Joe,
You asked:
JR: Does any of this make any sense to you, Gary? I fear I may just be raving
on at this point.
It all makes sense, Joe. Your personal experience strengthens your
argument (the "Father Bush" one especially). Your method also seems
quite plausible
(==don't let them convince us they're invincible) Joe, you are right on
target.
Thank you for being so bold as to have commented as you have below
(yes, some may find your conjectures re: Bushes jr and Sr hard to swallow,
but I must say that I came to the same conclusion you did re: Bush and Ross
Perot--so that, again, your credibility--at least for me--rises).
This is a time for men and women to be, well yes, reasonable and respectful;
but also courageous (as, btw, Henry van Eyken is showing himself to be
on the unrev
list).
Warm regards,
Gary
Joseph Ransdell wrote:
I agree with you completely, Gary. What you describe below is exactly what
is happening. The question is both what to anticipate happening in the
future in virtue of this, and what to do that might conceivably be helpful.
We can figure out in a general way where the people in control of things are
headed because they are actually out in front about it, apparently with
little tendency to worry about the need to keep it secret at the level of
the overall plan. We should not assume, though, that things will actually
go as they think they will go. There is a cabal at the basis of this -- let
us just assume that for the moment without going into detail on it yet --
and one of their most basic and crucially important tactics is to convince
us of their invincibility. We don't want to buy into that. They are
vulnerable and as much at the mercy of chance as anybody else is. Their
success will not be achieved because the general plan is flawlessly thought
through -- no such grandiose plan can be flawlessly thought through and
their grand plan is actually as much a weakness of theirs as a controlling
cabal as it is a strength since it makes them predictable -- but because
they are supple enough at the times and places where the unexpected occurs
to be able to turn it to their advantage. They are not unopposed by any
means, but it is not immediately apparent just who the more important ones
are, as far as they are concerned, in order to be able to figure out what
the situation really is at any given time. The clue to figuring that out is
see who they are attacking with use of their character assassins like, say,
Limbaugh and other such intellectual thugs. Who are they expending their
energy on?
I think the starting point in understanding the cabal is with father George,
who is the real president now just as before. Have you noticed how
uncannily quiet everyone is about father George, just as if he doesn't
exist? He exists, and any way you look at it it must be him who has been
providing the necessary unifying and commanding power that has taken them as
far as they have been able to go. The theoretical intellects are important
but their is an executive intellect behind this or it wouldn't be as
successful as it has been thus far, and I can't figure anybody for that
position other than George the elder. Young George is nothing. It is a
mistake to think of him as responsible, not because he is innocent of the
crimes being committed but because he simply is not mentally capable of
providing the leadership required. He is just a front for the cabal, the
direction and sustained leadership of which must be daddy George. He
should be openly regarded as the stooge he is rather than being responded to
as if he is of some importance. The key to undermining this thing lies, I
suggest, in exposing George the elder to public scrutiny. It is not easy to
see how this can be done, but that is what we should be trying to figure
out, namely, how to make it understood publicly that George the elder exists
and is manipulating everybody, including George the younger.
The one thing that won't work is just to state a reasoned case for the
conclusion that there is this sustained manipulation that has been going on
>from the time of his presidency, with beginnings going back at least as far
as his appointment to head of the CIA by NIxon. This is true, but you can
make the most plausible and seemingly obvious case you like and it won't do
a bit of good. You will just be identified as a crank whom no one should
pay any attention to. The problem is to make people see the obvious, and I
don't know how that is to be done.
I learned about how politics actually works from a master politician who was
a colleague of mine when I was on the tenure track at the U of California at
Santa Barbara from 1965 through 1973. He is dead now. His name was Harry
Girvetz, and I used to think of him as Arthur Schlesinger West. Harry
was -- in his own mind -- a Deweyan liberal of a type which was fairly
prevalent at that time, owing to some flaw in Dewey's political philosophy,
as it could not be an accident that there were so many liberals like Harry
then: devout pragmatists, supposedly, who were actually functioning as
instruments used by the rightwingers like Reagan to do much of their dirty
work, hoist somehow by their own petard. Harry was the leader of a cabal
which ran the entire U of California university system (Berkeley, UCLA, and
seven other lesser campuses) during that period. He died within a couple
of years after the time that I left, and my guess is that John Searle is the
guy who took Harry's place as the head of the ruling liberal cabal.
