Wednesday, April 10, 2013
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Jim has noted in many interviews that 9/11 was used to change the foreign policy initiates in the USA. Into becoming an aggressor nation which attacks nations without being attacked.
ReplyDeleteWell, what about Korea, Granada, Central America, WWI? The Spanish American War, Vietnam, WWII was a USA setup to enter those wars.
All wars are initiated by a lie. Forgot who said that.
Who is off base here Jim or myself?
Fair point. It was used to bring about a change in foreign policy that the public would understand to be a in policy--not to mention motivating the passage of the PATRIOT Act. Many of the cases you cite involved "false flag" attacks to create the impression we had been attacked, I agree; but the lies were so flimsy and the pretext so transparent that it seems to me this was a difference in degree that equalled a difference in kind.
DeleteTo add to your list, the United States attacked my country (then a British colony), Canada, in 1812, after declaring war on England. And during the Revolutionary War, Canada was also attacked. The American hope in both cases was to annex Canada so as to form one larger country. Both attempts failed (yes, America has lost wars). Expansionism has been an American goal from the inception of the country. The events of September 11, 2001 were not a change in policy, just a pretext for new wars, both foreign and perhaps more importantly, domestic.
ReplyDeleteExtraordinary interview/conversation. I've had some coursework and study, but I'm far from a professional on the issue. However, a serious study of propaganda can't avoid psychological questions, and I'm pretty well-read on the art and use of propaganda. I was disappointed that the schools of psychology that have dealt more specifically with external influences, stresses, and pressures of modern industrial civilization--those known collectively by us as "crowd psychology" and by German-speakers as "Massenpsychologie"--were left out of the discussion, e.g. those of Wilhelm Reich, R.D. Laing, Viktor Frankl, Leon Festinger. The psychology profession seems to have suppressed this area of study, just as academic philosophy has suppressed the challenges to bourgeois normalcy (there are even lucrative opportunities in "marketing philosophy"), academic economics the critical challenges to the assumptions of the capitalist system, etc.
ReplyDeleteAbout 35 years ago I read (Neo-Kantian) Jürgen Habermas's book Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), which defends Freudian psychoanalysis on the basis that, since the individual creates his/her own mental pathologies (excluding obvious genetic handicaps, which the more competent psyche has ways of compensating for normally), psychoanalysis is an obvious method for convincing, or better mentoring, the individual to undo his/her character flaws and replace them with healthy functionality. Habermas elsewhere in the book challenges the claims of Empiricism to objectivity. Recognizing that Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx have in common the notion that the true objectives of the individual may largely be unconscious or mentally suppressed, he makes this the basis for a critique of bourgeois assumptions and the foundations of standard received wisdom. An extraordinary, popular work.
Wilhelm Reich, who developed a full-blown psychosis in later years and redacted many of his earlier works in his madness, once remarked that, "Far from puzzling 'Why is it that so many in modern society are inflicted with psychopathology?', we should be asking, 'Why are so few?' " (not an exact quote).
One of my early favorites on the dynamics of propaganda was (anarchist) Sergei Chakotin's The Rape of the Masses: The Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda (1940). Chakotin (sorry that it's in German: the English version is still just a Wikipedia tab) worked as a student under Pavlov and as an opponent of the October Revolution of 1917 served as the propaganda minister for the Czarist General Piotr Krasnow in the Russian Civil War. In exile in Germany, he became friends with Albert Einstein. While still there, he did a detailed study of Nazi propaganda, from which he drew much of the material for the aforementioned book.
Erratum: please excuse the mistyped 'inflicted' for the intended 'afflicted', above. It was a Freudian slip.
DeleteFollow-up There is an entry for Jürgen Habermas in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which is more on an academic level and seems, to me, to be exceptionally fair and perceptive. It puts his Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), which I mentioned above, in the context of his body of work and touches on a lot of the pertinent socio-philosophical and psycho-anthropological issues. The entry is available online here.
DeleteI forgot to mention something that I think is important. Before the Roman Imperium had fully prepared Christianity to be the psychological/philosophical device of choice for controlling the global masses, they toyed with employing Stoicism for the same purpose. That's why we see the Emperor Marcus Aurelius appearing as one of the leaders of fully developed Stoicism, along with the slave Epictetus. After Christianity won out, we see it incorporating the well-known Stoic adage that "the slave can be as free as the freeman". Stoicism's major antagonist, Epicureanism, was suppressed in the Athens Academy. Then Aristotle's major work was sabotaged by the Pythagoreans--who were, like the Stoics, theists--to exclude Epicurean Materialism. Aristotle's Metaphysics, I believe, was not originally concerned with the supernatural, but dealt with the methodological language with which nature (in Greek, physika) could be investigated (as linguistic metalanguage is used to investigate language)--the 'meta' marker did not refer to the order of the books, and you can still see traces of this methodological language. The non-theistic works of Epicureanism (including the classic De Rerum Naturae of Lucretius) were banned under the Empire as heretical works because their materialism was incompatible with the worship of the Caesars as divine beings (the Imperial Cult, in which the Emperor had the title "Pontus Maximus", was eventually morphed into Roman Christianity, in which the Pope bears that title). During the struggle between the English Protestants and the Roman Catholics (literally, Roman!) in Elizabethan England, there were contending camps of "Epicureans" and "Stoics"; a compromise was struck adopting a pseudo-Protestant religion with Roman rites.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't until Pierre Gassendi in the early 17th century, in an attempt to reconcile Epicurean Materialism with Christianity, effectively rehabilitated Epicurus for modern Europe that the ideas of his school again became widely known. The rebirth of Epicureanism, helped enormously by the French philosopher Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon), was the major influence issuing-in the Enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to his friend William Short that "I myself am an Epicurean". Karl Marx wrote his doctrinal dissertation on The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, and later he famously "turned Hegelianism on its head" by replacing its Idealism with the Materialism of Epicurus, which was dialectic (not just dialogical--concerned only with human dialogue--as the classical "dialectic" of Socrates and Plato was). Marx's "Dialectical Materialism" is the most advanced philosophical method and tool for investigation of social and economic phenomena yet devised, and it has been attacked mercilessly by throw-backs to classical formalism and Idealism (notably by the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger), and by pretenders to "objective analysis" of the school known as Empiricism, which itself is straight-jacketed by classical formalism (audio presentation on mp3 by Robert Langston of the SWP).