegel, particularly the young Hegel of the    Phenomenology of the Mind    , would see in this dissolution a sad, yet comforting testimony to the “portentous power of the negative.” Certainly, if not the young Hegel, then the Young Hegelians — for they had much in common.[7] But be that as it may, it is a fact that the old Hegel was among the first to join in the defense of his doctrines against some early objections. He set out, in the    Berliner Jahrbucher    , to refute five separate attacks on his metaphysical teachings.[8] He soon tired of the game, having replied, somewhat contemptuously, to only two detractors, and excused himself by remarking — “must I quarrel with such rabble?”[9] As to whether or not he would have continued to remain aloof is a question that his unexpected death left unanswered. The task of defending the Master fell upon his disciples, the ‘epigoni’, as they were first called,[10] and they faced an ever more formidable opposition, an opposition which in time did not hesitate to use the power of the Prussian state to make its point.

Among these first defenders, none was more loyal than Carl Friedrich Goschel. He had come to Hegel’s defense in 1829, with a work entitled    Aphorismen uber Nichtwissen und absolutes Wissen. The    Aphorismen    is remarkable by reason of its exalted view of Hegel’s thought, a vision which saw in Hegelianism the highest speculative expression of spiritual life, Or Christianity itself. Christianity and Hegelianism were related as premise to conclusion, and to be a true Christian was to be a Hegelian. Indeed, for, Goschel, becoming a Hegelian was not unlike undergoing a religious conversion, a philosophical “Pentacost,” for “without a rebirth no one can rise from the sphere of natural understanding to the speculative height of the living notion.” Further, as the reward of attention, God’s word could be esoterically discerned in the language of philosophy, and to find out that word, one must

willingly and fully transport thyself into the concepts of philosophy;… be only first disposed to endure and to accept them, and thou will experience in thy heart their life and truth, that is, their total agreement with the word of God, whose restatement [Uebersetzung] they are.”[11]

Finally, and more significantly for the future of Hegelianism, it was defined as “the highest product of Christianity.” In this equation, Hegelianism is not the source of new truths, a “praxis” as von Cieszkowski will have it, but the fulfillment of past truths. On this point, Hegelianism divided into two schools, the “Old” and the “Young.” Hegel’s lavish praise[12] of Goschel’s work not only insured Goschel’s primacy in the orthodox school of Hegelianism, but proved that Hegel himself was an “Old” Hegelian.

On this matter, Hegel is — just as Goschel — sensitive to the complaint of both rationalists and theologians that speculative philosophy, i.e. Hegelianism, would “by means of the Notion… create another truth.” This, as Hegel notes, is a totally mistaken view,

for in this higher sphere of thought is understood that which constitutes the innermost truth — the untruth of the difference between form and content, and that it is the pure form itself which seeks content.”[13]

This essential unity of philosophical form and spiritual content, of Hegelianism as formulated Christinity, is the principle of conservative Hegelianism, of that which came to be known as “Old Hegelianism.” In this conservative perspective, original Hegelianism stood as the conclusion of thought, and not as a premise for future action. Carl Michelet, who stood in the 1840’s “on the dividing line between Old and Young Hegelians,”‘[14] tried to diplomatically unite them in order to lead them. To this end, he appealed to both sides that philosophy was not only “the Owl of Minerva” which introduced a night in which form and content joined, but equally a “cockcrow” which proclaimed a new dawn. But the schism had endured too long, and reached back into the very core of Hegelianism itself. Michelet failed to reconcile the “hostile brothers.”

Young Hegelianism can be said to have made one of its earliest appearances in a letter that Ludwig Feuerbach sent to Hegel in November of 1828. The letter was enclosed along with a copy of his recent doctoral dissertation,    De Ratione, une, universali, infinita, and both testify to their author’s indebtedness to Hegel.[15] Feuerbach was no less fulsome than Goschel in his praise of Hegel’s thought, expansively declaring it to be the “Incarnation of the pure Logos.” But still, Feuerbach took the opportunity to introduce his own perception of the import of Hegelianism. To Feuerbach, the knowledge gained through the study of Hegel should not merely

be directed to academic ends, but to mankind — for at the least, the new philosophy can make the claim that it is compelled to break through the limits of a school, and to reveal itself as world-historical, and to be not simply the seed in every spirit of a higher literary activity, but rather to become the expressed universal spirit of reality itself, to found, as it were, a new world-epoch, to establish a kingdom….There is now a new basis of things, a new history, a second creation, where… reason will become the universal appearance of the thing.