Don't misunderstand me. I am not a rightwinger full of animosity toward
liberals. I regard myself as a liberal in some fundamental sense of that
term. But liberalism was killed by the corruption of liberals like Harry
(and Searle), in my opinion . In any case, my point is that although Harrry
was manipulating the university like a puppet master, shaping it in
accordance with the aims of his supposed arch-opponent, Reagan, and I was in
position to expose him with definitive documentation, it was in fact quite
impossible to do so because people simply were not going to pay any
attention to it and would have written me off as a paranoid crank. So also
with exposing the Bush cabal for what it is. No matter how strong the case,
people will not pay the slightest attention to any straightforward
presentation of the truth of the situation and silence you throug\. Yet
the power of such cabals -- which are the real driving agents of politics --
depends on people not realizing that they are being manipulated in this way.
So you can jump up, with proof in hand, and point out that it is all just a
puppet show with Father George as the puppet master, and it won't do you a
bit of good because when they see your pointing finger they will not look at
what you are pointing it TO but see it rather as your finger, functioning
evidentially of your own supposed paranoia! The people that run the world
in that way, to the extent that anybody really does do that, realize all
that and do not live in fear of being exposed because they know that all
they have to do is to point their calumny machine in the direction of the
person(s) doing the expose and wipe them out as credible public figures.
That is what George Bush the elder did to Ross Perot, by the way.
Does any of this make any sense to you, Gary? I fear I may just be raving
on at this point.
Joe
they will just are not in the least intimidated by
such a thing , meaning by that to identify him as the West Coast's main
theoretical
and may ultimately turn out to be the best asset we have
One can trace this back to the time when he realized that Reagan
that is to figure out who they are attacking via their operatives, like,
say, Limbaugh and other such thugs. people who have their real enemies
and the first thing to figure out is who they are
and
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Richmond" <garyrichmond@rcn.com>
To: "Joseph Ransdell" <ransdell@door.net>
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 5:32 PM
Subject: Another aspect of the problematic
THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION by Roger Normand and Jan Goodwin A
shorter version of this article is availabe online at
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0320-06.htm)
We are in the midst of a new American revolution. The task at hand
according to the Pentagon's own official documents, is nothing less than
establishing "full spectrum dominance" of a "unipolar world."
To accomplish this goal requires a radical transformation not just of
American foreign policy but of domestic policy as well-by loosening the
constraints of well-established laws at home and abroad. Dick Cheney has
told us that "we can no longer operate under 20th century standards"
given that the war against
terrorism "may never end, at least not in our lifetime."
The revolution is already well underway. War in Iraq marks the next
phase in this process of transformation.
Under the new Bush Doctrine, a bold military strategy of so-called
preemptive attack-including the possibility of unilateral nuclear first
strike- is intended to prevent any state or group of states from
challenging our preeminent role in the world. As President Bush told the
graduating class at West Point Military Academy last year: "America has,
and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenges."
Preemptive attack, however, is an Orwellian term for illegal invasion.
As far back as 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected Germany's argument
of the necessity for preemptive war against Norway and Denmark, judging
it: "the supreme international crime differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the
whole."
This prohibition was incorporated into the United Nations Charter as the
basis for a new system of collective security in which no state retained
the unilateral right to attack another-with two specified exceptions:
self defense and Security Council authorization.
In self-defense, states may retaliate against an armed attack or the
imminent threat of one. But only if, in the words of Daniel Webster, an
earlier Secretary of State, the threat is "instant, overwhelming,
leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation." The Bush
Administration never provided a shred of substantiated evidence that
Iraq either participated in the attacks of 9/11, or had the means and
intention to launch an imminent attack against the U.S.
The Security Council may, as a last resort, authorize force outside of
self-defense when necessary to maintain international peace and
security. But only after all peaceful alternatives have been
exhausted-clearly not the case
in Iraq with the UNMOVIC weapons inspectors literally begging for more time.