To Feuerbach, Spirit, after “having worked for centuries upon its completion and development,” has finally revealed itself in Hegel’s philosophy. It is now the mission of Spirit, acting through its disciples — the Hegelians — to rationalize the world. In theological terms, which always seem natural in a Young Hegelian context, the redemption of the world by incarnate reason is now at hand, and from Feuerbach on, this “apocalyptic tone, this sense of historical revolution, was the essential ingredient of Young Hegelian metaphysic.”[16]

The style of Feuerbach’s letter preludes the whole of Young Hegelian literature. It’s glimpse of an ideal future provoked a stylistic brilliance that was simply absent in the staid commentaries of the Old Hegelians. But this same apocalyptically inspired enthusiasm, as magnified in their later literature, threatened to degenerate into noisy propaganda, fitted for “manifestos, programs and theses . . . “[17] On the other side, the Old Hegelians ran the equal but opposite risk of falling into a cryptic, flat    rechauffe    of original Hegelianism. As being charged to preserve, rather than act upon the truth of Hegelianism, they had little to say for themselves. These Old Hegelians, such as von Henning, Hotho, Forster, Marheineke, Hinrichs, Daub, Conradi and Schaller,

preserved Hegel’s philosophy literally continuing its individual historical studies, but they did not reproduce it in a uniform manner beyond the period of Hegel’s personal influence. For the historical movement of the nineteenth century they are without significance.[18]

The literary style of the two Hegelian schools mirrored their interests, and so, as the Old Hegelian, H.F. Hinrichs observed in 1842, “The style [Darstellungweise] of the right side is mostly aphoristic, that of the left, pamphleteering.”[19]

In the early 1830’s, Goschel found a willing ally in his defense of Hegel’s metaphysical coherency in the person of Georg Andreas Gabler. Gabler could claim the honor of being once Hegel’s student in Jena, and would be further honored, in 1835, by being appointed to Hegel’s former chair at Berlin. Together they formed the nucleus of the Old Hegelian school, and both were pleased to find, in the young theologian Bruno Bauer, an energetic and talented defender of Hegel’s theological orthodoxy. Bauer, who had first heard Hegel lecture in 1828, was then — and for a decade thereafter — convinced that Hegelian metaphysics formed the rational core of traditional Christianity. His skill in defending this view was put to the test when he was selected by the Old Hegelians to be the first among them to confront, and so confute, Strauss’ newly-published    Leben Jesu. This work put an end to the convoluted argumentation over the merits and demerits of Hegel’s metaphysics. The arguments were becoming, to be blunt, simply boring to all contenders. As one of the contestants, Johann Erdmann, more delicately remarked, “the interest in metaphysics — that is, the first point in which Hegel had shown himself to be a restorer, — was on the wane … the question of a logical foundation and of dialectical development was… soon regarded with perfect indifference.”[20]

The second set of arguments, concerning the relationship of Hegelianism to orthodox Christian belief, insofar as it touched directly upon the existing theological-political nexus, determined the future course of Hegelianism, and its echoes are still being heard.[21] To Bauer, Christianity was the proper content of Hegelian form; revelation found its most adequate rational expression in Hegelian thought. The content of Christian belief found its proper form in Hegelian philosophy. In short, Christian revelation and Hegelian reason were perfectly fitted to one another. To Strauss, on the other hand, representing a new, irreverent, and so “Young” Hegelianism, the relationship was one of pictorial representation against philosophic comprehension, of    Vorstellung    against    Begriff. What Christianity portrayed was but the inkling of what Hegelianism comprehended, and to stay at the noetic level of Christianity in the face of Hegelianism was to decide in favor of ignorance.

After the appearance of Strauss’ work, Hegelianism could no longer, without being suspect, play its old humble role of being the philosophic handmaid to Lutheran theology. With the    Leben Jesu    Hegelianism was transformed, in the eyes of a younger generation of philosophers, into at least the rival, if not the actual destroyer, of Christian orthodoxy. The work advanced with the same confident tone found in Feuerbach’s letter to Hegel, and it presented its conclusions with a blunt clarity. The conclusions were both simple and shocking: the Christ of the gospels was a myth generated out of the messianic longings of the Jews. Jesus actually existed, and his personality drew upon him the mantle of the Christ, but beyond that, little more can be said of Jesus. Finally, mankind is the actual Christ insofar as it is its own savior. It is this last optimistic, humanistic, and irreverent thesis which reveals Strauss as a Young Hegelian. The incarnation of the Logos, the    Geist, was not restricted to the particularity of Jesus but was received into the total human race. The messianic ideal of a redemption of mankind

does not squander its fullness on one individual in order to be stingy lo everybody else. Its desire, rather, is to distribute its wealth among the multiplicity of individuals … Is not the idea of the unity of divine and human natures a real one in a more lofty sense when I regard the entire human race as its realization than if I select one man as its realization? Is not the incarnation of God from eternity more true than an incarnation limited to one point in time?”[22]

In commenting upon this passage, William Brazill summarizes — “as there could be no man without God, so there could be no God without man. Humanity was the Christ.”[23]

Given Strauss’ theoretic perspective, avowedly Hegelian, there could be no other practical consequence but that the individual, to be saved, i.e., to overcome his alienation, should consciously enter into the secular equivalent of the Christ, the community. The individual was called upon to participate fully “in the divine-human life of the race.”[24] And so, at this early moment in its development, the dominant theme of Young Hegelianism is in evidence — a secularization of eschatological Christianity.

By a fine dialectical turn of fate, Bruno Bauer was chosen as the champion of Old Hegelianism, dialectical because within a few years he would be recognized as the leader of the Young Hegelians.[25] Bauer’s first counter-arguments appeared in the    Jahrbucher fur wissenschaftliche Kritik[26], then known less reverently as the “Hegel Gazette.” Bauer maintained that Hegelianism did not lead to a new quasi-religious truth, but provided the metaphysical foundation for traditional Christianity. In this, for example, the Incarnation could be understood as “the result of the encounter of receptivity and creative necessity and in this encounter all physiological questions are irrelevant.”[27] Goschel and Gabler, among others, also contributed their criticisms of Strauss’ Hegelianism, Gabler in his inaugural address of 1835 as he accepted his chair at the University of Berlin, and Goschel, first with an essay and then with a book.[28]

But the Young Hegelians, those who were to agree with Strauss — and at that time they could even number a very young Friedrich Engels[29] — had seized the initiative. The Old Hegelians soon ceased to be a significant philosophical force since their arguments encountered extreme speculative difficulties, and in addition, the orthodox Lutherans and pietists had never asked for nor accepted their proffered help. These conservatives, led by the Berlin preacher Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, now saw in the shocking Leben Jesu only what they had always suspected of Hegelianism: atheism and Jacobinism. Indeed, Strauss had at least been an honest Hegelian, and even Hengstenberg could ironically remark that the    Leben Jesu    was “one of the most pleasing contributions in the field of recent theological literature.”[30] This first judgment has been echoed by more recent commentators, such as John T. Noonan, who holds that Strauss’    Leben Jesu    is properly Hegelian, in fact, even more than that — “more courageous than Hegel, Strauss is the better Hegelian.”[31] In short, by the opponents of Hegel, Strauss’    Leben Jesu    has been taken as the authentic theological expression of original Hegelianism. The political influence of the pietists and orthodox Lutherans, which peaked in the reactionary reign of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, insured that Hegelianism would soon lose all of its previous academic and political influence. A Hegelian would soon be forced to choose to remain prudently silent on political and religious issues, and so remain without influence, as the Old Hegelians, or to speak out, and suffer academic and political repression, as the Young Hegelians. Only a very few of the latter escaped this repression, and that long series of imprisonments, exiles, impoverishments and rejections which marked their collective careers, was shared by Strauss when he was removed from his teaching post at Tubingen.[32]

In 1837, Strauss took up his own defense by writing a set of rejoinders to his numerous critics.[33] In introducing that section of his work dealing with the objections of the Hegelians, Strauss established a new mode of classifying the Hegelians. Borrowing the terms used to designate the relationships of the French politicians to the    Ancien Regime, Strauss classed all Hegelians as either of the “right” or the “center,” or the “left.”[34] This philosophical-political classification was popular from its inception, and has remained so to this day.[35] Strauss used it in an exclusively theological context, but with the right-wing Hegelians, such as Bauer, Goschel, and Gabler, accepting both the unity of the divine and human nature in Jesus as well as the factuality of the miracle-stories. Those on the left, — such as Strauss — would deny both. As for the center-wing, — such as Rosenkranz — they would hold only to the divinity of Jesus, and follow Strauss in other matters. On the whole, however, as Horton Harris has commented, the classification was confusing, for this difference was solely a question of definitions, and the line between centre and left was extremely ill-defined.”[36]