U.S. double standards were exposed for the world to see during the
bungled effort to squeeze a second resolution out of the Security
Council. Having first derided the U.N. as "irrelevant" and then failed
to sway even Guinea and Angola to the cause of war, the White House has
now been forced into the ironic position of justifying the legality of a
war opposed by the Security Council as
a whole by invoking a 12-year old Security Council resolution.
The untenable contradiction between U.S. policy and international law
arises because the revolutionaries in Washington are more concerned with
the unrestrained projection of American military power than with
disarmament, democracy or human rights.
This agenda is often misunderstood as a direct response to 9/11. But
Bush strategists have been writing for more than a decade about the need
to remove Saddam Hussein-despite the U.S. having armed and supported him
for years. Their openly articulated goal is to reshape the Middle East
to better serve American geopolitical interests.
Even Americans unconcerned by naked imperialism should consider whether
this radical new strategy is good for our country. In a world bristling
with fearsome weapons, what is the likely outcome of dismantling the
legal framework designed half a century ago to protect humanity from the
carnage of unlimited force? Can pure military might really defend us
>from evil and secure our freedom at the same time?
While loudly predicting swift military victory, our own leaders are also
quietly preparing us to lose the peace. We have been told by the White
House and the CIA itself to prepare for increased anti-American
terrorism at home and abroad, as war in Iraq incites extremist reactions
around the globe, not just in the Arab world. This can only mean one
thing: we will be even less safe after the war than we are now.
Consider, too, how other countries will exploit the U.S. example.
Repressive governments the world over have already increased human
rights abuses against their own brand of home-grown "terrorists"-usually
anyone opposing their policies. Simmering tensions in nuclear
flashpoints like India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine, and China-Taiwan
could easily and quickly escalate beyond control. Taken to its
logical-though never inevitable-conclusion, the absence
of law will lead to the absence of peace and human rights altogether.
The revolution is underway at home as well. In just two years the Bush
Administration has turned a $400 billion plus surplus into a $300
billion plus deficit-without yet allocating a penny to war and
occupation in Iraq or to reconstruction in Afghanistan (remember that
country we were repeatedly told would never again be forgotten and
abandoned?). Americans are suffering through a painful recession,
buffeted by waves of corporate crime and mass lay-offs, facing increased
poverty and unemployment. In the face of these dire economic
conditions, the White House has rammed tax "reform" legislation and
increased military-security budget allocations through a compliant
Congress to achieve a massive upwards redistribution of wealth undreamed
of even in the Reagan years.
Our Constitution is also under attack. Since 9/11 our civil liberties
have been significantly eroded in the name of protecting our freedom.
At some point after the invasion of Iraq, John Ashcroft's Justice
Department will present to Congress secretly-drafted legislation, the
Patriot Act II, which further limits fundamental and long-cherished
American principles of free speech and due process. Mr. Ashcroft has
even condemned lawful dissent as "aiding and abetting
terrorism"-raising the specter of criminalizing opposition to government
policy.
The practice of racial profiling-generally abhorred in American
society-has become institutionalized through mass detentions and special
registration procedures. American citizens can now be subject to
indefinite detention without trial. Our government has gone so far as
to justify and even practice torture-for God and Democracy, or course.
The bottom line is this: we face a carefully planned preemptive attack
against our most basic rights-Constitutional rights and human rights.
There is a pitiless logic at play that must at some point be confronted:
imposing American Empire abroad requires building Fortress America at
home. The two cannot be separated.
What lies ahead in the unfolding revolution? When and where will this
"endless war" finally end?
With U.S. troops engaged in battle, Americans will pray for their safety
and-for a time-also rally round the government. But before it is too
late, we would do well to heed Sir Thomas More's advice to Will Roper,
his protégé turned vigilante, in the play "A Man for All Seasons."
And when the last law was cut down and the devil turned around on you,
where would you hide, the laws all being flat? Do you really think
that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Americans of all political opinion have the right to speak and act
freely in opposition to Washington's revolutionary program-without being
treated as terrorists by our own government. This is, after all, still
our country. And if we truly love our homeland, we must take it back.