Whatever virtues such a schema might possess have been purchased at the cost of provoking a category mistake. The political categories of “left” and “right” cannot simply be superimposed upon Young and Old Hegelianism. In this regard, it can be noted that the liberal or socialistic interpretations of Hegelianism did not openly begin until the 1841 appearance of Arnold Ruge’s    Deutsche Jahrbucher. Prior to that time, and from the publication of the    Leben Jesu, Young Hegelianism had developed within a theological context. Strauss himself, as a matter of fact, was politically a conservative, as were all of the Young Hegelians up until 1840 — unless Moses Hess is considered, whose socialistic    Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit    appeared in 1837.

However, this theological context of early Young Hegelianism did fall within a larger political context, and in that same year in which the    Leben Jesu    appeared the Mainz Commission, established by the Frankfort Diet, had condemned the Young German movement for “attacking the Christian religion and the social order.”[37] The conservative equation of the two would insure the censure of Young Hegelianism as well.

In retrospect, perhaps the most striking feature of the Leben Jesu is not its content, but its intention. Strauss had — with that particular naivete found in youthful genius — imagined that the religious clique which gathered in the Royal court would gladly respond to the evidently well meaning rationality of his work. As he concluded in a lengthy letter defending his teaching post:

If all those who have accepted the critical and sceptical elements of the time wanted to resign from the ministry, only the unscientific faith would finally remain to it; the critical doubting would devolve onto the educated in the congregation and the Church would have to split into two halves between which, finally, agreement would be no longer possible; but as against this, so long as the sceptical and critical direction remains represented in the ministry, such a mediation, and therewith a continuing progress of religious and theological education is assured.”[38]

Such candor and confidence regarding the therapeutic effects of criticism had little effect upon his judges, as he was removed from his teaching post. He had repeated Feuerbach’s imprudence of 1830, who, being warned that to publish his speculations on death and immortality would ruin his career, proceeded to do both.

An extended controversy between Bauer and Strauss never occurred, for although Bauer was still eager to debate, Strauss took Bauer’s “foolish piece of pen-pushing”[39] as unworthy of reply. With this, Strauss’ contribution to the Young Hegelian movement came to an end. By 1840, after unsuccessfully attempting to regain respectability with a compromising third edition of the    Leben Jesu, and after a short and disastrous attempt to teach at Zurich, he turned to a career of writing unorthodox theological treatises.

For his part, Bauer continued to exercise his Hegelianism in the cause of religious orthodoxy. However, in 1839, Bauer — displaying an innocence equal to Strauss — took it upon himself to question Hengstenberg’s biblical interpretations. Hengstenberg was not at all prepared to receive a rebuke from a young Hegelian    privatdocent, and Bauer was persuaded, for his future well-being, to accept a post at the University of Bonn. At Bonn, Bauer’s faith in both Christianity and his fellow academics was lost. His loss of faith was precipitated not only by the immanent logic of his own theological principles, but by his confrontation with the    Leben Jesu    . In 1840, Bauer recalled that prior to this work, the disciples of Hegel “had lived like the blessed gods with patriarchal calm in the realm of the Idea,” but with it, “the lightning of thought struck into the kingdom of the Idea and disturbed the dream.”[40] This dream, of course, being the old Hegelian one of the unity between history and the Idea, between events and Hegelian philosophy. Bauer not only lost his faith, but his hope in conducting critical and free-ranging theological discussions within the context of the Prussian university system. In June of 1841, he had the temerity — or again, ignorance — to send a first copy of his most infamous work, the    Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, to the reactionary culture minister, J.G. Eichorn. The Minister sent a letter to the theological faculties of all Prussian universities asking two simple questions: was Bauer a Christian? and should he be allowed to teach on a theological faculty? The answers were mixed, but overall negative. In March of 1842, Bauer was formally forbidden to teach at any Prussian university. The reaction of the authorities is understandable in light of what Bauer had maintained in the    Kritik. His general conclusions were similar to those of Strauss, i.e., that humanity was divine, but he went beyond Strauss’ reduction of Jesus to mere humanity by considering him as a fictional entity. In sum, the gospels were nothing but the further offshoots of an original literary fiction by an unknown author who had simply intended to present his own philosophic viewpoint in the person of a fictional Jesus.

Bauer’s highly publicised removal established him as the “spiritual leader”[41] of the Berlin Young Hegelians. Engels celebrated Bauer’s return with an anonymous mock-epic,    Der Triumph des Glaubens.[42] Besides permitting an insight into the pre-Marx Engels, and the notorious Young Hegelian circle of    Die Freien, the poem is a fine example of the literary course being taken by intellectuals out of favor with the established powers: it is marked by a reckless, almost desperate bravado. Here, in 1842, the course of the school had already turned from optimism and willing orthodoxy into an ironic pessimism that could only terminate in a sour compliance or outright rebellion. The vision of a bright future marked by the progressive incarnation of reason, as projected in August von Cieszkowski’s 1838    Prologomena to the Wisdom of History    was replaced by the decision to engage in a “ruthless criticism of everything existing.”[43] By 1842, the repressive policies of Friedrick Wilhelm IV had taken full effect, although he had ascended the throne with the hopes, if not the blessings, of the Young Hegelians. Certainly some, such as Friedrick Koppen, the lifelong friend of Marx,[44] had first enthusiastically envisioned the new king as Friedrick the Great    redivivus    .[45]

The new King indicated his philosophic inclinations early in his reign, when he invited the aging Schelling to Berlin. In November of 1841, the lecture series began, a pleasant focus for the anti-Hegelians, such as Henrich Leo and Karl Schubarth, and an insult against “free philosophy” according to the Young Hegelians.[46]

In that same year of 1841, three events of great significance occurred within the Young Hegelian school: the publication of Feuerbach’s    Essence of Christianity, the publication of Bauer’s    Trumpet of the Last Judgment Against Hegel the Atheist and Anti-Christ    , and the first issue of Ruge’s    Deutsche Jahrbucher. With each event, a decisive turn was marked in the relationship of Young Hegelianism to Christianity, Hegelianism, and Prussianism .

The Essence of Christianity    theologically concluded what Strauss had doctrinally initiated, the absolute reduction of God to Man, the transformation of theology into anthropology. Henceforth, theological issues would be translated into human issues, and theological criticism would be replaced with social criticism. Marx, in 1843, summed up the matter in a famous passage:

For Germany, the    criticism of religion    has been largely completed; and the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.The    profane    existence of error is compromised once its    celestial oratio pro eris et focis    has been refuted. Man, who has found in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a supernatural being, only his own reflection, will no longer be tempted to find only the semblance of himself — a non-human being — where he seeks and must seek his true reality.”[47]

The second event, the publication of Bauer’s Trumpet, set about — by selectively employing the actual texts of Hegel — to demonstrate that the “Philosopher of the Restoration” was covert atheist and revolutionary. This “unmasking”, a familiar Young Hegelian conceit, destroyed the possibility of any future    rapprochment    between them and the conservatives, — be they religious, political, or philosophical. After the Trumpet, the disciples of Hegel would be compelled to choose between two warring camps: that of the conservative and Christian wing, and that of the revolutionary atheists. The line which presently separates Hegelians such as Marcuse, Kojeve, and Lukacs from others such as Findlay, Knox, and Kroner, was first drawn by Bruno Bauer.

In line with Feuerbach’s radical humanism, and Bauer’s radical criticism, there was yet one factor needed to complete the full formulation of mature Young Hegelianism: political radicalism. This third element was contributed by Ruge, who, in 1841, set forth in the preface to the first issue of his    Deutsche Jahrbucher    a call for Hegelians to enter into the political struggles of the day. The rejection of doctrinal servility in both theology and philosophy must be followed by a rejection of political servility, which was the pre-condition for all free criticism. His call was heeded by the most radically politicized of the Young Hegelians, such as Michael Bakunin, Karl Nauwerk, and Edgar Bauer — the brother of Bruno. But because of the expanding inner divisions within the frustrated group, and the constant pressure of governmental censorship and academic rejection, Ruge’s efforts to form a political.party about the banner of Young Hegelianism soon ailed. In 1843, the    Deutsche Jahrbucher    was prohibited to be published even in liberal Saxony, and the ill-fated    Deutsch-franzosische Jahrbucher, co edited with Marx in the Spring of 1844, was the last sad act in Ruge’s political drama.

Given the three declarations of 1841, from Feuerbach, Bauer, and Ruge, the Young Hegelian movement had set itself against the total spectrum of orthodoxy, religious, philosophical, and political. The insurrection failed on all counts, and after the abortive revolution of 1848, Germany entered into a period of reaction whose marks are yet in evidence.

In the Fall of 1844, Max Stirner’s singular masterpiece,    Die Einzige und sein Eigentum    —    The Ego and Its Own    , made its appearance. With this, Young Hegelianism reached a final and angry impasse. As “le dernier maillon de la chaine hegelien,”[48] Stirner left nothing standing except the pole of naked self-assertion. With Stirner, Hegelianism, as a system, had reached a dialectical limit and had been transformed into its opposite.[49] The optimistic drive to rationalize the whole of reality which had motivated the earliest of the Young Hegelians had finally withered into an irrational egoism. But Nicholas Lobkowitz has stated the matter with the greatest possible clarity:

Hegel had    idealized    the existing world. His disciples from Strauss to Marx felt forced to translate Hegel’s idealizing description of the world into a language of ideals to be achieved. In the course of this development they also tried to concretize Hegel’s abstract idealizations by translating talk about religion into talk about mankind, talk about the state into talk about existing bourgeois society, etc. Stirner might be described, and in any case was understood by Marx as the man who made the final step in this development — a step which leads beyond Hegelian idealism and negates it. For Stirner achieved the final concretization of Hegelianism by reducing all Hegelian categories to the naked individual self; he denounced not only a certain type of ideal, but all ideals whatsoever . “[50]

But even after Stirner, the logic of Hegelianism and the logic of events had to produce yet one final statement, a statement upon the school by one who had followed the course of criticism to the point where criticism rejected itself, to a point beyond Stirner — who could retain the title of the “final critic.” This last judge upon the school was Karl Schmidt, who wrote an extraordinary and now-forgotten work,    Das Verstandestum und das Inviduum. In it, Schmidt traced his, and the whole Young Hegelian    via dolarosa    from beginning to end. In retrospect, Schmidt recognized that throughout the whole history of the school an uncritical dogmatism had prevailed, a dogmatism that led its possessor into an unconscious apotheosis of his particular ideals. Even the hypercritical Stirner “stands with his enemies on the same ground. He is just as these, an idealist. He revels in his ideals and dreams thereby of a world full of egoists, of an egoistic world which should come to pass.”[51] Schmidt has passed through Young Hegelianism only to arrive at one certain truth: “I am only myself.” With this modest conclusion, the movement called Young Hegelianism came to an end.

For anyone wishing to pursue the subject further, I have appended a bibliography of recent general studies concerning Young Hegelianism.

Villanova University

NOTES

[1] Hans-Martin Sass, “Untersuchungen zur Religions-philosophie in der Hegelschule: 1830-1850” (Ph.D. diss., Munster, 1963), p. 200. This compares with David McLellan’s testatement that “by the end of 1844 the Young Hegelian movement was dead as a coherent force” if the writing of Karl Schmidt is taken into account. See McLellan’s    The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx    (London, 1969), p. 47.

[2] Heinrich Heine,    Sammtliche Werke    (Hamburg, 1867) 12, p. 83.

[3] Hegel,    Lectures on the History of Philosophy    , trans. by Haldane and Simsom (London, 1955) 3, p. 553.

[4] Ibid., p. 596.

[5] ??

[6] Friedrick Engels,    Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy    (New York, 1941), p. 12.

[7] Two authors who suggest an affinity are Jurgen Gebhardt,    Politik und Eschatologie    (Munchen, 1963), . 33; and Karl Lowith,    From Hegel to Nietzsche    (New York, 1964), p. 71,

[8] For a detailed study, see Erdmann,    Grundriss    , 2, p. 665ff.

[9]    Sammtliche Werke, Jubilaumsausgabe, 20, 362.

[10] Karl Immermann,    Werke, ed. Roberl Boxberger (Berlin, n.d.), 5,    Die Epigonen. Also, Gebhardt, p. 49ff.

[11]    Aphorismen    (Berlin, 1829), p 160.

[12]    Werke, 20, 309.

[13]    Ibid., p. 298.

[14]    Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie in Deutschland von Kant bis Hegel    (Berlin, 1837-38), 2, p. 623.

[15]    Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. J. Hoffmeisler (Hamburg, 1954), 3, pp. 244-248. Letter of Nov. 22, 1828.

[16] William J. Brazill,    The Young Hegelians    (New Haven, 1970), p. 56.

[17] Karl Lowith,    Die Hegelsche Linke    (Stuttgart, 1962), p. 10.

[18] Lowith,    From Hegel to Nietzsche, p. 54.

[19]    Jahrbucher fur wissen. Kritik, 52 (March, 1842), p. 414).

[20]    Grundriss, 2, p. 649.

[21] E.g. Alexandre Kojeve, “Hegel, Marx and Christianity,”    Interpretations, 1, (Summer, 1970), pp. 21-42.

[22]    Leben Jesu, 2, p. 734.

[23] Brazill, p. 112.

[24] , 2, p. 735.

[25] Bauer was recognized as such by his contemporaries, e.g. Karl Rosenkranz,    Aus einem Tagebuch    (Leipzig, 1853), p. 113.

[26] The first volume of the    Leben Jesu    was reviewed in Number 110-113 (Dccember, 1835); the second volume in Numbers 86-88 (May, 1836).

[27]    J. W. Kritik, December, 1835, No. 112, p. 897.

[28]    Beitrage zur spekulativen Philosophie    (Berlin, 1838).

[29] Letter of Engels to Graeber, Jullc 15, 1839; Marx-Engels    Werke    (Berlin, 1965), Erganzungsband, Zweiter Teil, p. 401.

[30]    Evangelisch Kirchenzeitung    (1836), p. 382. See also Horton Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 78-79.

[31] “The Dialectic and the Gospels,”    The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 12, (April, 1950), p. 144.

[32] Harris, pp. 58-65.

[33]    Streitschriften zur Verteidigung meiner Schrift uber das Leben Jusu und zur Characteristik der gegenwartigen Theologie    (Tubingen, 1837). This work is divided into three sections, the first dealing wilh the criticisms of the quasi-rationalist theologians Steudel and Eschenmayer, the second directed against the publicist Menzel, and the third part mainly against the pietists such as Hengstenberg and the Hegelians-Goschel, Gabler and Bauer.

[34] Ibid, 3, p. 95.

[35] As in Roberl S. Hartman’s introduction to Hegel’s    Reason in History    (Indianapolis, 1953).

[36] Harris, p. 81.

[37] Frederick B. Artz,    Reaction and Revolution    (New York, 1963), p. 278.

[38] Letter of Strauss to Karl C. Flatt (July 12, 1835); Harris, p. 63.

[39] Harris, p. 80.

[40]    Die evangelische Landeskirche Preussens und die Wissenschaft    (Leipzig, 1840), p. 2.

[41] Gustav Mayer, “Die Anfange des politischen Radikalismus im vormarzlichen Preussen,”    Zeitschrift fur Politik    (Berlin, 1913), 6, p. 46.

[42] Marx-Engels    Werke, Erganzungsband, Zweiter Teil, pp. 280-316.

[43] Letter of Marx to Ruge, September, 1843; in    Deutsch-franzoisischen Jahrbuchedrn, see    Werke, 1, p. 344.

[44] Helmut Hirsch, “Karl Friedrich Koppn,”    International Review for Social History    (Leiden, 1936), 1, p. 311-370.

[45]    Friedrich der Grosse und seine Widersacher    (Leipzig, 1840).

[46] Engels, “Schelling und die Offenbarung,”    Werke    , Erganz., Zweiler Teil, pp. 117ff.

[47] “Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,”    Werke, 1, p. 378; E.t.,    Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R.C. Tucker (New York, 1972), p. 11.

[48] Henri Arvon,    Aux Sources de L’Existentialisme: Max Stirner    (Paris, 1954), p. 177.

[49] See my article “Hegel and Stirner: Thesis and Antithesis,”    Idealistic Studies, 6, No. 3, (Seplember, 1976) pp. 263-278.

[50] “Karl Marx and Max Stirner,”    Demythologizing Marxism, ed. Frederich J. Adelmann (The Hague, 1969), p. 85.

[51] Karl Schmidt,    Das Verstandestum und das Individuum    (Liepzig, 1846), p. 237.

[52] Ibid., p. 308.